BY SOPHIA HOLCOMB

“They are laying down their lives for love, and love is laying waste to all my fears.” – Andrew Peterson, “Windows in the World”[1]

When I share my research on C.S. Lewis (known to his friends as Jack) and Joy Davidman with friends, family, or teachers, one common and well-meaning question arises: Why do you care so much? Though it looks sharp in print, the tone is always kind and genuine and I think I do their question injustice with my answer. Sometimes I responded with embarrassment, because at the end of the day it was just an obsession with some authors. Other times I overexplained and slipped into a false air of academic superiority, even though both my listener and I know this subject will never be “highbrow.” For months, my answer was something like: “I just really like C.S. Lewis, and I think Joy Davidman had an important influence on his work.” It wasn’t wrong—but it wasn’t the whole truth.

And as the past decades show, I’m not alone in my fascination. Filmmakers, scholars, and novelists have written and discussed Jack and Joy, and debates about them continue. Clearly, there’s more here than a thesis topic or a dramatic love story. There is something beyond a thesis we are interested in, something beyond a dramatic story or movie script. I think that there is something inherent in the story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman that reflects the narrative of the Christian faith. Not an allegory, not even a symbol exactly, but what Andrew Peterson calls a “window in the world.”

Andrew Peterson ends his song “Windows in the World” by singing, “It’s a window in the world, a little portal where you get a better view, and the wonder of it all is all you need to see the goodness getting through.” While countless theses about Jack Lewis and Joy Davidman have been written, and I continue to write them today, beneath all the scholarship and storytelling, their lives offer a glimpse of “the goodness getting through.”

This realization came to me while reading The Completion of C.S. Lewis, the third volume of Harry Lee Poe’s biography.[2] For more than two hundred pages before Joy even appears, Poe recounts Jack’s years of pain and disappointment. The book covers 1945–1963, and between 1945 and 1952 (when Jack first met Joy in person), his life was marked by hardship.

He lived in constant domestic turmoil with Mrs. Moore, the mother of a fallen war comrade he had promised to care for. Jack kept that vow faithfully for thirty years, until Mrs. Moore’s death in 1952, but she made his household tense and joyless. At the same time, Lewis lived through the anxiety of World War II and under the ever-present threat of bombings in England. He lost professorships, grieved the death of his friend Charles Williams, and eventually collapsed from a mix of exhaustion, illness, and intense anxiety in early 1950. To add to everything, his brother, Warren, was also an alcoholic and Jack found himself carrying for his brother after particularly bad binges. All the while, Jack still suffered from memories of the war and carried shrapnel in his body that caused great pain. Far from a picture of an ivory-tower professor, Jack was a man who suffered deeply.

Across the ocean, Joy faced her own share of turmoil and suffering. After a confusing and disillusioning season in the Communist Party, she converted to Christianity in 1947, influenced in part by Lewis’s writings. At the same time, she was trapped in a destructive marriage to William “Bill” Lindsay Gresham, an abusive alcoholic who subjected her to both physical and emotional harm.[3] She loved her two young sons deeply, but the home was marked by instability and fear. On top of this, Joy dealt with a series of serious health problems, one of which nearly claimed her life in 1951. Friends could see her resilience and pain. Michal Williams, the widow of Charles Williams, wrote: “I like Joy so much. She is most unusual… somehow I think she is a forlorn child + very brave + rather hurt by life.”[4]

These are the backgrounds of two people who first became pen pals, then friends, and eventually husband and wife. Warren, Jack’s brother, perhaps gave the best description of their relationship when he called it a “restoration.” He did not elaborate further, but based on what we know, it is safe to say their marriage was indeed a redemptive restoration.

For Joy, after enduring a very broken marriage, life with Jack brought overwhelming happiness. For Jack, after years in a home made desolate and dreary under Mrs. Moore, life with Joy meant a bright and pleasant household, shaped by the presence of an intellectually and spiritually astute woman.

Yet their marriage was overshadowed by the “sword of Damocles.”[5] They wed while Joy lay on her deathbed, expected to live only weeks. Miraculously, she recovered and went into remission for three years. During that time, some spoke of a kind of substitution: as Joy regained calcium in the leg broken by cancer, Jack was losing calcium and was diagnosed with osteoporosis.

Even so, the restoration endured. They wrote poetry together, Joy edited and typed his essays, they played Scrabble in every language they knew, and they traveled to Greece. Joy’s close friend Bel Kaufman recalled her saying, “Now I know that the poets and movies are right; it does exist.”[6]

As I said, their story echoes the Christian narrative: creation, the fall, redemption, and the new heavens and new earth. Jack and Joy’s lives embodied the latter half—redemption in the midst of brokenness, hope in the face of death, and the promise of eternal life. Their marriage did not erase suffering, but it bore witness to restoration. It was not a “happy ending” in the popular sense—Joy died in 1960, only three years after marrying Jack. Yet the central truth remains: we live as redeemed people in a still-broken world, awaiting the new heavens and the new earth.

As humans, we are drawn to redemptive plots in literature and movies, and the pull is even stronger when we encounter a “real-life” version. We are, of course, interested in Joy Davidman as an editor and collaborator on many influential books, and writing and researching about her is a worthwhile endeavor. Yet beneath all of that, the deeper reason for our investment is simple: their story points us to the larger narrative that holds the world together and to the eternal life we hope one day to inherit.

Footnotes

[1] Andrew Peterson, “Windows in the World,” Resurrection Letters, Volume 2, Centricity Music, 2008.

[2] Harry Lee Poe, The Completion of C.S. Lewis (1945 – 1963): From War to Joy, Crossway Books, 2022.

[3] For more details on the tumultuous marriage, see Abigail Santamaria, Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, especially 249–251.

[4] Letter to Chad Walsh in November [11?] 1952, “Correspondence of Chad Walsh with Michal Williams, April 9, 1951 – January 29, 1954,” Chad Walsh Papers, Box 1, Folder 6. Also referenced in K. Alan Snyder, America Discovers C.S. Lewis:  His Profound Impact, Wipf & Stock, 2016, 34.

[5] C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950–1963, edited by Walter Hooper, HarperCollins, 2007, 925.

[6] Lyle W. Dorsett and Jake Hanson, “C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman: Severe Mercies, Late Romance,” in C.S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy, Volume 1, edited by Bruce L. Edwards, Praeger, 2007, 275–294, 289.