Latest / Mythmakers / Mythmakers Encore: The Oddest Inkling - Charles Williams with Sørina Higgins

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Mythmakers Encore: The Oddest Inkling - Charles Williams with Sørina Higgins · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
• 0:10
  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for fantasy. My name is Julia Golding, I'm
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  an author but also I'm a director of the Centre. And today I'm joined by a very special guest
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  who is one of the world experts on Charles Williams, who perhaps we could call the third inkling
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  after C.S. Lewis and talking. So Sorina, would you like to introduce yourself and say who you
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  are and where you come from? Hello, yes. Thank you so very much for having me on. It's a pleasure
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  to talk to you. I am Dr. Sorina Higgins. I currently reside in Waco, Texas, where I've just finished
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  my PhD at Baylor University and I teach at Signum University, which is an online institution.
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  And yes, I've done research into Charles Williams, but more recently my research has shifted
• 1:00
  towards William Butler Yates, Alistair Crowley and the modern occult movement of which Charles
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  Williams was a member. Oh fantastic, we must we must talk about that because that's one of his
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  interesting differences in a way from the other years. Yes, that particular axis in his life.
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  Okay, so let's start with the basics. I'm not going to assume that people know who Charles Williams
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  is. So would you like to give us like the headlines on him? Sure. So Charles Williams born in 1886
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  in London and he spent most of his life in the city. He was a city boy. He wasn't as into
• 1:35
  nature as the other inklings. It's been a little time outside the city in St. Albans, went to
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  University for only a couple of years and had to drop out for financial reasons. So he was not
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  one of the Oxbridge educated men. He was largely self-taught. He began a job at the lowest
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  ranks at Oxford University Press, just doing the checking of some proofs. I think it was the
• 1:59
  complete works of Anthony Trollop. And then he worked his way up. He was doing it alone. He was
• 2:08
  doing it with Fred Pay to became his office mate and a very good friend for decades. So he
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  worked his way up the ranks of Oxford University Press from a lowly proof reader to become a senior
• 2:19
  editor. And through his editorial work and the introductions and preferences he wrote and the
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  authors with whom he corresponded and the collections he brought together, he actually had a fair
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  influence on the literary tastes of the times and what literature was available. He was the first
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  to publish the works of Soren Kierkegaard in England and was maybe the first person ever in
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  England to lecture on Kierkegaard as just one example of his editorial work. So for most of his
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  life, his day job and his ordinary activities were very different from the rest of the inklings.
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  We should mention that though he worked for Oxford University Press his actual office was in London.
• 2:59
  That's right. That's right because it was not the any what we would now call the pure reviewed
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  line of the press. It was academic but for a more popular audience work. That was what was going
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  on in London, whereas Oxford was where the strictly academic works were being produced. But then
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  in 1939, when the war hit and London was being bombed, he did evacuate two Oxford and that's when
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  he joined the inklings for the last six years of his life, which were six highly productive years.
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  However, even before joining the inklings, he was like all of them addicted to writing and he
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  wrote ravenously in all of his spare time and then seems never to have slept. So he would be
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  writing all night. He would carry tiny little pads of paper with him wherever he went so you
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  could find him on a train scribbling some esoteric poem on his knee while he's in the train or in
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  odd moments at the office. So those are kind of the external details of his life, not a very
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  not a very adventurous some life from an external point of view, but he had many spiritual intellectual
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  adventures that I'm sure we will get into. He was married, which is an interesting story. They had
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  one son. He was a member of the fellowship of the Rosie Cross Occult Group for 10 years and then
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  an unofficial member of another Occult Exploration Group for about 20 years.
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  Let's cover the occult at this point because I think when people hear the occult, people assume it
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  means like, no, weed your boards and black magic and things. This is not that. This is very much
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  occult as in the sense of hidden private, a sense of magic, but it's trying to use it for good
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  and healing, sharing of burdens, isn't it? That's the sort of philosophy of that group. That's the
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  theory. Okay, you're the, you're telling us what happened. What weed you boards? There was one
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  instance when he walked into a room where people were playing with weed you boards and apparently
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  it had been doing nothing and as soon as he walked in it went mad and told them all sorts of things.
