John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 115

Emerson, Lake, and Palmer

This is sad news: Keith Emerson, keyboardist extraordinaire, has died at the age of 71.

EMERSON, LAKE, & PALMER's work was uneven: like many other experimental musicians. At their worst they slipped over into the self-indulgent. But at their best they were unmatched: no one's ever done this kind of music better.

Especially Emerson, who explored the range of what you cd do with a Moog synthesizer (the answer is: quite a lot, creating all kinds of interesting musical soundscapes).

TARKUS, their second record, remains my favorite album.* Bar none. I have no idea how many thousands of times I've listened to it, and I still love it. I still have the somewhat-worse-for-wear record I bought from my cousin Sam decades ago, though these days I listen to it on cd or via iTune; just a few days ago I pulled the cd out to listen to it yet again.

Emerson was also responsible for my second-favorite piece from the group: Emerson's Piano Concerto #1, which remains my favorite piece of modern classical music (that is, new music written in the classical orchestral  idiom).

It was a long time ago, and his triumphs were in the past, but I remain grateful and am sorry to see him go.

--John R.


*side A that is, the twenty-plus minute 'Tarkus' itself, as opposed to the grab-bag of unrelated bits that make up side B.

An Inklings Tee for Tea

So, thanks to friend Steven for sending me the following link via Janice.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/itsu/

What interests me most about this design is that it includes the name of most, but not all, of the Inklings, plus one more who's usually not included in the group (although several Inklings scholars, such as Doug Anderson, have argued for his inclusion):

Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield, Williams, Christopher Tolkien, Warnie Lewis, Roger Lancelyn Green, Adam Fox, Hugo Dyson, Robert Havard,  J. A. W. Bennett, Lord David Cecil, Nevill Coghill

I cd quibble (why 'Hugo' for Dyson but Robert rather than 'Humphrey' for Havard?), but then there's a limit to how pedantic I want to get over a t-shirt. Besides, it's an attractive design (unfortunately didn't see the artist's name anywhere); I'll probably be picking one of these up.

So, thanks to Steven and Janice for the link.

--John R

Why Did Lewis Want to Become Professor of Poetry?

So, lately I've been puzzling over something that I'd never really questioned before: why did CSL want to become Oxford's Professor of Poetry?  At the time I first read about this in Carpenter and Hooper/Green it didn't seem at all odd: CSL was a fellow, roughly the equivalent of an associate professor in terms of the US system, meaning that he had tenure but did not belong to the top-ranking  tier within the faculty. But gradually I came to learn that the Professorship of Poetry is an unusual one at Oxford. For one thing, all the other professorships are lifetime appointments, held until the occupant retires, or resigns (as when Tolkien left the Pembroke chair for the Merton one), or dies. That's not the case with the Professor of Poetry, who's only appointed for a five-year term.*

Among the possibilities:

1. Lewis sought the promotion because he thought the prestige of the position might improve his chance of gaining a permanent professorship, either concurrently with the post (which had only nominal duties of giving three lectures a year) or subsequent to it.

2. Lewis needed the extra money that came with the position, being in financial straits over the cost of dealing with Janie Moore's dementia and declining health, which eventually led to her being institutionalized for the last few months of her life.

3. Lewis who had strong views on poetry, especially modern poetry, wanted the bully pulpit the
 Professor of Poetry provided.


Of these, the first might seem more likely, except that there doesn't seem to be much precedent for it having so benefited previous holders of the chair. The second is complicated by the fact that I'm not at all sure it came with any money at all -- Grevil Lindop in his new biography of Charles Williams says the position was unpaid (THE THIRD INKLING p. 410). But then he's speaking of the mid-forties, and things might have changed by the early fifties, when Lewis ran.**  The third almost certainly played some part, but I think it's impossible to say how large a part. But if so, why did Lewis leave the campaigning in the hands of the irascible Hugo Dyson?


I'd like to get a better read on this, because the Professor of Poetry-ship actually looms large in the Inklings story. Two Inklings, Adam Fox and John Wain, actually held the position. Lewis ran for it, narrowly losing what seems to have been a bitterly contested election.  Williams thought he had a good chance at gaining it when he retired (I think this unlikely, but in the event he died before ever running so we'll never know). So too did Barfield, who in a few late interviews wistfully mentions having thought it was all set up for him to take up the post upon his retirement, only to have the prospect fade away (did Lewis really think he cd get Barfield elected to the post?)***

So, a puzzle. Presumably over time bits and pieces will fall into place, making it easier to understand this part of Lewis's life. But for now, for me it continues to be an odd episode.

--John R



*so far as I know, there's nothing to prevent someone from being re-elected, but I don't think that's ever actually occurred -- at least, it hasn't in the whole twentieth century (before that most folks held the post for about a decade).

 **Nowadays it brings in around seven thousand pounds a year, according to wikipedia, which is more like a large honorarium than a salary.

***actually I think Barfield wd have been a brilliant choice, but an extraordinarily unlikely one, given his low profile; he only came into his own in his old age, by which point all his Oxford contacts were gone).


THE WIFE SAYSIf he took the post, what are the chances it'd help him get his own poetry published?
(JDR: I hadn't thought of that, and given how badly Lewis wanted to be a major poet, and how he'd republished his awful early book DYMER the year before (1950), I think this may well have been a major factor)

Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (part eight: Appendix D)

So, here's the final bit of my Williams lecture, which I hope folks have enjoyed. It was an interesting, immersive process to write it, and I was unsure what reception it might get at the MythCon. I was much relieved when it went down well.

For this posting on the blog I've resisted the urge to go back and improve the piece, though there are some addendum I might add. 

In any case, here's the final Appendix plus the bibliography.

