Mythmakers Encore: The Oddest Inkling - Charles Williams with Sørina Higgins

00:05 - Julia Golding (Host) Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author, but also I'm a director of the centre, and today I'm joined by a very special guest who is one of the world experts on Charles Williams, who perhaps we could call the third inkling after CS Lewis and Tolkien. So, Sørina, would you like to introduce yourself and say who you are and where you come? 00:37 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) from Hello. Yes, thank you so very much for having me on. It's a pleasure to talk to you. I am Dr Sørina Higgins. I currently reside in Waco, Texas, where I've just finished my PhD at Baylor University and I teach at Signum University, which is an online institution. And yes, I've done research into Charles Williams, but more recently, my research has shifted towards William Butler Yeats, Alistair Crowley and the modern occult movement, of which Charles Williams was a member. 01:07 - Julia Golding (Host) Oh, fantastic, we must talk about that, because that's one of his interesting differences, in a way, from the other particular axis in his life. Okay, so let's start with the basics. I'm not going to assume that people know who Charles Williams is, so would you like to give us like the headlines on him? 01:26 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Sure. So Charles Williams, born in 1886 in London and he spent most of his life in the city. He was a city boy. He wasn't as into nature as the other Inklings, spent a little time outside the city in St Albans, went to university for only a couple of years and had to drop out for financial reasons. So he was not one of the Oxbridge educated men. He was largely self-taught. He began a job at the lowest ranks at Oxford University Press just doing the checking of some proofs, I think it was the complete works of Anthony Trollope and then he worked his way up Just as a huge job. 02:06 Huge job, yes, he wasn't doing it alone. He was doing it with Fred Page, who became his office mate and a very good friend for decades. So he worked his way up the ranks of Oxford University Press, from a lowly proofreader to become a senior editor, and through his editorial work and the introductions and prefaces he wrote and the authors with whom he corresponded and the collections he brought together, he actually had a fair influence on the literary tastes of the times and what literature was available. He was the first to publish the works of Soren Kierkegaard in England and was maybe the first person ever in England to lecture on Kierkegaard, as just one example of his editorial work. So for most of his life his day job and his ordinary activities were very different from the rest of the Inklings. 02:54 - Julia Golding (Host) Now we should mention that, though he worked for Oxford University Press, his actual office was in London. 02:59 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) That's right. That's right Because it was not the what we would now call the peer-reviewed line of the press. It was academic but for a more popular audience work. That was what was going on in London, whereas Oxford was where the strictly academic works were being produced. But then in 1939, when the war hit and London was being bombed, he did evacuate to Oxford and that's when he joined the Inklings for the last six years of his life, which were six highly productive years. 03:29 However, even before joining the Inklings, he was, like all of them, addicted to writing and he wrote ravenously in all of his spare time. The man seems never to have slept, so he would be writing all night. He would carry tiny little pads of paper with him wherever he went. So you could find him on a train, scribbling some esoteric poem on his knee while he's in the train or in odd moments at the office. So those are kind of the external details of his life. Not a very adventuresome life from an external point of view. Not a very adventuresome life from an external point of view, but he had many spiritual, intellectual adventures that I'm sure we will get into. He, um was married, which is an interesting story. They had one son. He was a member of the fellowship of the rosy cross occult group for 10 years and then an unofficial member of another occult exploration group for about 20 years. 04:27 - Julia Golding (Host) I'm sure we will let's cover the occult at this point, because I think when people hear the occult, people assume it means like no ouija boards and black magic and things. This is not that this is very much occult as in the sense of hidden, private, a sense of magic, but it's um trying to use it for good and healing and sharing of burdens, isn't it? That's the sort of philosophy of that group, that's the theory oh, okay, you're the accident. You tell us what happened? 04:59 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) it was ouija boards. Um he, there was one instance when he walked into a room where people were playing with ouija boards and apparently it had been doing nothing, and as soon as he walked in it went mad and told them all sorts of things. The occult groups in which he was involved were, quote unquote, christian Occult groups we can get into what that means and how that's possible but they did practice many forms of divination. You know tarot cards, astrology. But they did practice many forms of divination tarot cards, astrology, meditation on the Sephirotic tree from the Jewish Kabbalistic mystical tradition. They did practice high ceremonial magic with great ritual, dressing up, choreography, words of power and so forth. 