We’d both agreed, this trip to visit Chad and Eva held some promise of reprieve.
Yet even that morning Bill had balked. “Do you want to spend this vacation with Chad because he’s close to Lewis?” he asked as we packed.
“That’s absurd.” I stood at the end of the bed with my open suitcase half full.
Bill opened a dresser drawer and then turned back to me. “He’s the one who told you to write to Lewis in the first place.”
“Bill,” I said and stepped closer to him, “Chad is the foremost scholar on Lewis in the United States. He’s a professor. And like us, he’s a middle-in-life convert. He’s a dear friend to you as much as to me. If you don’t want to go on this vacation, we won’t go. Just tell me now.”
Bill kissed me dryly, missing my mouth to land on my cheek. “We need to get out of here. We need a break,” he said. “Vermont might be just the trick.”
Joy:
Mr. Lewis, I feel lost in what Dante calls a “dark wood, where the road is wholly lost and gone.” Motherhood is selfless. Writing is selfish. The clash of these two unyielding truths creates a thin tightrope, one I fall off of daily, damaging all of us.
Yet my garden has been sustenance. Has yours yet blossomed?
C. S. Lewis:
Mrs. Gresham, I have also been lost in that dark wood and felt the same, not about motherhood of course (which would be quite odd), but about my life and work. God promised us these times; darkness is part of the program. I find solace and nourishment in nature as you do, and on my long walks up Shotover Hill (one day will you come see this place and walk with us?). The only command nature demands of us is to look and be present. But do not demand more of her than she can give.
It had been a year and a half since that first envelope had arrived from Oxford, and I couldn’t count the letters Mr. Lewis and I had exchanged. They flew over the ocean like birds passing each other in flight. I’d gather the tidbits of my day and save them like treasures. I wanted to share it all with him, to show him my life and read about his. I was as eager for his letters as anything in my life, rereading old ones until the new one arrived.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had reached our shores the year before, and I shared Mr. Lewis with my boys as I read it to them. Now Prince Caspian had been published and brought with us on the trip. Over and over I narrated, until Aslan and Lucy and Edmund were as familiar as family members.
C. S. Lewis:
Ah, yes, you see the medieval influence in my stories—it is above all my world view. Professionally I am mainly a medievalist with a desire for meaning and search for Truth, and I believe stories are there to delight and inform.
Joy:
Your Arthurian influences are deep within your prose. You must have found his legends early on.
C. S. Lewis:
I did find King Arthur at a young age, eight to be exact. The same age you decided to be an atheist, I see. And ever since then he’s probably been influencing much of my imagination. Along with Dante, Plato and moorings in Classical Greek thought and of course many others. How can we know what has filtered into our work? This is precisely why we must be careful of what we read.
Out of the corner of his letters I experienced a different kind of life: one of peace and connection and intellectual intimacy, of humor and kindness, and I indulged.
Meanwhile in that year of 1951, the world spun on its axis: the Great Flood filled the lands of the Midwest, the nuclear bomb was tested at a private site in Nevada, the Korean War was taking our men’s lives. Perry Como, Tony Bennett, and I Love Lucy attempted to alleviate our fears with music and laughter while Harry Truman fired General MacArthur.
But in our house a different battle raged. Fights with Bill grew monstrous. I was embarrassed by who we’d become and was resolute to change it, to heal our marriage.
Only a month before the vacation, drunk and throwing pages of a failed manuscript across the room, Bill had grabbed his hunting rifle and swung it wildly about.
“Stop!” I cried out. “You’re scaring me, and the boys are asleep.”
“You’ve never understood me, Joy. Not once. You got the house you wanted, the fame you desired, but what about me?”
“Bill, you’re not making sense. You’re drunk. Put down the stupid gun.”
“It’s empty, Joy. Stop being dramatic about everything.”
He pointed the gun at the ceiling, pulled the trigger, and blew a hole in the plaster. In an adrenaline rush of fear, my heart a bird against my ribs, I bolted up the stairs, unable in my muddled mind to decipher where the boys’ room was compared to the shot. Panic choked me until I reached the top of the landing and realized that the bullet had entered the guest room, a peephole now in the floor.
Bill ambled behind me, the gun dangling from his hand.
“Whoa,” he said and stared at the splintered wood. “I thought the chamber was empty.”
I closed the door in his face, dropped to the single bed, and shivered with rage. It was a weak response, but I hadn’t known what else to do. I only knew to try harder. Pray. Do more. And turn to the letters that sustained me in my search for Truth and meaning.
C. S. Lewis:
My brother Warnie enjoys your letters as much as I do. He bellows with laughter at your stories. He will write to you soon also. He is deep in research for a French history collection. Have I told you that he is also a corking good writer?
Joy:
I am envious (that breaks a commandment, non?) of your closeness with your brother and how you live together. My relationship with mine has been broken, and it is my fault. A series of articles came out in the New York Post, titled “Girl Communist,” where I bared my soul and told stories of my past, how I had journeyed from atheism to communism to Christ. I felt at the time that I was being truthful about my journey, that integrity was my goal. But now I’m not sure. Howie was embarrassed by the family stories I told; he was mortified that I confessed my involvement in the party and had confessed my youthful exploits. He’s angry and hasn’t spoken to me since. It is a great loss. Don’t you know that pain of baring your soul in the writing and suffering because of it?
C. S. Lewis:
Yes, Joy, I know that pain well. When we write the truth, there isn’t always a grand group applauding. But write it we must.
On that first afternoon in Vermont, after I had unpacked and the men had taken the children to the lake, Eva and I walked beneath the bright summer sun through the long paths and beds of wild flowers that ran beside the lake. She asked how our family was getting along.
“It’s too much to talk about,” I told her. “I try to be free and full of laughter for the boys, Eva. I want them to be happy. We’re thrilled to be here. Let’s not talk of the hard things for now.”
“What hard things, Joy? I’m your friend.” She plucked a black-eyed Susan from the ground and stuck it behind her ear, the yellow petals bright against her dark hair.
I didn’t want to tell her everything; I didn’t want to complain. My thyroid was low again, pulling me toward a deep fatigue. Asthmas and allergies for the boys. Bill with hay fever, phobias, and threatening a nervous breakdown. Then the alcohol, always the alcohol. And deep down I suspected that again there were other women.
I searched her sweet face before I asked, “Do you ever feel that there is more, that life holds so much more, and somehow we’re missing it? I want to be part of the bigger world, make a difference, see it and feel it, engage in it. Don’t you feel that longing inside you?”