--JDR


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APPENDIX D: AMONG THE GREATS? When Lewis says that he ranks Williams’s Arthuriad (by which he means both Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars considered together as one work) among the “two or three” best books of poetry of the century, the phrasing implies, to me at any rate, that Lewis had specific works in mind and, if asked, could readily have named them. As it turns out, we can identify one of the other works Lewis rated as highly as he did Williams’s Arthuriad, because he uses almost exactly the same terminology of praise to describe it: Edith Sitwell’s Sleeping Beauty (1924). Lewis wrote in 1955 I must read the Taliessincycle again. I hope I shall still put it easily top of the only three modern long poems that I admire. The other two are Edith Sitwell’s Sleeping Beauty and W. Penn Warren’s (an American) Brother to Dragons. The Sitwell is v. fantastic and musical, the Warren grim and realistic. [Note 33] (CSL, letter of 27/9/55; Collected Letters III 650) That would seem to be that, except that Robert Penn Warren’s book was first published in 1953, and thus Lewis could not have been thinking of it when writing his praise of Williams in 1947. Other possible contenders, predating the Penn Warren, might be Robert Frost, whom we know Lewis greatly admired [Note 34] but whose work can hardly be thought of as a ‘modern long poem,’ or perhaps W.B. Yeats, the poet who influenced him the most (Spirits in Bondage, Lewis’s first book, being quite a good imitation of Yeats, in manner if not in message)—but again, someone not known for working in the long poem form.Reading the Sitwell, however, raises doubts, because far from a hidden masterpiece it turns out to be word-salad: page after page of doggerel worthy of the great William McGonagall himself (he of ‘the bridge of the silvery Tay’). Like crystal-clear wysteria After the storm’s hysteria . . .
The farm-pond, fruitish-soft and ripe Was smooth as a daguerreotype (36)
Individual lines are likewise remarkable for their inanity: Wanders a little cold pig-snouted breeze (50) The crude pink stalactites of rain (91) stars like empty wooden nuts (93) If Lewis is putting this forward as the stuff of greatness, and ranking it with Williams’s work, then we are left with two possibilities. The first is that Lewis was an absolutely hopeless judge of poetry, savoring Sitwell’s gibberish and the “thicket of obscurities” (to again borrow the Zaleskis’s apt phrase; Fellowship 433) that make up the Taliessin poems while querulously denouncing the great poets of his era like Eliot, or Pound, or Dylan Thomas, or Auden. If I may be heretical for a moment, given Lewis’s implacable opposition to Modernism and disdain for most of the great poets of his lifetime, it is perhaps fortunate after all that he never gained the chair of Professor of Poetry. Although it would have raised his prestige within the university and increased his income, it would also have given him a platform from which to denounce modern poetry in favor of writers like Sitwell and Williams, which in turn I believe would have done serious damage to Lewis’s own standing as a critic. The second possibility is that Lewis is putting us on: that praising Sitwell and Williams is like declaring McGonagall the greatest poet of his time. We know that Lewis savored unreadable authors precisely for their ineptitude (most famously Amanda McKittrick Ros and her Irene Iddesleigh), but I have to say if he anywhere gives any hint that he is ever less than sincere in his admiration for Williams, both as a person and as a writer, I missed it.
NOTES33 Robert Penn Warren, whose first name Lewis seems not to have known despite his avowed admiration for his verse, is better known as the author of All the King’s Men (1946) and for his participation in the anti-Civil Rights manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930). Brother to Dragons tells the story of a lurid murder of a slave by a cousin of Meriwether Lewis (and nephew of Thomas Jefferson) and its consequences. The work was heavily revised in 1979, but it would have been the original version, published in 1953, which Lewis praises so highly. 34 Not only do Lewis’s letters make occasional appreciative comments about Frost (e.g., Collected Letters III.462, 469, 1224), but Lewis expressed deep regret when, owing to a slipped disk, he missed a chance to see Frost in person: I am most disappointed. He is one of the few living poets for whom I feel something like reverence (855)
Furthermore, as Jason Fisher recently discovered (Lingwe, post of 8 April 2015), when Lewis had the chance to propose two authors for the Nobel Prize, the two he chose were Tolkien and Frost. Given the high regard in which he is known to have held his old friend Tolkien, this confirms his high opinion of Frost as well. 
WORKS CITEDCarpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
Carroll, Lewis. The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits. 1876. Facsimile edition. New York City: Mayflower Books, 1980.
Cavaliero, Glen. ed. "Charles Williams on Taliessin Through Logres." Gnomon. issue number one (Fall 1965). 37–45.
—. Introduction and Notes. Letters to Lalage: The Letters of Charles Williams to Lois Lang-Sims. Kent and London: Kent State University Press, 1989. 1-14, 87-89. Crispin, Edmund (Bruce Montgomery). Swan Song. 1947 New York: Felony & Mayhem, 2006. [Gervase Fen series]
Dodds, David Llewellyn, ed. Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams. Woodbridge & Cambridge: The Boydell Press, 1991.
—. “Continuity and Change in the Development of Charles Williams’s Poetic Style.” In The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams. Ed. Charles A. Huttar and Peter J. Schakel. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1996. 192-214.
Donne, John. Meditation XVII. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. 1623. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Medita.... 9 July 2015.
Dorsett, Lyle W. "The Biographies of Charles Williams: Some Suggestions". Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal (No. 85, Spring 1994). 25–48.
Eliot, T.S. Introduction. 1948. In All Hallows’ Eve. By Charles Williams. 1945. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981. xi–xviii.
Fisher, Jason. “More on Tolkien and the Nobel Prize.” 8 Apr. 2015. 22 Aug. 2015.
Gilbert, R.A. The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1983.
—. A.E. Waite: Magician of Many Parts. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Crucible, 1987.
Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 2007.
Hadfield, Alice Mary. Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life and Work. New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.[image error]Havard, Robert E. (‘Humphrey’). Oral history interview with Dr. Lyle W. Dorsett, July 26th 1984. Totland Bay, Isle of Wight.
—. “Philia: Jack at Ease.” In C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences. Ed. James T. Como. New York: Macmillan, 1979. 215-228. Hunt, Raymond. Letter to Margaret Douglas, 2nd March 1942. Wade Center Charles Williams collection, folder CW 299. Lang-Sims, Lois. Letters to Lalage: The Letters of Charles Williams to Lois Lang-Sims. Kent and London: Kent State UP, 1989. Larkin, Phillip, ed. The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. —. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. Lewis. C. S. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Ed. Walter Hooper. Volume II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War: 1931–1949. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.
—. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Ed. Walter Hooper. Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy: 1950–1963. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007.
—. Preface. Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Ed. C. S. Lewis. London: Oxford UP, 1947. v-xiv.
—. Williams and the Arthuriad. In Arthurian Torso. Ed. C. S. Lewis. London: Oxford UP, 1948. 93-200.
Mascall, Eric L. “Charles Williams as I Knew Him.” In Charles Williams: A Celebration. Ed. Brian Horne. Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing, 1995. 1-5. Rateliff, John D. “‘And Something Yet Remains to be Said’: Tolkien and Williams.” Mythlore12.3 (#45) (1986) 48–54. Previously appeared in Proceedings of Mythcon XVI, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, 1985. Ed. Diana Pavlac (The Mythopoeic Society: 1985). 271–86.Ridler, Anne. Editorial comments on “Notes on the Arthurian Myth.” In The Image of the City and Other Essays. By Charles Williams. Ed. Anne Ridler. London: Oxford UP, 1958. 175-179.
Sitwell, Edith. The Sleeping Beauty. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1924.
The Taliessin Poems of Charles Williams, by Various Hands. Ed. Anne Ridler. Oxford: The Charles Williams Society, 1991. [Annotations and glosses of Williams’s poems; includes excerpts from Answers for C. S. Lewis].
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Rev. ed. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
—. “Our Dear Charles Williams.” In The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends. By Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. 123-126.
Warren, Robert Penn. Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices. New York: Random House, 1953.
Williams, Charles. The Advent of Galahad. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. In Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams. Woodbridge & Cambridge: The Boydell Press, 1991. 163-251. —. Answers for C.S. Lewis. Unpublished. Wade Center, Charles Williams manuscript collection, CW MS-2. —. The Figure of Arthur. In Arthurian Torso. Ed. C.S. Lewis. London: Oxford UP, 1948. 5-90. —. Heroes and Kings. Illustrated by Norman Janes. London: The Sylvan Press, 1930. [Privately printed limited edition (300 copies).] —. “Notes on the Arthurian Myth.” In The Image of the City and Other Essays. By Charles Williams. Ed. Anne Ridler. London: Oxford UP, 1958. 175-179. —. Poetry at Present. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930.
—. The Region of the Summer Stars. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1944. [PL: Editions Poetry London series]
—. Taliessin through Logres. London: Oxford UP, 1938.
—. To Michal from Serge: Letters from Charles Williams to His Wife, Florence, 1939–1945. Ed. Roma A. King, Jr. Kent & London: Kent State UP, 2002.
Williams, Oscar, ed. A Pocket Book of Modern Verse: English and American Poetry of the Last Hundred Years from Walt Whitman to Dylan Thomas. New York: Washington Square Press, 1954.
Zaleski, Philip and Zaleski, Carol. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (part seven: Appendix C)

