Read an Excerpt
1
1892–1930
In a recurring dream throughout her childhood, Joy Davidman found herself walking down a road she called Daylight Street. In time, she rounded a corner and followed a crooked, grassy path into an unfamiliar world. Joy ambled through that world, lost but unafraid, until the trail opened onto “a strange, golden, immeasurable plane,” as she described it, writing extensively about the dream in poetry and prose. Far in the distance rose the towers of Fairyland. Joy’s heart swelled with longing as she beheld a perfect kingdom defined by love, devoid of sorrow, capable of consummating every good desire. “Hate and heartbreak / All were forgot there.”
But before she could reach the castle gates, she woke up in the Bronx. Instead of a palace threshold, her round brown eyes saw only items in her bedroom: ballet slippers for the dreaded dance lessons her parents required, crisp dresses that made her into her mother’s perfect doll, and books that were her waking sanctuary in what often felt like a foreign land. Among her favorites were Greek myths ?— ?she longed to visit the land of the gods ?— ?and “ghost stories and superscience stories” by Lord Dunsany and George MacDonald, the Victorian minister whose fantasies evoked the same visceral desire as her dream, suggesting that everything sad could become untrue.
Hope lingered in the morning hours. “If I remembered the way carefully, the dream told me, I should be able to find it when I woke up.” For a fanciful child born during the Great War and raised in America’s “New Era” of postwar prosperity, a Fairyland on earth ?— ?as rich with material resources as her dream kingdom was rich with the immaterial ?— ?seemed almost possible. In the distance, automobile motors roared above the clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the Grand Concourse, the fashionable thoroughfare two blocks from 2707 Briggs Avenue in the genteel middle-class neighborhood where Joy lived with her parents, Joseph and Jeannette, and younger brother Howard, whom Joy came to call Howie. The rhythm of construction joined an orchestra of street sounds, heralding blocks of brand-new art deco apartment buildings with elegant sunken living rooms, electrical and waste disposal systems, refrigerators instead of iceboxes, elevators, and gracious lobbies adorned with marble inlay. “Every day, in every way, the world was getting more comfortable.”
But not the world inside herself, and not the local landscape populated with peers and parents. Joy was a sickly, lonely girl, a social outcast at school and a disappointment at home to immigrant parents who governed according to the goals of assimilation and success. They, too, had been branded in childhood with the shame of otherness. “They showed their affection by almost incessant criticism,” she told a newspaper reporter who profiled her life. They were “well-meaning but strict.” Off the record, she was less subtle. “‘Well-meaning but strict’ . . . is certainly damning by faint praise,” she wrote to a friend. “But since the truth would have called for loud damns, I don’t know how I could have put it milder.” She left the specifics to her reader’s imagination.
It would be decades before Joy understood the meaning of her dreams, but for her, Fairyland was never the standard little girl’s fantasy of opulence or romance. Joy would come to interpret the dream as a universal quest for eternal life, for a destination that could resolve her unconscious conviction that the perfect version of everything lay just ahead.
“There is a myth that has always haunted mankind, the legend of the Way Out,” she would write many years later, “the door leading out of time and space into Somewhere Else. We all go out of that door eventually, calling it death. But the tale persists that for a few lucky ones the door has swung open before death, letting them through . . . or at least granting them a glimpse of the land on the other side. The symbol varies . . . [F]or some, the door itself is important; for others, the undiscovered country beyond it ?— ?the never-never land, Saint Brendan’s Island, the Land of Heart’s Desire . . . Whatever we call it, it is more our home than any earthly country.” Joy called it Fairyland, a place she visited in her dreams and searched for in her waking hours.
C. S. Lewis, in his first published novel, The Pilgrim’s Regress, calls it the Island. That book ?— ?an allegorical revision of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress written shortly after Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity ?— ?would teach Joy the meaning of her childhood dreams. “By disguising fairyland as heaven,” Joy wrote after becoming a Christian, “I was enabled to love heaven.” Before this revelation and after, Joy’s attempts to reach the castle would determine the course of her brief yet abundant life. In forty-five years she embraced more milestones and worldviews than most people experience in a lifetime twice as long. Her Daylight Street would detour into a romance with the Communist Party, whose propaganda would seduce her into mistaking the Soviet Union for her utopic Fairyland. The route would dead-end in a miserable first marriage to Bill Gresham, a troubled Spanish civil war veteran, Joy’s partner in a misguided dance with Dianetics ?— ?another illusion. And the road would inevitably lead to C. S. Lewis, Joy’s final embodiment of heaven on earth, and the man who would point her in the direction of the Fairyland that would finally satisfy her heart.
