C. S. Lewis – A Life
Page 35
Davidman’s influence led to some much-needed renovation work at The Kilns. The blackout curtains, installed in 1940, were still in place in 1952.682 The furniture needed replacement. The woodwork needed painting. Following Mrs. Moore’s illness and death, Lewis and his brother had allowed the property to become decrepit. Davidman was determined to get it sorted out. The Kilns was renovated. New furniture began to appear.
In the end, however, events took a dramatic turn. Davidman had been suffering from pains in her leg, which Lewis’s physician Robert Havard mistakenly diagnosed as a relatively minor case of fibrositis. (Havard here seems to have lived up to his nickname “The Useless Quack.”683) On the evening of 18 October 1956, while Lewis was in Cambridge, Davidman fell over while trying to answer a telephone call from Katharine Farrer. She was admitted to the nearby Wingfield-Morris Orthopaedic Hospital, where X-rays showed a broken femur. But they revealed much more than a broken bone. Davidman had a malignant tumour in her left breast, as well as secondary manifestations elsewhere. Her days were numbered.
The Death of Joy Davidman
Davidman’s serious illness seems to have brought about a change in Lewis’s attitude towards her. The thought of Davidman’s death made Lewis see their relationship in a new way. Perhaps the most important witness to this transformation in Lewis’s thoughts is a letter to the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, written in June 1957. Referring to Thanatos, the Greek god of death, Lewis comments on how Thanatos’s approach galvanised Lewis’s own feelings, converting friendship to love:
My feelings had changed. They say a rival often turns a friend into a lover. Thanatos, certainly (they say) approaching but at an uncertain speed, is a most efficient rival for this purpose. We soon learn to love what we know we must lose.684
The realisation that Davidman might soon be taken from him concentrated Lewis’s mind. As he commented grimly to one of his long-standing female correspondents, he might soon be “in rapid succession, a bridegroom and a widower. There may, in fact, be a deathbed marriage.”685 To others, however, he was more optimistic. Writing to Arthur Greeves in late November, he suggested that there was a “reasonable probability” that Davidman would enjoy “some years more of (tolerable) life.”686
Lewis eventually realised that his furtive civil marriage to Davidman, which he had earlier referred to as their “innocent little secret,”687 needed to be publicly acknowledged, not least because of rumours of other romantic entanglements around this time involving Lewis.688 On 24 December 1956, the following announcement belatedly appeared in the Times:
A marriage has taken place between Professor C. S. Lewis, of Magdalene College Cambridge, and Mrs. Joy Gresham, now a patient in the Churchill Hospital, Oxford. It is requested that no letters be sent.689
This profoundly ambiguous announcement made no mention of the date of the marriage, nor that it was a purely civil affair.
Behind the scenes, Lewis had been attempting to arrange a marriage in church, which he believed would place his relationship with Davidman on a firmly Christian footing. On 17 November 1956, Lewis asked the bishop of Oxford, Dr. Harry Carpenter, a former warden of Keble College, if this might be possible. Although sympathetic to Lewis’s situation, Carpenter was clear that he could not sanction it within his diocese of Oxford. The Church of England did not then permit the remarrying of divorced persons, and Carpenter did not see why Lewis’s celebrity status should allow him privileges that were denied to others. In any case, Lewis and Davidman were already married, in that the Church of England—as the established church of the land—recognised civil weddings as valid. He couldn’t be married again in any parish church in the diocese. Lewis was angered by this ruling. On his view of things, Davidman’s marriage to Bill Gresham was invalid, in that her husband had been married before. But none of his Oxford clerical friends would marry him in open defiance of their bishop, or the accepted position of the church at that time.