So, getting near the end now, here's the third of the appendices. Again I've given it a post of its own since I consider it a major point. 

This section might well have been called "Williams and Larkin" and provides a glimpse into the way Wms came across to those who were not won over by this eccentric charisma. After all, not everybody who goes to a literary lecture is pleased to find himself or herself to captive audience of a sermon instead.

--JDR

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APPENDIX C: WILLIAMS AS HE APPEARED TO OTHERS
C.S. Lewis compared Charles Williams to an angel, [Note 27] while T.S. Eliot said meeting him was like being in the presence of a living saint. [Note 28]  I think, in view of the evidence that has emerged through letters and memoirs in the years since his death, some of which has been highlighted in this paper, that this characterization is, in the words of Lewis Carroll, “a sentiment open to doubt.” Clearly Williams had some sort of personal magnetism that tremendously impressed some people: Lewis, Sayers, Auden, Wain. But whatever it was, it does not survive him; no trace of it carries over onto the printed page of his works. Perhaps it lay in the fact that Williams was filled with a sense that his life was significant, that what happened to him was terribly important. Thoreau may have thought most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, but such was not the case with Charles Williams, who sincerely believed he was the greatest poet since Dante, as well as a major Christian thinker who had found a way to set right what he saw as an imbalance in Christian thought and practice (between what he called ‘the Way of Affirmation’ and ‘the Way of Negation’) dating back almost two millennium. Then too there was his habit of referring to himself using the royal We (“The restoration of Milton criticism to its proper balance is but a side-accident of Our existence; not Our chief affair”), usually reserved for kings, archbishops, or God Himself. [Note 29]  And something of that enormous inner confidence seems to have greatly impressed some who met him, especially those who got drawn in and became part of his Company, while others remained unswayed and simply thought him pleasant company for an afternoon in a pub. Perhaps Humphrey Havard put his finger on it when he described Williams as ‘a charming man’ (Havard interview 24) who listened to you with complete attention: “you were . . . attracted to him because he was so receptive to what you had to say” (ibid. 35). And just as clearly some people were immune to the spell: Havard himself, who called Williams’s poetry “of an obscurity beyond belief” (Havard, “Philia” 216); Tolkien (whose opinion of Williams changed greatly over the years); [Note 30] and Warnie Lewis, all of whom enjoyed Williams’s company without having a high opinion of his work.Lewis rhapsodizes about how rapt Oxford’s undergrads were at Williams’s lectures and how they hung on his every word (e.g. Collected Letters II.345–346), where what he sees as receptive fascination might just as easily be stunned incredulity. As it happens, we have a contemporary account from one of those students which gives a more plausible portrait of Williams than that projected by Lewis. Philip Larkin, who would eventually emerge as the great poet of his generation but was then an Oxford undergraduate, knew and liked Williams as a pub pal but had a very low opinion of his work. In Larkin’s words,we [Larkin and his friend Bruce Montgomery, author of the famous quote ‘there goes C.S. Lewis; it must be Tuesday’] [Note 31]  had lunch in the King’s Arms with Charles Williams, who drank and wheezed and talked and beamed and produced proofs of his new poems and handed them round. I admire Charles Williams a good deal as a literary critic, and as a ‘Pillar of the Swiss’, as Dylan Thomas would spoonerise, but I don’t give a [expletive] for his poetry. This I endeavoured to conceal. (letter of 19 October 1943 to Kingsley Amis; Larkin Letters 79) We can add to this contemporary account another from many years later, when Larkin came to read Carpenter’s The Inklings: I have just got round to The Inklings, as it has come out in pback. Funny lot they were — Chas Wms crazy as a coot, bit gamey too. His lectures were always full of the wildest misquotations; the one‘Tis chastity, my brother, chastity,
That fortress build by Nature herself Against infection, and the hand of war . . . † may be apocryphal, but I have personally heard him declaim ‘Oh, blind, blind, blind, amid the blaze of noon’.†† (letter of 13th March 1981; Larkin Letters 643) †as Thwaite, editor of Larkin’s collected letters, points out, the first line here comes from Milton’s Comus, while the second and third lines are from Shakespeare’s Richard II; Williams has run them all together as if a single quote from a single source. ††again, Thwaite gives the correct reading as ‘Oh dark, dark, dark,’ again from Milton (Samson Agonistes). From this emerges the idea of Williams as a somewhat comic figure: a funny little man who constantly misquotes poetry; good company over a drink but a terrible poet. This portrait is so different from that promulgated by Lewis et al. that the question arises whether any evidence exists to support it. And, as it turns out, the answer is an unqualified yes. For one thing, we also have to remember that Williams was not just an outsider at Oxford, a lover of poetry rather than an academician or scholar, but spoke in a Cockney accent, very much out of keeping with the usual Oxford manner. Carpenter briefly mentions “his curious accent” (Carpenter 102) and Lang-Sims “his odd accent” (Lang-Sims 31) but neither elaborates. Lewis calls it “rather a cockney voice” (Collected LettersII 501). E.L. Mascall is more specific in ‘Charles Williams as I Remember Him,’ in which he says as Williams read them the opening lines of Paradise Lost came out something like this: Of that forbidden tree, ’osemoral tiste
Brort death into the world and all our wow . . .
Sing, ’eavenly muse, that on the sicred top (Mascall 2, emphasis mine) while Wordsworth, as filtered through Wms, came out as
my heart leapt up when I be’elda rinebow in the sky (ibid 3)
The accusation of constantly misquoting is curious, given that both Lewis and Eliot lay stress upon Williams’s facility with spontaneous and accurate quotation. In Lewis’s words, “Before he came I had passed for our best conduit of quotations: but he easily outstripped me” (EPCW xi), while Eliot even emphasizes the accuracy of such quotes: “he could declaim long quotations from one or another of his favourite poets, for his memory for poetry was prodigious and accurate” (Eliot, Introduction to All Hallows’ Eve xii; emphasis mine). But support for Larkin’s description of this personality quirk exists as well: in one of his last letters to Lang-Sims Williams quotes Shakespeare but again gets it wrong. [Note 32]
 NOTES27 “not a feminine angel in the debased tradition of some religious art, but a masculine angel, a spirit burning with intelligence and charity” (EPCW ix).
28 “He seemed to me to approximate, more nearly than any man I have known familiarly, to the saint” (Carpenter 107). That statement was written in 1945 as part of a posthumous tribute (ibid 271) but Eliot had expressed the same opinion during Williams’s lifetime: in a 1940 letter to his wife Williams reports that Eliot had written him saying he thought Williams was “in a direct course towards beatification” (letter of 17 December 1940; Michal 101). 29 Williams to Raymond Hunt, letter of 29 March 1941, cited in Carpenter (181, 274). Lang-Sims says that Williams used the royal We only when speaking as the head of the Order (Lang-Sims 37), but this is not altogether the case, as any reader of To Michal from Serge will discover. 30 I have written elsewhere of Tolkien’s and Williams’s friendship, in my essay “‘And Something Yet Remains to be Said’: Tolkien and Williams,” first delivered at Mythcon XVI in Wheaton (July 1985), included in the Proceedings of said conference, and later published in Mythlore #45. 31 Their reason for seeking out Williams was that each had written a first novel† and each hoped that Williams, who worked for a publisher, might read and recommend it (Larkin Letters 86–87). Montgomery’s The Case of the Gilded Fly was published, under the pseudonym of ‘Edmund Crispin,’ the next year (1944), while Larkin’s Jill was published the year after (1945). It is not known if Williams played any role in their publication, but presumably not, since Larkin makes no mention of any such aid. †the famous quote appears in the fourth novel in the series, Swan Song (1947), p. 60 32 Williams writes, in his letter of 31 August 1944,
Shakespeare defined our proper limits when he wrote ‘no more than with a pure blush thou mayst come off withal’ (Lang-Sims 81) Glen Cavaliero, in his endnotes to Lang-Sims’s little book (Lang-Sims 89), provides the actual quotation: Williams is presumably (mis) quoting Shakespeare’s Celia. “. . . love no man in good earnest; nor no further in sport neither, than with safety of a pure blush thou mayst in honour come off again.”(As You Like It, act I, sc. 2, lines 27–29)