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  The occult groups in which he was involved were, quote unquote, Christian occult groups. We can
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  get into what that means and how that's possible. But they did practice many forms of divination,
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  you know, tarot cards, astrology, meditation on the Sephirotic Tree from the Jewish
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  Kabbalistic Mystical Tradition. They did practice high ceremonial magic with great ritual,
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  dressing up choreography, words of power and so forth. It was not black magic, you're right,
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  which is a different tradition and it was meant to do good, but it often, since it's being
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  wielded by weak and sinful people, it often did go wrong and end up in coercion and control and
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  even abuse of other people. Yes, there's, um, Gravel Lindock's biography of Charles Williams is
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  very interesting on this, isn't it, with the strange relationships he had with some women
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  as a result of this? Yes. So, um, let's think about him as a writer, though, of course, this
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  interest in his private life does come so much into his writing. I mean, you can't really understand
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  him as a writer without having a sense of where he came from. He, as he was saying, he was working
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  as an editor and a sort of person who set the taste by choosing to write certain introductions
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  and things like that, but he also started writing, um, poetry and novels on his own,
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  which, which, which we go for first, the poetry or the novels, because they have different beasts.
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  Let's go for the novels first, because they're easy to understand and I also don't want us to
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  overlook the plays and the nonfiction prose as well, because those are extremely important.
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  So, the novels are the most accessible, which isn't saying much, because for him, the bar of
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  accessibility is fairly high, but they are a lively and delightful and strange and memorable creatures.
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  I think one of the things that struck me about the novels is that each of them has a very
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  different concept. It's as though he's inventing a bit like, um, CS Lewis and Tolkien could be
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  claimed to invent a whole new Fantry genre for both of them. He's doing the same, but in rapid
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  succession. So, you've got the kind of Indiana Jones, um, uh, what's it called the, uh,
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  which for the war in heaven?
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  For in heaven, thank you. And then you've got the philosophic one with the place of the lion,
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  which is the amazing one with the platonic ideals breaking through to ordinary life and so on
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  and then a very haunting one, or Hallows Eve, which is in a sort of, um, Blitz London,
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  it's quite extraordinary, isn't it, that one, where the path and characters are in the,
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  sort of, anti-broom to the afterlife.
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  Yeah, two characters have been killed immediately at the very beginning of a novel, but they
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  continue to be active in London and what the lives of the living through the whole novel.
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  Yes, you're right. He picks, he chooses as sort of a central or sacred object.
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  Three of these novels and it's the point around which all the spiritual energy turns and it works,
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  it works the way a murder works and a lot of murder mysteries. You know how you have, like,
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  say, broad church and it starts in this nice quiet little English village and everyone seems
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  so nice and ordinary, but then the crime is committed and as the story goes forward,
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  you start to learn all the dark wicked things about each character and before the end you suspect
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  everyone. Well, the way a crime kind of reveals people's spiritual condition, so this sacred object,
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  a Williams novels, reveals people's spiritual condition, essentially whether they're on a path
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  moving toward God or away from God by how they respond to the object, like if they desire to
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  possess it, if they want to use it for worldly pleasures or for spiritual powers or if they
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  are willing to submit themselves to it and not possess it or use it for good.
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  So we have a holy grail, we have this magical stone in many dimensions, platonic archetypes,
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  it's a play in descent into hell, that's sort of that central object and there's a thing.
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  That one is, that's fascinating because it does link through to the plays, it reminded me a bit of
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  between the acts and the Virginia Wolf, which is, has another fascination in a very different
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  use, of course, but the sense of the amateur dramatic world of the interwar period.
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  Yeah, and so there's a definitely a sense of how societies
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  village society in these cases, how all the characters are drawn to get by the power of the play.
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  So should we talk about his plays then, because that's something which doesn't get much
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  of a mention, just to sort of put in context, this is the time when you've got people like
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  T.S. Eliot writing murder in the cathedral, it's in that tradition of plays, isn't it?
