A Severe Mercy

by Sheldon Vanauken

  I wrote another of my ‘Oxford sonnets’ on the Veronica legend about the woman who wiped the sweating face of Jesus on his way to the crucifixion, and dedicated it both to Davy and to swift, impetuous Bee Campion. I could see either of them doing just that.

  THE SWORD

  Yes, Mark was posted to the Tenth that year.

  The day we got there priests contrived to bring

  This ‘god’ to death, and mobs that made me cling

  To Mark surged round us, all one mocking jeer.

  No omen warned me when Mark led me near

  The yelling street that / should be implored

  By God to wear my girlhood like a sword

  So edged with mercy men would freeze in fear.

  Mark’s armour made the crowd draw back a space.

  Just there beneath his cross the god limped by.

  I saw his eyes and rushed into the street

  Through sudden stillness and I wiped his face.

  ‘My child,’ he said and staggered on to die.

  —My girlhood lay in fragments at my feet.

  It was only a short time after I announced my choosing to believe to C. S. Lewis and got his ‘hundred thousand welcomes’ that I got a card from him inviting me to dine with him at Magdalen College. I had never so much as seen a photograph of him, and in reading his books and letters I had vaguely pictured him as slender, perhaps somewhat emaciated, and slightly stooped with a lean, near-sighted face. What I met, when I turned up at his rooms, was John Bull himself. Portly, jolly, a wonderful grin, a big voice, a quizzical gaze—and no nonsense. He was as simple and unaffected as a man could be, yet never was there a man who could so swiftly cut through anything that even approached fuzzy thinking. Withal, the most friendly, the most genial of companions. Knowing that I would be burning with my new-found Christianity, he suggested that it would be best not to talk of Christian matters in hall or common room. That was my first intimation that some of the other Fellows at Magdalen, as well as other dons in the university, were not altogether cheerful about his Christian vocation. They would no doubt have tolerated his being, quietly, a Christian; but his acting like a Christian, writing widely read books about Christianity, was another thing. Much later, when Lewis was nominated for the Professorship of Poetry, Thad, who was walking along the High Street behind two dons, heard one of them remark: ‘Shall we go and cast our votes against C. S. Lewis?’ Not, that is, for the other chap. At all events, I refrained that night from talk of Christianity, at least until we returned to his rooms, and I therefore saw and heard, both at table and at the semicircle by the fire in the common room as the port went round, the Lewis who, in brilliance, in wit, and in incisiveness, could hold his own with any man that ever lived.

  That evening began my friendship with Lewis. It was a very deep friendship on my part: no man ever did so much to shape my mind, quite aside from Christianity, which of course shaped my whole life. I have never loved a man more. And I must believe, from things he said and wrote to me, that he felt both friendship and affection for me. Later, he became very fond of Davy—or Jean, as he called her—too. After his death, his brother, Warren, remarked to a friend: ‘Oh, Jack adored Van and Jean.’ I dined with Lewis—or Jack (not that I called him that for years)—a number of times at Magdalen, and there were happy hours of genial conversation in his rooms in college, rather bare rooms with a splendid view. Sometimes I walked with him round Addison’s Walk. The first time he proposed it, I prepared to modify my stride to suit an older man—and he nearly walked me off my legs. He was the Legions on the march. I was not wholly sorry when we came round again to the entrance; and Lewis said, ‘Around again, eh?’ And away we went. I also on occasion saw and heard him about the university, both lectures at the Schools and at the Socratic Club where Lewis was in his element. But our most usual meeting place was the Eastgate Hotel for lunch, where Lewis would immediately boom out: ‘Any pies today?’ A hearty helping of steak-and-kidney pie and a pint of bitter was standard fare.

  Once he forgot a lunch at the Eastgate that he had suggested, and next day he sent round to Jesus the following card:

  Porcus sum, I am a pig, porcissimus, the piggest of pigs. I looked at my diary at about 3 o’clock on Sat. afternoon and found to my horror that I had failed a tryst with you at 12. Please forgive a nit-wit. Will you prove your charity by meeting me at the Eastgate 12 o’clock next Saturday? Even I seldom make exactly the same howler twice! I really am very sorry; I had been much looking forward to it. C.S.L.

