ARTICLES

Doug Gresham - Beyond Narnia
by CA Staff for Christian Activities
3/28/2006

Nashville, TN - Doug Gresham, stepson of C.S. Lewis, talks about his involvement with the C.S Lewis: Beyond Narnia DVD that releases today

Did Lewis speak much about his works at home, particularly Narnia?

Doug Gresham: Yes and no is the best answer to that because we talked about Narnia quite often, but always as though it was a real place. And when I came back from it I might be asked slightly humorously if I had seen any fawns or what were the activities. We didn’t go into deep meaningful discussions about Narnia. It was as though we accepted the place as real and just around the corner all the time and we might stumble into it at any moment. It was almost a family game in a way.

Some say that Lewis was not as deliberate in using Christian themes in his books as some believers would like to believe. How did he feel about using seemingly Christian symbolism throughout the Chronicles?

Doug Gresham:I think that Jack was well aware of the fact that his own rich Christian faith infused everything that he wrote. Also I’m quite convinced that after he wrote some of the Narnian chronicles he saw far more of his own Christian faith in there than he had anticipated in the first place. But I don’t think he ever sat down with the intention of writing a Christian book, or writing some kind of instructional book. Later on, he realized that’s probably what he had done, but I don’t think he started out to do that. You’ve got to remember that the Narnian chronicles, and particularly “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” are infused with the great mythologies of man. From ancient Greece, Rome, the Norse mythology, Hindu mythology and so forth it’s all in there, and of course the true myth, the story of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is also in there as well. But you’ve got to remember that Jack loved mythology, and in fact, his own journey to Christ came via mythology. So I guess it’s to be expected that it would all turn up in his enjoyable writing of the Narnian chronicles. I think probably people want him to have sat down and thought out how can I evangelize children and write the book and so on. I don’t think it happened like that at all.

What would you most like people to know about C.S. Lewis, the man, as opposed to C.S. Lewis, the author?

Doug Gresham: I think the best answer to that is I’d like them to read my book on the subject and form their own opinions, but Jack’s life is available by the way. But I think one of the things that’s most important to remember about Jack and people don’t remember was his joyfulness, his great sense of humor, his warmth and compassion and his personality. All of the biographies (except for mine) about him miss out on all of these kind of things because you’ve got to remember that the people who wrote these biographies never met the man, and they’re guessing wildly from a 21st century cultural mores standpoint what he was like and so forth and they usually get it quite wrong. Jack was a man who was enormously aware of his own sinfulness but equally aware of his salvation from it, and that allowed him to live a life of Christian joy. That never comes across in the books about him and the movies and so forth. He was a great, fun man to be with. You couldn’t be with Jack for very long before roaring with laughter.

Did Lewis have a favorite pastime or hobby, other than writing?

Doug Gresham: Yes, Jack loved to go for long, long walks. I suppose American people would call them hikes or hiking. But for him though it was simply just walks across the country. He would walk 20 miles in a day quite happily sometimes. He would cover the hills and dales of Wales for example and long walking tours with friends he would take and sometimes alone and sometimes with Warnie and enjoy that enormously.

What did your mom and Lewis like to do as a couple?

Doug Gresham: My mother and Jack liked to do lots of different things as a couple. They liked to explore, they’d get a hired car with a driver and they’d take off into the country side, and go to places that they enjoyed. But at home most of the time they would sit together and read poetry together, they would read good prose to each other, they would play Scrabble. But of course Scrabble was a bit exceptional for them because they had their own rules. They would take one Scrabble board and the letter tiles from two sets of Scrabble, and then they would play Scrabble allowing all known languages with a fictional or factual. So you could put down the word Nasgoul for example and get triple word score or whatever on it, you’re doing alright. At the same time you could use a word from Ming Chinese if you could prove that it existed you could get away with it. Of course once in a while of them would try to con the other and there would be a challenge and some adjudicator would be called in once in a while they asked me and I always told them to ask Warnie because I haven’t got a clue of course. And Warnie I think on one occasion if I remember rightly it was some disputed word that nobody could prove existed and Warnie was fairly convinced I think that Jack was trying it on, and he penalized Jack so many points for trying a word that he couldn’t prove existed and he penalized my mother for crowing over the decision or something like that. Then watching them play Scrabble was a treat in itself, they would fill the entire board with letter tiles.