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  Exactly, and that's a perfect comparison because he and Eliot were friends, they're pretty close,
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  it's been a lot of time together, he actually said that T.S. Eliot was probably his second best
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  male friend after T.S. Lewis later in his life, I want only people who understood him,
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  and they wrote plays for the Canterbury Festival back to back. So Williams wrote Thomas
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  Cranmer of Canterbury and Eliot wrote murder in the cathedral for the same festival,
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  they attended each other's productions, they went to see other plays together like Neville
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  Coghill's production of Hamlet. Wouldn't you have loved to be there to hear what T.S. Eliot and
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  Charles Williams were saying about Neville Coghill's production of Hamlet in which Richard Burton had
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  his debut? Oh no, that was amazing. I've been thinking of like Eliot's essay, it's on Hamlet,
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  right? And the fact that people wrote dramas and wrote about Shakespeare is just that must have been
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  an amazing day. Is there any any extant comments like oh he did a good job or that was pretty
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  ropey? I have not, I have not seen any of them. It's a shame. Yeah, I imagine they liked it.
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  So what's the flavor of Thomas Cranmer? Is it similar with is it a symmetrical drama like the T.S.
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  Eliot one? Yes, it is a first drama. Williams wrote many first dramas and as a matter of fact,
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  he was probably best known as a playwright in his lifetime rather than as a poet or a novelist
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  because some of his plays were quite popular. He often had commissions for ecclesiastical settings,
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  he had schools that had had teenage girls put on his plays which is funny to think about.
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  So yes, what is the flavor? Very bizarre. Of course, it's Charles Williams. It's very
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  different from murder in the cathedral in its sort of its atmosphere or spiritual sense,
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  but it does have some mechanical similarities both set in a historical time about a martyr set
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  on location. So you have this kind of meta-performative thing going on, right? The play is happening
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  more or less in the same place. The events occurred historically and that they both have the main
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  character tempted and wrestling with these deep existential crises and in the end having to
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  decide to submit to Margar gum. So there are those similarities. But Williams' play is well,
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  I was going to say much less narrative, but then again, murder in the cathedral had
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  some strange narrative things too, doesn't it? But what makes Williams' play distinctive is the
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  character of the skeleton. So there's this character who's named that and who wore one of those
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  skeleton suits, you know, a black outfit with the white bones painted on and apparently gave a
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  brilliant performance. And he acts as sort of a conscience for Thomas Cramber and a temper and a
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  gold and a demonic figure, but apparently in the end it turns out he's actually a sort of a
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  holy spirit figure. He says he's the backside of Christ, the skeleton, and he's always challenging
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  and tempting and taunting Cramber. And in the end inspires Cramber to go running towards his doom
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  and to embrace his martyr gum. And so he's actually kind of the catalyst for Cramber's salvation.
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  So he's something of a chorus figure except that he's individual rather than collective.
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  And he's a mad manic figure who dances and does acrobatics all around the stage and raises all
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  these spiritual questions. So this is indicative, I haven't read that one, and I'm definitely going
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  to have to now go away and find a copy of it. He's quite hard to find Williams material these days
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  isn't it? Unless you've got Williams. Thanks for a couple of publishers working hard on reissuing
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  things and getting new things out. So that's great. I think we're going to an exciting moment for
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  that. But yes, we absolutely need a complete place. There's a lovely line with a collected
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  place edited by John Heath Stubbs, but that's only about half of the place. And there are even
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  still more in the Marion Wade Center that have yet to be published. So we are getting the sense here
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  aren't we that he is a man of very distinctive personality and tastes. So I think it might be worth
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  before we do the poetry. Have a look at the theology because and this is an interesting comparison
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  to CS Lewis. If you think of CS Lewis as being the plain man speaking plain words to people,
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  it very much, you know, the communicator on radio is where a lot of his theology started.
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  Jos Williams is very much the esoteric man having his own sort of approach to theology,
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  but it was very appreciated at the time and it definitely had its audience. If you're following
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  this at all, it's sort of in the evening under hill, more sort of metaphysical kind of way of
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  thinking isn't it? Okay. So tell us, this is a huge thing to do on a podcast, but
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  have a go at a little bit about how he approached theology. Yes. Well, as everything else, he
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  approached theology in a highly distinctive fashion. And I think this is partly because he didn't
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  go through the standard sort of Newton Oxford education. He didn't read all the same classics in
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  the same order or the same commentaries on them. So he developed his ideas idiosyncratically.
