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A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight #15
The Gale of the World
The final volume of the Chronicle finds Phillip alone on Exmoor. Although he finds solace in nature, he is haunted by memories of comrades who fell in the first World War and by a feeling of failure at not preventing the sufferings of the second. At the depths of despair, he is caught in a storm.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
66 people want to read
About the author
Henry Williamson
150 books55 followersHenry William Williamson was an English soldier, naturalist, farmer and ruralist writer known for his natural history and social history novels, as well as for his fascist sympathies. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter.
Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of The Beautiful Years (1921), Dandelion Days (1922), The Dream of Fair Women (1924) and The Pathway (1928). These novels are collectively known as The Flax of Dream and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.
Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of The Beautiful Years (1921), Dandelion Days (1922), The Dream of Fair Women (1924) and The Pathway (1928). These novels are collectively known as The Flax of Dream and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.
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December 30, 2018
Turning around in the storm,
Ending his own beginning,
Phillip, free to transform
A world that is rapidly spinning
Back into Ancient Sunlight,
The ultimate succour of life,
As candle burns close to its end,
Can finally settle to write.
Ending his own beginning,
Phillip, free to transform
A world that is rapidly spinning
Back into Ancient Sunlight,
The ultimate succour of life,
As candle burns close to its end,
Can finally settle to write.
September 25, 2021
The fifteenth and last volume in Henry Williamson’s Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence remains one of the most problematic, even among his fans, which is reflected in articles that have appeared in the Henry Williamson Society’s annual Journal. Set in the first two years after the end of the Second World War, it juxtaposes the Nuremberg Trials with the trials and tribulations of ‘the Norfolk hero’ Phillip Maddison, who can neither abandon his political mentor, Hereward Birkin (= Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist leader); nor wholly free himself from the mythic shadow of Adolf Hitler, whom he sees as Lucifer: both Light Bringer and Prince of Darkness.
Previous volumes have shown that Maddison feels some sort of psychic connection with Hitler, as survivors of WWI determined that Britons and Germans (who had rediscovered their brotherhood-in-arms during the famous Christmas truce) must never go to war against each other again, the true enemy being Bolshevism: For whereas the Communists (as Birkin/Mosley sees it) wanted to tear down the System and start again from scratch, the Fascist ideal was to strip away what was outdated and decadent to reveal what was authentic and pure in a national tradition; and to build a better world on a foundation with ancient roots.
So why was the reality of National Socialism so horribly different from the ideal? Hitler, whose “dream of resurgence” had brought light to millions in the Twenties, had ended up as the fallen Lucifer who, in his arrogance, tried to usurp the place of God the Father as creator; wanting a better world immediately, refusing to recognise the forces stacked against him: what Phillip will call “the almost irresistible brute forces of the cosmos.” Lucifer’s arrogance – and he is Eosphoros, the Herald of the Dawn, “the brilliant illuminator in the darkness of men’s minds” – is the opposite of Christ’s compassion; and we can see these two mythic brothers warring in Phillip Maddison’s soul, leading inevitably to the final cataclysm of the novel.
Phillip wants a revolution: but it must be “without bloodshed”; and “it must first begin with himself.” Phillip’s non-violent revolutionary path increasingly takes the middle way of attempting to see both sides of an argument. Reading a newspaper account of the Nuremberg trials at his club, he announces to a professor who had lost many friends in the concentration camps: ‘Atrocities induce atrocities – all those civilians burned by our phosphorus bombs on German towns – all those Jews burned in revenge.’
Although the point is never spelled out, phosphorus is from the Greek Φωσφόρος, meaning Light Bringer, Venus as the Morning Star. For Phillip, both sides fell under Lucifer’s shadow. Even his estranged wife notes that he “seemed to bear the whole war, both sides”. That his connection with Hitler is not just political but also emotional is revealed by the frequent references to Hitler as an emotionally damaged artist not suited to the role of political leadership.
But this connection also goes beyond the emotional level, to the dimension of the soul where time and space are relativised: In the previous novel in the sequence, Lucifer Before Sunrise, Phillip has a delirious dream in which he sees the charred head of a sacrificed wood spirit, “one arm folded on its chest and holding a photograph of a woman” whose features he cannot discern. Phillip wonders if this image is “an allegory of the death of Hitler”; and, indeed, his girlfriend Laura will later tell him that the glider son of an air ace, Buster Cloudesley, in the fall of Berlin, found a photo of Hitler “lying dead, clutching his mother’s photo across his breast.”
