A Severe Mercy

by Sheldon Vanauken

  He and I met a good many times for lunch in the months to come, and I went several times to the Kilns, in Headington, Oxford, to talk to Joy or to both of them. She was of course in bed—support straps hanging from the ceiling. She was not expected to live more than a year or, of course, ever to be again out of bed. Despite pain—she would wince now and then as we talked—she was cheerful and interested in everything.

  Then one day I took the train to Cambridge. It was a fine spring day, and I had the compartment to myself with all the windows open. The train meandered slowly and rather delightfully across England, stopping often to rest, perhaps, or to admire flower beds, while birds sang round about. Lewis said later that he and his friends called the train the Cantab Crawler.

  At Magdalene I had Pepys’s old room. After dinner at the high table, at which there was good-natured banter about Oxford men coming to Cambridge, Lewis and I talked until very late in his rooms. It was, in fact, one of the finest evenings of talk I can remember; and it was now that. I began, at his invitation, to call him Jack, at least in talk. We spoke, I remember, of love and grief —the grief I was still undergoing and he was so soon to face. He said he was praying for Joy’s recovery and asked me to pray for that, which I of course did. He said that because of Joy, he had come to see certain things I had said about my love for Davy in a new light. I told him about my thinking on the relationship of grief to the presence of the beloved, how the latter calls forth the former. I told him of my belief that Davy, too, had undergone bereavement and sorrow and, in that connection, told him of the ‘Oxford-Vision Dream’. He was thoughtful about the idea of the dead undergoing bereavement, and then said he could see no reason why it might not be so. I said that I had feared losing the reality of Davy but that the Illumination of the Past, now long since over, had seemed to impress her realityon my mind. One of us suggested, then or later, that if the dead do stay with us for a time, it might be allowed partly so that we may hold on to some-thing of their reality. Lewis, who had evidently thought further about the idea of the dead also experiencing sorrow, brought it up again, saying that the soul’s progress towards the Eternal Being might necessitate the experience of bereavement, either in life or afterwards.

  There was to be another journey to Cambridge, and that night we talked about poetry, including his five sonnets, which I had virtually memorised; and about Greek myth. In some letter had expressed the idea that Jane in That Hideous Strength was sort of a stereotype, and in his reply, now regrettably lost, he said that I should have a look at the woman in his next book. She was Orual and the book, one of the greatest novels of the century, I think, was Till We Have Faces. Now I took it all back: Orual was no stereotype; she was, indeed, a great character. Again, it was a grand evening of talk.

  C. S. Lewis was a strong, genial, stimulating, loving presence in my life from Oxford days through Davy’s death and the immensity of grief that followed. He was, above all, a friend. Although my book is nearing its end, its main theme completed or nearly so, I propose to carry on the theme of Lewis and Joy, briefly, through excerpts from his later letters to me. My reason for doing so is, at least partly, some curious parallels between my experience, recounted in this book, and his.

  When I received the note from him in March, and when we were together in Cambridge and at the Kilns, Joy was a dying woman, but Lewis and, no doubt, Joy were praying, as I was, for her recovery. In the autumn, when I had returned to Virginia, the excerpts begin. (The ellipses here are mine.)

  Lewis wrote:

  [27 November 1957] My own news continues better than we ever dared to hope. The cancerous bones have rebuilt themselves in a way quite unusual and Joy can now walk: on a stick and with a limp, it is true, but it is a walk—and far less than a year ago it took 3 people to move her in bed and we often hurt her. Her general health, and spirits, seem excellent. Of course the sword of Damocles hangs over us. Or shd. I say that circum-stances have opened our eyes to see the sword which really hangs always over everyone.

  I forget if I had begun my own bone disease (osteoporosis) when you were with us. Anyway, it is much better now and I am no longer in pain. I wear a surgical belt and shall probably never be able to take a real walk again, but it doesn’t somehow worry me. The intriguing thing is that while I (for no discoverable reason) was losing the chalcium [calcium?] from my bones, Joy, who needed it much more, was gaining it in hers. One dreams of a Charles Williams substitution! Well, never was a gift more gladly given; but one must not be fanciful.