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  Part of his approach to theology can be attributed to his father. When he was young, he and his
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  dad would go for long walks. However, his father was extremely near sighted and ended up going blind
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  and Charles himself was very near sighted. So they didn't go for walks to look at the landscape.
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  They went for walks to have conversations and they would get into deep and tangled theological
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  issues and halfway through his dad would make them switch sides of a debate. So Charles was always
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  having to try out both sides of any conversation and apparently he would do this all his life. So
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  you'd be halfway into, I don't know, predestination and free will. And he'd be arguing for God's
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  complete control of every detail and also he'd flip and be arguing for free will and you'd have to
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  reorient yourself in the conversation. But he also was coming at theology with a literary
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  scholar's point of view, not a theologian's. So when he read, say, Don's scotus, whom he did,
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  he was reading him through the tradition of courtly love, which as we know is much more of a
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  literary than an actual historical tradition. So he would get from that these ideas of the place
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  of romantic love in one's theological life rather than say a nice tidy history of Christianity
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  systematic theology or something. Okay, but we should get into some of his really specific ideas
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  and what he contributed. So the things that he contributed primarily are co-aheerence,
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  substitution exchange and romantic theology. If you have another one we should talk about.
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  No, no, no. My understanding is enough to, yeah, I'm headlines only.
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  Hold on, I think with these doctors, the more you know, the more dangerous it gets. So his core
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  doctrine is co-aheerence and it's founded on the historical Christian doctrine of the pericuresis
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  or the dance of the members of the Trinity. So the idea that God is three who are living in
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  loving harmony and unity as one. And then the second notion is the two in one natures of Christ.
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  So the hypostatic union, the divine and the human nature. So you have this idea of
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  things that are defined the laws of physics, right? Things we have more than one in the same
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  space at the same time, whether it's three persons of the Trinity, two natures of Christ or then
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  Christ in us or us in each other. And the two most perfect examples of co-aheerence and human
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  experience are pregnancy and romantic love. Because in pregnancy, you literally have one person
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  inside the other and they are, they're not exactly mutually interdependent, but they are mutually
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  exchanging, nutrition and so forth, but also ideally love. But sexual love was the number one
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  example that he used of how humans enact this co-aheerence theology. So in his strange little book
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  outlines of romantic theology, which he wrote in 1924, but it wasn't published until after his death,
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  he argues that any romantic relationship follows the stages of Christ's earthly life.
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  And so that every couple that is in love are enacting Jesus by their love. So he's following
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  after Dante in the via affirmative or the affirmative way, saying that created things are images of
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  God and that we get to know God through them by pursuing those things. But he takes it to quite an
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  extreme. He's not limiting it to Christian marriage. It's just really sort of any sexual attraction
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  can be rungs on the ladder to God. And while he says that this could be any sort of relationship
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  and that it works for either partner, the way he writes it does seem to be very much a male centered,
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  you know, the man who has this idealized woman who is amused for him and she's sort of upon a
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  pedestal and by idealizing and idolizing her, he's seeing God through her, although he claims it
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  can work the other way around or in any relationship. Rachel, the Dante and Beatrice thing
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  isn't it absolutely. That was his model for it. And so his final expression of this is one of his
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  last books, The Figure of Beatrice, that gets a lot more subtle. It's not as mechanistic as the
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  early works. It's like mapping a relationship on the life of Christ. It's much more how does the
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  affirmative way work out in history and theology, literature, and in your life?
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  So thinking about the connections of the other inklings, you can see some of this resonance
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  in things like tool we have face in spricious Lewis. And even sort of the
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  the Parallelanger, you know, the second of the space, the ransom. And I think there's
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  noodles of proof that CS Lewis in particular thought Charles Williams was just the bee's knees
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  and absorbed a lot of his ideas. And because it's CS Lewis, it comes out in a slightly
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  well, it's a simpler version, shall we say, than the Charles Williams form of us.
