1954–1960
1954–1960
The Move to Cambridge: Magdalene College
It was obvious to Lewis’s friends that he did not fit readily or easily into postwar Oxford. Lewis himself was painfully aware that he was an isolated figure there in the early 1950s. He had been passed over for senior appointments on at least three occasions. Relationships within the faculty were often fractious and unpleasant. Lewis’s correspondence of May 1954 speaks openly of a “crisis” within the Oxford University Faculty of English which tempted him “to hatred many times a day.”[626]
A year earlier, the English faculty at Oxford had voted on extending the range of the undergraduate curriculum from 1830 to 1914, thus allowing Oxford students to study the literature of the Victorian Age. Looking back, many would feel that this represented an entirely reasonable development, particularly in the light of the literary creativity of that important age. Yet it was a development that was robustly opposed by Lewis, if somewhat less aggressively by J. R. R. Tolkien. The English faculty’s challenge to the status quo—though ultimately unsuccessful—was nevertheless unsettling for Lewis, adding still further to his sense of isolation at Oxford. The Faculty of English increasingly coalesced around the “modernisers,” leaving Lewis dangerously alone.
Although the Narnia series—written during Lewis’s final years at Oxford, between 1949 and 1954—proved hugely successful, Lewis’s correspondence suggests that he found himself at a low artistic ebb during the years 1949–1950. While his letters point to at least a partial recovery of his creative powers towards the end of 1951, Lewis remained imaginatively becalmed for some time. Despite its considerable commercial and reputational success, Mere Christianity was not a new book, but a reworking of four series of broadcast talks from the early 1940s. Lewis’s most important work of this period was his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), which was a substantial work of literary scholarship, rather than a creative original composition. Furthermore, the writing of this mammoth work had exhausted him, draining him of both the energy and creativity that had characterised him as a younger man.
Lewis was also overworked. The postwar surge of students at Oxford University was creating serious difficulties for Lewis, whose tutorial responsibilities were now weighty. At Magdalen College, student numbers were escalating. Undergraduate levels had remained fairly constant at around forty during the 1930s, before slumping to record lows during the war years 1939–1945. In 1940, there were sixteen undergraduates; in 1944, only ten. After the war, the numbers soared. In 1948, there were eighty-four students; in 1952, there were seventy-six.[627] Lewis’s workload became unbearable, and was clearly interfering with his academic research and writing. Although the BBC offered him an open door to make radio programmes, Lewis had to decline due to the pressure of work.[628]
But what else could he do? And where else could he go? There seemed no obvious way out of his dilemma.
The New Cambridge Chair
Unknown to Lewis, one possible answer was emerging through developments at Oxford’s great academic rival—the University of Cambridge. Lewis had already been mentioned in the press as a possible candidate for the King Edward VII Professorship of English at Cambridge, following the death of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in May 1944. Late in 1944, rumours abounded that he had been offered this prestigious chair.[629] Even leading figures from the BBC wrote to ask when he was to take up the Cambridge chair.[630] Again, however, nothing came of this. In the end, the chair was filled in 1946 by Basil Willey (1897–1978), a highly regarded literary scholar and intellectual historian.
By the early 1950s, the University of Cambridge had one of the finest English faculties in the world. Its dominant personality was F. R. Leavis (1895–1978), whose approach to literary criticism Lewis detested. Yet Leavis was not popular at Cambridge. He had made enemies—including Henry Stanley Bennett (1889–1972), fellow of Emmanuel College and University Reader in English. A master of university politics and horse trading, Bennett had no doubt about what the Cambridge English faculty needed—a second chair, to supplement the existing King Edward VII Professorship. This new chair, Bennett believed, needed to be in medieval and Renaissance English. Perhaps more important, Bennett was quite clear who its first holder should be: Oxford’s C. S. Lewis, a powerful and credible critic of Leavis’s approach. And Bennett knew enough about university politics to make this happen.
