
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Introduction to Charles Williams' All Hallows' Eve
Author: Eliot, T. S. [Thomas Stearns] (1888-1965)
Date of first publication: 1948
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Avon Books, December 1969
   [Bard Books imprint]
   [first Bard printing]
Date first posted: 12 December 2017
Date last updated: 12 December 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1488

This ebook was produced by Al Haines and Mark Akrigg


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






Introduction to

Charles Williams'

ALL HALLOWS' EVE

by

T. S. Eliot




INTRODUCTION

It was in the late 'twenties, I think, that I first met Charles
Williams; and it was through the friend who first called my attention
to his work that the introduction was effected.  A woman with a notable
flair for literary talent, who liked to bring together the authors
whose work interested her, and who was in a position to do so, made me
read Williams's two first novels, _War in Heaven_ and _The Place of the
Lion_, and at the same time, or a little later, invited me to tea to
meet him.  I remember a man in spectacles, who appeared to combine a
frail physique with exceptional vitality; whose features could be
described as "homely"--meaning by that word a face which is immediately
attractive and subsequently remembered, without one's being able to
explain either the attraction or the persistence of the impression.  He
appeared completely at ease in surroundings with which he was not yet
familiar, and which had intimidated many; and at the same time was
modest and unassuming to the point of humility: that unconscious
humility, one discovered later, was in him a natural quality, one he
possessed to a degree which made one, in time, feel very humble oneself
in his presence.  He talked easily and volubly, yet never imposed his
talk; for he appeared always to be at the same time preoccupied with
the subject of conversation, and interested in and aware of, the
personalities of those to whom he was talking.  One retained the
impression that he was pleased and grateful for the opportunity of
meeting the company, and yet that it was he who had conferred a
favor--more than a favor, a kind of benediction, by coming.

From that time, I read all of Charles Williams's novels as they were
published; and I saw him, from that time, at the same house and
elsewhere.  It was not, however, until the middle 'thirties that I much
improved the acquaintance.  My play _Murder in the Cathedral_ was
produced at the Canterbury Festival in 1935; Williams's _Cranmer_ was
the play for the following year, and I went down with a party of mutual
friends to see the first performance.  Thereafter I saw Williams more
and more frequently until the outbreak of war.  He was a member of the
staff of the London office of the Oxford University Press, which, when
the war came, was removed to Oxford.  He was rarely free to come to
London.  I saw him only on my own occasional visits to Oxford, where he
cheerfully carried on his official duties in a converted bath-room in
which the tub had been provided with a cover to make an improvised
table.  In May of 1945 I went over to Paris to give a lecture.  I
returned late in the afternoon to my office in London, to find a
message that Sir Humphrey Milford wanted me to telephone him at once in
Oxford.  It was too late to get through to the University Press; so it
was not until the next morning that I learned that Charles Williams had
died in hospital in Oxford the day before, after an operation which had
not been expected to be critical.  He died only a few days after the
capitulation of Germany.

Such is the outline of an acquaintance of some twenty years, which I am
proud to think became a friendship--though I was only one of an
increasing circle of friends, and though, in his last years, there were
others who saw much more of him.  There are some writers who are best
known through their books, and who, in their personal relations, have
little to give beyond what more commonplace, uncreative minds can give;
there are others whose writings are only the shadow of what the men
have given in direct intercourse.  Some men are less than their works,
some are more.  Charles Williams cannot be placed in either class.  To
have known the man would have been enough; to know his books is enough;
but no one who has known both the man and his works would have
willingly foregone either experience.  I can think of no writer who was
more wholly the same man in his life and in his writings.  What he had
to say was beyond his resources, and probably beyond the resources of
language, to say once for all through any one medium of expression.
Hence, probably, the variety of forms in which he wrote: the play, the
poem, the literary or philosophical essay, and the novel.  Conversation
was for him one more channel of communication.  And just as his books
attract and hold the reader's interest from the start, but have a great
deal in them which only reveals itself on re-reading, so the man
himself had an immediate charm and likeability, a radiation of
benevolence and amiability which, while it concealed nothing, yet left
the best of him to disclose itself gradually on better acquaintance.

