in the entire volume—just the arguments of two men who knew how to communicate effectively. He could preach too. I knew a woman who was present at St. Mary’s, the University Church at Oxford when Lewis delivered his sermon, “The Weight of Glory.” She said the pews were crammed full and the students filled all the floor space as well. Furthermore, his skill as a communicator was not reserved for public or formal occasions. I once received a letter from Lewis’s fellow Inkling, the Chaucer scholar Nevill Coghill, in which he said that as a conversationalist, Lewis was “a splendid talker, a lot like Dr. Johnson in bulk as well as in wit and learning.” It does not stop there; Lewis was also a disciplined letter writer. He said he answered all of his mail. And the letters were full of wisdom and insight. Consequently, those who received letters from him saved them. As a result, there are eight volumes of collected correspondence. He wrote to fellow academics, he wrote to friends, he wrote to readers of his books, he wrote thoughtful letters to children, with no sign of condescension. His letters are pithy and thought provoking; some are clearly pastoral and full of spiritual direction. It is not merely that he wrote letters, but that the range of topics he discusses is encyclopedic.
Lewis was a master communicator on every imaginable level. Was it simply because he was Irish? I doubt it. He certainly was gifted, and honed his gifts to a well-practiced skill. We may never be the communicator Lewis was; even so, there is much one can learn from him if attentive to his craft, and willing to cultivate the discipline to develop the skill. If this is the reader’s interest, then a guide would ←xii | xiii→be helpful. And I can think of no greater guide to define and clarify those elements that made Lewis a master communicator than Professor Steve Beebe. Dr. Beebe was the chairperson of one of the nation’s largest communication departments at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas. Arguably, he has authored as many college and university textbooks on communication as anybody. Furthermore, he was president of the National Communication Association, the largest academic association for communicators in the world. Their annual meetings each year are where the experts in communication go to learn from one another. If you are going to learn about government you would like to have Abraham Lincoln at your elbow. If you want to learn about leadership, who would not love to tag along with Sir Winston Churchill? If you want to learn about American football, John Madden is the man to guide you. If you want to learn about art, Makoto Fujimura would be a great guide. For acting, Kenneth Branagh or Mark Rylands are the ones to seek out. When it comes to communication, Steve Beebe is the one to facilitate the process of learning. Furthermore, when Beebe turns his attention to C. S. Lewis, the combination is unbeatable: Lewis the master communicator, and Beebe the master teacher.
Not all of us will become communicators like Lewis; not all of us can teach like Beebe; but all of us can grow in skill. As Beebe reminds us, communication is audience centered. A good communicator speaking truth always gives hope to his or her audience. Professor Beebe gives double the hope. First, he points us to Lewis, whose written and oral communication is flush with hope. Furthermore, I know firsthand that Dr. Beebe is also a man whose insights and instruction breathe hope. When I sat for my doctoral defense at the Oxford Center for Mission Studies in Oxford, England, Steve Beebe was by my side. He was one of two supervisors who walked me through the seventh draft and the eight revision of my dissertation. I was nervous. He was confident. He knew his stuff and knew he had instructed me well. The topic was Lewis. He was my guide. I passed. It was a thrill. May you sense something of that thrill with Beebe at your elbow, guiding you through the corpus of Lewis as he teaches you about Lewis the master communicator.
Jerry Root, Ph.D.
Professor, Wheaton College
Note
1. C. S. Lewis, Letter to Eliza Marian Butler, September 25, 1940. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Volume II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949. ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2004), 444.
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I had my “Indiana Jones” moment of discovery while watching my clothes tumble in a laundromat dryer in San Marcos, Texas. Several years before my laundry insight, in Oxford University’s 400-year-old Bodleian Library, I had stumbled on an unpublished, unidentified partial book manuscript by author C. S. Lewis. But at the time I first read it, I didn’t know its significance. Seven years later, in a single “Eureka!” laundromat moment, I realized what I had discovered. I had found a manuscript whose existence was doubted by most Lewis scholars: the opening pages of a planned collaboration between Lewis and The Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien. Who would have thought that a laundry epiphany would solve a decades-old literary mystery involving two of the twentieth century’s most famous authors? The contents of that manuscript provided just the evidence I needed that C. S. Lewis was, among his many talents, also a communication professor. Discovering that manuscript provided the principal impetus for this book.
Communication is my life. I have spent more than forty years as a communication professor and author and co-author of several widely-used communication college textbooks.2 I have also had the privilege of serving as president of the National Communication Association, the largest academic professional association of communication educators and scholars in the world. Yet discovering Lewis and ←xv | xvi→Tolkien’s ideas about language and human nature was like finding the wardrobe door into some of the most important lessons I have ever learned about communication. This book includes those lessons.
At the time I found the manuscript I was relatively new to C. S. Lewis studies. I had not read The Chronicles of Narnia until I was in my 40s. In fact, I had not read a single word of Lewis until I spent Trinity Term 1993 in Oxford as a visiting scholar, attached to Wolfson College and the Department of Experimental Psychology.
While I was in Oxford, given that the city is where Lewis lived, studied and taught, I thought it would be a good place to learn about him. I picked up a biography of Lewis by A. N. Wilson, straightforwardly titled, C. S. Lewis: A Biography. I later learned that Wilson’s biography, although engagingly written, was controversial among Lewis scholars for including several errors, over-speculating about Lewis’s personal life, and being too “Freudian” in its analysis of Lewis’s relationships.3 Unaware at the time that the biography had been criticized by many Lewis scholars for inaccuracies, I nonetheless found Lewis’s life fascinating. The basic information in the book is true. I learned that Lewis was raised a Christian, then became an atheist, and then, in his late 20s and early 30s, slowly converted to Christianity, seeing it as the best way to make sense out of life. I also learned about Lewis’s marriage (twice) to Jewish and former communist and atheist Joy Davidman.4
After reading about Lewis and then returning home to Texas to see the movie Shadowlands, a film about the romance between Lewis and Davidman, which had been filmed during the time we were in Oxford (my wife, two sons, and I are in one of the crowd scenes), I was motivated to learn more about Lewis. I began reading his work more systematically, attending weekend seminars in nearby Austin and San Antonio, and eventually joining a Lewis discussion group in Austin. Those monthly meetings were like taking a five-year graduate seminar in C. S. Lewis. There I met and learned from distinguished Lewis scholars such as Dr. Joel Heck, who wrote the well-received Irrigating Deserts: C. S. Lewis on Education, and Dr. George Musacchio, author of C. S. Lewis, Man & Writer. These individuals were generous in sharing their insights about Lewis, as well as patient with me and others who did not have their depth of understanding.
