Blessed are the bitter things of God
Not as I desire but as I need
“BLESSED ARE THE BITTER THINGS OF GOD,” JOY DAVIDMAN
Spring, 1955
Three months passed until I was able to return to the Kilns for the rising of spring. Touch between Jack and me came easier now, a hand on the knee or wrist, a hug in greeting or farewell. But still Jack was chaste in the way he knew how, keeping that last inch open.
“You know,” I said, handing Jack a pile of letters I’d answered for him that morning, “when your first letter arrived I was afraid to open it, believing that Warnie might have written instead of you.” I tapped the pile now in his hands. “Now I feel sorry for the poor bloke who receives my reply instead of yours.”
Jack shook his head. “For some of these questions posed, your answers are better than mine. The recipient should feel privileged to have your hand in it.” His voice was subdued, quieter than usual, and I took this to be a cue for peaceful work. I too sat, settling into my chair across from him. Pages of Queen Cinderella in my hand, I began to edit my work but found my mind wandering.
It was spring holiday at the Kilns. March of 1955 had arrived not quite like the lion it was rumored to be, but more like a heralding of all goodness and light. My sons ran through the Kilns and through Oxford as if they’d lived there all their life. The Screwtape Letters was out in paperback, and I was editing Jack’s biography and indexing Warnie’s history book. Our days together were languid, long and comfortable.
What a flip,
I’d written to Belle just the night before.
I once shared a bed with Bill, was part of his writing and his life, and yet I felt such contempt. And here I share love, esteem, and need, and yet not the bed. It’s taking some adjustment, but I won’t give it up. Not as long as he wants me here.
When I glanced from my pages, Jack was staring at me. His face, that endearing face, his sleepy eyes hooded.
“What is it?” I asked, knowing the curtain that fell over his dark eyes when something bothered him. No more could he hide from me than I from him.
“Now that I’m settled into Cambridge and have more free time, I’m dry as a bone. I have no more ideas, Joy. What if I’m done?” He leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. “Really bloody done?”
“What are you talking about?”
Jack rose and strolled across the room, his hand out as if seeming to miss his walking stick. He stood in front of the window, pulling aside the blackout curtain and pressing his palm against the window. “Maybe it’s over for me. My writing, that is.”
I stood to walk to him. “Even if that were true, which I doubt it is, your body of work is so profound already.”
“That isn’t the point and you know it. If I have nothing left, what is there of me for God to work through? There must always be more until there isn’t.”
“Let’s brainstorm. Let’s throw out the ideas you love the most. I know you’re not dry.” I settled back into my own chair. “Is there anything you’ve started and put away?”
“Of course there is, but I put it away because it didn’t work.”
“Sometimes things need time to grow in the soil of the imagination, to percolate in the unconscious, to unfold without our dirty hands all over them.”
He smiled at me. “Yes.” Then he walked to the side table where he kept the liquor on the bottom shelf. He chose a decanter of whiskey and poured two glasses and motioned for me to sit opposite him at the game table.
Did he notice my new haircut or new pearl earrings or the way I did my very best to make him see me as a woman? No. Instead he stared at me with an intensity that told me he wanted only to solve his dry spell, and I was the possible source of water.
I sat across from him. “Is there anything you’ve abandoned that you might want to pick up again?”
“One of my very first short stories rests unfinished. ‘Light,’ I had called it.”
“Well then, what of that?”
“I don’t believe I have the heart for it as of yet.”
“Then let’s go here—what fascinated you the most as a child?” I asked, already knowing the answer and wanting to guide him to deep water.
March winds howled outside. A storm was on its way, but neither of us mentioned it.
“Myth,” he answered. “I could write another allegory like Screwtape or Pilgrim. Or another children’s book, but those seem to have run their course.”
“And what myth do you think of the most when you think of myth at all?” I asked.
“Cupid and Psyche,” he said without hesitation.
“Well then . . .”
“I’ve already tried that.” He sat in a posture of defeat, lit a cigarette as if the conversation were over.
“You give up that easily, my lad?”
He didn’t laugh, but a smile eased slowly from the corner of his lips. “I wrote a play about this myth, also tried prose, a ballade, couplets. I’ve approached it from every angle, but still I think of it often.” He poured another whiskey in his glass, sipped it. “I’ve even dreamt of the sisters.”
