Idiosophy

I came across a remarkable line in Charles Williams’s novel Many Dimensions. The point of view is Lord Arglay, the Chief Justice. The mind of his assistant Chloë Burnett has been temporarily possessed by the villain and she’s coming on to him, though more with cupidity than with lust:

To play deity to an attractive young girl — there was, for a moment he felt, a certain point to the idea. But even as the point pricked him ever so slightly he smiled to think of it, and the consciousness of the prick passed from him.

My marginal notation was just “Ahem”.

I had some Charles Williams scholars available the other day, so I asked if this was intentional. Their immediate reaction was “heavens, no!” but then there was a long discussion of how far back the slang term “prick” went. It’s in Shakespeare, certainly. Williams was well (though not formally) educated, so even if he didn’t notice what he was doig at that moment, he certainly knew about it.

Now comes Tom Hillman to remind us that “prick” is in the King James Version. He’s focused on the mention in Acts of the Apostles, and he concludes that the double meaning goes all the way back to ancient Greek, and who knows but what those Jacobean scholars might have used the word with humorous intent? Modern horseless, bloodless, and prudish translators use the word “goad” instead. But I notice that “prick” is also in the Book of Numbers, where the context is suitable for yet a third vulgar meaning. Where’s a Hebrew scholar who can tell us if it goes all the way back?

It was purely an accident, caused by the order I chose to read the novels of Charles Williams, that I got the idea that complex, abstract sentences were associated with female characters. (It was the start of Chapter IX of The Greater Trumps, which clocked in at grade level 13, followed by the first two chapters of The Place of the Lion.) I decided to test that idea, including the books I hadn’t read yet. To decide whether a chapter was about women or men, I counted the number of times “she” appeared. Nominative case, so she’s doing things instead of having things done to her. Then I divided that count by the total number of times “he” and “she” appeared, so I get a number between 0 and 1. It turns out that William’s novels have no chapters with 35% to 40% on this measure, so I set 40% as the breakpoint between chapters about women and chapters about men. It could have been 50%; the difference is only 6 chapters out of 104. Figure 1 shows one complexity metric, the proportion of abstract (as opposed to concrete) words ¹ in each chapter, tagged by whether the chapter is about women or men.

Fig. 1. The proportion of abstract words per chapter for each book, marked by prevalence of women.

Well, that hypothesis went nowhere. I checked lots of other metrics, and they showed a similar lack of pattern. At the chapter level, women and men get the same kind of prose. But I did see something unexpected. The books are sorted by date of writing, and there are no chapters about women in the first two books. Figure 2 adds the comparison novels I used last time. This is a box-and-whisker plot: the heavy line inside the box is the average over all chapters in the book. The box is drawn to include the middle 50% of the chapters, and the whiskers stick out to cover most of the rest. If there’s a weird outlier, it’s shown as a dot far away from the box.²

Fig. 2. the variation of gender prevalence in the sample books

To nobody’s surprise, Captain Blood is almost womanless. In fact, some of those “she”s are boats. Williams’s first published novel, War in Heaven, is even worse. At the other end, similarly unsurprising, Miss Marple’s story of The Murder at the Vicarage has women doing lots of things. Some of those chapters are 7/8 women. Leslie Charteris comes off unexpectedly well — that’s a lot of female agency for a story aimed at men in 1928. Williams shows a steady progression towards more female activity as time goes on. He starts out with a couple of Boy’s Own stories, but by the end of his life, he was matching Agatha Christie and surpassing her on average. All Hallows’ Eve only has three male-dominated chapters.

So what does this mean? I don’t know. It’s just rare to find such a definite trend when I’m quantifying literature, so I figured I’d mention it.

This summer’s idiosophical conceit is that the novelist Charles Williams ³ communicated pointers to occult rituals in his novels in concentric circles, mimicking the degrees of initiation into a secret society. That he put hints of his occult practices into his novels is well established. (See for instance, the introduction section of Gwen Grant’s 2021 paper.⁴) What I’m looking at is the structure of how he did so. If this idea checks out, the books will show stylistic or structural features arranged in three levels.

