Review: Jack’s Life, The Life Story of C. S. Lewis

reviewed by   T. C. Pinckney                                                                                                                  Vol. XIX, No. 1, January 2007

One might expect a biography of C. S. Lewis to have a literary and spiritual focus, and most, perhaps all, biographies about him do so. He was, after all, one of the striking writers and Christians of the twentieth century. But Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ stepson, takes a different approach: personal, familial.

This small book (167 pages), in Gresham’s words, “is my attempt to tell the story of his life, the way it was and the way it happened.”

Gresham succeeds admirably in bringing the reader into the daily life and trials “Jack”, as Lewis preferred to be called, experienced. One reads of Jack’s mother’s death when he was not yet ten, of his grieving father, who then sent Jack and his older brother, Warnie, to a private school in England. Bad enough after such a loss to be separated from family, but the shock was compounded because the “headmaster was an insane sadist whose chief delight seemed to be flogging the boys for little or no reason.” Indeed, later this gentleman was “certified insane and committed to an asylum.”

You read of Jack’s service in France in World War I where he was badly wounded, his pledge with a good Army friend that, if either were killed, the survivor would care for the lost one’s family, and Jack’s decades-long fulfilment of that promise ... and of how very trying it was.

The key event in Jack’s life, as for any Christian, was his coming to faith in Jesus. Here is one of the few cases where the book omits an important fact: when did Jack come to this wonderful decision? Gresham describes a slow process (“as the next months and years passed”) that began in 1929 and provides an interesting account of a motorcycle sidecar ride during which Jack came to his belief in Jesus as the Son of God. But he doesn’t tell when, not even the year.

Gradually Jack became a more prolific and better known and beloved author. Yet he never found a soul-mate with whom to share his faith, his intellect, and his heart. Never, that is, until he met and over several years came to know Joy Davidman. They were not married until March 1957 when Jack was 59 years old. Joy died of cancer in July 1960. Jack developed heart trouble and a kidney infection and died in November 1963.

You really should read this remarkably close and touching account of one the great Christian authors and true gentlemen of the twentieth century.

[Douglas Gresham, Jack’s Life, The Life Story of C. S. Lewis (Broadman & Holman, Nashville) 167 pp. Available from Overstock.com for $12.37 or buy.com for $12.37 both including shipping and handling.]