Joy Davidman (April 18, 1915 – July 13, 1960) is an unbearably talented and prolific poet, but sadly, her work is seldom arrived at without first passing through C. S. Lewis's memoir of her death. 

Although in all fairness Lewis' A Grief Observed is a stunning work, wrought from the heart of emotional upheaval at the loss of his wife. "It's not true that I'm always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible." the novelist described in personal diaries, "But the times when I'm not are perhaps my worst." Lewis's book, published anonymously, was my very first book, my very first article, on The Examined Life. So I, too arrived at Joy Davidman's body of work through Lewis. 

Nevertheless, I am here reading her words and she is textured, complex, demanding, powerful, intelligent, outspoken, and political, and I can see why Lewis mourned her loss acutely. 

 Joy Davidman.

Davidman was born Helen Joy Davidman in New York City to a culturally Jewish but religiously atheist family. Even during the Depression, the Davidman family had the financial means to provide music lessons, vacations, and access to good schooling. When she was fourteen, the highly intelligent Davidman finished high school, and by the time she was twenty, she earned an English Literature degree from Columbia University. Soon after, her verse was published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the most prominent English-language journal of the day, famous for publishing T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore.

Like Lewis, whose childhood was one of "attics explored in solitude," Davidman was a highly intelligent child who was homebound by constant maladies. She leveraged her imagination as a means of childhood existence, and this self-expansion into fantasy space connected her to Lewis before they met (he was seventeen years older).

The pair were also connected by their search for faith and the ultimate arrival of Christianity as a means of guidance and worship. Lewis' essays on his conversion comforted Davidman after the end of her first marriage. 

C. S. Lewis in 1919

Davidman and Lewis did not meet until 1952 when she traveled with her sons to England. By that point, Lewis had published the first three books of his Narnia series: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and was well-celebrated at home and abroad. 

Their meeting was ostensibly professional; Davidman was researching her contemporary interpretation of the Ten Commandments. But as evidenced by her letters and poetry, she fell pretty quickly for the Irish novelist. She returned the following year and set up in London with her sons; her amorous feelings for Lewis outpaced his. 

On Valentine's Day, 1953, Davidman wrote a series of poems full of confidence, longing, and desire.

You have such reasons for not loving me
As would persuade the sunfire to go out,
Divorce the moon from the obedient sea,
Make rain fall upward, lead the rose to flout
 
The amorous honeybees, and talk the wind
Out of a wandering life; as would compel
Satan to consort with angelkind
And Gabriel to wallow deep in hell.

The argument that keeps the sun in power
Over his children, makes the firefly glow,
Adorns the summer with her proper flower
And decorates the winter with his snow,

Makes dead men rise and promises come true —
Such reasons do I have for loving you.

The exquisite embroidery of artist Julie Campbell fuses emotion onto human anatomy to capture, in glorious vitality, the abundant complexity of being human.

2000 years ago Ovid, a Roman master of love and poetry, directed women to be demure to secure a beau. Davidman smashes this trope and presents power, conviction, and open expression of love and desire.

Can you forgive me for the tacit lie -
Love concealed in friendship and in laughter?
I have played all my tricks upon you, I
Vainly ran to bring you running after;
Every woman knows the art, my lad!

Silly I was to try it, all the same;
Tomorrow, possibly, I may be glad
And grateful that one man saw through the game.
Perhaps, though, you'll remember when it's over
Lightly I did not tempt you; I was caught
Else had not tried to catch you for my lover,
So contrary to all the laws you taught!

Long after I am dead, you may be lying
Endless hours awake some winter night,
While a sad outwearied moon is dying
In lonely rags and tatters of her light;
Sir, you may decide then I was right.

Illustration by Ana-Maria Grigoriu for The Examined Life.

While it is unclear whether Davidman presented these poems to Lewis, there is evidence she wrote several drafts. But lest there is any doubt of whom she speaks, Davidman boldly includes this acrostic, spelling out Lewis' name in the lines:

Could you listen to your devoted lover?
Listen just a while, it will soon be over-
In a day or two I shall lie contented,
Very straight and still, dead and unlamented.
Every word I said you will have forgotten,
Soon as I'm away and my bones are rotten.
Till then, listen then! Here's a little poem
After him who wrote - surely you must know him-
"Passer, deliciae" - what could be sweeter?
(Let me stop and see if I've got the meter.
End-rhymes thereunto, just to make it meaner;
Some day this whole page goes unto the cleaner,)
Look, my dearest, Jack, this is getting silly;
Each fool writes like this, even my poor Billy.
When I go to sleep, I'll make no more verses.
I feel gloomier than an empty hearse is;
So, sire, nighty-night. This is awful. Curses!

Davidman's mention of death and dying might serve as a metaphor for a silent supplicant (something she would never be!), but it also sadly foretold her future. 

There is relentless drama surrounding the life and love of these two writers, most of it tragic. The pair began dating and even married in 1956 when Davidman's expired immigration visa forced her to return to the United States. Even then, Lewis called it a common-law marriage. It was seemingly only when Davidman was diagnosed with cancer in 1957 that Lewis finally opened up his heart to himself and her.

Sadly, Davidman had quickly metastasized, untreatable breast cancer and died in 1960, four years after their civil wedding; she was forty-five, and Lewis was sixty-one. They lived together and considered themselves fully married and in love at the time of her death. Lewis died a few years later, conceivably heartbroken.

He wrote in A Grief Observed:

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called 'resources'. People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice, but it seems to be making out a good case for a while. Then comes the sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

The most unexpected - indeed the most delightful - acts of the scene-rich drama of Davidman and Lewis's time together, however, might be how their relationship would have been much less understood were not for the fact that in 2010, Davidman's close friend enlisted help from Davidman's son to clean out her house. Among the detritus and beloved things were boxes containing Davidman's manuscripts, letters, and unknown poems.

In 2015 the miraculous hoard was published in A Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C. S. Lewis, thoughtfully edited by Lewis and Davidman scholar Don W. King. It contains the discovered works and accurately dates them, so we know the sonnets of longing were written before Davidman and Lewis were officially together.

"Erotic love is the craving for complete fusion, for union with one other person," Erich Fromm wrote in his groundbreaking study of love and human separateness, "The 'loved' person becomes as well known as oneself." This desire for intimate knowledge of one another was central to Davidson's sonnets (she wrote more than forty) to Lewis and is echoed (finally! we might think) in Lewis's language in A Grief Observed.