John Buchan and Charles Williams: A Guest Post by G. Connor Salter

John Buchan

John Buchan, best known for his spy thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, rarely gets mentioned alongside Charles Williams. Besides Glen Cavaliero comparing the “time-fantasy” novel The Greater Trumps to Buchan’s rare science fiction novel A Gap in the Curtain in Charles Williams: Poet of Theology, few writers have seen similarities between their work. It’s not even clear that Williams read Buchan. He reviewed many thrillers in the 1930s (collected by Jared Lobdell in The Detective Fiction Reviews of Charles Williams, 1930-1935), including books by Buchan’s contemporaries like Sax Rohmer and M.P. Shiel, but Buchan never appears in these reviews.

However, the assumption that William didn’t know Buchan may be more due to timing and underexplored archives. Our knowledge of Williams’ reading comes from his letters (many still unpublished) and his published book reviews (of detective stories and thrillers). Buchan’s 1930s output was mostly military history, biographies, historical fiction, and atypical experiments like The Gap in the Curtain or his children’s book The Magic Walking Stick. He remained one of Edwardian England’s best-known thriller writers, but little he wrote would have appeared in the weekly review piles mailed to Williams.

If Williams did read Buchan, it would explain something that several Inklings researchers have mentioned in oral or written discussions: the surprising similarities between Buchan’s 1910 adventure novel Prester John and Williams’ first finished novel, Shadows of Ecstasy. As Mark Valentine has discussed in a Wormwoodiana post, this novel shows clear influence from Rohmer, so it is not a stretch to consider other Victorian-Edwardian pulp influences.

Buchan’s novel opens with young Scot David Crawfurd and his friends walking along the coast near their village and seeing something strange. A visiting African clergyman, John Laputa, appears to be performing a dark magic ritual in the moonlight. Years later in South Africa, Crawfurd discovers Laputa plotting an African revolt. Laputa recruits followers by wearing a ruby necklace called “the Great Snake” associated with Prester John, the legendary Christian king connected to the Magi and sometimes to grail legend.

The basic plot may not sound much like Shadows of Ecstasy, which features sorcerer Nigel Considine using African rebels and anti-Semitic mobs to create chaos until the British Empire gives him the African continent. Writers like Valentine and Aren Roukema have compared Considine to Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu: a mysterious man whose London activities fit within a larger conspiracy threatening British superiority. But if the London setting and supervillain overtones fit Rohmer’s formula, several plot elements more strongly resemble Prester John than anything in the Fu Manchu stories.

The most obvious connection is the name Prester John. Stephen Hayes’ blog post on Prester John highlights how Williams uses this figure in his second novel War in Heaven as a mystical grail guardian. Without using Prester John as a character in Shadows of Ecstasy, Williams does use overtones that Buchan generates via the name. In Prester John, the way Laputa takes on Prester Jonh’s mantle evokes Christ as king, setting him up as Africa’s messiah, but he is also a follower of Satan. Williams uses Christ imagery to suggest Considine is a messiah with his plans to free Africa from Britain but Sørina Higgins notes on The Oddest Inkling that Considine is an inverted Christ. Williams and Buchan offer Christ associations but then complicate the Christlike overtones to make their villains appear blasphemous.

The fact Williams associates his villain with Africa also suggests a stronger influence from Buchan than Rohmer. As Roger Lockhurst discusses in his essay for Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Fu Manchu, Rohmer preferred exploring the East in his stories—often China, more often Egypt. Williams and Buchan both imagine Africa as the epicenter of mysterious things, using it to explore fears about reverse colonialism. While Buchan imagines this threat rising (rebels gathering in South Africa), Williams imagines its realization (Africans causing chaos in London, reports of their reinforcements landing on British shores).

Jewels as a totem driving the plot also figure strongly in both books. In Williams’ case, the jewels are a collection belonging to the recently deceased financier Simon Rosenberg. While these jewels are not connected to a saintly figure as the Great Snake is connected to Prester John, Williams gives them an otherworldly significance. One character, Bernard Travers, mentions Rosenberg collected the jewels for his wife to wear; she provided a center for their glory and Rosenberg saw no point to the jewels after her death.

Williams and Buchan both offer secondary villains reacting to the otherworldly jewels. Crawfurd seeks to undermine Laputa through Laputa’s Portuguese follower Henriques, who craves the Great Snake. Considine’s plan to exploit anti-Semites craving Rosenberg’s jewels gets undermined when his German follower Mottreux craves the jewels.

