William Lindsay Gresham wrote in a 1950 Presbyterian Life article series “From Communist to Christian” about how much Lewis meant to him when he and Davidman began exploring Christianity (circa 1946-1947). The same year, he wrote a foreword to an American edition of The Greater Trumps. As I’ve discussed in a recent Mythlore essay co-written with Sorina Higgins, Gresham even wrote a poem about Lewis which references the Ransom trilogy.
In 1951, Gresham wrote about Williams again. “The Nature of Reality,” published in The Saturday Review on March 24, was his review of The Place of the Lion, “published originally in 1932 and reprinted now to please a growing Williams cult.” I would like to note some interesting features of this review (the full text is reproduced at the bottom of this post).
First, the late Perry C. Bramlett reports in his notes that 1951 is the last year Gresham called himself a Christian in articles. Abigail Santamaria notes in her biography of Davidman that Gresham retroactively described 1950 as the year he gave up on Christianity, becoming more interested in Zen Buddhism and Dianetics. Therefore, Gresham reviewed The Place of the Lion when he was still a Christian or just beginning to shift his views.
This chronology explains why Gresham writes about faith like a true believer. He calls “the identity of sexual love with Divine charity” a core Williams theme and explains how Williams would answer “the materialist, dyspeptic with ill-digested Freud who sneers at religious experience as ‘only sex’” that in fact, “sex is only God.” In post-1951 works Gresham has less reverence for faith of any kind, treating it as an illusion or coping mechanism.
Second, it’s an atypical review for Gresham. He was a prolific magazine/newspaper contributor. But other than reviewing vintage erotica for men’s magazine The Dude in the 1960s, when he needed money and took any assignment, Gresham generally reviewed books on subjects connected to his life or perceived expert areas. He was a former tuberculosis patient who set his literary novel Limbo Tower in a tuberculosis ward. He was an amateur mentalist who wrote about mentalists playing con games in his hardboiled novel Nightmare Alley, and further explored how magic intersects with carnival culture in books like Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls. His other three reviews for The Saturday Review covered the memoir Circus Doctor by J.Y. Henderson, the hardboiled novel Backlash by James Raisin, and the tuberculosis memoir I Took It Lying Down by Marian Spritzer. If Gresham had private eye business cards listing his writing specialties, they would have been magic, “carnies,” crime, and occasionally TB.
Therefore, it was unusual for Gresham to review a supernatural fantasy thriller like The Place of the Lion. It was almost certainly a book he sought to cover, not just another assignment. The fact he writes nothing but praise for Williams confirms this piece is a labor of love. Gresham opens his review saying that Williams “could do something that almost no one else can do: he could make a spiritual idea come alive in the flesh-and-blood world of fiction.”
Third, Gresham has done his homework. When he discusses how sex is God in Williams’s theology, he refers to The Descent of the Dove, an “extraordinarily illuminating history of the holy spirit in Christianity.” He compares the novel to four other Williams novels (War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, All Hallows Eve, The Greater Trumps), arguing that “The Place of the Lion is the most profound metaphysically” of these novels for how it makes readers “come to grips with the very nature of reality itself.”
His knowledge of Williams’s bibliography is not perfect. Early in the review he calls The Place of the Lion Williams’s first novel. His summary of “all Williams’s novels” omits Shadows of Ecstasy (republished the same year, by the same American publisher). But he has clearly read Williams voraciously and carefully. It may be overmuch to call Gresham a full-fledged Williams scholar, but he likely knew Williams as well as his friend Chad Walsh knew Lewis when Walsh wrote the first published Lewis biography.
Fourth, Gresham makes some perceptive insights. Like Lewis, he sees The Place of the Lion as one of Williams’s best works. Near the review’s end, he writes that Williams’s novels are “fundamentally different from the ‘supernatural fantasies’: one might say that his novels are not fantasy at all but a realism which concerns itself with essences instead of surfaces. Most fantasy makes its effect by exploiting the antithesis between the Natural—seen as the ‘real,’ commonplace, everyday world—and an unreal Supernatural. But Williams’s point is that the Natural is the Supernatural.”
Given how many Williams novels resemble pulp thrillers (the magic relic has been stolen!), one might expect Gresham to compare Williams to supernatural thriller novelists like Sax Rohmer, whose work inspired Shadows of Ecstasy. Alternatively, Gresham might discuss how Williams’s use of the supernatural in his thrillers compares to the way Gresham used the supernatural in Nightmare Alley. Instead, Gresham never frames Williams as a thriller novelist. He overlooks the chases and mind games, focusing on the spiritual. He sees Williams as more fantasist than thriller novelist, which is probably correct. Williams didn’t write fairytales per se, but like Lewis and Tolkien, he essentially wrote about magic. The hunt for a MacGuffin (a relic, a suitcase, a perfect con job) matters less to Williams than how MacGuffins affect his characters.
Yet if Gresham sees Williams as a fantasist, he also says that Williams transgresses conventional fantasy literature: what if magic is reality, not an exception to reality? Gresham knew crime fiction well, but he also knew fantasy. He contributed to pulp fantasy and science fiction magazines. He wrote a piece for The Baum Bugle about his love for L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. Davidman’s letters show he was familiar with The Hobbit and E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros.
So, Gresham was well-read enough to know that while magic can be more than a MacGuffin in a fantasy story, neither fantasy nor thriller fiction lets magic unsettle readers much. Particularly in Baum’s work, magic instigates plots without making readers consider whether the supernatural really exists. Williams did something rarer, comparable to what Lewis provided via Aslan: he made the supernatural challenge his characters, and leave readers a little rattled too. Even when it is good, the supernatural is never safe in a Williams story. Not conventional fantasy by half.
Although “The Nature of Reality” is a short review at five paragraphs long, it shows Gresham knew Williams far better than readers may expect. Based on what we know of his marriage to Davidman (her becoming interested in the Inklings and theism first), he probably discovered Williams by following her interests, but he quickly became a full-fledged Inklings student and researcher.
It is unclear if Gresham stayed interested in Williams after 1951. However, it’s not surprising that he liked Williams so much. Their writing styles differed, but Williams may be the Inkling with whom Gresham shared the most common territory. They were both working-class men who taught themselves about literature and faith. They sought the supernatural but chafed against religious orthodoxy. They were forever interested in esoteric undercurrents, whether it be secret societies or fortunetellers in caravans, that promised marvels. It led them both to produce fascinating fiction that grappled with why humans crave marvels.
G. Connor Salter
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