Name: Descent into Hell
Rating: 3.666666666666667 (3 reviews)

Charles Walter Stansby Williams

This book talks about damnation, redemption, horror, and joy and deals with things seen and unseen. It starts with a renowned poet, Peter Stanhope, who has just completed his latest play, and the theatrical production is about to begin its first rehearsals. The story's second half focuses on a doppelganger, a ghostly or spiritual double of a young lady named Pauline. The story then moves on to a pretentious actress named Adela and a historian named Wentworth, who has a crush on her and fantasizes about her, gradually training his spirit to feed itself on its fantasies.

Descent into Hell

Charles Williams

The key to Williams' mystically oriented theological thought, Descent into Hell (arguably Williams' greatest novel) is a multidimensional story about human beings who shut themselves up in their own narcissistic projections, so that they are no longer able to love, to 'co-inhere.' The result is a veritable hell.

Tim Pendry

This is not an easy book. In fact, it is a very difficult book on two grounds - the style and the content. But it is a minor masterpiece that deserves much wider readership. The style owes something to its period. The emotionally cold world of 1930s Britain. It is cerebral. The artistry - like the play at the centre of the first half - is classical and functional. Conversations can seem rhetorical and clipped. The approach to the supernatural is 'Roman' rather than romantic. Williams is not merely a highly educated Christian but he has read his Dante and his classics. His readership is uncompromisingly assumed to know the 'canon' - a barrier in itself to post-modern man. I found it very difficult and only mastered the style, to the extent that I did, by imagining it first as part-poetic and second to be read out aloud, perhaps on occasions declaimed. As one reads, one senses quotation after quotation for the cognoscenti. This calls for a critical edition. I came to this book as a result of the enthusiasm of the literary historian Glen Cavaliero, whose ‘The Supernatural in English Fiction’ (reviewed elsewhere on GoodReads) praised Williams for his startling portrayal of the supernatural. Williams’ books are not easy to find in modern London so I had to resort, not to the edition noted here, but to an old post-war standard edition from Faber &amp; Faber, which is unusually defensive about its limited appeal on the dust jacket, obtained by rummaging through the shelves of our local antiquarian bookshop. Williams writes as a High Anglican, an Elizabethan Settlement Christian, whose theological commitment is deep, so deep that I will confess that I could not always understand it. There are obscurities, arrogances almost. The cold word play might alienate many but it is worth persevering – to the point, in my case, where I might well choose to pick up this book again in ten years and know that I will see the great deal that was missed on first reading. Where his genius lies is in the literary elision of a recognisable material reality into the spiritual realm. I have seen no writing like this – perhaps the equally difficult and intense but very un-Christian John Cowper Powys might come close and perhaps there is something of the chilled intellect and emotional desert of the world of Brief Encounter in it, but it is rare to find something that can convey so effectively not what we might feel like if we met a ghost but what it is to be a ghost, as a rational possibility. And that is the point – Williams makes supernaturalism vividly possible, based on persons who are real rather than merely allegorical (though there is a dash of minor key allegory in each). Centred in a place embedded in history – the appropriately named Battle Hill – the book mixes up space, time and other worlds with more panache than the usual English business of going through a cupboard door, climbing into a police box or getting on a magical train. The continuity of an existence in which the natural and the supernatural flow ‘naturally’ into one another, all providentially one in space-time with Zion and Gehenna embedded within the Republic (our material world of work and more or less orderly administration), is masterfully handled. Spirits co-exist who are barely aware or are unaware of each other. A building may be built and not built at the same time. A spirit who dies in one place in time is met much later in time as if scarcely any time had passed. The occasion for the story is a play at a country house in a village. Far away is the Big City. Journeys between village and City have meaning. The world of work has ultimate meaning. But the play is the thing – a rather conventional poetic affair that sets off the more fantastic narrative that centres on, amongst others, the ghost of a beaten man, a woman troubled by a doppelganger, a succubus created by a man whose destiny is hell and an earthy and sinister Lilith figure. The play is to its writer, what the world is to God - a formal affair with poetry and beauty added. Between the formalities, the word play and the disquisitions are moments of exceptional expressive writing. We see a determined leaden journey to suicide, the ghost that slowly comes to terms with his new world without ever truly realising what he is, the descent into madness or evil (as distance from God) of one character, the haunting but dessicated temptation to lust (in its pure, not sexual sense) of another. At the bottom of all this is an attempt to express an inexpressible – the ‘mysterium tremendum’ of Christianity. This book does not exist without the author’s faith, intellectualised perhaps but only because the matters of which he writes are so deep that any explanation requires the dignity of intellect, rather than the expression of sentiment. It is a standing rebuke to shallow sentiment. Rather than do the impossible and try to explain what I might think Williams means, I will hone in one central idea – and the title of a central chapter - ‘The Doctrine of Substituted Love’. What this is, in essence, is redemption through charity where the pain and suffering of another can be taken through will and in trust that another will take yours. Pauline who wills her own redemption (God is referred to only elliptically throughout) is aided by two ‘saintly’ figures – the poet-playwright Stanhope who introduces her to the Doctrine and her aunt, Mrs Anstruther, an aged person close to the end of existence who is ready for the next stage. The hope for and faith in an eternal redemption is to be expressed through charity. The character of Wentworth, the darkest of the figures drawn, and the Lilith figure of Mrs Sammile are willfully disregarding of others’ true needs and are expressions of hate and lust respectively. Wentworth’s lust is the negation of love in his construction of a succubus out of the image of his desire. His descent into hell of the title is progressive. But no more on the content. Although not a thriller with a plot in quite that way, too much information could spoil the story. There is no surprise in persons getting their just deserts but how they get there, the temptations on the way and the opportunities for redemption ignored, that is for you to read. A highly recommended book – especially if you are not, as I am not, a believer in the religions of the book. The Christian tradition has degenerated in our eyes into stories of institutional tyranny and abuse and insane irrational politics or we have tried to construct some Gnostic version for our own times but Williams reminds us that, though we may not think it true, the Christian tradition can be noble in the Roman sense. This book did not get a large readership in its own time and probably will not appeal to most people today. The sensibility is Early Modern and aristocratic. It is also absurdly unscientific. But it will give some people some inkling of a religion that provided solace to many in darker ages. Above all, it does so by not being ‘traditionalist’ – which is the current fashion of conservative pessimists operating without a myth that is actively present in the world. Williams is not a Larkin or a Lovecraft. Things change in the material world and this is just how things are (as Pauline and Stanhope understand). Death just ‘is’ and it is not a matter for torment if a life is led well (as Mrs Anstruther demonstrates). Such Christianity is of the Stoic kind. New housing estates are built and jobs are taken in the City but all such phenomena are still built on the past and on a living tradition rather than some constructed '-ism': religion here is not ideology, at least in the eyes of the author. The torments and sufferings of ancestors are owed their own duty of substituted love. This is a book of conservative England at its best – and I write as a left-libertarian who wars with this tendency in his own world. Yes, very difficult - but rewarding.

Descent into Hell

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