Charles Williams: sadist or Rosicrucian saint?

Charles Williams was a bad writer, but a very interesting one. Most famous bad writers have to settle, like Sidney Sheldon, for the millions and the made-for-TV adaptations and the trophy wife. Williams had a following, and in the 1930s and 1940s some highly respected literary figures declared him to be a genius. But why did Williams appeal so strongly to a particular age — and what, if anything, can he offer us now?

He belonged to that wonderful generation liberated by the 19th-century spread of education. He came from a family with no resources, but a terrible, pathetic yearning for literature. His father, Walter, managed to scrape into print, writing moralising short stories and sentimental poems for the cheapest magazines. Grevel Lindop says that he was published in Dickens’s All the Year Round and Household Words, but I don’t see how that could have been possible, because Walter must have been 11 when Household Words came to an end. An aunt wrote verses for greetings cards, and one uncle had a scholarly bent, publishing on local history and ‘early earthworks’.

Education was at a charity-funded parish school — the smallest of educational opportunities. Against the odds, Williams won a scholarship to St Albans Grammar School and, at the age of 15, a county scholarship to UCL to a pre-degree course. But money in the end was too short, and Williams had to withdraw from formal education.

For the rest of his life, he combined writing with working in the book trade. There is something telling about the particular flavour of Williams’s professional life; it was in the dignified but ineffective part of publishing, first in the Methodist Book Room and later at Oxford University Press. A lot of his output there consisted of writing introductions to other people’s books or whole short books, commissioned by the Press.