As I have already suggested, Williams never appeared to wish to
impress, still less to dominate; he talked with a kind of modest and
retiring loquacity.  His conversation was so easy and informal, taking
its start from the ordinary trifles and humorous small-talk of the
occasion; it passed so quickly and naturally to and fro between the
commonplace and the original, between the superficial and the profound;
it was so delightfully volatile, that one was not aware, until after
several meetings, of any exceptional quality about it; and appreciation
of its value came all the more slowly because of his quickness to defer
and to listen.  There was also a deceptive gaiety in his treatment of
the most serious subjects: I remember a bewildering and almost
hilarious discussion in which we considered the notion, propounded by
some early Christian heretics, that the world had been created at the
Nativity.  (It was characteristic of his adventurous imagination, that
he should like to put himself at the point of view from which a
doctrine was held, before rejecting it.)  Amongst a small group of
friends, on a leisurely evening over beer or port, his talk would flash
from one level to another, never apparently leading the thought of his
companions, but seeming rather to respond instantly to the mood or tone
of the last speaker.  When it was pertinent to the matter in hand, he
could declaim long quotations from one or another of his favorite
poets, for his memory for poetry was prodigious and accurate.  He was,
furthermore, a very successful lecturer.  His means were always
straitened; for many years he supplemented his income by conducting
evening classes; and in his pupils he aroused, not only a warm devotion
to himself, but an excited interest in the literature to which he
introduced them.  After his removal to Oxford, he lectured to
undergraduates with, I believe, the same success.  As a platform
speaker, he was certainly unusual, and had, to an exaggerated degree,
some of those mannerisms which uninspired speakers should most
sedulously avoid.  He was never still: he writhed and swayed; he
jingled coins in his pocket; he sat on the edge of the table swinging
his leg; in a torrent of speech he appeared to be saying whatever came
into his head from one moment to the next.  But what would have been
the ruin of another lecturer contributed to Williams's success; he held
his audience in rapt attention, and left with them the contagion of his
own enthusiastic curiosity.

How, with his exacting daily work in a publisher's office, with his
evening lectures and with his economic anxieties, he managed to write
so much and so well as he did, remains incomprehensible to me.  Some of
his books--such as his _Life of Henry VII_--were frankly pot-boilers;
but he always boiled an honest pot.  And besides what could be
considered (if it had been less well done) merely hack-work, and
besides the financial lash on his back in writing even what he wanted
to write, much of his work, especially for the theatre, was done
without expectation of adequate remuneration and often without
expectation of payment at all.  He would respond to almost any appeal,
and produce a masque or play for a particular occasion for some obscure
group of amateurs.  Yet he left behind him a considerable number of
books which should endure, because there is nothing else that is like
them or could take their place.

I have already tried to indicate the unity between the man and the
work; and it follows that there is a unity between his works of very
different kinds.  Much of his work may appear to realize its form only
imperfectly; but it is also true in a measure to say that Williams
invented his own forms--or to say that no form, if he had obeyed all
its conventional laws, could have been satisfactory for what he wanted
to say.  What it is, essentially, that he had to say, comes near to
defying definition.  It was not simply a philosophy, a theology, or a
set of ideas: it was primarily something imaginative.  Perhaps I can
give some hint of it by returning for a moment to the man.  I have said
that Williams seemed equally at ease among every sort and condition of
men, naturally and unconsciously, without envy or contempt, without
subservience or condescension.  I have always believed that he would
have been equally at ease in every kind of supernatural company; that
he would never have been surprised or disconcerted by the intrusion of
any visitor from another world, whether kindly or malevolent; and that
he would have shown exactly the same natural ease and courtesy, with an
exact awareness of how one should behave, to an angel, a demon, a human
ghost, or an elemental.  For him there was no frontier between the
material and the spiritual world.  Had I ever had to spend a night in a
haunted house, I should have felt secure with Williams in my company:
he was somehow protected from evil, and was himself a protection.  He
could have joked with the devil and turned the joke against him.  To
him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also
supernatural.  And this peculiarity gave him that profound insight into
Good and Evil, into the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell, which
provides both the immediate thrill, and the permanent message of novels.

