Books Around Machen No. 16
Notes on The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams
by Dale Nelson
Arthur Machen read Charles Williams’s outstanding imaginative novel. From The New Statesman, “The Other Side” (Vol. II / November 14, 1931, pp. xii, xiv):
Here, at least, is one who has adventured into untrodden territory. I do not think that Mr. Charles Williams, in his “The Place of the Lion”, has succeeded in bringing down the archetypes, the creative ideas, from their platonic heaven to the earth; but it is a brave adventure.
One would have liked to get more of Machen’s thoughts!
If this is a “Christian fantasy novel,” “Christian” must be taken broadly. Admirers of Williams who would like to introduce his work to friends who shrink away from the Gospel could recommend this story. They will not be confronted with the Incarnation and Atonement.
Science fiction stories often take a “what if?” as a starting point—What if a comet came close to the earth? What if researchers in food productivity accidentally set loose a virus that destroys food grains? What if contact was established with an extraterrestrial civilization?—and so on.
Williams, instead, takes the Neo-Platonic speculation of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance,* and asks, “Supposing the transcendental Ideas or Universals ‘behind’ the world we know became, as the inadvertent consequence of a solitary researcher’s efforts, manifest and unrestrained, drawing back into their plane the things of this world that are dependent upon them—what would happen?”
The manifestations, e.g. the titanic Lion, are not the Ideas themselves, but visible “gods” that are the terrestrial visibilia of the Ideas.
They are drawing into themselves their (if I may put it this way) mundane counterparts. An escaped lioness disappears, drawn into the “archetypal” Lion, which is the representative of transcendental strength. As the Lion continues to roam in the novel’s rural setting, the strength goes out of buildings under construction and they collapse. Buildings permeated by the presence of man through long residence last longer; this prepares us for a key element of the story, the natural lordship—on this plane—of man. The authority of man over the “beasts” is a key element in the novel and its resolution.
Butterflies are drawn to and disappear “into” a supernally gorgeous archetypal Butterfly. An archetypal Snake manifests subtlety, a necessary and good thing in itself, a necessary constituent of the phenomenal world. The Eagle manifests the principle of balance in its seemingly effortless command of air currents and its unrivaled vision. Berringer’s house is enveloped in mystical flame—the nest of the Phoenix. A Sheep naturally represents the innocence that is an element of cosmic order. A Unicorn, here not the familiar goatlike creature of medieval imagination, but a modern mighty horse with a formidable horn, suggests purity, singleness of heart.
As the inevitable disintegration of materiality continues, an apocalyptic terror in the village develops towards the novel’s end. Williams does not wallow in scenes of horror as many another modern novelist would.
Prominent themes are themes of most people’s lives. These include friendship, family issues, love between the sexes, pursuit of real wisdom vs. false values, courage and fear, authority, balance, and redemption. I wouldn’t say that good vs. evil is a prominent theme. Berringer, the man who set the catastrophe into motion, seems not to be a super-villain but a kind of scientist dealing with powers beyond his understanding and beyond his control. He becomes a portal, and has no command over the manifestations. In fact, for most of the novel he is in a coma, and he never wakens from it before his death.
The friendship theme focuses on Anthony Durrant and Quentin Sabot and then somewhat on Anthony and Richardson. Anthony and Quentin have had lots of lively conversations and walking tours, etc. Anthony doesn’t know Richardson for long (do we ever know his first name?). Likely enough, remembering Surprised by Joy, one could discuss Anthony and Quentin in terms of the Lewisian “first friend,” the special friend who possesses an extraordinary affinity for the things that matter to oneself, but discuss Anthony and Richardson in terms of the “second friend,” who is a friend and yet in opposition to one’s opinions—except that Anthony and Richardson don’t have much contact. For the purposes of the novel, there is enough.