05:56 - Julia Golding (Host) It was not black magic, you're right, which is a different tradition, and it was meant to do good, but it often since it's being wielded by weak and sinful people it often did go wrong and end up in coercion and control and even abuse of other people. Biography of Charles Williams is very interesting on this, isn't it, With the strange relationships he had with some women as a result of this? Yes, so let's think about him as a writer, though, of course, this interest in his private life does come so much into his writing. I mean, you can't really understand him as a writer without having a sense of where he came from, really understand him as a writer without having a sense of where he came from. He, as you were saying, he was working as an editor and a sort of person who set the taste by choosing to write certain introductions and things like that. But he also started writing poetry and novels of his own. Which should we go for first, the poetry or the novels? Because they're different beasts. 06:44 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Let's go for the novels first, because they're easy to understand, and I also don't want us to overlook the plays and the nonfiction prose as well, because those are extremely important. The novels are the most accessible, which isn't saying much because for him the bar of accessibility is fairly high, but they are lively and delightful and strange and memorable creatures I think one of the things that struck me about the novels is that each of them has a very different concept. 07:16 - Julia Golding (Host) It's as though he's inventing, a bit like um cs. Lewis and tolkien could be claimed to invent a whole new foundry genre. For both of them he's doing the same, but in rapid succession. So you've got the kind of Indiana Jones, what's it called? War in Heaven? War in Heaven, thank you. And then you've got the philosophic one with the place of the lion, which is the amazing one, with the platonic ideals breaking through to ordinary life and so on and so on. And then a very haunting one, all Hallows' Eve, which is in a sort of blitz London. It's quite extraordinary, isn't it, that one Half the characters are in the sort of ante-room to the afterlife. 08:08 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Yes, two characters have been killed immediately at the very beginning of the novel, but they continue to be active in London and with the lives of the living through the whole novel. Yes, you're right, he chooses a sort of a central or sacred object for each of these novels and it's the point around which all the spiritual energy turns and it works. It works the way a murder works and a lot of murder mysteries. You know how you have like, say, broad church, and it starts in this nice, quiet little english village and everyone seems so nice and ordinary. But then the crime is committed and as the story goes forward you start to learn all the dark, wicked things about each character and before the end you suspect everyone. 08:48 Well, the way a crime kind of reveals people's spiritual condition. So this sacred object in Williams novels reveals people's spiritual condition essentially, whether they're on a path moving toward God or away from God, by how they respond to the object, like if they desire to possess it, if they want to use it for worldly pleasures or for spiritual powers, or if they are willing to submit themselves to it and not possess it or use it for good. So we have the Holy Grail, we have this magical stone in many dimensions, platonic archetypes, it's a play in descent into hell, that's sort of that central object. And there's a play and descent into hell, that's sort of that. Yeah, central object. 09:27 - Julia Golding (Host) and that one is. That's fascinating because it does link through to the plays. It reminded me a bit of between the acts. Uh, the virginia wolf book, which is has another fascination, in a very different use, of course, but this sense of the amateur, dramatic world of the interwar period, yeah, and so there's definitely a sense of how societies draw a village society in these cases how all the characters are drawn together by the power of the play. Yes, everyone said yeah. So should we talk about his plays then? Because that's something which doesn't get much of a mention. Just to sort of put it in context, this is the time when you've got people like TS Eliot writing Murder in the Cathedral. It's in that tradition of plays, isn't it? 10:15 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Exactly and that's a perfect comparison, because he and Eliot were friends, they were pretty close, they spent a lot of time together. He actually said that CS Eliot was probably his second best male friend after CS Lewis later in his life and one of the only people who understood him. And they wrote plays for the Canterbury and Elliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral for the same festival. They attended each other's productions. They went to see other plays together, like Neville Coghill's production of Hamlet. Wouldn't you have loved to be there to hear what TS Eliot and Charles Williams were saying about Neville Coghill's production of Hamlet, in which Richard Burton had his debut? Oh no, that was amazing. Yeah, we're thinking of like Elliotiot's essays on hamlet, right, and the fact they both wrote dramas and wrote about shakespeare. 