Book Review: Jack’s Life, a Loving Tribute to C.S. Lewis

Intimate, Personal and Unabashedly Christian

There are also new books about Lewis and his literary creations coming off the press. Jack’s Life is one such book. It is the life story of C.S. Lewis (Jack) as told by Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson through his marriage to Joy Davidman. It is meant to be an intimate and personal account of Lewis’s life by someone who lived under the same roof with him for many years. While most biographies aim at being impartial and objective, Gresham’s narrative is intentionally partial and subjective. For example, when describing Lewis’s influential tutor, W.T. Kirkpatrick, he has no qualms in saying “one thing that was a disadvantage about Kirk was that he was an atheist.” Gresham thus writes the story from an unabashedly Christian viewpoint.

Gresham has a knack for storytelling himself; his narrative is simple, fluid, and occasionally poetic. It incorporates many asides and personal observations, giving his storytelling a personal quality, though at moments he lapses into being preachy or didactic. Especially enjoyable is the recounting of Lewis’s childhood. He discusses what life was like for Jack and his brother Warnie growing up in Ireland; the closeness they shared and the kinds of things they liked to do to pass the time. Gresham uncovers the early seeds of Narnia in Lewis’s love for the animal stories of Beatrix Potter (such as “Squirrel Nutkin”), the Irish folk tales told by his nursemaid Lizzy, and the imaginary world “Boxen” that he and his brother invented and filled with talking animals.

The Domestic Scene

Gresham’s main concentration though, is on portraying the difficult personal circumstances that provided the context of Lewis’s writing career, especially his domestic life after serving in the First World War. Lewis made a promise to a soldier friend that whoever survived would take care of the other’s family. Lewis survived and so took it upon himself to take care for his friend’s mother, Mrs. Moore, and her daughter.

Mrs. Moore apparently made life very difficult for Lewis, especially as she grew older and more irrational, making many petty demands on Lewis’s time and treating him virtually like a servant. Gresham’s story stalls here at the midpoint, with several chapters redundantly overlapping in presenting the same material about Lewis’s domestic problems. The point of Gresham’s concentration on these domestic facts seems to be to show how heroic Lewis’s day-to-day life was.

A Good Family Story

Gresham’s devotion to Lewis leads to some distortion. He seems to have a bone to pick with Lewis’s fellow writer and friend J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien and Lewis drifted apart a bit over the years. Tolkien thought he perceived an anti-Catholic streak in Lewis and was probably dismayed at Lewis’s marriage to a divorced woman — something Lewis kept secret from most of his friends. Gresham reciprocates with some ill-feeling of his own. He emphasizes the fact that Lewis encouraged Tolkien to publish The Lord of the Rings, while Tolkien discouraged Lewis from publishing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. forgetting his own previous observation that honest opinions — even brutal criticism — was a service these literary friends provided each other. Lewis, for his part, thought that Tolkien would embarrass himself by publishing The Lord of the Rings without taking the poetry out of it. This was all a natural part of life among the Inklings, but Gresham seems to take personally anything directed at Lewis. Inexcusably, Gresham even drops Tolkien altogether from the narrative of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, though Lewis himself considered his friend a major influence.

Jack's Life is a pious tribute to a man Gresham is deeply devoted to. This is the book’s strength, because it gives us the insight of someone close to Lewis in a way that his friends were not; but it is also its weakness in that the bias of the author deeply colors the portrait. Still it is a portrait we enjoy. While Gresham’s book does offer an important perspective for scholars of Lewis, Jack's Life works best as a good family story.

© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange

Brian Killian is a freelance writer and a columnist for the Atlantic Catholic. He writes from Nova Scotia and enjoys receiving feedback at noumena1@hotmail.com.

Please don't miss The Chronicles of Narnia Catholic Outreach Site where you can get resources and news on how to use the Narnia movie in your parishes and schools. A definitive Catholic resource A Guide to The Chronicles of Narnia has just been released for individual or bulk purchases.

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Brian Killian is a freelance writer living in Nova Scotia. He is writing about the meaning of sexuality at his website http://nuptialmystery.com

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