Davidman’s intention to seduce Lewis is confirmed by a collection of papers bequeathed in 2010 by Jean Wakeman, Davidman’s closest friend in England, to the Marion E. Wade Center, the premier research institution for Lewis studies based at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.663 These newly acquired papers include forty-five sonnets, written by Davidman for Lewis over the period 1951–1954. As Don King has noted, these sonnets deal with Davidman’s intentions of returning to England after her initial meeting with Lewis and forging a closer relationship with him. Twenty-eight of these sonnets set out in great detail how Davidman attempted to forge that relationship. Lewis is represented as a glacial figure, an iceberg that Davidman intends to melt through a heady mixture of intellectual sophistication and physical allure. But this is to rush ahead of our story, even if it sets subsequent developments in their proper context.
Some of those close to Davidman in America had already worked out what was going on. Renée Pierce, Davidman’s cousin, was convinced that Davidman was falling in love with Lewis around 1950, despite never having met him—or even seen him.664 But how could Davidman “seduce” Lewis? For a start, she needed to get in touch with him and meet him. How could she do that?
Happily for Davidman, an answer lay to hand. By that time, Chad Walsh was established as the leading American authority on Lewis. After befriending Walsh, Davidman asked his advice about befriending Lewis. As a result, Davidman then wrote to Lewis in January 1950, and received a promising and engaging reply. She kept writing to him. And he kept replying.
Encouraged, Davidman sailed to England, arriving on 13 August 1952, leaving her two sons—David and Douglas—with their father. Her cousin Renée went to help Bill look after the children. The declared purpose of Davidman’s trip—funded by her parents—was to visit her penfriend Phyllis Williams and complete her book Smoke on the Mountain, a contemporary interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Yet the real objective of the visit was to befriend Lewis.
During the course of her extended visit to England, Davidman initiated correspondence that led to lunch with Lewis and some of his friends on two occasions in Oxford. Did Lewis have any idea of what was going on in Davidman’s emotional world? Or how easily he might be drawn into it? It is interesting to note that Lewis brought colleagues with him to these occasions. The word chaperone was never mentioned, but that’s what they were. When Warnie—the intended chaperone for one such lunch at Magdalen College—was unable to attend, Lewis hurriedly replaced him with George Sayer. Davidman clearly judged these occasions to be successful and interesting. Lewis seemed willing to allow the friendship to develop. Davidman made all the moves in the developing relationship; Lewis, however, seemed happy to go along with things. Up to this point, Davidman’s relationship with Lewis paralleled that of Ruth Pitter.
Perhaps Lewis now felt safe in the company of this female admirer, whom he introduced to his circle as “Mrs. Gresham.” Davidman lunched privately with Lewis in London in early December, an occasion which led to a further invitation to spend Christmas and the New Year with Lewis and Warnie at The Kilns. The experience, she later remarked to Walsh, made her into a “complete Anglo-maniac,” who was desperate to “transplant.”665 Did she see Lewis as the possible vehicle of such a transplantation? Would Lewis be the knight in shining armour who delivered this maiden from the clutches of her evil husband in a noble act of courtly love? The evidence certainly suggests that Lewis was prepared to play some such role, especially when Davidman produced a letter from her husband, informing her that he wanted to marry her cousin Renée.
Davidman returned to America on 3 January 1953 to confront this situation. By the end of February, she and her husband had agreed to divorce. She remained in contact with Lewis as the situation unfolded. According to her immigration record, Davidman returned to England on 13 November 1953 with her two sons, Douglas and David, then aged eight and nine—a decision that deeply wounded Bill Gresham. This development clearly requires further comment. Why move to England, where she had no family connections? Her parents were both still alive; indeed, they even came to visit her in London in October 1954. Why not remain in the United States, where the cost of living was significantly lower, and her employment prospects so much better?
Many have argued that there is only one persuasive answer: Davidman clearly believed that she would be supported financially by Lewis. Her immigration documents explicitly stated that she was permitted to remain in the United Kingdom provided that she did not “enter any employment either paid or unpaid.”666 She had enrolled both boys at Dane Court School in Pyrford, Surrey (which closed in 1981). She needed money. It is likely (but not proved) that Lewis met most of Davidman’s living costs and the school fees anonymously through the “Agapony Fund,” a charitable trust set up in 1942 by Owen Barfield to administer some of Lewis’s royalty earnings.667 Warnie clearly knew nothing of any such arrangement.