  It is nice being in love with Hellas, I expect. My brother is well. Write from time to time. Of course you are in my prayers as I am in yours.

  [26 April 1958] A letter from you is always a refreshment. First as to your question. Joy’s improvement continues. Indeed except that she is a cripple with a limp (the doctors, rather than the disease, shortened one leg) she is in full health. She had an x-ray examination last week wh. shows that the bones have re-built themselves ‘firm as a rock’. The Doctor, doubtless without what a Christian wd. regard as true seriousness, used the word miraculous. I am also, by the way, nearly quite restored myself. I sometimes tremble when I think how good Joy and I ought to be: how good we would have promised to be if God had offered us these mercies at that price. . . . All blessings. I wish we lived nearer.

  [15 Dec. 1958] My wife’s recovery is really more like resur-rection. We have been to Ireland together. She walks (with a stick and a limp) about the wood shooting—or anyway shooting at—pigeons; we walk together to the Ampleforth Arms. My brother is also well, and my own bone disease is as good as cured—anyway, quiescent. . . . I have lately passed my 60th birthday. I pray for you nightly and wd. much like to meet. Very good wishes, and warm love from us all.

  [The next letter (or letters) is missing.]

  [16 April 1960] You must pray for me now. Joy’s cancer has returned and the doctors hold out no hope. Of course this is irrelevant to the question whether the previous recovery was miraculous. There can be miraculous reprieve as well as miraculous pardon, and Lazarus was raised from the dead to die again. I can’t write much else; you can well imagine why. [Upon receiving the above letter, I immediately sent them the sculptural reproduction of a 12th-century Norman Christ that hung above my bed, telling him not to write. Joy died on July 13th. In July or August Lewis wrote about his grief, a letter I did not retain, except for an excerpt on the Norman Christ, which he hadn’t at first liked though Joy did: ‘but it has grown on me gradually .. . I believe it will come to mean a great deal to me.’]

  [23 Sept. 1960] We are . . . much at one in our reaction to grief and I find much wisdom in your poem. [Possibly ‘Shining Barrier’.] My great recent discovery is that when I mourn Joy least I feel nearest to her. Passionate sorrow cuts us off from the dead (there are ballads & folk-tales wh. hint this). Do you think that much of the traditional ritual of mourning had, unconsciously, that very purpose? For of course the primitive mind is v. anxious to keep them away.

  Like you, I can’t imagine real Eros coming twice. I still feel married to Joy.

  [30 June 1962] I am now as convalescent as (apparently) I am ever likely to be. Loneliness increases as health returns. One must have the capacity for happiness in order to be fully aware of its absence. We must talk of 1000 things when you come.

  In these letters and a number of later ones and in my letters to him, we talked, of course, of a hundred other things. I joked mysteriously about a drastic step I was contemplating for awhile, a secession from academe to the schooner life; and we spoke of literary and theological subjects. I was to see him once more, in 1963, in the fortnight before his death. We made tea there in the Kilns and talked about prayer and books, including my booklet ‘Encounter with Light’ (written two or three years earlier) which he had liked. He was his usual incisive self; though, because of his illness, he would doze momentarily during the talk. We set a date for a future meeting. When the day came, he was dead. I learned later that the Norman Christ I had given him was
over the head of his bed when he died. In connection with my earlier thoughts on time, Lewis and I in our friendship were somewhat harried by time: in my 1957 journey to England he was just marrying a seemingly dying woman, and when I came again, he was dying.

  Davy, ill and believing herself to be dying, prayed for one more year, and recovered—for one year. Lewis and Joy, when she seemed certainly dying, prayed, and she was healed—for a couple of years. In both illnesses there may have been a Charles Williams substitution. When Lewis and I talked of the loss and grief that I was experiencing, he, improbably, was only a few years away from a similar experience of grief. When he was undergoing it, he must have remembered all we had said about the nature of grief. Indeed, in the letter two months after Joy’s death, he wrote: ‘We are much at one in our reaction to grief.’ And we were at one, also, in the belief that genuine inloveness is, as I put it in my Shining Barrier poem, a ‘once-given grace,’ for he wrote: ‘Like you, I can’t imagine real Eros coming twice.’

