BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Dr. Charles Franklyn Beach (PhD, Baylor University) is a retired professor of English from Nyack College. He wrote his dissertation on pilgrimage in George MacDonald’s Lilith and Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell, and has gone on to discuss the Inklings and their influences in various pieces. His work has been published in such academic publications as Sehnsucht, Aethlon, Studies in Short Fiction, and Mythlore. His popular scholarship on the Inklings includes articles for CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society and The Oddest Inkling. He also contributed to The Mark Twain Encyclopedia and the essay collections Christianity and the Detective Story edited by Anya Morlan and ‎Walter Raubicheck and Popular Arthurian Traditions edited by Sally K. Slocum.

He was kind enough to answer a few questions.

Interview Questions

How did you first hear about the Inklings?

I think the first time I realized that there was a group of authors who gathered together as the “Inklings” was through Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Inklings.  I had already become aware that Lewis and Tolkien knew each other by means of Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, which I had read in my early days of being fascinated by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which followed the December 1977 broadcast of the Rankin & Bass adaptation of The Hobbit.  By the end of 1978, I had read through all four books at least three complete times, and I completed my seventh complete reading by Christmas 1981.

My discovery of Lewis’ Narnia books had occurred a few years earlier, when The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was serialized between September 1971 and May 1972 in the Sunday School newspaper that we kids received each week at my church.  After falling in love with that story, I had to track down the other six books, and it took three years to do so, as they were not held in our town library and were not available in most bookstores at that time.  After that, I gradually discovered the Space Trilogy and then Lewis’ theological and apologetics books, which I read during my college days in the early 1980s.

Did you discover George MacDonald separately or in connection with the Inklings?

I first became aware of George MacDonald through references C. S. Lewis made to him in various books, as well as in the anthology of excerpts from MacDonald’s writings that Lewis edited.  In addition, the musician David Edwards referenced MacDonald in some of his songs, and on one occasion when I had the opportunity to speak with him, Edwards gave me some suggestions about which books to read.  In that time period, the early 1980s, it was not easy to find MacDonald’s books, except for the much-abridged and altered versions of his English and Scottish novels that showed up in Christian bookstores in that decade.[1]  But I did find the Eerdmans editions of Phantastes and Lilith around 1984, and I recall one lunchtime not long afterward when I was sitting in my car and listening to one of Edwards’ albums when the song “A Fool’s Condition” played—and I realized that the spoken parts in that song were from the part of Phantastes that I was then reading.  It was later, while I was in grad school at Baylor, that I started reading more MacDonald, though I admit I still have a long way to go to finish reading all of his books.  (In the 1990s, I bought the complete set of reprints published by Johannesen.)

What are some things that keep you attracted to writing about the Inklings, instead of writing an essay and moving on to other scholarly topics?

I think that part of my continuing interest in the Inklings is partly due to the major role these writers played in my own imaginative and creative development and also due to the fact that I keep discovering new things each time I reread a familiar narrative, as well as when I read one of their books that I haven’t previously explored.  But these days much of my work with Lewis and Williams, in particular, involves making connections between their writings and those of other authors—people who influenced them or whom they influenced, as well as contemporaries—more than on the Inklings themselves or their books.  Part of that shift in focus has been due to the difficulty I have had in finding something new or distinctive to say about those authors, as many of the things I encounter in their books have already been discussed by scholars more skilled than I am.  But part of that shift is also due to my continually expanding literary landscape, as I discover new-to-me authors or new-to-me books by authors I’ve already encountered in the past.  Some of my reading and study of George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton, for example, has focused on books I had not previously encountered by each writer.  And I have also been doing research and study of other related writers, such as Hilaire Belloc, Anne Ridler, and Humbert Wolfe.

Charles Williams tends to be given names like “the difficult Inkling” because his ideas seem less accessible, but those who do enjoy his work tend to love it. What initially attracted you to his work?

Even though I had read Carpenter’s The Inklings, I had not understood (or even probably paid much attention to) what he said about Charles Williams, so all that I knew was that there was this author with that name who hung out with Lewis and Tolkien.  It wasn’t until August 1985 when the Christian bookstore in Schenectady, NY, had a sale which included the four Williams novels they had on hand that I finally started reading him.  (The bookstore special-ordered the other three Williams novels for me, and then sold them to me at the sale price.)  I finished reading all seven books in publication order in two weeks, and I was hooked.  As much as I loved the other two authors, Williams fired up my imagination even more, and it was in large part due to those seven novels that I took the step of going to grad school to study English literature in August 1986; as an undergrad, I had earned B’s and C’s in literature classes, and my main area of interest had been creative writing.

