An Interview with Douglas Gresham

For many Christians, particularly evangelicals, C. S. Lewis has achieved a sort of mythic status. In a way, he’s been a mentor and spiritual father figure to several generations of thoughtful Christians. But even many of the most ardent Lewis fans were not introduced to Lewis-as-actual-father until the release of Richard Attenborough’s 1993 adaptation of the William Nicholson play Shadowlands, a love story based on the courtship and marriage of Lewis and Joy Davidman, an American divorcee. Writer Anne Morse and RQ’s editors asked Douglas Gresham, Joy Davidman Lewis’s elder son, to tell us more about his mother and stepfather (here referred to by his nickname, Jack), and how they parented him.

RQ: What do you think of C. S. Lewis’s legacy and of the particular evangelical attachment to him?

DG: I find it perfectly logical. I am not sure if I see it as a parental role, more that of teacher and student. When one is athirst for knowledge and for the wisdom that only the Holy Spirit can provide, and one finds a writer who has such a gift for acting as a conduit for that knowledge and wisdom, it is natural to adopt him as a tutor.

RQ: As you observed it, how did Jack approach his role as a parent?

DG: The first thing Jack did was to properly identify the role the Lord had cast him in. He never tried to be a father to me, but tried to be the very best stepfather that he could be. It is here that so many people make a very bad mistake. You cannot become, and should not try to become, a father to a child whose real biological father is someone else, for to do so flies in the face of the scriptural instructions to honor your father and mother.

Instead, Jack became an excellent stepfather. It was easy for me to want to regard him as my father, and indeed emotionally, I did come to do so, but he was always careful to make sure that I payed honor to my genetic father. Jack provided me with all that he could in the way of instruction, example, and material help, and that was exactly as it should have been. In addition there was a great deal of affection and mutual respect between us, but that was something that had to be (and was) earned.

RQ: In what ways is the C. S. Lewis that so many Christians hold in such esteem different from, or similar to, the Jack that you knew?

DG: I think the only thing that seems to be easily lost is the immense humor and joy of his personality. His charity and wisdom are evident in his writings, but his huge sense of fun and personal forgiveness do not always shine through. It was impossible to be with Jack in any setting for more than five or ten minutes without roaring with laughter. Of course I am in a uniquely advantageous position because my personal experience of him allows me to hear his humour and vivacity pervading all that he wrote.

RQ: What aspects of Joy’s life and personality tend to get overlooked by biographers?

DG: I think what does get missed is how she coped with pain, and I think that’s something one should look at rather carefully. She was someone who, while in indescribable agony from metastasized cancer raging through her body, could make jokes about it. She was enormously courageous. A good friend of my mother’s-who had known many heroes of the Second World War-still tells me that my mother was the bravest person she ever met. This woman was enormously courageous, and it was her strength, in fact, that kept the family going.

RQ: It’s ironic that a brilliant poet and novelist is remembered primarily as someone’s wife.

DG: I don’t think she would mind being remembered as Jack’s wife in the slightest. I don’t think she would particularly want to be remembered as anything other than the servant of Jesus Christ and C. S Lewis’s wife. She’d be very happy with that.

RQ: Joy writes that she was a “well-brought up, right-thinking child of materialism.” Given this, do you think it’s unlikely that Joy would have been open to traditional sorts of evangelism?

DG: My mother was one of those personalities who search for truth by nature, and as a young university student, she was always on a search for truth, and she was still searching for truth when a friend of hers by the name of Chad Walsh recommended that she read the works of this English writer, C. S. Lewis. The book he recommended was Mere Christianity, which was instrumental in bringing her to Christ.

My mother was by nature someone with open mind anyway. She would have tried almost anything. One of her problems, though, was her enormous intellectual ability, her intelligence and her intellect, because she would very swiftly see the holes in something. One of the great difficulties of Christianity is that it has failed human individuals and sinners who promote it. Because we haven’t got anybody else. The more intelligent you are, very often, the harder it is to come to grips with the simplicity of Christianity. And my mother’s huge intelligence made it difficult for her. But when she did find it-and of course, when Jesus Christ came to her in the shape of the Holy Spirit, she just had to immediately submit.

RQ: Do people realize how dearly Joy paid for her commitment to Christ? Her biographer Lyle Dorsett makes it clear her parents considered her mentally disturbed, and she lost her relationship with her brother, with whom she had been close.

DG: She was persecuted, and I don’t think people do realize that-it particularly strained her relationship with her father, but also her communist friends completely disowned her. And she didn’t do herself any favors by writing glaring critiques of American communism, which exposed what sort of absolute nonsense it really was.

