Customer Reviews

Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman

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I've "lived" with this book for a week, and I still cannot stop staring at the undated jacket photo of young (twenty-something?) Joy Davidman. She's staring soberly into the camera, the flash reflecting in her watery eyes. She's stunningly beautiful and hauntingly present. A store browser might be swayed to buy the book on the merits of the jacket alone. But there's so much more to be revealed by reading the hefty volume of letters written by Joy Davidman, whose reputation might have been lost to history had she not married C. S. "Jack" Lewis, famed author of the Chronicles of Narnia series.

The first letters were written in 1936; at age 21, she already has a master's degree from Columbia and is corresponding about her poetic aspirations with Stephen Vincent Benét. This brings up a notable feature of the collection: it is designed for lay readers as well as literary types. The editor provides footnotes that give basic information on virtually all correspondents. If you don't happen to know the import of Benét in his time --- a Pulitzer Prize winner --- it's laid out for you right at the bottom of the page.

By age 30, she is a prize-winning poet and has published her first novel. She's a member of the Communist Party and an editor for its American magazine New Masses. She has married a fellow writer and Communist, William Lindsay Gresham, and is a mother. Many of the early letters focus on her own writing pursuits and also reveal her as a no-nonsense editorial mentor-critic. For example, she is quoted as saying, "What the words do not contain, you cannot add with punctuation."

One of the most interesting portions of the book is not a letter but an essay, "The Longest Way Round" (published in THESE FOUND THE WAY: Thirteen Converts to Protestant Christianity, 1951), that recounts her journey from atheism (as a secular Jew) and communism to Christianity. The essay ends on this note: "My present tasks are to look after my children and my husband and my garden and my house --- and, perhaps, to serve God in books and letters as best I can...."

But it isn't long before Joy's marriage falls apart, and in 1953 she and her sons move from suburban New York to London. A large portion of the book reprints Joy's letters to her estranged and then ex-husband, Bill Gresham, who has been drinking, is in love with (and, eventually, marries) Joy's cousin Renée, and whose writing career is floundering. In first and/or last paragraphs, she's forever asking him to pay the requisite child support. But once you get beyond that, you discover a complicated woman who wins the heart of "Jack" Lewis, with whom she has been corresponding for several years.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Readers looking for correspondence between Joy and Jack will be disappointed. As editor Don W. King notes in his lengthy introduction, "Lewis was notorious for not saving letters (he tried to burn the letters sent him three weeks or so after he received them), and most of Lewis's letters to Davidman have not survived." But don't let that deter you if you have any interest in things literary or Lewis.

A final note of interest: A previously out-of-print biography of Joy Davidman (AND GOD CAME IN by Lyle Dorsett) has been recently reissued by Hendrickson Publishers.

--- Reviewed by Evelyn Bence

I found this collection of the letters of Joy Davidman to be extremely interesting. I was thrilled to gain the insight into her dramatic life. Dr. King did an outstanding job organizing these letters and filling in any gaps or misconceptions with a thorough explanation. This book is a valuable addition to my library. It should be welcome universally in personal collections especially when there is an interest in the life of C.S. Lewis.

After reading CS Lewis this was interesting as a read to follow through for further information on Joy and the transformation from her life pre conversion to how she treated people post conversion is very encouraging and startling.

Good read for a CS Lewis Fan.

If you want to know more about the personal side of Joy Davidman, this is a good book for that. The author started with an over view on her life. There are a few notes here and there that give some context to what she was writing about. I think that it would have been better if the author had intertwined more of the overview section in between the letters. It was good to get a big picture up front, but as you read through the letters, it would have been better to get those specifics in between the letters. Overall a good read.

"Cut off, hemmed in, embittered, the Judaism of such villages resembled the taboo systems of savages more than it resembled the prophetic Judaism of the Old Testament or the philosophic and scholarly Judaism of medieval western Europe ... This religion of the letter rather than the spirit heartened the Jews to endure their isolation. But it was kept going by persecution, as a dead man in a crowd may be kept on his feet by the pressure of those around him. In America, with the persecution removed, the corpse collapsed. Boys like my father, growing up in the polyglot world of New York, looked at their small-town religion and found it absurd (2009:84, 1951:13-26).