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  One of the things which I think is particularly interesting and you might even see in Tolkien as
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  well, this is an idea of, you had a particular term for it, but it's the substitution idea that
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  you take on the burden for somebody else, which of course feels a bit like Frodo carrying the ring.
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  And then I'm carrying Frodo. I can't carry it, sir, but I can carry you.
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  Right, that should be a line from Charles Williams. So, put some Europe to explain a little bit about
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  this because you see it in his novels as well. It's a better place when you know it's there.
• 21:54
  Yes. So his idea of the way of substitution or the way of exchange, exactly, it's the idea that
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  suppose that you have some very, very difficult thing that you're going through. Suppose you've
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  lost a loved one and so you have this burden of grief or you've gotten some terrible news or
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  an awful diagnosis. And you just feel like you can't handle this mental, emotional, spiritual
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  burden. Well, you could tell me about it and we could make a contract and then I would take it for
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  you and you would no longer feel it as a burden. Now, it's not that your memory would be erased or
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  anything like that. You would still, if it were a grief for a lost loved one, you'd still be able
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  to remember them, mourn them and honor them, but you would no longer feel it as a burden. You would
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  be licensed and I would carry that burden for you, but because it wasn't mine, it wouldn't feel as
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  burdensome to me either. So he bases this on the verse, Barry, you won another's burdens and so
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  fulfilled a lot of Christ and he takes it absolutely literally. He says it's exactly like if you're
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  carrying a box and your arms have gotten tired and so now the box is too heavy for you, I can take
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  the box and carry it for you because my arms are not as worn out. So it's that literal and there
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  is a debate among scholars as to how Christian this doctrine is and how magical this doctrine is.
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  There are people who find it absolutely inspiring and try to practice this in their own lives. There
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  is, well, there was, there was a Yahoo group called co-inherence.net which I think is hilarious
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  and people would get on there and talk about sharing each other's burdens. I don't know if there's
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  some descendant of that group now. I think there is. I'm on the side that thinks that it's
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  much more magical and that he never really did grow out of his occult training, but instead he
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  went on and established his own group, the order of the co-inherence or the companions of the
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  co-inherence. Because to my mind, this looks more mechanistic than miraculous and it looks to be
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  much more of a piece of ceremonial ritual that you perform and it has to happen if you execute
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  the formula correctly rather than a much more Christian supplication to God and God being the one
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  who performs it. So I fall on the more magical side of that, but I just want your listeners to know
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  this is a debate and not everyone agrees with me. Yeah, and it's certainly something you can imagine
• 24:21
  the Inglings discussing at great length and disagreeing on and toying with and so it's not
• 24:27
  surprising that we see it coming out in how they're thinking of what you do with
• 24:32
  practice in that fiction. There was a conversation, oh, I wish we had more details.
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  We had a letter from CS Lewis to his brother saying that they had an Inglings and there was
• 24:42
  another visitor named Charles Ren and in the course of their conversation, Ren expressed almost
• 24:47
  seriously a desire to burn Charles Williams as a heretic and we don't know what the doctrine was
• 24:54
  and CS Lewis goes on to say Charles Williams at least makes us understand why people were burned
• 25:00
  at the stake. He is eminently combustible. So this this world of sort of a particular form of
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  theology is very much lace behind his Arthurian cyclopones which is where I first met your work
• 25:21
  Serena and I want to thank you first of all for supplying a very cogent introduction.
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  So the two collections of the Arthurian cycle are Taliesin through Logres. Now Taliesin just
• 25:36
  to explain these terms. He's the name of a bard, a singer who Charles Williams imagines at the
• 25:43
  court of King Arthur. He's actually a character already existing in folklore and Logres is
• 25:50
  a word meaning Britain at the time and then the second series is called The Region of the Summer
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  Stars. Now these are a series of short poems that sort of joined together like a quilt to tell
• 26:07
  the story of King Arthur's court from the point of view really of the poets in that court. More or
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  less. I mean it's more it's obviously a bit more complicated than that but that gives us
• 26:21
  a sort of approach. So tell us about what you think of the strengths of this and what's the
• 26:27
  experience of reading them for a modern reader who's thinking I really want to know what his
• 26:33
  poetry is like. Right. The strengths of this cycle are Williams' distinctive theological
• 26:40
  perspectives and his willingness to experiment with some modern poetic forms more than perhaps
• 26:47
  the other inklings and there his friendship with T. S. Eliot's I think was fruitful for him.
