Joy Poet, seeker, and the woman who captivated C. S. Lewis

Review by New York Times Review

EVEN IF "JOY," Abigail Santamaria's life of C. S. Lewis's wife, were a bad book, Lewis's zealous admirers would read it, eager for another way to finger his shroud. Joy Davidman married Lewis, author of the beloved "Chronicles of Narnia," at 41, and her late entrance into his bachelor existence is a cherished part of his legend. She soon died of bone cancer, but she had made him a husband and stepfather, adding an intimate touch to the genial but distant self-portrait that emerges from his grown-up books, tracts like "Mere Christianity." Her death was also the subject of "A Grief Observed," his classic book on mourning and how faith can survive it. It's only because we know the importance of her final act that "Joy" is compelling even for the Lewis-indifferent, like me. In Santamaria's clear, unsentimental telling, Davidman's life was, from her birth in 1915 almost up until her death in 1960, dreary and unremarkable. But readers of "Joy" will know how it ends, and therein lies the question that keeps us reading: How will she win over this famously sensitive, witty writer? And in the last chapters, Davidman achieves a greatness of her own, in the nick of time, just ahead of death, in a way available to us all: by making a happy union. A Jewish girl from the Bronx, Davidman was a grasping, competitive student in high school and at Hunter College. She became a naïve Communist, very late to see the truth about Stalin. As a contributing editor at New Masses, she dutifully subordinated artistic merit to party line. Her ethics could be dodgy: Short on contributions to an edited volume of international poetry, she attributed her own poems to Russian and English poets. "She had fun with the job," Santamaria writes of her subject's subterfuge. "Joy wrote of 'shires,' 'Sherwood Forest' and 'working chaps' riding home on the 'Underground,' and she took care with her spelling of words like 'colour' and 'valour.'" She gave an author she invented a convenient biography: "Hayden Weir was killed in action in 1942." Davidman and her gallant but alcoholic husband, the writer William Gresham, had two sons, whom she benignly neglected in the way of earlier eras. With their marriage in trouble, Davidman and Gresham together read Lewis's Christian apologetics, and were converted. They joined a Presbyterian church, and she began corresponding with Lewis - even as, oddly, she and her husband dabbled in Scientology. Through their letters, Davidman fell in love with Lewis, although at first he did not seem to reciprocate. Still, in 1952, she set sail for England, leaving behind her husband and sons, making no secret of her intentions. Where others had tried - Lewis had female epistolary suitors to spare - Joy Davidman Gresham succeeded. On April 23, 1956, she married him. After, that is, securing from her husband a divorce and custody of their two boys, whom she sent to a boarding school selected in part because it was endorsed by P. L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins. The boys were miserable, but they were becoming proper Brits. "You should hear Doug clip his words and broaden his A's!" Davidman wrote to their father. WHAT REDEEMS THE book, and perhaps the woman herself, is that she and Lewis were happy. The homely American, disliked by Lewis's friends for her Hebraism and her pushiness, had with the old man a very real intimacy. They laughed, drank, and copulated through the pain of her advancing cancer. "The house pulsed with love and laughter," Santamaria writes. "They played Scrabble together - words in any language were fair game - and did crosswords." They named her bedpan after Shakespeare's Caliban and the "'fishtailed female invalid urinal' after Miranda." Reading such details, I did not feel much better about Joy. But, reminded how love can befall us all, I felt better about life. MARK OPPENHEIMER writes the Beliefs column for The Times and hosts the podcast Unorthodox for Tablet magazine.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 9, 2015]

---

Review by Booklist Review

C. S. Lewis' biographers view Joy Davidman (1915-60) as having deliberately captured as well as captivated him. Although Santamaria is never hostile, her candid presentation doesn't dispel the desperate-schemer image. Indeed, Davidman seems to have been chronically desperate. Possessed of a virtually eidetic memory for writing, she was a contrary young woman who countered her parents' middle-class attitudes by embracing communism. She won a Yale Younger Poets award, parlayed that into six months in Hollywood, and married a fellow leftie writer. With him she had two sons, traded Marxism for Christianity and then Dianetics, and drank and spent too much. She ran away to England to meet the sf novelist and Christian apologist she adored for his writing. Lewis initially resisted, but she prevailed and, after diagnosis with irreversible cancer, married him and inspired his last novel and the classic reflection, A Grief Observed (1961). Santamaria makes no case for Davidman's scant literary accomplishments but uses her letters and unpublished, journal-like sonnets to try to sympathize with the pathetic, crass woman who somehow blessed Lewis' life.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