It was only later that I realized that, besides the power of Williams’ language, what appealed to me was that he placed the fantastic elements within the England of his own day.  That encounter between the fantastic and the real seemed to have so much more possibility than the escape to a secondary world, such as the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve experience in Narnia, or the total immersion in the secondary world, such as Tolkien develops in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  My interest in Williams was increased the more I read of his writings, and since my approach to the analysis of his novels in my M.A. thesis required me to develop a thorough picture of his theology, I ended up reading nearly everything he had written and published before I finished the thesis.

Do you have any recommendations for readers interested in Williams’ Arthurian poetry?

Williams’ mature Arthurian poetry—those poems which are contained in Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of Summer Stars—are obviously more difficult for readers new to Williams than his earlier work on an Arthurian cycle, in more traditional poetic forms and styles, such as he used in the Heroes & Kings collection.  Besides reading C. S. Lewis’ Arthurian Torso, a commentary on Williams Arthurian poems and vision, as well as Williams’ incomplete The Figure of Arthur that was published with it, I think the best approach is to familiarize oneself with Williams’ central ideas, as well as reading and rereading the poems on several occasions over a period of time.  It helps to understand that most of the Arthurian poems are told from the perspective of the poet Taliessin, who has experiences outside Arthur’s court and who brings that greater knowledge of the world to his descriptions of the people and events of Arthur’s court.  A few poems are told from other characters’ viewpoints, especially Sir Bors, the one Grail knight who returns from the quest to tell the other knights what he, Sir Galahad, and Sir Percivale experienced.  But a reader of Williams’ Arthurian poems needs to be patient and willing to accept not understanding everything, even after several readings.  I have immersed myself in those poems at several points over the past 35 years, and I can’t say that I yet fully understanding all that Williams is expressing through them.

Your chapter in Christianity and the Detective Story was partly an exploration of how Williams’ novel War in Heaven starts like a murder mystery and becomes something else. Any thoughts on why Williams pushed against detective fiction formulas when his (literally) hundreds of book reviews show he loved a good mystery?

I think that, for Williams, his ideas and his particular vision of the world would not have let him simply write a more formulaic or traditional detective story.  For a writer like Agatha Christie, the characters and the mystery were the thing;  her mysteries are frequently innovative and inventive, but they rarely step beyond the circumstances and the events of the mystery that Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple is investigating.  But Williams is always thinking about more about spiritual realities than about the details of ordinary life, even as his novels are very much rooted in the details of the characters’ daily lives.  In War in Heaven, he seems to try to pursue a traditional murder mystery, but once he decides the book is about the Sangraal, the murder becomes of secondary importance:  the Graal is all.  In his other novels, there are sometimes elements of mystery or adventure stories, but ultimately the narrative centers around the Stone of Solomon or the original pack of Tarot cards or the Platonic images or the doppelgängers—and the effect those images have on the central characters. 

Unless I’m mistaken, you’ve reviewed a book collecting Dorothy L. Sayers’ thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes stories and also read Jared Lobdell’s book collecting Williams’ detective fiction reviews. How do Williams and Sayers compare as crime fiction critics?

I think that, for Sayers, the genre of detective fiction has its own value and merits, but for Williams everything always comes back down to his ideas.  Plus, the context in which they are writing is quite different:  Sayers was discussing the Sherlock Holmes stories, about which she had had many years to develop her ideas, whereas Williams was dashing off short reviews about two to four mystery novels which he had probably read in a hurry in between his work at Oxford University Press, his lectures on literature for the city university, and his daily commute by train from St. Alban’s to London (and back).  If Williams had had more time and space to develop his vision of what a detective novel could be or should be, then perhaps there would be more connection or overlap between his and Sayers’ observations on the genre.

As many scholars know, Williams and Sayers became acquainted in the 1940s, which plays a major role in Sayers’ decision to translate The Divine Comedy. Any thoughts on why they both started as fans of detective fiction but developed into writers who challenged the format?

