Light shines through 'Shadowlands'

This Week’s Winner

Clarissa Estuar is a scriptwriter and six-time Palanca award winner. She wrote her first teleplay when she was 19, which won third place in the Palanca Awards. This year, she won her first 1st prize for a one-act play. She was a finalist in the 2007 “If My Life Were a Book” contest.

I was certain that I would be wasting time reading the little pocketbook with the picture of Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger on the cover. It was bad enough that, supposedly, it is a novelization based on a screenplay based on a play. Worse, it is a fictionalization of events that actually transpired many years ago. I figured that the story within the pages of Shadowlands had been regurgitated so many times in different genres, it’s bound to have lost all meaning and is probably only held together by a chockfull of false sentiment. But I was very wrong.

Shadowlands presents us with the character of Jack, or C.S. Lewis to the rest of us. Only the closest and dearest to the author of The Chronicles of Narnia were welcome to call him by his chosen nickname. Counted among them were his fellow Oxford dons and brother Warnie, a confirmed bachelor like himself with whom he shared his home. By then, Jack was in his 50s and enjoyed a routine that consisted of teaching the brightest minds of England and fulfilling speaking engagements where he dispelled arguments against the faith that he advocated.

Jack was content with the simple life he built for himself…that is, until he met American poet Joy Gresham, who was more than a decade his junior. What started as a perfunctory answer to a fan letter turned into a correspondence that always piqued his curiosity and challenged his intellect. But when Joy hollered Jack’s name upon her arrival at the designated venue of their first meeting, Jack thought that developing a deeper friendship with her was improbable. Her being married wasn’t an issue because he did not entertain the notion of romance with her in the first place, but he just did not approve of people who made spectacles of themselves in public.

Within a few sentences, Jack and Joy were involved in a verbal joust. Joy challenged a statement he made about being a private person, saying the fact that he continued to write books and give talks belied his wish to be left alone, prompting Jack to declare with some annoyance, “We’ve only just met, and already you see through me.”

Joy started to hesitate, but Jack assured her that he was actually enjoying their conversation because he always liked a good fight. “Yes,” she started to say, “but when did you last lose?” Finally, it seemed, he had met a worthy opponent in the debates he was so fond of.

Joy felt some regret that she didn’t rein in her natural bluntness, but then, she had never felt any real need to censor herself. It is an attitude that should be lauded: if you are an intelligent woman, you should know you are entitled to your opinions and, by God, you must express them. As far as Joy was concerned, if the men she found herself acquainted with found this off-putting, it was their problem.

Jack didn’t understand why, but he started telling her things that he hadn’t shared with anyone for the longest time. Not with any woman, certainly. He hypothesized that he was trying to prove that he wasn’t untouched by emotions as Joy might have thought. For the life of him, he couldn’t process why he would even care what she thought of him. Several days after this, Joy was already on her way back to the States with her son and still, Jack couldn’t figure it out.

He thought that would be the end of it, but it didn’t take Jack too long to realize that he missed Joy. This wasn’t helped by the fact that with no warning at all, she stopped writing to him altogether. The months of him wondering about her silence culminated with Joy suddenly showing up at one of his book signings. Forgetting all semblance of propriety, Jack demanded, “Where have you been?” This loss of composure was enough to surprise Joy, but when Jack admitted that he had been thinking about her, so many possibilities seemed to open up. 

Because she was now free from her ex-husband who remarried as soon as the ink on their divorce papers was dry, it became easy for Joy to relocate to London with her son. She and Jack started seeing each other regularly. Their relationship developed to one that was “as comfortable as old slippers, warm and friendly and free from tension”… at least in Jack’s point of view. Despite being many, many IQ points ahead of most of us (she did receive her master’s degree from Columbia University at 21), Joy found herself having to go through a ritual a majority of women have gone through at one point or another…initiating “The Talk” with a clueless male.

Hearing what she had to say bewildered the staunch academic because he had assumed that Joy was as content as he was with how things were between the two of them. Joy started to see that this man she had admired for his intellect, this man she was starting to fall in love with, was “a spectator of life rather than a joyous participant in it.” For the most part, he lived in a world of theories and ideas because he saw emotions as unwelcome intrusions in his life. Wanting to prove that she was a thoroughly modern woman, Joy resolved to accept things as they were instead of pushing Jack to see what he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see. They were bound to continue in this nameless, definition-less state they were in for years, if fate hadn’t intervened.

Joy could not see herself returning to the States for a long time, so she had to find a way to have her visa renewed indefinitely. Because they were supposed to be such good friends, she sought Jack’s help and after just one conversation, he agreed to marry Joy “technically,” on paper. They continued to live apart, with Jack visiting Joy’s apartment regularly for platonic teas together. Until one day, Joy stood up to answer her telephone, and one of her thigh bones snapped like a twig from under her.

Jack immediately rushed to her side and they were told that it was bone cancer. She did not have much time left. Discussions weren’t necessary. It was a given that Joy and her son would come to live in the house Jack shared with his brother so that Jack could make sure that she would receive the care she needed. All at once, he realized that he didn’t want to do this for her in the capacity of a friend, but as a true husband — not one in name only. Because of Joy’s condition, he knew that he could not afford to waste any more time. Though already married, he deemed it necessary to propose to Joy with these words, “Will you marry this foolish, frightened old man, who needs you more than he could bear to say, and loves you even though he hardly knows how?” 

In his public appearances, Jack often shared one of his core beliefs about how God uses suffering to force us to think beyond ourselves and become mature in our faith; after all, “Pain is the megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” He had always been confident that he knew what he was talking about because of the death of his mother when he was a child. Nursing Joy through her illness, though, had led him to see that he had intellectualized that old pain for the most part, and he was not very well equipped for the pain of losing his beloved wife in the present.

Joy’s health seemed to improve and she went into remission. A colleague remarked, “I know how hard you’ve been praying, Jack. And now God is answering your prayer.”

Jack’s response was this: “That’s not why I pray. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.” 

All too soon, Joy’s remission ended and her health deteriorated rapidly. At one point, Jack reached a conclusion that truly touched me: Without exception, every single person in the world would know at some time the excruciating pain of loss. For some it would come from losing a loved one; for others, it would be having nobody to love.   And Jack suspected that far and away the first might be easier to bear. Because, with all the agony that he and Joy were going through, separately and together, in loving her and in knowing that she loved him Jack was happier than he’d ever been in his life. Wasn’t that some absurd divine paradox? Did it mean that God had a sense of humor? 

In the end, the man who used to live in his head lost his wife. He came to understand how it feels to truly grieve. But he did not lose his faith; in fact this experience heightened the need for it. He didn’t become broken in spirit, but came out of all this with a newfound strength of character.

It isn’t important to me how much of this book was based on reality and how much came from the author’s imagination. The fact that it was able to weave together a story about love, faith, suffering and strength of character was enough to affect me irrevocably. Each description of what Jack and Joy experienced rang true; way before I reached the back cover, I already felt that I knew them through and through.

As this year draws to a close, I skim this book’s pages and I am reminded that I should resolve to be bolder in facing life, grasping the possibility of love with both hands and not letting go. Making this the first resolution on my list would be a good way to start another year. Because of the faith that I also profess, I am certain that there isn’t much to fear out there anyway.