When I talked to him about it many years later, he explained that, while he personally felt that it was a harsh rule which could justifiably be relaxed now and then, he did not consider that this would be possible in the case of Lewis, simply because of Lewis’s celebrity. If permission were given to such a public figure (argued my father), everyone would demand the right to follow suit. My father told me that Lewis did not see the force of this argument … and seemed to be hurt and upset. He went on to say that he himself was glad when a clergyman in another diocese, a former pupil of Lewis’s, shortly afterwards performed the marriage service at Joy Gresham’s bedside … This mildly illicit solution seemed to my father a convenient get-out from the church’s ruling; he had no animosity against the marriage as such.25
Before a ‘mildly illicit solution’ could be arrived at regarding Joy, Lewis had to deal with an embarrassing problem caused by the same Kitty Martin who had been writing him love letters for years. On Thursday, 25 October 1956, Paul Sargent of London’s Daily Mail visited Lewis in Cambridge. He was doing a story about Miss Martin, who told him that she and Lewis were being married at the Registry Office in London on Saturday morning, 27 October. On 26 October the Daily Mail carried an article entitled ‘Marry? I’ll Be Miles Away, Says the Professor’, which began:
Professor C.S. (Screwtape Letters) Lewis, 57-year-old Cambridge Don and author, learned yesterday that a marriage has been arranged … between himself and a woman admirer who fell in love with him through the highbrow pages of his books.
The astounded bachelor-professor also learned that he should attend Marylebone Register Office tomorrow to take the hand in marriage of plump Miss Louise Kitty Martin, a 46-year-old London antique dealer of Wigmore-street.
But later wealthy Miss Martin learned that as far as Professor Lewis was concerned he will ‘be miles from London on Saturday’.
The professor and Miss Martin have never met. But Miss Martin, who fell in love with him chapter-by-chapter as his scholarly books appeared, decided it was ‘time to shock him into an answer’ …
The Daily Mail carried a photograph of Lewis, and another of Miss Martin surrounded by her ‘objets d’art, bric-à-brac, china cats, dogs, and smiling cherubs’.
There were so many rumours about Lewis being married to someone that Lewis finally had the following announcement put in The Times (24 December 1956): ‘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.’ That same day the Oxford Mail carried a story entitled ‘Wedding of Former Oxford Don’ which mentioned both Joy Gresham and Kitty Martin.
Lewis was thus forced to write to various friends explaining the nature of his ‘marriage’. In a letter to Dorothy L. Sayers of 24 December 1956 he said: ‘You may see in the Times a notice of my marriage to Joy Gresham. She is in hospital (cancer) and not likely to live; but if she gets over this go she must be given a home here. You will not think that anything wrong is going to happen. Certain problems do not arise between a dying woman and an elderly man. What I am mainly acquiring is two (nice) stepsons.’26
The Daily Mail would not leave him alone. In the issue of 27 December 1956 the tabloid carried Lewis’s picture with a double story about the fact that he had not in fact married Miss Martin but Mrs Gresham. In the story entitled ‘One Romance That Never Was’, they repeated what ‘Forty-six-year-old Miss Kitty Martin said of Professor Lewis at the time of her “marriage” notice’. The other story, entitled ‘Two-Week Secret, Then Bride is Struck Down’, began:
While news of his secret marriage spread among his friends, Professor C.S. (Screwtape Letters) Lewis spent Christmas at the bedside of his bride, who is seriously ill in an Oxford hospital. Regarded, at 58, as a confirmed bachelor, the Cambridge don and author married a 41-year-old American poetess, Mrs Joy Gresham …
At his Oxford home yesterday Professor Lewis said: ‘It is not a time for congratulations. I have married a lady who is now desperately ill.’
His brother, Major Lewis, said: ‘It is very sad indeed. Mrs Lewis developed this illness shortly after their marriage.’
At the hospital last night an official said: ‘Mrs Lewis is quite comfortable, but unable to receive visitors yet.’