The advertisement appeared on 31 March 1954, with a closing date for applications of 24 April.[631] On 10 May, Bennett joined seven other senior academics to elect Cambridge’s first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English in a meeting chaired by the vice-chancellor, Sir Henry Willink (1894–1973), who was also master of Magdalene College. Two of these electors were from Oxford: Lewis’s former tutor at University College, F. P. Wilson, and Lewis’s close colleague and (still) friend J. R. R. Tolkien.[632] Lewis, however, had not applied for the position. The committee chose to overlook this inconvenient formality. They enthusiastically and unanimously decided to offer the job to Lewis, with Helen Gardner—then fellow in English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford—as their second choice.[633]
Willink wrote personally to Lewis to offer him the position, emphasising its landmark importance. The electors, he declared, “were unanimous with a warmth and sincerity which could not have been exceeded, to invite you to become the first holder of what we feel will be a Chair of great value to the University.”[634] The advantages of the position for Lewis were obvious. Moving to Cambridge would not merely extricate Lewis from a situation he was known to find difficult. It would also eliminate any responsibility on his part for undergraduate teaching, and free him to devote his time to research and writing. It would also triple Lewis’s salary.
Lewis replied to Willink by return of post, declining the position.[635] In the manner of both its speed and its substance, Lewis’s reply is somewhat puzzling. He responded with almost indecent haste to the offer, setting out reasons for refusing the position which seem less than compelling. Lewis suggested that he was not in a position to move to Cambridge, in that he would lose the services of Fred Paxford, his gardener and handyman. And he was, in any case, too old for a new chair; they needed someone younger and more energetic.
Yet Lewis did not trouble to ask anything about the conditions of the new position—including the critically important question of whether he would be required to move house to Cambridge. Nor does it seem to have occurred to him that the Cambridge electors were aware of his age, which was not unusual for such a senior appointment.
Willink was not impressed by Lewis’s somewhat feeble reasons for declining, and was probably somewhat hurt at the speed with which Lewis had spurned Cambridge’s advances. He wrote to Lewis again, urging him to reconsider his position.[636] Again, Lewis declined. There was now nothing that Willink could do, other than offer the position to Helen Gardner.
Tolkien, however, was made of sterner stuff. On the morning of 17 May, he confronted Lewis in the presence of Warnie over his reasons for declining the chair. The real problem, he soon discovered, was that Lewis had misunderstood the University of Cambridge’s residence requirements for professors. He had assumed that he would have had to move lock, stock, and barrel to Cambridge, leaving behind his beloved Kilns, Paxford, and Warnie.
Tolkien had rightly discerned that there could be some flexibility here. Immediately after the meeting, Tolkien wrote two letters. First, he explained to Willink that Lewis needed to be able to keep his house in Oxford, and have college rooms in Cambridge that would be large enough to house most of his books.[637] Second, he penned a confidential letter to Bennett, expressing his faith that Cambridge would get Lewis, despite the unfortunate turn of events. They just needed to be patient. On 19 May, Lewis also wrote to Willink to clarify his situation. If he could indeed be allowed to retain his house in Oxford, while living in Cambridge during weekdays, then he would reconsider the offer.
But by then it was too late. On 18 May, Willink had written to offer the job to Helen Gardner, Cambridge’s second choice.[638] Belatedly, he confirmed to Lewis that the university’s residence requirements were perfectly open to allowing Lewis to live in Oxford at weekends during full term, and to reside in Oxford outside term. But this was now an academic issue. Willink informed him that a letter to “Choice No. 2”—Lewis never knew the identity of this person—had already been dispatched.[639] The matter was now closed.
But it wasn’t. On 19 May, Professor Basil Willey—one of the Cambridge electors to the new chair—wrote confidentially to Willink. It now seemed “very probable” that Helen Gardner would decline the position that had just been offered to her.[640] Willey gave no indication of where this information came from, nor did he explain why Gardner was so likely to refuse Cambridge’s offer.[641] But he was right.