• 26:54
  So the poems are really balanced in a very careful way on the ancient tree of the Arthurian
• 27:02
  tradition but somewhat metrically experimental and certainly very vivid in their imagery and
• 27:09
  in the musicality of the poems. They're absolutely beautiful. What is the experience of a reader
• 27:14
  approaching them? Complete bafflement. But as I do say in that introduction tell us through Logres.
• 27:23
  I think that if a reader approaches them first just to experience them like music then I think
• 27:28
  they would have a really enjoyable experience because the poems sound absolutely lovely and we do
• 27:35
  need audiobooks of these and we do need composers to step up and set these to music by the way
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  but if you were to read these poems say three times through the first time just enjoy the aesthetic
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  sensory experience the gorgeous imagery of roses and heraldic banners,
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  lions and unicorns and the luscious clothing of the people in King Arthur's court and the
• 28:02
  exciting action moments of the battle scenes and so forth. And then on a second read perhaps start
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  picking up on what are the major themes and what are the images that are coming up over and over
• 28:14
  again and starting to distinguish some of the characters because although Williams is not
• 28:21
  writing strict narrative poetry with details, character arcs, he does occasionally do a deep dive
• 28:28
  into a character state of mind, state of mind, the way lyric poetry can do. And then finally on
• 28:34
  a third reading you can start to pick up on much more plot and the details and the things that
• 28:39
  Williams is adding to the tradition and just to sort of give a spoiler on that. What Williams
• 28:46
  is adding to the tradition not surprisingly are his distinctive beliefs, coherence, exchange
• 28:52
  and the romantic theology but also the absolute centrality of the grail. He did more with the holy
• 28:59
  grail than probably any previous author since Roberto Barone in the 14th century French romance
• 29:07
  which was one of his primary sources. So he uses the grail the same way that he does in his novels
• 29:13
  and like all those other ritual objects we talked about that each person's reaction to the grail
• 29:18
  reveals his or her spiritual condition and that's specifically revealed in whether they're willing
• 29:25
  to submit to and participate in coherence or whether they insist on being an individual
• 29:31
  and being free from that interwoven fabric of reality. Basically whether they would rather
• 29:38
  reign in hell or serve in heaven pretty much so that it comes to you. I don't want to scare people
• 29:43
  off too much. I mean if listeners have managed the wasteland for example or half of the
• 29:49
  test they can manage this pretty I mean it's more I think it's easier to unpick in some ways than
• 29:54
  the four quartets. I just sweat to see the ray finds readings of the you know the stage readings
• 30:01
  which absolutely brilliant but I did have to read a lot in advance to understand them and I think
• 30:06
  Charles Williams pays off if you give it equal attention but it's not so impossible because you've
• 30:12
  got some of the Arthurian material to sort of help you the superstructure underneath. You can see
• 30:17
  where he's varying the tune for example and then you ask yourself why is he varying it what's
• 30:22
  going on here. So in your introduction Serena I was looking at the this description of how he
• 30:29
  treats history and I think there's another interesting link here particularly to Tolkien. The idea
• 30:34
  that he crunches up basically a thousand years of history from the sort of beginning you know what
• 30:41
  we call the Dark Ages just after the fall of the Roman Empire to the fall of Constantinople that
• 30:49
  sort of swath of time which was about 400 to about 1600 something like that. It's about the
• 30:56
  Battle of Baden Hill 500 to 1453. So if you can imagine that period of history he is dealing
• 31:05
  dealing as if it's all happening in King Arthur's reign. So I like this idea that you can sort of
• 31:13
  crunch history together because I think in a sense that's what Tolkien does in he invents a pre
• 31:18
  history and he wants to imagine what it could have been like and I think just at that simple level
• 31:25
  Charles Williams is doing this is what it could have been like. So if you if you like that sort of
• 31:30
  reinventing of history it's another reason for thinking about Charles Williams as someone you might