Shaka (spelled Tchaka or Chaka in older texts), the famous Zulu king who ruled from 1816 to 1828, is a background character in both stories. Crawfurd’s friend Mr. Wardlaw warns him a rebellion could happen any time: “Supposing a second Tchaka showed up, who could get the different tribes to work together.” Crawfurd concedes that “if there was some exiled prince of Tchaka’s blood, who came back like Prince Charlie to free his people, there might be danger…” In Shadows of Ecstasy, this possibility nearly comes true. Considine’s plan involves manipulating Inkmazi, a Zulu prince educated in the West who is “chief of the sons of Chaka.”

For Williams and Buchan, the reference to Shaka opens up a larger discussion about kingliness. Laputa is the villain but undisputably a leader. When Crawfurd sees Laputa at a ceremony, he thinks: “Then I knew that, to the confusion of all talk about equality, God has ordained some men to be kings and others to serve.” When Inkmazi gets rescued from a racist mob and hides at a London home, he tells his rescuers his full title and they are impressed, even unsettled, by the regal power he emanates. Neither Buchan nor Williams may offer a story in which Africans achieve independence. But by offering an African king-to-be who even enemies respect, they cut against some racist expectations and suggest that Edwardian readers should not be shocked that a black man could be a great ruler.

Nigel Considine may be inspired by Rohmer’s tales about Scotland Yard uncovering sinister conspiracies in London alleys. But the African theme in Shadows of Ecstasy, particularly the complex image of Africa as a land treated as exotic yet to be respected, reads more like something Willaims would have gotten from Buchan than anything in Rohmer.

As of this writing, more work must be done exploring Williams’ archives to see how well he knew Buchan’s work. Even if references to Prester John cannot be found, the work matters for dispelling an accidental misconception about Williams and other Inklings. Many scholars discuss Williams and his friends being influenced by canonized classic authors—writers like Chaucer, Dante, and Milton—or newly canonized Victorian fantasists such as George MacDonald. These discussions are important but may give the impression the Inklings never read popular literature from their period (Holly Ordway addresses this problem in Tolkien’s Modern Reading). Exploring how familiar the Inklings were with authors like Buchan, less reputable figures who informed Victorian-Edwardian culture in inescapable ways, shows the Inklings were well-read but not snobs.

(Much thanks to Eric E. Rauscher whose comment about Shadows of Ecstasy being similar to Prester John prompted this discussion)

 G. Connor Salter

William Lindsay Gresham Reviews A Charles Williams Novel: A Guest Post by G. Connor Salter

Joy Davidman’s first husband is sometimes disregarded as just the off-camera cad in Shadowlands, but he was a successful writer in his own right. He was also a student of the Inklings in his own right.

William Lindsay Gresham wrote in a 1950 Presbyterian Life article series “From Communist to Christian” about how much Lewis meant to him when he and Davidman began exploring Christianity (circa 1946-1947). The same year, he wrote a foreword to an American edition of The Greater Trumps. As I’ve discussed in a recent Mythlore essay co-written with Sorina Higgins, Gresham even wrote a poem about Lewis which references the Ransom trilogy.

In 1951, Gresham wrote about Williams again. “The Nature of Reality,” published in The Saturday Review on March 24, was his review of The Place of the Lion, “published originally in 1932 and reprinted now to please a growing Williams cult.”  I would like to note some interesting features of this review (the full text is reproduced at the bottom of this post).

First, the late Perry C. Bramlett reports in his notes that 1951 is the last year Gresham called himself a Christian in articles. Abigail Santamaria notes in her biography of Davidman that Gresham retroactively described 1950 as the year he gave up on Christianity, becoming more interested in Zen Buddhism and Dianetics. Therefore, Gresham reviewed The Place of the Lion when he was still a Christian or just beginning to shift his views.

This chronology explains why Gresham writes about faith like a true believer. He calls “the identity of sexual love with Divine charity” a core Williams theme and explains how Williams would answer “the materialist, dyspeptic with ill-digested Freud who sneers at religious experience as ‘only sex’” that in fact, “sex is only God.” In post-1951 works Gresham has less reverence for faith of any kind, treating it as an illusion or coping mechanism.

Second, it’s an atypical review for Gresham. He was a prolific magazine/newspaper contributor. But other than reviewing vintage erotica for men’s magazine The Dude in the 1960s, when he needed money and took any assignment, Gresham generally reviewed books on subjects connected to his life or perceived expert areas. He was a former tuberculosis patient who set his literary novel Limbo Tower in a tuberculosis ward. He was an amateur mentalist who wrote about mentalists playing con games in his hardboiled novel Nightmare Alley, and further explored how magic intersects with carnival culture in books like Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls. His other three reviews for The Saturday Review covered the memoir Circus Doctor by J.Y. Henderson, the hardboiled novel Backlash by James Raisin, and the tuberculosis memoir I Took It Lying Down by Marian Spritzer. If Gresham had private eye business cards listing his writing specialties, they would have been magic, “carnies,” crime, and occasionally TB.