After allowing the customary decent interval to pass to show that she was taking the offer seriously—something that Lewis had so conspicuously failed to do—Helen Gardner politely declined the chair on 3 June. She did not explain the reason for her decision. However, after Lewis’s death, Gardner revealed that she had picked up rumours at that time that Lewis now wanted the chair, and that she herself had believed he was its ideal occupant.[642] Her refusal of the position reflected her knowledge of who would occupy the chair as a result. Relieved as much as delighted by Gardner’s diplomatic masterstroke, Willink wrote again to Lewis: “No. 2 has declined, and I am filled with hope that after all Cambridge will obtain the acceptance of No. 1.” He also mentioned that his own college, Magdalene, might be able to offer Lewis the rooms that he needed.[643]
It was enough. The deal was done. Lewis agreed to be appointed to the new chair effective 1 October 1954, but would not take up the position until 1 January 1955, allowing him time to settle his affairs in Oxford.[644] Lewis’s departure from Magdalen created a vacancy in the fellowship, which had to be filled. His allies within the college quickly decided whom they wished to succeed him. Who better to follow Lewis than Owen Barfield?[645] This proposal, however, was defeated, and Lewis was eventually succeeded by Emrys L. Jones.
Was this move to Cambridge wise? Some certainly doubted it. John Wain, one of Lewis’s former pupils, suggested that it was like “leaving an overblown and neglected rose-garden for a horticultural research station on the plains of Siberia.”[646] Wain’s meaning here was ideological, not meteorological. He was not thinking primarily of the icy east winds from the Urals that can make Cambridge so bitterly cold in winter, but of the clinically cool attitude towards literature that dominated the Cambridge English faculty at this time. Lewis was entering a lion’s den—a faculty which prized “critical theory” and treated texts as “objects” for analytical dissection, rather than for intellectual enjoyment and enlargement.
Others wondered whether the commuting during full term would wear Lewis down. Yet, as things turned out, Lewis proved able to cope with his new routine. He resided in his comfortable wood-panelled rooms at Magdalene College during the week, and returned to Oxford for weekends, taking the direct train from Cambridge to the Rewley Road station in Oxford. This was popularly known as the “Cantab Crawler” (because it stopped at every station, and took three hours to cover the 80 miles [128 kilometres]) or the “Brain Line” (a pun on main line, in that the route was frequented by academics of the two universities). Neither the line nor the Oxford station of that name now remain in use.
Some felt that Lewis tried too hard to fit in at Magdalene, perhaps reflecting his nervousness that he would not be accepted in his newly adopted college. Richard Ladborough, fellow and Pepys Librarian of the college from 1949–1972, felt that Lewis was too eager to win acceptance at Magdalene, cultivating a booming voice and “jolly farmer” bonhomie as a way of obscuring his personal shyness and social anxiety. Might Lewis’s shyness have been misunderstood as aggressiveness? Yet in the end, Lewis found acceptance more readily than he had dared to hope.
13.1 Magdalene College, Cambridge, seen from the River Cam in 1955.
By the end of his first complete calendar year in Cambridge, Lewis felt able to “pronounce the move to Cambridge a great success.” Magdalene College Cambridge was a “smaller, softer and more gracious place” than Magdalen College Oxford. In comparison with the increasingly industrialised city of Oxford, Cambridge was a “delightfully small” market town, allowing Lewis to get “a real country walk” whenever he wanted. “All my friends say I look younger.”[647]
Renaissance: The Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge
The success of Lewis’s inaugural lecture as Cambridge’s first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English may have contributed to his buoyant mood. The lecture was delivered at 5.00 p.m. in the largest humanities lecture room Cambridge had at its disposal on Lewis’s fifty-sixth birthday—Monday, 29 November 1954—while he was still resident in Oxford. Numerous reports of the lecture survive, emphasising the vast crowd that turned out to hear Lewis, and his remarkable competence as a lecturer.[648] The BBC Third Programme gave serious consideration to broadcasting the lecture—a rare honour for such an academic event.[649]
Lewis’s theme was the periodization of literary history, an issue which he had explored during earlier lectures in Cambridge—a series of eight weekly lectures on Renaissance Literature delivered in Lent Term 1939, and the Clark Lectures, given at Trinity College in May 1944. Lewis reiterated a core theme of those lectures: “The Renaissance never happened.” It was a theme he had been developing for some years. As he wrote to the Milton expert Douglas Bush in 1941, “My line is to define the Renaissance as ‘an imaginary entity responsible for anything a modern writer happens to approve in the Fifteenth or Sixteenth Century.’”[650]
