Quote of the Day: On Self-Worship, Boredom, and Lovelessness

It is true that few of us can worship the self, naked and unashamed for very long. For one thing, it simply doesn’t work. Living for his own pleasure is the least pleasurable thing a man can do: If his neighbours don’t kill him in disgust, he will die slowly of boredom and lovelessness–Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain

Everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve learned–both from my own experience and from observing the experience of others–tells me this is true, and that fulfillment, love, and life, lie outside and beyond the boundaries of narcissism and self-involvement.

Helen Joy Davidman died sixty-four years ago today, on July 13, 1960.  She was an extraordinarily interesting and bright woman (earning a masters degree in English literature from Columbia in the days when that meant something) when she was just twenty.  As a young woman she married; dabbled with, and then renounced, Communism; divorced her husband, who was having an affair with her cousin; and converted (from Judaism via atheism) to Christianity, at which point she left the United States to visit England with her two sons.

She captured the attention, and subsequently the heart, of lifelong bachelor C.S. Lewis after overcoming his initial reticence at forming any sort of emotional attachment to another.  Their first “marriage” in 1956 was an unconsummated civil ceremony which Lewis described as “a pure matter of friendship and expediency,” which enabled Davidman and her sons to continue living in the UK.

A year or so later, she fell in her kitchen (she and Lewis were living separately), broke her hip, and was then diagnosed with incurable breast cancer.  The treatments at the time were grueling, and the couple faced them together, finally realizing that a church-sanctioned marriage was the only logical (we are talking about C.S. Lewis, after all) conclusion to their deep affection and love.  The marriage was conducted at the bedside, in Davidman’s hospital room by an Anglican priest and family friend.

Following her release from the hospital, the couple enjoyed an almost three-year remission period before Davidman’s cancer returned, and she died at the age of 45, on July 13, 1960.

After her death, C.S. Lewis wrote of his awakening love and his shattering grief in A Grief Observed.  I wrote about it on Ricochet, but the post isn’t currently publicly available, so I’ll include it here, because I can:

I will not, if I can help it, shin up either the feathery or the prickly tree. Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind. One is that the Eternal Vet is even more inexorable and the possible operations even more painful than our severest imaginings can forbode. But the other, that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’” — C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (embedded quote from Julian of Norwich)

A couple of weeks ago, I watched, for the umpteenth time, one of my favorite movies. It’s Shadowlands, the dramatized account of C.S. Lewis’s romance with, and marriage to, Joy Davidman Gresham, the divorced, former Communist, Jewish then atheist then Christian, American poet he married “in a matter of friendship and expediency,” (so that she could stay in the UK, sort of a British version of a “green card” marriage in the US) in April 1956, and then again, in the eyes of God, and for real, in March 1957.

By that time, Joy had been diagnosed with cancer, and the marriage took place at her hospital bedside. By that time, in addition to the marriage being “for real,” both of them had realized that the relationship was “for real,” as well.

Joy’s next three years were largely cancer-free, but she suffered a relapse in 1960, and in July of that year, after suffering the torments of the “treatments” of the time, she died at home, surrounded by her devoted husband and her two sons from her earlier marriage to American author William Gresham.

I love this movie. I know it’s romanticized and oversimplified, but the fine, nuanced performances of Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger are just wonderful. The young actor who plays Douglas Gresham (only one son is featured in the film) is also very good. Much of it was filmed in my home territory of Worcestershire and Herefordshire, and it’s beautiful and speaks of home to me. And, I think its treatment of its subjects is sensitive and real.

A day or two after seeing the film again, I decided to tackle A Grief Observed. This is one of Lewis’s last works (published in 1961; he died two years later), and I recently described it to a friend as what happens when all of C.S. Lewis’s marvelous intellectual ideas “collide with reality.” The grief. The pain. The healing. The place of God in our lives.

It’s a series of reflections on the death of a beloved wife. Some have speculated that Lewis wasn’t really “feeling” what’s described in the book (which is quite short), but that he was imagining this grief and writing it to “help,” others through the process as an intellectual exercise. I disagree, mostly for two reasons.

First, he initially published the book under a pseudonym, that of “N.W. Clerk,”* and I’m not sure what the point of that would be, unless he wanted to separate his academic self from his grief-stricken self and write unconstrained and straight from the heart.

Second (and this is why I’m glad I waited so long to read this, until I had (considerable) experience of both grief and joy (lower case “J”), myself. I recognize such passion, such rawness, such feeling in what he writes, about both his physical and spiritual connection to “H” (the only name he gives to his wife, and the initial for her first name, which she didn’t use — Helen), that I won’t believe it’s not coming straight from his heart.

I’ve always admired C.S. Lewis. His fiction. His non-fiction. His clear writing. His humanity. His common sense. His morality. But I’ve always (pace, serious Lewis devotees) thought of him as an academic, with all the emotional limitations implied by the word.

This little book rocked my world.

I highly recommend it.

* Possibly a pun on the Old English phrase for “I know not what author (or scholar),” “Nat Whilk (sometimes “Hwilc“) Clerc.” Sorry. I know this is probably TMI. So, sue me.

The quote at the top of this post comes from Smoke on the Mountain, Davidman’s powerful interpretation and explication of the Ten Commandments.  The foreword is by C.S. Lewis and contains the word “poltroonery” which makes it worth reading, just for that.  Lewis says, of his wife: “The flaw in us which Joy Davidman seems to me to expose with most certainty will be to some perhaps be an unexpected one: the sin of fear…quite simply, cowardice.”

I think Lewis was learning something from his soon-to-be wife.

Helen Joy Davidman, rest in peace.