259 From a letter to Anne Barrett, Houghton Mifflin Co.

7 August 1964

I am a man of limited sympathies (but well aware of it), and [Charles] Williams lies almost completely outside them. I came into fairly close contact with him from the end of 1939 to his death -1 was in fact a sort of assistant mid-wife at the birth of All Hallows Eve, read aloud to us as it was composed, but the very great changes made in it were I think mainly due to C.S.L, – and much enjoyed his company; but our minds remained poles apart. I actively disliked his Arthurian-Byzantine mythology; and still think that it spoiled the trilogy of C.S.L. (a very impressionable, too impressionable, man) in the last pan.

In the matter of the proposed blurb to Tree and Leaf.... I am afraid that difficulty really arises from the juxtaposition of two things that only in fact touch at a corner, so to speak. I do not think I was responsible for the proposed association, and anyway it came up at a time of great troubles and distractions for me. Myself, I had for some time vaguely thought of the reprint together of three things that to my mind really do flow together: Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics; the essay On Fairy-stories; and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. The first deals with the contact of the 'heroic' with fairy-story; the second primarily with fairy-story; and the last with 'heroism and chivalry'.