Charles Williams in Letters & Remembrances ~ The Imaginative Conservative

If there is one essential theme in Charles Williams’ writing, it is summed up in his favorite quotation from Julian of Norwich: “I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensualities God is.” His wife recalled that their life together, from beginning to end, aspired to poetry.

Charles Williams, a lifelong member of the Church of England, was an influential British theologian and an accomplished man of letters. He is best known as a principal member of the Inklings, an informal group that included J.R.R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield. The Inklings met regularly in C.S. Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College in Oxford for nearly two decades beginning in the early 1930s to discuss literature, society, and culture among themselves and with various guests. Although Williams resided in London for most of his adult life, he was obliged to change his residence in 1939 when Oxford University Press, the firm for which he had worked as editor since being hired in 1908, moved to Oxford after Britain declared war on Germany.

Williams’s wife, Florence, however, chose to remain at their London flat. Williams rejoined her there on weekends when his schedule permitted, and Florence, whom he fondly called Michal, visited Oxford as often as she could manage. But for nearly six years they lived the better part of their time separated. Williams, who not only adored Michal but relied on her as chief inspirer and critic of his creative endeavors, deeply resented the arrangement and, upon settling into his quarters in Oxford, promptly initiated a daily exchange of letters that lasted until he took ill three days after the Germans surrendered to the Allies.

Williams’s part in this prolific exchange is accessible thanks to the dutiful research of Roma A. King Jr. King’s edition of Williams’s personal correspondence, published in 2002 under the title To Michal from Serge: Letters from Charles Williams to His Wife Florence, 1939-1945, includes representative selections, painstakingly transcribed by King, from nearly 700 hurriedly handwritten letters. In them we hear Williams at his best — as faithful Christian, loyal husband, caring father, and generous friend — and, occasionally, at his worst — as one who loved human beings but sometimes found them intolerable. What resounds above all else is the voice of a man “honestly struggling,” as King puts it in his introduction, “toward the light beyond the darkness.”

Contributing to the darkness was no end of practical concerns with which Williams dealt daily during this personal crucible. “Waking in the morning is not very cheery these days, is it?” he writes (May 20, 1940). “There emerges slowly in the mind a kind of consciousness…of the war, and of the need for being iron, so to speak, and of all the things depending on it, such as work and money.” There were bills to be paid and never enough money to pay them. As an editor, Williams received a meager income and waited impatiently for advances and royalties on his work as an author. In virtually every letter to Michal there is talk of receipts and expenditures, the latter always outstripping the former. There are numerous letters focused almost exclusively on the subject of sartorial dearth, the shortage of socks, for example, or the need for vests and knickers.

In addition to being a physical reality, the darkness was for Williams an innate force against which he fought a continual battle. In an undated letter written shortly upon his arrival in Oxford, he appeals to Michal to be his guide and comfort through his dark night of the soul: “You’ll have to keep me faced in the right direction as you have done so often. There are wells of hate in one which are terrifying, and wells of suspicion and even malice.” It may have surprised those who thought Williams a saintly man to hear him say, “You can’t imagine how I dislike people’s faces. Only the conventions of years of social behaviour stop me, I sometimes feel, shouting at them” (Oct. 15, 1943). Williams could be spiteful, even petty. “It is very shocking,” he admits, “and shows what evil is in our natures, or rather mine” (Dec. 9, 1943). It should be pointed out that brooding admissions such as these are usually attended by words of genuine compunction. As King incisively notes, Williams “had a tender conscience that gave him no end of trouble.”

Looming over private matters both mundane and metaphysical was, of course, the reality of international warfare. Williams worried incessantly about the safety of his wife, who retreated with their teenage son to Leicester whenever the bombing of London became severe. For Williams, the Second World War seemed the very dusking of Christendom. “We live at the end of an age, and the re-ordination of the world,” he writes, “and very trying it all is” (Oct. 17, 1939). Recurrent in the letters is a sharp denunciation of the Nazis, whose obsession with race Williams knew to be diametrically opposed to Christianity, the essence of which he defended time and again with the sword of his ethical imagination. The body and blood of the Nazis’ rhetoric and Aryan mythos were neither divine nor common; they were merely German. In his published writings, Williams fearlessly propounded this view on more than one occasion before the strife began to escalate. But when the Germans besieged France and appeared to be on the verge of invading England, he began to entertain the frightening possibility of incarceration, or something worse, in retaliation for what he had written about the enemy of Europe’s Christian culture. “I find myself thinking occasionally of those pages…with the faintest anxiety,” he confesses (June 11, 1940). “And if my reputation were higher and the Gestapo got here,” he wrote, half seriously, four days earlier, “I should certainly be shot.”

