Charles Williams, All Hallows’ Eve: 80 Years Later 

In May 1945, the writer and editor Charles Williams died unexpectedly after a medical procedure. Writing about him for The Atlantic in 1949, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and editor Geoffrey Parsons commended Charles Williams to American audiences as follows: 

The rich and strange soul of Charles Williams departed his body at Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, in 1945. It may seem odd to accept so confidently the persistence of a spirit. But however vague one’s faith or philosophy may be in general terms, the devoted readers of the Williams volumes — of whom I am one — could hardly do otherwise. He not only accepted immortality as an obvious fact; he portrayed its mysteries in such vivid detail as to make his own continuity seem somehow inevitable. As C. S. Lewis, the British author, one of his intimate friends, wrote: ‘No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed.’

Published the year of his death, All Hallows’ Eve turned out to be Williams’s final novel. It forms the basis of this interview with Grevel Lindop, award-winning poet, prolific literary critic, and one of the world’s leading experts on Charles Williams. He is the author of Charles Williams: The Third Inkling. 

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Nadya Williams: Let’s start with a difficult question: Would you consider All Hallows’ Eve a classic now? Why or why not?

Grevel Lindop: I’d say a classic is a book that continues to interest and excite readers, and lets them find new meanings in it, at least two generations after it was written. 

That means a classic is still exciting when the world has changed and generations have moved on. I think Charles Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve lives up to that: It’s now 80 years since it was published (in 1945!), but it remains remarkable, strange, exciting, thought-provoking.

Nadya Williams: Charles Williams is (as you describe him in your book) the “third Inkling.” Others have described him as the oddest Inkling. What do you and others mean by this description? Who was he, in brief, and why do you think has he been somewhat forgotten, compared to the two famous Inklings (Tolkien and Lewis)? 

Grevel Lindop: Charles Williams was central to the Inklings, but he was also the odd one out. He came from a poor background—he dropped out of university because his parents couldn’t afford to support him—and he was quite left-wing politically. 

By sheer brilliance he worked his way up in publishing from being a humble proofreader to being a senior editor at the London office of the Oxford University Press, and moved to Oxford when his office was evacuated in 1939 at the start of the war. By then he was an experienced lecturer, having taught evening classes in London, and so he stepped easily into lecturing at Oxford, which he did with immense energy and eloquence, gaining a huge following. Extremely charismatic, he quickly gained a cult following. He met C.S. Lewis in 1936, when he edited Lewis’s book The Allegory of Love, for Oxford University Press, and they instantly became friends, finding common ground in their Christianity, their love of poetry, and their love of debate. 

Williams was a member of the Inklings even before he moved to Oxford, and Tolkien admired him as much as Lewis did. They all read each other’s fiction avidly, and it’s been suggested that the destruction of the Ring in Tolkien’s epic was suggested by the destruction of the magical Stone in Williams’s 1931 novel Many Dimensions. 

What his fellow Inklings didn’t know was that Williams was involved in Christian occultism: he was a member of The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a mystical organization founded by the writer and occultist A.E. Waite, which performed rituals and ceremonies designed to focus the participants’ minds on the spiritual path, and to somehow “supercharge” their quest for mystical union with the Divine. With his fellow Rosicrucians, Williams studied the Tarot and the Kabbalah, and much of the magical lore that comes into his novels came from that source. It was all entirely well-intentioned, but Tolkien in particular was quite shocked when he found out after Williams’s death.

Williams died very suddenly, aged only 58, in the last weeks of World War II, and was to some extent forgotten. I hope my biography, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, has helped to bring him back, because he is a fascinating figure and writer.

Nadya Williams: The opening scene of All Hallows’ Eve reminds me of the opening of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. Without giving away the ending, what is going on here? What is the overall premise?

Grevel Lindop: It’s extraordinary. The two young women we meet first—Lester and Evelyn—have just died, but they don’t really know it yet. They’ve been killed in a plane crash in central London, and are in the world of the newly dead, a kind of intermediate world, maybe the “astral plane,” where the dead have a chance to perform their last duties before leaving. And they can occasion still be briefly aware of living people they have a close connection with—such as Lester’s husband Richard, and his friend Jonathan, an artist. 