• 31:36
  read. Really really is and he does that primarily because he wants to erase the east west
• 31:42
  schism of the church he hates schism he hates division. Yes so he has this beautiful imagined Roman
• 31:48
  Byzantine Empire that never existed historically but it's as if what if those eastern west
• 31:55
  halves of the empire were completely united and what if England were a province of the Byzantine
• 32:01
  Empire not only of the Roman what would this mean historically and theologically. So it
• 32:07
  positions Arthur sort of in dialogue with Constantine really and so you get all the deep
• 32:14
  theological and artistic resonances of those two empire those three empires really the Roman
• 32:20
  the Arthurian and the Byzantine conflated together. I'm just thinking about what because a lot of
• 32:25
  people who listen to this have come from Tolkien that's where they're coming from and I'm just
• 32:30
  thinking that if you if you want to find a sense of some of the really interesting poems about the
• 32:36
  Roman Emperor who's a sort of figure in in his city there's a sense of a I know I'm minister of the
• 32:44
  type world and imagine there is there's resonance there is also sort of the forests and I think
• 32:54
  lapse a lot rather charmingly goes wild as a wolf. There's so many different treasures defined
• 33:01
  in this sequence. Yeah it is absolutely gorgeous you're right they both love the city and the empire
• 33:09
  and they see glory and those human achievements of the beautiful building of a city and
• 33:14
  at Charles Williams as a world builder I think has not been appreciated enough he just he grabs
• 33:20
  from all these different traditions but he does synthesize them he doesn't end up with a
• 33:24
  hodgepodge as talking accused Narnia of being he ends up with something beautifully synthesized
• 33:30
  with layers and layers of symbolism and yet also just real human emotion his poems are frequently
• 33:38
  spoken in the first person by one character or another more dread gets a poem in which he's
• 33:43
  just cursing against Arthur it's really powerful we get personal singing one of the songs so
• 33:52
  you're right there are a lot of beauties in this work and I think your listeners would love it
• 33:56
  it definitely repays the attention given to it. So don't go expecting to understand it go
• 34:02
  in the sense go expecting to just enjoy it I think it's from somewhere looking at it so it's
• 34:09
  really obvious that the early death of Charles Williams brought to a sudden stop a really interesting
• 34:17
  career and he wasn't that he he died as a result of an operation which he wasn't expected to have
• 34:24
  any complications from and this was right towards the end as the Segmer war so he suddenly vanishes
• 34:31
  from the literary scene and I think people like yourself are trying to remind us of his existence
• 34:37
  because he was a bigger deal in his time than he is and now and he had more influence on people.
• 34:42
  So should we talk about him as a sort of influence figure we've mentioned the inklings but he's
• 34:47
  connected to in other ways to we've mentioned T.S. Eliot but also there's Auden who
• 34:54
  admired him and others still to talk about his sort of circle beyond the inklings.
• 34:58
  Yes please thank you that's one of my favorite things. W. H. Auden attributed his conversion
• 35:04
  to Christianity to the reading of Charles Williams works and to meeting Williams several people
• 35:10
  who met him thought of him as a saintly figure so his theological influence but also his literary
• 35:17
  influence went on and on after his death. Now another person we need to talk about in this
• 35:23
  connection although he died sooner than Williams is William Butler Yates. I don't think they ever
• 35:29
  met in person but they corresponded a good deal because they worked together on an anthology
• 35:35
  that Yates was putting together and Williams was editing and of course they were occult cousins
• 35:41
  because they were in related occult groups and their poetry can be very very fruitfully
• 35:49
  compared and they both have this deep profound mysticism shot through all of their works
• 35:55
  and yet those two poets in their lives evolved from sort of a more romanticism through an Edwardian
• 36:02
  style into very very modern poetic styles so it's important to look at those overlapping groups
• 36:09
  but there was also a generation of young writers kind of in the extended Oxford circles
• 36:15
  who really admired Charles Williams and I think carried his legacy forward. The complete list is
• 36:22
  in Grable Lindop. I can't remember right now all of them. I know Philip Larkin loved Williams