Messages of congratulation from surprised friends were still arriving at his home when Professor Lewis was visiting his wife in hospital.
All this time Joy was becoming worse, and on 5 February 1957 Lewis wrote to Green saying: ‘my wife lies ill – indeed almost certainly dying. Pray for us.’27 The Reverend Peter Bide,* of the Diocese of Chichester, had come to know Lewis when he was an undergraduate at St Catherine’s College. Ordained in 1950, he performed in 1954 what Lewis regarded as a miracle. Lewis asked Bide to come to Oxford for the night of 20 March and lay his hands on Joy. Peter Bide gave an account of what followed:
Shortly after my arrival at The Kilns, he said to me, ‘Peter, I know this isn’t fair, but do you think you could marry us? I’ve asked the Bishop; I’ve asked my parish priest; I’ve asked all my friends on the Faculty; and they’ve said no. Joy is dying and she wants the Sacrament before she dies.’ … I asked Jack to leave me alone for a while and I considered the matter. In the end there seemed only one Court of Appeal. I asked myself what He would have done and that somehow finished the argument.28
The marriage took place in the Wingfield-Morris Hospital on 21 March 1957, and the fullest, and most touching, account of it is found in Warnie’s diary of that day:
One of the most painful days of my life. Sentence of death has been passed on Joy, and the end is only a matter of time. But today she had one little gleam of happiness; it has worried her all along that her’s and J’s marriage was only a registry office one, because the Bp. of Oxford objected to a religious ceremony. But this J’s old friend and pupil Peter Bide consented to perform – a notable act of charity, for he is not of this Diocese, and had no right to do so without the Bp’s authority. However, at 11 a.m. we all gathered in Joy’s room at the Wingfield – Bide, J, sister, and myself, communicated, and the marriage was celebrated. I found it heartrending, and especially Joy’s eagerness for the pitiable consolation of dying under the same roof as J: though to feel pity for any one so magnificently brave as Joy is almost an insult.
She is to be moved here next week, and will sleep in the common-room, with a resident hospital nurse installed in Vera’s room. There seems little hope but that there may be no pain at the end.29
In April Joy was moved to The Kilns, where it was expected she would soon die. On 8 May 1957 Lewis wrote to Green saying, ‘Joy is home – alas – only because hospital can do no more for her – completely bed-ridden. But thank God, no pain, sleeping well, and often in good spirits.’30 But then began what Lewis described as the nearest thing to a miracle he had ever experienced. When Green met Joy for the first time, on 21 June 1957, she was in bed in the sitting-room, with a day and night nurse in attendance. On 24 September he and his wife, June, taking their elder son to Dane Court for his first term, called at The Kilns to pick up Douglas Gresham, and found Joy up, but in an invalid chair. She had written to Chad Walsh on 6 June 1957:
My case is definitely arrested for the time being – I may be alright for three or four years. There’s a faint hope [the bone] may knit enough to let me hobble around a little in a caliper … Jack and I are managing to be surprisingly happy considering the circumstances; you’d think we were a honeymoon couple in our early twenties, rather than our middle-aged selves … I never before had the experience of keeping a fairly large household staff happy – I feel quite the lady of the manor! For ten weeks we had, in addition to the gardener, housekeeper, and daily woman, two nurses.31
Whatever stratagems Joy Davidman may have used in an attempt to win a romantic response from Lewis, in the end it was her illness rather than anything else that finally brought Eros into play. In one of the books she liked so much, The Great
Divorce, Lewis distinguished the passion of Pity from the action of Pity. He defined the first as ‘the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth’. The action of Pity, on the other hand, is a ‘weapon’ used by God. ‘It leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good.’32
Despite the attempts of those who want to turn the real story on its head and have Lewis smitten by Eros almost as soon as they met, the truth is that it was now, all these years later, that Lewis felt Eros, romantic love, for Joy. He provided an account of the changes in his feelings to two friends. Writing to Dorothy L. Sayers on 25 June 1957, he said:
On examination it turned out that Joy’s previous marriage, made in her pre-Christian days, was no marriage: the man had a wife still living. The Bishop of Oxford said it was not the present policy to approve re-marriage in such individual cases, but that his view did not bind the conscience of any individual priest. Then dear Father Bide … who had come to lay his hands on Joy … said he would marry us. So we had a bedside marriage with a Nuptial Mass.
When I last wrote to you I would not even have wished this: you will gather … that my feelings have 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.33
Nowhere does Lewis describe the alterations in his feelings for Joy more clearly than in a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of 24 September 1957: ‘It is nice to have arrived at all this by something which began in Agape, proceeded to Philia, then became Pity, and only after that, Eros. As if the highest of these, Agape, had successfully undergone the sweet humiliation of an incarnation.’34
The one friend Lewis failed to notify of these ‘marriages’, and who was deeply hurt by the neglect, was Tolkien. On the day Lewis and Joy were married by Peter Bide, Tolkien wrote to Katharine Farrer: ‘I believe you have been much concerned with the troubles of poor Jack Lewis. Of these I know little beyond the cautious hints of the extremely discreet Havard. When I see Jack he naturally takes refuge in “literary” talk (for which no domestic griefs and anxieties have yet dimmed his enthusiasm).’35
This failure of Lewis’s to tell Tolkien about Joy and his marriage was a serious omission, and it contributed to the coolness between them. ‘We were separated first by the sudden apparition of Charles Williams,’ Tolkien wrote to his son, Michael, in 1963, ‘and then by his marriage. Of which he never even told me; I learned of it long after the event.’36 Humphrey Havard no doubt told him the bare bones of the case, but Lewis seems never to have spoken of it to Tolkien, much less asked his advice.
This touches on what had been a point of disagreement between them ever since Lewis published Christian Behaviour with its chapter on ‘Christian Marriage’. There Lewis had argued that as the ‘majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives’, there ought to be ‘two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members’.37 Tolkien, with his solid Catholic teaching, was appalled by this. ‘I should like to know on what grounds you base your “two-marriage” system!’ he wrote to Lewis in an undated letter of 1943. Rebutting Lewis’s ‘two-marriage system’ he insisted that
No item of compulsory Christian morals is valid only for Christians … The foundation is that this is the correct way of ‘running the human machine’. Your argument reduces it merely to a way of (perhaps?) getting an extra mileage out of a few selected machines …
Toleration of divorce – if a Christian does tolerate it – is toleration of a human abuse … Anyone in any case can see that the enormous extension and facilitation of ‘divorce’ in our days, since those of (say) Trollopean society, has done great social harm. It is a slippery slope – leading quickly to … a promiscuity barely restrained by legalities: for a pair can now divorce one another, have an interlude with new partners, and then ‘re-marry’.38
Why did Lewis not take Tolkien into his confidence about Joy? Tolkien was a happily married man, he loved his friend, and he clearly wanted to help. On the other hand, Lewis knew Tolkien regarded marrying a divorcee as a very serious matter. Tolkien would of course strongly disapprove of Jack’s marriage to Joy. Lewis probably decided against talking to Tolkien about the matter because he knew what his advice would be; as he had already decided what course he was going to take, he saw no point in either asking for, or hearing, that advice.
Lewis had to return to Cambridge for the Lent Term of 1957 when he gave further lectures on ‘English Literature 1300–1500’. He left Joy in Warnie’s hands, with Paxford and Mrs Miller close by. Some of those to whom Lewis introduced Joy disliked her from the start, and would not make an effort to know her better. Before long, however, Joy had a circle of friends who greatly enjoyed her company. For almost twenty years, Warnie wrote in his Memoir, he had shared in his brother’s ‘submission to matriarchal rule’. This, he said, might
predispose some readers towards a suspicion that I may have been a possessive brother, jealous and resentful if any other person had importance in Jack’s eyes. If this had been the case, I would have resented this marriage of his intensely: and in fact, my earlier experience did lead me to the preparation of plans for withdrawal and for the establishment of a home of my own in Eire. But Jack and Joy would not hear of this; and so I decided to give the new régime a trial. All my fears were expelled. For me, Jack’s marriage meant that our home was enriched and enlivened by the presence of a witty, broad-minded, well-read and tolerant Christian, whom I had rarely heard equalled as a conversationalist and whose company was a never-ending source of enjoyment: indeed, at the peak of her apparent recovery she was at work on a life of Madame de Maintenon, which unfortunately never got further than several books of notes and an explanatory preface.39
Among the friends who took much interest in Joy were Austin and Katharine Farrer and Roger and June Lancelyn Green. But Joy’s greatest friend was a woman some six years younger than herself. On a number of occasions Jack had taken Joy for a drink or dinner to Studley Priory at Horton-cum-Studley, a few miles from Oxford. One night when they were there Joy met Jean Wakeman, a radiant young woman, who had been lame since birth, but who more than made up for it by becoming a motoring journalist. Having overcome so many obstacles herself, she felt an instant sympathy and liking for Joy. Jean lived near Studley Priory and over the next few years she visited Joy often, drove the boys back and forth to their schools, and took them all on holidays. Jean was a devout Anglican who later became a Catholic. When Lewis died, she offered Douglas a home with her, David already being independent.
Warnie’s second book, The Sunset of the Splendid Century, was published on 28 November 1955, his third book, Assault on Olympus: The Rise of the House of Gramont, had been sent to his agent, and he was now writing a biography of Louis XIV. When Jack came home in July 1957, however, he left abruptly for his annual holiday in Ireland.
It was not long before Jack had a telephone call from the landlord of the White Horse Hotel in Drogheda to say that Warnie was ‘dead drunk’ and they were trying to get him into Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Writing to Arthur on 21 August 1957, Jack explained that Warnie had written to say ‘he has been diagnosed as having a heart complaint which will kill him in a year. It may not be true – he says anything in his alcoholic spasms – and I’ve written to the Rev. Mother asking for the facts. It’s weary waiting for an answer. It always might be true this time.’40 Mother Mary Martin sent Lewis her diagnosis of Warnie’s problem. ‘I’ve now got the real news about W.,’ Lewis wrote to Arthur on 5 September, ‘which is much less alarming. The heart trouble is slight and curable: it was a bye-product of acute alcoholism and pneumonia.’41
L
ewis had been praying for some time that God would allow him to accept Joy’s pains into his own body, and this seems to have happened. By the autumn of 1957 Joy’s cancer was arrested. Lewis wrote to Dom Bede Griffiths on 1 August 1957 saying, ‘A new element of beauty as well as tragedy has entered my life. Certainly God has taken me at my word – I have for many years prayed “Lord, take me out of myself, to seek and serve thee in others”.’42 Lewis believed this to be an instance of what Charles Williams called the ‘Way of Exchange or Substitution’ – the bearing of one another’s burdens. In his letter to Sister Penelope of 6 November 1957, Lewis said:
When they sent Joy home from hospital last April, they sent her home to die. The experienced nurses expected her life to be a matter of weeks. She could not even be moved in bed without a lifting squad of three of us, and, with all our care, we nearly always hurt her. Then it began to appear that the cancer had been arrested; the diseased spots in the bones were no longer spreading or multiplying. Then the tide began to turn – they were disappearing. New bone was being made. And so little by little till the woman who could hardly be moved in bed can now walk about the house and into the garden – limping and with a stick, but walking. She even found herself getting up unconsciously to answer the telephone the other day. It is the unconsciousness that is the real triumph – the body which would not obey the most planned volition now begins to act on its own. General health and spirits excellent …
Did I tell you I also have a bone disease? It is neither mortal nor curable: a prematurely senile loss of calcium. I was very crippled and had much pain all summer but am in a good spell now. I was losing calcium just about as fast as Joy was gaining it, and a bargain (if it were one) for which I’m very thankful.43
C. S. Lewis Page 49
