And this is wisdom in a weary land;
ask nothing, shut your teeth upon your need
“SELVA OSCURA,” JOY DAVIDMAN
Nineteen months later
August 1951
August shimmered thick with heat and rain as our old Impala, choking on fumes, pulled into Chad and Eva Walsh’s Vermont summer property. After I’d contacted Chad about his article, we’d forged an intellectual and spiritual friendship through phone calls and letters, and then finally his wife and four daughters visited our farm in upstate New York. The Walshes had become dear friends.
Davy and Douglas bounced around the back seat, weary from the long drive and hungry, as they’d eaten all their well-packed snacks before we crossed the New York state line. Bill’s hands were tense on the silver steering wheel as we entered a lush landscape of craggy rocks and moss-crusted trees, of thick, wild fields and a crystalline lake winking in the sunlight.
We’d both agreed, this trip to visit Chad and Eva held some promise of reprieve.
Yet even that morning Bill had balked. “Do you want to spend this vacation with Chad because he’s close to Lewis?” he asked as we packed.
“That’s absurd.” I stood at the end of the bed with my open suitcase half full.
Bill opened a dresser drawer and then turned back to me. “He’s the one who told you to write to Lewis in the first place.”
“Bill,” I said and stepped closer to him, “Chad is the foremost scholar on Lewis in the United States. He’s a professor. And like us, he’s a middle-in-life convert. He’s a dear friend to you as much as to me. If you don’t want to go on this vacation, we won’t go. Just tell me now.”
Bill kissed me dryly, missing my mouth to land on my cheek. “We need to get out of here. We need a break,” he said. “Vermont might be just the trick.”
Joy:
Mr. Lewis, I feel lost in what Dante calls a “dark wood, where the road is wholly lost and gone.” Motherhood is selfless. Writing is selfish. The clash of these two unyielding truths creates a thin tightrope, one I fall off of daily, damaging all of us.
Yet my garden has been sustenance. Has yours yet blossomed?
C. S. Lewis:
Mrs. Gresham, I have also been lost in that dark wood and felt the same, not about motherhood of course (which would be quite odd), but about my life and work. God promised us these times; darkness is part of the program. I find solace and nourishment in nature as you do, and on my long walks up Shotover Hill (one day will you come see this place and walk with us?). The only command nature demands of us is to look and be present. But do not demand more of her than she can give.
It had been a year and a half since that first envelope had arrived from Oxford, and I couldn’t count the letters Mr. Lewis and I had exchanged. They flew over the ocean like birds passing each other in flight. I’d gather the tidbits of my day and save them like treasures. I wanted to share it all with him, to show him my life and read about his. I was as eager for his letters as anything in my life, rereading old ones until the new one arrived.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had reached our shores the year before, and I shared Mr. Lewis with my boys as I read it to them. Now Prince Caspian had been published and brought with us on the trip. Over and over I narrated, until Aslan and Lucy and Edmund were as familiar as family members.
C. S. Lewis:
Ah, yes, you see the medieval influence in my stories—it is above all my world view. Professionally I am mainly a medievalist with a desire for meaning and search for Truth, and I believe stories are there to delight and inform.
Joy:
Your Arthurian influences are deep within your prose. You must have found his legends early on.
C. S. Lewis:
I did find King Arthur at a young age, eight to be exact. The same age you decided to be an atheist, I see. And ever since then he’s probably been influencing much of my imagination. Along with Dante, Plato and moorings in Classical Greek thought and of course many others. How can we know what has filtered into our work? This is precisely why we must be careful of what we read.
Out of the corner of his letters I experienced a different kind of life: one of peace and connection and intellectual intimacy, of humor and kindness, and I indulged.
Meanwhile in that year of 1951, the world spun on its axis: the Great Flood filled the lands of the Midwest, the nuclear bomb was tested at a private site in Nevada, the Korean War was taking our men’s lives. Perry Como, Tony Bennett, and I Love Lucy attempted to alleviate our fears with music and laughter while Harry Truman fired General MacArthur.
But in our house a different battle raged. Fights with Bill grew monstrous. I was embarrassed by who we’d become and was resolute to change it, to heal our marriage.
Only a month before the vacation, drunk and throwing pages of a failed manuscript across the room, Bill had grabbed his hunting rifle and swung it wildly about.
“Stop!” I cried out. “You’re scaring me, and the boys are asleep.”
