Beer and Cheese with Charles Williams

In reading some of the fascinating interviews by Raymond H. Thompson with Arthurian authors at The Camelot Project, I was surprised to find one with Christopher Fry, the writer of blank verse plays very popular in the Fifties (A Phoenix Too Far, 1946, The Lady’s Not for Burning, 1948 etc), though these are now well out of fashion.

But one of his earliest plays includes Merlin as a character, rather oddly (as he concedes) linked to Norse adventurers. He explains that he always wanted to create an Arthurian play but could not get the shape of it, though he still hoped he might (he didn’t, so far as I can see).

Fry took his surname in tribute to the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker, and was himself a Quaker and a non-combatant in World War 2. He recounts in the interview how he knew Charles Williams well in the early years of WW2 and they would often meet in a pub in Oxford:

‘At the beginning of the war, in 1940, just before I was directing at the Oxford Playhouse, the Oxford University Press moved from London to Oxford because they were expecting air raids. I used to meet with Charles Williams and Gerard Hopkins, who was Gerard Manley Hopkins' nephew. They both worked at Oxford University Press. Basil Blackwell came too, and we used to meet every Thursday at a pub in Oxford to have a beer and cheese.’

Fry, as he himself makes clear, was not then all that well-known, but Williams was already himself writing verse plays: perhaps that was how they became acquainted.  Fry was impressed by the erudite and vivacious conversation of his companions. It seems likely that he may have been given guidance and encouragement by Williams about his verse plays, as he also was by T S Eliot: all three were part of a mid-20^th century renaissance in the form.

Basil Blackwell was of course the well-known Oxford bookseller and publisher, but what of the fourth member of the beer and cheese party? Gerard Hopkins (1892-1961) was, like Williams, a novelist alongside his day job at the Press: and, again like Williams, was the author of seven novels. The last four of these were published by Gollancz. They are not much akin to Williams’ metaphysical thrillers, though they share a rather beady-eyed perception of human foibles. There is, of course, no reason why two colleagues at the same Press and with the same publisher should write books in any way similar, and I suspect Hopkins thought his were of a different literary timbre to those of Williams.

They were close though often combative friends. Grevel Lindop, in his recent biography of Williams, explains that Hopkins’ final published novel, Nor Fish nor Flesh (1933), contained an unmistakable caricature of Williams, which the latter found hurtful, leading to a distinct coolness between them, though there may have been later a sort of rapprochement. This book is now very hard to find, perhaps because Williams enthusiasts are alert to the link.

However, I have been able to pick up a few of his other titles. His books are perhaps best described as solemn comedies of manners. I found those I have tried a little studied and rather over-absorbed in the personal relationships of his characters. There is much leisurely conversation, little in the way of incident. An ambience of sophistication and cultivation prevails, but one wishes for some of the vigour and panache of Williams. A certain stateliness about them puts me in mind of the novels of L H Myers. Like those, Hopkins’ books sometimes contemplate speculative thought in an abstract manner, but, unlike those of Williams, do not venture into the more vivid realms of the occult.

Gollancz tried to give Hopkins’ penultimate novel, An Angel in the Room (1931), a determined push, claiming ‘it will certainly come as an unexpected delight to thousands and, we venture to think, tens of thousands of readers’ (it does not appear to have done so). His previous novels were ‘interesting, serious in the best sense, and of high intelligence’ but this new one ‘is, within its own compass, an almost perfect thing, instinct with rare and moving beauty’.

It takes place almost entirely within a Chelsea dinner party: most of the chapters are named after the dinner courses. The conversation, and the inner thoughts of the characters, reveal significant changes in the shape of their lives and their relationships, and in some cases a new self-realisation of their ‘essential being’, their finer purpose. While there are none of the strong supernatural incursions in Williams' novels, there is a sense of higher reality, a hint of the numinous and celestial.

‘There are certain descriptions – of the nights and smells of London, of Oxford – which affect one with the nostalgia one feels for a gracious thing that one has had and lost,’ the notice suggests. And it is true that Hopkins does have a feel for the fine evocation of the amenities and the courtesies of civilised existence. Inevitably, his books may now seem as outmoded or faded as the verse dramas of Williams, Eliot and Fry now do: yet they also share some of the masque-like and mythic qualities of those.      

A Checklist of the Novels of Gerard Hopkins

A City in the Foreground (Constable, 1921)

An Unknown Quantity (Chatto & Windus, 1922)

The Friend of Antaeus (Duckworth, 1927)   

Seeing's Believing (Victor Gollancz, 1928)

Something Attempted (Victor Gollancz, 1929)

An Angel in the Room (Victor Gollancz, 1931)       

Nor Fish nor Flesh (Victor Gollancz, 1933)

(Mark Valentine)