Clive Staples Lewis. Poor fellow - I know exactly how he felt about being saddled with the name Clive. And I understand why he insisted on being called Jack from a very early age. That is a passing thought, however, for I must consider his famous romance with the American divorcée, Joy Davidman Gresham.

It’s a well known story, thanks to the film, Shadowlands, and I need give only the bare bones of the tale here (if you want a good summary of their story, there is an excellent one here). At the age of 54, Lewis met and formed a friendship with Joy while she was visiting England. Later, after her divorce, she moved to England and Jack agreed to a marriage of convenience so that she could stay in the country. Over time their relationship deepened and, once they recognized that they were now in love, they married again but in a religious ceremony this time. Joy was suffering from cancer by then and their time together was brief but intense. She died in 1960 and Jack was distraught, pouring out his grief in a book entitled A Grief Observed. Three years later, Jack died on the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated.

What is often ignored in the biographies and re-telling of the Lewis/Gresham romance is the profound effect Joy had upon Lewis. He was indeed “Surprised by Joy”.

Jack was one of those creatures we call “a confirmed bachelor”. He lived a cloistered life as a master of literature at Oxford University and never showed much interest in the delights of marriage, being apparently content with the more cerebral pursuits of academia. In class and debate, he was a terror, ruthlessly dissecting the arguments of those who opposed him, and he showed little mercy to those he considered insufficiently exact in their thinking.

There was a hint of misogyny too in his attitudes to women, understandably so in one who had so few dealings with them. The convivial Jack that we see glimpses of in the tales of the Inklings at the “Bird and Baby” was reserved for his male friends and his readership, for he had no women friends.

In the early 1950s, Joy started started corresponding with him about his books on Christian apologetics. It is ironic that this was probably the best way for a woman to get close to him for he could maintain a distance from her, partly through the physical fact of her being far away in America, and also through the impersonality of text. This established a relationship that was friendly but focused upon things other than gender.

And so, when Joy visited England in 1952 and asked him to meet her, the ground had been prepared and Jack was ready to do so. Notice, however, that he took his brother, Warnie, along with him to that first meeting; Jack was still shy enough with the opposite sex to need support in this.

As the saying goes, they got on like a house on fire. Joy’s willingness to engage in debate with him altered Jack’s preconceived notions of female intellectual capacity and he found himself enjoying her company more and more. By 1956, when Joy had problems renewing her visa to stay in Britain, it was an obvious thing for Lewis to solve her problems by suggesting a civil marriage.

Their relationship continued to deepen and, when Joy was admitted to hospital, apparently dying of cancer, Jack at last admitted his true feelings and they were married again by a priest. Joy experienced a remission thereafter and the couple spent the next couple of years in complete happiness. It is no wonder that her subsequent death crushed Lewis in a way he had never experienced before.

But Joy had changed the man that Lewis was. No longer did he carelessly destroy others’ arguments in debate, no more did he expect the ruthlessness in others that he demanded of his own thinking. Joy had taught him that he was as human as anyone and that intellectual rigor is no substitute for love. It was as though God had granted him Joy so that he might learn the last few things he needed to know before going home.

This, surely, was the greatness of their romance; that both came to know love in a way that was so intense that it changed their lives completely. It is a story of tragedy in that they were granted so few years, and yet it is a saga too of the triumph of the human spirit over pain. That is why we should remember them.

Clive Allen