Why be complacent? Davidman's unacceptable anti-Jewish diatribe does not speak for Jews, represent Judaism, or Christianity. She parrots her fanatic father's hideously deformed views. Her essay "The Longest Way Around" reveals niether a Jew or intelligent Christian. Do not call Davidman a Jew. Her grotesque rhetoric was written in 1951, only 6 years after WWII. Six million Jews dead, along with gypsies, Catholics, and other minorities; two thousand years of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Davidman never spoke out, before or after WWII, about what Jews suffered. Faith sustained Jews in their poverty and tribulations, in the concentration camps, and beyond. But Davidman was a narcissist atheist, a conformist communist (without carefully reading Marx), a bad poet who thought herself a prophet, a bourgeoisie materialist whose father derided the faith of his Jewish parents to justify his devout atheism.

When Davidman became a "Christian," she discovered her supposed "Jewishness" had cache with naive Christians. But Davidman was a bigot who never understood the Judaism of Jesus or her forebears. This explains the attraction between Davidman and C.S. Lewis, a man who in 1955 actually had the incredible self-pity to call his boyhood school a "Concentration Camp" at "Belson." Davidman refers to Lewis as having prejudices of "a tough Ulsterman ... with the sort of views you expect of an Orangeman - though in his case they're half humorous" (2009:337). After bragging about his literary criticism in "Surprised By Joy," he wrongly believes the New Testament gospels were written by, "those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them" (1955:236). At the very least, Lewis was limited by the narrow parameters of an insular culture; completely unlike the Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote beautifully about Jews.

The people of the First Covenant survive. Christians can deepen their faith by exploring beyond Church Fathers, to the living heritage of Judaism. The accomplishments of Judaism do not culminate in Jesus. Western Civilization arose with gifts from the God of Abraham and Moses. Despite incredible hardships over 4000 years, Jews remain. No other people maintained their religion, language, and culture after 2000 years of diaspora. There are no surviving, intact ancient Egyptian, Greek, or Roman cultures. The survival of Judaism is a miracle. Let's celebrate that fact for once. Don't depend on false, self-appointed prophets for information. After reading C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, I thought this collection would be interestng, but I won't read another word of Davidman; the book is not even being donated, but disposed of.

Anyone who has read the Narnian series in its entirety, or who wants to do so, may be fascinated with spunky feisty Jill Pole who breaks the traditional mold of how a girl ought to behave in Lewis' day. I believe that Jill was, perhaps in part, based on his one true love: Joy Davidman Lewis.

Joy drank beer, and complained when there was not enough of it to her liking. She wrote fierce poetry. She showed courage in the face of an economic depression, a painful divorce, World War II, McCarthyism, and cancer. Her letters to family and friends show a constant display of strength, almost to the point of harshness. This was the woman who won C.S. Lewis' heart!

This cheering book, at times, makes me laugh at not only Joy's irony, but God's. She remarks in one letter "Jack's juveniles [the Narnian series including The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader] have a small steady sale . . . but we'll never get rich from those . . . the good thing is that they don't dwindle with time - but I think it's only the most successful juveniles that go on forever." While downplaying her cancer, she remarks about nasties such as financial nightmares and the fact that mild intestinal flu played hell with her beer-drinking! There is even a picture of Joy in 1958, wearing pants and wielding an air rifle!

While tea and shortbread have their place, Joy shows the very joy in beer, laughter, intellectual pursuits, and sheer chutzpah!

My only dislike on this magnificent book is the picture of her first husband William Lindsay Gresham on the front cover, as it is my understanding that the love of her life was Lewis, and while his picture is also on the cover, I believe it would have been much more appropriate for only her, Lewis, and her sons David and Douglas to be pictured, leaving Gresham's picture in its proper place among the other photographs.

The wise seeking tales of comfort and joy, with a good loud laugh or two thrown in for good measure, would do well in reading Joy's letters, and reading them often in this excellent book.

This book is well worth the cost and it is an inviting read. The seller did a great job with packing and delivery was very prompt.