Ramblings on Goudge and Williams

You know, I just thought about the way Charles Williams didn’t like country life and slowness, and preferred the city and its speed and needed to have many people around him. And I think that is the point where he essentially differs from Elizabeth Goudge, who loved the country, and quiet, and, if not solitude, then certainly the absence of a mass of people. (Interestingly, they both had their problems with Oxford for opposite reasons – while both liked it from a historical point of view, Williams found it too rural and plain, whereas Goudge found it stressful and frightened of her social obligations.) 

I say this, because their writing is, in many ways strikingly similar. Not in the sense that it resembles each other, but that it is written from a very similar way of thinking, a connected theology, or a matching, though differently animated spirituality.

This is not a new thought – Goudge and Williams are (for two rather obscure writers) fairly often compared to each other, though usually in passing. It’s also obvious that if you skim their books without thinking much about them, you won’t find them similar at all: Williams’ books are comparably dark, very quick, and not very descriptive, whereas Goudge’s books are picturesque, quiet, and very detailed.

But I wonder if that is, rather than contrary, complementary. It is not that they wrote books with some similar themes in stylistically different guises, but rather that the way they, as persons, worked, and felt, and believed, greatly affected the way they used at times similar, overlapping or connected themes and thoughts in their fiction, which brought out different aspects altogether. Because... because it’s not just a matter of taste of lifestyle that only affects style and prose, etc. It’s rather that the way they saw the world, the way they saw Creation, and Love, and Mercy, differed in the question where they saw it, which in turn changed how they saw it, and how they approached ideas that are related, but not only portrayed differently but truly changed through their focus, and their natural place in the world.

One man’s sheet of paper might be another woman’s flower. What I mean is, traffic can be birdsong for some people, and a moor can be a study. But the noise of people’s voices as well as of their thoughts and feelings, and solitude, and nature, and bustle, and quiet work, all belong together, but people respond differently to them, and through that things respond differently to people, resulting in a much more nuanced and diverse way of approaching the same basic concepts, and through this offering more and more glimpses at Truth in different ways for all people, like a great mosaic or puzzle, with some times matching especially well, because they lay side by side, while still remaining different, as different tiles. And that is part of the great beauty of it.

And maybe Williams and Goudge has matching pieces in different colours or different shapes... matching, as in fitting, not as in looking the same. And that is how the similar aspects of their books respond to each other, rather than tell a few of the same concepts in a “gritty” and a “sweet” manner.