We are here in the realm of what Jung calls synchronicity; and a connection with the analytical psychologist’s theories is made explicit when HW uses a quote from Jung as the epigraph to Part Two of The Gale of the World: “The work in progress becomes the poet’s fate and determines his development.” This statement can perhaps be taken as HW’s credo as the novelist of the Chronicle; and Jung’s ‘mesoteric’ psychology – holding the tension of the opposites between the exoteric and the esoteric, between Reason and Imagination – may be closer to where HW was at spiritually than either mainstream Christianity or the revival of (or reversion to) paganism.
Phillip does encounter some of the alternative psychological and spiritual movements that take hold at times of cultural crisis – or, as a horse-painter with horse-sense says to Phillip with regard to the cult of Diaphany (based on Scientology), “all the usual sort of nonsense that starts up, like a virus, after every war.” Belief in flying saucers (which Jung called “a modern myth of things seen in the sky”) is mentioned; and we are introduced through Laura to the Eirēnēan Society (perhaps based on Theosophy), which teaches that Jesus is a Venusian “whose whole being is turned to love.”
It is in fact in his encounter with the Eirēnēans that Phillip reveals his own spiritual beliefs, after witnessing an invocation on a prehistoric barrow on Midsummer Eve: “We believe”, says an Eirēnēan, “that God cannot be limited, least of all by man.” William Blake, he goes on, must have been “despondent” when he wrote that All Deities reside in the Human breast.
Phillip replies: “Blake was thinking of the clerics who take the New Testament literally, instead of taking it poetically; for the potential of deity resides in the human consciousness.” Earlier, when Laura asked him if he believes in “the unseen world”, his response was that he believes in Blake, who said that everything that lives is Holy. And indeed, anyone open to the spiritual power of the best of Williamson’s nature writing will experience holiness shining through his descriptions of the living world.
That nature is theophany, a revelation of divinity, is a poetical or symbolic truth that puts the fear of God into the demythologising literalists of scientism and clerical religion. Phillip’s Blakean statement that God is “one vast Imagination” is probably as close as we can get to identifying his (and HW’s) religion – if we accept the etymology of religio as meaning ‘that which connects us to the sacred.’
But if God is Imagination, His sons Lucifer and Christ manifest as noetic Images – Images, that is, which have the power to transform consciousness. The visionary Image, as the French philosopher Henry Corbin puts it, “is our inner paradise; yet it can also become our hell.” So Lucifer can be the Evening Star, a light in the darkness (like Tolkien’s Eärendil); the Morning Star, heralding the greater light of the Sun (Christ); or the arrogant usurper, whose hellish light will be absorbed by “deep, dreadful night” while Christ’s all-embracing compassion prevails, that ancient sunlight which casts no shadows.
Williamson explores the mythic power of Lucifer one last time in Phillip’s testament to the future, a letter he addresses to an imagined survivor of the Second, as Phillip was of the First, World War: a young poet whom he invites to reveal, without moral judgment, the cause of the war in “the tragic split in the mind of European man”; and to show “the luminous personality” of “this Lucifer, this light-bringer”. For Hitler was, in the early Thirties possessed by “the highest spiritual force”; but, because he had the “feminine sensibility” of an artist and “a weak or diffident inner core,” he could not balance this force; instead, “counter-forces which led to the disintegration of the West” also led him “in contortion” to do the very opposite of all he believed in. Hitler’s vision of building was denied by Money; but the poet’s spirit will roam “from the inner hopes of the Light-bringer distorted by power to the inner hopes of the Jew purified by powerlessness.”
It is hard to imagine how many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust felt “purified” by the “powerlessness” which rendered them victims of the power-distorted Lucifer; but once again HW uses mirroring to suggest equivalence between the “inner hopes” of persecutor and persecuted, as he did between the Allied bombing and the Nazi crematoria. And is the poet being addressed by Phillip not Henry Williamson himself, who will devote fifteen volumes to exploring the causes and effects of the “tragic split” in the European mind?
At the end of the fifteenth volume, HW also points to a new political settlement which will heal the split, expressed rather clumsily through Phillip’s friendship with Melissa Watt-Wilby and Miranda Bucentaur. Phillip and his girlfriend Laura often refer to each other as Prospero and Ariel, the magician and sprite from Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and this leads us to suspect significance in the name Miranda, which is that of Prospero’s daughter. It is she who announces a brave new world; and the death of HW’s Miranda in a dramatic storm at the end of the novel may symbolise the death of the hope of a brave new Europe through Mosley’s Fascism or Birkin’s Imperial Socialism.