Therefore, it was unusual for Gresham to review a supernatural fantasy thriller like The Place of the Lion. It was almost certainly a book he sought to cover, not just another assignment. The fact he writes nothing but praise for Williams confirms this piece is a labor of love. Gresham opens his review saying that Williams “could do something that almost no one else can do: he could make a spiritual idea come alive in the flesh-and-blood world of fiction.”

Third, Gresham has done his homework. When he discusses how sex is God in Williams’s theology, he refers to The Descent of the Dove, an “extraordinarily illuminating history of the holy spirit in Christianity.” He compares the novel to four other Williams novels (War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, All Hallows Eve, The Greater Trumps), arguing that “The Place of the Lion is the most profound metaphysically” of these novels for how it makes readers “come to grips with the very nature of reality itself.”

His knowledge of Williams’s bibliography is not perfect. Early in the review he calls The Place of the Lion Williams’s first novel. His summary of “all Williams’s novels” omits Shadows of Ecstasy (republished the same year, by the same American publisher). But he has clearly read Williams voraciously and carefully. It may be overmuch to call Gresham a full-fledged Williams scholar, but he likely knew Williams as well as his friend Chad Walsh knew Lewis when Walsh wrote the first published Lewis biography.

Fourth, Gresham makes some perceptive insights. Like Lewis, he sees The Place of the Lion as one of Williams’s best works. Near the review’s end, he writes that Williams’s novels are “fundamentally different from the ‘supernatural fantasies’: one might say that his novels are not fantasy at all but a realism which concerns itself with essences instead of surfaces. Most fantasy makes its effect by exploiting the antithesis between the Natural—seen as the ‘real,’ commonplace, everyday world—and an unreal Supernatural. But Williams’s point is that the Natural is the Supernatural.”

Given how many Williams novels resemble pulp thrillers (the magic relic has been stolen!), one might expect Gresham to compare Williams to supernatural thriller novelists like Sax Rohmer, whose work inspired Shadows of Ecstasy. Alternatively, Gresham might discuss how Williams’s use of the supernatural in his thrillers compares to the way Gresham used the supernatural in Nightmare Alley. Instead, Gresham never frames Williams as a thriller novelist. He overlooks the chases and mind games, focusing on the spiritual. He sees Williams as more fantasist than thriller novelist, which is probably correct. Williams didn’t write fairytales per se, but like Lewis and Tolkien, he essentially wrote about magic. The hunt for a MacGuffin (a relic, a suitcase, a perfect con job) matters less to Williams than how MacGuffins affect his characters.

Yet if Gresham sees Williams as a fantasist, he also says that Williams transgresses conventional fantasy literature: what if magic is reality, not an exception to reality? Gresham knew crime fiction well, but he also knew fantasy. He contributed to pulp fantasy and science fiction magazines. He wrote a piece for The Baum Bugle about his love for L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. Davidman’s letters show he was familiar with The Hobbit and E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros.

So, Gresham was well-read enough to know that while magic can be more than a MacGuffin in a fantasy story, neither fantasy nor thriller fiction lets magic unsettle readers much. Particularly in Baum’s work, magic instigates plots without making readers consider whether the supernatural really exists. Williams did something rarer, comparable to what Lewis provided via Aslan: he made the supernatural challenge his characters, and leave readers a little rattled too. Even when it is good, the supernatural is never safe in a Williams story. Not conventional fantasy by half.

Although “The Nature of Reality” is a short review at five paragraphs long, it shows Gresham knew Williams far better than readers may expect. Based on what we know of his marriage to Davidman (her becoming interested in the Inklings and theism first), he probably discovered Williams by following her interests, but he quickly became a full-fledged Inklings student and researcher.

It is unclear if Gresham stayed interested in Williams after 1951. However, it’s not surprising that he liked Williams so much. Their writing styles differed, but Williams may be the Inkling with whom Gresham shared the most common territory. They were both working-class men who taught themselves about literature and faith. They sought the supernatural but chafed against religious orthodoxy. They were forever interested in esoteric undercurrents, whether it be secret societies or fortunetellers in caravans, that promised marvels. It led them both to produce fascinating fiction that grappled with why humans crave marvels.

G. Connor Salter  

G. Connor Salter is a writer and editor with over 1,400 bylines, from local news to peer-reviewed academic articles. His work has won or been cited in awards issued by the Colorado Press Association Network and the Blue Ridge Christian Writers Conference. His work on the Inklings has appeared in such places as Mythlore, The Lamp-Post, Fellowship & Fairydust, and CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society.

