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for his later Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region o f Summer Stars (1944),
Williams’s early ‘spiritual shocker’, as he termed it, has much to commend it. It is a
well-paced thriller which begins as a sensationalist crime story, a style that could not
be more different from the lofty tone of nineteenth-century Grail poetry:
The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-
one in the room but the corpse.124
The corpse is that of a victim of a black magic ritual perpetuated by Gregory
Persimmons, a publisher of occult books. Throughout the course of the novel
Persimmons, along with a Grail scholar, Sir Giles Tumulty,* a Greek merchant and a
mysterious Jew, attempts to wrestle control of the Grail for diabolical purposes. Much
of the novel is taken up with lurid descriptions of their Black Magic rituals, and
Satanic attempts to murder, possess another’s soul and to destroy the Grail. This
Black Magic is opposed by three figures who roughly correspond to Galahad,
Perceval and Bors: the Archdeacon, Kenneth Momington and the Duke of Ridings.
For each of these latter-day knights, the Grail is revealed according to their innate
capacity to perceive the nature of vessel. The Catholic duke sees it as a sacred relic of
his Church; while Momington, the poet, understands it through the literature of
‘Hawker, and Tennyson, John, Malory and the mediaevals’.^125 Williams, however,
leaves the reader in no doubt that although glimpses of the Grail can be perceived by
many, it is the Archdeacon’s understanding of the Grail which is the most true. For
him the Grail is a channel linking the material world, the sacraments and history to
Divine Nature itself.126
* The title of Giles Tumulty’s latest work of Grail scholarship is Historical Vestiges o f Sacred Vessels
in Folklore, a work that sounds suspiciously like a description of the work of the Celticist and
Folklorist, Alfred Nutt.
+ During the veneration of the Grail, he sees ‘the chivalry of England riding upon a quest’, and to
describe it he repeats the lines from Tennyson’s ‘The Holy Grail’: ‘And down the long beam stole the
Holy Graal, / Rose-red with beatings in it’ (136).
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The novel reaches its denouement with the arrival of Prester John, a rare,
though not unique figure in the traditional story, probably suggested by Waite’s The
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Hidden Church o f the Holy Grail.
He defeats Persimmons and his accomplices and
then holds a Mass, wherein the glory of the Grail is revealed for those who maintained
the good fight against the Satanic forces. At the Mass the Archdeacon, like Galahad,
passes into Heaven:
The archdeacon stood up suddenly in his stall; then he came sedately from it,
and turned in the middle of the chancel to face the three who watched. He
smiled at them, and made a motion of farewell with his hand [.. .1 as he set
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q
foot on the first [steps of the altar he] sank gently to the ground.
This spiritual shocker, which began as a crime thriller, ends in a beatific vision of the
Grail and the assumption into Heaven of a quiet, unassuming man, who throughout
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the novel has a psalm quietly on his lips (‘His mercy endureth for ever’).
The
difference from the nineteenth-century warring, questing Galahad is pronounced. The
Archdeacon achieves victory through faith, not might of arms, while Grail scholars
are mocked or resisted throughout the novel.
The strength of Machen’s, Waite’s and Williams’s resistance to the nineteenth
century’s version of the Grail as an Anglican / Humanist symbol was grounded in the
fact that each of these writers had found an alternative vision of the vessel. Machen,
Waite and Williams were all interested in the Grail as a mystical object, whether
Celtic, Catholic or Anglo-Catholic in orientation. It may also be relevant, when
considering their resistance to traditional English interpretations of the Grail, that
none of them were from the usual English upper-middle class, which provided nearly
all of the Arthurian writers of the Victorian period. Machen was Welsh; Waite a
naturalised American and Williams was from a working-class North London suburb.
For English writers who were of Tennyson’s class and lacked a confirmed religious
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belief, the problem of how to treat the story of the Grail was more problematic, its
solution less readily definable.
In Peronnik the Fool (1921), the Anglo-Irish gentry writer George Moore
favoured a hybrid approach to the Grail. Unlike the work of most other interwar Grail
writers, Moore set his novel not in the contemporary world but in the medieval past -
his source being a Breton tale collected by Emile Souvestre in 1841 and known in
English through Andrew Lang’s Lilac Book o f Fairy Tales (1910).*130 The tale
concerns the adventures of a simple cowherd, called Peronnik, who must journey to
the Castle Kerglas to obtain the Gold Basin, which has the power to supply limitless
food, cure sickness and restore the dead to life, and the Diamond Lance, which is able
to slay all whom it touches. When he achieves this quest Peronnik is able to free his
village from the drought it has been suffering for several years. Joining the King of
Brittany, the cowherd then drives out the French from Nantes, and goes on to defeat
the French at Anjou, Poitou and Normandy, before travelling to the Holy Land, where
he defeats the Saracens, forces their king to be baptised and marries his daughter.
Moore Christianised this Celtic tale and also added several distinctly
Westonian elements. Peronnik manages to achieve his quest through a mixture of
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prayer, wood-lore and empathy with the natural world.
While the Golden Basin is
essentially a Celtic vessel of plenty, familiar enough to any reader of the Mabinogion,
when used in conjunction with the Lance it becomes a restorative power that can
rejuvenate a waste land that Moore configures in distinctly Westonian terms. The land
is infertile because of the drought - the cattle are dying, the people are starving -
caused by the sorceress who has cursed the land, while the villagers’ faith jn God
* It is unlikely that ‘Peronnik l’idiot’ is a particularly ancient Breton tale. In 1899 W. Newell wrote that
‘It has little similarity to genuine Breton folk-tales, and it is scarcely to be doubted that the account we
have is only a literary recast, answering to the inventions of Hersart de la Villemarqu^’ (‘The Legend
of the Holy Grail. VI’, 278).
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