11:10 - Julia Golding (Host) It's just, that must have been an amazing day any any extinct comment like oh he did a good job or that was pretty ropey I have not. 11:18 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) I have not seen any such thing. It's a shame. Yeah, I imagine liked it. 11:23 - Julia Golding (Host) So what's the flavor of Thomas Cramer? Is it similar? Is it a metrical drama like the TS Eliot one? 11:30 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Yes, it is a verse drama. Williams wrote many verse dramas and, as a matter of fact, he was probably best known as a playwright in his lifetime rather than as a poet or a novelist, because some of his plays were quite popular. He often had commissions for ecclesiastical settings. He had schools that had teenage girls put on his plays, which is funny to think about. So, yes, what is the flavor? Very bizarre, of course it's Charles Williams. 11:57 It's very different from Murder in the Cathedral in its sort of its atmosphere or its spiritual sense, but it does have some mechanical similarities, both set in a historical time, about a martyr, set on location. So you have this kind of meta performative thing going on. Right, the play is happening more or less in the same place, the events occurred historically, and that they both have the main character tempted and wrestling with these deep existential crises and in the end, having to decide to submit to martyrdom. So there are those similarities, but William's play is well, I was going to say much less narrative. But then again, murder in the Cathedral does some strange narrative things too, doesn't it? 12:49 But what makes Williams play distinctive is the character of the skeleton. So there's this character. Who's named that and who wore one of those skeleton suits, you know, a black outfit with the white bones painted on, and apparently gave a brilliant performance and he acts as sort of a conscience for Thomas Cranmer and a tempter and a goad, uh, and a demonic figure. But apparently in the end it turns out he's actually a sort of a Holy Spirit figure. He says he's the backside of Christ, the skeleton, and he's always challenging and tempting and taunting Cranmer and in the end inspires Cranmer to go running towards his doom and to embrace his martyrdom, and so he's actually kind of the catalyst for Kramer's salvation. So he's something of a chorus figure, except that he's individual rather than collective and he's a mad manic figure who dances and does acrobatics all around the stage and raises all these spiritual questions. 13:53 - Julia Golding (Host) So this is indicative. 13:55 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) I haven't read that one and I'm definitely going to have to now go away and find a copy of it. It's quite hard to find the collected plays edited by John Heath Stubbs, but that's only about half of the plays, and there are even still more in the Marian Wade Center that have yet to be published. 14:26 - Julia Golding (Host) So we're getting the sense here, aren't we, that he is a man of very distinctive personality and tastes. So I think it might be worth, before we do the poetry, have a look at the theology, because and this is an interesting comparison to CS Lewis If you think of CS Lewis as being the plain man speaking plain words to people, it very much, you know the communicator on radio is where a lot of his theology started. Joss Williams is very much the esoteric man, having his own sort of approach to theology, but it was very appreciated at the time and it definitely had its audience. If you're following this at all, it's sort of in the evening, underhill, um, more sort of metaphysical kind of way of thinking, isn't it? So tell us, this is a huge thing to do on a podcast, but have a go. 15:29 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) add a little bit about how he approached theology yes, well as everything else, he approached theology in a highly distinctive fashion. I think this is partly because he didn't go through the standard sort of beaten Oxford education. He didn't read all the same classics in the same order and the same commentaries on them, so he developed his ideas idiosyncratically. Part of his approach to theology can be attributed to his father. When he was young, he and his dad would go for long walks. However, his father was extremely nearsighted, ended up going blind, and Charles himself was very nearsighted. So they didn't go for walks to look at the landscape. They went for walks to have conversations and they would get into deep and tangled theological issues and halfway through his dad would make them switch sides of a debate. 16:24 So Charles was always having to try out both sides of any conversation and apparently he would do this all his life. 16:26 So you'd be halfway into I don't know predestination and free will and he'd be arguing for God's complete control of every detail and all of a sudden he'd flip and be arguing for free will and you'd have to reorient yourself in the conversation. Sudden he'd flip and be arguing for free will and you'd have to reorient yourself in the conversation. But he also was coming at theology with a literary scholar's point of view, not a theologian's. So when he read, say, duns Scotus whom he did he was reading him through the tradition of courtly love which, as we know, is much more of a literary than an actual historical tradition. So he would get from that these ideas of a place of romantic love in one's theological life, rather than say a nice tidy history of Christianity and systematic theology or something. Okay, but we should get into some of his really specific ideas and what he contributed. So the things that he contributed primarily are co-inherence, substitution and exchange and romantic theology. If you have another one we should talk about. 