 

The Troubling of the City

‘Suppose that a number of fiends from Hell were sent to make war on a modern English cathedral city . . .’

Not the plot of a hitherto unknown Charles Williams or C S Lewis novel, but the enticing opening sentence of the blurb for an early Sixties fantastical thriller, The Troubling of the City (1962), also described by the publisher as ‘a new engagement of ‘The War in Heaven’’. The book’s epigraph is from Revelation XII, verses 7-9 and 12, the origin of that phrase, which was also used by Williams as the title of his first published novel.

The author, Roger Lloyd (1901-1966), was a Canon in the Cathedral close at Winchester, where he was appointed Vice-Dean, and the city provides the setting for his novel. He explains in a foreword that it was ‘first written to be read aloud on seven successive evenings to a conference of the Servants of Christ the King’ at the city, but has been much revised and expanded for book publication. The plot also takes place in part at a retreat and conference, on the theme of reconciliation.  The SCK organisation had been founded by Lloyd in 1943.

He was a prolific writer of books on theology and related social issues, and also incidentally (like many clergymen) a railway enthusiast, issuing three books on that subject. He had some success with two epistolary historical fictions, The Letters of Luke the Physician (1957) and Letters from the Early Church (1960). After these he also wrote a literary study, The Borderland: An Exploration of Theology in English Literature (1960), with examples that included Charles Williams. Like Williams (and Eliot, and Mary Butts, and Dorothy L. Sayers), Lloyd was evidently of the High Church persuasion.

Lloyd says in the Preface to this latter book that among citizens of the ‘Borderland’ he discusses, ‘one of its most recent, and certainly most honoured, was Charles Williams of blessed memory.’ He was, he tells us later, ‘the spiritual adviser of so many who had the luck to have his friendship, and, in all but name, the confessor of some of them’. The book does not offer a close critical study of Williams, but he is clearly a major influence on the author’s ideas.

His fictional approach, however, is rather different to Williams. A strength in Williams’ novels is his cast of all-too-human characters, with failings and foibles, whom we get to know first before the full force of the supernatural is evident. This is the approach also adopted by M R James in his ghost stories: to start with the fairly familiar before you introduce the unearthly.

By contrast, the first few chapters of The Troubling of the City depict the machinations of a princely demon sent to Winchester to undermine the city, and his conference with a few minor resident demons, whose infernal work has not been judged effective enough. The conceit of the conspiring, and not always competent, demons will call to mind the flavour of C S Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters (1942).  Lloyd also introduces celestial figures who have been sent to aid the city, including a converted buccaneer, St Swithin and King Alfred.

The ancient city of Winchester is not described in a lyrical and vivid way, as for example Machen does with Caerleon. There are episodes in the cathedral and other notable places, and even a few contemporary touches, such as a scene in a Robinson Crusoe themed beatnik coffee bar, but there is not a strong sense of place. I think this is because the novel is driven more by pace and polemic than by atmosphere or mood. There are some effective scenes outside the city, for example at a gathering of demons at the Devil’s Punchbowl, and in the series of malevolent attacks on a monk travelling through London, but these are linked to action rather than ambience.

Charles Williams’ novels gain by deploying talismans with a rich heritage of symbolism, such as the Grail, the Tarot, the Stone of Solomon and the Platonic Images. These impart an aura of magic and mystery which contrasts with the everyday lives of the characters and opens entrances to other dimensions. There are glimpses of one or two localised ancient objects in Roger Lloyd’s book, but they are not to the fore.

On the other hand, his book does have the shrewd idea that it is easier to undermine a city and a community by building up manifold minor irritations – locked gates, blocked roads, noise, sleeplessness, all leading to bad temper – rather than by more dramatic supernatural incursions. It is no doubt a sound pastoral insight: but it does not make for sweeping drama (though there is some of that too).

I think it would have to be conceded, therefore, that the Canon’s book does not have the sophistication or nuance of Williams or Lewis, either in the metaphysics or in the literary qualities, and it is also more earnest and missionary in tone. Nor does it quite avoid the problem Milton encountered in Paradise Lost – that his Satan was rather too glamorous and compelling, as is the princely Archdemon here. Even so, the novel has its own brisk sincerity, a certain brio and a clear resolve, and is an interesting example of a supernatural thriller in the service of theology, seeking to follow in the tradition of the two Inklings.

