Coffeehouse gig with PowerPoint

Some biographers are like rescue workers, digging through that collapsed structure known as history for those who have been forgotten. Others gravitate toward the already-famous, hoping to come up with an angle.

In other words, do you choose Robert Frost’s “road less traveled,” or do you choose Robert Frost? Will Vaus has seen it from both sides.

For awhile, Vaus was one of a handful of experts on C.S. Lewis. Then two blockbuster movies were made from Lewis’ “Narnia” books, and suddenly that field became very crowded.

Vaus’ appearance at the White Hart in Lynchburg this Saturday (3 p.m.) is still somewhat Lewis related, but it will be largely focused on a lesser-known player in the world of literature — the late Lynchburg College professor Sheldon Vanauken.

This isn’t the usual coffeehouse gig. Vaus, a theologian and writer who now lives in the Virginia hamlet of Monterey, will be unaccompanied by guitar, voice or bongo drums. Rather, he will be playing the PowerPoint projector.

“I’ve known Ed Hopkins (owner of the White Hart) for years,” Vaus said, “and I did a similar thing (there) last year with C.S. Lewis and Narnia. It went well, I thought.”

Vaus’ interest in Vanauken goes, he said, “way back. I was in high school when I picked up a copy of ‘A Severe Mercy,’ which talks a lot about C.S. Lewis. The funny thing is, I couldn’t make it through the first chapter. Then, I read it again later and got hooked by it. I’ve had other people say the same thing.”

When he was a student at Princeton, Vaus formed a C.S. Lewis Club and invited Vanauken to speak to it.

“He sent me a very nice letter explaining that he was a writer, not a speaker, and thus would have to decline,” Vaus recalled. “He did tell me to stop in and see him if I was ever in the South.”

Eventually, Vaus took him up on that offer.

“Unfortunately, it was in 1996, the year that he died,” Vaus recalled. “I really regret that.”

A more appropriate time for Vaus’ presentation might have been a week later, for Sheldon Vanauken and his wife, Davy, were a Valentine’s Day story for the ages.

After they met and fell in love in college, Sheldon and Davy (full name: Jean Palmer Davis) made a vow to share everything in life. Lots of newlyweds do that, but in this case, that included deciding not to have children, because motherhood was not a shareable experience. When Vanauken used some of the money from an inheritance to buy a sailboat, he named it “the Grey Goose,” after a bird that remains true to one mate throughout life.

Davy died of a liver disease in 1955, not long after Vanauken had returned to Lynchburg College after a sabbatical to Oxford. Out of his devastation came “A Severe Mercy,” which was published in 1977 and won a National Book Award.

I remember Sheldon Vanauken for two things — the postcards he used to send me commenting on something I’d written or gently correcting a misspelling, and the story about his British sports car. A group of LC students known as the “Merry Pranksters” picked up Vanauken’s little vehicle one night and somehow got it into the school library, where it was discovered the next morning.

When Vanauken was told that the students might be suspended for their prank, he replied: “Oh, no. We need more of that.”