Book Recommendation: A Severe Mercy
Sheldon Vanauken's memoir reminds us of the pain of beauty
A version of this essay first appeared on my blog, roadstainedfeet.wordpress.com.
If you ever recommend a book to me - and I hope you do - you might find me returning the favor by recommending the same book back to you a few years later. Many years ago, one of my sisters told me I should read A Severe Mercy, a memoir by one of C.S. Lewis’s students which told about falling in love with a girl named Davy, marrying her, feeling drawn slowly to Christianity, but finally losing Davy to a long illness. I tucked the book somewhere in my cluttered mind attic but didn’t read it. Then a different friend gave me a copy for my twenty-fourth birthday, but I still didn’t read it. Finally, I read the book during 2020, that year of attaining many “maybe somedays,” and quite insufferably told my sister that she should read this AMAZING book. She was gracious.
I had a lump in my throat for two-thirds of A Severe Mercy and tears on my cheeks for the other third. It’s a love story: a tragic, triumphant, heroic, beautiful, painful love story. If you’ve known what it is to “fall into friendship” before you fell in love, a lot of this book will resonate with you. If you’re not into love stories, that’s okay – this book has even more philosophy and searching for the good life.
Van and Davy met in the late 1930s and had barely a decade and a half together, but those years were filled with a world war, a couple years of schooning around the Caribbean (!), going to Oxford, befriending C.S. Lewis, converting to Christianity, living a faithful marriage, and altogether sharing a timeless love that they put their all into defending.
Though the book was written by Van, or perhaps because we see everything through his eyes, I just adore the character of Davy. She's one of those brilliant, feisty, talented women who manages to be both self-effacing and unforgettable in her eagerness to live and do and be for others: in short, a heroine. In heaven, I hope we can be best friends.
One of my favorite quotes comes from Van’s recollections of their first date, when he realized that Davy, like him, felt that beauty could be painful.
“A girl who liked the sea and owls and dogs and poetry: Good heavens! A girl of girls! Then — then she said something about how beauty hurts. ‘What! You, too?’ I exclaimed, in effect. ‘You know that? The pain of beauty? I thought I was the only one.’ Whether love was born that night, I cannot certainly say: friendship was.”
This “pain of beauty” – the Germans have a word for the wistful longing that beauty stirs, sehnsucht. C.S. Lewis talks about it in Surprised by Joy. We know that beauty is transient, and *we* are transient, but it’s not just mortality that makes beauty hurt. Beauty highlights the rest of the world’s brokenness and ugliness and clarifies our desire for a real, lasting, eternal peace.
This hints about the book’s title, A Severe Mercy. There is “a mercy that was as severe as death, a death that was as merciful as love.” I won’t say more about how that mercy unfolds in the lives of Van and Davy, but trust that it’s a very painful read. Vanauken does not gloss over doubts, missteps, or agonies.
Yet it’s a beautiful book because of, not in spite of, its pain.