And yet the horror is a woman still;
It grieves because it cannot stroke your hair
“SONNET XXI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
April 1954
My first spring in England was like the first day of being alive in the world, a deaf woman’s first chord of Beethoven. Daffodils, tulips, and blue primroses the color of sky filled London in wild bursts. The anemones and bluebells and star-faced daisies were overwhelming in their intricate beauty. Like the Greek goddess of spring, Persephone, it arrived in a slow seduction. First the cherry trees, scattering their pink-white petals through the air like snow, then the currant bushes with their fiery blossoms. Gardens erupted with earth’s desire to create a torrent of color and aroma.
It was now April, the boys were home from school for the holidays, and soon we would leave for the Kilns. I would again see Jack, his smile turned up at the corners, eyes crinkling under his spectacles, cigarette ash falling onto his lap.
I allowed the boys to sleep a little longer before I roused them for our journey to Oxford.
It had been late January when I’d dropped Davy and Douglas off at Waterloo Station with a tall, Adonis-like man they called a headmaster. Other little boys in uniform, clean and buttoned, gathered like a herd of baby lambs around the man, who, in his bowtie and jacket, drew my sons to him as if he’d known them all along. This, I thought, was the exact right decision. Though the boys had said they didn’t want to go, I could see the goodness in it. I would miss them, and yet I felt a sense of relief. They would be educated, well, and taken care of, and I could work again to provide for us.
January then birthed a winter so fierce and frigid that I’d given it a name—Fimbulwinter, after the great Norse winters that came right before the end of the world. I wrote like death was knocking at my door and my work could convince its dark specter to depart. It’s not the best way to write—in a panic of poverty—but it was all the inspiration I had. In four months I’d finished a novel called Britannia and also written at least twenty-two short stories, which I sent to my agent at Brandt and Brandt.
Nothing sold.
I had also ripped away anything in Smoke on the Mountain that sounded “American” and then sent it off to the English publisher, who wanted it because Jack had agreed to write the foreword. In it he’d said, For the Jewish fierceness, being here also modern and feminine, can be very quiet; the paw looked as if it were velveted, till we felt the scratch.
Is this about my work or about me? I wondered, but didn’t ask.
I even took out my mentions of Ingrid Bergman and Ginger Rogers, as the publisher was fearful they might sue me for using them as examples of breaking the Ten Commandments.
I worked on King Charles and tinkered with Queen Cinderella. From afar my life might appear not so much miserable as difficult; one might believe that my choice to leave America hadn’t worked out very well. But non! No matter the dingy and damp basement job at European Press, where I used Dexedrine to keep myself awake, or the poverty, or the sleep deprivation, I felt I was becoming—in some way—my true self. As I told one of my sci-fi boys, “For such a long while there was a breach between the woman I mean to be and the woman I am, and now that gap is closing, slowly. It just ain’t so pretty in the becoming.”
Meanwhile, I’d taken Jack up on his offer to pay for the boys’ schooling through his Agape Fund. I hated to take his money, and I’d been skipping lunches, making things stretch as far as I could, with the intention of paying him back—I had every intention of all my writing paying off. I also begged and nagged and pleaded with Bill for more money, but one could not squeeze water from a stone. He was out of work again, and I highly suspected he was back with Renee, although he wrote to me that it was only friendship. But this was the same man who had married me days after his first divorce was final, which ours was not yet. It was ekeing along as slowly as a snail in mud.
The month before I had awakened one morning to a man’s face on the pillow next to mine: Harry Williams from the sci-fi crowd. His soft snore let me know he was still asleep. We’d flirted for a few weeks, and then one night when the whiskey and the thick beer had done their intoxicating job, we admitted that we both needed some love, and not the permanent kind or the I’ll-take-care-of-you kind. Just the variety that warmed the last of winter’s chill from our bodies.
It didn’t last long, this brief, tepid affair, but it was enough to quench a rising hunger for touch and skin. It was only Jack I wanted to be near, but it was Harry with his jolly Cockney accent, deep belief in aliens on other planets, and large soft hands who slept next to me that morning and a scattering of others.
This was a sin. I wasn’t a fool; I knew the commandments of my religion. I wrote about them. Still I fell. And repented. And fell again. Maybe I always would, but somehow grace felt big enough, sturdy enough as I stood again, resolute to do better. Meanwhile, I wrote my sonnets. I eased the pain and loneliness by forging sheaves of poetry no one would ever read.
My friendship with Jack and Warnie grew—we wrote back and forth as always, our conversations pausing and beginning again, making plans to meet in London or Oxford. On rare times we chatted on the crackling phone in the hallway.
