Below is an interesting introduction, explaining how a literary
manuscript, marginalia based on a lost letter, a series of lectures, and oral
history culminated in the publication of a book:
INTRODUCTORY
[by C. S. Lewis]
When Charles Williams died in 1945 he left two works
unfinished. One was a long lyric cycle on the Arthurian legend of which
two installments had already appeared under the titles of Taliessin
through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer
Stars (1944). The other was a prose work on the history of the
legend which was to have been entitled The Figure of Arthur. The
lyrical cycle is a difficult work which, if left without a commentary, might
soon become another such battlefield for competing interpretations as
Blake's Prophetic Book. Since I had heard nearly all of it
read aloud and expounded by the author and had questioned him closely on his
meaning I felt that I might be able to comment on it, though imperfectly, yet
usefully. His most systematic exposition had been given to me in a long
letter which (with that usual folly which forbids us to remember that our
friends can die) I did not preserve;but fortunately I had copied large extracts
from it into the margin of my copy of Taliessin at the
relevant passages. On these, and on memory and comparison with Williams's other
works, I based a course of lectures on the cycle which I gave at Oxford in the autumn
of 1945. Since a reasonable number of people appeared to be
interested I then decided to make these lectures into a book.
It soon became clear that I could hardly
explain the narrative assumptions of the cycle without giving some account of
the earlier forms of the story — a heavy task which I shrank from
undertaking. On the other hand, those to whom Williams had committed the
manuscript of the unfinished Figure of Arthur were at the same time considering how
that fragment could be most suitably published. The plan on which the present
book has been arranged seemed to be the best solution of both problems.In it
Williams the critic and literary historian provides an introduction to my study
of Williams the Arthurian poet; or, if you prefer, I add to Williams’s history
of the legend an account of the last poet who has contributed to it — namely,
Williams himself. Chapters IV and V of his work I saw for the first time
when Mrs. A. M. Hadfield sent me a typed copy of them. The two first
chapters had been read aloud by the author to Professor Tolkien and
myself. It may help the reader to imagine the scene; or at least it is to
me both great pleasure and great pain to recall. Picture to yourself,
then, an upstairs sitting-room with windows looking north into the ‘grove’
of Magdalen College on a sunshiny Monday
Morning in vacation at about ten o’clock. The Professor and I, both on the
chesterfield, lit our pipes and stretched out our legs. Williams in the
arm-chair opposite to us threw his cigarette into the grate, took up a pile of
the extremely small, loose sheets on which he habitually wrote — they came, I
think, from a twopenny pad for memoranda, and began as follows:—
From Charles William and C. S. Lewis, Arthurian Torso:
Containing the Posthumous Fragment of the Figure of Arthur and a Commentary on
the Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams (London: Oxford University Press,
1948), 1-2.
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