Joy Davidman, Poet: Letter to a Comrade

Although best known as the wife of C. S. Lewis, Joy Davidman was a gifted writer. As an enthusiastic Communist, her poetry, book reviews, and movie reviews often appeared in the New Masses (hereafter NM), the semi-official weekly magazine of Communist Party of the United States of American (CPUSA) from April 1938 through July 1945. (1) In addition, she published two novels, Anya (1940) and Weeping Bay (1950), and Smoke on the Mountain (1953), her interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Anya and Weeping Bay received modest but generally favorable critical scrutiny while Smoke on the Mountain continues to be read and quoted by those doing intensive study of the Decalogue. (2) It is as a poet, however, that she excelled; her Letter to a Comrade (1938) won both the Yale Younger Poet competition and the Russell Loines Memorial award for poetry given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. (3) In what follows I sketch the development of Davidman as a poet, explore a thematic discussion of the poems in Letter to a Comrade, and offer a brief critical assessment of the volume as a whole. (4) Davidman identified herself as a poet as early as age fourteen in her autobiographical essay, "The Longest Way Round": When I was fourteen I went walking in the park on a Sunday afternoon, in clean, cold, luminous air. The trees tinkled with sleet; the city noises were muffled by the snow. Winter sunset, with a line of young maples sheathed in ice between me and the sun--as I looked up they burned unimaginably golden--burned and were not consumed. I heard the voice in the burning tree; the meaning of all things was revealed and the sacrament at the heart of all beauty lay bare; time and space fell away, and for a moment the world was only a door swinging ajar. Then the light faded, the cold stung my toes, and I went home, reflecting that I had had another aesthetic experience. I had them fairly often. That was what beautiful things did to you, I recognized, probably because of some visceral or glandular reaction that hadn't been fully explored by science just yet. For I was a well-brought-up, right-thinking child of materialism. Beauty, I knew, existed; but God, of course, did not .... A young poet like myself could be seized and shaken by spiritual powers a dozen times a day, and still take it for granted that there was no such thing as spirit. (5) (Bone 83-84; Way 14; Davidman's emphasis) Although this passage focuses upon her early atheism, it is marked by several poetic phrases, including, "clean, cold, luminous air," "trees tinkled with sleet," and "a line of young maples sheathed in ice" that "burned unimaginably golden." Moreover, she confesses that "a young poet like myself" was often in the grip of overwhelming aesthetic experiences. She then adds: Like most adolescents, I was really two people. The hard, cocksure young atheist was largely what psychologists call a "persona," a mask, a surface personality for dealing with the world. In the greedy, grabbing, big-city, middle-class world I knew, this seemed the sort of person that was wanted. But underneath the surface my own real personality stirred, stretched its wings, discovered its own tastes. It was a girl with vague eyes, who scribbled verses--scribbled them in a blind fury, not knowing what she wrote or why, and read them afterward with wonder. We call that fury "poetic inspiration" nowadays; we might be wiser to call it "prophecy." (Bone 86; Way 16) In addition, manuscripts containing examples of her earliest attempts at poetry confirm that from the age of fourteen Davidman self-identified as a poet who "scribbled verses ... in a blind fury." (6) At fifteen she matriculated at Hunter College in New York City and soon became an associate editor for the college's literary magazine the Echo. In addition to her editorial duties, she published translations of two French poems in the Echo--"Clair de Lune" (by Paul Verlaine) and "Odelette" (by Henri de Regnier) in the Christmas 1932 issue. …