“You’ve never understood me, Joy. Not once. You got the house you wanted, the fame you desired, but what about me?”
“Bill, you’re not making sense. You’re drunk. Put down the stupid gun.”
“It’s empty, Joy. Stop being dramatic about everything.”
He pointed the gun at the ceiling, pulled the trigger, and blew a hole in the plaster. In an adrenaline rush of fear, my heart a bird against my ribs, I bolted up the stairs, unable in my muddled mind to decipher where the boys’ room was compared to the shot. Panic choked me until I reached the top of the landing and realized that the bullet had entered the guest room, a peephole now in the floor.
Bill ambled behind me, the gun dangling from his hand.
“Whoa,” he said and stared at the splintered wood. “I thought the chamber was empty.”
I closed the door in his face, dropped to the single bed, and shivered with rage. It was a weak response, but I hadn’t known what else to do. I only knew to try harder. Pray. Do more. And turn to the letters that sustained me in my search for Truth and meaning.
C. S. Lewis:
My brother Warnie enjoys your letters as much as I do. He bellows with laughter at your stories. He will write to you soon also. He is deep in research for a French history collection. Have I told you that he is also a corking good writer?
Joy:
I am envious (that breaks a commandment, non?) of your closeness with your brother and how you live together. My relationship with mine has been broken, and it is my fault. A series of articles came out in the New York Post, titled “Girl Communist,” where I bared my soul and told stories of my past, how I had journeyed from atheism to communism to Christ. I felt at the time that I was being truthful about my journey, that integrity was my goal. But now I’m not sure. Howie was embarrassed by the family stories I told; he was mortified that I confessed my involvement in the party and had confessed my youthful exploits. He’s angry and hasn’t spoken to me since. It is a great loss. Don’t you know that pain of baring your soul in the writing and suffering because of it?
C. S. Lewis:
Yes, Joy, I know that pain well. When we write the truth, there isn’t always a grand group applauding. But write it we must.
On that first afternoon in Vermont, after I had unpacked and the men had taken the children to the lake, Eva and I walked beneath the bright summer sun through the long paths and beds of wild flowers that ran beside the lake. She asked how our family was getting along.
“It’s too much to talk about,” I told her. “I try to be free and full of laughter for the boys, Eva. I want them to be happy. We’re thrilled to be here. Let’s not talk of the hard things for now.”
“What hard things, Joy? I’m your friend.” She plucked a black-eyed Susan from the ground and stuck it behind her ear, the yellow petals bright against her dark hair.
I didn’t want to tell her everything; I didn’t want to complain. My thyroid was low again, pulling me toward a deep fatigue. Asthmas and allergies for the boys. Bill with hay fever, phobias, and threatening a nervous breakdown. Then the alcohol, always the alcohol. And deep down I suspected that again there were other women.
I searched her sweet face before I asked, “Do you ever feel that there is more, that life holds so much more, and somehow we’re missing it? I want to be part of the bigger world, make a difference, see it and feel it, engage in it. Don’t you feel that longing inside you?”
She smiled prettily. “We are making a difference—by taking care of what God has given to us in our children.”
“That’s not what I mean, Eva.”
“I know.” She touched my arm. “I know.”
“I want a life of my own—heart, mind, and soul, who I really am. I want my life to be my own, and yet I also want it to be my family’s and God’s. I don’t know how to reconcile.”
She laughed. “You want to figure it all out at once, don’t you?”
“I do.”
She shook her head. “Not everything is about logic, but you know that—I’ve read your poetry.” She paused. “It’s about surrender, I think.” She shielded her eyes in the sun with a palm over her eyebrows, called out for one of her daughters. “Madeline?”
“We’re in the lake, Mommy,” Madeline called in return.
Eva grabbed my hand. “Come on, Joy. Let’s go have some fun.”
C. S. Lewis:
My saddest moment, you asked me? Of course it is obvious—my mother’s death when I was ten years old. She withered away with cancer and it is the defining dreadful moment of my life, all stable happiness gone. It was as if the continent of my life sank into the sea. And by the by, please call me Jack, which is the name all of my friends use.