The failure of the Fascist ideal is also illustrated by the death of Miranda’s cousin Buster Cloudesley in the course of a quixotic attempt to spring Rudolf Hess (Hitler’s deranged deputy) from prison. Buster is the Baron of Lyonesse, the mythical realm of Wagner’s Tristan, which is evoked several times in the novel, along with Parsifal: Laura refers to herself as Kundry (a woman seduced by the evil magician Klingsor – whose name is mis-spelled ‘Klingfor’ throughout) and Phillip as her redeemer, Parsifal; and to her writing as “a search for the Holy Grail.”
Wagner was an anti-Semitic Christian but his music dramas drew heavily on pagan mythology, as did many German nationalists and racists (including Hess) in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Jung wrote of Hitlerism as the return of the repressed pagan shadow of Christian Europe; and the revival of paganism is still mooted by some as the way to heal the European mind, split between Reason and Imagination. Before his death, Buster asks: “Would the day come when scientists accepted that the ancients, who gave personalities to all natural phenomena, had divined the actual truth?”
This, like many important questions, must be left hanging in the air; unlike Buster himself, falling whirling into the eye of the storm which is wreaking havoc on Earth below. Phillip survives this onslaught of “the old gods”, despite being struck by lightning (another Light Bringer); and feels as if he has been reborn, emerging from Hades like the initiate of a mystery religion. Walking home along the cliffs, he sees the waves below as “the tears of Christ breaking on the stones of the world.” He has experienced both a pagan initiation and a Christian baptism of fire.
But has he finally chosen the compassion of the younger brother over luciferic spiritual pride? Later, Phillip and Melissa Watt-Wilby (who might just as well have been named Kay Sarà) exchange quotations from The Alternative: a text here attributed to Birkin but in reality written by Mosley, with which he launched his post-war political campaign for Britain to become part of a new Europe with “a common government for purposes of foreign policy, defence, economic policy, finance and scientific development.” Phillip wants the novels he now feels free to write to complement Birkin/Mosley’s dream of healing the tragic split in the European mind.
Europe a Nation...or another Brave New World...? The future’s not ours to see...But Phillip’s future seems now to be tied to Melissa, who has brought to him “love which dissolves arrogance and hatred” so that he can at last feel what Blake meant when he spoke of the stars watering Heaven with their tears. These are the tears of Christ’s compassion; and Christ’s is the “love by which one can see all things as the sun sees them; without shadows.” And this is the spirit in which he will write his Chronicle: to reveal the “invisible and neglected” truth of the past which flashed before his eyes in his near-death experience; to celebrate his “friends in ancient sunlight”; and “to speak for those who had not come back from the Western Front.”
Henry Williamson, by his own account, wrote the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight between 1949 and 1968. Nine years after completing his great work, having been diagnosed with senile dementia, he spent his last days at Twyford Abbey, a Gothic revival mansion in Ealing which was then used as a nursing home run by monks. One day he was found on the platform of the local railway station with no clothes on. Was he, who celebrated “imagination freed from fear”, trying to make his last journey as naked as he came into life?
The poet and playwright Ronald Duncan, in his Introduction to a symposium on HW, wrote: “It is the privilege of writers to be mistaken; great writers can be most mistaken.” To this I would only add: When great writers fall under the spell of Lucifer, their mistakes can be of mythic proportions.
There is more on Henry Williamson, literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter).
Previous volumes have shown that Maddison feels some sort of psychic connection with Hitler, as survivors of WWI determined that Britons and Germans (who had rediscovered their brotherhood-in-arms during the famous Christmas truce) must never go to war against each other again, the true enemy being Bolshevism: For whereas the Communists (as Birkin/Mosley sees it) wanted to tear down the System and start again from scratch, the Fascist ideal was to strip away what was outdated and decadent to reveal what was authentic and pure in a national tradition; and to build a better world on a foundation with ancient roots.
So why was the reality of National Socialism so horribly different from the ideal? Hitler, whose “dream of resurgence” had brought light to millions in the Twenties, had ended up as the fallen Lucifer who, in his arrogance, tried to usurp the place of God the Father as creator; wanting a better world immediately, refusing to recognise the forces stacked against him: what Phillip will call “the almost irresistible brute forces of the cosmos.” Lucifer’s arrogance – and he is Eosphoros, the Herald of the Dawn, “the brilliant illuminator in the darkness of men’s minds” – is the opposite of Christ’s compassion; and we can see these two mythic brothers warring in Phillip Maddison’s soul, leading inevitably to the final cataclysm of the novel.
