Joy Davidman - Life With William Lindsay Gresham

Life With William Lindsay Gresham

She married her first husband, author William Lindsay Gresham on 24 August 1942, after becoming acquainted with him through their mutual interest in communism. They had two sons, David Lindsay Gresham (born 27 March 1944) and Douglas Howard Gresham (born 10 November 1945). Bill Gresham had become disillusioned with the Communist Party while volunteering in Spain during the Spanish Civil War to fight fascism and influenced Davidman to leave the party after the birth of their sons. During the marriage, Gresham wrote his most famous work Nightmare Alley in 1946, while Davidman did free lance work and cared for the house and children.

The marriage was marred by difficulties that included financial problems, as well as her husband's alcoholism and infidelities. Gresham often had drunken, violent outbursts where he assaulted his wife and children. Davidman wrote that her husband had telephoned her, one day in spring 1946, telling her that he was having a nervous breakdown, and didn't know when he would return home. Afterwards, she suffered from a defeated emotional state. She then had an experience that she described as: "for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, 'the master of my fate'. . . All my defenses – all the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God – went down momentarily – and God came in." When Gresham did return home, the couple began to look to religion for answers. Davidman at first studied Judaism, but decided to study all religions and concluded that "the Redeemer who had made himself known, whose personality I would have recognized among ten thousand—He was Jesus." Through their religious studies, the couple, in particular, began to read and be influenced by the books of C.S. Lewis.

When Gresham received a large sum for the movie rights to Nightmare Alley, the family moved to an old mansion with acreage in the New York countryside, where Davidman began to write her second novel, Weeping Bay and Gresham also started writing on his second novel, Limbo Tower. In 1948, they became members of the Pleasant Plains Presbyterian Church. Gresham had quit drinking during this time, but his conversion to Christianity was short-lived; he continued to have extramarital affairs and developed an interest in Dianetics, tarot cards and the I Ching. The couple became estranged, even though they continued to live together. After an introduction by a fellow American writer, Chad Walsh, Davidman began a correspondence with C. S. Lewis in 1950.