As an initial hypothesis, we could look for a structure like

1. The Outer Circle: A reader who knows nothing about the occult⁵ can read the novel as a murder mystery or an Indiana-Jones-style adventure story and not worry about it. But a reader who’s interested can find clues that there’s something deeper in the book, if they’re willing to dig. This is obviously true — is it done by machine-detectable stylistic cues?
2. The Initiate: Williams’s novels are “an attempt at active communication of an established body of knowledge in symbolic form.” ⁶ Some occult symbols aren’t as obvious as an ancient relic or an alchemical formula. Esoteric practices were popular in Victorian England; in the 1930s and 40s memories remained as cultural touchstones. Collecting a list of these and searching for their presence in the text could reveal patterns. I’m not talking about the object of power that activates the plot. Rather, there will be tools or ideas that the characters use to get out of the plot alive.
3.  The Adept: Each novel has a character who possesses an inner tranquillity that gives them almost supernatural power over events. Sørina Higgins calls them “jedi masters“. Perhaps these characters personify the innermost circle.

The singular feature of this hypothesis is that the inner circles have already been done, to a great extent. Previous scholars have written entire books about the cool parts. Grant: “Gavin Ashenden’s Alchemy and Integration (2006), which focuses on alchemical symbolism in Williams’ novels and, more recently, Grevel Lindop’s biography Charles Williams: The Third Inkling (2016), which provides a fully integrated discussion of Williams’ occult activities alongside the other events of his life. Aren Roukema’s Esotericism and Narrative (2018) has continued this exploration to include Kabbalistic symbolism, the role of the imagination, and specifically the influence of The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross rituals in Williams’ novels.”

So all I have to do is the first stage. Williams is famous for “the obscurity of his prose style.” It’s reasonable to suppose that the more obscure parts of the books are a signal to the reader that a deeper meaning lies beneath. Can we measure obscurity? That would have to be defined specially, but maybe complex occult ideas require complex writing. We can measure complexity of a text with canned algorithms. There are lots of them. Probably the most famous is the Flesch-Kincaid formula that measures the effective “grade level” of a text.

Figure 1 shows the results if we break up all of Williams’s novels into chapters and measure each one separately. There’s a magenta dot for Williams’s chapters. Dots in other colors are measurements of four comparison novels from the same historical period: two adventure stories and two murder mysteries. The adventure stories are Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini and Meet the Tiger by Leslie Charteris (the first story about “The Saint”). The mysteries are The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (the first “Miss Marple” story) and Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers (a “Lord Peter Wimsey” story). I guessed that an obscure novelist like Williams should make a clear contrast with pop-culture fiction. I was wrong.

Fig. 1. Chapter-by-chapter reading grade level

All the novels vary from chapter to chapter in the complexity of their prose, but some trends are clear. The Miss Marple story is the easiest to read, with its chapters tightly bunched between 4th and 5th grade. Lord Peter Wimsey is second easiest.⁷ The two adventure novels are indistinguishable from Williams’s novels using this measure. That’s going to take some explaining. Another unexpected thing: note that Figure 1 is sorted by writing date — Williams’s later novels are written at a lower grade level than he used earlier in his career.

At one level, this is easy to understand. Before the occult came into the calculation, Charles Williams wanted to make money by selling books. Charteris and Sabatini sold very well a few years earlier, so it makes sense to follow their lead. Shadows of Ecstasy was written first, but War in Heaven was published first. It’s easy to see the shift to simpler writing between the two; the difference may have been important to the publisher.

Looking a little deeper, it would be useful to have a more direct metric for comparison. We find that when we restrict ourselves to novels from a short period in one place, lots of the ways to measure complexity of a text agree with each other. For this sample, grade level is 99% correlated with sentence length, which is much easier to calculate, so let’s switch to that. It turns out that averaging over chapters makes us miss an important feature of Williams’s prose style. Most of the time, Williams writes very directly. Here’s a randomly-selected paragraph, from The Place of the Lion, ch. XIV:

She went into the kitchen and made herself some sandwiches, considerably to the maid’s astonishment. She even attempted a little conversation, but she was feeling so shy that it was not altogether a success. The maid, she realized, was very much on her guard. That was the kind of world that Damaris Tighe had hitherto insisted on making all round her, a world where people were watchful and hostile. She looked at it humbly while she finished the sandwiches; then she went upstairs to her father.