While this theme runs through all of Williams's best work, it is made
most apprehensible in this series of novels, from _War in Heaven_ to
_All Hallows' Eve_.  Not having known him in his earlier years, I do
not know what literary influences were strongest upon him at the
beginning.  I suspect some influence from Chesterton, and especially,
in connection with the novels, an influence of _The Man Who Was
Thursday_.  If this influence is present, it is most present in the
first novel, _War in Heaven_, and becomes fainter in the later work.
(Chesterton may also have influenced the early verse; Williams's poetry
became more and more modern and original in form.)  But I suggest a
derivation only to point a difference.  Chesterton's _The Man Who Was
Thursday_ is an allegory; it has a meaning which is meant to be
discovered at the end; while we can enjoy it in reading, simply because
of the swiftly moving plot and the periodic surprises, it is intended
to convey a definite moral and religious point expressible in
intellectual terms.  It gives you _ideas_, rather than _feelings_, of
another world.  Williams has no such "palpable design" upon his reader.
His aim is to make you partake of a kind of experience that he has had,
rather than to make you accept some dogmatic belief.  This gives him an
affinity with writers of an entirely different type of supernatural
thriller from Chesterton's: with writers as different as Poe, Walter de
la Mare, Montague James, Le Fanu and Arthur Machen.  But the danger of
this second type of story is that its thrills are apt to turn into pure
sensationalism.  If Poe, at his best, as in _The Fall of the House of
Usher_ or _Ligeia_, escapes this accusation, it is because the
symbolism of nightmare has its reference in the psychological ailment
of Poe, which is itself a serious matter.  If De la Mare escapes it, at
his best, it is because he gives you a perception of something which
you can interpret as you please.  But with inferior stories of
supernatural horror of this type, you feel that the supernatural world
is not really believed in, but is merely being exploited for an
immediate but very transient effect upon the reader.  The nearest
approximation to Williams's effects that I can think of, is given by
Stevenson's _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_; and even here, I feel that the
literary craftsman is too obviously the manipulator of the scene.

The stories of Charles Williams, then, are not like those of Edgar
Allan Poe, woven out of morbid psychology--I have never known a
healthier-minded man than Williams.  They are not like those of
Chesterton, intended to teach the reader.  And they are certainly not
an exploitation of the supernatural for the sake of the immediate
shudder.  Williams is telling us about a world of experience known to
him: he does not merely persuade us to believe in something, he
communicates this experience that he has had.  When I say that we are
persuaded to believe in the super-natural world of Charles Williams, I
do not mean that we necessarily give complete credence to all the
apparatus of magic, white or black, that he employs.  There is much
which he has invented, or borrowed from the literature of the occult,
merely for the sake of telling a good story.  In reading _All Hallows'
Eve_, we can, if we like, believe that the methods of the magician
Simon for controlling mysterious forces could all be used with success
by anyone with suitable natural gifts and special training.  We can, on
the other hand, find the machinery of the story no more credible than
that of any popular tale of vampires, werewolves, or demonic
possession.  But whether credulous or incredulous about the actual
kinds of event in the story, we come to perceive that they are the
vehicle for communicating a para-normal experience with which the
author is familiar, for introducing us into a real world in which he is
at home.

