Abigail Santamaria: More about the Jack and Joy relationship

Here are a few more questions to and answers from Abigail Santamaria, author of Joy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a new biography of Joy Davidman, who became Mrs. C.S. Lewis. The magazine interview is in the March 5 issue.

Many people are most familiar with the Lewis-Davidman relationship through the movie Shadowlands. What do you think of the film? I think Debra Winger did a great job, especially bringing out Joy’s vulnerability. I sent Debra Winger a copy of my book. She read it, and we met and talked. She came and participated in my book launch and has been really supportive. But she said that if she had read my book, she may not have taken the role, or she would have been a real pain to [director] Richard Attenborough because she would have played Joy differently. So maybe it’s good that these kinds of things weren’t reported earlier on.

When C.S. “Jack” Lewis initially began developing a relationship with Joy, was he concerned that a married woman was in love with him? He was friends with a lot of women and a lot of men. She told him her marriage wasn’t going well, and he took on a bit of a pastoral role. He wasn’t overtly flirtatious or anything in letters that I’ve read from him to other women with whom he corresponded. The only evidence that I have that really speaks to that question is what Joy says in her poems, in her sonnets, that he rejected her and sent her away. When she went back to England, she got a divorce, and after that he married her. He had previously had a stand on remarriage after divorce that did not support him marrying her, and he grappled with that. Bill [Gresham] had been married before his marriage with Joy, so he rationalized it, that in the eyes of the church Joy’s marriage to Bill was not legitimate because he had previously been married.

Henry VIII used a similar explanation. I know, it’s kind of surprising. C.S. was a man of reason and logic. He took this argument to the bishop of Oxford and asked him to marry them, and the bishop said no, he didn’t agree with that loophole.

C.S. Lewis was a human being. Yes, he was a human being.

Had they not developed their relationship, how would Lewis’ later writing have been different? The Four Loves maybe would have still been written, but he wouldn’t have had the understanding of friendship and romantic love that he did because of Joy. Till We Have Faces would not have been written. Lewis thought that was his greatest novel, even though it’s not one of his best selling or best known. Obviously, A Grief Observed wouldn’t have been written, and that book has helped many, many, many, many grieving people who’ve struggled with their faith after losing a loved one. So that legacy is really important.

So as close as you got to her psychologically, you don’t think she and you would have been friends. I don’t think she was an easy person to be friends with, and her motivations were often what can she get out of something, out of a relationship. But I don’t think her sole motivation for being with Lewis was “What can I get out of this relationship?” She gave a lot, and he benefited tremendously from her friendship and her love. He said in many letters that he had never been so happy as when they were married together, even though she was dying.

Joy was tenacious, and so are you to write this book over so many years. Are there other ways you see yourself in her? We’re both determined and passionate and goal-oriented. We’re both New Yorkers and we’re both direct, assertive, and maybe a little bit brash. I’ve often heard people dismiss Joy’s obnoxiousness by saying, “Oh, she was a New Yorker,” but even by New Yorker standards she was over the top and not likable in some ways.

What did J.R.R. Tolkien dislike about her? He didn’t say exactly. He said it was a strange marriage. I don’t think that he liked her personality, her abrasiveness.

Others did not like her for a variety of reasons. Joy had a lot going against her moving to Oxford. She was divorced, a single mother, Jewish by birth, and American. Debra Winger told me even when she went to Oxford in the early 1990s to film Shadowlands that she sensed some anti-Semitism. So I think that that was a little bit at work. I don’t know if it was with Tolkien, but I’m sure that there was some of that behind some of the attitudes toward her.

Joy wanted to spend money that C.S. Lewis had put aside for various charities. It is such a human thing. Can you talk about that a bit? I cringe because some of these things I found out about Joy were so unappealing and disappointing that I struggled with how to write about her. After an earlier draft, my editor came back to me and said you need to go back in and have more compassion for her, because I was starting to come down heavy-handed and a little bit judgmental.

But you were committed to telling the truth. Joy, when she first moved to England with her two boys, didn’t have a job or money. Bill was supposed to be sending her regular money, but he wasn’t. He would send sporadic checks, and they often were not for the agreed-upon amount. Lewis helped a lot financially and paid for the boys’ boarding school. The bulk of the royalties from his books went into an Agape Fund where he often would kick in money for people’s medical expenses or school expenses. Joy, when she married him, wanted less money to go into that fund and more money to go into their pockets, so that was a hard reality to confront. I just put it out there in the book—quoted her saying in a letter that too much of Jack’s money goes to charity. I didn’t really make a judgment on it, but it speaks for itself.

And their marriage, while brief, was good. They went to Ireland on a belated honeymoon. He had moved from Oxford to Cambridge, so he spent part of each week at Cambridge, and she sometimes went along, and their marriage was really wonderful by every account. It was pretty brief. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer, so they got married at her hospital bedside. Then she went into remission, so it was colored by her impending death.