Cupid and Psyche: it was a myth about the most beautiful of three sisters, Psyche, who was sacrificed to the gods, her older sisters complicit, only to be rescued by the winds and then discovered by Cupid—a love story at its finest. But when Psyche disobeyed Cupid and looked directly at him in the night, she was cast out to the forest, and then sent by Venus to fulfill impossible tasks. When Psyche finished the tasks with the help of the river god and magic ants, she was reunited with her true love. I knew the myth well—it was one of my childhood favorites, complicated and chock-full of envious gods, jealousy, true love, and mystical rivers.
“I first read of the sisters in Metamorphoses,” I said. “I was as jealous of the beautiful Psyche as if I were the older sister in the story. I felt as if I’d sent Psyche into the woods to be sacrificed. But I couldn’t have; I never would have stolen her happiness on purpose as her sisters did.”
“Not even to save her?” he asked. “Maybe her sisters took away her happiness because they believed they were saving her.”
“There, Jack. You’ve got it.” I popped my hand onto the tabletop. “Write about that.”
He closed his eyes and exhaled a long plume of smoke. “The sisters weren’t taking away her happiness but trying to confirm reality.”
“Yes, saving her, not destroying her. That’s it. Your story is hidden in there.”
“In this version . . .” He stared past me to whatever Muse spoke to him. “In my version, Psyche is motherless, so her older sister is raising her.”
“The beautiful older sister who isn’t quite as beautiful but—”
“No,” he bellowed in a friendly way and stood with his whiskey to look down to me. “This time she’s ugly. She’s the opposite of Psyche. And she loves Psyche with such obsession that—” He slammed his hand on the table with glee. “Yes.”
“More . . .”
“That love,” he said and bent down to look me in the eye, “will be what destroys. When love becomes a god it becomes a devil. And the ugly older sister will turn her love for Psyche into a god.”
“Jack, go write. And don’t stop.”
“Thank you, Joy.” He blurted these words, and in a great burst of happiness, kissed me on top of my head. He hurried away to begin writing that very night.
I touched the top of my warm hair, his kiss lingering there as his words echoed across my consciousness: when love becomes a god it becomes a devil.
By the middle of the next day Jack brought me chapter one, written in his tight scroll of liquid ink.
I sat at the desk in my bedroom where I’d organized the multiple projects I was immersed in. He hadn’t entered that room while I stayed there, always offering me privacy. But that day he burst in as I was muddling through Warnie’s history book, indexing it with a growing headache.
“Joy!”
I startled and stood. His mere presence in my room brought a warm flush to my thighs and belly.
“What?” I laughed and was conscious of how I appeared: I wore an A-line dress I’d bought in London, sleeveless and dainty. I hadn’t yet brushed my hair, and it fell over my shoulders. I was barefoot.
But he noticed none of this. He held out his hand with a sheaf of handwritten pages. “Will you type these? And then tell me—am I on to something at all?”
He sat on the edge of my bed, unaware of anything but our creative collaboration. I returned my attention to the pages. “Do you want me to type now?”
“First . . . read.”
I sat and began to do just that. Orual, the name he had given Psyche’s ugly older sister, was speaking from her old age, from the knowledge of her imminent demise. I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of the gods.
From there the prose and the story unfolded, confounding and enchanting as an original myth, as if he’d spent months on the pages.
Orual was the eldest daughter of the King of Glome. She told of their castle where she and her sister Psyche; their nurse; and the Fox, their beloved tutor, resided. But mostly Orual told the reader of Psyche and her beauty and Orual’s great love for her—blinding love. Orual’s ugliness was described in detail, and the reader discovered that in her old age she wore a veil to cover her face. When I reached the end of the chapter I looked to Jack, who had not looked away.
“I’m envious that you can write this in a night and half a day, and it can hold an entire story in its hints and foreshadowing.”
“I’m not here for praise, Joy. Tell me where it lacks.”
“Let me type it and write notes, not off the cuff.”
“A little off the cuff?” He smiled; he already knew, as I did, that I would never turn away from that smile.
“Okay, on first blush. I need to understand why the Fox loves poetry so much, and I want a hint of who he will become to Orual. He seems integral and interesting. He needs to hint at what is to come.”
“Yes.” Jack took the papers from me and a pencil from my desk, making a mark in scribbled handwriting.
I looked at him. “Jack, I want to tell you something.”
“That it’s a terrible idea to head down this road, to write this book?”
“No. Not that at all. I want to tell you about the day I received your first letter. A winter afternoon in January of 1950. Five years ago now.”
He nodded at me and set the papers to the side, crossed his legs, and leaned on his elbow. “Yes?”
“You’d asked for my history, and I didn’t know where to begin. I spent hours thinking about it and realized that my life had been made of masks, many of them. And I decided that afternoon that I wouldn’t wear any of them with you. I decided that I would show you me. That I would be barefaced. And here—in your story—you have Orual covering her face with a veil.”
He stared at me for so long that I almost wished for Orual’s veil. Then he spoke. “Never hide your face from me. It is precious and dear.”
I smiled. “Sometimes I wish I could, but I cannot.”
“Bareface,” he said. “That should be the title.” He stood and held the pages. “I haven’t been this excited about my work in a very long time. How can I thank you?”
“Get out of here and finish it.”
Or take me in your arms and set me down on that bed and make love to me.
The forbidden thought flew by unspoken. Jack rushed out of the room to return to his true love: the page.
Over weeks, we braided our themes and stories together into this novel—the new myth set in Glome, a fictional Greek town: two sisters, princesses—one beautiful, one ugly. Orual loved her younger sister with a destructive possession and narrated her case to the gods—how she’d only meant to protect and love her sister even as she caused her to lose true love by forcing her to face “reality.” Meanwhile, even as Orual eventually became Queen of Glome, she loved a man she could never have: her loyal advisor Bardia. Although Orual eventually came to self-knowledge, self-love, love for the gods, and reunion with Psyche, much destruction had been wrought along the way.
I saw both Jack and myself in the pages we forged together, but in Orual’s obsessive and possessive love for Psyche I caught more than a glimpse of myself. God, I asked, how much of Jack’s creation was of me?
Finally one night, after the second whiskey, I asked. “Jack, do you think I’m ugly?”
He jolted as if I’d prodded him with electricity. “Whyever would you ask that?”
“You put my words into Orual’s mouth many times. And I’m not a blonde,” I said, a meager attempt at a joke.
“I do not think you’re ugly. You are beautiful. It’s not your countenance in Orual, Joy. And many times I feel I am Orual also.”
“And are you the Fox? Orual loves him, and he’s devoted to her but doesn’t love her the same. Are you . . .”
Jack’s kind expression didn’t change as he spoke. “How can I know what parts of us are threaded through this story? But one thing I do know—this story would not be what it is without you. Its depth and intimacy would not exist without who we are together.”
Much of our friendship and our lives found its way into that novel: my Fairyland and his North, his Island. Our views on longing and need and joy. Our accusations and questions for the gods. Our shared history of mythology and its ability to offer meaning. And for me, the problem of obsessive love. There was a tangled twine ball of us in that myth, unraveling day by day with our discussions and our readings, our bantering and our debate. There were moments in the writing of that novel that we merged into one without ever touching.
We were consumed and distracted by Orual and Psyche—we talked about them even as we picked apples or walked to Oxford or sat in the garden. Over dinner or beers it was Orual, the Fox, and Psyche who joined us.
“All I’ve ever read or done has led to this novel,” he told me as we walked through Oxford, untangling how Psyche would be removed from the tree in the forest where she’d been bound and sacrificed.
“I feel the same, Jack. Although I’m not writing it, I feel the same.” I paused and touched his arm. “As it’s always been—we use stories to make sense of the world.”
He’d stopped right there in front of the bookshop and faced me with his lopsided fisherman’s hat and his red cheeks, with his great admiration. The cobblestone streets were wet with rain, small puddles rippling in the dip of the road. A priest on a bicycle rode by, ringing the small bell on his handlebars and waving to us both. Jack paid him no mind but spoke right to me.
“You are writing it, Joy. I’m putting the words on paper and so are you with every word you speak, every question you ask, every thought you offer, every page you edit. We are writing it.”
“What will we call it?” I asked. “Still Bareface?”
“Yes.” He was resolute in this title and smiled when he said it. “Because eventually for love to be true, we must show our real faces.”
“What is it in the end, what is it that must happen at the end of the story? The shattering of Orual’s self-centeredness?”
Jack nodded. “The journey from possessive love to wholesome love.” Jack looked off as if not speaking to me at all, as if Orual herself stood behind us and slowly lifted her veil. “From the profane to the divine: union with the divine through love.”
“Yes,” I said in agreement that went far beyond the words he spoke.
The book eventually came to be titled Till We Have Faces. It braided our spiritual journeys together like two stories from the same Father, parallel and mystical, infused with nature’s divine ability to change us.
Through the process of its writing we had become as bound together as any man and woman.
Only one step remained, and it was not my step to take.