Abigail Santamaria: More about young Joy

WORLD Magazine’s March 5 issue includes an interview with Abigail Santamaria, the author of Joy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which tells of how C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman became a married couple. Here are some questions and answers we didn’t have room for in the print edition.

As a master’s student at Columbia University you wondered about Joy Davidman’s experience there when she was getting her master’s degree in 1935. I knew I had to put a copy of my master’s thesis in the library archives, so I asked the reference librarian. Two days later I sat with the typed manuscript Joy had deposited more than 70 years earlier. It seemed no one had looked for it, and I thought if this is literally at my fingertips, what else might be around me? I started talking with people.

You started working on this book shortly after 9/11, when you were grappling with the attacks the way a lot of people now are grappling with what happened in Paris. You pursued this project over a dozen years. How did you keep going all this time? I’m not the type of person to start something and not finish it. I had passion for this subject and for telling Joy’s story, and constant affirmation that I was the one who was supposed to be writing this book, finding these things that nobody had ever found before but had been looking for since the 1970s—I was born in 1978. C.S. Lewis scholars had always spoken of a rumor about a box of Joy’s papers somewhere. Nobody ever found it, and then it came to me. So this constant affirmation of constantly finding things, finding people who knew Joy, finding new letters, new material, just knowing that it was my calling and purpose.

How did you manage this financially? It was really hard. I had an advance from my publisher. I had help at times from family. My grandmother passed away at one point during this and left me a little bit of money that paid my rent for a couple of years. I also worked as a research assistant for another biographer part-time.

So let’s turn to Joy. How did she grow up? She wasn’t popular as a young girl growing up. She was sick and often out of school. Her parents didn’t let her have sleepovers or go to sleepovers. Her parents were academics, and her father would give her supplementary homework and tests on weekends and summers.

She became an adult during the depths of the Depression. How did she react to it? A tipping point for her was in the spring of 1934, just before her college graduation. She was looking out the window at Hunter College and saw one of her classmates on the roof of a nearby building. The classmate jumped to her death. She learned later that the student was an orphan living with her sister and an aunt, that relief checks had stopped coming and they didn’t know how they were going to put food on the table. So many people were killing themselves because they thought, “My family is better off without one more mouth to feed.” That started Joy on a trajectory of thinking, “What’s going on in society and how do we solve it?”

She became a successful poet. After one unsuccessful try she submitted a manuscript to the Yale Younger Poets series and won. There was a write-up in The New York Times and other magazines and newspapers all over the country. Stephen Vincent Benét, a major poet at the time, hailed her as the voice of a generation. She contributed poems and articles to The New Masses, a Communist magazine, and became its poetry editor and film critic.

She married Bill Gresham, a troubled man. He attempted suicide several times before they were married, was an alcoholic, and was also gregarious and well-loved. Everybody I’ve met who knew them as a couple really liked Bill and many of them didn’t like Joy.

And then she started writing letters to Lewis. Right. Years later she became a deaconess at the local Presbyterian Church. Bill became an elder, and in 1949, a couple of years after this conversion experience, she and Bill together wrote a first letter to C.S. Lewis. The correspondence grew from there.