I’m reading (again) Charles Williams’ final novel, All Hallows Eve. I’m not quite half way through it. Williams is not the easiest read, but I keep coming back to his books. Just a few thoughts tonight about my ongoing impressions.
A recurring theme in Williams’ novels is the city – properly spelled with a capital “C” when he deals with it. J. R. R. Tolkien was always a little leery of Williams, and I’d imagine attitudes towards cities had something to do with it. Tolkien was a countryman, reveling in woods and meadows, trees and flowers and butterflies. Williams was London-born, and felt best at home there, amid the noise, the crowds, the bustle.
I’ve never (yet) read St. Augustine’s City of God, but I understand it to be a meditation on the societal catastrophe of the fall of Rome. Augustine told Christians that they mustn’t identify the City of God with any city of man, however great its pretensions. Christianity could do without Rome – we look to the City with foundations, eternal in the Heavens.
Nevertheless, Williams saw something of eternity in London, and in any great metropolis. A city has a being of its own; a body, a pulse, and a spirit. Many members work together to support a common life. The man of God can find an image of Heaven in the city, if he looks for it. London is itself an active character in All Hallows’ Eve.
Another thing that always strikes me – bothers me, really – in this book is that the villain is a Jew, and his Jewishness is an important element. There is no hint here of Jewish inferiority – rather the opposite. The villain here, Father Simon, is, we are made to understand, the Antichrist. And as the true Antichrist, he has to correspond to Jesus Christ, but in an inverted way. The Jewish capacities that in part made Jesus Messiah are aped and parodied in Father Simon.
This is my personal opinion – we need to be careful, when reading, to understand that people didn’t view antisemitism the same way back then (Williams died in 1945, as the war was ending, but before most people knew the true extent of Hitler’s Holocaust). The old antisemitism was bad enough, but Hitler improvised a new kind. The persecutors of Jews before that time – Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox – had never considered annihilating the Jews. They wanted to convert them. Hitler cared nothing for the Jews’ souls. He was all about “pure” blood, and regarded the Jews as an infection to be removed.
I don’t think we can ever treat Jews the same way in literature again. And that’s a good thing.
Do read City of God. It’s a long slog, but there’s all kinds of interesting stuff along the way. I need to read it again.
CW left indications of problematic stuff in his writings, but there’s a lot that’s worthwhile to engage with too. Some of his work has just proven to be unreadable: I cannot manage The Forgiveness of Sins and He Came Down from Heaven. I don’t expect I will try yet again to read them. Maybe if I had a mentor to help….
Aw, I like both of them.
And, semi-echoing “Lee N. Field”, the Penguin City of God has a good index,so even people like me who have not read it write through can browse around with interest and edification. (Maybe other translations are similarly well-indexed…)
Back to Williams – whom I tend to think of as anti-racist and philo-Semitic…
If you don’t know it, I would recommend trying ‘The Death of Palomides’ in Taliessin through Logres (1938). Williams’s makes the knight Palomides (whom, for example, T.H. White gives a very different treatment) into a Zoroastrian who is converted to Islam, but, among other things is sort of shocked into an experience of the Incarnation, and eventually accepts baptism, though not in the heartiest way, yet somehow deeply:
“The Chi-Ro [sic] is only a scratching like other scratchings;
but in the turn of the sky the only scratching – ”
However, in his dying moments he goes back to “a night in a lodging of ancient Israel” where hospitable “twins of Levi” chant, until “they pronounce Netzach” – and he shouts the question “What is Netzach? Together and deeply they answered:
Netzach is the name of the Victory in the Blessing:
For the Lord created all things by means of his Blessing.”
And in his last moments “I sit with the old men, as they were; we sing:
The Lord created all things by means of his Blessing.”
I have indeed read the entire Logres cycle — though it was some time ago.
Right through! (I really should proofread as behoves a textual editor…)