17:30 - Julia Golding (Host) No, no, no, my understanding is enough to yeah, I'm headlines only. 17:37 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Okay enough to be dangerous, Although I think with these doctrines, the more you know, the more dangerous it gets. So his core doctrine is co-inherence and it's founded on the historical Christian doctrine of the perichoresis or the dance of the members of the Trinity, so the idea that God is three who are living in loving harmony and unity as one. And then the second notion is the two in one natures of Christ, so the hypostatic union, the divine and the human nature. So you have this idea of things that are defying the laws of physics, right Things where you have more than one in the same space at the same time, whether it's three persons of the Trinity, two natures of Christ, or then Christ in us or us in each other. And the two most perfect examples of co-experience and human experience are pregnancy and romantic love, Because in pregnancy you literally have one person inside the other and they're not exactly mutually interdependent, but they are mutually exchanging nutrition and so forth, but also, ideally, love. But sexual love was the number one example that he used of how humans enact this co-inherent theology. 19:00 So in his strange little book Outlines of Romantic Theology, which he wrote in 1924, but it wasn't published until after his death he argues that any romantic relationship follows the stages of Christ's earthly life and so that every couple that is in love are enacting Jesus by their love. So he's following after Dante in the via affirmativa or the affirmative way, saying that created things are images of God and that we get to know God through them, by pursuing those things. But he takes it to quite an extreme. He's not limiting it to Christian marriage, it's just really sort of any sexual attraction can be rungs on the ladder to God. And while he says that this could be any sort of relationship and that it works for either partner, the way he writes it does seem to be very much a male-centered. You know the man who has this idealized woman who is a muse for him and she's sort of up on a pedestal and by idealizing and idolizing her he's seeing God through her, although he claims it can work the other way around, or in any relationship. 20:15 - Julia Golding (Host) So that's a bit like the Dante and Beatrice thing, isn't it? Absolutely? 20:19 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) That was his model for it, and so his final expression of this is one of his last books, the Figure of Beatrice. That gets a lot more subtle. It's not as mechanistic as the early works. It's like mapping a relationship on the life of Christ. It's much more. How does the affirmative way work out in history and theology, literature and in your life? 20:42 - Julia Golding (Host) So, thinking about the connections to the other inklings, you can see some of this resonance in things like Till, we have Faces by CS Lewis and even sort of the Perilandra, you know, the second of the space, the Ransom, ransom, yeah. And I think there's oodles of proof that CS Lewis in particular thought Charles Williams was just the bee's knees and absorbed a lot of his ideas. And because it's CS Lewis, it comes out in a slightly well, it's a simpler version, shall we say, than theles williams form of this. One of the things which I think is particularly interesting and you might even see in in tolkien as well, is this idea of um. You had a particular term for it, but it's the substitution idea that you take on the, the burden for somebody else, which of course feels a bit like Frodo carrying the ring um, and then I'm carrying Frodo. 21:40 I can't carry it, sir, but I can carry you yeah, that could be a line from Charles Williams, um, so perhaps you want to explain a little bit about this, because you see it in his novels as well. Um, it's a place when you, when you know it's there. 21:56 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) So his idea of the way of substitution or the way of exchange, exactly it's the idea that suppose that you have some very, very difficult thing that you're going through. Suppose you've lost a loved one and so you have this burden of grief, or you've gotten some terrible news or an awful diagnosis and you just feel like you can't handle this mental, emotional, spiritual burden. Well, you could tell me about it and we could make a contract, and then I would take it for you and you would no longer feel it as a burden. Now it's not that your memory would be erased or anything like that. You would still. If it were a grief for a lost loved one, you'd still be able to remember them, mourn them and honor them, but you would no longer feel it as a burden. You would be lightened and I would carry that burden for you. But because it wasn't mine, it wouldn't feel as burdensome to me either. So he bases this on the verse bury one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. And he takes it absolutely literally. He says it's exactly like if you're carrying a box and your arms have gotten tired, and so now the box is Christ. And he takes it absolutely literally. He says it's exactly like if you're carrying a box and your arms have gotten tired and so now the box is too heavy for you, I can take the box and carry it for you because my arms are not as worn out. So it's that literal and there is a debate among scholars as to how Christian this doctrine is and how magical this doctrine is. 23:17 There are people who find it absolutely inspiring and try to practice this in their own lives. There is well there was, there was a Yahoo group called co-inherencenet, which I think is hilarious, and people would get on there and talk about sharing each other's