More on The Sime

So, back in November I got a piece of original S. H. Sime art:* a small painting on wood of a dark waterfall. At first I thought it was simply a dark scene (much of Sime's work having been in black-and-white, with brilliant usage of darkness), but I've become more and more of the opinion that, while probably intended to be dark, it's now darker than it shd be, due to aging of the varnish (it is, after all, just over a hundred years old).  So we're been talking about getting it professionally cleaned before we have it framed, but with one thing and another I've put it off for going on four months now. Enter Janice, who did some online research that led to her driving me up to Issaquah on Thursday, where we dropped it off at a museum-quality art restorer. I was apprehensive to let it out of my hands, and worried that they might brighten it up too much, spoiling the moody ambiance of the scene. But then I'd have to leave it with someone sometime, be it cleaner or framer. These folks seem to know what they're doing, and their procedure seems sound: clean a small spot (as unobtrusive a one as possible) and e-mail me the results so I can give them the go-ahead or call a halt. If the test result looks promising, I'll give them the go-ahead. Then when they let me know they're done we'll head up either to their main locale in Shoreline (where it turns out the actual restoration work is done) or back to Issaquah, view the results, and make decisions about the frame.**

It shd be great. We'll see.

--JDR


* http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2015/11/my-sime.html

**we cdn't do that Thursday because the appearance of the picture might change enough that what makes a good match now might not with the restored work.

Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (part six: Appendix B)

So, this appendix is short enough that I thought of blending it in with Appendix A or perhaps with Appendix C.  But I decided in the end it's best if it's given a post of its own. That's because the point of this Appendix is to focus attention upon someone who tends to get overlooked, time and time again, in biographies of CW and studies of his work: Raymond Hunt. Without Hunt, much of Wms scholarship wd be impossible: he's the one who preserved the text of Wms' letters (including the famous first letter from CSL to CW, where the name "Inkling" first appears) and much else besides. 


So here's my brief tribute to the man who preserved so much of Wms' work, without whom much of present-day Wms scholarship wd be impossible, or at least sorely impoverished.

