Book Review
by Anne Powell
Jack's Life
By Douglas Gresham
Broadman & Holman, 2005
There is a distance between biographer and subject that teases readers with research, with cataloged places and events but fails to conjure understanding. Douglas Gresham's tale of Jack's Life is different.
Gresham chronicles his famous stepfather, C.S. Lewis's life not in ordinary biographical style but simply and lovingly. If you have read another biography of Lewis, this will contribute nothing to the accumulation of trivia. Gresham ignores biographical data that he acknowledges has been more extensively and appropriately covered by others. Instead, he writes authoritatively about his stepfather's character and deals with Lewis's life, works and actions with transparent admiration. Gresham does not obscure the story with an exhaustive or scholarly look into his life but breathes life into legend with a conversational prose reminiscent of Lewis's much-loved children's series The Chronicles of Narnia.
Jack's Life is not so much a biography as a portrait and an impressionistic one. Gresham's perspective, though honest, is second-hand and often heavy-handed. He doesn't qualify his unflattering and sometimes one-sided portraits of friends and relatives who frustrated Gresham more on his stepfather's behalf than they seemed to have frustrated his stepfather.
In Gresham's hands, Lewis takes on saint-like qualities that seem impossible but echo the hard-line philosophies and tender conflicts we encounter in his work.
Gresham's crime is that he is imprecise and vague. His own understanding of the "true" Lewis is tied to his personal experience with his stepfather but he leaves out his own part in Lewis's story. While Gresham invites us to see what he saw, he never quite tells us what that is.
Gresham does however introduce us to Jack, the estranged son, the tortured veteran, the duty-driven and worried family man, the witty, jovial friend and the joyful and sorrowing husband. Unlike others, he makes us personally acquainted with an imposing scholar and brilliant writer we have already learned to love.