Joy:
Yes, don’t our breaking points thereafter influence our life? Mine? Maybe there are too many to count, but if you must make me choose, it is the day I saw a young girl commit suicide. My senior year at Hunter College I was studying at my desk and looked out to see her fly like a bird from the top of a building across the spring green quad. When she landed, askew and bloody on the sidewalk, I knew I’d never be the same. When I discovered the cause was her poverty and hunger, I believe it was my first impetus toward communism—the unfairness of it all.
And yes, by the by, I am honored to be considered a friend, and Jack it is. Please call me Joy.
“What do you dream of when you dream of more than this, Joy?” Eva asked as we ambled down the hill.
“When I was very young, and for years afterward, I had the same dream over and over.”
“Tell me.” Eva stopped midstep and lifted her sunglasses.
“I’m walking down a road. It always begins in a familiar neighborhood, but as I continue, I round a corner onto a grassy path and suddenly I’m on unfamiliar ground. But still I walk and walk. I know I’m lost, but for some reason I’m not afraid. There are willow trees and oaks lining the walkway with high limbs that protect me. There are daffodils and tulips bright, just like my childhood parks. The grass is thick and emerald. It’s too lush and familiar for me to be afraid. I continue onward until the path opens.”
“And then what?” Eva was now interested.
“Doesn’t just that image of the path make you long for something wonderful? Like I’m about to tell you the best story you’ve ever heard? One that will satisfy your heart?”
She laughed. “Yes, it does. Go on.”
“The path opens into a woodland everlasting green with grand rocks and a forest floor full of small mushrooms and flowers,” I said. “It’s a place I call Fairyland. And when I arrive there, I feel that my heart is going to burst with happiness. Far off over the hill there is a castle, and its spires rise into the clouds. I’m not there yet, but I already know it’s a place where there is no hate, no heartbreak. Anything sad or terrible is only a lie. All is well. Peace reigns.”
“Do you ever make it there?” Eva asked. “In your dream?”
“No.” I shook my head, and the old disappointment that often filled me when I woke from that dream returned. “I always wake up before I arrive. All I can do is see it there.” I paused. “I told Jack this dream too.”
“Lewis? You told him that? I didn’t realize you two were so close.”
I laughed. “We haven’t even met, but yes. The amazing thing is that he has imagined the same place. He wrote of it in his Pilgrim’s Regress, this Fairyland. Well, he calls it ‘the Island,’ but it’s the description, the idea of a place where longing is fulfilled.”
“We all want to believe something perfect lies ahead. That’s heaven, Joy.”
“I know. But here’s the difference—I dreamt this when I didn’t believe in anything greater than what our eyes can see. It was Jack’s book that revealed to me what my dream truly meant.”
“Does his pilgrim ever reach the island?” she asked as if this were the most important thing to know, and maybe it was.
“Yes, he does.”
She exhaled as if in relief.
Jack:
You must become frustrated that I can’t answer all your questions, Joy. Your mind is as quick and lithe as any I’ve known. But sometimes I have no answer but his, which is “Just follow me.” Your marriage and your husband’s infidelity sound like horrors, but you also sound resolute to love.
Joy:
Yes, with the questions that won’t let me rest, it’s best to remember your answer. Again and again I will turn to that: “Follow me.”
Eva stopped as we crested the hill, spying Bill and Chad on a blanket with a picnic basket between them. All six children were at the lake’s edge, splashing and calling one to the other. Multihued wild flowers, thimbleweed and liverwort, aster and doll’s-eyes, bloomed in open-faced eagerness that made them seem desperate for attention.
“Look at this world,” I said. “It’s such a wonder, profoundly beautiful. I want to live in it that way—not as if life is one big chore.” I leaned over and picked a flower, held it to the sun.
“That’s a lovely thought. You, my friend, you are the most fascinating woman I know. I’m thrilled you’re here.” She hugged me with a tight squeeze before descending the hill to the men.
I stood still for a moment. The lake rippled with our children’s splashing and swimming. Bill and Chad cast a handsome scene, leaning back on the blanket and laughing.
It was two lives I lived: the one right there, the sun extending its warmth toward us, the children calling with happiness, the cry of songbirds in the canopy of oak trees overhead, the splash of lake water. Then there was the second, parallel life: the one where my mind was preoccupied with how to describe this time and feeling to Jack. What would I take of this day to share with him? I was living a life with him in my mind while externally picnicking with my family. It was both disorienting and balancing.
I walked carefully down and reached the blanket where Eva sat, her face lifted to the sun, laughing so freely. I was envious. There she was, happy with her husband and four girls.
