Joy Davidman

“For thou art my hope, O Lord GOD: thou art my trust from my youth.”

— Psalm 71:5, KJV

A Girl From the Bronx

Helen Joy Davidman was born in New York City on 18 April 1915, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her father, Joseph Davidman, was a schoolteacher and later a school principal. Her family were not religious, and Joy grew up an atheist. She was astonishingly clever. She went to Hunter College at fifteen, took a master’s degree in English at Columbia University at twenty, and was soon publishing poems, reviews and novels. In 1938 her first book of poems, Letter to a Comrade, won a national prize for young poets, the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and was published to wide praise.

Like many young American intellectuals of the Depression years, Joy turned to Communism. She joined the Communist Party in 1938, and for several years she wrote for its magazine, New Masses. She went briefly to Hollywood as a scriptwriter, without success. In 1942 she married a fellow Communist and writer, William Lindsay Gresham, who had fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and who suffered from alcoholism and depression. They had two sons, David, born in 1944, and Douglas, born in 1945. They lived in a house in the country north of New York.

A Night in 1946

The marriage was unhappy from the start. Bill drank, was unfaithful, and was subject to violent moods. One evening in the spring of 1946 he telephoned Joy from New York to say that he was having a breakdown, that he could not come home, and that he did not know what he would do. Then he rang off. Joy was alone in the house with two small children, with no way of reaching him and nothing she could do.

What happened next she described a few years later in an essay she wrote about her conversion. In her helplessness her pride gave way, and for the first time in her life she found that she was aware of God. She did not reason her way to him. She felt that he was there, in the room, and that he had been waiting for her. She found herself on her knees, praying. Bill came home safely, and not long afterwards both of them began attending a Presbyterian church, though Bill’s faith did not last.

Joy had already been reading the books of C. S. Lewis, and after her conversion she read more. She found in them the clearest account she knew of the faith she had stumbled into, and an intellect that matched her own.

The First Letter

In January 1950 she wrote to him. Her early letters have not survived, but Warnie, who handled much of his brother’s post, later recalled that hers stood out from the rest: they were lively, direct and well informed, and their writer was plainly a match for Jack in argument. Lewis replied. A correspondence began that lasted more than two years.

By 1952 Joy’s marriage was in ruins. She was ill and exhausted, and she decided to go to England for a few months, partly to recover, partly to work on a book, and partly, it seems clear, to meet the man whose letters had come to mean so much to her. She left the boys with Bill and with her cousin Renée Pierce, who had come to live with them after leaving a marriage of her own. In August she sailed for England.

The Eastgate Hotel

On 24 September 1952, Lewis met Joy Davidman for the first time, at lunch in the Eastgate Hotel in Oxford, opposite Magdalen. She had come with a friend. The lunch was a success, and it was followed by others, at Magdalen and at the Kilns. Joy was blunt, funny, abrasive and fearless. She said exactly what she thought, she was not in the least overawed by Lewis, and she beat him at his own game of argument. He enjoyed it hugely. Warnie, when he met her, liked her too, and he remained her loyal friend to the end.

That December, Joy spent Christmas at the Kilns. While she was there a letter came from Bill. He told her that he and Renée had fallen in love and asked for a divorce. Joy showed the letter to Lewis, and he advised her to agree. She went back to America in January 1953 to settle her affairs.

London and Headington

In November 1953 Joy came back to England, this time with her sons, and settled in London. She was poor: Bill was supposed to send money, and rarely did. She supported herself and the boys by writing and by occasional work, and Lewis quietly helped to pay the boys’ school fees. Her divorce was granted in 1954. Her book on the Ten Commandments, Smoke on the Mountain, had appeared in America in 1953, and when it was published in Britain in 1955 Lewis wrote a foreword for it.

She and her sons visited the Kilns in the holidays. David and Douglas, then about nine and eight, were enthralled by the house, its woods, its pond, and the tall, kindly professor who had written the Narnia books. In 1955 Joy moved to Headington, to a house in the Old High Street, about a mile from the Kilns. Lewis found it for her and paid the rent.

By then it was obvious to their friends that Joy was in love with Lewis. Whether Lewis was in love with her is much less clear, and he himself seems not to have known for some time. He enjoyed her company more than anyone’s outside the Inklings. He depended on her for criticism and encouragement in his writing. But he was a bachelor of nearly sixty who had never expected to marry, and he seems to have thought of their relationship as a deep friendship and nothing more.

A Wedding of Convenience

In 1956 the British Home Office refused to renew Joy’s permit to live in England. She and her sons would have to return to America. Lewis could not bear the thought of losing her company, and he could see no reason why she and her sons should be sent back to a country where they had no home and very little money. He offered a solution. He would marry her in a civil ceremony, which would give her British nationality and the right to stay. The marriage would be a legal formality only. They would not live together. She would remain at her own house, and he at the Kilns.

On 23 April 1956 C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman Gresham were married at the register office in St Giles, Oxford. Very few people were told. Lewis did not regard it as a real marriage, since it had not taken place in church, and he expected nothing to change.

Hope From Youth

The verse at the head of this chapter is a prayer of an old man who has trusted God since his youth. Joy Davidman had not trusted God from her youth. She came to him at thirty, as Lewis had come at thirty-two, after years of atheism and against the grain of all her education. Like him, she had been found by a God she had not been looking for. That shared experience was part of what drew them together. They were two converts, two former unbelievers, two people who had spent their lives in argument and had both, at last, knelt down. Neither of them knew, in the spring of 1956, how little time they had.