In March 1957, as Davidman’s condition seemed to worsen, Lewis turned his thoughts to a student who had attended his lectures in the 1930s. Peter Bide, a former Communist, had studied English Language and Literature at Oxford from 1936 to 1939, and had attended Lewis’s lectures. After serving in the Royal Marines in the Second World War, he had taken orders in the Church of England in 1949, and settled in the diocese of Chichester. In 1954, Bide was heavily involved in pastoral ministry during a polio outbreak in Sussex. Following his prayers for Michael Gallagher, a young boy believed to be terminally ill, the child recovered. Lewis heard of this miracle, and asked Bide to come and pray for his dying wife.690
Bide was apprehensive about this invitation. On the one hand, he did not particularly want to be thought of as a “priest with a gift of healing.” On the other, he considered that he owed a “considerable intellectual debt” to Lewis, who had been a formative influence on him during his Oxford days. After much thought, he agreed to “lay hands”—a traditional Christian way of asking for God’s blessing—on Davidman. Lewis’s account of what happened next is found in a letter written three months later to Dorothy L. Sayers:
Dear Father Bide (do you know him?) who had come to lay his hands on Joy—for he has on his record what looks v. like one miracle—without being asked and merely on being told the situation at once said he wd. marry us. So we had a bedside marriage with a nuptial Mass.691
Lewis’s description does not ring completely true. Bide would have been aware of the position of the Church of England at this time, and known that it would have been a serious matter of ecclesiastical discipline and personal integrity to conduct any such service. Lewis’s account of events implies that Bide saw such matters as being of little importance, and that he volunteered to marry Lewis and Davidman as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
It is instructive to compare Lewis’s version of events with Bide’s rather different recollection of what happened that day.692 According to Bide, he arrived at The Kilns in preparation for laying hands on Davidman, when Lewis pleaded with him to marry them as well. “Look, Peter, I know this isn’t fair, but do you think you could marry us?” Lewis seems to have believed that a priest of the Church of England from outside the diocese of Oxford was not necessarily subject to its bishop’s ruling, and may not have realized that he was placing Bide in a very difficult position.
Bide asked for some time to think about this request, which was in his view out of order. In the end, Bide decided he would do whatever Jesus Christ would have done. “That somehow finished the argument.” He agreed to marry them. But he had not volunteered to do so, and was clearly uneasy about both what he was being asked to do, and the manner in which he had been asked to do it.
It remains unclear why Lewis appears to have believed that Bide made an unprompted offer to marry them, which seems to be contradicted by Bide’s vivid memory of being asked to do something that he regarded as irregular and improper. The balance of evidence would seem to lie in favour of Bide’s account of things. It is possible that Lewis’s belief that Davidman was about to die may have shaped the way he understood his conversation with Bide.
Yet we cannot overlook the fact that Lewis’s entire relationship with Davidman was cloaked with subterfuge, recalling Lewis’s earlier lack of transparency (particularly with his father) about his relationship with Mrs. Moore in 1918–1920. We do not know why Lewis failed to tell his friends the truth about this newer relationship, beginning with the civil marriage of April 1956, and ending with the religious marriage service of March 1957. There is no doubt that some of his closest acquaintances—most notably, Tolkien—were deeply hurt at being excluded from Lewis’s confidence.
The Christian marriage service took place at eleven o’clock in the morning of 21 March 1957 in Davidman’s ward at the Churchill Hospital, with Warnie and the ward sister as witnesses. Bide then laid hands on Davidman, and prayed for her healing. It was obviously a moment of great solemnity and significance for both Lewis and Davidman. It was also a moment of no small sign
ificance for Bide. He had crossed a Rubicon, deliberately flouting the discipline of his church. His forced choice had put his career on the line.
