Lenten Lands (Paperback)

Gresham was eight years old when his mother divorced her first husband in America and took him and his brother to live in England. Mrs. Joy Gresham was an intellectual and a writer, and had begun a friendship with C. S. Lewis. The friendship gradually deepened, and in time Joy and "Jack" Lewis were married. Their home was the picturesque cottage called "The Kilns" in Oxford, which was also occupied by Lewis' brother, Warnie.

Gresham's mother suffered for years with cancer and died when Douglas was fifteen. Lewis was completely devastated by her death, and died three years later, following a lengthy illness. Warnie Lewis died, an alcoholic, ten years later. By this time, Gresham was happily married, had four children, and was a farmer in Australia.

The problem I have with this book is that Douglas Gresham is certainly not famous enough in his own right to warrant writing an autobiography. He came to love C. S. Lewis in the ten years he knew him, but spent the entire time away at various boarding schools, only going home on summer vacations. This explains why his descriptions of life with Lewis are told in vague, general terms; he never spent enough time with him to know him well. We learn nothing of the famous man at all. Indeed, the thing that is described best and in the most detail, is Lewis' home, the Kilns. It is described as an exquisitely beautiful fairyland with a lake and woods, made for a little boy's adventures. He writes of the numbing sadness he felt at the deaths of his mother, Jack, and Warnie; however, he was not there when any of them died and, and has only hazy memories of those events. The biggest mystery about this book is that he only mentions the existence of his brother a handful of times. He never says what the relationship between his brother, mother, and Jack was, how the deaths affected his brother, how he did at school, or what he did afterward. (The only answer I can come up with is that the brother must have asked to be left out of the book, as he was from the movie "Shadowlands.")

The subtitle of this book is "My childhood with Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis," and yet he talks very little about them. The subject of the book is clearly Douglas Gresham, who had a very ordinary childhood. The review on the book cover says it is the "story of one of the most tender love stories of the mid-century," and yet Gresham gives no specific events or examples of this love. He talks about them in the most superficial terms, for, in fact, he was a little boy and he wasn't around them much.

The book should have ended with Jack's death, for surely Gresham is only known because of his association with Lewis. Those fans of C. S. Lewis hoping to gain insight into the man will be disappointed. The book is about Gresham's childhood, which was mostly spent apart from Lewis and, unfortunately, did not merit an autobiography.