A Vial of the Apocalypse

DESCENT INTO HELL (248 pp.)--Charles Williams--Pellegrini & Cudahy ($2.75).

"There was, at that part of the cemetery wall, a lean-to erection of boards, a kind of narrow shelter, almost a man's height, and having a rough swinging door at the nearer end. It had been there before anyone could remember, and it stayed there because no one could remember to have it taken away. It was very old and very weather-stained.

It was almost a toolshed, but then the necessary tools were, more conveniently, kept elsewhere. Everyone supposed that someone else used it."

Someone else did. And thereby hangs the tale told in Descent into Hell by Charles Williams (TIME, Nov. 8), perhaps the most remarkable English mystical writer since William Blake, a man whose life and work have had strong influence in the religious thinking of such leading British intellectuals as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers.

The Gritty Caress. When Williams died in 1945, at 58, he left 26 volumes of poetry, drama, criticism, biography and theology, and seven novels. The most profound, difficult and serious of the novels is

Descent into Hell. It is also one of the most frightening books ever written.

The cemetery shed is inhabited by a certain Mrs. Lily Sammile, a fluttery woman (though "rather like a chicken fluttering round the glass walls of a snake's cage") of no determinable age, with a face that was once beautiful. She is very sociable indeed ("She meets one continually and she's at things. She calls"), but not very good company. ("It was said that they whom she overtook were found drained and strangled in the morning, and a single hair tight about the neck, so faint, so sure, so deathly . . .")

Lily Sammile is Lilith, the female demon of Jewish folklore, the first wife of Adam, who wanders the world caressing men with her gritty hand, kissing them with her dusty mouth, luring them to the forgotten cemetery shed, which is the Gatehouse of Hell.

The Way to London. The scene of Lilith's present depredations is a place called Battle Hill, a rise of ground with a "strategic situation in regard to London." Through history, Battle Hill has witnessed massacres without number--"mornings and evenings of hardly human sport." Now, "from other periods of its time other creatures could crawl out of death, and invisibly contemplate [the living], awaiting the hour when they should either retire to their own mists or more fully invade the place of the living."

Now, Charles Williams writes, their hour was at hand. The days had a queer brightness. People in their neat suburban houses were having queer dreams. Already one dead man was roaming the streets; he asked the way to London. Everyone sensed it: "Something's about!" Mrs. Sammile knew very well what was about. The path of time on Battle Hill had swerved sharply toward eternity.

Graves burst open. The unquiet dead, in frenzied legions, issued-screaming, backward through time toward life. And the living on Battle Hill became stricken with strange conditions of mind and body. "What is happening to us!" men cried. And one wiser than the rest replied: "One of the vials of the Apocalypse . . ."

How long, a woman asked, might the visitation last? Charles Williams answers, through one of his characters: "Why, perhaps a thousand years, those of the millenium before the Judgment. On the other hand, since that kind of thousand years is asserted to be a day, perhaps till tomorrow morning . . ."

Sustaining Love. Descent into Hell is a development of Williams' reverent conviction that men must bear one another's burdens; that the universe of humanity includes both the living and the dead; that lost and drifting spirits among the dead may still be sustained by the charitable love of living men.

The result is something very like an ecstatic vision. Readers who believe that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in most contemporary philosophy may agree with Reader W. H. Auden: "I think he's an uncertain craftsman, but I don't care."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.