This challenging and bold statement needs careful nuancing. Lewis’s fundamental objection was to the widespread notion that a period called “the Renaissance” cast aside the drab, old ways of the Middle Ages, introducing a new golden age of literature, theology, and philosophy. This, he suggested, was a myth, constructed by none other than the advocates of the Renaissance itself. By failing to challenge this myth, Lewis argued, scholarship was simply perpetuating this ideologically driven reading of the history of English literature. In making this point, Lewis quoted from the Cambridge historian George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962), who had hosted Lewis’s Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1944: “Unlike dates, ‘periods’ are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray.”[651]
In at least some important respects, Lewis is entirely correct. Recent studies of the European Renaissance have shown that its “narrative of identity” was deliberately constructed to emphasise its agenda. Renaissance writers coined the term “the Middle Ages” to denote and to denigrate what they regarded as being a drab and degenerate period between the glories of classical culture and their rebirth and renewal during the Renaissance. Lewis rightly pointed out that history simply could not be allowed to be shaped by such polemical agendas, which sought to minimise the continuity between medieval and Renaissance culture. “The barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda.”[652] The literature of the Middle Ages deserved to be treated with sympathy and respect, not to be summarily dismissed in the manner encouraged by Renaissance humanism.
It is significant that Lewis’s lecture was primarily on the topic of “Renaissance.” Did Lewis use this lecture as a way of reinventing himself? Did the move to Cambridge entail, at least in his mind, a change in his identity—a personal renaissance, in which he was “born again,” as if emerging, transformed, from a cocoon? Was the Cambridge Lewis to be a new Lewis, drawing a line under some of the activities and issues that had been characteristic of his later Oxford years? It is, for example, significant that Lewis did not write anything substantial in the field of apologetics during his time at Cambridge. His popular writings of this period—such as Reflections on the Psalms and The Four Loves—are explorations of an assumed faith, not defences of a challenged faith.
Lewis now no longer saw himself primarily as an apologist, concerned to defend the Christian faith to its critics outside the church. His focus shifted to exploring and appreciating the depths of the Christian faith for the benefit of those who believed, or were close to believing. This new strategy is clearly set out in the opening pages of Reflections on the Psalms:
This is not what is called an “apologetic” work. I am nowhere trying to convince unbelievers that Christianity is true. I address those who already believe it, or those who are ready, while reading, to “suspend their disbelief.” A man can’t be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.[653]
This final sentence needs to be read in the light of Lewis’s frequently repeated assertions that he found defending Christian ideas draining and exhausting (page 258). He seems to be arguing that he ought to be allowed to enjoy these ideas, rather than be forced into battle constantly on their behalf.
Yet Lewis’s concerns at Cambridge are best understood as representing a change in focus within Lewis’s overall approach, rather than a significant—let alone radical—change from his basic commitments. Lewis represents an approach to the Christian faith in which the mind, heart, reason, and imagination are brought into creative interplay, with different audiences in mind. During the 1940s and early 1950s, Lewis developed works of rational apologetics—such as Miracles and Mere Christianity—which offered a rational defence of the Christian faith to unbelievers; during the later 1950s, Lewis tended to focus on works—such as Surprised by Joy—exploring the imaginative and relational dimensions of faith, with a presumed Christian audience in mind. The shift in envisaged readerships may reflect Lewis’s changing perceptions of the needs of the moment; yet there is no loss of the comprehensive vision of the Christian faith that became so characteristic of Lewis, and was first seen in The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933).
Lewis’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge can certainly be read as the adept construction of an intellectual facade—not in the sense of something flimsy or deceitful, but rather in terms of shaping how one is seen. Just as Renaissance humanism developed its own narrative of identity, which Lewis skilfully deconstructed, so Lewis developed his own account of how he wished to be understood. Provocatively, he declared that he wished to be seen as an “intellectual dinosaur,” prepared to challenge the “chronological snobbery” of his day. Although some interpreted Lewis’s lecture otherwise—for example, as a manifesto for the reinvigoration of Christianity itself, or at least a Christian influence in literary studies—the ensuing controversy soon died down.