--JDR

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APPENDIX B: RAYMOND HUNT
Hunt’s importance to Williams scholarship is so great that I would argue that to fully understand Charles Williams, you have to know who Raymond Hunt was, and the role he was appointed to play in Williams’s story. Briefly, Lewis considered Williams one of the two or three greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his Taliessin cycle to be one of the greatest works of literature of the century, and Williams agreed with that assessment. Yet despite a few favorable mentions here and there, in the years leading up to his big breakthrough in 1938–39, Williams’s work had notably failed to attract any significant attention—so much so that at one point R.W. Chapman, the Secretary of Oxford University Press (e.g., the man in charge of its Oxford office) half-jokingly asked Humphrey Milford (the Publisher, or head of the London office, and Williams’s immediate boss) “How CAN we put CW over? Shall we try announcing him as the most unsalable of all Oxford authors?” (Hadfield 79; earlier Hadfield had noted that one of his books of poems sold 198 copies; the next, 126 [Hadfield 31]). Given this lack of appreciation for his work, long before Lewis began championing it Williams had taken steps to remedy matters. Most significantly, he appointed his own biographer, Raymond Hunt, who was to produce an authorized critical biography after Williams’s death that would establish Williams’s importance as a major literary figure of his time. Accordingly, Williams passed along to Hunt any letters he received from literary figures, such as Yeats or Eliot. In fact, it is to Hunt that we owe the preservation of Lewis’s first letter to Williams, which contains the first known mention by name of The Inklings, this being one of the testimonials Williams passed along to Hunt for eventual use in the planned biography. [Note 23] In the event Hunt compiled all the necessary relevant materials —a massive archive of thousands of pages, including a transcription of virtually  every talk Williams ever gave and extensive notes taken at the many lecture- series he taught in London night schools—but in the end failed to produce the biography, possibly because the skills required to collect and preserve an author’s works are different from those needed to write a biography. [Note 24]  However, with the enthusiastic aid of Margaret Douglas, who turned out to be indefatigable in pursuit of Williams material, he preserved a vast amount of material [Note 25] that would otherwise have been irretrievably lost—including the eight-page [Note 26] letter Answers to C.S. Lewisthat Hunt was able to establish Williams had written on December 3rd and/or 4th, 1938 (described by Hunt as “a week-end job”), which comprises pages 3597 through 3606 of Volume XIX of Hunt’s archive (Raymond Hunt to Margaret Douglas, letter of 2 March 1942; Wade CW folder 299).

NOTES

23 Cf. Walter Hooper’s note to Lewis’s letter of 11 March 1936 (Collected Letters II 183), although Hooper there identifies the typist (mistakenly, I believe) as Williams himself.

24 An additional complication might lie in the fact that control of Williams’s estate rested in the hands of his widow, Florence† (‘Michal’), for whom any mention of her husband’s infatuation with Phyllis Jones was anathema:[T]here were certain areas into which it was perilous to trespass. . . . [S]he felt . . .  the guardianship of her husband’s literary reputation had been stolen from her by certain of his friends . . . : she could be both sorrowful and devastatingly caustic on that topic. . . . [W]hen stung into bitter recollections by the publication of some reference, however delicate, to his other love, she . . . was withering. (Cavaliero 6–7) [I]t could not be said that a great deal of love was lost between her and the group of people whom she regarded as having connived at his love affair with someone else. . . .  Total rage against Phillida burned in her most, but not all, of the time. When it was not burning it was nonexistent. One never knew with Michal, from one moment to the next, which Michal she was deciding to be. I used to say that, with one exception, Charles was the strangest human being I had ever met in my life: the one exception was Michal. (Lang-Sims 19) This attitude must have placed Hunt in the unenviable position of being committed to write a biography in which he would either be unable to refer to what Williams believed the most important event in his life—his Beatrician moment of falling in love with Phyllis Jones—or, if he did include this side of Williams’s life, be forbidden by the estate from quoting anything Williams had written. †Williams had named Florence his sole executrix in his will, dated 3 May 1927.
25 Hunt himself estimated his archive to contain “twenty five million recorded words” (Hunt to Douglas, letter of 2nd March 1942; CW folder 299).
26 The surviving typed versions of this letter at Wheaton† range from seven (MS CW-2, MS CW–415) to eight (MS CW–166) pages and bear varying titles, such as “Notes for C.S. Lewis” (CW–166 and CW–415) or “Answers to Questions from C.S. Lewis” (CW-2). Hunt, who had access to the twenty-page handwritten original,†† titles his transcription Answers to C.S. Lewis, which I have accordingly adopted. †at least one more copy, which I have not consulted, survives in the Bodleian.
††Hunt to Douglas, letter of 2 March 1942. Cf. Lewis’s account of the “extremely small, loose sheets” upon which Williams liked to compose, which Lewis describes as coming from “a twopenny pad” (Torso 2).

Charles WIlliams: The Lost Letter (part five)

So, here's the conclusion of my essay, along with the first Appendix (subsequent Appendices will follow, along with the bibliography, as the last few posts in this thread)
--JDR


