Anglophilia and A Severe Mercy

 

“So surrender the hunger to say you must know,

Have the courage to say ‘I believe,’
For the power of paradox opens your eyes,
And blinds those who say they can see.”

-Michael Card “God’s Own Fool”

I’m part of a group of American Evangelicals that I think of as The Anglophiles. They often homeschool. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved British stuff. I grew up on a steady diet of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster, and Joan Hickson as (the only) Miss Marple. Mr. Darcy was upheld as the ideal of all manhood.

My dad read me The Chronicles of Narnia, followed by The Hobbit, followed by that fiction above all other fiction, The Lord of the Rings. Charles Dickens, Terry Pratchett, and G.K. Chesterton number themselves among my favorite authors (lucky sods). I practice my Oxford English, Irish, Scottish, Cockney, and Geordie accents whenever I read aloud to my younger siblings. Just about the only thing I dislike is British music; I loathe the Beatles. But I eagerly devour British-inspired music.

When I started reading Sheldon “Van” Vanauken’s memoir A Severe Mercy, I was immediately swept into his familiar love. Like me, Van grew up immersed in British Lit., even though his childhood spanned the 1920s, and not the 2000s. He read Sherlock Holmes and Treasure Island – “As a child England had seemed much nearer than New York or the cowboy west.” When he finally went up to Oxford, he said it “was like coming home, coming to a home half-remembered – but home.” (EX-actly, I thought).

Van was one of the early Anglophiles, just like me. He was also an incorrigible romantic, a lover of beauty and goodness and all that is fair. He had the extraordinary luck to step into Oxford while the Inklings still lived. He and his wife, Davy, became good friends with C.S. Lewis, read Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton, and were converted to Christianity. They entertained dozens of deep thinkers at their little apartment in downtown Oxford.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty - Except It Isn't

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is a line written by romantic poet John Keats. Being a Christian and having a philosophical bent, I'd always thought he meant the truth is beautiful, but as Doug McKelvey points out in this terrific article over on the Rabbit Room, he meant just the opposite. It means that if a thing is beautiful, it is the truth. If it makes me feel good, it is good.

McKelvey's article challenges the idea that art can be meaningless, an outpouring of pointless emotion. Instead, he declares the Christian belief that there is intrinsic meaning in everything, that that idea extends even to abstract art and stream-of-consciousness writing. It's also harder to do right, but it's worth it. Because, after all, if...

If things meant something, if art incarnated ideas and if ideas had consequences, if truth was not the same as beauty (at least not in the way that Keats believed it), then I was responsible for the impact of the things I made and therefore had need to be sensitive and discerning. It wasn’t enough just to spin evocative, poetic phrases that were fragments of no greater whole. This was a holier vocation than I had imagined.

Meaningless art is just the easy way out. As a writer who spends a lot of time crafting, and, as Hemingway said, "getting the words right", this affirmation of the try-again-and-again-till-it's-just-right approach versus the flash-bang!-inspiration-equals-automatic-product school is refreshing. (Even better, he called it a holy vocation. Cool.)

McKelvey believes that, as Flannery O'Connor said, there are "lines of spiritual motion" in everything, and it is the artist's job to discover them. And it might mean there's a greater romance than the romantics every dreamed. What is it? Read the article to find out.

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