Bide decided to come clean with the church authorities immediately. He went to see Carpenter before leaving Oxford, and explained what he had just done. Carpenter was furious at this blatant breach of protocol, and ordered him to go straight back to his own diocese and confess everything. On his return home, Bide was alarmed to find that the bishop of Chichester, George Bell, had already asked to see him. Fearing the worst, Bide met Bell the next day and confessed his misdemeanour. Bell made it clear that he was not pleased with this development, and asked for a reassurance it wouldn’t happen again. But that wasn’t why he had summoned Bide. He wanted to offer him one of the best jobs in his diocese—the parish of Goring-by-Sea. And the offer, he reassured him, was still open. Would he accept it?693
13.3 Peter Bide in November 1960. Bide officiated at the “marriage service” between Lewis and Joy Davidman at the Churchill Hospital, Oxford, on 21 March 1957.
Davidman returned home to The Kilns in April, in the expectation of dying within weeks. Lewis himself was now suffering from osteoporosis, which caused him considerable pain in his legs and made it difficult for him to move around without the use of a surgical belt. Lewis took some small pleasure in the thought that as his pain had increased, Davidman’s had decreased. This, he declared, was a “Charles Williams substitution,”694 in which the lover bore the pain of the beloved. For Williams—and later for Lewis—“one had power to accept into one’s own body the pain of someone else, through Christian love.”695
In what Lewis regarded as a miracle, Davidman recovered sufficiently to allow her to start walking again by December 1957. In June of the following year, her cancer was diagnosed as being in remission. In July 1958, Lewis and Davidman flew to Ireland, where they spent ten days on a “belated honeymoon,” visiting Lewis’s family and friends, and drinking in the sights, sounds, and smells of his homeland—the “blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell and the heather just then beginning to bloom.”696
In this late summer of his life, reassured about his wife’s health, Lewis was able to turn to writing again. His Reflections on the Psalms (1958) and The Four Loves (1960) both date from this period, and reflect Davidman’s influence. It is difficult to read the latter work without seeing at least something of Lewis’s developing relationship with Davidman reflected in its chapters and some of its elegant phrases—such as the celebrated “Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’”697
Meanwhile, Lewis’s lack of familiarity with the British tax system was causing him major headaches. In the postwar period, the United Kingdom imposed punitive tax rates of up to 90 percent on those who earned substantial amounts through royalties.698 Both Lewis and Tolkien found themselves staggered by large and unexpected retrospective tax demands, resulting from the success of their books. Lewis does not appear to have employed an accountant, and was thus caught unawares by his legal obligations. In March 1959, Lewis told his confidant Arthur Greeves that he had been “knocked flat by a huge surtax on royalties earned 2 years ago,” which forced him and Davidman to cut back drastically on expenditure.699 Lewis became anxious about money, and was increasingly reluctant to buy new furniture or to continue renovating The Kilns, in case he would have to meet further massive demands from the Inland Revenue.
His finances seem to have recovered to some extent by September 1959, when—apparently at Davidman’s instigation—Lewis and Roger Lancelyn Green planned an overseas trip together with their wives to explore some classical sites in Greece. But their plans were thrown into confusion by developments a few weeks later. On 13 October, following what was meant to be a routine hospital checkup, it was discovered that Davidman’s cancer had returned.700
But the Greece trip still went ahead.701 In April 1960, a week after the publication of The Four Loves, Lewis and Davidman flew with Roger and June Lancelyn Green to Greece, to visit the classical sites of the ancient world in Athens, Rhodes, and Crete. It was the first time Lewis had travelled outside the British Isles since setting out to fight on the killing fields of France in the Great War. It was to be the last trip Lewis and Davidman made together. Lewis’s “very strange marriage” was soon to end in tragedy.
CHAPTER 14
* * *
1960–1963
Bereavement, Illness, and Death: The Final Years
Joy Davidman died of cancer at the age of forty-five at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, on 13 July 1960, with Lewis at her bedside. At her request, her funeral took place at Oxford’s crematorium on 18 July. The service was led by Austin Farrer, one of the relatively few among Lewis’s circle who had come to like Davidman. Her memorial plaque remains there, and is to this day one of the crematorium’s best-known features.
