C.S. LEWIS, JOY GRESHAM, & THE LONDON CIRCLE
Following the war and release from the Army ... I married and went to live in London; and after a year of trying to survive by writing short stories and a poorly-received first novel found a job with the Diamond Corporation. The advantage of a small but regular monthly income was enhanced by location: my office was in Ludgate Circus, no more than a long stone's throw from Fetter Lane and the White Horse pub, which had been chosen by the elders of the tribe as the site for the weekly meetings of the London Circle. In a quiet way the group became known, and strangers from the wider world dropped in from time to time: Marie Stopes, the high priestess of contraception was one, the flamboyant journalist, Nancy Spain, another. (In the Daily Express she administered a light-hearted but stinging put-down to my first Christopher novel, but was kind to Hilary Ford [John Christopher and Hilary Ford were both Youd pen-names].) And one evening a petite dark-haired American lady, who had heard of us through our equivalent New York group, turned up. That was Joy Gresham. During the last winter of the war I'd read PERELANDRA, and written a letter to its author, appreciative but reproachful. I took issue with his representation of the scientist, Weston, as deeply evil, seeing this as an unjustified slur on such as my friend Arthur Clarke. I had a reply from Lewis:
Dear Sir, Years later I mentioned this to Joy, who roared with laughter. It was, she said, a stock response to men who wrote him letters: had I been a woman, he would have been less dismissive. She spoke with authority, since her own acquaintance with the man she would eventually marry had begun with a letter from her. She knew she was not alone in being admitted to correspondence because of gender; there had been another American lady who got so carried away as to have the banns of her marriage to the unwitting Lewis called in an Oxford church. I don't know how many women there were with whom Lewis innocently flirted by mail; but I would guess Joy was the most intelligent. Her mind, Lewis wrote after her death, 'was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard'. It was through her that Lewis visited the London Group. I subsequently wrote him a second letter, basically to congratulate him on the Narnia books which, in my early thirties, I was devouring. Mindful of the previous encounter, I did not include my address. He nevertheless wrote back to me, care of the Globe Inn in Hatton Garden to which the science-fiction group had moved: a warm letter whose opening line stays in my memory: "It is a fine Elizabethan thing to address a man at his tavern ....." The fact that by then Joy was living at The Kilns sufficiently accounts for the difference. Joy herself I got to know quite well. We drank bitter together and argued endlessly through those Thursday evenings. Joy never stopped arguing, and we derived much mutual pleasure from the exercise. She had endured a cruelly-hard childhood, involving a range of diseases that included curvature of the spine, exaggerated insulin secretion resulting in excessive appetite and a weight problem, and Grave's disease - hyperthyroidism. For the last she was treated by a doctor who required her to wear a radium collar around her neck, weekly for a year. It appeared to cure the condition, but one can speculate on the cost in later life. I did not know any of this before reading AND GOD CAME IN, her biography by Lyle Dorsett, published in 1983. Nor did she talk about her achievements as an award-winning poet, her authorship of two well-regarded novels, or her stint in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Perhaps she did not want to belittle our petty triumphs in sales to Astounding Stories or Galaxy or New Worlds. She had a tremendous sense of humour. How amused she would have been at the suggestion that she might eventually, thanks to 'Shadowlands' in its various incarnations, be represented as one of the great tragic heroines of the twentieth century. I seem to hear her laughing now. - excerpted from 'A Fifties Farrago' as published in RELAPSE #17 (Spring 2010, ed. Peter Weston)
Joy Gresham - previously Davidman, later Lewis - is the subject of the biography JOY by Abigail Santamaria (SPCK, 2015) in which she reports that:
As soon as she and the boys left the Kilns, Jack [ie. Lewis] read Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End on her recommendation. Clarke, an acquaintance of Joy's from the London Circle, had struck pay dirt with his latest science fiction novel, selling in the hundreds of thousands. Jack's letter to Joy - long and informal - is part rapturous review, part brilliant criticism studded with casual references to works by Olaf Stapledon, H.G. Wells, Virgil, Richard Wagner, Saint Luke, and Dante. Later in the book comes an intriguing revelation:
Joy had little social life apart from Thursday nights ... and had "at least one brief affair" with a man she met at the Globe Tavern, according to John Christopher: "She spoke of it to me frankly as something pleasant and unimportant." The lover was merely a surrogate for the man she really wanted.... I wonder who that could've been? A gentleman never tells and I don't recall ever reading any reference to this in a fanzine, but knowing it happened might make sense of an oblique reference somewhere.
FRANK ARNOLD: Following a change of management at the White Horse, the group transferred to the Globe tavern, Hatton Garden, in 1953, and has been meeting there ever since. [They moved on in 1974 when it was demolished as part of the redevelopment of the area.] Despite the lack of a formal organisation in London the circle of enthusiasts has expanded over the years and an average evening nowadays brings in about forty or fifty people, with frequent visitors from overseas. The first distinguished author to call on us at the Globe was no less a man than C.S.Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, The Screwtape Letters, etc.) [and apparently accompanied by Reverend Leslie Llewelyn Elliot of Melbourne, Australia - JOY p.287]. One of the great scholars of his time, Professor Lewis was forthright in upholding his own views on all questions of history, literature and theology. If they happened to coincide with fashionable opinion, well and good, but if they did not - well, it was rough luck on fashionable opinion! When he came to the Globe, Lewis did not really know who we were, nor did he need to - enough that here was The Master enjoying an evening off amongst admiring pupils. What a feast of conversation we had that evening! Lewis hated and loved SF in almost equal measure, and I shall never forget how his eyes lit up when I chanced to mention Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus. "An evil book," he called it, with relish, for he was as strongly devoted to it as I am. So far from sharing A.M.Low's belief in the blessings of science, Lewis believed that science was the especial gift of Satan - a view which has since been propagated by many much less exalted thinkers and agitators. Dr.Lewis was brought to the Globe by our friend Joy Gresham, the quiet little New York journalist who had come to London soon after the War, found her way to the White Horse and quickly settled in as a regular and "one of the girls." Mrs Gresham's marriage had ended earlier, and a year or two after the aforesaid meeting she had married Dr.Lewis. Their story has been finely commemorated in The Letters of C.S.Lewis (Geoffrey Bles 1966), a book deserving attention not only from admirers of Lewis but lovers of SF generally. - excerpted from 'The White Horse and The Globe' as published in THE FRANK ARNOLD PAPERS (Ansible Editions, 2017 and 2024)
JOE PATRIZIO: Anne [Joe's wife, and the daughter of Globe regular W. F. 'Bill' Temple] remembers Joy Gresham visiting Elm Road [7 Elm Road, Wembley - the Temple family home] a number of times, but doesn't recall much other than that she liked Joy. On 19 Sept 1957, Bill writes in the journals:
re-read a letter I had from Joy Gresham (now Lewis) this morning from her sickbed in Headington Quarry, she said: "I'd infinitely rather have this illness (cancer) than the emotional and financial problems I've left behind me." When she died, C.S. Lewis wrote a letter to the Temple family, which we still have somewhere. - letter in RELAPSE #19 (Spring 2011, ed. Peter Weston)
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