Phillip wants a revolution: but it must be “without bloodshed”; and “it must first begin with himself.” Phillip’s non-violent revolutionary path increasingly takes the middle way of attempting to see both sides of an argument. Reading a newspaper account of the Nuremberg trials at his club, he announces to a professor who had lost many friends in the concentration camps: ‘Atrocities induce atrocities – all those civilians burned by our phosphorus bombs on German towns – all those Jews burned in revenge.’
Although the point is never spelled out, phosphorus is from the Greek Φωσφόρος, meaning Light Bringer, Venus as the Morning Star. For Phillip, both sides fell under Lucifer’s shadow. Even his estranged wife notes that he “seemed to bear the whole war, both sides”. That his connection with Hitler is not just political but also emotional is revealed by the frequent references to Hitler as an emotionally damaged artist not suited to the role of political leadership.
But this connection also goes beyond the emotional level, to the dimension of the soul where time and space are relativised: In the previous novel in the sequence, Lucifer Before Sunrise, Phillip has a delirious dream in which he sees the charred head of a sacrificed wood spirit, “one arm folded on its chest and holding a photograph of a woman” whose features he cannot discern. Phillip wonders if this image is “an allegory of the death of Hitler”; and, indeed, his girlfriend Laura will later tell him that the glider son of an air ace, Buster Cloudesley, in the fall of Berlin, found a photo of Hitler “lying dead, clutching his mother’s photo across his breast.”
We are here in the realm of what Jung calls synchronicity; and a connection with the analytical psychologist’s theories is made explicit when HW uses a quote from Jung as the epigraph to Part Two of The Gale of the World: “The work in progress becomes the poet’s fate and determines his development.” This statement can perhaps be taken as HW’s credo as the novelist of the Chronicle; and Jung’s ‘mesoteric’ psychology – holding the tension of the opposites between the exoteric and the esoteric, between Reason and Imagination – may be closer to where HW was at spiritually than either mainstream Christianity or the revival of (or reversion to) paganism.
Phillip does encounter some of the alternative psychological and spiritual movements that take hold at times of cultural crisis – or, as a horse-painter with horse-sense says to Phillip with regard to the cult of Diaphany (based on Scientology), “all the usual sort of nonsense that starts up, like a virus, after every war.” Belief in flying saucers (which Jung called “a modern myth of things seen in the sky”) is mentioned; and we are introduced through Laura to the Eirēnēan Society (perhaps based on Theosophy), which teaches that Jesus is a Venusian “whose whole being is turned to love.”
It is in fact in his encounter with the Eirēnēans that Phillip reveals his own spiritual beliefs, after witnessing an invocation on a prehistoric barrow on Midsummer Eve: “We believe”, says an Eirēnēan, “that God cannot be limited, least of all by man.” William Blake, he goes on, must have been “despondent” when he wrote that All Deities reside in the Human breast.
Phillip replies: “Blake was thinking of the clerics who take the New Testament literally, instead of taking it poetically; for the potential of deity resides in the human consciousness.” Earlier, when Laura asked him if he believes in “the unseen world”, his response was that he believes in Blake, who said that everything that lives is Holy. And indeed, anyone open to the spiritual power of the best of Williamson’s nature writing will experience holiness shining through his descriptions of the living world.
That nature is theophany, a revelation of divinity, is a poetical or symbolic truth that puts the fear of God into the demythologising literalists of scientism and clerical religion. Phillip’s Blakean statement that God is “one vast Imagination” is probably as close as we can get to identifying his (and HW’s) religion – if we accept the etymology of religio as meaning ‘that which connects us to the sacred.’
But if God is Imagination, His sons Lucifer and Christ manifest as noetic Images – Images, that is, which have the power to transform consciousness. The visionary Image, as the French philosopher Henry Corbin puts it, “is our inner paradise; yet it can also become our hell.” So Lucifer can be the Evening Star, a light in the darkness (like Tolkien’s Eärendil); the Morning Star, heralding the greater light of the Sun (Christ); or the arrogant usurper, whose hellish light will be absorbed by “deep, dreadful night” while Christ’s all-embracing compassion prevails, that ancient sunlight which casts no shadows.
Williamson explores the mythic power of Lucifer one last time in Phillip’s testament to the future, a letter he addresses to an imagined survivor of the Second, as Phillip was of the First, World War: a young poet whom he invites to reveal, without moral judgment, the cause of the war in “the tragic split in the mind of European man”; and to show “the luminous personality” of “this Lucifer, this light-bringer”. For Hitler was, in the early Thirties possessed by “the highest spiritual force”; but, because he had the “feminine sensibility” of an artist and “a weak or diffident inner core,” he could not balance this force; instead, “counter-forces which led to the disintegration of the West” also led him “in contortion” to do the very opposite of all he believed in. Hitler’s vision of building was denied by Money; but the poet’s spirit will roam “from the inner hopes of the Light-bringer distorted by power to the inner hopes of the Jew purified by powerlessness.”
