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       Introduction

       A Conversation with Douglas Gresham

      All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

      —The Last Battle

      On November 22, 1963, C. S. Lewis began the Great Story, and his fans around the world lost their beloved author. In honor of the 50th anniversary of his passing, you are invited to join in on an exclusive conversation with Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson, who lived with him at his home, The Kilns, from the age of ten.

      Mr. Gresham remembers his stepfather, Jack, telling stories about how as boys, he and his brother, Warnie, crossed the Irish Sea from Belfast on a steamer to get to boarding school in England. Though Warnie suffered terrible seasickness, Jack delighted in the voyages and would dash about the ship with great enthusiasm. He loved the sights, sounds, smells, and liveliness of the sea, which he vividly depicted in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Mr. Gresham also recalls Jack’s famous friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien (Tollers, to Jack), a bond that grew from shared values in literature and ultimately encouraged the men to write The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, respectively, works now included in the canon of classic literature. Mr. Gresham continues to see the legacy of Narnia carried on worldwide and more intimately within his own family—his tenth grand-child is called Caspian, a name that, to him, stands for something far-off and adventurous, a touch magical and wondrous.

      On this momentous occasion, Mr. Gresham graciously shares these and other personal memories of growing up with the author of Narnia while he was still writing the series, and pays tribute to the lasting impression C. S. Lewis made on generations of readers.

      1. You told us that C. S. Lewis always said that if a book was worth reading when you are five, it should be equally worth reading when you are fifty, or any age at all. How do you think people react to The Chronicles of Narnia as children, and how is that different when reading the books as adults?

       Children have the ability to more easily project themselves into the fantasy, and unless they savour and practice this skill, it tends to fade as life and the world get in the way. Grown-up people who do not have this skill must relearn it to become a part of Narnia in the way that children do. Also, young children have often not yet been indoctrinated regarding what is real and what is not and what can happen and what is impossible; thus they can accept fantasy far more readily than adults can instead of somehow validating it by calling it “news” or “reality.” Children have a far better and undimmed sense of truth than adults.

      2. Why did your stepfather set out to write a children’s book? Did he talk about the process and if it was different from writing an adult book?

       I think it all goes back to a conversation, or series of conversations, between my stepfather and Tolkien, and possibly others as well. They seem to have talked about the children’s literature of the late 1940s and early 1950s with dismay, finding nothing СКАЧАТЬ