by Dr. U » February 6th, 2010, 5:25 pm
Hi! Just a quick question to stourhead's post. If the source of the letter from Lewis to Gresham is in a novel (by Geo Sayers, who I'm not acquainted with), could it be a fictional letter? There's certainly no shortage of novelists both present (e.g. Dan Brown) and past (e.g. Jules Verne or Rider Haggard) who insert real-sounding "quotes" or "newspaper reports" or historical "facts" that are strictly fictional, but serve a purpose to set a tone they desire within a novel. The letter's content sounds somewhat odd for CSL, compared with other information that's available. On the other hand, Doug Gresham's descriptions of his father's behaviors in the early chapters of Lenten Lands suggest some pretty serious problems, and Lewis may have felt responsible to protect his step-sons from returning to those, so it's possible.
Here's all that Doug Gresham seems to say about the visit in Lenten Lands (in the chapter "Carrying On").
My father, Bill Gresham, visited us in 1960 shortly after Mother's death, and I now know that the apparent coolness of my greeting and our subsequent relationship caused him a considerable amount of pain. I regret that; it was not intended. I was an English schoolboy by then, however, so I shook his hand and said "How do you do, sir?". In truth, I confess I felt no emotion for him at all. He was a stranger; we could not bridge the gap of the years of separation. We spent considerable time together and became friends, but really that was all. When he left to go back to America and his new family, I missed him less than I had before he had come
Jack was really the man to whom I looked, in respect and admiration, and, without in the least trying to, he had taken the place in my mind that a father should fill, and it was Jack, who, gently and kindly, told me in September of 1962 that my father had taken his own life. Dad had cancer of the tongue, and had no wish to face, or to face his family with, the prospect of a long, ugly death. My feeling for Jack developed from liking and respect through admiration to, at last, some degree of understanding. It was not until quite recently that I realised that I loved Jack, and very deeply at that.
Somewhere else, but I couldn't find the source at hand, I read either Gresham saying, or a biographer saying, that Lewis was specific that Doug & David Gresham never call him "father" or any similar term, but only "Jack", that he felt they should only call their own father "father", even if CSL were their step-father.