Joy Davidman
In January 1950, C.S. Lewis receives the first of many letters from an American woman, Joy Davidman Gresham (1915–1960). 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.
Civil marriage
In August 1955, Joy rents 10 Old High Street in Oxford, about one mile from C.S. Lewis’s home, The Kilns. Lewis starts visiting Joy and her sons Douglas and David every day now. For unknown reasons, Joy cannot have her visa renewed in 1956. The British Home Office refuses Joy permission to live and work in England, but Lewis would rather not see her return to America. The only solution he can think of is for them to go through a civil marriage ceremony. Regarding such a legal form as totally different from a true marriage, Lewis is following the teaching of the Anglican Church. The civil ceremony does not make them man and wife; Lewis will continue to live in his house, and Joy in hers. On 23 April 1956, when he is 57 years old, Lewis marries Joy in a private civil ceremony in a Register Office at 42 St Giles’ in Oxford. This gives Joy the right to British citizenship, and the patrial status entitles David and Douglas to claim British nationality. After the ceremony, Joy keeps her own name and home at Old High Street.
Sickness
Although she is only 41, Joy begins suffering from pains in her leg, back, and chest in 1956. Following a fall on 18 October, she is discovered to have cancer in her leg, breast, and shoulder. She is admitted to the Wingfield-Morris Hospital in Oxford. Her prognosis is grim, and the doctors believe her to be dying. Joy’s illness and suffering make C.S. Lewis aware of his love for her. He wants to take her home to The Kilns but first seeks to be married by the church. In line with the Catholic Church’s position on marriage, Lewis has come to believe that he may marry Joy because her marriage to Bill Gresham was invalid since Bill’s first wife, whom he divorced, was still alive when he married Joy. However, the Bishop of Oxford, Harry Carpenter (1901–1993), says that the official Church of England’s position is otherwise. He refuses to permit any of the priests in the Diocese of Oxford to marry Lewis and Joy.
Christian marriage
To comfort Joy in her pain, C.S. Lewis asks his former student and friend, Rev Peter Bide (1912–2003), from the Diocese of Chichester, to come. As a hospital Chaplain, Bide faced a terrible polio epidemic in his area in 1954. When he prayed for a seriously ill boy who seemed to be dying, the boy healed miraculously. Therefore, Lewis asks Bide to come and lay hands on Joy and pray for her. Lewis and Bide discuss the impediments to a Christian marriage, and they agree that it would be right to conduct a church ceremony before Joy dies. Bide promises to perform it the day after he prays for Joy’s recovery. On 21 March 1957, C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman are married by Rev Peter Bide in a ceremony in the Wingfield-Morris Hospital’s Mayfair Suite.
Recovery
Much to the astonishment of her doctors, Joy regains strength after Bide prays for her. In April 1957, she joins her sons and C.S. Lewis at The Kilns. By the fall of 1957, Joy is greatly improved and almost without pain. But Lewis is suffering great pain due to osteoporosis, and at times, he could scarcely walk. By April 1958, his health is much better. Joy’s improvement continues, and in July 1958, Lewis and Joy have a belated honeymoon in Ireland, where they stay at The Old Inn at Crawfordsburn, near Belfast.
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