I think we can see a more gradual movement from the traditional mystery formula to something deeper and more substantial in the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers.  The first few Lord Peter Wimsey books contain complex mysteries that seem to be doing something similar to what Agatha Christie is writing, but over time, Sayers’ mysteries develop added depth and start to shift focus away from a simple mystery story.  In Strong Poison, the arrival of Harriet Vane adds the element of romance to Wimsey’s mental and emotional landscape, and most of the subsequent novels are as much about Peter and Harriet’s relationship as the mysteries they solve.  And in Murder Must Advertise, as Wimsey solves the murder, Sayers provides a series of critical assessments of the world of commercial advertising in which she was employed before her novels began to sell;  as a result, that narrative is as much a kind of social commentary as anything else.  What is different between Sayers and Williams, of course, is that her novels still contain enough of a traditional mystery for the reader to view them as within that genre, whereas Williams’ novels stand fully outside the mystery genre—and pretty much every other traditional literary genre.

I think that, for Sayers, the traditional mystery novel formula started to become somewhat limiting and possibly even frustrating.  As a graduate of Oxford University, she had wanted to pursue an academic career as a scholar, but that door was not open to most women in the 1920s.  Even when she was able to publish her translation of Thomas of Britain’s Tristan in 1929, it did nothing to help her toward that desired academic career.  As a result, she had had to work for several years as a copywriter in an advertising agency, and she was only able to escape that drudgery when her novels started bringing in the money.  It would seem that, even when she became a successful novelist, Sayers was always looking beyond fiction toward other outlets for her creative and intellectual energy—outlets that included writing plays, essays, and eventually a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

While plenty has been written about MacDonald’s effect on the Inklings, it seems more common to see people discussing his effect on Lewis. How did you become interested in common territory between MacDonald and Williams as you were writing your PhD thesis?

That connection was something I hadn’t planned on, as I had been expecting to focus my dissertation on Williams in much the same way that my M.A. thesis had done.  However, Dr. James E. Barcus, my dissertation mentor, urged me not to limit myself to a dissertation focused only on a 20th-century author.  Instead, he suggested I consider working with someone like George MacDonald because having more than one literary period incorporated into my dissertation would give me more employment options.  Since I had been interested in continuing to work with at least one of the three novels I had discussed in the M.A. thesis, and since my favorite of those three novels was Descent into Hell, it was easy to choose to discuss MacDonald’s Lilith as both that book and the Williams novel included a Lilith figure in the story.  Because my focus of the discussion was on literary pilgrimages (spiritual journeys), the Lilith connection was perhaps more of a peripheral than a central element of the finished study.  But as I developed the discussion, I did find some common ground in each author’s emphasis (albeit expressed in different ways) on self-denial as an important goal in the personal journeys of the characters (primarily the characters who are seeking God).

Lillith is an interesting book because it’s a darker work than MacDonald’s famous fairytales like The Princess and the Goblin. Would you consider it a horror novel, or perhaps a fantasy novel with gothic elements?

I think one could read Lilith both as a horror novel and as a fantasy novel with Gothic elements.  I probably personally read it more as a fantasy-Gothic combination because I’m not naturally drawn toward the horror genre, so I’m not consciously thinking of horror even when those elements show up in something I’m reading.  I find moments of beauty in Lilith which I don’t see in writings of horror masters like H. P. Lovecraft.

Your article for Studies in Short Fiction explored how Williams depicts hell as a knowledge problem in the short story “Et in Sempiternum Pereant.” Any thoughts on how this compares to the way Lewis depicts hell in works like The Great Divorce?

In Dante’s Inferno, Virgil tells the poet that Hell is “the place where souls have lost the good of the intellect.”  That idea was central to Williams’ understanding of damnation, as a soul moves towards Hell every time that soul chooses self over duty to love its neighbor.  In the short story, that is seen in the strange figure Lord Arglay encounters, which is so self-focused that it is gnawing away at its own arms.  Williams develops this understanding of a soul choosing the path to Hell in the portrayal of Lawrence Wentworth in Descent into Hell.  What Lewis does differently in The Great Divorce is to focus on brief glimpses of souls in that process of choosing Hell, in order to draw distinctions between the ones what continue to choose the not-God, not-neighbor path and those, like the man with the lizard on his shoulder, who are willing to submit to divine justice and be freed of the self-centeredness that would lead them to remain in Hell.  But even more, Lewis portrays the essence of Hell and its servants to be a kind of mindlessness, as we see in the Unman that Weston becomes after his arrival on Perelandra.  That characterization is perhaps the most direct, most developed example of the kind of “lost the good of the intellect” that Williams portrays in his fiction.  (On a side note, the episode in which the Lewis narrator experiences an attack from the forces of evil in the first chapter of Perelandra is similar in many ways to what Lord Arglay experiences in “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” as he approaches the house which serves as the entrance gate to Hell.  It’s quite possible Lewis had Williams’ story in mind as he wrote that chapter, as Williams had published the story six years earlier and was, by the time Perelandra was written, regularly attending Inklings meetings.)