Yet this is not the full story. Davidman’s desire to remain in England was partly fuelled by anxiety about her employment prospects back home. Cold War fever was sweeping America, given added credibility by Soviet nuclear tests and the Korean War (1950–1953). Davidman could not have failed to notice that her active Communist past, which she never sought to hide, would cast a dark shadow over her chances of finding a job in Hollywood or the media. The House Un-American Activities Committee—an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives—was actively pursuing people with Communist commitments and influence, especially those working in the media. Eventually more than three hundred artists with alleged Communist sympathies or connections—including movie directors, radio commentators, actors, and particularly screenwriters—were blacklisted, and boycotted by the Hollywood studios.668
Davidman’s past was rapidly catching up with her. Who would be able to overlook her past membership with the Communist Party? Or her active involvement in its publications, such as the journal New Masses? She would be unlikely to secure employment as a Hollywood scriptwriter, or to make an impact as a writer anywhere in America. Davidman’s conviction that her future as a writer lay outside the United States is perfectly plausible, given the political context of the time.
Davidman’s relationship with Lewis gained new momentum in 1955, when she and her sons moved into a three-bedroom house at 10 Old High Street in Headington, not far from The Kilns. Lewis arranged for this lease and paid the rent. He visited Davidman for extended periods daily, clearly enjoying her company. Yet Davidman was more than good company for Lewis; she also helped stimulate his literary imagination—a matter which needs further comment.
Initially, Lewis was drawn to Davidman by her sense of humour and her obvious intellectual gifts. It soon became clear that she could be much more than this. It is likely that Davidman’s influence lay behind Lewis’s decision to start using a literary agent, rather than dealing directly with publishers. On 17 February 1955, Lewis informed Jocelyn Gibb (1907–1979), the managing director of Geoffrey Bles, that he had hired Spencer Curtis Brown (1906–1980) to represent him in future negotiations with publishers.669 This decision appears to have been motivated by financial, rather than literary, considerations. Did Lewis suddenly realise he needed a greater income?
13.2 Joy Davidman Lewis in 1960.
Yet Davidman did more than suggest a way in which Lewis could make more money from his writings. She was midwife to three of Lewis’s late books—including Till We Have Faces (1956), widely regarded as one of Lewis’s most important novels. Davidman liked to compare herself to the “editor-collaborator” Maxwell Perkins (1884–1947), the great American literary editor who helped craft the finest novels of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. A respected writer himself, Perkins possessed the rare gift of enabling other authors to refine and perfect their art. Davidman had played this role already with Bill Gresham, and now brought her skills to bear on Lewis.
In March 1955, Davidman came to stay at The Kilns. Lewis had long been interested in t
he classical myth of Psyche, and had produced a poetic rewriting and interpretation of the story in the 1920s. But the project had stalled. Lewis could not work out how to develop the idea. Davidman began to deploy a collaborative strategy. She and Lewis “kicked a few ideas around till one came to life.”670
It worked. Lewis suddenly saw how a book could be written on the Psyche theme. He was fired up with enthusiasm. By the end of the next day, Lewis had written the first chapter of the text that would become Till We Have Faces. Lewis dedicated the book to Davidman, and regarded it as one of his best pieces of writing. Commercially, however, it was something of a disaster. As Lewis himself ruefully remarked in 1959, the work that he himself considered “far and away the best I have written” turned out to be “my one big failure both with the critics and with the public.”671 Yet the Narnia Chronicles aside, it has become Lewis’s most critically discussed piece of writing. Davidman’s encouragement also lay behind two more of Lewis’s later writings: Reflections on the Psalms (1958) and The Four Loves (1960).
Lewis worked collaboratively on many of his writing projects during his Oxford period. Although the Inklings were primarily concerned with the testing and improvement of works already under way, Lewis found that others provided him with the creative stimulus to write—probably most clearly Roger Lancelyn Green, who played a significant role in the genesis of the Chronicles of Narnia, especially The Magician’s Nephew. Davidman can be seen to fit into this general pattern. Yet Davidman did rather more than join the ranks of those who stimulated Lewis’s literary imagination. She also became his wife.