burdens. I don't know if there's some descendant of that group now. I think there is. I'm on the side that thinks that it's much more magical and that he never really did grow out of his occult training, but instead he went on and established his own group, the Order of the Co-Inherents or the Companions of the Co-Inherents, because to my mind this looks more mechanistic than miraculous and it looks to be much more of a piece of ceremonial ritual that you perform and it has to happen if you execute the formula correctly rather than a much more Christian supplication to God and God being the one who performs it. So I fall on the more magical side of that. But I just want your listeners to know this is a debate and not everyone agrees with me. 24:19 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, and it's certainly something you can imagine the Inklings discussing at great length and disagreeing on and toying with, and so it's not surprising that we see it coming out in how they're thinking of what you do with in their fiction there was a conversation. 24:36 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Oh, I wish we had more details. We had a letter from CS Lewis to his brother saying that they had an Inklings. And there was another visitor named Charles Wren. And in the course of their conversation Wren expressed almost seriously a desire to burn Charles Williams as a heretic. And we don't know what the doctrine was. And CS Lewis goes on to say Charles Williams at least makes us understand why people were burned at the stake. He is eminently combustible. 25:12 - Julia Golding (Host) So this world of a particular form of theology is very much laced behind his Arthurian cycle of poems, which is where I first met your work, Sørina, and I want to thank you first of all for supplying a very cogent introduction. So the two collections of the Arthurian cycle are Taliesin through Logres. Now, taliesin, just to explain these terms, it's the name of a bard, a singer, who Charles Williams imagines at the court of King Arthur. He's actually a character already existing in folklore, and Logres is a word meaning Britain at the time. And then the second series is called the Region of the Summer Stars. 25:59 Now, these are a series of short poems that sort of join together like a quilt to tell the story of King Arthur's court from the point of view, really, of the poets in that court, more or less. I mean, it's obviously a bit more complicated than that. Well said, yeah, yeah, it gives the sort of approach. So tell us about what you think are the strengths of this and what's the experience of reading them for a modern reader who's thinking. I really want to know what his poetry is like, right? 26:35 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) The strengths of this cycle are William's distinctive theological perspectives and his willingness to experiment with some modern poetic forms, more than perhaps the other inklings, and there his friendship with TS Eliot, I think, was fruitful for him. So the poems are really balanced in a very careful way on the ancientry of the Arthurian tradition, but somewhat metrically experimental and certainly very vivid in their imagery and in the musicality of the poems. They're absolutely beautiful. What is the experience of a reader approaching them? Complete bafflement. But as I do say in that introduction to Taliesin through Logres, I think that if a reader approaches them first just to experience them like music, then I think they would have a really good, enjoyable experience, because the poems sound absolutely lovely and we do need audiobooks of these and we do need composers to step up and set these to music. By the way, but if you were to read these poems, say, three times, through the first time, just enjoy the aesthetic, sensory experience, the gorgeous imagery of roses and heraldic banners, lions and unicorns and the luscious clothing of the people in King Arthur's court and the exciting action moments of the battle scenes and so forth, and then, on a second read, perhaps start picking up on what are the major themes and what are the images that are coming up over and over again and starting to distinguish some of the characters, because although Williams is not writing strict narrative poetry with detailed character arcs, he does occasionally do a deep dive into a character's state of mind, the way lyric poetry can do. And then finally, on a third reading, you can start to pick up on much more of the plot and the details and the things that Williams is adding to the tradition. 28:42 And just to sort of give a spoiler on that, what Williams is adding to the tradition, not surprisingly, are his distinctive beliefs, co-inherence, exchange and the romantic theology, experience exchange and the romantic theology, but also the absolute centrality of the grail. He did more with the Holy Grail than probably any previous author since Robert de Boron in the 14th century French romance, which was one of his primary sources. So he uses the grail the same way that he does in his novels, like all those other ritual objects we talked about that, each person's reaction to the grail reveals his or her spiritual condition and that's specifically revealed in whether they're willing to submit to and participate in co-inherence or whether they insist on being an individual and being free from that interwoven fabric of reality, basically, whether they would rather reign in hell or serve in heaven. Pretty much that's what it comes down to. 29:42 - Julia Golding (Host) I don't want to scare people off too much. I mean if listeners have managed the Wasteland, for example, or the Four. 29:49 Quartets. They can manage this pretty. I mean, it's more, I think it's easier to unpick in some ways than the four quartets. I just went to see the ray fines readings of the, you know the stage readings, which absolutely brilliant. But I did have to read a lot in advance to understand them and I think Charles Williams pays off if you give it equal attention. But it's not so impossible because you've got some of the arthurian material to sort of help you, the superstructure underneath. 