Descent into Hell by Charles Williams

First published: 1937

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Moral

Time of plot: June and July in the 1930’s

Locale: Battle Hill, near London

Principal characters

• Pauline Anstruther, an orphaned woman in her twenties
• Margaret Anstruther, her grandmother
• Peter Stanhope, an eminent poet
• Lawrence Wentworth, a military historian
• Adela Hunt, an aspiring actress
• Hugh Prescott, her suitor
• Mrs. Lily Sammile, a neighbor
• Mrs. Parry, a civic leader engaged in directing a play

The Story:

In the suburb of Battle Hill, Peter Stanhope is involved in the production of his verse drama. He is an eminent poet and inhabitant of the Manor House, which belonged to his family before the housing estate was built. Under the leadership of the capable Mrs. Parry, a group of his neighbors has the privilege of performing his new play in his garden, but only one of them, Pauline Anstruther, even remotely grasps the spiritual significance of his pastoral fantasy. Pauline’s sensibility is so quickened by the nuances of his verse that she confides to him the terror that haunted her for years: the recurrent appearance of her doppelgänger.

Stanhope explains to her the principle of substitution: One person, through love, can assume the burden of another so that the sufferer is relieved. When Pauline becomes willing to accept his offer to bear her burden, she discovers that she is no longer tortured by her own problem. Instead, she is given the opportunity to bear someone else’s burden of fear. Her growth in grace influences everything around her.

As the rehearsals for the play proceed, Pauline’s role as leader of the chorus is paralleled by her role in the supernatural drama that is taking place concurrently in Battle Hill. The spiritual energy released through the play sets in motion a series of events that transcends ordinary time, affecting a number of other inhabitants of the suburb. The housing estate, built in the 1920’s, took its name from the hill, which was a site for battles from the time of the ancient Britons to the period of the Tudors. While the estate was being built, the timeless “magnetism of death,” still powerful on the Hill (as the suburb was usually called), touched a despairing unskilled laborer, who hanged himself on the scaffolding of an unfinished house. His restless spirit still inhabits the area, unrecognized by the occupant of the finished house, Lawrence Wentworth, a noted military historian and adviser to the producer of the play. A middle-aged bachelor, Wentworth develops a secret passion for pretty, conceited Adela Hunt, who is the heroine in the play and the girlfriend of the leading man, Hugh Prescott. Wentworth’s jealousy is so consuming that he is destroying himself as surely as the suicide did. Pauline’s grandmother, Mrs. Anstruther, is dying, but her death is the natural fulfillment of a well-spent life. Shortly before she dies, she is visited by an unpleasantly ingratiating and vaguely sinister neighbor, Mrs. Lily Sammile, who appears unexpectedly at several crises in the novel.

Pauline’s love for her grandmother is dutiful but detached during the years since her parents’ death. She lives in Mrs. Anstruther’s house as a dependent and companion. It is not until Stanhope relieves her of her fear that Pauline can talk to her grandmother about it and appreciate the depth of the old woman’s love. Mrs. Anstruther initiates Pauline further into the doctrine of substituted love by explaining that she can be called upon to bear the pain of their ancestor, John Struther, whose martyrdom by fire is well-known family history.

As Mrs. Anstruther approaches the limits of mortality, she can see the face of the suicide as he looks into her window during his ceaseless wandering. Soon she tells Pauline that Pauline has to go out in the middle of the night because someone needs her near Wentworth’s. Pauline thinks that Mrs. Anstruther’s mind is wandering, but somehow Pauline also knows that she has to go. She discovers she no longer fears the dark, and she sees the dead man in ordinary mortal form. He asks the way to London, gently refuses her offer to pay his fare, and sets off to walk to the city. As she watches him, his form is transmuted into the agonized body of her ancestor, and she is given the opportunity of bearing his burden by enduring the fire in a mystical experience of real pain. This happens during the night between the dress rehearsal and the first performance of the play. Mrs. Anstruther dies five minutes after Pauline gets home, but the death does not keep Pauline from acting in the play, as the producer feared. Love gives Pauline a new perspective on time and mortality.