The “Very Strange Marriage” to Joy Davidman
It is usually suggested that Lewis’s “very strange marriage” (the phrase came from Tolkien, who regarded their relationship with undisguised hostility)672 to Joy Davidman was the result of a crisis which came to a head shortly after she moved to 10 Old High Street, Headington. Most biographies relate—often vaguely and without substantiation—that Davidman’s right to reside in the United Kingdom was revoked by the Home Office in April 1956. This precipitated Lewis’s decision to marry Davidman. Yet the situation is more complex than this.
Davidman was initially permitted to remain in England until 13 January 1955. However, this leave to stay was subsequently extended by the Home Office until 31 May 1956. There is no question of anything being “revoked.” Davidman’s permission to reside in the United Kingdom was simply due to expire at the end of May. The civil marriage might well have been planned with Lewis as a strategy of last resort to allow her and her sons to remain in Oxford.
Another possibility also needs to be noted. Davidman’s permission to live in England was conditional; she was not permitted to undertake any employment, whether paid or unpaid. Warnie and many others in Lewis’s circle assumed that Davidman was able to cover her living costs by undertaking writing or editing projects. In fact, she was explicitly forbidden to do this. Lewis’s covert financial support for Davidman—carefully concealed from Warnie—was arguably a matter of necessity, in that she had no source of income while in England. A civil marriage to Lewis would remove this obstacle and allow Davidman to earn a living. Lewis may well have seen such a marriage as a legal formality enabling Davidman to make her own way in the world.
Yet this was not a sudden development. Lewis appears to have discussed the possibility of a civil marriage to Davidman months earlier, during a September 1955 visit to his confidant Arthur Greeves in Northern Ireland. Although we have no record of Greeves’s reaction to this somewhat surprising proposal, it is clear that he raised significant concerns about it, which Lewis was unable to allay. When writing to Greeves a month after the visit, Lewis was defensive about the idea of a civil marriage to Davidman: it was merely a “legal formality,” without any deeper religious or relational significance. Following the marriage, the Home Office removed any conditions on Davidman remaining in the United Kingdom. She applied for British citizenship on 24 April 1957, and was registered as a “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” on 2 August 1957.673
Lewis had earlier, to Tolkien’s disquiet, set out such a view of civil marriage in his broadcast talks, and subsequently in Mere Christianity. A church marriage—the “reality”—was out of the question for Lewis, who held very traditional views on the matter. Such a religious “marriage” would have been adulterous from a religious perspective, since Davidman was divorced. Yet Lewis emphasised that this possibility was not even under discussion.674
To most of Lewis’s close friends it seemed clear that Davidman had manipulated Lewis, putting him under moral pressure to enter into a marriage he did not want with someone whose interests in him were at least as mercenary as they were literary or spiritual. They took the view that Davidman was a gold digger, out to secure her own future and that of her sons. Davidman moved in on Lewis, whereas Pitter was so well bred she would never have dreamed of imposing herself in such a way. Lewis’s furtiveness about his developing relationship with Davidman meant that members of his inner circle were unable to offer him advice and support, precisely because they were unaware of how serious matters had become. By the time Lewis announced his marriage, it was too late for them to do anything, other than to try to make the best of a messy situation. Lewis was out of his depth, and none of his friends had realised the extent to which he had become entangled with Davidman.
There is, of course, a second way of interpreting this relationship, favoured by Hollywood scriptwriters, which sees it as a late-blossoming love affair in Lewis’s life, a fairy-tale romance which ultimately turned to tragedy. This romanticised reading of things—famously and uncritically presented in the movie Shadowlands (1993)—presents Lewis as a crusty, socially withdrawn old bachelor whose drab life was turned upside down by a feisty New York girl who knew a few things about the real world. The brash and breezy New Yorker brought a breath of fresh air to Lewis’s dull existence, helping him to discover the good things in life and shake off his fusty old habits and dreary social conventions.