30:17 You can see where he's varying the tune, for example, and then you ask yourself well, why is he varying it? What's going on here? So in your introduction, Sørina, I was looking at this description of how he treats history and I think there's another interesting link here to particularly to Tolkien the idea that he crunches up, um, basically a thousand years of history from the sort of beginning of you know what we call the dark ages, just after the fall of the Roman Empire, um to um, the fall of Constantinople, that sort of swathe of time which was it? About 400 to about 1600, something like that. 30:55 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Around the Battle of Badon Hill 500 to 1453. Yeah. 31:01 - Julia Golding (Host) So if you can imagine that period of history, he is dealing as if it's all happening in King Arthur's reign. So I like this idea that you can sort of crunch history together, because I think in a sense that's what Tolkien does he invents a pre-history and he wants to imagine what it could have been like. And I think, just at that simple level, Charles Williams is doing this is what it could have been like. So if you like that sort of reinventing of history, it's another reason for thinking about Charles Williams as someone you might read. 31:37 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) It really, really is. And he does that primarily because he wants to erase the East-West schism of the church. He hates schism, he hates division. Yes, so he has this beautiful imagined Roman Byzantine empire that never existed historically, but it's as if what if those East and West halves of the empire were completely united? And what if England were a province of the Byzantine empire, not only of the Roman? And what would this mean historically and theologically? So it positions Arthur sort of in dialogue with Constantine, really. And so you get all the deep theological and artistic resonances of those two empire, those three empires, really. And so you get all the deep theological and artistic resonances of those two empire, those three empires really, the Roman, the Arthurian and the Byzantine, conflated together. 32:24 - Julia Golding (Host) And I'm just thinking about what? Because a lot of people who listen to this have come from Tolkien. That's where they're coming from, and I'm just thinking that if you want to find a sense of some of the really interesting poems about the Roman emperor, who's a sort of figure in his city, there's a sense of a I don't know ministerial type world. I imagine there's resonance there. There's also sort of the forests and I think Lancelot rather charmingly goes wild as a wolf. There are so many little treasures to find in this sequence. 33:03 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Yeah, it is absolutely gorgeous. You're right. They both love the city and the empire and they see glory in those human achievements of the beautiful building of a city. And Charles Williams as a world builder, I think has not been appreciated enough. He grabs from all these different traditions, but he does synthesize them. He doesn't end up with a hodgepodge, as Tolkien accused Narnia of being. He ends up with something beautifully synthesized with layers and layers of symbolism and yet also just real human emotion. His poems are frequently spoken in the first person by one character or another. Mordred gets a poem in which he's just cursing against Arthur. It's really powerful. We get Percival singing one of the songs. So you're right, there are a lot of beauties in this work and I think your listeners would love it. 33:56 - Julia Golding (Host) it definitely repays the attention given to it so don't go expecting to understand it, go, in the sense, go expecting to just enjoy it. I think it's from somewhere looking at it. So it's really obvious that, um, the early death of Charles William Williams brought to a sudden stop a really interesting career. He died as a result of an operation which he wasn't expected to have any complications from, and this was right towards the end of the Second World War. So he suddenly vanishes from the literary scene and I think people like yourself are trying to remind us of his existence, because he was a bigger deal in his time than he is now and he had more influence on people. So should we talk about him as a sort of influence figure? We've mentioned the Inklings, but he's connected to in other ways, to what we've mentioned, to ES Eliot, but also there's Auden who admired him and others. Do you want to talk about his sort of circle beyond the inklings? 34:58 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Yes, please. Thank you. That's one of my favorite things. Wh Auden attributed his conversion to Christianity to the reading of Charles Williams' works and to meeting Williams. Several people who met him thought of him as a saintly figure. Him thought of him as a saintly figure. So his theological influence, but also his literary influence, went on and on um after his death. 