Like many others, C. S. Lewis has been an inspiration for my life. When I was in high school, his essay “On the Reading of Old Books” led me to the writings of the Church Fathers. He told us to read primary sources, because we can understand them without secondary commentary. He was right to a point (secondary commentary helps highlight aspects which we might otherwise overlook and it puts the text into context so we do not misread it anachronistically). Like many others (such as Walter Hooper), Lewis’ writings helped lead me to think about theology differently, and he helped lead me to the Catholic Church. The irony of this, of course, is that Lewis never became Catholic, had no interest in becoming Catholic, and was instinctively hostile to the thought of becoming Catholic. His good friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, believed Lewis’ Irish-Protestant background caused Lewis to hold to various anti-Catholic prejudices, and this prevented him from taking the challenges of Catholicism seriously. Lewis did not like the pressure that his friends, be it Tolkien or Dom. Bede Griffiths, put on him to become Catholic. Yet, his ecumenical approach led him to form friendships and relationships with Catholics that let him appreciate the faith of his friends, even if he never did approve of the Catholic Church itself.
For many years, I’ve wrestled with this relationship Lewis has had with Catholicism. Now, with the release of Joy Davidman’s letters in the book, Out of My Bone, I feel I have seen another side of Lewis and understand more as to why he could never become Catholic.[1] Despite the friendships he had with Catholics, his greater circle of friends and loved ones reinforced his anti-Catholic bias. Joy, indeed, seems to have had far more influence on Lewis than we might otherwise have known. She helped reinforce attitudes by having them herself. Indeed, it seems her influence led Lewis to become more willing to bend religious rules than he did before he met her, which is why he would eventually look for and find a priest to marry him to Joy despite the fact that Joy was unable to get an annulment from her first marriage (when Lewis married her secularly, he did hope it would lead to a religious ceremony, and they were trying to get an annulment, even before she got cancer).
Out of My Bone provides us an up close and personal view of Joy Davidman. While some of the key letters between Joy and Lewis are lost (probably forever, thanks to Lewis’ tendency to destroy letters), Joy’s life is brought forward before us, not only through her letters, but through the excellent editorial work of Don W. King. We see her journey from atheist to Marxist, from Marxist to Christian. We also see, through her own words, the continued influences of her materialistic past, with its apathy to organized religion, as being the major source for her own personal rejection of Catholicism. What Tolkien suggests was the case for Lewis (that his background influenced him) is shown to be true for Joy. Catholicism was too religious, too mystical for her, even after her own mystical experience led her to become Christian. Despite this, Catholics can read her letters and be impressed with her journey, only wishing it could have been completed (even as we wish Lewis could have gone all the way and become Catholic).
Joy was raised in a culturally Jewish household. They were not particular religious, but they did remember the abuses Christians had waged against the Jews (and we find this influencing her perspective on traditional Christianity, such as her hostile words for the Orthodox). She was raised to be a materialist, and like many of her contemporaries, was slowly attracted to Marxism (it was an attraction to the movement itself, and not necessarily to the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, whom she would only read later in life and find to be unconvincing). The complaints contemporary Marxists held against society attracted her, and she started going to meetings of the Communist Party. It was at these meetings she would meet her first husband, William Gresham.
Joy was a writer; not only was she a critically acclaimed poet (we see some of her works in her letters), she dabbled in fiction and literary criticism. She helped direct many young Marxist as an editor and writer for the journal New Masses. But, one day, she found herself having an experience of Christ – it was short and yet to the point, so that afterward, she would move forward with her experience and become a Christian. Yet, early on, as she relates, she tried to keep hold of her Marxism and influence other Marxists through the insights of her new faith. This was a period of great challenge for her; she started to read the “classics” of Marxism, only to find them to be philosophically shallow. Her reading of Marxist atheism and its self-contradictory nature is very telling, though it took her some time to finally move beyond Marxism and to give it up (even if she never would give up its complaints against contemporary society). Thus, in a letter we have during the period she was trying to be a Marxist while integrating her new faith, we find a very interesting discussion about Engels:
Atheism is the characteristic philosophy of industrial capitalism. Atheism was developed, and exists, to suit the needs of the bourgeoisie.
For
he himself has said it
and it’s greatly to his credit…But then, by God, what does he do? He forgets the entire negation of the negation! He applies dialectics, and the view of truth as an emergent factor, to all subjects but religion. On this subject, if you please, a final truth has been reached. And by whom? By the bourgeoisie!
[…]
Yet as students of dialectics we ought to expect something quite different. If atheism suits the needs of industrial capital, it ought to be obvious that it cannot suit ours. (Letter to V.J. and Alice Jerome, Jan 21, 1948; pg. 49-50).
Despite this criticism, she believed there was something of value, something of intellectual acumen, found in the works of Marx and Engels. She was to find her experience with Lenin far worse. She found him be behind the times, not just philosophically, but scientifically as well, as she explained in an essay about her conversion (originally printed elsewhere, but included in this volume):
Inch by inch I retreated from my revolutionary position; fallacy after fallacy, contradiction upon contradiction, absurdity upon absurdity turned up in Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, one of the basic textbooks of Marxist philosophers. This is not the place for taking dialectal material apart; enough to say that it was unsound as philosophy to begin with, and that its ‘scientific foundation’ had been swept away by Einstein’s early work even before Lenin wrote. (pg. 95-6).
