Charles Williams: Oxford’s lost poetry professor
It was strikingly
appropriate that Sir Geoffrey Hill should have focused his final lecture as
Oxford Professor of Poetry on a quotation from Charles Williams. Not only was
the lecture, in May 2015, delivered almost exactly seventy years after
Williams’s death; but Williams himself had once hoped to become Professor of
Poetry. And with supporters of the calibre of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, W.H.
Auden and T.S. Eliot – admittedly not all of them Oxford M.A.s – Williams might
well have succeeded, but for his sudden death, aged 58, in the final weeks of
World War Two.
Charles
Williams had come to Oxford with other staff from OUP’s London office when war
broke out in September 1939. OUP then had its London headquarters (specialising
in textbooks and mass market books) at Amen House near St Paul’s cathedral –
too vulnerable to bombing. So when war began, the London business was moved to
Southfield House, a mansion on the north-east edge of Oxford.
Williams
was a central figure at the Press, running the World’s Classics and the Oxford
Standard Authors, both highly successful series. But he was also a notable
popular novelist, with a string of fantasy-thrillers to his credit –
Buchan-style adventure tales which dealt with eruptions of the supernatural
into ordinary life. Their themes now seem oddly prophetic: War in Heaven
concerned the theft of the Holy Grail by a gang of black magicians; Many
Dimensions was about the Philosophers’ Stone.
But
Williams was also an experienced and entrancing lecturer on literature. Forged
in the tough environment of London County Council evening classes, his lecturing
skills included an encyclopaedic knowledge of poetry (he would quote tracts of
Milton, Tennyson or Shakespeare from memory at the drop of a hat), fervent and
engaging enthusiasm, and a strikingly odd accent (North London mixed with
Hertfordshire, with quirks all his own) which you either loved or hated. Most
listeners – used to lectures delivered in a languid ‘upper class’ accent – were
shocked and then fascinated by his harsh tones.
Moving to
Oxford in 1939, Williams already knew Lewis and Tolkien. In fact he had edited
Lewis’s scholarly masterpiece The Allegory of Love for OUP. (It was
Williams who devised the book’s snappy title; Lewis’s own title had been The
House of Busirane: An Essay on the Erotic Allegory of the Middle Ages –
which would have killed the book!) Lewis and Tolikien were both avid readers of
Williams’s fantasy thrillers, and they immediately invited him to join the
Inklings. He remained a central member of the Oxford Christian writers’ group
throughout the war.
Wartime
Oxford was short of lecturers, and Lewis immediately set about pulling strings
to get Williams to lecture for the English Faculty. He began in February 1940,
speaking on Milton, and the results exceeded all expectations.
Fifty
years later, former students still remembered his performances vividly –
‘Mounting the steps at a bound and launching straight into a flood of
quotation’; ‘telling students “Never mind what Mr. so-and-so says about it,
read the text and think for yourself!”’; ‘declaiming like an Old Testament prophet
or an enthusiastic evangelical preacher’; ‘Leaping from one side of the stage
to the other, and acting in turn the part of each character he was talking
about’; ‘clutch[ing] his copy of Wordsworth, once almost throwing it into the
air, but luckily catching it again… totally absorbed in his fascination with
the subject’; ‘Pacing up and down the platform… return[ing] to its centre table
three times to bang on it three times with his fist to impress on his audience
that “Eternity — forbids thee – to forget”’. In short, ‘Electrifying!’ Some of
those students went on to become teachers of English and throughout their
careers returned to their notes on those lectures for inspiration.
Lewis was
so impressed with Williams’s lecture on the theme of chastity in Milton’s Comus
that he declared, ‘That beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed
anything so important since some of the great medieval or Renaissance lectures.
I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded
to do: teaching Wisdom.’
But
Williams was also a notable poet. In 1930 he had edited the first mass-market
edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it had galvanised his own writing. In
1936 he had published Taliessin Through Logres, the first of a
two-volume sequence on the Arthurian legends.
The
poems, together with his powerfully inspiring lectures, had brought him
admiration not only from his contemporaries (Auden in New York writing to say
that he couldn’t wait to buy Taliessin, though ‘it would take courage’ because
he didn’t know how to pronounce it!) but from aspiring undergraduate poets,
many of whom were taking short courses whilst awaiting mobilisation. Drummond
Allison, Sidney Keyes and John Heath-Stubbs, all at Queen’s College, read his
work avidly, attended his readings at the Celtic Society and the Poetry
Society, and wrote on Arthurian themes in emulation of his work. Both Allison
and Keyes, after an early poetic flowering, would die, tragically, in the war;
Heath-Stubbs remained a lifelong enthusiast for Williams’s poetry.
And on
days when he wasn’t enjoying a lunchtime drink with the Inklings at the Eagle
and Child, Charles Williams could often be found in the King’s Arms with
Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Less enthusiastic about his poems, both keenly
attended his lectures and it was to Williams that Larkin sent the manuscript of
his first novel, Jill, hoping that Williams could gain the attention of
Eliot at Faber and Faber.
With
retirement approaching, Williams began to consider the future; there were
murmurs that the Chair of Poetry would suit him ideally; he could continue at
the Press whilst lecturing, and perhaps take a college Fellowship afterwards.
Not only were the Inklings keen; scholars of the calibre of Helen Gardner and
Maurice Bowra were likely to back him.
Then, on
15 May 1945, it all fell apart. An old abdominal complaint suddenly recurred;
Williams was rushed into hospital, and died after an emergency operation. In
the turmoil of the war’s last weeks, his death passed largely unnoticed by the
outside world. But literary Oxford was bereft. Hearing the news, C.S. Lewis’s
brother Warnie wrote, ‘The Inklings can never be the same again.’ Another
undergraduate poet and future Professor of Poetry, John Wain, heard from a
fellow-student (‘she was only just not crying’) as he walked into college. Wain
sensed that it was the end of an era: ‘This was a general disaster, like an
air-raid… The war with Germany was over. Charles Williams was dead. And
suddenly Oxford was a different place.’
Grevel Lindop was formerly Professor of
Romantic and Early Victorian Studies at the University of Manchester. His
previous books include The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey; A Literary
Guide to the Lake District; Travels on the Dance Floor, which was a BBC Radio 4
Book of the Week; and a twenty-one volume edition of The Works of Thomas De
Quincey. He has published six collections of poems, and his Selected Poems
appeared in 2000. His latest book is Charles
Williams: The Third Inkling (OUP, 2015).
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