Books in Brief: A Severe Mercy

A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken (Harper, 238 pp., $6.95). The rich man’s son and the minister’s daughter meet by accident. Looking back almost forty years, Professor Vanauken tells what happened to him and Jean next. Ten months later they were secretly married—and still teenagers. They went through the Second World War in Hawaii (he was a naval officer). Their love was a grande passion, and they fashioned a marriage that reflected their solipsism, their specialness, their imperviousness to the world. After the war they went to Oxford for postgraduate study, and there they met, and socialized with, C. S. Lewis. Soon they were caught, as Lewis said, “in the meshes of the net,” for they had decided the time had come to “look into” Christianity. Together, and with Lewis’ tender counsel (the book contains many letters from Lewis, never published before), they climbed the mountain of Struggle, and were swept into the blue distances of Faith. They returned to America, and within a couple of years Jean took sick and, still a young woman, died. Her wordless adieu, the young husband’s fathomless grief, C. S. Lewis’ marvelous support that included the acknowledgment of sadness and the cry of joy—these are the piercing motifs of the “real” part of this highly personal, irresistibly emotional, disturbingly objective account of a young man’s awesome liberation. It was Lewis who pointed out that the solipsism of their springtime love could not have lasted, that Christ had penetrated the wall that had kept the world out, and that it was finally a mercy, a “severe mercy,” to let Jean go now, in order to translate the springtime into a different eternity.

WR

About the Author

William F. Rickenbacker

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A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken (Harper, 238 pp., $6.95). The rich man’s son and the minister’s daughter meet by accident. Looking back almost forty years, Professor Vanauken tells what happened to him and Jean next. Ten months later they were secretly married—and still teenagers. They went through the Second World War in Hawaii (he was a naval officer). Their love was a grande passion, and they fashioned a marriage that reflected their solipsism, their specialness, their imperviousness to the world. After the war they went to Oxford for postgraduate study, and there they met, and socialized with, C. S. Lewis. Soon they were caught, as Lewis said, “in the meshes of the net,” for they had decided the time had come to “look into” Christianity. Together, and with Lewis’ tender counsel (the book contains many letters from Lewis, never published before), they climbed the mountain of Struggle, and were swept into the blue distances of Faith. They returned to America, and within a couple of years Jean took sick and, still a young woman, died. Her wordless adieu, the young husband’s fathomless grief, C. S. Lewis’ marvelous support that included the acknowledgment of sadness and the cry of joy—these are the piercing motifs of the “real” part of this highly personal, irresistibly emotional, disturbingly objective account of a young man’s awesome liberation. It was Lewis who pointed out that the solipsism of their springtime love could not have lasted, that Christ had penetrated the wall that had kept the world out, and that it was finally a mercy, a “severe mercy,” to let Jean go now, in order to translate the springtime into a different eternity.