TCM’s “Oscar-worthy love stories” — Casablanca (1942); Now, Voyager (1942); and Brief Encounter (1945) — feature unhappily married spouses who fall in love with someone else, only to reject the forbidden fruit. The one exception, Marty (1955), has two lovers, both devout unmarried Catholics in their mid-30s — a jovial Italian-American butcher and dutiful son, and a sensible, yet plain-looking and seemingly bland high school chemistry teacher — finding happiness when they find each other.
One Hollywood love story, Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands (1993), though it did not win Oscar gold, is spiritual gold.
A meeting of minds
Based on the true story of C.S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) and his relationship with Helen Joy Davidman Gresham (Debra Winger), the film is set about the same time as the fictional story, Marty.
Clive Staples (“Jack”) Lewis, the famed Oxford professor, prolific author, and Christian convert from atheism, begins receiving letters from Mrs. Gresham in January 1950 after he had just finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), the first of his children’s book series, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956).
Joy's troubled marriage led her to crave Christ after which Lewis’ books — The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Great Divorce (1945), and Miracles (1947) — catalyzed the conversion of “the world’s most astonished atheist” to Christianity. She just had to meet this icon of intellectual Christianity, especially given his role in her conversion. He, in turn, is captivated by the sparkling intelligence of this woman, a literary light in her own right.
Recovering atheists
Both Jack and Joy are recovering atheists. Lewis was raised in a Christian household in Ireland, wooed to atheism at age 16 by a tutor and deepened as he reached 20 with the horrors of World War I. His good friend J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, gradually wooed him back to Christianity by his early 30s, along with his reading of G.K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man.
Lewis opines on Guillaume de Lorris’ poem, “Roman de la Rose” with students, and what it conveys about the essence of “love,” namely “unattainability.” “The most intense joy lies not in the having but in the desire. The light that never fades…”
Speaking to the Association of Christian Teachers, he refers to a letter he received “yesterday,” presumably from Gresham, about an event a year earlier, December 4, 1951 — the killing of 24 Royal Marine cadets outside the Chatham Dockyard, when a bus ran into them due to poor lighting.
“Where was God on that December night?” the letter asks.
A question of suffering
“Does God want us to suffer?” the letter continues. “What if the answer to that question is yes. You see, I’m not sure God particularly wants us to be happy. I think He wants us to be able to love and be loved. He wants us to grow up... we are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves… blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us better.”
The block of stone later receives another letter from Mrs. Gresham — “a Jewish communist Christian American,” he notes — and reading along he sees, “she is coming to England”--suggesting “tea in a hotel.”
The day of the meeting, the attraction is immediate.
When he disavows his “public figure” status, she quips, “You mean, you write all those books and give all those talks and everything just so everybody will leave you alone?”
“We’ve only just met and already you see right through me,” says Jack.
So she does.
Lessons of pain and love
Later, Joy recites a poem she wrote at age 22, during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937, noting she had never been in Madrid. “Experience isn’t everything,” he says. Au contraire, it “is everything,” she replies. Books do not cause pain, leading him to opine about “pain” as, embarrassingly, she quotes from his “block of stone” speech to finish his idea.
On that first trip she confides in him that her husband -- in fact, she was divorced -- is a compulsively unfaithful alcoholic. She was wife number two.
Their platonic relationship blossoms and, in 1956, when Joy is about to be deported, Lewis quietly marries her on paper. They live in separate houses, while Lewis adopts her sons, Douglas and David. But, in 1957, when cancer strikes, Joy’s dying wish is for them to be married in the church and the priest grants it, knowing how ill she is. They marry in Joy’s hospital room after which she miraculously recovers and they enjoy three blissful years together, until her death in 1960, after which Lewis cares for his adopted sons.
“It’s funny,” Lewis wrote, “having at 59 the sort of happiness most men have in the twenties … thou has kept the good wine till now.”
A week shy of his 65th birthday, he breathed his last, having learned the lessons of love and pain well.
The 1993 film of Shadowlands is available on Blu-ray and DVD, and available to stream on YouTube. You can also stream the 1986 BBC-TV adaptation of the original play on Prime Video.
