CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

AND GOD WALKED IN

Mrs. C. S. Lewis

In a nod to the idea that dreams do not just have to be for sleeping, a lonely Oxford don, C. S. Lewis, achieved autumnal romance with a woman whose early life was bereft of joy, in a story as magical as the one the Pevensie children discovered behind the wardrobe.

Parents who christen their children after values (Hope, Faith, Chastity) often desire their offspring embody these traits, but this did not come to pass with Joy Davidman, born in the Bronx in 1915 to Polish-Ukrainian immigrants. The word used in conjunction with Joy was “prodigy”; at age eight, a bedtime story was H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History (which caused her to declare herself an atheist), and more lighthearted fare were books of fantasy. Her IQ tests nearly broke the charts. As a sickly teenager who suffered from scarlet fever and anemia, Joy spent her days reading philosophy, history, and literature and completed her master’s from Columbia before she was twenty.

Her firecracker academic momentum dissipated during the Depression when studying at Hunter College she witnessed an incident that shattered her belief in the American Dream: a starving orphan jumped to her death from one of the school’s buildings. The horror haunted Davidman for years and led to her joining the Communist Party, which she believed was the solution for society’s ills. Another form of catharsis to assuage her chronic angst was writing, and she became the recipient (along with Robert Frost) of a $1,000 award for her collection of poems, Letter to a Comrade. As word of her talent spread, she was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and spent six months writing scripts before, unimpressed with Hollywood, she returned to New York City as an editor for The New Masses.

The Communist Party doubled as matchmaker when Joy fell in love with fellow left-wing writer William Lindsay Gresham, who volunteered as a medic during the Spanish Civil War. When he returned, after a stay in a tuberculosis ward and a suicide attempt, they were married in 1942. Gresham had become disillusioned with communism during his experiences in Spain and influenced his wife to leave the party after the births of sons David and Douglas. Joy was content with her role as homemaker, and financial success followed with the publication of Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley (dedicated to Joy Davidman) as well as a substantial sum from Twentieth Century Fox for its movie rights (which starred Tyrone Power). The family fully abandoned their earlier communist tendencies by moving to a mansion in the New York countryside. To replace their lost faith in Marxism and her lack of fulfillment with Judaism, they became members of Pleasant Plains Presbyterian Church. She eagerly embraced Christianity, but as with communism, it did not provide Gresham with the elixir for what he wanted or from what he was running. The Southern alcoholic could have stepped from the pages of Faulkner or Tennessee Williams, his depressive demons spawned from his experiences in the war, in the tuberculosis ward, and in hidden recesses of his interior nightmare alley. Deeply troubled, he dabbled in Buddhism, Dianetics, tarot cards, and I Ching. Joy was tolerant of these but not so much when he dabbled in extramarital affairs and chronic drinking.

Over the years, the bottle took its toll and the money dried out, which fueled domestic abuse. For diversion, Gresham took to firing rifles into the ceiling. Nightmare Alley soon became an apt metaphor for their lives. One afternoon in 1946, Gresham called from Manhattan to say he was having a nervous breakdown and did not know if he would ever return home. When Joy hung up, she felt the world was a hammer, she its anvil. Suddenly, a ray of light appeared at that very moment out of nowhere. “There was a person with me, a person so real that all my previous life was a mere shadow-play. God came in.”

With her renewed belief in Jesus and her love of fantasy novels, Joy immersed herself in the works of British writer C. S. “Jack” Lewis with whom she began a two-year correspondence. She was delighted the Oxford don and author of The Chronicles of Narnia, who had appeared on the cover of Time, took time to correspond. She felt him a kindred spirit when he wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen—not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” The letters with the British postage soon were the only rays of light as her marriage continued to spiral into a yawning abyss.

At the breaking point, when her cousin Renée Rodriguez moved into the Gresham home as an escape from her own tempestuous marriage, Joy left her to care for her sons and fled to London and then eventually to Oxford. A lifelong Anglophile, she adored the ancient town awash in a sea of history and felt at home at last. Her first meeting with Lewis occurred at the East Gate Hotel, where he autographed her copy of his book The Great Divorce. Lewis was a crusty, middle-aged academic, a devout Anglican more comfortable in discoursing with God than the opposite sex. He had spent his years following the same comforting pattern, a pipe-smoking bachelor who lived in a world of theology and fantasy.

All that was to change upon his introduction to the brash New Yorker. After several luncheons with Lewis and his brother Warren, the latter noted in his diary that a “rapid friendship” had developed between Jack and Joy, whom he described as, “A Christian convert of Jewish race, quite extraordinarily uninhibited.” She spent Christmas at their home, the Kilns, and her visit exceeded her wildest expectations. However, news from home immediately cast her back to the shadow-land. Gresham wrote he was involved in an affair with Renée and wanted a divorce; Joy, afraid to lose her old world without possessing another, returned to the States. Upon her arrival, Gresham magnanimously suggested that Joy, Renée, and he live in a bizarre ménage à trois.

Joy’s response was to move lock, stock, poetry books, and sons to England. However, when Gresham, whose parenting skills amounted to “out of sight, out of mind,” failed to send child support, Joy became destitute. Lewis, a knight clad in tweed, came to her rescue and found her a flat near the Kilns and graciously agreed to pay her bills. Joy fell in love, but the feeling was not reciprocated by the confirmed bachelor. He merely regarded her as an agreeable intellectual companion, one who shared his love of God, literature, and whiskey. Warren wrote, “For Jack the attraction was undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humor and a sense of fun.”

The idyll was threatened when the British government, regardless of her feeling England was her spiritual homeland, declined to renew Joy’s visa, owing to her communist past. Lewis was horrified and did not want to lose his platonic soul mate, especially as her return home would entail the wrath of a brutish husband and possible persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although it jarred his ethical code, he decided to enter into a civil marriage so she could remain in the country, informing the Inklings, a group of his male literary friends (which included J. R. R. Tolkien) who met weekly at a pub, the Eagle and Child, “the marriage was a matter of pure friendship and expediency.” His circle judged Joy as the royal family did Wallis Simpson: a Jewish convert to Christianity, divorcée, and gold-digger New Yorker. Nevertheless, the don felt it his Christian duty to tweak the law, and Joy and Jack married in a civil ceremony in St. Giles, Oxford, in 1956. They became husband and wife in name only—until God walked in, though in a guise far from recognizable. Joy was in her kitchen when she tripped over a telephone wire and fell in agony to the floor, which resulted in breaking her left leg. At the Churchill Hospital, it was determined the injury had stemmed from incurable bone cancer, and a malignant breast tumor was also detected. It took this tragedy to make Lewis realize he was desperately in love. Utterly distraught, he called Father Peter Bide, an Anglican priest, to Joy’s bedside to pray for her cure, bestow religious wedding vows, and perform a last rite. On March 21, 1957, in the presence of Warren Lewis, the priest administered the sacrament of marriage and the dying Joy Davidman Gresham became Joy Lewis.

Miraculously, the cancer went into remission, and Joy and her sons moved in with Lewis and Warren at the Kilns. The connection between the two may not have begun with a thunderclap, but it ended with an electrical storm. The couple went on a honeymoon to the Lewises’ native Ireland followed by a trip to Greece. Lewis remarked to his friend, “I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties.” Joy was instrumental in helping with his writing, and in appreciation and love, she once again became the recipient of a husband’s book dedication, this time in Till We Have Faces. The relationship of the couple was destined to last a decade: they had begun corresponding in 1950, and ten years later, the cancer returned, this time inoperable. Joy Lewis passed away on July 13, 1960. Lewis honored her wish that she be cremated and her ashes spread over an Oxford rose garden, thereby becoming one with her spiritual homeland. Lewis raised her sons as if they had been his own: the brothers eventually became estranged from one another, perhaps because Douglas embraced the Christian faith while David turned to Orthodox Judaism.

Upon her death, Lewis was paralyzed with grief and, as in his teens, suffered a crisis of faith. He felt God was the White Witch, casting his Narnia into an endless winter, one sans any Christmas. He penned A Grief Observed as an outlet for his anguish, writing, “She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign, and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more.” And for those who knew their story, much more. Lewis eventually made peace once again with his God, realizing at least they had been permitted a time free from the shadow-land. Love had served as the magician who had unlocked the wardrobe that allowed a lonely man and woman to enter a magical kingdom.

Three years later, Lewis passed away on November 22, 1963, his American obituary obscured by the avalanche of coverage of another far more famous Jack, gunned down on the same fateful day in Dallas. Warren chose for his brother’s epitaph a quotation that their beloved mother had hung in their childhood home: “Men must endure their going hence.” The line from King Lear was apropos because like Lear, Lewis was not able to recognize truth till almost the end.

C. S. Lewis was able to discern the face of love, one he had once only understood in his books, when, in a guise far from recognizable, God walked in.