If not for Joy Davidman's marriage to C.S. Lewis, it's unlikely that anyone would be reading a book about her. Nevertheless, debut author Santamaria does her best to fill in Davidman's scattered life, starting with her days as a student at Hunter College in the early 1930s; her infatuation with the Communist Party and poems supporting the cause; her first marriage, to author William Lindsey Gresham, in 1942; and the birth of their two sons. The marriage was rocky, with Davidman dissatisfied with life as a conventional housewife and Gresham struggling with alcoholism. The couple dallied with Dianetics before Joy, already interested in C.S. Lewis's writing, became smitten with him after the two began corresponding. As her marriage dissolved, she left for England hoping to start a relationship with Lewis. Joy succeeded, divorcing Gresham in 1954 and marrying Lewis in 1956. Though Santamaria describes their relationship as "blissfully happy," some details indicate that Lewis may have been more ambivalent (he buried their wedding announcement in the Christmas Eve edition of the Times, where few would notice it). Readers enchanted with the version of Davidman and Lewis's romance presented in the film Shadowlands may be disappointed that the facts don't fully support what Santamaria calls "one of the 20th century's greatest love stories." B&w insert. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Company. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

This comprehensive and exhaustively researched work provides new and fascinating insights into the life of Joy Davidman and her relationship and subsequent marriage to C.S. Lewis. Most listeners will know of her because of her marriage to Lewis and through his writings. This work brings extensive coverage of her own writing and correspondence, and it is an unexpected delight to discover her wit and her endless quest to know learn more. The author quotes extensively from Davidman's writings. Verdict Recommended for medium and larger public libraries where there is an interest in 20th-century poetry, modern Christianity, or this writer. ["Fans of Lewis and the movie Shadowlands, a dramatized version of his life with Joy, may be disappointed by the lack of romance and shocked by how calculating she was. However, those who want to know the real Davidman will discover a woman in search of purpose and meaning who finally finds it in the faith and person of Lewis": LJ 6/1/15 review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]-Gretchen Pruett, New Braunfels P.L., TX © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A woman's quest for faith and love. In this impressive debut biography, Santamaria traces the life of Helen Joy Davidman (1915-1960), a woman who likely would be a historical footnote if not for her marriage to the noted writer C.S. Lewis. In the 1993 film Shadowlands, director Richard Attenborough portrayed their love affair. Poet, essayist, critic, and novelist, Davidman was a rebellious, abrasive, precociously intelligent woman with no social skills: "She'd look at you intensely and ask inappropriately intimate questions out of the blue," one acquaintance recalled. It's no wonder that she felt herself an outsider, even as a child. Her parents, secular Jewish immigrants, prized education and pushed her to excel. She became a teacher but hated it. In 1938, searching for a community with like-minded political viewsand also hoping to meet menDavidman joined the Communist Party. While she participated in meetings and social events, she devoted herself to her true vocation: writing. She won a Yale Younger Poets Award, contributed to the Marxist journal New Masses as well as other venues, and even went to Hollywood to write screenplays. By 1946, she and her husband, William Gresham, became deeply disillusioned with Marxism and gave up their Communist Party membership. Joy shifted her focus to religion, first thinking she would "become a good Jew," then enthusiastically embracing L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. But suddenly she discovered C.S. Lewis, whose writings on Christianity she found compelling. She wrote to him and soon fell obsessively in love, traveling to England with the aim of marrying him. Her marriage to Gresham, roiled by his alcoholism and infidelities, ended in divorce. Although Lewis first bristled, he warmed to her attentions and was devastated when, months after their marriage, Joy was diagnosed with bone cancer. With access to unpublished documents and family papers, Santamaria has fashioned a compelling narrative, remaining cleareyed about her subject's many personal failings. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