You've recently published a new book called Jack's Life. Tell us about it.

Doug Gresham: Well Jack’s life is my kind of reaction to all of the biographies that have been written about Jack. It’s simply a simple telling of Jack’s life story, in my introduction to it, it makes it quite plain. It’s not supposed to be a scholarly work, or an analytical or critical work. I don’t go into what he thought or why he thought it and why he wrote what he wrote and how he wrote it and so forth. I’m not interested in that because all of the other biographies try that and mostly get it wrong anyway. One of the problems we’ve got with most of the biographies written about Jack is that most of the people who wrote them have two big disadvantages. The first is that they never met the man and never knew him. The second is, and it’s almost more of a disadvantage; that they are locked into all the cultural mores and thinking of the 20th and 21st centuries and cannot escape it…cannot escape back into the thinking of the 19th century in which Jack himself was trained and…. I was trained by Jack and Warnie. They can’t understand how Jack would have thought because they simply are locked into this 20th and 21st century thinking. So those huge disadvantages work against the people who try to write biographies of Jack. On the other hand, I simply sat down to write his life story because I haven’t encountered a biography of Jack which I enjoyed reading, as a book. I mean, for information certainly George Sayer is probably the best. But simply to read it as a book it’s not very enjoyable. So I thought, well…for younger people particularly I’d like to write a book of Jack’s life story the way it happened, which people could actually have fun reading and extraordinarily enough, the people who seem to enjoy this book the most and have given me the highest praise on it have always been academic English faculty people, which is kind of interesting because they say it’s very well-written and all that sort of thing which I wasn’t really trying to achieve. I was trying to write something that people from the age of five to one hundred and five would enjoy reading, and would come away from with a sense of Jack as a man, as a real living, breathing human being. I hope I’ve achieved it.

Will this book provide any new or unusual insights into the life of C.S Lewis previously not known by the public?

Doug Gresham: Well I think certainly it would provide some insights into the life of C.S. Lewis. Certainly it will provide insight as to who he was as a person, as I say this is something that’s often neglected. It will provide, I hope, some insights into his thought processes and the sort of man he was. The fact that he was so committed to all of those 19th century values such as duty, honor, courtesy, honesty, personal responsibility, personal commitment, chivalry and so forth that we threw away in the 20th century. The fact that he found those things not only to be important but to be vital to the survival of human beings as a society. Those sort of things I think will open people’s eyes a bit about C.S. Lewis. There is a lot more in there about his experiences in the First World War he never told anyone except me and he only told them to me because I was in a stage of teenage years when I was beginning to think that war was a glorious business and I ought to get involved in it. Jack and Warnie very quickly disabused me of those kinds of thoughts. But there are quite a few things that I think you’ll find out in “Jack’s Life” that you wouldn’t be able to get from any other book. Because nobody else knew the man, there’s nobody left alive who knew Jack as I did. I’m the last of the dinosaurs, perhaps the Tyrannosaurus Rex of my era.

I'm sure most interview requests like this one focus around the life of Lewis or his writings. Tell us a little about Douglas Gresham, and the things you're particularly interested in accomplishing or committed to that have been shaped by your childhood experiences.

Doug Gresham: Well I think everything I’ve ever done and everything I do has been shaped by my childhood experiences. I think that’s probably true of every human being. But what I’m most committed to of course is Jesus Christ and working to his service and I think that should be the primary focus of anyone, for any Christian who has committed their lives to Christ as all Christians should. But secondarily to that I think that one of the things the Lord has moved me into of late as you may have noticed is making movies, and one of my great ambitions, probably an ambition that will last the rest of my life is to make all of the Narnia chronicles into fine films. If I get the opportunity to do that first I’ll have to live a good many years and second we’ll have to make successful movies out of several of the Narnia chronicles to get each one to lead on to the next one. We’ve tried the first one and it has met with some success as I’m sure you’ve noticed. So I’m hoping that we will get the chance to make most of if not all the Narnia chronicles before I shuffle off this mortal coil and go to meet my maker. But there are lots of other things I’m committed to, I’m committed to my family. I have five children and nine grandchildren for example, who are all desperately important to me and I love them more than anyone in the world except perhaps my wife, and there are other people and things to which I am committed. But really basically what it comes back to I guess is discerning the will of God in my life and then doing it, being available, being obedient. I guess that’s what I’m mostly committed to these days.

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