Anxious though they are, Williams’s letters to his wife are essentially declarations of love. He begins them all with terms of affection, most often with “dearest,” and concludes them with expressions of endearment. He signs them “Serge,” a sobriquet whose origin is unknown. And as he was wont to do since the first time she attempted to curb his unrestrained manner of reciting poetry, Williams addresses Florence throughout as “Michal,” a name borrowed from the Old Testament story of King Saul’s daughter Michal, who upbraided David for dancing exuberantly to attract the attention of the maidens. In some places, the letters are excessively sentimental, but they leave no room for doubting the depth and sincerity of Serge’s love for Michal. It was, Williams maintained, “amor intellectualis, intellectual love” (Aug. 11, 1941), of which the medieval philosophers speak so desirously.

When he arrived in Oxford, Williams was enjoying a transatlantic reputation as a writer. Since the invasion of Poland, he had been working furiously and showed no signs of slowing. In fact, the war years were one of his most productive periods. Despite the threat of air raids and the inconvenience of blackouts, he penned his third novel, a series of poems, and several verse plays, along with numerous book reviews and book introductions. He also lectured and wrote a number of essays on Milton and Wordsworth while completing three monographs on topics literary and theological. Williams’s later writings are recurrent topics in his letters to Michal; indeed, the letters provide a firsthand account of his final work’s progression, reception, and influence.

Mentioned frequently is The Descent of the Dove, which Faber published about a month after fighting broke out on the Continent. In this masterful work of theology, Williams develops the doctrine of co-inherence, which consists in several postulations of Christian anthropology. Mythically speaking, his argument goes, ages cannot “separate one from another,” for they are inextricably co-inhered, each reaching “back to the beginning as it stretches on to the end, and the anthropos is present everywhere.” Notwithstanding the eons that separate the modern world from Adam, he adds, “we were in him and we were he; more, we sinned in him and his guilt is in us.” Referring to 1 Corinthians 15:22, Williams observes that everyone was “made sin in Adam, but Christ was made sin for us and we in him were taken out of sin.” To deny “the ancient heritage of guilt,” he contends, “is to cut ourselves off from mankind.”

Co-inherence is predicated on the law of exchange and substitution — a hidden law, by which Williams himself clearly lived, as well as a sacramental law, which was actualized in the marital bond between Williams and Michal, who bore his suffering as he did hers, even in their physical separation during the war. W.H. Auden, the most prolific English-born poet of the 20th century, summarized this law in an early review of the Dove. No one can bear his own burden alone, he writes. “He only can, and therefore he must, bear someone else’s.” Whose burden he should bear is, of course, a personal choice in large part determined by his “character” and “social circumstances.” Some, like the poet Taliessin in Williams’s variation on the Arthurian legend, can become so skilled in the practice of exchange that “they can do it for anybody.” Others, Auden cautions, fail to realize that “one-sided exchange is a contradiction.” Genuine exchange and substitution, he writes, “has nothing to do with the self-righteous attitude I once heard expressed in a parody of a sermon: ‘We are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.’”

To be sure, Williams depended on the book’s success to make ends meet. “The Dove is to be published, they hope, on 16 October,” he wrote to Michal. That will clear the bank” (Sept. 15, 1939). But what most concerned him was its potential effect on certain persons whose opinions he highly valued, particularly T.S. Eliot, Faber’s longtime editor, whom Williams admired more than any other contemporary, excepting Michal and C.S. Lewis. Eliot, a consistent and unequivocal champion of Williams’s work, wrote a favorable review in which he praised not only the Dove but also Williams’s imaginative works to date: War in Heaven (1930), Descent into Hell (1937), and Taliessin through Logres (1938). “I shall bring it when I come,” wrote a delighted Williams to Michal of Eliot’s review. “It is not that it is wildly laudatory, but it has a seriousness about my work” (Nov. 8, 1939).

