War in Heaven, by Charles Williams

As I was singing in the bath this AM–why do the streets have no name, do you think? Negligence in the municipal roads departments?–I pulled up from the treasure vaults of memory something I’ve been meaning to tell you.

Stop me if I have mentioned this before, but my Uncle Tom has a mania for ghastly old silver, which is how I imagine my good and deserving Aunt Dahlia came to read a novel called War in Heaven, by Charles Williams. Some kind of frightfully old silver mug called the grill or the grall, something of that kind, features largely in it. Such is the esteem in which the good and deserving holds her Bertram that no sooner had she read that my little autobiographical assays come into the thing then she rang up and insisted I read it forthwith and at the nonce.

Well. One is eager to oblige despite one’s busy schedule of doing this and that. I dipped into the volume in question and found that the g. and d. had not erred. Chas. Williams describes my chronicles in black and white as “perfect art,” which I thought was very decent and putting it rather well. “Just the term I would have used myself,” one imagines Baudelaire or some other acolyte of the mot juste saying.

As preux chevalier, my natural, generous impulse to these little expressions of well-phrased regard is to reply in kind, which happily I am able to do. Yes, any time Chas. Williams wants to know my opinion of his work, I’ll give him the straight-from-the-shoulder, manly truth. The thing is a scream, from start to finish. Absolutely! How he invents such delightfully improbable tosh I cannot say. The melodious Wooster laugh rang out more than once.

Jeeves says that he ventures to suggest that I may have mistaken the character of the work, seeing comic invention in what was meant to be recondite theological speculation, or words to that effect. Poor Jeeves must be losing his touch. I’ve read sermon collections by the Reverend Thingummy, and this is nothing of the kind. I mean to say, if the book isn’t comic in tenor I’m not a pleasant baritone. Rather! I’m dashed if one character doesn’t even say that he sniggers at Jeeves! Sniggers! Which just goes to show you. If that’s not an overflowing of the comic spirit, I wouldn’t know the comic spirit if it stole my umbrella. One would as soon seriously snigger at Jeeves as guffaw at Margaret Thatcher, Mr. T., or La Belle Dame Sans Merci.