It is hard to imagine how many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust felt “purified” by the “powerlessness” which rendered them victims of the power-distorted Lucifer; but once again HW uses mirroring to suggest equivalence between the “inner hopes” of persecutor and persecuted, as he did between the Allied bombing and the Nazi crematoria. And is the poet being addressed by Phillip not Henry Williamson himself, who will devote fifteen volumes to exploring the causes and effects of the “tragic split” in the European mind?
At the end of the fifteenth volume, HW also points to a new political settlement which will heal the split, expressed rather clumsily through Phillip’s friendship with Melissa Watt-Wilby and Miranda Bucentaur. Phillip and his girlfriend Laura often refer to each other as Prospero and Ariel, the magician and sprite from Shakespeare’s The Tempest; and this leads us to suspect significance in the name Miranda, which is that of Prospero’s daughter. It is she who announces a brave new world; and the death of HW’s Miranda in a dramatic storm at the end of the novel may symbolise the death of the hope of a brave new Europe through Mosley’s Fascism or Birkin’s Imperial Socialism.
The failure of the Fascist ideal is also illustrated by the death of Miranda’s cousin Buster Cloudesley in the course of a quixotic attempt to spring Rudolf Hess (Hitler’s deranged deputy) from prison. Buster is the Baron of Lyonesse, the mythical realm of Wagner’s Tristan, which is evoked several times in the novel, along with Parsifal: Laura refers to herself as Kundry (a woman seduced by the evil magician Klingsor – whose name is mis-spelled ‘Klingfor’ throughout) and Phillip as her redeemer, Parsifal; and to her writing as “a search for the Holy Grail.”
Wagner was an anti-Semitic Christian but his music dramas drew heavily on pagan mythology, as did many German nationalists and racists (including Hess) in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Jung wrote of Hitlerism as the return of the repressed pagan shadow of Christian Europe; and the revival of paganism is still mooted by some as the way to heal the European mind, split between Reason and Imagination. Before his death, Buster asks: “Would the day come when scientists accepted that the ancients, who gave personalities to all natural phenomena, had divined the actual truth?”
This, like many important questions, must be left hanging in the air; unlike Buster himself, falling whirling into the eye of the storm which is wreaking havoc on Earth below. Phillip survives this onslaught of “the old gods”, despite being struck by lightning (another Light Bringer); and feels as if he has been reborn, emerging from Hades like the initiate of a mystery religion. Walking home along the cliffs, he sees the waves below as “the tears of Christ breaking on the stones of the world.” He has experienced both a pagan initiation and a Christian baptism of fire.
But has he finally chosen the compassion of the younger brother over luciferic spiritual pride? Later, Phillip and Melissa Watt-Wilby (who might just as well have been named Kay Sarà) exchange quotations from The Alternative: a text here attributed to Birkin but in reality written by Mosley, with which he launched his post-war political campaign for Britain to become part of a new Europe with “a common government for purposes of foreign policy, defence, economic policy, finance and scientific development.” Phillip wants the novels he now feels free to write to complement Birkin/Mosley’s dream of healing the tragic split in the European mind.
Europe a Nation...or another Brave New World...? The future’s not ours to see...But Phillip’s future seems now to be tied to Melissa, who has brought to him “love which dissolves arrogance and hatred” so that he can at last feel what Blake meant when he spoke of the stars watering Heaven with their tears. These are the tears of Christ’s compassion; and Christ’s is the “love by which one can see all things as the sun sees them; without shadows.” And this is the spirit in which he will write his Chronicle: to reveal the “invisible and neglected” truth of the past which flashed before his eyes in his near-death experience; to celebrate his “friends in ancient sunlight”; and “to speak for those who had not come back from the Western Front.”
Henry Williamson, by his own account, wrote the Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight between 1949 and 1968. Nine years after completing his great work, having been diagnosed with senile dementia, he spent his last days at Twyford Abbey, a Gothic revival mansion in Ealing which was then used as a nursing home run by monks. One day he was found on the platform of the local railway station with no clothes on. Was he, who celebrated “imagination freed from fear”, trying to make his last journey as naked as he came into life?
The poet and playwright Ronald Duncan, in his Introduction to a symposium on HW, wrote: “It is the privilege of writers to be mistaken; great writers can be most mistaken.” To this I would only add: When great writers fall under the spell of Lucifer, their mistakes can be of mythic proportions.
There is more on Henry Williamson, literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter).
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