My most pleasurable hours were either with the writing crowd on Thursday nights or typing Jack’s biography, both critiquing and editing as he’d asked. Surprised by Joy, it was titled. He was coming to depend on me with his work, but alas, the title had nothing to do with me! Slowly I ran my eyes over his handwriting, able to decipher even phrases he couldn’t read after he’d written them from his inkwell.
During these hours of typing Surprised by Joy, my emotions swung wildly. His words, the means by which I had first come to love him, now told me of his childhood and life, and it only made me love him all the more. I read much of what he’d already told me: the pain of losing his mother when he was ten years old; the horrific boarding school; the war and its horrors. I also spied parts of our relationship in the telling of his story, or did I only see what I desired? Whether it was the description of his conversion sounding similar to mine, or the phrasing of a thought he’d voiced on our long walks through the moors, nettles stinging our ankles and laughter following us high into the hills.
And my sons—on Sundays I would worship at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, where I had once been cleansed by the one o’clock bells, and then hop the train to visit them in Surrey. Those visits were the lifeblood I needed to begin another week.
As spring arrived, the trees covered in milky mist as they moved toward green, I walked for miles and miles through London. I sat in Primrose Park with a notebook and ball pen overlooking Hampstead and Belsize. I spread an inexpensive orange blanket I’d found in the market on the thick grass to write and revel in earth’s rebirth: the May trees, the roses everywhere, the rhododendron and elder trees competing in a beauty contest. It was there that I plotted Queen Cinderella with Warnie’s outline as a guide. I felt like she could be a real moneymaker, something to free me from begging Bill for money or depending on Jack for the boys’ education.
I also planted a small garden behind our Avoco House room, and by April the vegetables were just beginning to sprout from the ground. Sometimes I would imagine a green bean or tomato busting forth and be taken back in a rush to my garden on Staatsburg. But by then another family lived there, other children ran through its acreage and splashed in its creek. I hoped they were happier than we’d been.
Do you miss it? Jack had asked in a letter a few weeks before.
I felt inside myself, poked around for the answer. No, I’d written. I mourn what it could have been. I feel sad for what I wanted it to be but it never was. Maybe I miss the idea of what I wanted for all of us. But no, I don’t miss what was.
Never had a man been such an integral part of my life without also being in my bed. It was taking some getting used to, and included some heartache to boot.
But on this April morning, instead of typing more of Jack’s biography or forging another sonnet (now numbering more than thirty), I took the quiet time to mend my boys’ frayed clothes and sew name tags on their new shirts and pants. My little calico cat, Sambo, curled in my lap, and I worked around his soft, purring body.
The boys awoke without my prodding, and soon they came running into the hallway, their traveling clothes buttoned and ready. Sambo flew from my lap, and Davy tripped, landing flat on his bottom. Douglas roared with laughter, staying on his feet with a deft move.
“Stupid cat,” Davy screamed, and Sambo was off, hiding beneath the couch.
“I’m ready, Mommy,” Douglas said, and his voice contained the tiniest hint of an English accent, the mommy sounding a bit like mummy.
“Douglas, my poogle. You’re starting to sound like a proper English boy,” I said.
“I’m practicing,” he said. “American accents can get you beat up, you see. Other boys can go barmy with it.”
“Barmy?” My voice held restrained laughter.
“It means crazy.”
“I know what it means, Douglas. It sounds quite proper coming from you. I like it.” I placed my forefinger on his chin and tilted his face to mine. “Are you getting beat up?”
“No, Mommy.” He glared at Davy. “And neither is Davy.”
Davy stood by quietly, back on his feet with an angry look.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Douglas stood taller.
“Well then, are you both ready to go to the Kilns?” I asked.
“Very,” Douglas said. “I wish we could just live there. Let Mr. Lewis teach us instead of going back to that school.”
Davy poked at Douglas with a closed fist against his arm. “It ain’t so bad.” He glared at his brother.
Douglas beamed then. “I’m going to help Paxford plant some fir trees and new green bean stalks.”
“Then we best be going to Paddington Station,” I said.
We arrived at the welcoming green door and pressed the same thumb latch to be greeted by the same Mrs. Miller. The same bellowing voices came as Jack and Warnie arrived in the back hallway.
Without the need of coats and bundling, we were off into the springtime land of the Kilns before our suitcases were even unpacked. The boys ran into the woods and out of sight, leaving me to stand in the newly sprouted garden with Jack and Warnie. I touched the very tip of a tomato plant, its tiny frond just sprouting from the earth. “The earth is waking up.”
Warnie laughed and dug his foot deeper into the damp soil as if planting himself. “I think Paxford is trying to show off for you. On your last visit you gave him advice and now he wants to prove that his garden is worthy.”
“Worthy? Cat’s whiskers indeed. This land could go without a man to tend it. What rich soil.” I bent down and scooped a handful into my palm, allowed the dirt to run through my fingers. Looking up, I approached the next subject gingerly, with care.
