(Note: this review appeared in the National Catholic
Register, some years ago—around 1982, I think. I found, on re-reading it,
that I had identified the character to whom the title refers. In the interests
of not giving away too much of the story to first-time readers of the novel,
I’ve removed that name; otherwise the review is as it originally appeared.)
Charles Williams was a member of the circle of literary
friends which included J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. He shared with them a
belief in Christianity and a dislike for the prevailing naturalistic mode in
literature. And like them, he wrote novels in which the natural, the
supernatural, and the sheerly imaginative are freely mingled, though his work
is utterly different from theirs, with the exception of Lewis’s That Hideous
Strength.
For much of his life Williams belonged (with Yeats and the
Satanist Aleister Crowley) to the Order of the Golden Dawn, a gnostic cult with
secret rituals and a devotion to the study if not the practice, of magic. In
spite of this, his writings leave one with no doubt that he was a Christian,
though not a Catholic. He himself always considered his great work to have been
a long and complex Arthurian poem, Taliessin Through Logres. Unfortunately,
almost no one else (not even T.S. Eliot, another friend and admirer of
Williams) has been able to make much sense of it. His reputation now rests
chiefly on his novels.
These suffice, however, to make Williams a Christian author
worth everyone’s attention. Six of the seven, most of them long out of print,
have now been reprinted by Eerdmans in paperbacks of reasonable price and
quality. This brief review will mention only one, considered by many to be
Williams’ best: Descent Into Hell.
This book is as dreadfully accurate and complete a
description of the psychology of sin as can be found in fiction. It confronts
us with the truth which each of us holds, consciously or not, in his heart: the
fact that we desire to sin and are often willing, not in ignorance but in full
knowledge, to choose certain misery over obedience. The damned soul in Descent
Into Hell chooses to reject the world of the living because he does not
occupy in it the position of importance to which he feels entitled.
A striking aspect of Williams’ conception of sin is his
equation of evil and illusion; this notion has the lovely converse that only
what is good is really true. The characters in the book who yield to temptation
are yielding to a desire that the universe be modified to suit their
preferences, and when this desire is not granted by reality they embrace
falsehood. In the case of this book’s lost soul case especially, and in a
manner which I leave to the reader’s discovery, the phrase “devices of our own
hearts” (from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer) has a horrible and
entirely literal meaning.
This literalness in Williams’ treatment of supernatural
reality makes the book very strange, so strange and so complex that it is folly
to hope to give any real sense of its richness in so brief a review as this.
Time and space in the book are subject to the most extreme transformations, and
the lost one’s fall is only one of a number of contrapuntal threads in the
narrative, several of which lead to salvation for the people involved, so that
the book could almost as well have been titled Ascent Into Heaven.
Williams’ prose, and his vision as well, become obscure at
times, and a certain odor of occultism clings to the book—especially to the
character Stanhope, half guru, half poet, and entirely benevolent, but having a
little too much of the magician about him to suit me. Still, most of the book
has the clear ring of Christian truth, and I think the descent mentioned in the title will put a
distinct and very healthy fear of the Lord into any reader’s heart.
Light On Dark Water 