I come to individual books through a multitude of channels—friends’ recommendations, browsing used book stores and libraries, reading the New York Times Book Review, scouring lists of prize winners and year end “Best 10 Books” lists, and allusions to books in other books.  I found this book through a play we saw in London in March, “Shadowlands”.  It’s the dramatization of the love affair and marriage between the British writer, C.S. Lewis, and an American woman who fell in love with him through his writings, Joy Davidman.  In searching for the book, I found a copy in Harvard’s Widener Library, deep in the stacks and not circulable.  I read it in a single sitting in the library’s Reading Room.

Davidman, many years younger and already married with two sons, writes to Lewis, a confirmed bachelor living in Cambridge with his brother, and visits him.  Over a period of months, they first find intellectual kinship and eventually romantic love.  The play was wonderful and left me with a desire to learn more about Davidman.

She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants and grew up in the Bronx. A child prodigy, she graduated from Hunter College at 19 and earned a Master’s Degree from Columbia in three semesters. She married, had two sons, and joined the Communist Party.  Her marriage to an alcoholic and abusive writer  ended in divorce, and she moved to England developing a close friendship with Lewis.  When her visa could not be renewed, Lewis married her in a civil ceremony to enable her to remain in England, and when Davidman was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, he married her in an Anglican ceremony demonstrating what had become a true love.  She died in 1956 at the age of 41, and the grief-stricken Lewis wrote his famous book, ” A Grief Observed”.

Davidman’s poetry became widely known when she won the Yale Series of Younger Poet’s award in 1938 for this book.  The editor of the series, Stephen Vincent Binet wrote of her work that she had “very considerable command of technique and an individuality that can express itself successfully in a variety of forms.” He praised her “power, vividness, and sharp expression, richness of imagery, and a lively social consciousness.”  The 45 poems in the book range from traditional rhyming patterns to free verse and address topics from romantic love to the inequalities in America.  She praised the working man and farmer and supported the Communist cause in the Spanish Civil War.  She dedicated her book to Ernest Thaelmann who was the leader of Germany’s Communist Party during the Weimar years and was imprisoned for 11 years of solitary confinement by the Nazis before he was executed at Buchenwald in 1944 per a direct order from Hitler.

Davidman is a fascinating character whose first book of poetry was never followed by another significant work.  She is primarily remembered now for her relationship to Lewis, an irony that would not have been lost on her younger, ambitious, and radical self.  Love conquers all.