  When he died, I remembered his great shout across the Oxford High Street: ‘Christians NEVER say goodbye!’ In eternity there will be ‘time enough’. And as Jack said, ‘We must talk of 1000 things when you come.’

  To return to my 1957 stay in England, my time there, after the second journey to Magdalene in the Cantab Crawler, was drawing to a close.

  Only a fortnight before I was to sail, I went to see a friend in Lincoln. He had told me how to find his rooms in the Cathedral Square, saying that he would be along a bit later. The train arrived about sunset, and, as I walked up the ascending streets, past old houses, towards the cathedral above, the air was full of golden light. Davy and I had never been in Lincoln, yet now, when I had walked but a short way, I became aware of an extraordinary sense of her presence. It was very peaceful, having her there, if she was. There was no catch in my throat or tear in my eye, just the sense of her presence. And as I walked up that hill, Davy seemed to walk lightly beside me. The sun was setting now. The gold turned to red. Rooks circled, flying home to their nests in the cathedral towers. The great bell boomed for the half hour. cathedral was rose-red in the sunset. And Davy was beside me. I was tranquilly happy. All was most well.

  I did not think of that lovely walk up to the rose-red towers as a farewell, yet perhaps it was. In later times I was to think of it as the last thing we did.

  In Virginia again, no longer living at Mole End, I found that my tears were dried. The grief had passed. When I drove out to Lady-wood, there was no sense of Davy’s being there with me, nor any sense that she was in the wind. If I wrote to her—I attempted it but once—I found myself saying ‘she’ instead of ‘you’; the feeling of its being a real letter had vanished. There were no more dreams. It may be that through the evocative power of music, I might have felt a stab of grief, but I had no wish to force it or prolong it beyond its natural term.

  This—the disappearance of the sense of the beloved’s presence and, therefore, the end of tears—this is the Second Death.

  I could not escape the impression that the Second Death was a withdrawal— that Davy had withdrawn herself from me. It seemed something more or other than merely a changing psychological state in me. It seemed to correspond to some actuality, some real spiritual event. If, indeed, grief is a response to the presence— seeming or real—of the dead, then the end of grief might correspond to some necessary turning away on their part. That walk up to the cathedral might have been, in truth, a farewell.

  The disappearance of the grief is not followed by happiness. It is followed by emptiness. C. S. Lewis in his letter on eternity quoted me as saying that my love for Davy must, in some sense, be killed—and ‘God must do it’. Now perhaps God was doing it. And it was, precisely, my earthly love for her—an earthly love that would endure as long as she seemed near—that was being killed. That love had not died when she died—had not died perhaps in either of us—and it sustained me in the grief that may have been our grief. She had been near me, it seemed, waking and in dreams—especially in that one incredible dream. I had felt her in the wind. I had rushed from London to Oxford to find her in the misty night. I had walked up the streets of Lincoln with her.

  Now all that was gone, leaving emptiness. I wanted the grief again, not for itself but for its corollary: the presence that calls it forth. But it is not allowed. There was only emptiness. I was drained of all emotion. My mother, whom I loved, died, and I could not feel anything. Life had no savour. The Second Death, in many ways, is a harder thing than the first, only of course one has no tears for it.

  I wrote to Lewis about it in November, and in the first half of the November 27th letter already given (the letter, though divided, is complete) he replied:

  It hardly seems a quarter of a year since you were such a welcome visitor in Oxford.

  I note what you say, that you are now in your second bereavement; that which bereaves one of the bereavement itself. And, as you unflinchingly see, it is ‘according to the Law.’ I feel you are probably right in thinking that the fading of the beloved as-she-was is a necessary condition of the trans-mortal and eternal relation. May we not conjecture (am I repeating myself?) that when Our Lord said ‘It is expedient that I go away’ he stated something true par excellence of Himself, but also true, in their degree, of all his followers?