The conflict which is the theme of every one of Williams's novels, is
not merely the conflict between good and bad men, in the usual sense.
No one was less confined to conventional morality, in judging good and
bad behavior, than Williams: his mortality is that of the Gospels.  He
sees the struggle between Good and Evil as carried on, more or less
blindly, by men and women who are often only the instruments of higher
or lower powers, but who always have the freedom to choose to which
powers they will submit themselves.  Simon, in this story, is a most
austere ascetic, but he is evil; Evelyn is a woman who appears too
insignificant, too petty in her faults, to be really "bad," but yet,
just because she is no more than pettiness, she delivers herself
willingly into the hand of evil.  Her friend, who makes the other
choice, is also a rather commonplace woman; but, having lived just well
enough to be able to choose the good, she develops in the light of that
good she follows, and learns the meaning of Love.  Williams's
understanding of Evil was profound.  Had he himself not always seen
Evil, unerringly, as the contrast to Good--had he understood Evil, so
far as it can be understood, without knowing the Good--there are
passages in this book, and in other books (notably in _Descent Into
Hell_) which would only be outrageous and foul.  He is concerned, not
with the Evil of conventional morality and the ordinary manifestations
by which we recognize it, but with the essence of Evil; it is therefore
Evil which has no power to attract us, for we see it as the repulsive
thing it is, and as the despair of the damned from which we recoil.

It would be easy, but not particularly profitable, to classify Williams
as a "mystic."  He knew, and could put into words, states of
consciousness of a mystical kind, and the sort of elusive experience
which many people have once or twice in a life-time.  (I am thinking of
certain passages in _The Place of the Lion_, but there is no novel
without them.)  And if "mysticism" means a belief in the supernatural,
and in its operation in the natural world, then Williams was a mystic:
but that is only belief in what adherents of every religion in the
world profess to believe.  His is a mysticism, not of curiosity, or of
the lust for power, but of Love; and Love, in the meaning which it had
for Williams--as readers of his study of Dante, called _The Figure of
Beatrice_, will know--is a deity of whom most human beings seldom see
more than the shadow.  But in his novels he is as much concerned with
quite ordinary human beings, with their struggle among the shadows,
their weaknesses and self-deceptions, their occasional moments of
understanding, as with the Vision of Love towards which creation
strives.

His personages have a reality, an existence in their own right, which
differentiates them from the ordinary puppets of the usual adventure
story.  Only as much of the reality of each character is given as is
relevant: the rest could be supplied.  In _All Hallows' Eve_, we are
given only enough of the characters of Richard Furnival and his friend
Jonathan to establish their relations with Lester and Betty
respectively; the character of Betty is necessarily not more vivid than
it is, because of the conditions of the twilight world in which her
mother has kept her; and the mother herself is inevitably simplified in
terms of the control over her exercised by the magician.  And Simon
himself is defined by his function of representing the single-minded
lust for unlawful and unlimited power.  It is to the two young women
whose destinies are so different, Lester and Evelyn, that Williams
devotes his analysis; and a study of these two figures will reveal his
understanding of the depths and intricacies of human nature.  And the
delineation of the relationship between Lester and her husband, as seen
by Lester after she has begun her journey towards enlightenment, shows
great psychological insight.

I hesitated before writing this introduction, for the very fact of an
introduction might, I felt, give a false impression of the book to be
introduced.  It might suggest that the book is hard reading, or that it
is perhaps a book for some other type of reader than that to which the
prospective reader belongs.  So I want to make clear that these novels
of Williams, including _All Hallows' Eve_, are first of all very good
reading, say on a train journey or an air flight for which one buys a
novel from a bookstall, perhaps without even noticing the name of the
author.  They are good reading even for those who never read a novel
more than once, and who demand only that it should keep them interested
for two or three hours.  I believe that is how Williams himself would
like them to be read, the first time; for he was a gay and simple man,
with a keen sense of adventure, entertainment and drollery.  The deeper
things are there just because they belonged to the world he lived in,
and he could not have kept them out.  For the reader who can appreciate
them, there are terrors in the pit of darkness into which he can make
us look; but in the end, we are brought nearer to what another modern
explorer of the darkness has called "the laughter at the heart of
things."

T. S. ELIOT

London, August 14, 1948






[End of Introduction to Charles Williams' All Hallows' Eve,
by T. S. Eliot]