As its circulation widened, the Dove found an appreciative audience. Soon after his return to the Church of England through the Episcopal equivalent in America, Auden sent Williams a note of thanks in which he acknowledged the role the book had played in his journey back to the faith of his boyhood. Auden took such delight in the Dove that in early 1940 he sent Williams a personal note praising the work and its author. “He just wanted to tell me,” Williams informed Michal, “how moved he was by the Dove (and he no Christian) and he was sending me his new book ‘as a poor return.’” (The book Auden promised to send was Another Time, a curious volume of verse manifesting a slight but definite shift from a secularist to a religious point of view.) Auden added that he was yet again reminded “of a curious fact that though I’ve only met you twice, in times of difficulty and doubt, recalling you has been of great help to me.” To his wife, Williams confessed, “I can’t think why it should be — but…it does seem you and I have not been without a result” (March 12, 1940).

In a letter to Michal (Oct. 16, 1940), Williams relates that Auden expressed his conviction that Williams had “‘a divine gift as a teacher’ and that ‘one day the Dove will be known for the great book it is.’” Auden “has gone all Christian,” Williams goes on to say, “and is composing verse under your husband’s influence — he sends me four poems and says so.” Auden was also praying that Williams might “be kept safe from bombs” as the violence of the war extended to England. “I’m quite moved by this,” Williams tells Michal. “Thus we — you and I — ‘move the minds that move the world.’ Like what Macaulay said of Francis Bacon.”

Here is not the place to recollect all the minds Williams incited with his mimetic powers of representation. But something must be said about the mystery writer and polemicist Dorothy L. Sayers. She had written him, as Williams tells Michal (Aug. 23, 1944), to praise his contribution to Dante studies, The Figure of Beatrice (1943). A few weeks later, she had cause to send another letter. Sayers had attended a conference, Williams tells his wife (Sept. 21, 1944), at which the image of Beatrice had been much discussed. Sayers wanted Williams to know that she had told a rather fulsome participant, who pretended to know something about the subject, that “he had better read” Williams’s book, “Mr. Williams being about the only person who has seriously applied himself to the disentangling of this very difficult matter.”

That Williams stirred the imaginations of Auden and Sayers is evident. Auden, in his notes to New Year Letter (1941), a long lyrical composition unambiguously conceived under Williams’s influence, refers the reader to the Dove, calling it “the source of many ideas in the poem.” That Auden, an erstwhile atheist with Marxist leanings, discovered a system of poetics and a faith centered on eternal questions and ultimate concerns, one which resigned itself to the intimacy and assurance of divine grace, owes much to his adopted mentor. It was Williams, he avows in one of his last poems (appropriately titled “A Thanksgiving”), along with Søren Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis, who finally “guided me back to belief.”

Sayers was so inspired by The Figure of Beatrice that she devoted herself to mastering the language of the Divina Commedia and rendering it into English. Her translations of Inferno and Purgatorio were published before her death in 1957. Her translation of Paradiso was completed posthumously by her goddaughter, the late Barbara Reynolds, accomplished English scholar of Italian studies and longtime managing editor of SEVEN, a literary review dedicated to celebrating and explicating the works of Williams and other Inklings. It is surely no exaggeration to say that these exquisite renditions of Dante would have never been attempted had the intellects of Sayers and Reynolds not been ignited by the sparks of Williams’s published elucidations.

Yet, just when the fruits of his influence were beginning to issue, Williams died on May 15, 1945, after undergoing surgery to repair damage caused by a previous operation. Seven days earlier, one day after the defeat of the Axis, Michal had received a short missive from her husband conveying “a dim sense of relief” and speaking of “the awful days when I thought the enemy might forever be between me and you.” Indeed, the external darkness was lifting. “The mourning and the burying are done,” as Williams put it. It appeared to be time to turn with a greater concentration to uncompleted manuscripts. And it was apparently time to reside once again at home with his son, Michael, of whom Williams speaks with tender solicitude throughout the letters he penned during Germany’s siege on Britain. But what seemed finally ready and right for transpiration was not to be.

After his death, Williams was not forgotten by his admirers. When he spoke, said C.S. Lewis in the preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947), his face became like that “of an angel — not a feminine angel in the debased tradition of some religious art, but a masculine angel, a spirit burning with intelligence and charity.” Williams left a similar impression on Eliot. “Had I ever to spend the night in a haunted house,” he wrote in his introduction to All Hallows’ Eve (1945), “I should have felt secure with Williams in my company: he was somehow protected from evil, and was himself a protection.” Williams was one of those rare souls, Sayers attested in The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement (1963), for whom “the solidarity of human society lay visibly extended, not only in space, but in time.” In Williams’s presence, Auden wrote in his autobiographical contribution to Modern Canterbury Pilgrims (1956), one felt momentarily “transformed into a person who was incapable of doing or thinking anything base or unloving.”