1   1892-1930   In a recurring dream throughout her childhood, Joy Davidman found herself walking down a road she called Daylight Street. In time, she rounded a corner and followed a crooked, grassy path into an unfamiliar world. Joy ambled through that world, lost but unafraid, until the trail opened onto "a strange, golden, immeasurable plane," as she described it, writing extensively about the dream in poetry and prose. Far in the distance rose the towers of Fairyland. Joy's heart swelled with longing as she beheld a perfect kingdom defined by love, devoid of sorrow, capable of consummating every good desire. "Hate and heartbreak / All were forgot there."        But before she could reach the castle gates, she woke up in the Bronx. Instead of a palace threshold, her round brown eyes saw only items in her bedroom: ballet slippers for the dreaded dance lessons her parents required, crisp dresses that made her into her mother's perfect doll, and books that were her waking sanctuary in what often felt like a foreign land. Among her favorites were Greek myths ?-- ?she longed to visit the land of the gods ?-- ?and "ghost stories and superscience stories" by Lord Dunsany and George MacDonald, the Victorian minister whose fantasies evoked the same visceral desire as her dream, suggesting that everything sad could become untrue.        Hope lingered in the morning hours. "If I remembered the way carefully, the dream told me, I should be able to find it when I woke up." For a fanciful child born during the Great War and raised in America's "New Era" of postwar prosperity, a Fairyland on earth ?-- ?as rich with material resources as her dream kingdom was rich with the immaterial ?-- ?seemed almost possible. In the distance, automobile motors roared above the clip-clop of horses' hooves on the Grand Concourse, the fashionable thoroughfare two blocks from 2707 Briggs Avenue in the genteel middle-class neighborhood where Joy lived with her parents, Joseph and Jeannette, and younger brother Howard, whom Joy came to call Howie. The rhythm of construction joined an orchestra of street sounds, heralding blocks of brand-new art deco apartment buildings with elegant sunken living rooms, electrical and waste disposal systems, refrigerators instead of iceboxes, elevators, and gracious lobbies adorned with marble inlay. "Every day, in every way, the world was getting more comfortable."        But not the world inside herself, and not the local landscape populated with peers and parents. Joy was a sickly, lonely girl, a social outcast at school and a disappointment at home to immigrant parents who governed according to the goals of assimilation and success. They, too, had been branded in childhood with the shame of otherness. "They showed their affection by almost incessant criticism," she told a newspaper reporter who profiled her life. They were "well-meaning but strict." Off the record, she was less subtle. "'Well-meaning but strict' . . . is certainly damning by faint praise," she wrote to a friend. "But since the truth would have called for loud damns, I don't know how I could have put it milder." She left the specifics to her reader's imagination.        It would be decades before Joy understood the meaning of her dreams, but for her, Fairyland was never the standard little girl's fantasy of opulence or romance. Joy would come to interpret the dream as a universal quest for eternal life, for a destination that could resolve her unconscious conviction that the perfect version of everything lay just ahead.        "There is a myth that has always haunted mankind, the legend of the Way Out," she would write many years later, "the door leading out of time and space into Somewhere Else. We all go out of that door eventually, calling it death. But the tale persists that for a few lucky ones the door has swung open before death, letting them through . . . or at least granting them a glimpse of the land on the other side. The symbol varies . . . [F]or some, the door itself is important; for others, the undiscovered country beyond it ?-- ?the never-never land, Saint Brendan's Island, the Land of Heart's Desire . . . Whatever we call it, it is more our home than any earthly country." Joy called it Fairyland, a place she visited in her dreams and searched for in her waking hours.        C. S. Lewis, in his first published novel, The Pilgrim's Regress, calls it the Island. That book ?-- ?an allegorical revision of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress written shortly after Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity ?-- ?would teach Joy the meaning of her childhood dreams. "By disguising fairyland as heaven," Joy wrote after becoming a Christian, "I was enabled to love heaven." Before this revelation and after, Joy's attempts to reach the castle would determine the course of her brief yet abundant life. In forty-five years she embraced more milestones and worldviews than most people experience in a lifetime twice as long. Her Daylight Street would detour into a romance with the Communist Party, whose propaganda would seduce her into mistaking the Soviet Union for her utopic Fairyland. The route would dead-end in a miserable first marriage to Bill Gresham, a troubled Spanish civil war veteran, Joy's partner in a misguided dance with Dianetics ?-- ?another illusion. And the road would inevitably lead to C. S. Lewis, Joy's final embodiment of heaven on earth, and the man who would point her in the direction of the Fairyland that would finally satisfy her heart. Excerpted from Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis by Abigail Santamaria All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---