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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Messages from the Cellar

Messages from the Cellar

Both George MacDonald and Charles Williams are writers with a theological bent who mix realism and fantasy in unpremeditated doses. Furthermore, both owe something of their popularity to the powerful advocacy of Dr C.S. Lewis, who shaped the conscience of every S.C.M. member throughout the world with his grim little book, The Screwtape Letters. Dr Lewis has convinced himself, and possibly many others, that in the normal course of events religion begins with romanticism, and theology with fantasy, and hence his two favourite writers are sages and seers, interpreters of supernatural events. What he does not say is that they are respectively a Victorian Scotsman and a neo-Victorian Englishman.

I owe a debt to George MacDonald for his two superb fairy-tales, The Princess and the Goblins and The Princess and Curdie, and a less certain debt for another one, At the Back of the North Wind, from which I absorbed early and erroneous views on good and evil, the life of children before birth, and the kind of death one should wish for. But Phantastes, and in a greater degree Lilith, are the unworked ore of George MacDonald’s imagination – a journey into that writer’s subconscious mind, which is no less cramped, disordered and bogie-haunted than yours or mine. In Phantastes a bevy of archetypes of the Jungian variety help or hinder the cerebral hero: in Lilith we are given George MacDonald’s subconscious vision of Woman as Temptress, and very gruelling that nightmare becomes, sweetened by a series of necrophiliac rhapsodies. For the first time in years I was grateful to the schools of modern psychology which enable us to disbelieve a little the urgent message from the cellar – ‘Kill Mum before she kills you’. Dr Lewis in his wide and varied reading has apparently bypassed the works of Freud and Jung.

Charles Williams has undoubtedly written several plays which could go well on the boards. He chooses – rightly, on account of his bent – the one kind of drama in which ideas are given legs, the morality play. Though Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury comes the nearest to it, I do not think any of his plays have people in them. And there is another difficulty. The success of a dramatist, much more than that of a poet, depends on how true his vision of reality is. Eccentric ideas about the way the world works can vitiate a play. It seems quite clear that Charles Williams believed in magic, especially the raising of spirits; and while this factor adds variety and sensationalism to his plays, there is always the point where one gets tired of the game – if one does not happen to share the author’s belief. It is really the same difficulty as that which occurs with George MacDonald’s Lilith. One is being asked to acceptpage 664 as objective truth a private prejudice of the author. Charles William’s plays are most readable. But I have yet to be convinced, as The House of the Octopus, a very well-constructed play, would try to convince us that disguised cults of Satanism are the chief danger of the modern world. I suspect that normal bone-headed dislike of people who speak with a different accent from one’s own has a larger part to play.

1964 (312)