  We talked, Lewis and I, about everything under the sun, and beyond the sun, too. There were several good discussions of science-fiction, which we had both read a lot of. And of course we talked of Christianity and of Christian morality. I remember one after-noon in his rooms I asked him whether I should have said a certain harsh thing to someone who quite deserved it; and Lewis went instantly to the heart of the matter with the question: ‘What was your motive?’ In the course of a discussion about the efficacy of prayer, he made the point that it was altogether healthier to find yourself being used as the answer to someone else’s prayer. And he told the story of his nagging impulse to go and get an unneeded haircut, finding when he gave in to it that his barber had been steadily praying that Lewis would come by. Several of his stories, like that one, later found their way into his writing. One night at Magdalen, we talked of ‘the Island in the West’ in Pilgrim’s Regress — that something we long for, whether it be an island in the west or the other side of a mountain or perhaps a schooner yacht, long for it in the belief that it will mean joy, which it never fully does: because what we are really longing for is God. There was no idea of Lewis’s that I more deeply understood, and our conversation about it was deep and enthralling. Finally we made tea and drank it, and then I walked home through the misty silent streets of Oxford, still in the spell of the talk, to tell an eagerly waiting Davy all about it. On other occasions Lewis and I talked—so my little blue Oxford diary informs me—of definitions of the novel and of what the novel should be (a good story), of poetry, of the ‘bent world’ in both his science-fiction and in G. M. Hopkins’ ‘God’s Grandeur’. Lewis believed that he had thought of it independently, since it was so natural and right in his story. But in his poem ‘Pilgrim’s Problem’ where, at the end, ‘earnest stars blaze out in the established sky/Rigid with justice,’ he thought he must have unconsciously borrowed the ‘earnest stars’ from Keats. We talked at other times of human frailty, of beer, of prayer, of literary sources, and of favourite books. Rereading books, we said with immense agreement, was the mark of the real lover of books.

  Davy and I had been moving about a bit among the Oxford churches, and we came to accept, essentially, the high-church position that the Anglican church was part of the Church Catholic. And we found the Anglo-Catholic mass very beautiful. As a result of the high-church veneration of Mary, the Blessed Virgin, I wrote a sonnet on her:

  THE HEART OF MARY

  Dear sister, I was human not divine,

  The angel left me woman as before,

  And when, like flame beneath my heart, I bore

  The Son, I was the vestal and the shrine.

  My arms held Heaven at my breast—not wine

  But milk made blood, in which no mothering doubt

  Prefigured patterns of the pouring out,

  O Lamb! to stain the world incarnadine.

  The Magi saw a crown that lay ahead,

  But not the bitter glory of the reign;

  They called him King and knelt among the kine.

  I pondered in my heart what they had said,

  Yet could not see the bloody cup of pain.

  I was but woman—though my God was mine.

  In June, at the end of Summer Term, Davy and I inherited from a friend going down, a tiny mews flat, the Studio, in the centre of Oxford. We were saddened at the loss of the piano, but, all the same, we gladly moved. It was located on cobbled, gas-lit Pusey Lane. A red door opened into an alleyway where
another door announced ‘The Studio’. There was a closet-sized kitchen on the ground floor, a staircase so narrow that two skeletons could not have passed on it, and one long upstairs room. That was all—the bathroom was across the garden in the main house. Our one long room had two windows overlooking the garden, and a large skylight was set in the gently sagging roof. At one end of the room was a fireplace, which would immediately fill the room with dense coal smoke if the wind veered into the wrong quarter. Wherever the wind was, we could hear all the bells of Oxford, including the deep boom of Great Tom at Christ Church. This was the Studio—or St. Udio’s—inconvenient, damp, smoky, and very dear to us and to many.

  Because the Studio was central and, incidentally, on the way from North Oxford to St. Ebbe’s, and because, perhaps, of its extraordinary atmosphere, compounded of the gas-lit cobbled lane outside and the warm upper room, with its skylight black with rain and its cheerful fire (except when the wind was wrong, of course), it became the centre of a lively life in Christ for a great many people. We soon accepted that if we hoped to get any work done we must do it in the Bodleian Library; and even then we often came home to find that friends had arrived and were already deep into some absorbing discussion. The diary indicates that in one week, taken at random, twenty-four people came, six of them twice, so there were thirty times that the brass knocker sounded and one of us leaped down the narrow stairway. For nearly two years, except when we went up to London to see plays or went visiting or travelling, there was hardly a day or night that people did not come, both Christians and non-Christians (those who said they weren’t); and there were literally hundreds of absorbing conversations. Oxford.