Chad, his dark hair plastered against his round and eager face, smiled at me. “Welcome, ladies.” Mosquito bites welled on his freckled arms and he scratched absently.
Eva turned to him, and he leaned down to kiss her lips. “What are you boys doing down here?”
Bill sat up. “Poogle!” he cried in a joyous voice that suggested I had just arrived from far off. He too leaned over, kissed me with the sweet taste of Chianti on his lips, and palmed my cheek gently. “Aren’t you glad we came?” He turned back to Chad. “How can we ever thank you?” Exuberant, he was up and off to run into the lake with the children. He swooped Davy over his head and ran into the water with him to squeals of delight.
Jack:
I have read your conversion essay, “Longest Way Round.” I am quite in awe at your ability to explain what is almost impossible to articulate—the power of conversion and the realization that atheism was too simple. It is flaming writing. Not much in our world is as simple as it appears, and if you want to dig deeper, as you do, Joy, you must be prepared for the difficulty in that journey. Most are not. And I am honored that you mentioned my work in your essay. Thank you.
Joy:
In that essay I state that ever since that half minute, I’d been slowly changing into a new person. And for the first time in a long while, I can feel that change again—the transformation toward a new life with my true self.
Yes, of course I mentioned your work. Both The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce stirred the dormant parts of my spiritual life. It took a little while, but the stories moved inside me until I was ready. Isn’t that the way with all good stories? But it was you, Jack, who taught me where I had gone wrong in my intellectual analysis. Your words were not the last step in my conversion, but the first.
Chad lifted a bottle of Chianti, poured some into a glass, and handed it to me.
Eva glanced at Bill in the lake and then lowered her voice as if we shared a secret. “I want to know how it all started,” she said, returning to the subject of Jack. “What do you two write about?”
“Everything. Books. Theory. We have a running argument about birth control. Love. Mythology. Our dreams. Our work.” I laughed. “There’s no subject off limits.”
Eva smiled. “There are learned men everywhere who would love to have Lewis write to them about philosophy and dreams.”
“Eva, it’s as if all the reading and all the writing I’ve done in my life have led me to this friendship.”
“I don’t feel that way about anything.” Eva smiled at me. “Except my girls.”
“And me, my love?” Chad asked and pulled her close.
“And you.”
I glanced toward Bill at the lake’s edge, throwing Davy from the far edge of the dock.
I wrote about the Ten Commandments, yet wrestled with their meaning in my own life. Yes, I was committed to staying married. I wanted to make it work with Bill, and yet my mind was consumed with what to say or write to another man and what he might say to me in return. This wasn’t infidelity, but what was it?
Jack:
You asked about mythology. It was Tolkien (have you yet read his work?) who convinced me of the one true myth—Jesus Christ. It wasn’t an easy conversion for me, but one of an all-night conversation at the river’s edge.
Joy:
Of course I have read The Hobbit (and read it to my sons). It is extraordinary. As far as myth, I was once ashamed of my taste for mythology and fantasy, but it helped me make some sense of a world that made no sense. And I’m grateful for it now, as it brought me to your work, and to my beliefs. I found MacDonald’s Phantastes at twelve, bored in the school library. Once I only believed in a three-dimensional world, but it was a fourth-dimensional world I wanted, and those stories gave it to me. It all seems one master plan in hindsight—each story a stepping-stone to where I am now.
Jack:
My! What a joyful coincidence—it was Phantastes that baptized my own imagination, and to wonder that it brought you to my work. What joy to have a pen-friend whom I admire and look forward to hearing from. I expect your next letter with great anticipation.
Chad rose to join Bill and the children in the lake. I took a long sip of the Chianti and let the warm haze settle over me. Far off, thunder clapped.
Eva groaned. “Not again with the rain.” She rolled over to study me. “What has helped you get through this year?” she asked. “If there are so many ills?”
I folded my legs beneath me and set the empty glass sideways on the grass. “My sons. Writing. Drawing close to God, or what I know of him, as best I can. I still don’t quite have Christianity all figured out as you seem to.”
“I surely don’t have it figured out.” She propped her face in her palm. “None of us does.”
“Do we ever? You’ve believed much longer than I have.”
“I don’t think so, Joy. It’s an unfolding. A constant unfolding to new life—or at its best that’s what it is.”
“New life.” I said the words as if I wanted to taste them.