The perception that Lewis was a “dinosaur”—a massive beast whose values and working methods are ill-adapted to the modern world—has been reinforced by changing scholarly habits since the 1950s. Lewis’s personal library shows signs of intense engagement. Annotations and underlinings, sometimes in different inks, indicate successive rereadings of already familiar texts. The British historian Keith Thomas (1933– ) recently commented on the reading habits of the English Renaissance, noting the importance of annotation as a means of safeguarding the insights of extended periods of direct textual engagement:
It was common for Renaissance readers to mark key passages by underlining them or drawing lines and pointing fingers in the margin—the early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, “the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students” were marked through, “with little lines under or above” or “by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance.”[654]
Thomas—who shares Lewis’s commitment to the extended, active reading of primary sources—also remarked that he had now “become something of a dinosaur.” Researchers no longer read books from cover to cover; they use search engines to find words or passages. But this approach has made researchers less sensitive to the deeper structures and inner logic of the texts they are discussing, and much less likely to make the “unexpected discoveries which come from serendipity.” As Thomas ruefully remarked, the sad truth was that what once took a lifetime to learn by slow and painful accumulation can now “be achieved by a moderately diligent student in the course of a morning.”
Nobody who has worked through Lewis’s heavily annotated personal library can doubt the intensity or quality of his engagement with the texts he studied. Lewis illustrates precisely the detailed textual engagement and conceptual mastery that Thomas applauds—yet believes to be in terminal decline through the rise of technology. So is literary scholarship a dying art? In speaking of himself as a “dinosaur,” was Lewis referring to his research methods, and not merely their outcomes? Lewis increasingly seems to witness to a lost age of scholarly methods, above all the mental inhabitation of primary sources, which does not appear to have survived his generation.
In the end, Lewis enjoyed a long and productive period at Cambridge, until ill health finally forced him to resign his chair with effect from October 1963. By my reckoning, Lewis wrote thirteen books and forty-four articles during his Cambridge years, not to mention numerous book reviews and several poems, and he edited three collections of essays. There were controversies, of course, perhaps most significantly the 1960 debate with F. R. Leavis and his supporters over the merits of literary criticism. Nevertheless, Lewis’s Cambridge period—while not being anything like Bunyan’s “Plain called Ease”—was certainly an oasis of creativity, resulting in some of his most significant works, including Till We Have Faces (1956), Reflections on the Psalms (1958), The Four Loves (1960), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and The Discarded Image (published posthumously in 1964).
Yet Lewis’s Cambridge period was dominated by an event in his personal life, which had a significant impact on his writings during this time. Lewis found a new—but rather demanding—literary stimulus: Helen Joy Davidman.
A Literary Romance: Enter Joy Davidman
On Monday, 23 April 1956, without any fanfare of advance publicity or courtesy of prior announcement, C. S. Lewis married Helen Joy Davidman Gresham, an American divorcée sixteen years his junior, in a civil ceremony at Oxford’s Register Office at St. Giles. The ceremony was witnessed by Lewis’s friends Dr. Robert E. Havard and Austin M. Farrer. Tolkien was not present; in fact, it would be some time before he learned of this development. It was, in Lewis’s view, purely a marriage of convenience, designed to allow Mrs. Gresham and her two sons the legal right to remain in Oxford when their permission to reside in Great Britain expired on 31 May 1956.
After the brief ceremony, Lewis caught a train to Cambridge and resumed his normal pattern of weekly lectures. It was as if his marriage had made no difference to him. Lewis’s close circle of friends knew nothing of this development. He had gone behind their backs. Most of them believed that Lewis was reconciled to remaining a bachelor for the rest of his life.
So who was this “Mrs. Gresham,” whom Lewis married in such a furtive and secretive manner? And how did such a marriage come about? To understand this development, we need to appreciate the impact that Lewis had upon a specific audience—intelligent, literary women, who found Lewis to be both an effective apologist for the Christian faith and an enthusiastic and persuasive advocate of the use of literature in developing and communicating the themes of faith.
One such person was Ruth Pitter (1897–1992), a highly competent English poet who was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1937 for A Trophy of Arms, which she had published the previous year. During the Second World War, Pitter heard Lewis’s broadcast talks on the BBC, and found them a source of spiritual inspiration and intellectual stimulation. Pitter was in a state of despair at this time, which nearly led her to throw herself off Battersea Bridge in the dead of night. Reading Lewis, however, persuaded her that the world made sense. Her rediscovery of faith was, she later insisted, due to Lewis.[655]
Having been influenced so much by him, Pitter sought to meet Lewis, using mutual friends as a means of bringing this about.[656] She asked Herbert Palmer (1880–1961) to help arrange a meeting. Lewis invited her to a lunch party at Magdalen College on 9 October 1946. It was the first of many such meetings, which led to a deep friendship and mutual respect on both sides. In 1953, Lewis even accorded her the rare honour of allowing her to address him as “Jack” in her letters. According to his friend and biographer George Sayer, Lewis once remarked that if he were the kind of man who was to get married, he would have wanted to wed the poet Ruth Pitter.[657] But though some saw Pitter as Lewis’s obvious soul mate, nothing romantic resulted from this friendship.[658] With Joy Davidman, however, things were different.
Helen Joy Davidman was born in 1915 in New York City to Jewish parents of eastern European roots, who had by then ceased to practise their religion. In September 1930, at the early age of fifteen, she began attending Hunter College in New York City, taking courses in English and French literature. While at Hunter, Davidman formed a friendship with the future novelist Bel Kaufman (1911– ), best known for her 1965 bestseller Up the Down Staircase. Kaufman recalls that Davidman tended to date “older men,” particularly those who were “seriously interested in literature.”[659] Davidman herself showed considerable talent as a writer, and was awarded the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize while at Hunter for “Apostate,” based on a story about nineteenth-century Russia her mother had told her. After taking an MA in English literature from Columbia University in 1935, she tried to make a career of freelance writing.
Initially, things seemed to go well. She won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Series Award for her 1938 poetry collection, Letter to a Comrade. Then came an invitation to go to Hollywood. MGM, searching for new talent, recruited Davidman as a scriptwriter for a six-month trial period in 1939, paying her fifty dollars a week. During that time, Davidman worked on four scripts. MGM didn’t like any of them, and sent Davidman back to New York. There she devoted herself to earning a living, developing her writing, and working for the Communist Party.
Like many during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Davidman had become an atheist and a Communist, believing that radical social action was the only solution to America’s economic woes. She married fellow Communist and writer Bill Gresham, who fought on the socialist side in the Spanish Civil War. Their marriage was unstable. Gresham was prone to depression and alcoholism. And there were other women in his life. By February 1951, the marriage was in deep trouble.
By then Davidman’s life had taken an unexpected turn. Having “sucked in atheism with [her] canned milk,” Davidman encountered God suddenly and unexpectedly in the early spring of 1946. In a 1951 account of this dramatic event, Davidman suggested that God had, like a lion, been “stalking” her for a long time, awaiting an opportune moment to strike when she was unprepared. God “crept nearer so silently that I never knew he was there. Then, all at once, he sprang.”[660]
Having discovered God, Davidman began to explore the new territory of her faith. Her chief guide was a British author who had recently acquired fame in America—C. S. Lewis. The Great Divorce, Miracles, and The Screwtape Letters became her gateway to an intellectually enriched and robust faith. Yet while others merely sought Lewis’s advice, Davidman sought his soul.
In a series of newspaper reports in 1998, marking the centenary of Lewis’s birth, Davidman’s younger son, Douglas Gresham, declared that his mother had gone to England with one specific intention: “to seduce C. S. Lewis.”[661] Although some questioned this statement at the time, there is a growing consensus that Douglas Gresham may have been quite accurate in his assessment of the situation.[662]
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 the 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 Buckingham 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 1956, 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.
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.
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 significance 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.