Eastgate Hotel
Eastgate Hotel stands on the site of a former seventeenth-century inn, The Crosse Sword, which stood near the medieval East Gate in Oxford’s city wall. In 1772, the inn is knocked down and replaced by another hostelry, known as the Flying Horse. The current building dates from 1900. It is designed by the English architect and archaeologist E.P. Warren (1856–1937) in a seventeenth-century style. A cartouche between the upstairs windows shows what the city wall at this point, demolished in 1772, looked like. Over the years, the hotel has expanded into what it is today. Eastgate Hotel is one of C.S. Lewis’s favourite Oxford venues for eating and drinking. He regularly meets there on Monday mornings with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) to discuss their work and writings. On 24 September 1952, Lewis first meets his later wife Joy Davidman (1915–1960) for lunch at Eastgate Hotel.
Joy Davidman
In January 1950, C.S. Lewis receives the first of many letters from an American woman, Joy Davidman Gresham. Joy Davidman is born on 18 April 1915 in New York City to Jewish parents from Poland and Ukraine. Her parents leave the Jewish faith before Joy is born. Joy grows up in The Bronx, the northernmost borough of New York City. At the age of eight, she declares herself an atheist. She is educated in New York public schools. After that, she receives a B.A. in English from Hunter College in 1934 and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1935. After teaching English in New York high schools for two years, Joy devotes herself to writing. Her first book of verse, Letter to a Comrade, is published in 1938 and wins that year’s Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The Great Depression of the 1930s affects Joy so deeply that she joins the Communist Party and becomes a journalist and critic in the Party’s magazine, New Masses, in 1938. In 1939, she goes to work as a junior screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, but after six unsuccessful months, she returns to New York. Her first novel, Anya, is published in 1940, and her second, Weeping Bay, in 1950. In between, she also edits an anthology, War Poems of the United Nations, published in 1944.
Marriage
On 20 August 1942, Joy marries the divorced freelance writer and veteran from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) William ‘Bill’ Lindsay Gresham (1909–1962) from Baltimore, Maryland, whom she meets through the Communist Party. They go to live in Sunnyside, Queens, New York. They have two sons, David (1944–2014) and Douglas (1945). In 1946, Bill suffers a mental collapse. Joy feels her defences fall away. She finds herself on her knees, praying and experiencing God. After reading the New Testament, she recognizes Him; He is Jesus. Joy and Bill become Christians and join the Presbyterian Church, and Joy and her sons are baptised in 1948. After that, things improve. Bill’s first novel, Nightmare Alley, is published in 1946, and the film rights from the book make it possible to move to a larger house in New York.
C.S. Lewis
While Joy pursues Christianity, Bill does not. Joy begins to read the books of C.S. Lewis. She also reads the book C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, published in 1949 by the American poet, teacher, and writer Chad Walsh (1914–1991). They begin to correspond, and Walsh encourages Joy to write to Lewis. On 10 January 1950, Lewis receives the first letter from Joy, and they begin to correspond. On 24 September 1952, Joy meets Lewis for the first time to have lunch at Eastgate Hotel, when she spends about five months in England. A friendship begins, and Lewis invites her to The Kilns, where she spends two weeks. At Christmas 1952, Joy stays another two weeks at The Kilns. Lewis and Joy read each other’s unpublished writings, and Lewis writes a preface to Joy’s latest book, Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments, published in 1953.
Divorce
Towards the end of her stay at The Kilns, Joy receives a letter from her husband, Bill. He writes that he and Joy’s cousin, Mrs Renée Pierce, who cares for him while Joy stays in England, are in love, and he asks Joy for a divorce. Joy goes home in January 1953, but in November, she returns to England with her sons David and Douglas and takes rooms in Belsize Park in London. Eventually, Joy and Bill divorce on 5 August 1954. In August 1955, Joy rents 10 Old High Street in Oxford, about one mile from C.S. Lewis’s home, The Kilns.
Sources
Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis. Companion & Guide
Simon Horobin, C.S. Lewis’s Oxford
Jeffrey Schultz & John West, The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia