Joy Davidman

Helen Joy Davidman (18 April 1915 – 13 July 1960) was an American poet and writer. Often referred to as a child prodigy, she earned a master's degree from Columbia University in English literature at age twenty in 1935. For her book of poems, ''Letter to a Comrade'', she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1938 and the Russell Loines Award for Poetry in 1939. She was the author of several books, including two novels.

While an atheist and after becoming a member of the American Communist Party, she met and married her first husband and father of her two sons, William Lindsay Gresham, in 1942. After a troubled marriage, and following her conversion to Christianity, they divorced and she left America to travel to England with her sons.

Davidman published her best-known work, ''Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments,'' in 1954 with a preface by C. S. Lewis. Lewis influenced her work and conversion and became her second husband after her permanent relocation to England in 1956. She died from metastatic carcinoma involving the bones in 1960.

The relationship that developed between Davidman and Lewis has been featured in a television BBC film, a stage play, and a theatrical film named '' Shadowlands''. Lewis published '' A Grief Observed'' under a pseudonym in 1961, from notebooks he kept after his wife's death revealing his immense grief and a period of questioning God.

Early life

Helen Joy Davidman was born on 18 April 1915 into a secular middle-class Jewish family in New York City, of Polish-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish descent. Her parents, Joseph Davidman and Jeanette Spivack (married 1909), arrived in America in the late 19th century. Davidman grew up in the Bronx with her younger brother, Howard, and with both parents employed, even during the Great Depression. She was provided with a good education, piano lessons and family vacation trips. Davidman wrote in 1951: "I was a well-brought-up, right-thinking child of materialism... I was an atheist and the daughter of an atheist".

Davidman was a child prodigy, who scored above 150 on IQ testing, with exceptional critical, analytical and musical skills. She read H. G. Wells's ''The Outline of History'' at the age of eight and was able to play a score of Chopin on the piano after having read it once and not looking at it again. At an early age, she read George MacDonald's children's books and his adult fantasy book, '' Phantastes''. She wrote about the influence of these stories: "They developed in me a lifelong taste for fantasy, which led me years later to C. S. Lewis, who in turn led me to religion." A sickly child, suffering from a crooked spine, scarlet fever and anemia throughout her school years, and attending classes with much older classmates, she later referred to herself at this time as being "bookish, over-precocious and arrogant".

After finishing high school at Evander Childs High School at fourteen years old, she read books at home until she entered Hunter College in the Bronx at the age of fifteen, earning a BA degree at nineteen. In 1935, she received a master's degree in English literature from Columbia University in three semesters, while also teaching at Roosevelt High School. In 1936, after several of Davidman's poems were published in ''Poetry'', editor Harriet Monroe asked her to work for the magazine as reader and editor. Davidman resigned her teaching position to work full-time in writing and editing.

During the Great Depression, several incidents, including witnessing the suicide of a hungry orphan jumping off a roof at Hunter College, are said to have caused her to question the fairness of capitalism and the American economic system. She joined the American Communist Party in 1938.

For her collection of poems, ''Letter to a Comrade'', she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1938. She was chosen by Stephen Vincent Benét, who commended Davidman for her "varied command of forms and a bold power." In 1939, she won the Russell Loines Award for Poetry for this same book of poems. Although much of her work during this period reflected her politics as a member of the American Communist Party, this volume of poetry was much more than implied by the title, and contained forty-five poems written in traditional and free verse that were related to serious topics of the time such as the Spanish Civil War, the inequalities of class structure and male-female relationship issues. Davidman's style in these poems showed an influence by Walt Whitman's ''Leaves of Grass''.

She was employed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1939 for a six-month stay in Hollywood writing movie scripts. She wrote at least four, but they were not used and she returned to New York City to work for ''The New Masses'', where she wrote a controversial movie column, reviewing Hollywood movies in a manner described as "merciless in her criticisms." Her acclaimed first novel, ''Anya'' was published in 1940. Between 1941 and 1943, she was employed as a book reviewer and poetry editor for ''The New Masses'' with publications in many of the issues.

Life with William Lindsay Gresham

She married her first husband, author William Lindsay Gresham, on 24 August 1942 after becoming acquainted with him through their mutual interest in communism. They had two sons, David Lindsay Gresham (born 27 March 1944) and Douglas Howard Gresham (born 10 November 1945). Bill Gresham had become disillusioned with the Communist Party while volunteering in Spain during the Spanish Civil War to fight fascism and influenced Davidman to leave the party after the birth of their sons. During the marriage, Gresham wrote his most famous work '' Nightmare Alley'' in 1946, while Davidman did freelance work and cared for the house and children.

The marriage was marked by difficulties that included financial problems, as well as her husband's alcoholism and infidelities. Gresham sometimes had drunken outbursts, once smashing his guitar on a chair. Davidman wrote that her husband had telephoned her one day in spring 1946 telling her that he was having a nervous breakdown and did not know when he would return home. Afterwards, she suffered from a defeated emotional state. She had an experience that she described as: "for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, 'the master of my fate'... All my defenses – all the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God – went down momentarily – and God came in." When Gresham did return home, the couple began to look to religion for answers. Davidman at first studied Judaism, but decided to study all religions and concluded that "the Redeemer who had made himself known, whose personality I would have recognized among ten thousand—He was Jesus." Through their religious studies, the couple, in particular, began to read and be influenced by the books of C.S. Lewis.

When Gresham received a large sum for the movie rights to ''Nightmare Alley'', the family moved to an old mansion with acreage in the New York countryside, where Davidman began to write her second novel, ''Weeping Bay'' and Gresham also started his second novel, ''Limbo Tower''. In 1948, they became members of the Pleasant Plains Presbyterian Church. Gresham had at first similar Christian convictions as Joy, but soon rejected them; he continued to have extramarital affairs and developed an interest in tarot cards and the ''I Ching''. Both experimented with L. Ron Hubbard's theories of Dianetics and "audited" each other and friends. The couple became estranged, even though they continued to live together. After an introduction by a fellow American writer, Chad Walsh, Davidman began a correspondence with C. S. Lewis in 1950.

Life with C. S. Lewis

Davidman first met Lewis in August 1952 when she made a trip to the United Kingdom. She planned to finish her book on the Ten Commandments, which showed influences of Lewis's style of apologetics. After several lunch meetings and walks accompanying Lewis and Davidman, Lewis's brother, Warren Lewis, wrote in his diary that "a rapid friendship" had developed between his younger brother and Davidman, whom he described as "a Christian convert of Jewish race, medium height, good figure, horn rimmed specs, quite extraordinarily uninhibited." She spent Christmas and a fortnight at The Kilns

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