A Ghostly Link between Tolkien and Charles Williams?

I was reading Charles Williams' 1945 novel All Hallows' Eve yesterday morning. It's a rather spooky story, the first chapter of which is told from the point of view of a ghost, a young woman named Lester Furnival. At first she doesn't realize that she's dead, that she's been killed by a plane that crashed on the streets of London in the last days of the Second World War. She walks the streets of a ghostly version of London. She encounters her husband, who is still alive, and for a moment they are able to see each other. But he vanishes, as if the living are as ghostly to the dead as the dead are to the living. She then meets a friend, also dead, whom she had been on her way to meet when she had been killed. 

In the second chapter, Lester's husband, Richard, is walking through London several months after the war has ended. His wife has been dead and buried for a while now. Then suddenly he sees her.

She was [there]. It was along Holborn that he was walking, for he had half-thought of going that night to look for Simon’s hall or house or whatever it was. And there, on the very pavement [i.e., sidewalk], the other side of a crossing, she stood. He thought for the first second that there was someone with her.... They stood on either side that Holborn by-way, and gazed [across the street at each other].

I then recalled a letter from 3 April 1944 in which Tolkien recounted a visit he made to his hometown of Birmingham and his old school, King Edward's, two days earlier. Unhappy about the damage done to the city by Nazi bombs and (even worse) by the modern architecture of (too many) new buildings, he writes, "I couldn't stand much of that or the ghosts that rose from the pavements" (Letters #58 p. 101). 

Now it's nothing new or surprising that someone who survived the Great War should speak of ghosts, or even write about seeing the ghosts of the dead on the streets of London, and its well-known that Tolkien lost two extremely close friends to the Somme, both of whom he knew from King Edward's School. They were not all, of course. Over 1,400 students and masters served, and over 250 died. Tolkien will have known a good many of these. 

What I found interesting is that on 10 November 1943, Williams had read two chapters of his new novel All Hallows' Eve to Tolkien (Letters #51b p. 89). By the middle of October, according to his biographer, Grevel Lindop, Williams thought he had about twenty-five percent of the novel done (Lindop p. 379). So the first two chapters (out of ten) sounds about right for what Williams read to Tolkien. Years later Tolkien would claim that he had been "in fact a sort of assistant mid-wife at the birth of All Hallows Eve, read aloud to us [i.e., Tolkien, C. S. Lewis & other Inklings] as it was composed" (Letters #259 p. 489). Tolkien and Lewis both provided feedback, but, Tolkien avers, that Lewis was the greater influence. Still, Tolkien seems to remember himself as quite engaged with the book. 

So, we have Tolkien speaking figuratively about ghosts rising from the pavement in war damaged Birmingham just under six months after Williams had read to him about a ghost appearing on the pavement of war damaged London. This could just be a coincidence, and it probably is, but it might also be a recollection, conscious or not, of some strange and striking writing by Charles Williams.

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Grevel Lindop. Charles Williams: The Third Inkling. Oxford University Press 2015.

Review: Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth

Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth by Brian Attebery
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book, not a great one, and there is the measure of my disappointment. Attebery is at his very best -- which is exceptionally good -- when actively analyzing and commenting on individual texts and authors. He is usually quite skilled in integrating such analysis with the opinions of other scholars. Attebery makes many fascinating observations on Charles Williams, Hope Mirlees, George MacDonald, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others, as well as on various species of fantasy, angels, and post-colonial fantasy. This book is an excellent education in the history of the genre.

Yet it is not without fault. At times Attebery slips into that self-renewing world in which scholars reference only each other and make pronouncements for which they neither adduce evidence nor produce an argument. Some call this engagement, but elopement might be the better term. True enough, this turning away from evidence is a common enough failing in academic writing over the last couple of generations, but it is the flight of the deserter rather than the escape of the prisoner (and so not to be commended). Mercifully, Attebery never stumbles into the Mirkwood of Jargon, where every utterance is impressive, but only as clear as the lyrics to Close to the Edge.

He seems a bit harder on C.S. Lewis than is necessary, however, and is at times dismissive: the entry of Joy Davidman into Lewis' life is apparently the sole reason that Till We Have Faces is less open to the charge of misogyny than Narnia is. While Joy Davidman surely had a profound effect on him, perhaps Till We Have Faces should suggest the need for a re-examination of the case again Lewis rather than the facile conclusion that he was swept off his feet and into enlightenment.

He also makes the occasional bald assertion, such as claiming that 'in order to avoid direct representation of religious iconography' Shakespeare substituted 'fairies for angels.' Did he? How so? But no proof is offered, no argument made. Since Shakespeare's fairies could not be mistaken for angels, and since Shakespeare's audience knew well that fairies and angels were not the same. this is an odd claim.

In discussing the attempt, specifically of G. P. Taylor, to write fantasy acceptable to literalist Christians, a failed attempt as it turned out, Attebery comments: 'Even the most faithful transcription of faith language into a work of fantasy has the effect of setting religion adrift.' But this one unsuccessful attempt by Taylor doesn't establish this. Perhaps Taylor just did it badly. Moreover, while it only takes one example to prove that something can be done, one example cannot prove that it cannot be done.

So I do recommend this book, but not without reservation. I found much to profit by here, but also some moments that could mislead the unwary.