BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Stephen Barber has published articles on Charles Williams in a variety of publications, including The Journal of Inklings Studies, Sehnsucht, The Oddest Inkling, and the newsletter for the Charles Williams Society. Many of his writings have been collected in Patterns of Glory: Studies in Charles Williams.

He was kind enough to answer a few questions about his scholarship.

Interview Questions

How did you first hear about Charles Williams?

I was fourteen years old and staying with a school friend for a few days. His mother lent me a book she thought I might like to read. The book was Charles Williams’s Many Dimensions. I had never heard of Williams, and I did not realize until later that my friend’s mother. Alice Mary Hadfield, had been a friend of Williams and his first biographer. Over the next few years I gradually read the other novels, then the Arthurian poetry and so got gradually drawn into an enthusiasm for his work.

You’ve written about many parts of Williams’ work, but especially his poetry, generally seen as the most difficult part of his work to understand. What attracted you to his poetry?

I remember seeing a copy of Taliessin through Logres and thinking it sounded wonderfully mysterious and strange. And at first I didn’t know how to pronounce it. The sense of mystery and strangeness is probably what attracted me first and it has remained. The sound of the language came before the meaning. I then read Arthurian Torso, with C.S. Lewis’s exposition of the poems, and started to understand them.

It’s been said that Williams’ poetry is his most challenging work, because it offers so many layers of images. Any advice for early readers who feel put off by the complexity?

It helps to know something of the Arthurian legends through reading Malory or a modern retelling. Otherwise, read them along with Lewis’s commentary—which you don’t have to agree with in every detail—and just let yourself get used to the language and the ideas.

Can you recommend any similar poets to read as preparation for reading Williams?

The poet he is most like is W. B. Yeats. Yeats was also keen on mythology, in his case Irish rather than Arthurian. He was also heir to the English romantic poets. He used a systematic symbolism in his poems, as does Williams. And they were both interested in the occult—a feature which deters some readers. In writing his Arthurian poems, Williams’s starting point was Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, because they dissatisfied him and made him want to make his own version. In doing so, he was considerably influenced by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and in his poetic technique by the example of Hopkins, whose poems he edited.

You’ve noted in one of your articles that T.S. Eliot and Williams were “friends and rivals,” writers who knew each other and had things in common, but not without tension in that relationship. Can you offer some details on what made them “rivals”?

They each wrote poems and plays, and Eliot was more successful than Williams in terms of critical and commercial recognition. They each were involved in preparing an anthology of modern poetry, and the Faber Book of Modern Verse was a success while Oxford’s equivalent was a failure. They each wrote a play for Canterbury: Eliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral and Willams wrote Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury. They each wrote a book on Dante, Williams’s The Figure of Beatrice being probably his prose masterpiece.[1] Williams was unable to persuade Oxford to publish Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, while Eliot was able to accept it on his own authority. Williams’s characterization of Peter Stanhope in Descent into Hell is partly a portrait of Eliot.

What are some ways that Eliot aided Williams’ career?

Eliot accepted Williams’s novel Descent into Hell when Gollancz, who had published his previous novels, had refused it. He went on to publish Williams’s last novel, All Hallows Eve, also The Figure of Beatrice and Witchcraft. He also commissioned The Figure of Arthur, although Williams died before finishing it and the incomplete text was eventually published by Oxford in Arthurian Torso. He later wrote an introduction to All Hallows Eve and an article, “The Significance of Charles Williams.”[2] As a publisher, he was able to reissue Williams’s novels and theological works after Williams’s death and keep these in print for a number of years.

You’ve written about how one of Williams’ underexplored roles was writing literary criticism. What are some unusual features of his criticism?

Most twentieth century literary critics avoid discussing the religious or psychological significance of the works they consider and tend to concentrate on technique and texture. Williams is quite different. He seems to regard literature, and in particular poetry, as a kind of secondary revelation alongside scripture. He also liked to explore the way in different poets handled a common theme, and in his books on The English Poetic Mind, he does this with Shakespeare as his main text. His book on Dante, The Figure of Beatrice, treats Dante as primarily a spiritual teacher.