RQ: How did she share her faith with you?

DG: She went to church, with Jack or without him, regularly. I knew that she prayed, and when I asked questions, she would answer me. But neither Jack nor my mother ever preached at me. I think they realized that this would be counterproductive with a teenager. It was their example more than anything else that taught me. But in a sense, it was a disadvantage for someone whose nature is conceit, arrogance, and pride to grow up in the household of C. S. Lewis. You think that because of it you know all the answers-how can the village priest teach you anything if you were brought up by C. S. Lewis?

This was a huge stumbling block for me. I believed in Jesus Christ, and I believed in God, and I knew who Jesus was-I’d met him in a churchyard when I was a child-but I did not submit my life to Christ. I didn’t want anyone else to run my life; I thought I’d make a better job of it than anyone else could, and of course I completely destroyed it, or nearly did. And it wasn’t until I realized that I simply wasn’t qualified to run my own life that I committed my life to Christ, and he took over-thank God.

RQ: Did Shadowlands do a good job of portraying your mother’s faith?

DG: It did a very good job of portraying my mother-faith was not worn on her sleeve, so was not necessary to portray it in the movie. You have to remember that Shadowlands was never supposed to be an historical documentary. It was a fictional piece written about real events in the lives of real people, and I feel that Debra Winger’s portrayal of my mother is superb.

RQ: Lyle Dorsett has said that Debra Winger-who had read your mother’s letters and studied her life-was frustrated that the script did not come closer to real life events.

DG: Yes, I can understand that, but one has to must remember that the film was not supposed to be a Christian testimonial; it’s a love story-and it’s a fairly tragic love story, but a very beautiful love story.

I’ve had letters from ardent atheists who say, what a wonderful film, isn’t it a pity that it hits you over the head with all that Christian nonsense. And I get letters from committed evangelical Christians saying, what a great movie, but isn’t it a great shame that they left out all of C. S. Lewis’s and Joy Davidman’s Christianity. People tend to read their own mindset into what they see and hear on the screen.

RQ: Dorsett says that Smoke on the Mountain cast new light on the Ten Commandments. He suggests this was because of Joy’s Jewish heritage.

DG: Because of her understanding, her particularly of Jewish ways of thinking, and her particularly Jewish humor, she could see a lot more in that part of the Bible than one might expect. One of the things most evangelical Christians miss altogether is the enormous wealth of Jewish humor that runs through the Bible. People tend to overlook that.

RQ: Throughout her adult life, your mother made many costly choices, choices which had serious, often destabilizing implications for you and your brother. These days, parents are often very committed to ensuring that their children enjoy a stable, well-managed and “safe” childhood. What do you think of your mother’s choices and the values that drove them?

DG: I have to take issue with your premise here. I simply do not believe that these days, parents are very committed to ensuring that their children enjoy a “safe” childhood. If parents to be were committed to their children, they would be far more careful about who they married in the first place. As a psychotherapist working with the Institute of Pregnancy Loss and Child Abuse Research and Recovery, I come into contact all the time with the results of modern parents’ commitments, and they are certainly not first and foremost to their children’s wellbeing. Parents (sadly even “Christian” ones), are committed first to themselves. That said, I think that Mother actually did make choices that were aimed at the very best she could do for her children while at the same time also followed her own desires. The failure of her marriage to Dad was more his doing than hers, and her choice to go to England made very good sense for my brother and me as well as for her.

RQ: There’s a lot of talk these days about family values, which often focuses primarily on the traditional, nuclear family. In many ways your own family history doesn’t fit this model, partly due to circumstance, and partly because of specific choices that Jack and your mother made. What, for Jack and for your mother, comprised “family values”-the principles that they would have seen as crucial and worth defending against negative influences in the larger culture?

DG: The term “family values” is in itself flawed, for there are good family values and bad family values. Jack and Mother saw the structure of the family as being prescribed by the recipes for it in the Bible. The nuclear family is not what the Bible recommends, and the mistaken interpretation of Genesis 2:24, Matt 19:5, Mark 10:7 and Ephesians 5:31 has led to the isolation of nuclear family units. This is a great shame, for it leads to a steady corrosion of what a family should be. The infiltration of Satan’s favourite corrosives, secrets and lies, is far less effective in extended family situations, and both Jack and Mother had seen this in their own families of origin. Had they had the opportunity, I believe they would have loved to have had extended family around them and us, as the Bible implicitly recommends.

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