Because she had once been duped by Marxism, she felt she had to investigate religion slowly, and not just take things as simply as she did with the Marxists. That meant she was, despite her turn to faith, still hostile and skeptical of organized religion; even as a prominent Christian, she would still hold to that skepticism, which, perhaps more than anything else, explains why she was unwilling to consider Catholicism. She had fallen for a false ideology once; a bad dogmatic past affected her so much that she found it difficulty to accept any dogmatic tradition. Perhaps it led her to even be hostile to dogmatic traditions. It found its way in her novels, and she was more than forthcoming about this fact.[2]
In her letters, she even provides some observations as to Lewis and his relationship with Catholicism, confirming Tolkien’s understanding of the situation, highlighting an aspect of Tolkien’s criticism otherwise left unnoticed (because his essay on Lewis, The Ulsterior Motive, remains hidden from the general public):
Lord, no; Jack is about as likely to turn Roman Catholic as I am to be made Pope. That canard is a hardy perennial; the Romans always indulge in wishful thinking about anyone who has theological influence. But Jack isn’t even High Church. He’s a tough Ulsterman, after all, half Scot and half Welsh, with the sort of views you expect of an Orangeman – though in his case they’re half humorous. […] Tolkien, who is RC, explained Jack’s refusal to be converted to Rome as a dislike of the Virgin based on misogyny! One’s as likely as the other. (Letter to William Lindsay Gresham, July 2, 1958; pg. 336-7).
Here, we find Joy is as convinced as Tolkien that Lewis’ background influenced him and kept him firmly within the Ulster tradition. But it is also interesting to see that Tolkien claimed Lewis was somewhat misogynous (long before Pullman would make that claim). While it would be nice to see how Tolkien argued for this, it is telling that Joy was unwilling to deny that possibility (“one’s as likely as the other”); however, if this is true, it would have had to be unconscious, and of the kind which did not hinder his positive relationship with Joy.
Interestingly enough, we find some details about the cordial relationship Tolkien had with Joy in these letters – something which is rarely discussed in other places (because of Tolkiens’ disapproval of her marriage to Jack). There is a sense of humor in the story of how she first met Tolkien; she was walking with Lewis and they happened to stumble into him, as he was coming back toothless from the dentist (his dentures were being worked on). We also get a sense of how Tolkien did try to make himself available to Joy’s family, such as when he corresponded with her son Davy on the nature of runes. While it is clear her relationship with Lewis helped further Lewis’ separation from Tolkien, it is good to know Tolkien showed a sense of candor in the whole situation.
There is a great story to be told in these letters. One can appreciate the journey Joy Davidman (Gresham, Lewis) took in her life. Her remarkable qualities and talents can be clearly ascertained here. However, we can see so much more. We can see the ill effects of her divorce took upon her; all the talent which she had, and was beginning to channel, were lost to the world when her husband said he wanted a divorce so he can marry his mistress, Joy’s cousin, Renee. From that time onward, her life was difficult; she would live poorly, trying to put her sons through school while living on the meager funds William would give to her or that she could make for herself in England. Her writing, of which she had many ideas, suffered; she had to focus on the necessities of life before she could work on the projects she had planned. She was able to write a little, but the only major project she finished was Smoke on the Mountain, her Jewish-Christian interpretation of the Ten Commandments. When she got cancer, the rest of her life would focus on dealing with the cancer or her relationship with Lewis. She was not able to manifest her natural writing talents again. We have here, in her letters, the foundations of what those projects would have been. That she was able to get as much done in her hardships as she did shows how strong willed and bright she was – but, to be sure, it is the first half of the book, with her early writings and her slow progression to Christianity that is the highlight of this volume.
For the fan of C. S. Lewis, or someone who liked the movie Shadowlands, this is a highly recommended book. It provides first hand insight into the life of Joy and her relationship with Lewis. There is much which is missing in the book (the key introductory letters between Lewis and Joy), but Don King compensates for this the best he can, using other resources to fill in the blanks (such as the diaries of C. S. Lewis’ brother, Warnie). One really feels for Joy and what she went through in life. As a Catholic, I end up wishing that she, as with C.S. Lewis, would have been able to overcome her biases and actually dealt with the possibility of becoming Catholic; but we do at least get a sense of the cultural disposition she had which prevented it. This should help us understand better how social conditioning affects even the best of us throughout our life.
4/5 stars
Footnotes
[1] Don W. King, ed. Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co, 2009).
[2] Writing about her novel Weeping Bay, she tells Kenneth Potter: “Since you’ve read Weeping Bay, you are not likely to think me pro-Catholic….” (Letter to Kenneth W Potter, Aug 16, 1951; pg. 121). This bias caused one of MacMillan’s sales managers, a Catholic, to suppress the book, “for reasons you’ll understand when you read it” (Letter to Kenneth W. Potter, May 29, 1951; pg 119).
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