Charles Williams

Fernando Gouvea · 17 Dec 2012, 17:34 · from 2012-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: fqgouvea at colby.edu (Fernando Gouvea)
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:34:56 -0500
Subject: (urth) Charles Williams
In-Reply-To: <CAJ8=rtiEh+hUgwwtOUP0bS48Y7C42RJH0a=Suqb7bTW-HNh=4A at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAM0v-i6Be2GaCqnecVLLBF7oej7_Hy1+jguyOnO5PT6utoRRVQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<50CF4F0C.2070205 at colby.edu>
	<CAJ8=rtiEh+hUgwwtOUP0bS48Y7C42RJH0a=Suqb7bTW-HNh=4A at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <50CF57C0.9090402 at colby.edu>

On 12/17/2012 12:04 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> Fernando Gouvea wrote:
>
>     I would definitely start with /War in Heaven/,
>
>
> Several good reasons to start here, including it's Williams's first 
> novel. There is a definite development of the density of his novels as 
> they go along.

I think the first is actually /Shadows of Ecstasy/, though it was 
published only later. And probably should have remained in the drawer.

>     The two best of his novels are, in my opinion, /Descent into Hell/
>     and /All Hallows Eve/,
>
>
> Not surprisingly, these are his last novels and quite dense.

And also the ones that read better if the reader understands Williams's 
rather strange theological ideas. That said, /Descent/ is a wonderful 
study of the notion of damnation.

>     Williams' poetry is worth a look, but many people find it
>     impenetrable. It's certainly old-fashioned.
>
>
> If by "old-fashioned" you mean "early 20th-century modernist," I must 
> agree. There is a strong kinship between Williams' poetry (I refer to 
> the Arthurian poetry, which is all I have read) and Eliot's work. 
> (Eliot, by the way, praised Williams's novels and wrote an 
> introduction to at least one of them.)

I think that's a good description, though there are some late-Romantic 
things there as well. What's most old-fashioned about it is that it is 
intended as narrative, rather than as an exploration of the personal, 
which is where most poetry seems to be these days.

Fernando

-- 
=============================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea                http://www.colby.edu/~fqgouvea
Carter Professor and Chair
Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics
Colby College                     Editor, Carus Mathematical Monographs
5836 Mayflower Hill               Editor, MAA Reviews
Waterville, ME 04901              http://www.maa.org/maareviews

Food for thought is no substitute for the real thing.
   -- Walt Kelly, "Potluck Pogo"

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20121217/861f7acb/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net