As a counterpoint to Pauline’s experience throughout the novel, Wentworth’s love operates negatively because it focuses on himself. His passion is for his idea of Adela rather than for the real person, and his jealousy of Prescott is so powerful that it creates a tangible image of the woman who, he imagines, visits him with increasing frequency and becomes his mistress. In the bedroom where the suicide hangs himself, Wentworth’s reason is destroyed by his fantasies of false love. The crisis of his descent into hell is reached on the day of the dress rehearsal, when Mrs. Parry consults him, as a military historian, on a detail in the costumes of the guards. Wentworth knows that they are wrong and that he can arrange for them to be altered. He is so preoccupied with his erotic experience, however, that he cannot be bothered and tells an expedient lie instead of the truth. This sacrifice of the historian’s integrity confirms the loss of his soul. The next day his seat at the play is empty. On the afternoon of the performance, there is an unnatural stillness in the atmosphere, like the calm before a storm. Some of the cast complains of the heat, but the play proceeds successfully, and the only disturbance is Mrs. Sammile’s fainting at the end. After that, a number of residents of the Hill feel unwell, but life proceeds normally. Mrs. Anstruther is buried. Pauline makes plans to move into London and take a job.

A few days after the funeral, Adela and Prescott walk and carry on a mild argument that reveals the difference between them. Prescott’s love for Adela is consistent with his habit of seeing life clearly, while Adela’s love for him is an aspect of her desire to manipulate others. As their walk takes them near the cemetery, they meet Mrs. Sammile. While they talk to her, they become transfixed by the sight of the graves opening. Mrs. Sammile shrieks and disappears into a small shed at the edge of the cemetery. Adela screams and starts running, pursued by Prescott, shouting that the illusion is caused by the wind blowing up loose earth on the graves. His mind clears rapidly, and, as it does his love fades, so that he gives up the pursuit.

Adela’s wild flight leads her to the house of the man who she knows idolizes her. When she looks through the window, she sees the image of herself that his diseased imagination creates, and she collapses in terror. Found by a policeman and taken home, she awakens delirious with the impression that she forgot her part in the play, a key passage about perception and love. When Pauline calls to see her, Adela insists that Pauline has to find Mrs. Sammile in the shed by the cemetery, to give her Adela’s part and thus make her well. Pauline, sensing that Mrs. Sammile is, in fact, Lilith, the image of false love, tries to offer Adela her own help in recovering her part, but she finds that only by promising to look for the old woman can she ease Adela’s tortured spirit.

The climax of love’s triumph over death in the novel comes when Pauline goes, as she had previously gone out into the night at the request of her dying grandmother, to confront Mrs. Sammile in the cemetery shed. Recognizing her as the illusion rather than the reality of love, Pauline rejects her promises of rewards with a laugh of pure contented joy. Lilith dissolves into the dust and rubble of the old unused shed, which collapses from Pauline’s push on the door. In attempting to bear Adela’s burden, Pauline thus finds the completion of her own part in the drama of Battle Hill and is ready to leave for London. Seen off on the train by Stanhope, who says his own role is to comfort the many people in the community who are ill, she looks forward with joy to her new life in the city. Wentworth travels on the same train but refuses her company and goes in a daze to a historian’s dinner at which his lifelong rival is honored. Wentworth sinks into complete insensibility.

Bibliography

Ashenden, Gavin. Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2008. Examines the influence of Williams’s interest in neo-Rosicrucianism on his novels and poetry.

Bleiler, Everett F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983. The treatment of Williams’s novels is brief (pages 532 to 534), but it places them in the context of the fantasy genre.

Cavaliero, Glen. Charles Williams: Poet of Theology. New York: Macmillan, 1983. Explains influences on Williams and contains excellent descriptions of Williams’s originality. Pages 78 to 90 provide interpretative commentary on Descent into Hell.

Dunning, Stephen M. The Crisis and the Quest: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Charles Williams. Carlisle, Cumbria, England: Paternoster Press, 2000. Uses the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard to analyze the crisis between Christianity and hermiticism in Williams’s work and to chronicle his attempts at resolution.

Fredrick, Candice, and Sam McBride. “Women as Mythic Icons: Williams and Tolkien.” In Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Williams and the other two authors were members of the Inklings, a group of male intellectuals that met at Oxford during the 1930’s and 1940’s. This book examines the role of women in the three authors’ lives, their attitudes toward women, and the depiction of women in their work.

Hadfield, Alice Mary. Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life and Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. A critical biography by Williams’s colleague at Oxford University Press. Hadfield understood Williams’s creative intentions and was a trusted confidant in his circle of family and friends.

Reilly, R. J. Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971. Reprint. Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 2007. Examines the theological and philosophical ideas of a group of writers and intellectuals now known as the Oxford Christians. Devotes a chapter to Williams.

Shideler, Mary McDermott. The Theology of Romantic Love: A Study in the Writings of Charles Williams. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1966. An indispensable study of Williams’s central theological ideas and recurring symbolism.