Jack, of course, spent many hours at Joy’s hospital bedside. The more time he spent with her, the more he felt his feelings toward her intensifying. It became obvious to him that he had fallen in love with Joy, and she with him. This situation presented a strange quandary; they were already married in the eyes of the law, and now they wanted to be married in the eyes of God. But Jack was a staunch defender of the Anglican Church and one of its leading lay authors and public speakers, and the church forbade divorced people from remarrying. So what were he and Joy to do?
Jack thought about the dilemma and decided to talk to Harry Carpenter, the bishop of Oxford. He explained the situation to the bishop, who listened attentively. Harry was sympathetic to Jack’s plight, but he explained that the Church of England could neither conduct nor condone such a marriage. Church doctrine forbade divorced people from remarrying. Jack responded by making the argument that since Bill Gresham had been married and divorced before he met Joy, the Gresham marriage had never been a proper marriage, since in the eyes of God (who according to church doctrine does not recognize divorce) Bill was still married to his first wife. Harry explained that in the Catholic Church such an argument could well be persuasive and lead to an annulment, allowing the parties to then marry, but not in the Anglican Church. Joy was a divorcee with two sons—that was all there was to it—and the Church of England could not condone Jack’s marriage to her.
Jack went away from his meeting with the bishop feeling dejected and unsure of how to proceed. Several months passed as he struggled with what to do. At the same time Joy’s health remained in a precarious position. Since Joy was much too ill to bring “home” to The Kilns, Jack and Warren took care of her boys, which wasn’t an easy task.
Thankfully, Maureen, who had just learned of Jack’s secret civil marriage to Joy, arrived at The Kilns in early January 1957 and took the two boys back with her to Malvern, where she lived with her husband and their two young children. The arrangement was only temporary, but the idea was that if they all got along well together, Maureen and her husband might keep the boys once Joy died. Unfortunately, they did not all get along. Maureen found David a very difficult child to handle. She was sure he stole money from her and bullied her young daughter. As a result, the boys were soon back at The Kilns, with their “legal” stepfather—Jack.
In the midst of all that was going on in Jack’s life, the seventh and final book in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, was published in December 1956. Jack hardly had time to notice.
As Jack continued to watch Joy suffer, the name Peter Bide came to his mind. Peter had been a student at Oxford studying English literature. He was an older student, having started out as a chemist before deciding he enjoyed literature more. While he was not one of Jack’s students, he had attended a number of Jack’s lectures. Peter, Jack learned, was now an ordained Anglican vicar with a gift of healing.
Jack wrote to Peter and asked him to come to Oxford and pray for Joy’s healing. Peter soon arrived in Oxford, and with Jack at his side, he went to the hospital, where he laid his hands on Joy’s head and prayed that God would heal her.
After Peter had prayed for Joy, he and Jack talked together about the predicament Jack and Joy found themselves in. Jack repeated his argument that Bill Gresham had been married and divorced before he married Joy, and therefore, in the eyes of God, Joy was never really married to Bill and was now free to marry Jack. He pointed out that for the Church of England to deny this point was to want to have it both ways, that Bill’s marriage to Joy was and was not a Christian marriage. Like the bishop of Oxford, Peter listened attentively to all that Jack had to say. But unlike the bishop, he agreed with Jack’s argument and could see no reason why Jack and Joy could not be married. He offered to conduct the service himself the following day. Jack breathed a sigh of relief, and a wedding was quickly arranged.
At eleven in the morning on March 21, 1957, Warren accompanied Jack to Joy’s room at the hospital, where the Reverend Peter Bide was waiting for them. One of the ward nurses joined the group in Joy’s room to act as a witness along with Warren. Peter married Jack and Joy in a religious service, after which he said mass and administered communion to the five people packed into the room. As far as Jack was concerned, he was now married to Joy both legally and, more important, spiritually.
The following morning the Times carried an announcement of the wedding. “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 at Oxford. It is requested that no letters be sent.” Many of Jack’s closest friends were dumbfounded when they read the announcement. Jack, as he had done with Janie Moore years before, had kept the nature of his relationship with Joy so secret that they had no idea he was even contemplating marriage to her.
In the course of a year, C. S. Lewis’s whole life had been turned upside down. He was now married to a terminally ill woman and had her two sons to take care of. As well, the new school term had just begun, and Jack wondered how he would cope with what lay ahead.