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LOST KEY, LOST LETTER: WILLIAMS’S LEGACYIn his final chapter of Williams and the Arthuriad, Lewis presents his argument that Williams was one of the great writers of his time. Lewis bases this claim on three factors, which he calls Wisdom (by which he means the degree to which a poem makes us think), Deliciousness (by which he means aesthetic pleasure—e.g., delight in its word music), and Strength of Incantation (by which he means world-building; the creation of a compelling secondary world [Torso 190–191]). Judged by these criteria, he believes that Williams’s Arthuriad“abounds and even excels” in the first category, ‘Wisdom’ (193); that although marred by too much sprung rhythm Williams “produced word music equalled by only two or three in this century and surpassed by none” (194–195); and that he excels at ‘Strength of Incantation,’ so much so that like it or not, his explicitly Christian, Grail-centric Arthurian world is like a taste you can’t get out of your mouth (198)—an unfortunate analogy, I think, but Lewis’s point is that Williams’s conception of the grail is so compelling that even atheists reading these poems would find themselves deeply moved by Williams’s inclusive vision of Christianity therein. Such has not proved to be the case. We should recognize that Lewis was, with great and characteristic generosity, staking his own reputation—which at that time was enormous from Screwtape and wartime broadcasts (he had even appeared on the cover of Time!)—on trying to make the case that his late friend was not just a good poet but a great one, in fact one of the greatest poets of his time. He reaffirmed this point in his Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, in which he declared that Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars . . . seem to me, both for the soaring and gorgeous novelty of their technique and for their profound wisdom, to be among the two or three most valuable books of verse produced in the century. (EPCW vi-vii; emphasis mine) History, as it turns out, has not agreed. Oscar Williams’s widely influential anthology A Pocket Book of Modern Verse, “from Walt Whitman to Dylan Thomas” as the tag-line puts it (1st publ. 1954, with many subsequent reprints), used in classrooms everywhere for decades, includes over a hundred poets, but you will not find Williams’s name among them. The same is true of The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), which was compiled by Philip Larkin, who had known and liked Williams. Larkin took great pains to make his anthology truly representative, seeking out new poems and poets rather than simply updating some earlier anthology—for example, he includes one of C.S. Lewis’s poems (“On a Vulgar Error”), which he found in the Hooper-edited collection. Yet there are no poems by Charles Williams anywhere to be seen. Far from being ranked among the top two or three, outside of Lewis alone he is never ranked in the top ten, or top twenty, or even top hundred. If Tolkien is today on the point of entering the Canon of Literature, then Williams signally failed to do so and is remembered today, seventy years after his death, only as a moderately obscure novelist of low-key supernatural thrillers and as a friend of Lewis and Tolkien. There is much to admire in Williams’s career—he was a self-made man who worked his way up from proofreader to senior editor at one of the world’s most respected publishing companies. Like Lewis a fast writer, he produced the whole of his acclaimed Introduction to the World’s Classics edition of Milton in a single weekend, with time left over to review a few detective novels as well (Michal81; see also 76–77). He wrote one good play (Terror of Light) and two or three interesting novels (War in Heaven and The Greater Trumps the best among them). If he failed as a poet—and the evidence is very good that he did so fail [Note 21] —it lies mainly in his wanting both to encode his inner life into his poems and at the same time working to keep others from finding out details about that life by withholding the key to that dark allegory. I would argue that he belongs not on the same shelf as Tolkien and Lewis, authors with whose works he had little in common, [Note 22]  but rather alongside Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and A.E. Waite. It seems unlikely he will ever be remembered as more than a minor figure from the mid-twentieth century, but he will not utterly vanish from view, thanks to his being known as an Inkling, to his being selected as one of the Seven Authors whose papers make up the Wade Center, and to his being singled out as one of the three key authors to which this Mythopoeic Society is devoted. The choices, made decades ago, by Humphrey Carpenter, Clyde Kilby, and Glen GoodKnight have assured that Williams’s name will not wholly be forgotten. Notes21 When T.S. Eliot calls your work “some of the most obscure poetry that was ever written” (Carpenter 109), it’s a pretty good sign that something’s gone seriously wrong so far as communicating with your audience goes. I am grateful to Dr. Carol Zaleski for sharing with me some pieces in which Eliot discusses Williams’s work, confirming Carpenter’s summation. 22 The best evidence that Lewis and Tolkien ultimately had little influence on Williams, although he enjoyed their company, is that no figure corresponding to Lewis or any other Inkling was added to Williams’s Arthurian mythos between Taliessin through Logres, published just as he was getting to know them, and The Region of the Summer Stars, written during a five-year period when he was meeting with them weekly.

[image error]APPENDIX A: HOW TO READ WILLIAMS’S ARTHURIAD For those who might want to read Williams’s poems but have been put off by their oft-repeated description as ‘obscure’ or ‘difficult’ or ‘impenetrable,’ I would like to offer the following advice. First, the obscurity and difficulty of Williams’s poems have been much exaggerated, until they have reached legendary proportions. They’re no more difficult than reading Eliot or Pound, and a good deal easier than the later Joyce of Finnegans Wake. If you can read The Cantosor The Waste Land, then you can read this. Second, I strongly recommend you not follow Lewis’s advice in Williams & the Arthuriad (96), where he advocated interweaving poems from the two main books (Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars) into the sequence of events in Arthur’s reign, its internal chronology. The problem with Lewis’s approach is that the two books are quite distinct in style, with the first comprised of a number of short lyric pieces from a lot of different points of view while the second is longer narrative pieces that expand upon major concerns within that tale. Most importantly, the opening poem of the first book, “Prelude” (TtL 1–2) presents a quick overview culminating in the failure of the Arthurian experiment and the withdrawal of mythic Britain (‘Logres’), leaving behind only England. This is bookended by the closing poem of the second volume, “The Prayers of the Pope” (RSS 46–55), which transforms that disaster into a eucatastrophe, with the forces of evil entrapped and forced to withdraw along with the supernatural forces of good. “The Prayers of the Pope,” especially the lines (53–54) concerning the defeat of the Headless Emperor (a sort of King in Yellow/Cthulhu figure) and his octopoidal minions, is by far the best of all Williams’s Arthurian writing, but it depends for its effect upon all that has preceded it. As for trying to puzzle out all the symbolism and autobiographical allegorical elements, my advice would be to simply sit down and read, putting aside for now any worry about what stands for what in the overall allegory underlying the story. Any good allegory (e.g., The Faerie Queene, Pilgrim’s Progress) should stand up on its own merits as a story. You can always look up the references afterwards to try to work out the referents, but to do so while reading takes you out of the story and breaks any secondary belief. Think of it as like coming across a word you don’t know while reading a story and, rather than stopping to look it up in a dictionary, making an educated guess from context and continuing to read, coming back at the end to try to work out the referent. Williams made this stage more difficult than it needs to be by not providing a clear gloss to explain who various characters in the poems stand for, but it’s still possible to identify the main characters and grasp the main outlines of his story just by reading the poems. Then read it again. A second reading will enable you to see some of the patterns and make some of the connections; you’ll then know what happens if not why. If you find you enjoy them, then press on and re-read as you would any other poetry you read for pleasure and not an assignment. If not, rest with a clear conscience that you gave it a fair trial and found it wanting.

Flieger Day

So, today's the deadline for turning over essays for the Flieger festschrift, A WILDERNESS OF DRAGONS. The essays have been coming in, one at a time every day or so, over the past week, with a v. pleasant spurt today. Well done, all.

For those who actually got their contributions in not just on time but early, especially the two that came in more than a month ago, I say : praise them with great praise.

There are still a number of essays outstanding, but most of these are from people who've contacted me and let me know the various reasons for the delays; I expect to have these essays in hand shortly.

Now comes multitasking time, when I spend some of each day working on first reading and then editing the essays and also part of each day on the Nodens (which I'm glad to say is coming along nicely, at least for now).

It'll be a busy and an interesting month.

--John R.