  As a result of our embracing the faith, the circle of our Christian friends of course enlarged, nearly all being university people. We continued to see a great deal of the original five, Lew and Mary Ann, Peter and Bee, and Thad—and I have mentioned the bushy-headed Welshman, Geraint Gruffydd, who could read poetry in his vibrant voice so magnificently that it would send chills down the back of a statue. He was himself a poet, though we only saw his poems in his own translations from the Welsh. Once at his house in Wales, as the result of an argument about the relative merits of burgundy and claret, we scoured the wine merchants for vintages and had a grand series of wine-tasting sessions, rather in the ‘Brideshead’ manner. Claret was rather ahead, until, back in Oxford, I opened a treasured bottle of a velvety Chambertin of a great year in Burgundy. Another poet— an extraordinary poet—and a deep Christian friend through the years was Julian—Dom Julian of St. Benet’s Hall. Although born in England, he had partly grown up in Maryland; and his Bene-dictine priory in New England had sent him first to Rome and then to Oxford, where, in due course, we attended his priesting. Also reading theology for the priesthood were David Griffiths of Kent and Worcester College and Tom Harpur of Toronto and Oriel College, only, for them, it was the Anglican priesthood. But it was with David that we shared the exciting discovery of the Catholic Faith within the Church of England, and many a night we talked long about it. Tall, blue-eyed Tom, despite the tradition of Newman and the Oxford Movement in his college, was more Evangelical. But that was the Studio: Catholics and Evangelicals and Atheists and all shades of Betwixts and Betweens, all talking happily and spiritedly on equal terms. Sometimes, when Tom stayed late, I would walk back to Oriel with him to make a back for him so that he could reach up and remove a bar from one of the barred windows that all colleges have and climb in. Once he dropped the bar with a clang that echoed across the silent night, and seconds later a proctorial party turned into the lane. We—Tom still holding the bar—ran rapidly away among the shadows, later returning for another go. Davy, in heavenly compensation for the lost piano, was sometimes asked to play the organ at St. Ebbe’s. In the choir, looking very much like a small dark angel, was a young girl named Jane, whom Davy brought back to the Studio. After that, Jane and sometimes her friend, Mia, both studying for university entrance, came often. Jane was very silent, but she, too, was a lover of poetry, and a poet. We read a lot of poetry aloud at the Studio, and when I would read, especially T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, I could almost feel the intensity of Jane’s listening.

  Poetry was no small part of the magic of the Studio, not only the great poems but our own—the poems we wrote and read to each other and discussed, poems in which the Incarnate God was very much present. Geraint in a poem to Luned, the Welsh girl he was to marry, spoke of their ‘holy hours/When our spirits flowed quietly at one/In the streams of our Christ’s love.’ And Julian’s poetry was pure prayer, deep and holy. He spoke of him-self: ‘Walking in the garden . . ./Pawing with the foot of my philosophy the dust of the path/[seeking] uncaring unknowingness and unreasoned trust.’ At his Oxford ordination, he offered Christ: ‘Tormented thought and worn-out shoes/Take all and dwell therein.’ One of his poems was about going away from the Studio at night:

  Cry to the night

  To the gaslight

  After the rain

  What shall I cry?

  Farewell, goodbye

  I leave you with your pain

  The Lord be with you

  And in your hour, again

  Tread in this cobble lane

  And rain His faith within you.

  Amen.

  One night Julian and Davy-and I had a deep and gentle talk about poetry and Mary Virgin—what she means to man and her role in the Kingdom. Out of that long night’s talk there came another of my Oxford sonnets, dedicated lovingly to Julian:

  OUR LADY OF THE NIGHT

  When this world hides the constant heart of light

  We sink to chill despair through stars that wheel

  In deathless unconcern, our senses reel

  At nothingness, and darkness steals our sight.

  Appearing wrapped in deep blue heaven, bright

  With secret sun, the moon for tenderness

  Looks down to earth where, reassured, we bless

  The sun in her, our lady of the night.

  O lady, eyes can neither bear the pain

  Of utter light, nor see without it how

  To walk, so blindly stumbling we are drawn

  To seek that light in you who see it plain.

  Be with us, lady, through the darkness, now

  And at the awful hour of the dawn.

  Although our Christian friends came often to the Studio, our non-Christian friends were, of course, equally welcome. Indeed, in some of the best discussions on Christian subjects, there would usually be a couple of non-Christians there, too, joining in with healthy scepticism. Our experience of Oxford was that everybody talked about everything. And for that very reason, we usually knew who was Christian or non-Christian or semi-Christian or Hindu or whatever because it came out in conversation.

  One afternoon Davy and I walked in the University Parks and Mesopotamia, talking of some day writing a novel, catching some-thing of the extraordinary variety of Oxford life, including the Studio, a novel that we would put ourselves in as characters. Then, saying ‘Some day, maybe’, we went to the Copper Kettle on the High for tea. That night, as usual, a couple of friends came by. One was Julian and the other was a non-Christian friend from Corpus Christi College named Richard, and it was Richard who wanted to talk about Christianity. After considerable talk, he said: ‘The thing that stumps me is the Trinity. The Trinity and, above all, the Incarnation. You all seem to believe that Jesus was, at the same time, completely a man—and completely God. In the name of common sense, how could he be? You Christians always take refuge in mysteries.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘We aren’t hiding behind a mystery in this, at least.’

  ‘Well,’ said Richard. ‘Explain it in some way that makes sense.’

  Julian began to say something about the Persons of God, and I could see that Richard wasn’t finding it very helpful. Then I thought of the novel Davy and I had been talking about and murmured to Davy, ‘I’ ve got it!’