(Mark Valentine)

Beer and Cheese with Charles Williams

In reading some of the fascinating interviews by Raymond H. Thompson with Arthurian authors at The Camelot Project, I was surprised to find one with Christopher Fry, the writer of blank verse plays very popular in the Fifties (A Phoenix Too Far, 1946, The Lady’s Not for Burning, 1948 etc), though these are now well out of fashion.

But one of his earliest plays includes Merlin as a character, rather oddly (as he concedes) linked to Norse adventurers. He explains that he always wanted to create an Arthurian play but could not get the shape of it, though he still hoped he might (he didn’t, so far as I can see).

Fry took his surname in tribute to the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker, and was himself a Quaker and a non-combatant in World War 2. He recounts in the interview how he knew Charles Williams well in the early years of WW2 and they would often meet in a pub in Oxford:

‘At the beginning of the war, in 1940, just before I was directing at the Oxford Playhouse, the Oxford University Press moved from London to Oxford because they were expecting air raids. I used to meet with Charles Williams and Gerard Hopkins, who was Gerard Manley Hopkins' nephew. They both worked at Oxford University Press. Basil Blackwell came too, and we used to meet every Thursday at a pub in Oxford to have a beer and cheese.’

Fry, as he himself makes clear, was not then all that well-known, but Williams was already himself writing verse plays: perhaps that was how they became acquainted.  Fry was impressed by the erudite and vivacious conversation of his companions. It seems likely that he may have been given guidance and encouragement by Williams about his verse plays, as he also was by T S Eliot: all three were part of a mid-20^th century renaissance in the form.

Basil Blackwell was of course the well-known Oxford bookseller and publisher, but what of the fourth member of the beer and cheese party? Gerard Hopkins (1892-1961) was, like Williams, a novelist alongside his day job at the Press: and, again like Williams, was the author of seven novels. The last four of these were published by Gollancz. They are not much akin to Williams’ metaphysical thrillers, though they share a rather beady-eyed perception of human foibles. There is, of course, no reason why two colleagues at the same Press and with the same publisher should write books in any way similar, and I suspect Hopkins thought his were of a different literary timbre to those of Williams.

They were close though often combative friends. Grevel Lindop, in his recent biography of Williams, explains that Hopkins’ final published novel, Nor Fish nor Flesh (1933), contained an unmistakable caricature of Williams, which the latter found hurtful, leading to a distinct coolness between them, though there may have been later a sort of rapprochement. This book is now very hard to find, perhaps because Williams enthusiasts are alert to the link.

However, I have been able to pick up a few of his other titles. His books are perhaps best described as solemn comedies of manners. I found those I have tried a little studied and rather over-absorbed in the personal relationships of his characters. There is much leisurely conversation, little in the way of incident. An ambience of sophistication and cultivation prevails, but one wishes for some of the vigour and panache of Williams. A certain stateliness about them puts me in mind of the novels of L H Myers. Like those, Hopkins’ books sometimes contemplate speculative thought in an abstract manner, but, unlike those of Williams, do not venture into the more vivid realms of the occult.

Gollancz tried to give Hopkins’ penultimate novel, An Angel in the Room (1931), a determined push, claiming ‘it will certainly come as an unexpected delight to thousands and, we venture to think, tens of thousands of readers’ (it does not appear to have done so). His previous novels were ‘interesting, serious in the best sense, and of high intelligence’ but this new one ‘is, within its own compass, an almost perfect thing, instinct with rare and moving beauty’.

It takes place almost entirely within a Chelsea dinner party: most of the chapters are named after the dinner courses. The conversation, and the inner thoughts of the characters, reveal significant changes in the shape of their lives and their relationships, and in some cases a new self-realisation of their ‘essential being’, their finer purpose. While there are none of the strong supernatural incursions in Williams' novels, there is a sense of higher reality, a hint of the numinous and celestial.

‘There are certain descriptions – of the nights and smells of London, of Oxford – which affect one with the nostalgia one feels for a gracious thing that one has had and lost,’ the notice suggests. And it is true that Hopkins does have a feel for the fine evocation of the amenities and the courtesies of civilised existence. Inevitably, his books may now seem as outmoded or faded as the verse dramas of Williams, Eliot and Fry now do: yet they also share some of the masque-like and mythic qualities of those.      

A Checklist of the Novels of Gerard Hopkins

A City in the Foreground (Constable, 1921)

An Unknown Quantity (Chatto & Windus, 1922)

The Friend of Antaeus (Duckworth, 1927)   

Seeing's Believing (Victor Gollancz, 1928)

Something Attempted (Victor Gollancz, 1929)

An Angel in the Room (Victor Gollancz, 1931)       

Nor Fish nor Flesh (Victor Gollancz, 1933)

(Mark Valentine)