One of Williams’ most influential works as a literary critic is his Dante scholarship. What are some things he particularly focuses on in his writings about Dante?

The most important single thing is that when Dante sees Beatrice as being practically a divine being, Williams says he is seeing her as if she were unfallen, and that this is a true vision, not just an infatuation, and without negating any of the faults she must have had. Dante hints at this vision at end of the Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy works it out in detail. He also sees the Divine Comedy as exemplifying what he calls the Way of Affirmation, a spiritual path which he contrasts to the better-known way of negation, explored by the mystics.

You mention in Patterns of Glory that you considered writing an article on how Williams sees theology as an exact science, comparable to mathematics. Can you elaborate on that?

Williams was impressed by the way the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century used mathematical imagery, such as the compasses in Donne’s A Valediction: forbidding mourning and the parallel lines in Marvell’s Definition of Love. Two aspects particularly appealed to him. One was the precision of mathematical ideas. So the “trigonometrical milk of doctrine” in The Vision of the Empire is milk, as it is in the New Testament, because Christian teaching is nourishing, and trigonometrical, three-sided, because it includes the doctrine of the Trinity. The other is the use of infinite sequences to express spiritual states, as in The Sister of Percivale, which uses both the transcendental number π, which is an infinite and non-recurring decimal, and the idea of an asymptote, which is a line which meets another one only at infinity, to express the quality of Blanchefleur’s smile.

You’ve published several articles on your Academia.edu page about classical authors such as Horace and Virgil. What are some ways that Williams draws on classical sources for his work?

Williams was not a classicist, but he had a great admiration for Virgil. In the Aeneid, Aeneas moves from being a refugee from Troy to becoming the founder of Rome. Rome for Williams, represented the City, which is more or less his term for the kingdom of God, a place of mutual love and exchange. Virgil was also considered to prophesy the birth of Christ in his fourth Eclogue. However, Dante represents Virgil in the Divine Comedy both as the guide to Dante the character in the poem and also as excluded from heaven as a pagan. Williams took the issue of the fate of the good pagan seriously and explored it in his poem Taliessin on the death of Virgil.

In 2016, you contributed a thoughtful but honest article to the Journal of Inklings Studies about Williams’ flaws as a father. What has helped you to balance appreciating his work while recognizing his weaknesses?

I think you always have to consider someone’s work entirely separately from their life. When I started reading Williams, I knew nothing of his life. I then read Alice Mary Hadfield’s two studies of him, and she had a great respect for him. More recently I read Grevel Lindop’s biography, and it is clear that he, like all of us, had personal flaws. They do not detract from his work, which has to stand or fall on its own merits.

What would you like to see future Williams scholars explore?

I feel quite frustrated that Raymond Hunt took extensive notes of Williams’s lectures, and no one has yet tried to work them up into publishable form. This was done for Auden’s lectures on Shakespeare, which were taken down by students, and I feel that it might well be possible to do something similar for Williams. We could do with a complete edition of his first Arthurian cycle, The Advent of Galahad, which is not of the same quality as the mature Arthurian poems but is an important source document. We could also do with an edition of his Arthurian Commonplace Book.[3] And someone should do what I never achieved, which is an annotated critical edition of the mature Arthurian poems.

More information about Stephen Barber’s work can be found on his Academia.edu page.

Interviewer Footnotes

[1] It is worth noting here that Williams’ Dante scholarship strongly influenced another author associated with Dante scholarship and the Canterbury plays: Dorothy L. Sayers, playwright of Zeal of Thy House and translator of a popular edition of the Divine Comedy.

[2] This essay first appeared in The Listener, vol. 36, no. 936 (19 December 1946), 894-95, later published in The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition Vol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946 edited by David E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard; also available at https://muse.jhu.edu/document/825.

[3] For more information about this resource, see Sørina Higgins’ summary on The Oddest Inkling.