Charles WIlliams: The Lost Letter (Part four)

 And here's the third and final of the three main points of my essay:--JDRXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
THE THIRD KEY: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL(PRIVATE PERSONAE)And here I think we come up against the third and most important of all the ‘Keys’ to unlocking the meaning of Williams’s Arthurian poems: the autobiographical element. The Inklings may have had the habit (derived no doubt from English public schools) of giving each other nicknames (‘Tollers,’ ‘Humphrey,’ ‘Hugo’), but Williams (who was not so fortunately schooled) carried the practice to extremes, assigning a persona to accompany the name thus bestowed. Thus for him Humphrey Milford (later Sir Humphrey), his boss at Amen House (the London office of Oxford University Press), was ‘Caesar’ and, in the Arthurian poems, Arthur himself. Williams’s most loyal disciple (and one of the few men among the Company), Raymond Hunt, was ‘Dinadin,’ the court’s unofficial jester. Taliessin is Williams himself, and the love of Williams’s life, Phyllis Jones, whom Williams had earlier dubbed ‘Phillida’ (by which he probably meant ‘the Loved One’) and then ‘Celia’ (‘Heavenly One’), appears successively as Taliessin’s beloved: first as The Princess of Byzantium (H&K), and Blanchefleur (TtL)/Dindrane (RSS). At first glance it would seem as if Lang-Sims’s somewhat problematic relationship with Williams is recorded in “The Queen’s Servant,” the story of the slave-girl sent from Taliessin’s house against her will, but the chronology argues otherwise: Lang-Sims entered Williams’s inner circle just a little too late to have inspired the poem in The Region of the Summer Stars, and it seems overwhelmingly probable that the poem “The Queen’s Servant” refers to some otherwise unrecorded events with yet another of his unnamed disciples. [Note 16] Despite this, Lang-Sims’s account offers us a rare first-name look at how Williams created one of these personae and inserted it into his Arthurian myth—not (and this is crucial) because the myth had a lack that was thus filled but instead to bring the events in his daily life and his myth into parallel, so that the myth could serve as a kind of encoded autobiography, a roman à clef. In Letters to Lalage, she traces the various steps by which she was invited to join The Companions of the Co-inherence, given a name within the myth (“Lalage”), and assigned a role to play. After several hints that he sees her as a slave-girl (e.g. 40, 42) and ripe for punishment (ibid), Williams bestows her with a name in a brief vignette: “Lalage heard her name called and looked up hastily” (52; letter of 22 December 1943). Her full back-story arrives prefaced with a quote from Horace: Dulce ridemtam Lalagam amabo, dulce loquentam (Book I, Ode 22), which means roughly Sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking, Lalage I will love. Williams continues And since he [Horace] was chronologically before Taliessin, I suppose the King’s poet might have seen a manuscript in Byzantium where, no doubt, in the suburbs, he—bought? say so in the Myth—the Greek slave Lalage, whose particular work it was (they say) to see that all the candles in the house were lit at the proper time . . . though sometimes (they also say) she was lazy and lay on her pallet-bed or lounged in the court till the water-clocks had told an hour beyond the proper time; indeed, it is even said that occasionally the Lord Taliessin, wishing to write verse, found his own room dark—after which (as might be expected) Lalage spent some time in general discomfort, though no one lost any joy. However . . . —CW to LLS, letter of 1 January 1944 (Lang- Sims 53). [image error]It’s disconcerting to see that even as he creates the character, Williams prepares the ground for yet another slave girl to get a supposedly well- deserved beating (the ‘general discomfort’ casually alluded to). [Note 17]  Yet it’s of greater interest that Lang-Sims reports how she thereafter felt under constant pressure to stay ‘in character’ (Lang-Sims 16). Even, apparently, to the extent of not being able to refuse corporal punishment, since that would be to step out of character as a slave girl before her lord and Master. And when she finally broke character and insisted on talking to Williams in her own persona as Lois, not ‘Lalage’, he promptly ended both relationship and correspondence then and there (Lang-Sims 79–80). In the end Lalage’s story found its way into Williams’s poetry only through the sonnets he occasionally sent her alongside the letters (duly included in Letters to Lalage), which may represent a kind of halfway house between creating a persona and fully integrating it into the existing myth. Lalage’s absence from the published works is probably due less to their estrangement than to his early death before he had time to write more than a few scattered bits of what he hoped would be the next book in his Arthurian cycle, to be made up of “the great narrative poems which are to follow” (Michal233, letter of 23 November 1944). [Note 18] Other autobiographical elements abound; so much so that they dominate the entire myth-cycle. Even Lewis, who was inclined to take Williams at face value (cf. his various references to Williams’s perfect marriage), thought one poem autobiographical, calling “The Founding of the Company” (RSS 34–38) “the most autobiographical element in the cycle” (Williams and the Arthuriad 141)—and, incidentally, using it as his model for the community at St. Anne’s in That Hideous Strength, with his own series character Ransom, remade into an idealized portrait of Williams himself, appearing in place of Williams/Taliessin. Unfortunately so far as understanding his work goes, Williams would sometimes attempt subterfuge, giving a patently false identification meant to conceal, not reveal. One good example of this is when he tells his wife that he and she are represented in the myth by the characters Bors and his wife Elayne (Michal 93, 152, 234). This may be true, so far as it goes, but it is deeply misleading, and no doubt intentionally so. Sir Bors is a relatively minor character in the myth as Williams tells it; his defining characteristic is his utter devotion to his wife. Declaring that everything he does is inspired by her, he endlessly praises all she does to provide a home, a safe place to return to from the wars (“Bors to Elayne: The Fish of Broceliande,” “Bors to Elayne: on the King’s Coins”(TtL 24– 26 & 42–45) [Note 19]—just as Williams repeatedly laments in his wartime letters home to his wife about being deprived of all the little comforts of domesticity (which he extravagantly romanticizes) due to their enforced separation during the war years. All this is well enough. And yet it is self-evident to anyone reading the poems that Taliessin, the central figure in the entire cycle, is Williams himself—or at least Williams as he saw himself. This has been universally recognized by everyone from C.S. Lewis (see above) to Hadfield (“Charles was Taliessin the King’s poet”; 151), from Carpenter’s mild “Taliessin [...] whose character and role had a relation to Williams’s own idea of himself” (108) to Lang-Sims’s observation about “Charles’s total identification of the King’s poet, Taliessin, with himself” (Lang-Sims 38). Even Williams made this connection elsewhere in his letters to Florence (Michal 247). All in all, Williams’s purported identification with Bors smacks of cover story designed to allay suspicions of Florence Williams (which were, we know from Lang- Sims, Phyllis Jones, and others, thoroughly justified). I cannot avoid a suspicion that Williams created Bors as the ever-faithful, ever-loving husband in order to give himself what used to be called ‘plausible deniability.’ The second example is more telling, and closer to the core of Williams’s myth, its essence. When Lewis queried the significance of the name P’o-lu, the dark inverse of Byzantium, where on the far side of the world the Headless Emperor and his cephalopoid minions await their chance to unleash destruction upon the Empire and drive the Kingdom of God from this world, Williams’s explanation is a masterpiece of misdirection: P’o-lu is the Chinese name, of about the period, for the point of Java,— the extreme point (nobody knew New Zealand then). (Lost Letter, gloss on the next-to-last section of “The Vision of Empire”; rpt Gnomon 41 and Various Hands18) —That is, ‘P’o-lu’ represents not just the antipodes but ‘the ends of the earth,’ quite literally: the point on the other side of the world when land ceased and beyond which there was only empty ocean. Except that it isn’t. Modern maps of Java show several places named Palau (which seems to be the modern spelling of the Javanese word for ‘island’): cf. Palau Panaitan, Palau Deli, Palau Tinjil, all off the western end of Java (not the eastern, or further, end, as we might expect); one, Palau Sertang, is within sight of Krakatoa. But beyond Java is not empty sea but, to the east, New Guinea and, to the south, Australia. Only by heading south and west into the Indian Ocean (that is, back towards Byzantium rather than away from it) is there emptiness of the sort Williams prescribes. This might just be geographical carelessness on Williams’s part, but is instead likely to be more myth-making, as with the moons of Jupiter, so that in his world there is no Australia or New Guinea or New Zealand, et al.: the world ends at Java. Why Java, of all places? Because, Carpenter reveals (and Hadfield confirms), it was to Java that Phyllis Jones, his ‘Celia’, had gone after her marriage with her new husband, Billie Somervaille (an oil company executive), in September 1934 (Carpenter 108; Hadfield 117, 129). P’o-lu is thus of crucial, heart-breaking importance to Williams’s life, and hence was given commensurate significance within the myth: as Hadfield describes it, “[i]n the far seas [...] the place of chosen, willed and operative evil, P’o-lu, an island towards Java” (152). Thus, Williams was sometimes deliberately obscure, withholding information that would explain a poem, diverting attention elsewhere, because to do otherwise would reveal his most closely-held secrets. Yet such information is vital to understanding the poems; the autobiographical element in this cycle became more important to him than any internal cohesion of the story. [Note 20]  The failure of Williams’s Arthuriad lies not just in factors like its inversion of the Arthurian story to move the Grail from the periphery to its core or its remote and unsatisfactory Arthur but in precisely this: characters do things in the cycle not because that furthers the story Williams is purportedly trying to tell (and which Lewis was so diligent in trying to extract from the published poems) but because they are thus acting out their appointed roles in his private myth, recreating the events of his life as they should have been. Thus his fictional Blanchefleur does not have an affair, marry, have children, divorce, and remarry, as did her original, Amen House librarian Phyllis Jones; she enters a convent, from which she and Taliessin (the Williams figure) love each other chastely to the end of their days. The reason so many find Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars difficult to read lies not in any inherent inability to communicate on Williams’s part but in the fact that it is a roman à clef autobiography with no key provided.
Notes16 Williams’s first letter to Lang-Sims is dated September 9th 1943; less than two weeks later, on Sept. 20th, he invites her to join his Order and sends her its Credo on October 5th; they met for the first time on Thursday October 14th (Lang-Sims 24, 26, 28–30, 31). Yet he mentions proofs for the book having just arrived in a letter to his wife on October 7th and complains on October 13th that the book is supposed to be out but he has not yet seen any copies for sale (Michal 171, 226). Finally, he sends Lang-Sims a typescript of the poems on December 10th and makes no mention of any role she might have played in inspiring any of its contents, which we would expect him to have done if any of these poems did owe anything to their relationship (Lang-Sims 48–49). Thus the time-frame is simply too tight to allow time for Williams to have written a poem about Lang-Sims, gotten it typed (no doubt by the ever-faithful Douglas), added it to the typescript, gotten it typeset, and arrive. And, of course, her break with Williams did not come until much later, in April 1944 (Lang-Sims 80). 17 It may be relevant to note that Williams once described himself as a sadist, albeit “a cerebralizing sadist.” He then immediately ordered the person to whom he was writing (who was not one of his disciples but instead the love of his life, the inspiration for Blanchfleur/Dindrane) not to look up the word in a dictionary because it would “give you the wrong idea of me” (Hadfield 104, quoting from an unpublished letter to Phyllis Jones).† †#292 of a series that ran to at least 354; cf. Hadfield 242 and ff.
18 The move towards longer, more narrative poems had begun with The Region of the Summer Stars and marks a distinct improvement in Williams’s verse. The fragments are printed by Dodds, in the section of Arthurian Poets: Charles Williamsdevoted to “Poems after Taliessin through Logres” (Dodds 265–291), which includes only seven poems, most of them unfinished and fragmentary, and at least one of which (“Divites Dimisit”) is a draft for a poem that had appeared in The Region of the Summer Stars (the concluding piece, “The Prayers of the Pope”). 19 We might have expected Bors to feature more prominently, given that he is one of only three knights who achieve the Grail (the others being Galahad, whom Williams sees as godlike,† and Percivale, whom Williams oddly enough makes less important than his own sister, Taliessin’s beloved). In addition to being an extravagantly devoted husband, Bors as a soldier plays a role in Arthur’s victories establishing his realm, albeit a less significant one than that rather improbably played by Taliessin himself (“The Calling of Arthur,” “Mount Badon”; TtL 14–15 & 16–18). Bors appears in two more poems associated with the cycle but found outside the three published books. The first, “Bors’ Song of Galahad”, part of the unpublished Advent of Galahad, depicts him instead as a fond father (Dodds 214–217); Elayne is mentioned (here as Helayne) but much less prominently. The second, “The Return of Bors,” is a fragment that breaks off after just fifteen lines, describing Bors’s return from otherworldly bliss to the hell of Mordred’s war; its placement by Dodds suggests it might be Williams’s last Arthurian poem (Dodds 291). †This is signaled by Williams’s applying to him the term ‘necessity of being,’ in his lexicon an attribute of the godhead not of created beings (who are ‘contingent’).20 Williams did not limit his habit of arranging and re-arranging elements in his work to correlate with events in his own life, and vice versa, just to his Arthurian cycle. Lyle Dorsett, in his study of the six biographies of historical figures written by Williams (of Sir Francis Bacon, James I, the Earl of Rochester, Queen Elizabeth, Henry VII, and Rev. W.H. Flecker), discovered that Williams was apt to change biographical facts so that the lives of his subjects reflected the events of Williams’s own private inner life (Dorsett 36–37, 47). I am grateful to Dr. Dorsett for sharing his discovery and the Wade Center for providing me with a copy of his essay. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX