Joy Davidman - Life With C. S. Lewis

Life With C. S. Lewis

Davidman first met writer C. S. Lewis (Jack) in August 1952, when she made a trip to England, after a two-year correspondence with him. She planned to finish her book on the Ten Commandments that she had been working on, and which showed influences by Lewis's style of apologetics. After several lunch meetings and walks accompanying Davidman and his brother, Warren Lewis wrote in his diary that "a rapid friendship" had developed between his younger brother and Davidman, who he described as "a Christian convert of Jewish race, medium height, good figure, horn rimmed specs, quite extraordinarily uninhibited." She spent Christmas and a fortnight at The Kilns with the brothers and by this time was said to have fallen in love with C. S. Lewis, but he seemed to be oblivious to her feelings.

She returned home in January 1953, having received a letter from Gresham that he and her cousin were having an affair and he wanted a divorce. Her cousin, Renée Rodriguez, had moved in to the Gresham home and was keeping house for the family while she was away. Davidman intended to try to save the marriage, but after a violent encounter with Gresham, who had resumed drinking, she agreed to a divorce. He married Rodriguez when the divorce became final in August 1954.

Confessing to be a "complete Anglomaniac", Davidman returned to England with her sons in November 1953. Given her political affiliations in the past, the activities of HUAC, may also have been a factor in her decision to emigrate, and not return. Davidman found a flat in London and enrolled David and Douglas at Dane Court Preparatory School, but she soon had financial difficulties, when Gresham quit sending money for support. Lewis paid the school fees and found Davidman and her sons a house in Oxford close to The Kilns. Lewis originally regarded her only as an agreeable intellectual companion and personal friend. Warren Lewis wrote: "For Jack the attraction was at first 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 humour and a sense of fun."

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.

C. S. Lewis

Lewis began to ask for Davidman's opinion and criticism when he was writing and she served as the inspiration for Orual, the central character in Till We Have Faces (1956). Other works that she influenced or helped with, include Reflections on the Psalms (1958) and The Four Loves (1960). When Davidman's book Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments was published in 1955 in England with a preface by C. S. Lewis, it sold 3,000 copies, double that of US sales.

In 1956, Davidman's visitor's visa was not renewed by the Home Office, requiring that Davidman and her sons would have to return to America. Lewis agreed to enter into a civil marriage contract with her so that she could continue to live in the UK, telling a friend that "the marriage was a pure matter of friendship and expediency." The civil marriage took place in St Giles', Oxford in April 1956.

The couple continued to live apart after the civil marriage. In October 1956, Davidman was walking across her kitchen when she tripped over the telephone wire and fell to the floor, thereby breaking her leg. At hospital, she was diagnosed with incurable bone cancer and a malignant breast tumor. It was at this time, upon realizing how despondent he would feel to lose her, that Lewis recognized that he had fallen in love with her, writing to a friend "new beauty and new tragedy have entered my life. You would be surprised (or perhaps you would not?) to know how much of a strange sort of happiness and even gaiety there is between us." After Davidman had undergone several operations and radiation treatment for the cancer, in March 1957, Warren Lewis wrote in his diary: "One of the most painful days of my life. Sentence of death has been passed on Joy, and the end is only a matter of time."

The relationship between Davidman and C. S. Lewis had developed to the point that they sought a Christian marriage. Since she was divorced, this was not straightforward in the Church of England at the time, but a friend and Anglican priest, Reverend Peter Bide, performed the ceremony at Davidman's hospital bed on 21 March 1957. The marriage did not win wide approval among Lewis's social circle, and some of his friends and colleagues avoided the new couple.

Upon leaving the hospital a week later, she was taken to The Kilns and soon enjoyed a remission from the cancer. She helped Lewis with his writing, organized his financial records and wardrobe, and had the house renovated and redecorated. The couple went on a belated honeymoon to Wales and then by air to Ireland. In October 1959, a check-up revealed that the cancer had returned, and as of March 1960, was not responding to radiation therapy, as before. In April 1960, Lewis took Davidman on a holiday to Greece, to fulfill her lifelong wish to visit there, but her condition worsened quickly upon return from the trip, and she died on 13 July 1960.

As a widower, Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, which he published under the pseudonym of N.W. Clerk, to describe his feelings and pay tribute to his wife. In the book he recounts his initial loss of faith due to the overwhelming grief he suffered after Davidman's death, and his struggle to regain his faith. After developing a heart condition two years later, Lewis went into a coma from which he recovered but then died a year later, three years after his wife.