Mister God, This is Anna

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

When I Shall Die by Anna

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

Many of the personalities that make the most powerful and transforming impression on us in the world’s literature are the ones we see only or mostly at second hand, not in their own undoctored words. Plato’s Socrates is an obvious example; Boswell’s Johnson a rather weaker one. At another level completely, theologians have long pondered the fact that Jesus left no written word of his own and that we rely on four testimonies to him, of very different sorts, not all of which can claim to be eye-witness record.

And perhaps that is appropriate. If you want to see why a personality makes a difference to his or her contemporaries, you need first to understand that difference itself; and this can only be done by means of testimony. Seeing someone through another person’s eyes, a person close to them, whose life is really shaped by them, will tell you more than the most accurate third person chronicle. Only a very individualistic age could imagine that the most important truths about someone could be established by a supposedly neutral chronicle.

Fynn is as far as possible from being a neutral chronicler. This is passionately involved reporting. And if a superficial reader skimming the pages starts to imagine that this is a Pollyanna-ish story of a wise and saintly child, which can be relegated to a rather tired genre, they have not begun to see what is being done here. The explosive individuality of Anna is not sentimentally touching but sometimes almost frightening. What is it like to confront a child characterised above all by an undeniable spiritual and intellectual authority? It is even harder than an encounter with an adult who demonstrates such authority (and that’s hard enough). Fynn leaves us nothing to patronise in Anna (or in himself), but brings us under a merciless scrutiny such as only a child can exercise.

And the point about knowing someone by seeing the effect they have can be taken a stage further. If you want somebody to understand what the major intellects of the world religions mean by God, you could do a great deal worse than introduce them to Anna. The God we encounter here is in no sense simply another inhabitant of the universe who just happens to be more powerful than any other; nor is he an observer of the created scene from an advantaged position, reacting to our behaviour from outside. As the theologians have said, this is a God whose own bliss and beauty and order are simply the ground, the energy and the context of everything, ‘more intimate to us than we to ourselves’, pressing with a steady loving urge to be manifest to us and so to change us. Anna is memorably sceptical about what happens in church – but in a way that a reader of the gospels will recognise. Religious behaviour that relies on diminishing the human beings involved in it is actually resisting the pressure of God. Anna echoes the incarnate God by saying over and over again, ‘Fear not’.

That, I suppose, is why I find these texts so extraordinary, so inexhaustible. I am being asked over and over again whether when I say I believe in God it is actually God that I believe in. Anna’s God is of course loving and forgiving, just and holy; but he is so much more than any kind of lawgiver, whether lenient or strict. His law is his being, as the philosophers say; and his being demands of us the utmost in both love and intellect, so that passion for God can open for us the casements of that mathematical and scientific wonder that exhilarates Anna and her chronicler.

C.S. Lewis once wrote about the sort of book that was like a ‘mouthwash for the imagination’ – clearing out clichés and tired or lazy images and ideas. These books are like that. I hope that a new edition will introduce a new generation of this formidable and astonishing figure – and to the God she lived (and lives) with.

Dr Rowan Williams

Archbishop of Canterbury

December 2003

Introduction

Vernon Sproxton

There are good books, indifferent books, and bad books. Amongst the good books some are honest, inspiring, moving, prophetic, and improving. But in my language there is another category: there are Ah! Books. This is one of them. Ah! Books are those which induce a fundamental change in the reader’s consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. Ah! Books are galvanic. They touch the nerve-centre of the whole being so that the reader receives an almost palpable physical shock. A tremor of excited perception ripples through the person.

Ah! Books don’t come all that often, at least not my way. André Malraux’s The Psychology of Art was one of them. It was published just after the war. It was too expensive to buy, but I located a copy of this luminous book in the Manchester Art Gallery; and I had to make several journeys by motor-cycle, often through sleet and snow, until I had finished it. From time to time I wanted to get up on the table and proclaim its truth to all around me, or slap my desk-neighbour over the back and say, ‘There you are; just get hold of that!’ Once I nearly did but, just in time, I noticed that he was reading a text on the structure of plastics. By now, of course, I know that some people can get as much aesthetic pleasure out of contemplating the formula for a long molecule as others do from beholding a mural by Piero della Francesca. Technologists have their Ah! moments, too!

Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever way you handle them, they widen your vision. For they are essentially Idea-creating, in the sense that Coleridge meant when he described the Idea as containing future thought – as opposed to the Epigram which encapsulates past thought. Ah! Books give the impression that you are opening a new account, not closing an old one down.

So for me, at any rate, this is an Ah! Book, and has been since the manuscript first came my way; from the very first sentence, too. ‘The diffrense from a person and an angel is easy. Most of an angel is in the inside and most of a person is on the outside.’ A few seconds’ thought and then – the tingle in the mind. I remembered the poet Norman Nicholson, as a young man on the cricket field, newly come to T. S. Eliot’s use of common speech in poetry, incanting between overs, ‘The young man carbuncular arrives … on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’ That was a sentence which gave a fresh look to language. This was one which gave a fresh look to holiness.