• 36:27
  works and was influenced by it and there were some others in that generation of younger poets
• 36:34
  but then we also see some of his legacy going forward in perhaps the more Gothic strain of modern
• 36:42
  fantasy. I think of for instance Madeline Lengel and Ursula K. Ligwin as kind of later people
• 36:50
  who were carrying on and inklings like legacy but I see it even on into things like Dr. Hoo and
• 36:58
  the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we have these these superhero stories of this main figure with
• 37:04
  this honestly spiritual power even though they often scientize it in those works but those works
• 37:12
  are Dr. Hoo universe and the Marvel universe and DC and so forth. It's just the one story over and
• 37:18
  over again of the central heroic figure who sacrifices themselves to save one person or to save
• 37:26
  the multiverse and frequently comes back again. So the dying and rising god story
• 37:33
  connected to the sacrificial story of the co-inherence. So I think that Williams was part of this
• 37:39
  really really important network or web in his own time with the inklings with the modernists,
• 37:46
  with the occultists and that those influences go on and on and on and ways that have not yet
• 37:51
  been explored thoroughly. Yeah I mean when you say like that of course we can just carry on listing
• 37:57
  them. We've got Ben Kenobi everyone Kenobi we've got Harry Potter and I think one of the one
• 38:04
  the stories which isn't the dying god one but is from the grail influence is of course Indiana Jones
• 38:12
  because the last moves in Indiana Jones are so totally taken from the Charles Williams playbook.
• 38:17
  So yeah it's fascinating isn't it? I hope so Serena more power to you for your work on Charles
• 38:26
  Williams. I look forward to seeing more of his work coming back into more general circulation.
• 38:30
  I always end these podcasts with asking where in all the fantasy world is the best place for
• 38:37
  something. And I thought in honor of King Arthur and all things Arthurian we should ask where is
• 38:45
  the best place to be a knight? Where would you choose to go if you had to Don Niamma or the
• 38:52
  Knightley code and go to any world? I suppose it depends if you're going for longevity you might
• 38:59
  not want to go into game with friends. I certainly wouldn't last very long there. But whatever
• 39:05
  do you want to game? Oh boy I've been thinking this is back in my head the whole time we've been
• 39:09
  talking and I'm really torn and I think I'm going to go with an unexpected move because of course
• 39:15
  I'm expected to say Charles Williams is Byzantine Roman Empire and I will just say that would be
• 39:21
  an awesome place to go if you are both like poet and a knight. Yeah. Gallicin is the court poet
• 39:26
  but he's also Arthur's captain of horse and so he also commands a battle so that would be a brilliant
• 39:32
  place to go. But I'm also thinking of the Celtic world of Tirna Nug and the Tuatha de Donem
• 39:41
  this shadowy Celtic twilight world where you could be a fairy knight and sail off to the west
• 39:49
  and live in this these islands of mist and magic and mystery. I think that's where I would like to go
• 39:54
  if I were a knight. Wonderful. I know where I would go. There's an American writer called
• 40:02
  Tamora Pierce who wrote a sort of young person's a YA series called The Song of the Lioness which
• 40:08
  is a quartet and it's quite a huge experience in that it's two twins who swap. So the girl goes to
• 40:15
  take the boys training and the boy goes to be the wizard magician which was Railogastani and it's
• 40:21
  beautifully written wonderfully a sort of coming of age story a traditional knight's place but it's
• 40:28
  serious about training. I mean there's a lot of detail about how you build up muscle strength if you're
• 40:33
  you know a five foot four girl as opposed to a six foot two boy. Yeah so I think that gives you
• 40:39
  serious tips. So I think that training you might survive as a knight for a bit it helps that she's
• 40:45
  also magical. Yeah, yeah, Mac and Muffle. That's a good combination. Thank you so much for joining us
• 40:53
  and it's been absolutely a joy to talk about Charles Williams who I'm going. Thank you.
• 40:58
  So delightful. I do hope that I'm most intriguing of the inclings. I think so. The oddest
• 41:03
  inkling I do hope that your listeners pick them up and try some of the novels or poetry or theology
• 41:09
  whatever appeals to the most. Thank you very much. Goodbye. All right thank you.
• 41:19
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• 41:26
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