| Helen Joy Davidman | |
|---|---|
| Born | 18 April 1915 New York City, New York |
| Died | 13 July 1960 (aged 45) Oxford, England |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | American |
| Occupation | Poet, author |
| Spouse | C. S. Lewis |
Joy Davidman (born Helen Joy Davidman; 18 April 1915 – 13 July 1960) was an American poet and writer. Often referred to as a child prodigy, she earned a master's degree from Columbia University in English literature in 1935. She won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for the book of poems, Letters to a Comrade in 1938. She was an atheist and member of the American Communist Party until her conversion to Christianity.
Davidman published her best known work, Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments in 1950 with a preface by C. S. Lewis. Lewis had been an influence on her work and conversion and became her second husband after her permanent relocation to England in 1956. She died from bone cancer in 1960 after a three year remission.
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Helen Joy Davidman was born into a secular middle class Jewish family in New York City, of Polish and Ukrainian background. She was a child prodigy who read H. G. Wells's The Outline of History at the age of eight and entered Hunter College in New York City at the age of fifteen, earning a degree at nineteen. In 1935, she received a master's degree in English literature from Columbia University in three semesters, while also teaching at Roosevelt High School.[1][2][3] During the Great Depression, several incidents, including witnessing the suicide of a hungry orphan jumping off a roof at Hunter College, are said to have caused her to question the fairness of capitalism and the American economic system. She joined the American Communist Party in 1938.[4]
Davidman's poems were published in Poetry by the time she had reached the age of twenty-one. For her collection Letters to a Comrade she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. She was chosen by Stephen Vincent Benet who commended Davidman for her "varied command of forms and a bold power."[1] In 1939, she won the Russell Loines Award for Poetry for this same book of poems. Although much of her work during this period reflected her politics as a member of the American Communist Party, this volume of poetry was much more than implied by the title and contained forty-five poems written in traditional and free verse that were related to serious topics of the time such as the Spanish Civil War, the inequalities of class structure and male-female relationship issues. Davidman's style in these poems showed an influence by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.[4] Her first novel Anya was published in 1940.[5] She was employed as a book reviewer and poetry editor for The New Masses, with publications in many of the issues between 1941 and 1943.[6]
She married her first husband, William Lindsay Gresham on 24 August 1942, after becoming acquainted with him through their mutual interest in communism. They had two sons, David Lindsay Gresham (born 27 March 1944) and Douglas Howard Gresham (born 10 November 1945).[2][3]
The marriage was marred by difficulties that included her husband's alcoholism and infidelity. She recounted how after her husband had telephoned her one evening in spring 1946 that he was having a nervous breakdown and didn't know when he would return home, she suffered from a defeated emotional state.[5] She then had an experience that she described as: "for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, 'the master of my fate'. . . All my defenses - all the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God - went down momentarily - and God came in."[3] Following Davidman's conversion to Christianity and Gresham's developing an interest in Dianetics, tarot cards and the I Ching, the couple became even more estranged.[1] [4]
Her second novel, Weeping Bay was published in 1950. Her best known work was Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments that was published in 1956 with a preface by C. S. Lewis.[5]
She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more.
Davidman first met writer C. S. Lewis in 1952 when she made a trip to England after a two-year correspondence with him. Her cousin Renée Rodriguez, moved in to keep house for the family while she was away. She returned home the next winter to discover that Gresham and her cousin were having an affair. When the ensuing divorce became final two years later, Gresham married Rodriguez and Davidman moved to England with her two sons.[8]
Lewis originally regarded her only as an agreeable intellectual companion and personal friend. His brother, Warren Lewis wrote: "For Jack the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met ... who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and a sense of fun." [1] Lewis agreed to enter into a civil marriage contract with her so that she could continue to live in the UK telling a friend that "the marriage was a pure matter of friendship and expediency." The civil marriage took place in St Giles', Oxford in April 1956.[9]
Davidman was then diagnosed with incurable bone cancer, and the relationship developed to the point that they sought a Christian marriage. Since she was divorced, this was not straightforward in the Church of England at the time, but a friend and Anglican priest, Rev. Peter Bide, performed the ceremony at Davidman's hospital bed on 21 March 1957.[10] The marriage did not win wide approval among Lewis's social circle, and some of his friends and colleagues avoided the new couple.[11] Joy encouraged Lewis, known to his intimates as "Jack", to write and inspired his work.
She enjoyed a remission from the cancer for three years, but it returned in a terminal form in October 1959. Davidman died on 13 July 1960, aged 45.[2] As a widower, Lewis wrote A Grief Observed to describe his feelings and pay tribute to his wife. In the book he recounts his initial loss of faith due to the immense grief he suffered after Davidman's death, and his struggle to regain his faith. After developing a heart condition two years later, Lewis went into a coma from which he recovered but then died a year later, three years after his wife.[12]
Shadowlands, a dramatized version of her life with Lewis by William Nicholson, has twice been filmed. In 1985, a television version was made by the BBC One starring Joss Ackland as Lewis and Claire Bloom as Davidman. The BBC production won BAFTA awards for best play and best actress in 1986.[13] Nicholson's work, in part drawing on Douglas Gresham's book, Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and CS Lewis (Macmillan USA 1988, HarperCollins, 1989), was also performed in London as an award-winning stage play in 1989–90. The play transferred successfully to Broadway in 1990–91, and was revived in London in 2007.[14] A cinema film version was released in 1993, with Anthony Hopkins as Jack (C. S. Lewis) and Debra Winger as Joy.[15]
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.[16]
This epitaph by C. S. Lewis was originally written on the death of Charles Williams; he later adapted it to place on his wife's grave.