It was the repristinizing of religious language which struck me forcibly when the manuscript of this book first came into my hands; except, of course, that there was by no means what a publisher calls a manuscript. There were a few pages hesitantly and anonymously offered by a friend of the author who wished to remain humbly and unobtrusively in the background. But these were enough to show that, whoever he was, the writer, though by no means an accomplished literary man, had a quick eye for the human scene, a warm regard for his fellows and, above all, a mind of great originality which appeared to have either escaped from or never been subjected to the processing which normally marks people who write about such matters. I read those first few pages over and over again until I was pursued by Fynn and Anna as a kind of literary puzzle. I tried to make an Identiwrit picture of the author and his background: a man certainly thinking his way through to the frontiers of thought; a scientifically trained parson or a theologically astute scientist; in any event someone who was attempting to communicate a message of some sort, and was finding that purely logical forms would not bear the burden of his meaning; an inventor of a mini-myth. For Alice in Wonderland read Anna in Bethnal Green. Whoever he was, the few dog-eared pages sharpened the appetite for more. I could hardly wait for the following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T. B. Macaulay walking from Cambridge to meet the London coach bearing the next instalment of the Waverley Novels. (Much to the disgust of his father, incidentally, who believed that novels were no fit occupation for a scholar and a gentleman!) There grew in me a mastering curiosity to meet the author, if only to confirm my guesses.

We met. And I was wrong – at least in large part. Fynn disguises nobody but Fynn. At the time of writing I have known him for a couple of years. But there is another way in which I have known him all my life. For there is about him that transparent vulnerability which makes for a total and immediate correspondence with anyone who is prepared to throw prejudices to the wind and celebrate life as a lump of mysterious and joyful awe. But all the speculation about a trained scientist or theologian with imaginative leanings and communication problems was pretty wide of the mark. Fynn, thank God, was not trained as either of these. Intelligent to the eyelashes and with a gargantuan appetite for knowledge, Fynn was early advised to eschew (may his adviser rest in peace) universities and other institutions for the purveying of processed thought. So most of his formative thinking took place far from the quads and colleges and punted rivers amongst the small streets, warehouses, and canals of the East End. But with his modest job and his Woolworth’s do-it-yourself laboratory he produced thought to which few PhDs have approximated. If in doubt, thumb through the theses lodged in the libraries of the universities: ‘Four Methods of Washing a Cup’, ‘The Social Life of the Sperm Whale’, ‘The Water-absorbing Properties of Pink Geraniums’! It is no disrespect to sperm whales, or for that matter tea-cups and geraniums, to say that Fynn has produced something qualitatively different from PhD-thinking and which would probably not have emerged if during those critical years he had had to attend twice-weekly tutorials on logical positivism which was then raising its airy-fairy head.

Fynn is a large man; tall, and once on a day enormously strong; and not only physically large but mentally very masculine, with a bold aggressive intelligence compounded of that mixture of credulity and scepticism which is always prepared to abandon well-trodden ground for intellectually virgin territory. But on the other hand he has a strongly developed feminine side which can only be described as skin stretched over tenderness. I remember sitting with him one night talking about his early experiments with mirrors and Meccano. (Now he uses computers made up from surplus W.D. junk.) And then he started discussing people who were maladjusted or had fallen on bad times and with whom he had worked for a large chunk of his life. And he did so with such deep insight and total acceptance that his attitude could only be described as love. As I watched and listened my mind began to search around for some historical person of whom he reminded me: who also had had little formal education, and whose feminine and masculine streaks co-existing made an inner dialectic which produced a creative vitality. At last, as the night folded us in a brotherhood of discussion and debate, the name dropped out of the memory. It was that of Leonardo da Vinci.

Fynn has suffered: suffered not only physically, mentally, and emotionally; but has also suffered spiritually in that total solitariness, isolation, and abandonment which, however close one’s friends and relatives may be, becomes a terrifying experience for the lonely being. The men of the Middle Ages were right to describe it as ‘a dark night of the soul’. Fynn is still partially disabled from a psycho-physical injury. But he is now in process of throwing away his crutches with an almost insolent, hilarious impudence, relying on his own grit and gumption, and the grace and goodness of his fairly recently acquired wife. And all this makes Fynn the sort of person who gives you the impression that though he has been tossed about by life his feet have firmly touched the bottom.

So Fynn is the author of this book; and he is who he was, and who he is. He has an address and a telephone number. He is pretending to be nobody other than himself. But a very real and permanent part of his being is – Anna.

Now, to tell a plain and honest tale, I did not need convincing that the East End had bred and moulded Fynn. I knew the East End thirty years and more ago and the cameos he makes of that rich, gay, almost voluptuous life are cut from the flesh. That marvellous Cockney Mum, the soft-hearted brassy Venus de Mile End, the garrulous Night People; I knew and loved such people by the hundred.