While not as simple as Christie’s prose⁸, this is easy to read, and it’s what Williams does most of the time. But occasionally he cuts loose. Figure 2 shows what I mean. It shows Meet the Tiger and The Greater Trumps together. The horizontal axis is the number of words into the novel. The vertical axis is the average sentence length, where the average is computed over a sliding window 1000 words wide.

Fig. 2. Rolling average sentence length in two novels.

The Saint’s adventures are documented with a steady sentence length of 20-25 words, with occasional sallies that stretch sentences out 30 or more, usually for humorous effect.⁹ Williams, indicated by the red curve, mostly uses paragraphs of short sentences, but these are punctuated with occasional sallies into epic verbosity. That giant spike was caused by a 242-word monster of a sentence, describing a box of marionettes corresponding to the cards of the tarot.

So this is the first place to look. The next step is to correlate the long sentences with some more intuitive marker of occult content.

I am reading The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams (1931), about an upper-class English family that discovers a deck of cards they have is the original, full-powered Tarot. As I went, I came across the part where Aaron “pointed to the Fool in the middle of the field. It was still: it alone in the middle of all that curious dance did not move”. Ha, thought I. Paul McCartney’s “Fool on the Hill” is keeping perfectly still, too. (1967)

Then a few chapters later, I read “she was under them—those awful moving origins of storm”. Well, yes, it is the nexus of the crisis, and the origin of storms, just like Blue Öyster Cult sang in “Astronomy” (1974). That’s two.

Now that I’m keeping my eyes open, “the remote figure of the juggler, standing in the void before creation was, and flinging up the golden balls which came in to being as they left his hands, and became planets and stars…” sounds a lot like “He took the stars in his hands and as he scattered them he’d shout, ‘I’m the joker of the Universe.’” That’s from “The Great Sun Jester”, again by Blue Öyster Cult (1979).

As the saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. What’s going on here? The hypothesis that Williams was deliberately incorporating references to rock songs from 30-40 years in the future, I swiftly rejected. On the other hand, though, I only found out about Charles Williams from reading The Oddest Inkling. Were he famous enough to inspire rock bands¹⁰, I would have heard of him in my wasted teenage years. So what’s the thread connecting these things? McCartney was writing about his guru, the Maharishi, but he was thinking of the tarot card too, at one remove. Could be just happenstance.  

The Blue Öyster Cult link is more interesting. The lyrics to “Astronomy”¹¹ were written by Sandy Pearlman, who sounds like exactly the sort of person who’d read Charles Williams. I asked over on Reddit, where u/AmazingAngle8530 told me that Pearlman certainly read Dion Fortune, so the odds are good that he read books by other early 20th-century British occultists, too. “The origin of storms” doesn’t have to be an allusion to Williams; it was a term used in the early 19th century by the people who were trying to create a science of weather. However, the context looks more like mysticism than meteorology.¹² Pearlman’s other cult interests make me think this one’s real, and deliberate. The lyricist of “The Great Sun Jester” is Michael Moorcock, who presents a different problem. Moorcock has read everything, but his opinion of at least two Inklings is famously negative. Would he have consciously alluded to Williams?¹³ Moorcock is certainly not averse to re-using ideas: Balo the Jester in “The Singing Citadel” appears to be the same character as the Fireclown, which is another name for the Great Sun Jester.¹⁴ Given Moorcock’s political leanings, Williams’s working-class origins could have made him acceptable, but I’d need to see some proof.

So maybe there’s an older thread of myth we’re seeing here, where wise men are seen as fools because they remain motionless, and weather comes from mystical powers, and cosmic jugglers put the celestial bodies in place. Or maybe speculations like this just happen when you read too many Charles Williams novels.