Book Review -"Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis"

Book Review - "Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis"

Reviewed by J. Scott Jackson

Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. LewisBy Abigail Santamaria, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 432 pages, $25.88

Joy Davidman’s image has long stood in the shadow of her famous husband, C.S. “Jack” Lewis. In Richard Attenborough’s 1993 film Shadowlands, Debra Winger rivetingly portrays Davidman as the blunt Jewish writer from the Bronx who sweeps the hapless, middle-aged Oxford don (portrayed by Anthony Hopkins) off his smug bachelor pedestal. Shadowlands does capture something of Davidman’s tenacious, passionate relationship with her idol, whose popular theological works, such as The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters, had helped turn her from atheism to Christianity. Still, Abigail Santamaria’s groundbreaking 2015 biography renders a story more complex and more compelling than earlier portrayals. From an early age, this daughter of self-made Russian immigrants was driven toward projects of “serious purpose,” and was a remarkable, gifted woman in her own right.

During the Depression, Davidman bristled at her parents’ ambitions that she follow them into the educational profession. She detested teaching, pursuing instead a literary career, and matriculating rapidly from Hunter College (BA) and Columbia (MA). Drawn into the heady New York leftist literary scene—featuring such luminaries as W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams—the young idealist joined the U.S. Communist Party, then in its halcyon days. She wrote myriad reviews for the party magazine, New Masses, and clung to Marxist ideology after the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1938 facilitated a mass exodus of members from the party. She published a book of poems, Letters to a Comrade (1938), two novels—Anya (1940) and Weeping Bay (1950)—and a study of the Ten Commandments, Smoke on the Mountain (1954), prefaced by Lewis.

In heartrending detail, Santamaria explores Davidman’s ultimately failed first marriage to the writer, folk singer, and veteran William Lindsay Gresham, with whom she had two sons. After Gresham attained success with his noir classic Nightmare Alley, the family, often struggling with money problems, bought a large farmhouse in upstate New York.

As Santamaria shows, Davidman’s materialist utopianism had always masked a yearning for the transcendent, which in her youth was manifest in ecstatic experiences of beauty. Once as a teenager, taking a winter walk in a park, Davidman perceived the sky and trees glimmering in the golden sunset light: “I heard the voice in the burning tree; the meaning of all things was revealed and the sacrament at the heart of all beauty lay bare; time and space fell away, and for a moment the world was only a door swinging ajar” (p. 22). Davidman and Gresham began reading Lewis, and Davidman eventually abandoned Marxism as a worldview. Suffering from trauma and alcoholism, an absent Gresham once phoned that he was having a nervous breakdown. Davidman suspected (unconfirmed) adultery. Distressed, she suddenly felt the personal presence of a gracious God, an experience which transformed her life.

Gresham (initially) concurred with her new insights, and Davidman studied world religions. Initially averse to Christianity, she considered Judaism, having always read the Bible with respect for its literary merits. Lewis’ work helped convince her that the accounts of Jesus in the Gospels were (mainly) accurate and that the essential claims of Christianity were true. The Greshams joined a Presbyterian church in Staatsburg, New York. Meanwhile, the couple dabbled in L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, practicing psychological “audits” on friends in distress.

Gresham and Davidman’s literary aspirations butted heads amid the demands of supporting their household. As their marriage imploded, they invited Davidman’s cousin, Renee Pierce— who, with her two children, was fleeing an abusive marriage—to their home. Davidman, who had become a regular pen-friend of Lewis, idealized the Oxford don and fantasized about seducing him. Through a fortuitous discovery of personal papers that eluded previous researchers, Santamaria discovered that, beginning in the early 1950s, Davidman had penned plaintive love sonnets dedicated to Lewis. On the pretense of researching an article on Charles II, Davidman took a months-long trip alone to England, where she first met Lewis, whose romantic affection—vainly, at first—she sought to win. Gresham wrote to her that their marriage was over and that he and Renee had fallen in love.

After returning to the States, Davidman later moved her two sons to London, over Gresham’s fierce objections, while their divorce was in process. Settling in London in 1953, with few prospects as a single mother in a foreign country, she enrolled them in boarding school while collecting inconsistent child support payments from Gresham. Lewis and Davidman spent an increasing amount of time together, enjoying debates and warm repartee, while Lewis introduced her—his American friend—to often incredulous peers. Davidman moved closer to the homestead Lewis shared with his brother Warren. As Davidman faced the prospect of an expiring visa, Lewis agreed to wed her in a civil marriage so she could stay in England.

After her femur snapped, Davidman was diagnosed with aggressive, metastasized cancer in her bones and breast; a dire prognosis gave her months, at most. Lewis realized he loved her, and, despite objections from the Anglican bishop of Oxford against remarriage after divorce, Peter Bide, a priest friend, married Davidman and Lewis in her hospital room, laying hands on Davidman for healing. She experienced an apparently miraculous recovery. Amid health struggles, the couple enjoyed marital bliss for two and a half years, while she re-organized the household and traveled with Lewis to Ireland and Greece. The cancer returned aggressively and she died, age 45, in 1960, and Lewis retained custody of the boys.

Davidman collaborated with Lewis on several of his finest later works— especially The Four Loves, Til We Have Faces, and his autobiographical Surprised by Joy, whose title was not inspired by her name but, rather, expounded Lewis’ life-long obsession with a transcendent desire that animates life remaining unfulfillable this side of heaven. According to Santamaria, this unlikely couple shared the same spiritual quest: “Both Joy and Lewis longed, all their lives, for a spiritual realm that transcended both the beauty and the quotidian sting of earthly existence” (xi). After Davidman’s death, Lewis wrestled with God amid his devastating loss in A Grief Observed. ♦

J. Scott Jackson is an independent scholar and theologian who lives in Northampton.