  The Second Death and Davy’s withdrawal towards the Mountains of Eternity—whatever it means—does not of course mean that I love her any the less, though it is a love without the immediacy of the flesh. Because of the dream that raised the Shining Barrier, because of the intense sharing of love and beauty, Christ and death and grief, we were perhaps as close as human beings can be. And the union thus created will, I believe, transcend death: it endures and will endure.

  In her dying I was, as intensely as I could be, with her. Her last words were to me. Her blindly reaching hand found my face, as she knew it would. When I myself come to cross that boundary that she has crossed, I think I shall find her hand and hear her voice first of all. Perhaps by the old lily pond at Glenmerle.

  But in my thoughts of her I come back again and again to that foretaste of eternity on the decks of Grey Goose: the timeless beauty and closeness of the night of the sea-fire. An image, not of the past but of what is to be.

  Under the Mercy.

  The End

  An Afterword on the Genesis

  of A Severe Mercy

  Apart from the question “Where was Glenmerle? ”— stemming from a meaningless appetite for facts irrelevant to what Glenmerle eternally is —the commonest question on A Severe Mercy is “Why did you wait so long to write it? ”This question, implying an original purpose, however infirm, to do so eventually, wants restating as “Why did you write it when you did? ”but the question deserves an answer.

  There was fortunately no original intention to abandon privacy for print. If, indeed, I had immediately attempted a book, it would have been not only a bad book but an immense one, for I should have lacked the will to omit any dear memory and, worse, been quite unable to see the essential shape of what had been.

  Instead, I reflected upon the past, seeing it anew year by year in sharper if more distant perspective. The foothills, as it were, merged with the plain while the blue mountains stood forth. Our life, including her dying, acquired form in my mind. I was, in fact, preparing myself to write a book I didn’t intend to write. Just as a sculptor might contemplate a block of stone, seeing ever more clearly what was within it and only then beginning to remove the stone hiding that form, so I, contemplating the past, saw ever more clearly the essential form, moving in time, hidden within the block of seven thousand days. Art is first a seeing and then a revealing.

  To say how I came at last to write the book, I must explain that I was one of those caught up in the mood and action of the 1960s, especially the Peace Movement. Christ, I thought, would surely have me oppose what appeared an unjust war. But the Movement, whatever its ideals, did a good deal of hating. And Christ, gradually, was p
ushed to the rear: Movement goals, not God, became first, in fact— not only for me but for other Christians involved, including priests. I now think that making God secondary (which in the end is to make Him nothing) is, quite simply, the mortal danger in social action, especially in view of the marked intimations of virtue — even arrogant virtue — that often perilously accompany it. Some may avoid this danger, perhaps. But I was not obeying the first and greatest commandment — to love God first — nor is it clear that I was obeying the second — to love my neighbour. Hating the oppressors of my neighbour isn’t perhaps quite what Christ had in mind.

  But the ‘60s died, save for a few belated bishops just arriving, in the early 70s. For me there came what I was to look back on as a year of nudges towards God —or perhaps twitches on the tether. Small things in themselves, each had the effect of making me thoughtful about my still-distant God. One was simply a book, sent by a friend, in which some familiar C. S. Lewis words on joy (my page 207) were singled out, thus bringing them into sharp focus. I put them on a card and stared at them for months.

  Then one October night I was comfortably reading a detective story in bed. Suddenly in mid-page I was seized by an urgent desire to reread the first Lewis book I’d ever read, Out of the Silent Planet. I fetched it and read the first page, which had nothing significant upon it. Nevertheless, by the time I reached the bottom of that page, I was back in the Obedience. I prayed. God was first.

  Years before, I had given my Lewis letters to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Now I wrote for copies, meanwhile continuing to read Lewis books and Charles Williams, not finishing the detective story until I had read every book, including the scholarly, they had written. When I came home one evening to find my Lewis letters had come from Oxford, I didn’t even take off my coat and scarf until I’d read them all, not without a tear or two for his loving friendship.