Jack’s official duties at Cambridge as Professor C. S. Lewis began in January 1955, and Joy came to Oxford to help him pack up his office. It was a bittersweet time for Jack as he recalled the many years he had spent in those rooms. He thought of the secret trips to visit Mrs. Moore during his early years as a student, the evenings spent discussing manuscripts with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, and the sound of Warren tapping away at the typewriter as he produced the Lewis family history. Now, as he approached old age, Jack was about to embark upon a new adventure—even if it was reluctantly.
Chapter 15
The Two Weddings of C. S. Lewis
I am tall, fat, bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired and wear glasses for reading,” Jack wrote in response to a letter from a schoolgirl in the United States who wanted to know what he looked like. His description was accurate, though it did not carry any hint of his enthusiasm for life and his lively imagination—traits that had to be discovered in person.
After initially dreading the move to Magdalene College, Cambridge, Jack quickly embraced the change, calling it a great adventure. He was glad to be done with tutoring a never-ending flow of undergraduates and able to concentrate more on lectures and writing. His life soon fell into a routine that allowed him the time and energy to do this.
The new rooms Jack was assigned at Magdalene College were smaller and not as well appointed or comfortable as his rooms in Oxford, but Jack took this in stride. There were lots of other things to like about Cambridge. The town was smaller and quieter than Oxford, and Magdalene College offered a more relaxed atmosphere in which to work. Also, the college’s fellows were much more friendly and courteous than those at Magdalen had been. Jack also liked the leisurely train trip from Oxford to Cambridge and back each week. The train was usually almost empty, affording him plenty of time to read and think.
Once he had arrived at Cambridge, Jack settled into his weekly routine. He would rise early each morning and attend chapel service, after which he would eat breakfast and then retire to his rooms to go over his correspondence. The flow of fan letters was ceaseless, and with Warren back at The Kilns in Oxford, Jack was left to respond to most of the letters on his own. (Jack had employed Mrs. Miller to come to The Kilns from Tuesday through Friday to cook for and generally look after Warren.) After going over his correspondence, Jack would then prepare or give lectures until lunchtime. Following lunch he would take a long walk through the surrounding countryside, followed by a cup of tea, and then he would spend the rest of the afternoon and evening reading and writing.
Now that he was a professor at Cambridge, Jack’s income had tripled, easing the financial situation at home. In addition, royalties from his books continued to flow in (though they also flowed out through Jack’s charitable trust).
Soon after Jack made his move to Magdalene College, Joy Gresham made a move of her own. She had just secured a publisher for her book Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments, which she had decided to publish under her maiden name, Joy Davidman. She had dedicated the book to Jack, and in turn he had written a flattering foreword for it. With the book behind her, Joy had decided to move to Oxford to be nearer to Jack. At first Jack was not sure about this move. He described Joy in a letter as “our queer, Jewish, ex-communist, American convert.” Nonetheless he had a soft spot for her and not only found her a place to live a mile from The Kilns but also signed up to pay the rent on the place.
This move brought about some interesting outcomes for both Jack and Joy. Jack had just finished writing an autobiographical book called Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Of course the joy he was talking about was not Joy Gresham but the overpowering feeling that he had sensed when he embraced Christianity. The book dealt mainly with his childhood—the loss of his mother, the terror of boarding school, and his Christian conversion—though it left out some of the most interesting parts of his story. For instance, Jack did not mention his thirty-year relationship with Mrs. Moore, nor did he acknowledge that his father’s death had any effect on him at all. But with Surprised by Joy now at the publishers, for the first time in many years, perhaps ever, Jack could not think of a single thing he wanted to write. His mind was blank.
On one of his visits to Joy’s house in April 1955, Jack confided his predicament to her. Joy poured them both something to drink, and they began discussing ideas for book topics. Before the end of the evening, they had settled on Bareface. The story revolved around the retelling of the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche, which Jack had first encountered while a student at Malvern College. In telling the story, Jack would try a different approach. Unlike his other works of fiction, which had all been written in the third person, Jack would write this book in the first person, telling the story from the point of view of Orual, queen of Glome and the sister of Psyche.
As the project progressed, Jack and Joy found that they worked well together. This was a surprise, since both of them were very independent writers who had never collaborated before. They began each chapter by discussing what it should contain, and then Jack would write the chapter in longhand. Joy would then edit what he had written and type it out. They would then read over each completed chapter together and make any changes necessary before moving on to write the next chapter. Working in this manner they made fast progress, and the book was finished and ready for typesetting by February 1956. The only thing they did not have for the book by then was a title that satisfied Jack’s publisher, Geoffrey Bles.
Although Jack and Joy both liked the title Bareface, Geoffrey did not, telling Jack that the book might be mistaken for a western. Jack did not agree. He thought that Bareface captured the thrust of the book’s story better than any other title. However, Jack also trusted his publisher’s judgment, and eventually he came up with the title Till We Have Faces. Geoffrey accepted the new title.