Auden, in his inaugural address as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, which he delivered 19 years after first meeting Williams in 1937, depicted lyrical language as a ritual act in celebration of a sacred object, and he bolstered his claim, not surprisingly, with Williams’s words. Specifically, he quoted at length from Witchcraft (1941), in which Williams describes a “hand lighting a cigarette” as “the explanation of everything,” a “foot stepping from the train” as “the rock of all existence,” a “pair of light dancing steps by a girl” as the essence of “what all the Schoolmen were trying to express,” and, by way of contrast, “two quiet steps by an old man” as the veritable “speech of hell.” Such phenomena as these, said Williams, each being “wholly itself,” is “laden with universal meaning.” The impression made by such, added Auden, each phenomenon being in itself a sacred event, is of “an overwhelming but undefinable significance.” One’s response to them, he maintained, “is a passion of awe.”

If there is one essential theme in Williams’s writing, Auden wrote in an essay titled “The Co-Inherence” (National Review, 1959), it is summed up in Williams’s favorite quotation from Julian of Norwich: “I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensualities God is.” Williams, as theologian, marshalled a relentless campaign against “the heresy of Manichaeism,” Auden wrote, “into which, consciously or unconsciously, Christians who cannot or do not wish to take the other ‘natural’ alternative, atheistic humanism, always have been and always will be tempted to fall.” In Christ’s suffering as a man of flesh and blood, Williams found proof that “the joys of the flesh have a validity of their own and that the soul ought not to be allowed, far less encouraged, ‘to reduce the body to its own shadow.’” And, in Christ’s passion, Williams discerned that “to be embodied is to be dependent upon others and have others dependent upon oneself, willy-nilly.”

To be sure, many intellectuals besides Auden, Eliot, Sayers, and Lewis remembered Williams fondly after his untimely death at age 58 when his greatest achievements seemed to lie in the future. But how did Michal remember her husband? She tells us in a personal essay King appends to the volume of letters. Hers is a poetic remembrance confirming what one infers: their life together, from beginning to end, aspired to poetry. “Little did Charles and I see one another in those early years,” she says of their incipient courtship. “But Cherubim and Seraphim saw to it that we sometimes met at crossroads.” In summer she and Charles would take the road that led to the meadows, where “the red-hot poker flowers blazed greeting, and the ripening corn waved and bowed to us.” Nor did they travel alone on those prenuptial walks. “We would take Charles’ book and boon companions along with us: Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Milton, Donne and Crashaw, Saint Athanasius, or rather his Creed, Saint Augustine and the Lady Julian of Norwich.”

One night, Williams overtook Michal as she was walking home from a lecture. In her hands he apprehensively put a stack of bounded pages, a sequence of 82 sonnets titled The Silver Stair, on which he asked her to comment. After reading the poems over and again, she suddenly realized that they were about no one else but herself. Williams had found his Beatrice. She married him in 1917, and the publication of his first book, the sonnet sequence, followed soon thereafter.

Michal underscores the untimeliness of her husband’s death: “We who admire his mature poetry cry lament for those final Arthurian poems Charles was going to write.” Eliot was eager to have Faber produce a book of them. They were eventually made available by Lewis, who included them in Arthurian Torso (1948). If Williams’s published poetry “is to many of us a strange, exquisite tapestry woven in colours of rich beauty,” Michal continues, “what might we not conjecture of the loveliness and revelation of that unborn poetry?” We shall never know what splendid poems died with Williams. “Nor shall we know the pattern and scope of that ‘one more novel,’” says Michal, “unless in that high town which is eternity our dead are bidden to continue their work of high intention.”

And what of the hundreds of letters to Serge from Michal? She read the first again a few days after he died, she tells us: “It was a very good letter. I burnt it, and I burnt all my letters to him in the fireplace of the room in which I am writing. Charles had liked them. Their purpose was fulfilled. I watched them burn. Red and gold the flames from them. Red and gold my love for him.” Few though they be, these words speak volumes. As Williams says in his final written sentence to Michal, “we are, in a way, blessed” (May 8, 1945).

This essay first appeared in the New Oxford Review and is republished here with gracious permission from the author.

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