“Jack, when you describe joy in your biography, I realize that sometimes I can’t feel that emotion, as if it’s left me for good. But right now, with the garden just about to burst wide open, and the boys laughing out there in the woods, hearing them and knowing they’re here, I believe I feel it again.”
Warnie let out a sound very close to a sigh. “Jack’s first taste of joy was in a little garden.”
Jack nodded, and he too bent down and picked up a handful of dirt, cupped his other hand overtop and shook it before releasing it to the ground. “Yes,” he said. “Have you come to that part yet? When I was sick as a child and couldn’t leave the bed, Warnie went outside and made me a little box, a little fairy garden as it were. Inside a biscuit tin he set twigs and moss, tiny flowers and grass, even pebbles. It was a veritable world as small as a hand. And I felt it, the simplest joy. It was a mystical quality, and I’ve spent most of my life looking for it ever since.” He smiled. “It is a feeling that jumps up under one’s ribs.”
“And here you have it,” I said. “Joy.” I pointed at myself in jest; a great smile spread across my face.
“Yes, indeed we do.” Jack released that laughter I loved.
“But honestly,” I said, “the way you describe it is palpable. It’s a word that barely has a description, but you find a way—how it is a reminder.”
“And isn’t it odd,” Warnie said and slapped his walking stick to the ground, “how he states that misery feels much the same as joy at first feels?”
I nodded.
“Quite,” was all Jack said. He seemed embarrassed that we talked of his work as he stood there. He fell silent and ambled a few feet ahead of us, swinging his walking stick. We traipsed along the soggy path toward the pond, where the boys’ cheers echoed. The air smelled of lost rain and fetid earth, of green and of birth. I inhaled deeply.
When I drew closer to Jack he looked from the ground to my eyes. “And what have you thought of it so far?”
I touched his coat sleeve and smiled at him. “When I type your words and read your work, I know this: our experience is alike, from the surprising mystical quality of nature to open our hearts to the reluctant conversion. How could I have anything but wonderful things to report?”
He nodded.
“And I think you’re right about the misery,” I said. “There’s a certain pleasure in the acuteness of that agony, in the piercing of the heart. It’s not the same as joy, but isn’t it?” I paused. “As you wrote, ‘joy is different than happiness or pleasure and it is never in our power.’”
“‘Surprised by joy—impatient as the wind,’” he said, quoting Wordsworth, the poem from which he took his title.
I replied in same. “‘I turned to share the transport, Oh! With whom but thee.’”
“Indeed,” he said quietly and then took me in with his gaze, steady and still. “Nothing is ever wasted on you, is it? I believe more than anyone I know, you are enchanted by this world and its sentiments.”
I couldn’t respond to this compliment, to the vision he had of the woman I was and always had been. Had anyone ever known me so well? I allowed the intimacy to linger between us for a moment before I drew a breath and kept on. “If people are expecting you to reveal secrets of your life in this biography, they’re going to be disappointed.”
“It’s meant to be a story of conversion, not a tell-all,” he said.
“Of course. You aren’t quite the tell-all type.” I tipped my imaginary hat to him with a laugh. “To me it feels like the story of a conversion that is ever unfolding, as if you could write this book for all your life. But there is something I want to ask you,” I said quietly, so Warnie would not hear.
“Yes?”
“I see parts of us in your work, pieces of our relationship and our discussions.” I swallowed. “Is this true?”
“Of course it’s true. How could you not be part of it? But if anything has crossed the line, you must point it out, because nothing would be said or done without your permission, or if plagiarized.”
“No, Jack! Nothing like that. But when you describe your conversion, for example, the way it sneaked up on you, the ‘reluctant’ conversion, it’s like my essay.”
He shook his head. “Your description rang the same bell as mine.”
I didn’t feel he was stealing my words, and I didn’t want him to think so either—he’d started this book long before he met me. I wanted him to see that we’d landed on the same shoreline after two disparate shipwrecks, that our love wasn’t merely intellectual, but also spiritual—I pointed at our inevitability.
We reached the pond’s edge, and Douglas ran to Jack. “Mr. Lewis, can we go out in the canoe?” He pointed to the red punt sinking into the new-soft spring earth. “Please? It was too cold last time.”
“Of course you may, son, but don’t go scaring my two ducks. They aren’t used to such exuberance. They’re accustomed to two old men piddling about.”
“Old men?” I said. “Ha!”
Jack bent over to help my sons drag the punt from the mud with a great sucking noise. With effort, and merry laughter, they launched from the dock with a paddle. The boat shimmied and rocked and then settled on the lake, ripples radiating outward, a circle of misplaced water that reached the shore’s edge to dance with the tall grass.
We stood watching until Jack roared out to the boys, “Narnia and the North!”