Lewis was devastated. Not only had he lost his wife, whom he had nursed through her illness, and had come to love; he had also lost a personal Muse, a source of literary encouragement and inspiration. Davidman had been a significant influence on three of his late books—Till We Have Faces, Reflections on the Psalms, and The Four Loves. Now Davidman would be instrumental for one of Lewis’s darkest and most revealing works. Her death unleashed a stream of thoughts which Lewis could not initially control. In the end, he committed them to writing as a way of coping with them. The result was one of his most distressing and disturbing books: A Grief Observed.
A Grief Observed (1961): The Testing of Faith
In the months following Davidman’s death, Lewis went through a process of grieving which was harrowing in its emotional intensity, and unrelenting in its intellectual questioning and probing. What Lewis once referred to as his “treaty with reality” was overwhelmed with a tidal wave of raw emotional turmoil. “Reality smashe[d] my dream to bits.”702 The dam was breached. Invading troops crossed the frontier, securing a temporary occupation of what was meant to be safe territory. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”703 Like a tempest, unanswered and unanswerable questions surged against Lewis’s faith, forcing him against a wall of doubt and uncertainty.
Faced with these unsettling and disquieting challenges, Lewis coped using the method he had recommended to his confidant Arthur Greeves in 1916: “Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”704 In the days following Davidman’s death in July 1960, Lewis began to write down his thoughts, not troubling to conceal his own doubts and spiritual agony. A Grief Observed is an uncensored and unrestrained account of Lewis’s feelings. He found liberty and release in being able to write what he actually thought, rather than what his friends and admirers believed he ought to think.
Lewis discussed the manuscript with his close friend Roger Lancelyn Green in September 1960. What should he do with it? Eventually, they agreed that it ought to be published. Lewis, anxious not to cause his friends any embarrassment, decided to conceal his authorship of A Grief Observed. He did this in four ways:
By using the leading literary publisher Faber & Faber instead of Geoffrey Bles, his long-standing London publisher. Lewis handed the text over to his literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, who submitted it to Faber & Faber, without giving any indication that Lewis had any connection with the work. This was designed to lay a false trail for literary detectives.
By using a pseudonym for the author—“N. W. Clerk.” Lewis originally suggested the Latin pseudonym Dimidius (“cut in half”). T. S. Eliot, a director of Faber & Faber, who immediately guessed the true identity of the obviously erudite author on reading the text submitted by Curtis Brown, suggested that a more “plausible English pseudonym” would “hold off enquirers better than Dimidius.”705 Lewis had already used several pen names to conceal the authorship of his poems. The name he finally chose is derived fr
om the abbreviation of Nat Whilk (an Anglo-Saxon phrase best translated as “I don’t know who”) and “Clerk” (someone who is able to read and write). Lewis had earlier used the Latinised form of this name—Natwilcius—to refer to a scholarly authority in his 1943 novel Perelandra.
By using a pseudonym for the central figure of the narrative—“H.,” presumably an abbreviation of “Helen,” a forename that Davidman rarely used yet which appeared on legal documents concerning her marriage and naturalisation as a British citizen, and her death certificate, which refers to her as “Helen Joy Lewis,” “wife of Clive Staples Lewis.”
By altering his style. A Grief Observed is deliberately written using a format and writing style which none of his regular readers would naturally associate with Lewis. By incorporating these “small stylistic disguisements all the way along,” Lewis hoped to throw his readers off the scent.706 Few early readers of the work appear to have made the connection with Lewis.
Even to those who recognised at least some telltale signs of Lewis’s style in the work (such as its clarity), A Grief Observed seemed quite unlike anything else he had written. The book is about feelings, and their deeper significance in subjecting any “treaty with reality” to the severe testing which alone can prove whether it is capable of bearing the weight that is placed upon it. Lewis was famously uncomfortable about discussing his private emotions and feelings, having even apologised to his readers for the “suffocatingly subjective” approach he adopted at certain points in his earlier work Surprised by Joy.707