A joy observed: C.S. Lewis in love.

For me, seeing the film Shadowlands was like watching shadowy characters superimposed on people I had known in real life. The uncommon love story between the writer, C.S. Lewis, and my friend, Joy Davidman Gresham, who died of cancer shortly after their marriage, was true. But the film tells very little about Joy herself--who she was, and why someone like Clive Stapleton Lewis, Christian theologian, Oxford don, and confinned bachelor, fell in love with a Jewish divorcee sixteen years his junior and married her though she was dying.

Joy was a remarkable person, a gifted poet and novelist, a rebel, an original, whose intellectual and spiritual qualities Lewis recognized. Most important was the strong bond of their common religious faith.

I met Joy in the early 1930s at Hunter College; she was my close friend and schoolmate. In the college yearbook, among the photos of the graduates, all women, all young, all with identical discreet black velvet V-necks and marcelled hair, I see my own photo--how young I was! And here is Joy, with her dark, limpid doe eyes and soft round face, looking grave and lovely. She did not have time to grow old; she died in her forties.

We both went on to Columbia for graduate work, she in seventeenth-, I in eighteenth-century English literature. In those days I was diffident, and what I admired most in Joy was her daring and independence. Though ladylike, cultivated, and soft-spoken, she liked to jolt others by her nonconformity. I remember how shocked we were (this was in 1933!) when she mentioned that she used to go to burlesque shows. And there were strong rumors in college that she was having an affair with one of our professors of English--a rumor she did not deny. It gave her a kind of status in our unsophisticated eyes.

Her collection of poetry, Letter to a Comrade, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1938. She also edited an anthology of antifascist war poems, for which she induced me to translate a half-dozen Russian poems into English. She inscribed it to me "with affection for the damndest reasons."

She often seemed sad and restless, as if seeking for something in literature, in poetry, in politics, in fads, in religion, embracing various causes, rejecting them. For a while she was an ardent Communist. Disillusioned, she renounced communism in the press, in a series of articles which created a bit of a scandal.

When she married William Lindsay Gresham, author of Nightmare Alley, a novel about circus geeks, they both became involved in L. Ron Hubbard' s dianetics, a technique later discredited and more recently resurfaced as Scientology. I remember how Joy and Bill used to run "engrams" through each other; these were supposed to reach earliest memories. Once they tried it on me, and I pretended to recall a prenatal experience, just to please Joy.

Although they had two sons, David and Douglas, only Douglas is shown in the film. But if Fiddler on the Roof can subtract two of Tevye's daughters from the seven Sholom Aleichem had given him, then why shouldn't Shadowlands subtract one from Joy?

Bill had a temper; when he was angry he would go down to the basement of their house and shoot a rifle. Joy was no mean shot herself. What with engrams and gun shots, it was a stormy marriage.

Joy turned to Christianity and began a correspondence with C.S. Lewis, whose theological writings she admired. One of his books, prophetically titled Surprised by Joy, written before he had met Joy, was not about her but about searching for faith and finding it. Joy went to England to meet him, came home, returned to England with her two small sons, and began to write me letters describing how she and Jack (as Lewis was called) would walk on the moors and hold hands, and how hopeless it was for her to love him.

After she divorced Bill, Lewis married her "in name only," to give her and her two sons British nationality. But it was only after she contracted cancer that their real marriage took place in a hospital in Oxford, where Joy lay dying. She was given no more than a few days to live. Jack brought her to his home in the Kilns, on the outskirts of Oxford, where he took care of her, and where she miraculously recovered. They thought she was cured, but she wasn't. She died three years later.

I was privy to a brief glimpse of their life at the Kilns when I was invited to visit them in 1957. There I met Jack and his brother Warren, and saw Joy in bed, fatally ill. She never looked happier. I found Jack more handsome than his book jacket photos--a charmer and a delightful raconteur.

He told me a story he was afraid was a bit too risque for my American ears, until Joy reassured him. It seems a women' s college nearby gave a production of Midsummer Night's Dream with an all-women's cast, which he was invited to see. When it was over, he was asked to say a few words about it. "I told them"--here he harmmphed a bit, perhaps he even blushed--"I told them this was the first time I have ever seen a female Bottom."

A page from my diary entry on Sunday, August 25, 1957:

Freezing day. To Oxford. Loved Jack Lewis on sight. Brother Warren (Warnie)--very tweedy-British. Joy looks wonderful, though in bed. Gravely ill; knows it. Jack, too, has osteo-something, back pains. Brought gifts: Gave Joy hankie, French lipstick & scent, silver earrings. Gave Jack tie and brandy. Talked Pheasant for lunch. Walked on moors in high wind with Joy's nurse. Tea and Scrabble, in all languages. Very learned. (Send them Blotto. ) Cold supper. Jack told "daring" story re Bottom. More talk with Joy. To bed with hot water bottle.

Slept very well. Woke in freezing room. Fine breakfast served by Mrs. Miller (housekeeper). Talked with Joy about love. She: "Now I know that the poets and the movies are right; it does exist.t

Ambulance came to take her to hospital for treatment. Said good-bye(final?).

Not quite final. Joy rallied, went into remission, wrote me that she was able to walk with a cane, to work in her garden. She and Jack even managed a trip to Greece, in her wheel chair, a year before she died.

Jack took her death very hard. Having at last found love, he tried to come to terms with his loss and with his faith in a brief and moving book, A Grief Observed. Not long after that, he too died.

And now, in the shadowland of the screen, here they are: Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger pretending to be Jack Lewis and my friend Joy.

When the movie was over and we were leaving the theater, I asked my husband: "Why is your necktie wet?" He had been crying.

Perhaps the poets and movies are right, after all.

BEL KAUFMAN

Bel Kaufman is author of Up the Down Staircase. This essay is part of a work in progress.