“Narnia and the North,” they cried in unison, raising their fists as they paddled to the far edge of the pond.
Jack then turned to me with such a serious expression I at once thought something wrong. “I would like to talk to you about something, Joy.”
“Anything. What is it?”
“Warnie,” he said and turned to his brother, “would you mind very much making sure those young chaps don’t drown while I return to the house with Joy? I’d like to ask her opinion on Cambridge.”
“I believe it is a task I am fit for,” Warnie said and smiled.
Settled into the common room at the Scrabble table, Jack took his lovely time tamping tobacco into his pipe and lighting it with a match. Then he looked to me, smoke curling from his lips, the sweet aroma of the rich tobacco filling my senses.
“Joy, I’ve been offered a job at Cambridge and I’ve turned it down, but now I’m having my doubts. I’ve talked to Tollers and wondered if you too would delve into the problem with me.”
“Problem?” I asked. “Aren’t you honored?”
“Of course. It’s Cambridge.” He drew on his pipe. “And they’ve created a position just for me. Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.”
“Oh, Jack. That’s simply wonderful.” I leaned my elbows on the table, avoiding the tiles, and told him, “When I first visited it last year, I wrote to Bill and told him how much I loved it, how it is more compact and harmonious than Oxford, more Old World. But that I love the architecture better in Oxford. It’s a glorious city, Jack.”
He was silent as he set a word on the Scrabble board between us, as if it helped him think. He was beating me. I then placed my four tiles, the z on a triple score—zeal. “Looks like the game isn’t quite as over as I thought,” I said.
His laughter caused him to sputter smoke. “Do you mean my career or this game?”
“Both,” I said. “Tell me everything. This offer must feel like redemption after Oxford’s pass-over.”
“It does, but here’s my concern: how could I leave here, Joy?” He spread his hands across the room. “I’ve been at Oxford for thirty-five years.”
I nodded. “Yes, that’s a long time. A little less than a lifetime for me. But maybe change is good. And Cambridge is only a couple hours away; it’s not another country.”
“It’s Magdalene College there also. Only one letter difference.”
“Interesting. Would you stay here? Move? What does it all mean?”
“I could not leave Warnie. Or this home.”
I took four more tiles from the pile, placed them on my rack but didn’t look at them. “There must be a way,” I said. “If they want you that much, enough that they created a position just for you, then they will help you find a way to live here and work there.”
“Yes, they will.” He took a puff of his pipe and closed his eyes. “But maybe I’m too old to make a change.”
In this statement I heard his reticence of all things new, of all things that might unsettle his peace and quiet. He had built a safe life, and anything that rippled it as the punt had just done to his pond was to be avoided.
“Jack, forgive me for my impudence, for possibly offending you with my analysis of this, but I love you, you know that. And I can see parts of your heart that others can’t, that sometimes you can’t either. Your fear of change is palpable. You hide all the turmoil and pain of your past life inside of you: the loss of your mother; whatever happened in the war; the boarding schools. And Paddy and Mrs. Moore. And now here you are, at peace in your Garden of Eden with your brother and your acreage and your students and your Inklings and your friends and your quaint town. All these things both inspire and protect you. But a change might be in order. Not a change that disrupts, but one that expands.” I paused. “Let new things touch your soul.”
He stared at me for too long, so long that I believed I had overstepped. But he blinked once before stating, “You’re right. And Tollers said much the same—that I could use a change of air. He believes Oxford has not treated me well. And the new job is three times the pay with half the work. But the problem is that I’ve turned it down twice now with very eloquent letters.” He shook his head. “Or I believed them eloquent. It would seem absurd, would it not, to tell them that I would now reconsider?”
“Jack, they created the position for you! Why would it be absurd to change your mind? Sometimes we have to mull things over, pray about them, talk about them, and then our eyes are opened to the best path.”
“And perhaps they’ll allow me to live there only four days a week so I can be here as much as possible.”
“You know how to work and sleep in trains. This job is made for you.”
“You know what tells me I should go?” He paused and smiled. “I have already begun lectures in my mind.”
“Then let us go from imagination to reality,” I said.
“Yes, I think you’re right.” He nodded at me. “I shall write to the vice chancellor today and tell him I’d like the job, if it’s not too late.” Then he placed his tiles, forming the word mischief.
I shook my head. “How will I ever win again?”
Jack set down his pipe on the edge of the table and leaned forward. “Thank you, Joy. I always feel clearer and invigorated after talking things through with you.”
Joy, that elusive concept that Jack coveted, enough to make it the title of his biography, washed over me for a blessed moment. It was as he’d written in his very first chapter, It is not happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.
If ever I would glorify this day, and I knew I would, it would be that moment where he asked me to sit with him to discover what next to do with his life.