Douglas Gresham Recalls his Stepfather, C.S. Lewis
10/31/05
The Bluefield Daily Telegraph has a nice little article with some quotes from Douglas Gresham, C.S. Lewis's stepson--it's not an interview, more of an informational overview. Here are some excerpts:
Soon, Lewis began weaving these images into a story that also included a strange dream that he had at age 16. In it, he saw a faun holding an umbrella and some packages, standing in a snowy wood near a lamppost.
"He told people, 'I'd like to make a story out of that image because it has been in my head all of my life,'" said Douglas Gresham, the author's stepson. As Lewis would say, the great lion "Aslan simply leapt into the story and dragged all the rest of the Narnian Chronicles along with him. ... I believe that all of this was a gift from God, of course."
...
"Many people ask, 'Why are they coming back?' The answer is that these books never went away," said Gresham, who has served as co-producer and the spiritual conscience of the movie project.
Like Gresham, Lewis suffered the trauma of losing his mother when he was very young. Gresham notes that, when Lewis' father died years later, Jack and his older brother Warren returned to Belfast to clean out the family home. They put all of their toys and other childhood memorabilia into a trunk and buried it in the garden.
Nevertheless, Gresham stressed that Lewis never "lost the intimate memory" of what it was like to be a child. While the scholar claimed that he was not good with children, his stories, letters and experiences late in life suggest otherwise.
"In my experience, he was excellent with children," said Gresham. "He didn't talk down to us. He may have brought himself down to our level, but he never talked down to us from above. ... Jack was always conscious of the fact that children are people. They may be small and unformed, mentally and emotionally as yet, but they are people with all of the same trials, tribulations, frights and foibles as other people."
Gresham paused, remembering. "In a sense, the child in him lived with him the rest of his life. ... For anyone who is writing for children, that is an important thing."
