Descent into Hell (1937)
Ere it shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,
the Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image
Walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Prometheus
Unbound
Charles Williams is less well known than his fellow Inklings, like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, but like them he wrote a series of novels which combine elements of fantasy and Christian symbolism. The action of Descent into Hell takes place in Battle Hill, outside London, amidst the townspeople's staging of a new play by Peter Stanhope. The hill seems to reside at the crux of time, as characters from the past appear, and perhaps at a doorway to the beyond, as characters are alternately summoned heavenwards or descend into hell.
Pauline Anstruther, the heroine of the novel, lives in fear of meeting her own doppelganger, which has appeared to her throughout her life. But Stanhope, in an action central to the author's own theology, takes the burden of her fears upon himself--Williams called this The Doctrine of Substituted Love--and enables Pauline, at long last, to face her true self. Williams drew this idea from the biblical verse, "Ye shall bear one another's burdens :"
She said, still perplexed at a strange language :
'But how can I cease to be troubled ? will it leave
off coming because I pretend it wants you ?
Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street ?'
'It is not,' he said, 'and you shall not pretend
at all. The thing itself you may one day meet--never
mind that now, but you'll be free from all distress
because that you can pass on to me. Haven't you
heard it said that we ought to bear one another's
burdens ?'
'But that means---' she began, and stopped.
'I know,' Stanhope said. 'It means listening
sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being
anxious about, and so on. Well, I don't say
a against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when
Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear,
or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he
meant something much more like carrying a parcel
instead of someone else. To bear a burden is
precisely to carry it instead of. If you're
still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for you--however
sympathetic I may be. And anyhow there's no
need to introduce Christ, unless you wish. It's a fact
of experience. If you give a weight to me,
you can't be carrying it yourself; all I'm asking you to
do is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn't
sound very difficult.'
And so Stanhope does take the weight, with no surreptitious motive, in the most affecting scene in the novel. And Pauline, liberated, is able to accept truth.
On the other hand, Lawrence Wentworth, a local historian, finding his desire for Adela Hunt to be unrequited, falls in love instead with a spirit form of Adela, which seems to represent a kind of extreme self love on his part.
The shape of Lawrence Wentworth's desire had emerged
from the power of his body. He had
assented to that making, and again, outside the
garden of satisfied dreams, he had assented to the
company of the shape which could not be except by
his will and was imperceptibly to possess his
will. Image without incarnation, it was the
delight of his incarnation for it was without any of the
things that troubled him in the incarnation of the
beloved. He could exercise upon it all arts but
one; he could not ever discover by it or practise
towards it freedom of love. A man cannot love
himself; he can only idolize it, and over the idol
delightfully tyrannize--without purpose. The great
gift which the simple idolatry os self gives is
lack of further purpose; it is, the saints tell us, a
somewhat similar thing that exists in those wholly
possessed by their End; it is, human experience
shows, the most exquisite delight in the interchanges
of romantic love. But in all loves but one
there are counterpointing times of purpose; in this
only there are none.
As he isolates himself more and more with this insubstantial figure, and dreams of descending a silver rope into a dark pit, Wentworth begins the descent into Hell.
Because of the way that time and space and the supernatural all converge
upon Battle Hill, the book can be somewhat confusing. But it is rich
in atmosphere and unusual ideas and it is unlike any other book I've ever
read. It is challenging, but ultimately rewarding if you stick with
it.
(Reviewed:21-Feb-01)
Grade: (B)
