A Joy observed
Kaufman, Bel
ILLUMINATING 'SHADOWLANDS' A JOY OBSERVED C.S. LEWIS IN LOVE For me, seeing the film Shadowlands was like watching shadowy characters superimposed on people I had known in real life. The...
...Although they had two sons, David and Douglas, only Douglas is shown in the film...
...Pheasant for lunch...
...Joy was no mean shot herself...
...Jack brought her to his home in the Kilns, on the outskirts of Oxford, where he took care of her, and where she miraculously recovered...
...Having at last found love, he tried to come to terms with his loss and with his faith in a brief and moving book, A Grief Observed...
...Joy was a remarkable person, a gifted poet and novelist, a rebel, an original, whose intellectual and spiritual qualities Lewis recognized...
...Once they tried it on me, and I pretended to recall a prenatal experience, just to please Joy...
...these were supposed to reach earliest memories...
...This essay is part of a work in progress...
...Brother Warren (Warnie)—very tweedy-British...
...Woke in freezing room...
...Lewis, whose theological writings she admired...
...And there were strong rumors in college that she was having an affair with one of our professors of English—a rumor she did not deny...
...Fine breakfast served by Mrs...
...Lewis, and my friend, Joy Davidman Grcsham, who died of cancer shortly after their marriage, was true...
...it does exist...
...Gravely ill...
...Brought gifts: Gave Joy hankie, French lipstick & scent, silver earrings...
...I remember how Joy and Bill used to run "engrams" through each other...
...She did not have time to grow old...
...He told me a story he was afraid was a bit too risque for my American ears, until Joy reassured him...
...She never looked happier...
...I met Joy in the early 1930s at Hunter College...
...Send them Blotto...
...When she married William Lindsay Gresham, author of Nightmare Alley, a novel about circus geeks, they both became involved in L. Ron Hubbard's dianetics, a technique later discredited and more recently resurfaced as Scientology...
...To bed with hot water bottle...
...She died three years later...
...It seems a women's college nearby gave a production of Midsummer Night's Dream with an all-women's cast, which he was invited to see...
...I was privy to a brief glimpse of their life at the Kilns when I was invited to visit them in 1957...
...when she mentioned that she used to go to burlesque shows...
...Talked...
...In the college yearbook, among the photos of the graduates, all women, all young, all with identical discreet black velvet V-necks and marcelled hair, I see my own photo—how young I was...
...She was given no more than a few days to live...
...But if Fiddler on the Roof can subtract two of Tevye's daughters from the seven Sholom Aleichem had given him, then why shouldn't Shadowlands subtract one from Joy...
...Joy looks wonderful, though in bed...
...And here is Joy, with her dark, limpid doe eyes and soft round face, looking grave and lovely...
...Jack told "daring "story re Bottom...
...There I met Jack and his brother Warren, and saw Joy in bed, fatally ill...
...And now, in the shadowland of the screen, here they are: Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger pretending to be Jack Lewis and my friend Joy...
...she died in her forties...
...I told them"— here he harrumphed a bit, perhaps he even blushed—"I told them this was the first time I have ever seen a female Bottom...
...Bill had a temper...
...It gave her a kind of status in our unsophisticated eyes...
...Disillusioned, she renounced communism in the press, in a series of articles which created a bit of a scandal...
...More talk with Joy...
...Jack took her death very hard...
...She also edited an anthology of antifascist war poems, for which she induced me to translate a half-dozen Russian poems into English...
...I remember how shocked we were (this was in 1933...
...I found Jack more handsome than his book jacket photos—a charmer and a delightful raconteur...
...Though ladylike, cultivated, and soft-spoken, she liked to jolt others by her nonconformity...
...What with engrams and gun shots, it was a stormy marriage...
...Loved Jack Lewis on sight...
...But it was only after she contracted cancer that their real marriage took place in a hospital in Oxford, where Joy lay dying...
...She: "Now I know that the poets and the movies are right...
...Not quite final...
...when he was angry he would go down to the basement of their house and shoot a rifle...
...After she divorced Bill, Lewis married her "in name only," to give her and her two sons British nationality...
...Cold supper...
...Jack, too, has osteosomething, back pains...
...Her collection of poetry, Letter to a Comrade, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1938...
...To Oxford...
...But the film tells very little about Joy herself—who she was, and why someone like Clive Stapleton Lewis, Christian theologian, Oxford don, and confirmed bachelor, fell in love with a Jewish divorcee sixteen years 6: 25 March 1994 his junior and married her though she was dying...
...BEL KAUFMAN Bel Kaufman is author of Up the Down Staircase...
...She often seemed sad and restless, as if seeking for something in literature, in poetry, in politics, in fads, in religion, embracing various causes, rejecting them...
...Talked with Joy about love...
...She and Jack even managed a trip to Greece, in her wheel chair, a year before she died...
...Very learned...
...A page from my diary entry on Sunday, August 25, 1957: Freezing day...
...We both went on to Columbia for graduate work, she in seventeenth-, I in eighteenth-century English literature...
...The uncommon love story between the writer, C.S...
...Walked on moors in high wind with Joy's nurse...
...In those days I was diffident, and what I admired most in Joy was her daring and independence...
...Most important was the strong bond of their common religious faith...
...Perhaps the poets and movies are right, after all...
...knows it...
...Tea and Scrabble, in all languages...
...Gave Jack tie and brandy...
...For a while she was an ardent Communist...
...He had been crying...
...One of his books, prophetically titled Surprised by Joy, written before he had met Joy, was not about her but about searching for faith and finding it...
...Joy rallied, went into remission, wrote me that she was able to walk with a cane, to work in her garden...
...Slept very well...
...When it was over, he was asked to say a few words about it...
...Miller (housekeeper...
...she was my close friend and schoolmate...
...Not long after that, he too died...
...Joy went to England to meet him, came home, returned to England with her two small sons, and began to write me letters describing how she and Jack (as Lewis was called) would walk on the moors and hold hands, and how hopeless it was for her to love him...
...She inscribed it to me "with affection for the damndest reasons...
...Ambulance came to take her to hospital for treatment...
...Joy turned to Christianity and began a correspondence with C.S...
...Said good-by—(final...
...They thought she was cured, but she wasn't...
...Commonweal 25 March 1994: 7...
...When the movie was over and we were leaving the theater, I asked my husband: "Why is your necktie wet...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 6