Richardson (off-scene) eagerly enters the great mystical fire to pass into, or closer to, the Ultimate. While the ashes of Berringer and the housekeeper are found, there are no remains of Richardson. It seems likely that he did not commit suicide by entering the flames but was translated alive to a higher plane, dare I say it like Elijah’s ascent in the fiery chariot? Does the association of the fire with the Phoenix indicate something thrilling about Richardson’s destiny?
The self-preoccupation of Damaris and her near-hatred for her inoffensive father would suggest she’d be a terrible prospect for wifehood, except for her eventual “conversion,” as CW explicitly calls it. “Grue before grace,” says a character in a George MacDonald novel—a necessary despair of self before the humble reception of grace. Still, she will have a longer way to go than some readers will think; but that is “another story,” like Raskolnikov’s regeneration.
The love business between Anthony and Damaris is generally interesting and fresh. CW gives us no backstory about this romance, nor did he need to.
The Two Camps is the name of a London magazine. One might think CW conceives of it entirely satirically, as a futile endeavor: “the paper’s effort to maintain tradition in art, politics and philosophy while allowing the expression of revolt” (p. 22). Anthony thinks it allows pursuit of the “living and intelligent” vs. indulgence in the “dying and scholarly. But might Owen Barfield wonder if the original notion of the paper could become a worthwhile kind of polarity. Is it possible that the magazine could become an organ of balance rather than a vain potpourri?
Anthony exhibits courage that is based not on being made of heroic stern stuff but on love and a sense that he must try. Already on page 82 (of 206), he confesses, “‘I believe that I must try myself against these things.’” One recalls Frodo at Rivendell: I will take the Ring to Mordor, though I do not know the way. In contrast to his friend, Quentin exhibits pathetic, extreme terror as he is “hunted”—the manifestations might hunt certain people. At last, when he is utterly exhausted, the renewed Damaris becomes his nurse. This is an image of redemption.
Anthony one day prays “with all his strength to the Maker of the Celestials.” He becomes a “second Adam” not like Christ, but as he submits to the divine will in order to secure the world’s safety from an absorption into a plane not meant for it now. He is a kind of redeemer. His counterpart, Berringer, isn’t satan, though he unwisely sought knowledge not now intended for human beings. I wasn’t pleased by Williams alluding to the account of the lost Eden as a “fable” (this is the narrator’s own voice somewhere).
The resolution of the crisis depends on the gracious restoration—or a few minutes at least—of the powers of unfallen man. Williams implies that our culture’s present notions of man (the somewhat highly evolved ape) are inadequate—even though his narrator endorses an evolutionary origin of man. The best works of modern fantasy involve rehabilitations of traditional “properties” liable to become trite—dragons, elves, heroes, etc. The Place of the Lion rehabilitates Man himself.** Underlying the novel is a cheerfulness that reminds one of Chesterton’s Man Who Was Thursday, where it is more overt. I wouldn’t say this is a fantasy about the struggle of good and evil, although Miss Wilmot’s intention to distribute clever poison pen letters shows the influence of the Snake upon a bad person.
When reading Williams’s work it may generally be best just to push away thoughts about the troubled and sometimes harmful man whom we may know now, thanks to revelations that memoir and biography have brought forth in the past 35 years or so. I’m glad that I had read all of the novels at least twice (except the inferior Shadows of Ecstasy), before I read Lang-Sims and Lindop.
NOTES
*Williams mixes the non-Christian Neo-Platonist Porphyry, the nominally Christian (Pseudo)Dionysius, and the fictitious Renaissance Platonist figure Marcellus Victorinus of Bologna. Neo-Platonists could combine contemporary science, magic, philosophy, and religion.
A theme of the Way of Affirmation of Images vs. the Way of the Negation of Images is at work in the novel. Anthony Durrant represents the former, while Richardson is an ardent practitioner of the latter way. Anthony is more ready than others to see the visible manifestations as symbols of a greater reality, while for Richardson nothing that can be imagined or conceptualized is a trustworthy pointer to the ultimate Reality. His is the “flight of the alone to the Alone” of Plotinus.
**See the present author’s “Mythopoeic Fantasy and Rehabilitation: A Note.”
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