Chapter 16
Some of the Happiest Days of His Life
Shortly after their marriage service, Joy was released from the hospital and went to live at The Kilns. Once there she began to feel better, amazing many people who had expected her to die soon after her discharge from the hospital. But Jack was not surprised. He saw the improvement in her health as the answer to a peculiar prayer he had prayed. In Oxford during the war Charles Williams had told him about a theory called “substitution,” by which God would allow one person to bear another’s pain. Jack had prayed and asked God to take Joy’s pain away and give it to him instead. As Joy improved, Jack began to get sick. His condition was diagnosed as osteoporosis, a bone disease caused by lack of calcium. Sometimes Jack was in so much pain that he had to take strong medication to sleep, and Dr. Havard fitted him with a surgical back brace. Nonetheless, Jack was glad to shoulder the pain, since he believed that in doing so he was helping Joy to feel better. Now they faced ill health together.
Another matter the couple had to face together was the fate of David and Douglas if and when Joy died. The need to resolve this became apparent when the boys’ father, Bill Gresham, wrote to Joy saying that he was sorry to hear of her illness, but in the event that she died, he would obviously want to regain custody of the boys. At hearing this, Jack swung into action, writing perhaps the most forceful letter he had ever written in his life. He told Bill that the boys belonged with him in England and that neither of them wanted to return to the United States and live with their father. In the course of the letter, Jack included a threat:
If you do not relent, I shall of course be obliged to place every legal obstacle in your way. Joy has, legally, a case. Her (documented) desire for naturalization (which there may still be time to carry out) and the boys’ horror of going back, will be strong points. What is certain is that a good deal of your money and mine will go into the lawyers’ hands. You have a chance to soothe, instead of aggravating, the miseries of a woman you once loved. You have a chance of recovering at some future date, instead of alienating forever, the love and respect of your children. For God’s sake take it and yield to the deep wishes of everyone concerned except yourself.
Jack’s stern letter seemed to settle the matter. Bill wrote back to say that he would not pursue custody of David and Douglas if and when Joy died. Instead, as their legal stepfather, Jack would assume custody of the two boys.
Both Jack and Joy were relieved to have the matter of the boys’ custody behind them. They had another reason to be happy as well. Neither of them was experiencing pain. In fact, they both felt in great health. By December 1957 Joy was up and about and could walk a mile and do some gardening. It was a turn for the best that astonished those who watched, and which Jack called a miracle.
Jack felt so energized that he began work on a new project. During 1957 he had been approached by the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, to write and record a series of talks for broadcast on the radio in the United States. After some negotiation, Jack agreed to do this, but he did not really get under way on the project until the start of 1958. The topic he decided on for the series was “The Four Loves,” examining the four types of love mentioned in the New Testament. These four types of love in the Greek were storge, philia, eros, and agape. Writing the talks proved harder than Jack had first imagined, but by summer he had finished them, and on August 19 he traveled to London for two days to record them.
The tapes of the recording sessions were then shipped off to the United States for broadcast. The plan was to give the talks a wide airing on American radio stations, and a promotional campaign to drum up interest was begun. As it turned out, though, Jack’s talks were never played widely on the radio in the United States. As part of his negotiation to write the series in the first place, however, Jack would be free to do with the radio script as he pleased after the talks were recorded. He decided to turn the script into a book. Making some revisions as he went, he completed the manuscript for The Four Loves by summer 1959, and the book was published in March 1960.
At the same time as he was preparing The Four Loves in 1958, Jack completed work on a book titled Reflections on the Psalms, the idea for which had come to him ten years before.
In July 1958, after finishing writing the script for The Four Loves and before going to London to record it, Jack and Joy flew together to Ireland. This was the first airplane ride either of them had ever taken. They were both nervous, and their knuckles were white from gripping the arms of their seats as the aircraft rumbled down the runway for takeoff. But once they were finally in the air, Jack and Joy relaxed and marveled at the beauty of the cloudscape laid out beneath them. The couple spent two weeks in Ireland and enjoyed every moment of the time together. When they returned to England, Jack wrote to a friend about the vacation. “We had a holiday—you might call it a belated honeymoon—in Ireland and were lucky enough to get that perfect fortnight in July. We visited Louth, Down, and Donegal, and returned drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just beginning to bloom.”
The year 1959 began on an optimistic note for Jack and Joy. Jack had an article about Joy’s health published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, in which he declared,
I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thigh-bone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones as well. It took three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a few months of life: the nurses (who often know better) a few weeks. A good man laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through the woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photographs was saying “These bones are as solid as rock.” It’s miraculous.
During the weeks Jack continued his routine of going to Cambridge on Monday afternoons and returning to The Kilns and his wife on Friday afternoons. He savored the weekends when he would sit and talk with Joy and they would take long walks together.
This hiatus in Joy’s cancer lasted for ten more months, when Jack took Joy back to the hospital to have what they thought would be her final cancer checkup. They both were expecting that she would be given a clean bill of health. Instead, they were blindsided by devastating news: Joy’s cancer, which had been in remission, had returned with a vengeance. “We are in retreat,” Jack wrote afterward. “The tide has turned.”