In their “intermediate” post-death world, Lester and Evelyn encounter Betty, an old school friend. Betty is not dead, but she is a psychic whose evil parents are sending her out to time-travel into the future to get information for her father, Simon the Clerk, a wicked guru bent on world domination. Indeed, though it takes a while for us to find this out, he is the Antichrist! Obviously the story’s motives are: how Lester and Evelyn will deal with their tasks in this “intermediate world” before they depart completely; and how (if at all) the guru Simon the Clerk can be foiled. (Spoiler alert: One of the women practices love and forgiveness, and we presume she is saved; the other remains closed-in and selfish to the end. Of course I can’t say which!)

Nadya Williams: What are the major themes that interest Williams? Am I correct in seeing a strong presence of spiritual warfare here?

Grevel Lindop: Definitely. For Williams, the essence of Christianity was love: he was preoccupied by St Paul’s injunction that we should “be members of one another.” We are all part of each other, and all of us also of Christ. None of us can exist alone. Therefore, love and sharing are essential. 

Williams wrote religious novels (if you like to call them that) about people who were not religious, ordinary people who discover the truths of spirituality through experience and life’s challenges. He even believed that we could quite literally take on each other’s suffering to help one another. He called it “substitution” and during World War II, when so many people were anxious and in danger, he organized a group called “The Companions of the Co-Inherence” to support each other’s suffering and sometimes actually to take on each other’s pain and suffering when it seemed too great to bear. (C.S. Lewis described how he did this to help his wife Joy when she had cancer.) “Co-Inherence” means being part of one another, which Williams saw as our human condition anyway; the challenge is to recognise it. We are not separate!

Nadya Williams: What tips would you give to first-time readers of this book? What should the readers look for in particular?

Grevel Lindop: First, a warning: some readers love Williams’s novels; other people hate them! You’ll soon find out which you are. Another warning: All Hallows’ Eve isn’t maybe the best place to start. 

If you’re totally new to Williams, I’d recommend Many Dimensions, a more straightforward thriller (and an excellent one!) which is an easier read but conveys all of Williams’s main ideas. You’ll tear through it and probably love it! All Hallows’ Eve is more challenging. There’s the sheer weirdness of the story; and quite a lot of philosophizing. My advice would be not to worry if you don’t understand all of it. Read it as a story, relish the weird atmosphere of the world-between-worlds where Lester and Evelyn meet their challenges, enjoy the melodrama of the creepy scenes where Simon the Clerk operates his bizarre cult, and—well, I won’t say what happens to Simon, but it’s a spectacular scene. Then read the book a second time and linger on the more complex, reflective passages and see what’s there to learn. Because there is much.

I should also add a warning: Williams used the strange traditional idea that because Jesus had been Jewish, the Antichrist must also be a Jew. Williams himself wasn’t Antisemitic at all, but because of this tradition he makes Simon the Clerk, his villain, Jewish. This is rightly disturbing to us, especially in a novel written in the 1930s. Williams was writing before knowledge of the Holocaust reached the general public in Britain; but the persecution of Jews in Germany was already well-known and (I think) should have given him pause. It seems Williams—who was increasingly ill as he wrote—was thinking less and less about public events, and this escaped him. It’s a blemish on an otherwise extraordinarily humane and original novel.

Nadya Williams: I’m curious about readers' reception of this book at the time of publication.

Grevel Lindop: Perhaps surprisingly, All Hallows’ Eve was well received by the popular press. The mass-market papers praised it, and it sold very well. Most intellectual critics were dismissive because they didn’t approve of thrillers; but the poet Henry Reed wrote that though the novel had all sorts of faults, it was “ten times more interesting than most novels.” Williams, he said, knew so much more about human nature that other writers seemed “adolescent compared to him.” It was, he said, “a peculiarly wonderful book.” (And, I can’t resist mischievously adding, wonderfully peculiar too!) 

Nadya Williams: Where would you rank this novel among others that Charles Williams wrote? What is your favorite one of his novels? Why should readers today still read him?

Grevel Lindop: All Hallows’ Eve is certainly his most complex novel, maybe his most profound. It vies with his previous novel, 1937’s Descent into Hell, as among his most ambitious. Both are very dark; but I like the fact that All Hallows’ Eve ends with love and healing. For new readers, I strongly recommend Many Dimensions (about the Philosophers’ Stone—52 years before Harry Potter!) or War in Heaven (about the Holy Grail—73 years before Dan Brown!). If you are a Tarot enthusiast, then you absolutely must read The Greater Trumps—far and away the best novel ever written about Tarot. 

Constantly surprising, full of wisdom, showing how spirituality permeates daily life even when we don’t notice it: Charles Williams is unique!