This view of the relationship has obvious problems. It is frankly somewhat difficult to see how Lewis’s social skills might have been enhanced by Davidman, whose lack of social or emotional intelligence was frequently noted by her irritated contemporaries. It is nonsense to suggest that Lewis was socially withdrawn; his colleagues remembered him as a social creature, possessed of an occasionally larger-than-life bonhomie, chiefly notable for his loud laughter.
In reality, Lewis had become—to put it bluntly, yet accurately—“an American divorcée’s sugar daddy.”675 But Lewis seems to have been a willing victim, unquestionably benefitting from any such arrangement—perhaps most obviously in regaining his literary motivation and inspiration—however dubious the process by which it came about. Lewis had his own concerns and problems, and Davidman did much to help him engage with some of these.
It is also important to appreciate that Lewis was actively supporting other American women writers financially around this time. The most important of these was Mary Willis Shelburne (1895–1975), a poet and critic who kept in contact with Lewis over an extended period of time, and was clearly well regarded by Lewis.676 She also had financial needs, which she did not conceal from Lewis. Initially, Lewis was not able to help her financially because of the strict regulation of foreign exchange by the British authorities, which prevented him (as a private British citizen) from sending money to America. In a letter to Shelburne on Christmas Day 1958, Lewis refers to a relaxation of foreign exchange regulations, which now allowed him to send her a regular stipend from the Agapony Fund.677
That Lewis saw his marriage to Davidman as a matter of chivalrous generosity, rather than as an exclusive passionate romance, is suggested by the fact that Davidman did not displace Pitter in Lewis’s life. Lewis’s enduring respect and affection for Pitter is obvious from his letter of July 1956—several months after his clandestine marriage—in which he invited her (rather than Davidman) to be his guest at a royal garden party at Buc
kingham Palace.678 In the end, Pitter couldn’t make it, so Lewis went on his own. He wrote to Pitter again a week later to tell her that the event was “simply ghastly,” and invited her to lunch with him sometime soon, so that they could catch up with each other.679 Lewis’s correspondence and his meetings make it clear that Davidman did not dislodge other women who mattered to him.
Lewis’s civil marriage to Davidman, which he so obviously regarded as a mere legal formality, was in reality a ticking time bomb, giving Davidman certain legal rights that Lewis seems to have assumed she would not choose to exercise. Lewis clearly believed that the marriage would make no difference to their lives or mutual relationships. Yet Lewis’s gesture of solidarity towards Davidman and her sons turned out to be something of a Trojan horse. Davidman soon staked her claim to her rights, making it clear that she was not content to remain in her lodgings in Headington. The Kilns would soon be occupied by subterfuge rather than explicit invitation. If she was Lewis’s wife—as she was in the eyes of the law—she and her sons had legal rights stretching far beyond the mere right to remain in England. For a start, they were entitled to live with her husband. Lewis had no options. By early October 1955, he had reluctantly agreed to install Davidman and her two sons at The Kilns.
Warnie had gloomily yet accurately foreseen such mercenary developments as soon as he was informed about the civil marriage. He had regarded it as inevitable that Davidman would “press for her rights”—a discreet allusion to the interest in Lewis’s earnings and property that resulted from her new status as his wife. Davidman now regarded The Kilns as her house, clearly unaware of the complex arrangements for the legal ownership of the house stipulated in Mrs. Moore’s will, by which Lewis was merely an occupant of The Kilns.
This became unpleasantly clear in a confrontation between Maureen Blake and Davidman, arising from Davidman’s stated belief that her two boys would inherit The Kilns when Lewis and she were dead. Maureen (who had only recently found out that Lewis was married) promptly corrected her, making it clear that under Mrs. Moore’s will, legal ownership of the house would pass to Maureen after the deaths of Lewis and Warnie.680 Yet Davidman would have nothing of such legal niceties: “This house belongs to me and the boys.”681 Maureen, of course, was right. The conversation is important more in illuminating Davidman’s mercenary motivations than her knowledge of English law. Davidman pressed Maureen on the matter, demanding that she yield her right to the property. Under some pressure, Maureen agreed to discuss the matter with her husband. Nothing further ensued.
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 34