35:21 Now, another person we need to talk about in this connection, although he died sooner than williams, is, uh, william butler yates. I don't think they ever met in person but they corresponded a good deal because they worked together on an anthology that Yeats was putting together and Williams was editing. And of course they were occult cousins because they were in related occult groups and their poetry can be very, very fruitfully compared and they both have this deep and profound mysticism shot through all of their works. And yet those two poets in their lives evolved from sort of a more romanticism through an Edwardian style into very, very modern poetic styles. So it's important to look at those overlapping groups. 36:09 But there was also a generation of young writers, kind of in the extended Oxford circles who really admired Charles Williams and I think carried his legacy forward. The complete list is in Gravel Lindop. I can't remember right now all of them, but I know Philip Larkin loved Williams' works and was influenced by it, and there were some others in that generation of younger poets. But then we also see some of his legacy going forward in perhaps the more gothic strain of modern fantasy. 36:44 I think of, for instance, madeleine L'Engle and Ursula K Le Guin as kind of later people who are carrying on an Inklings-like legacy. But I see it even on into things like Doctor who and the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we have these superhero stories of this main figure with this honestly spiritual power, even though they often scientize it in those works. But those works are the Doctor who universe and the Marvel universe and DC and so forth. It's just the one story, over and over again, of the central heroic figure who sacrifices themselves to save sacrificial story of the co-inherence. So I think that Williams was part of this really really important network or web in his own time with the Inklings, with the modernists, with the occultists, and that those influences go on and on and on in ways that have not yet been explored thoroughly. 37:52 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, that have not yet been explored thoroughly. Yeah, I mean, when you say it like that, of course we can just carry on listing them. We've got Ben Kenobi, obi-wan Kenobi, we've got Harry Potter, and I think one of the stories which isn't the dying God one but is from the Grail influence is, of course, Indiana Jones, because the last moves in Indiana Jones are so totally taken from the Charles Williams playbook. So yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? I agree. So, Sørina, more power to you for your work on Charles Williams. I look forward to seeing more of his work coming back into more general circulation. I always end these podcasts with asking where in all the fantasy world is the best place for something, and I thought, in honor of king arthur and all things arthurian, we should ask where is the best place to be a knight? Where would you choose to go if you had to don the armor or the knightly code and go to any world? I suppose it depends. If you're going for longevity, you might not want to go into Game of Thrones. 39:03 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) I certainly wouldn't last very long there. 39:04 - Julia Golding (Host) So where would you want to go? 39:06 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) Oh boy, I've been thinking this back of my head the whole time we've been talking and I'm really torn and I think I'm going to go with an unexpected move, because of course I'm expected to say Charles Williams' Byzantine Roman Empire and I will just say that would be an awesome place to go if you are both a poet and a knight. Sally Hudson is the court poet, but he's also Arthur's captain of horse and so he also commands a battle. So that would be a brilliant place to go. But I'm also thinking of the Celtic world of Tirnanug and the Tuatha Dé Danann, this shadowy Celtic twilight world where you could be a fairy knight and sail off to the west and live in these islands of mist and magic and mystery. I think that's where I would like to go if I were a knight. 39:56 - Julia Golding (Host) Wonderful. I know where I would go. There's an American writer called Tamora Pierce who wrote a sort of young person's YA series called the Song of the Lioness, which is a quartet, and it's quite. 40:10 Shakespearean in that it's two twins who swap. So the girl goes to take the boy's training and the boy goes to be the wizard magician which was her destiny, and it's beautifully written, wonderfully, sort of coming of age story, a traditional knight's place, but it's serious about training. I mean, there's a lot of detail about how you build up muscle strength if you're, you know, a five foot four girl as opposed to a six foot two boy. Um yeah, so I think that gives you serious tips. 40:41 So I think that training you might survive as a knight for a bit. It helps that she's also magical yeah, yeah, good muscles. 40:48 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) It's a good combination. 40:50 - Julia Golding (Host) So Sørina, thank you so much for joining us, and it's been absolutely a joy to talk about Charles Williams, who I'm. Thank you so much for joining us and it's been absolutely a joy to talk about Charles Williams, who I'm. Thank you so delightful the third and most intriguing of the Inklings. 41:02 - Sørina Higgins (Guest) I think so the oddest Inkling. I do hope that your listeners pick him up and try some of the novels, or poetry or theology, whatever appeals to them most. Thank you very much. 41:11 - Julia Golding (Host) Goodbye, all right. Thank you the most. Thank you very much. Goodbye, all right. 41:18 - Speaker 3 (None) Thank you. Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.