Some time ago,[2] I recall you mentioning at an event that you admire the works of Jeremias Gotthelf. For the benefit of those who haven’t read him, what did he write and how did you become interested in his work?

I became interested in the work of Jeremias Gotthelf—the pseudonym of Albert Bitzius (1797-1854), a Reformed Church pastor—when I discovered his grave outside the Reformed Church in Lützelflüh, Switzerland, where he had pastored 1832-1854.  I was there because, at the time, I thought that some of my ancestors had lived in that community, but even after I discovered that they had been connected to a different village in that area, I had already started reading Gotthelf’s novels and had become interested in his work.  Most of his fiction focuses on the lives and experiences of Swiss peasants, and he regularly wrestles with spiritual and theological questions in his novels.  Today, the best-known of his books is the Gothic horror novel Die Schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider) (1842), which wasn’t translated into English until the 1950s.  In that book, Gotthelf tells the story of a group of peasants who literally make a deal with the devil to fulfill an impossible task their feudal overlords demand of them.  The consequences are what one would expect, but Gotthelf shapes the story in such a way that it goes beyond a simple morality tale.  Even though it wasn’t translated into English until a half century after his death, I have been wondering if George MacDonald—who published his translations of some German authors—knew of the book, as I see some parallels with how both authors present and address darkness and evil in their writings.  (On a side note, one of the peculiarities of Gotthelf’s novel is that he sets the entire story in the valley adjacent to his parish in Lützelflüh, and I’ve wondered if, behind his writing of the novel, there was some pastoral intent to scare his congregation into behaving themselves!)

You made an insightful comment in one of your Sehnsucht book reviews about a flaw in Disney’s Narnia movies, how they “focus increasingly on Event, with little regard for the Myth for which Lewis created the narratives in the first place.” As of this writing, a new series of Narnia films is coming soon from Netflix. Any thoughts on how that problem can be avoided as we await the reboot?

I think that the Narnia series will be more successful if the screenwriters and the directors are more willing to trust the original material.  One doesn’t need to rush into action sequences in order to maintain an audience’s interest.  And sometimes suggestion is enough to create the desired effect.  In the Walden Media version of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, they threw in an unnecessary scene in which the children and the beavers are fighting wolves on the breaking river ice on their way to Aslan, even though Lewis clearly intended Peter’s first heroic moment to occur after he had received the gifts from Father Christmas and been commissioned to a leadership role by Aslan.  The filmmakers probably felt that the fighting wolves scene was necessary to show the danger the children and the beavers were in.  But all they needed to do was to have wolves howling in the distance, then coming closer, because, as any child could probably tell you, the mere thought of wolves in the darkness or in the shadows would be enough to cause terror.  (If the filmmakers want to experience that kind of thing for themselves, I can point them to a mostly unused campground in an Illinois state park, where a pack of coyotes celebrate their night’s successes by gathering together and howling in the darkness in the middle of the campground around 3:00am.  Sitting there in my tent and listening to them howling was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.)

Any Inklings scholarship topics you would especially like to see covered soon?

I think some more work to connect the Inklings to their (now) lesser-known contemporaries would be a good thing, as well as further discussion of some of their less-studied writings.  For instance, not much yet has been written about Charles Williams’ plays or his early poetry.  Also, a comprehensive collection of Williams’ letters would be of some value, along with annotated editions of his novels.  Some of Tolkien’s later posthumous publications could be fertile ground for study.  And even Lewis has some writings, such as his narrative poems, which could provide the basis for further analysis.  In any case, I’m glad there are still many areas in which we can continue to explore the ideas and the writings of these authors we love so much!

Interviewer Footnotes

[1] Rebekah Stuive, a PhD student at the University of Victoria, has presented work on these Bethany House editions and how the alterations affect the presentation of MacDonald’s ideas. “Redacting MacDonald: Comparing the Paratexts in MacDonald’s and Lewis’s Editions from the 1980s,” November 9, 2024, George MacDonald Bicentenary Conference, St Andrews, Scotland.

[2] This would have happened during one of the conversations that happens at the Inkling Folk Fellowship, a virtual community organized by Joe Ricke.