But Anna … She was qualitatively different, and she had me puzzled, not so much because of her flamboyant precociousness, but because I needed a good deal more documentation of her uniqueness. To begin with, I found it hard to believe that anyone could have existed at that age who was so untouched by the constraining type of education available at that time, and whose precocity took the form of devastating challenges to the received way of construing things; and more so, when her nascent philosophy went to the heart of some problems of spiritual perception and the nature of being which are precisely contemporary. And I questioned the intimate physical relationship between Fynn and Anna which, even in these permissive days, will undoubtedly be offensive to many well-meaning ladies who are in good standing with the executive committee of the Mothers’ Union.

But these problems began to resolve themselves as soon as I met Fynn. There is another quality about him which transcends his masculinity and femininity; the only word I can use to describe it is Innocence. No doubt he is touched by original sin, whatever that may mean, and many of the things that frail flesh is heir to. He is not amongst the ever-sanctified. But there is about him a touch of that engaging, wide-eyed, winsome innocence which mankind must have had before the Fall, and which would permit a youth and a young girl to snuggle up in bed together in a way which was completely innocent (there the word is again) of any sexuality. In fact the simple honesty of their relationship reminded me of the practices of the subintroductae – those virgins who slept with the early Christian fathers without intercourse taking place – which had to be abandoned in the fourth century because Cyprian and others were worried about SCANDALS; and of which Charles Williams writes in The Descent of the Dove (London, 1939 and 1950, p. 13): ‘It was one of the earliest triumphs of “the weaker brethren”, those innocent sheep who by mere volume of imbecility have trampled over many delicate and attractive flowers in Christendom. It is the loss, so early, of a tradition whose departure left the Church rather over-aware of sex, when it might have been creating a polarity with which sex is only partly coincident.’

The other credibility problems resolved themselves when I realized that Fynn lives on dialectic. It is not simply that he has a great appetite for dialogue with people. He gives the appearance of being in a kind of reciprocal tension with all phenomena all the time. He is a man of furious intellectual energy. It is as though his mind is processing data (and not only that of number) at every moment and perceiving and printing out new and significant patterns of relationships.

It was into this dialectical orbit that Anna fortuitously swam, and suddenly found her spirit lifted up to see the world with different eyes from other children and to refuse the blinkers which both school-ma’am and parson had readily to hand in their pre-packed word-parcels. If Fynn needed Anna, Anna also, and just as specifically, needed Fynn. And it stands to reason that the problems which they teased away at together were the problems which obsessed Fynn. And it also follows that the problems which have preoccupied him over the intervening years have naturally become contemporary. In other words this dialectical relationship shaped the Anna story. An analogy from the Christian story casts some light upon this problem.

The first three Gospels represent the words and deeds of Jesus which the early Church found useful and necessary for their domestic life of living, and teaching, and explaining. With the passage of time the continuous use made the form. So Fynn, continuously reflecting on and remembering and re-evaluating his life with Anna, within the context of his own intellectual growth, formed the Anna story and its meaning. Just as the Fourth Gospel is a theological work, where perhaps one pregnant sentence spoken by Jesus (like, ‘I am the bread of life’) is expounded by putting words into the mouth of Jesus, so, it seems to me, Fynn has taken an Idea of Anna, expressed in a lapidary way and, grasping its meaning, has worked out its significance so that the Ah! of it makes a dramatic impact on bears of very little brain like me.

Even so, some readers may remain incredulous. They will ask, ‘Is it true?’ Now I happen to believe that it is true in the way they are asking the question. But then I know Fynn. I have seen the documents in the case: the notes, the drawings, the essays, the music. But there is a sense in which the relics have nothing to do with the truth of this, any more than the truth of the myth of the Garden of Eden would be enhanced by the discovery of a fossilized apple with a couple of bites taken from it!

What is Truth? Pilate raised the question and wisely declined to answer it, realizing no doubt that all political truth is necessarily tainted. But Søren Kierkegaard did make an attempt at answering the same question; and many people have found it satisfying as a rough-and-ready measure for that kind of truth which cannot be measured on the laboratory bench. The truth, he wrote, is what ennobles. It is, in other words, that which makes you a better being. It is in that realm that the truth of Mister God, This is Anna is finally to be found. It is an ennobling tale which greatly widens our perception and touches the heart. And it does so in a way which defies the processes of logic. We cannot find words to explain how it works its spell. But, as Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Nobel prize speech, ‘Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into the realm beyond words … It is like that small mirror in the fairy tales – you glance in it and what you see is not yourself; for an instant you glimpse the Inaccessible, where no horse or magic carpet can take you. And the soul cries out for it.’

This book has the same kind of transporting magic. Fynn and Anna, with their mirror-book and all their other simple impedimenta, allow us to glimpse the Inaccessible. They would never have won a Nobel prize for literature. They do, however, make me congratulate myself on having joined the human race. Above all they put back the Ah! into that mixture of mess and marvel which makes the mystery of our mortal life.

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