In December 1955, The Magician’s Nephew was published in time for the Christmas market. This was the sixth year in a row that a new book in The Chronicles of Narnia series was published, and the book soon climbed the Christmas bestseller list, much to the delight of Jack and thousands of his young fans. However, when Till We Have Faces was finally published in September 1956, it did not make such a big impression on the public. Jack was disappointed with the slow sales in England, though it did sell better in the United States. Yet, while sales were slow, the book did garner some positive reviews.
According to the Times Literary Supplement, Till We Have Faces was a profound allegory. The New York Times Book Review stated that in the book “love is quite literally given wings again.” And Anthony Boucher, an American reviewer, declared Till We Have Faces to be “a masterwork,” Jack’s “major work to date.” He then went on to declare, “As a story, as a fantasy, as a study in human psychology, as a grappling with spiritual dilemmas, above all as a work of art this book is magic.”
In the spring of 1956, Joy had approached Jack with a problem—and a solution. She and her two sons, now ages eleven and twelve, had been staying in England on visitors’ visas. The visas were about to run out, and the British government had decided not to allow the Greshams to renew them. Because Joy had always assumed that she would spend the rest of her life in England, the pending expiration of their visas came as a shocking blow. Joy was now faced with uprooting her boys and returning to the United States, unless she became a British citizen. And the only way to do that, she told Jack, was to marry an Englishman, and the Englishman she had set her sights on was Jack.
Jack viewed the idea as a business deal. Joy needed a piece of paper that said she was married to an Englishman, and Jack was in a position to be able to help her get that piece of paper. It would be a strictly civil matter, nothing to do with really being man and wife before God, and nothing else about their relationship would change. Jack’s friend George Sayer disagreed with this assessment and strongly tried to talk Jack out of going through with it. He asked what would happen if Joy died. Jack replied that he was ready to take legal responsibility for the boys in that circumstance. And what if Joy fell in love with someone and wanted to marry the person? She would have to divorce Jack first in order to do so, and then Jack would be a divorced man. These were all valid objections, but for whatever reason, Jack chose to dismiss them. On April 23, 1956, Joy Gresham and C. S. Lewis were married in a civil ceremony held at the Oxford Registry Office. Warren knew of the arrangement, but most other people did not, including Maureen Moore and J. R. R. Tolkien.
Subtle changes began to occur in Jack’s life after the civil service. He took more of an interest in his “stepsons.” He taught David Latin and bought a pony for Douglas to ride when the family came to visit The Kilns. He also began visiting Joy late each night when he was in Oxford and found himself spending less and less time with Warren. In fact, Jack was spending so much time with Joy that she began hinting that now that they were legally married, it would be much easier for everyone if she and the boys moved into The Kilns.
Meanwhile, things were going well in Jack’s new position at Cambridge, so well, in fact, that in October 1956 he was asked to consider becoming chairman of the Faculty Board of English at Cambridge. By now Jack was quite aware of his own limitations and had no need to prove himself to others. He replied to the offer in a letter:
No. It would never do. People so often deny their own capacity for business either through mock-modesty or through laziness that when the denial happens to be true, it is difficult to make it convincing. But I have been tried at this kind of job; and none of those who experienced me in office ever wanted to repeat the experience. I am both muddlesome and forgetful. Quite objectively, I’d be a disaster. But thank you for your suggestion.
It was a good thing that Jack turned down the position, because within days his and Joy’s lives were turned upside down.
It was October 18, 1956, a cold, dreary fall day. Joy was sitting in a chair in her house at Headington Quarry when the telephone rang. She got up to answer the phone, and in the process she tripped on the phone cord. As she tumbled to the floor, she felt the femur in her left leg snap. Despite the searing pain, Joy kept her wits about her, reached for the telephone receiver, and told the person on the other end of the line, Katherine Farrer, wife of the local Anglican vicar, her predicament. Katherine quickly hung up and called for an ambulance, and Joy was soon transported to the hospital.
Over the previous few months Joy had been experiencing pain in her upper leg, back, and chest that sometimes made it difficult for her to walk. The condition had been diagnosed as fibrositis, but X-rays taken at the hospital after her accident showed this diagnosis to be wrong. Joy’s condition was much worse. She had a cancerous tumor in her left femur that had weakened the bone, causing it to snap when she fell. Worse still, her doctor discovered that she also had malignant tumors in her right leg, one of her shoulders, and her left breast. The doctor explained that the tumor in the breast was most likely the primary site for the cancer and it had spread from there into her bones.
This was devastating news. Joy was only forty-two years old, and her prospects for living a long life were now almost zero. According to her doctor, perhaps she would live for a few more months, or maybe even a year. In the meantime, immediate steps were taken to try to stop the spread of the cancer. In the course of three operations over the following month, the tumor growth in her femur was removed and the bone repaired, the tumor in her breast was removed, and her ovaries were taken out.
