communication, and words. As a communication professor, I recognized a number of insightful communication ideas embedded in his works. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could learn more about Lewis’s perspective on communication.
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With my emerging fascination with C. S. Lewis, I returned to Oxford in 2002 on a second sabbatical from Texas State University. I wanted to read original, handwritten C. S. Lewis manuscripts in Oxford University’s centuries-old Bodleian Library. I enjoyed leisurely leafing through manuscript pages that Lewis’s pen had touched. Lewis was ahead of the sustainability curve, as he would re-use paper and often write on the back of old manuscripts. Among my favorite documents are Lewis essays written on the back of student papers that had been corrected in a firm hand by his friend J. R. R. Tolkien.
As a communication professor, I was interested in what Lewis thought about language, meaning, and communication, but also in how he thought about these topics. I wondered if I could glean new insights into what the ancient Roman rhetoricians called invention: how Lewis’s thoughts emerged and took shape. Could looking at his original manuscripts help me better understand him as a thinker, author, and speaker? I hoped so.
Upon returning my first batch of Lewis manuscripts to the library staff, I ordered a notebook described in the Lewis manuscript catalogue as a collection of miscellaneous notes and scraps. If you are granted access to the holdings at the Bodleian Library (requiring that you swear a centuries-old oath that you will not “kindle a fire” in the library), you first complete a form to request a book or manuscript from the archives, and then wait a few hours (or sometimes a day or more) to retrieve what was ordered. Since the Bodleian is a non-lending library, books and manuscripts are under tight security and read in special reading rooms; even the Queen cannot take a book out of the library! (Other monarchs have tried, with no success.) When the manuscript I had requested arrived in the reading room, it was a somewhat worn and slightly frayed, small, orange-covered paper notebook. I smiled when I saw that Lewis had penciled the word “SCRAPS” in capital letters on the outside cover.
The Lewis catalogue had accurately described the little notebook as containing drafts of Lewis’s ideas on a variety of topics. Other researchers had read these scraps before I did—it is quite famous because its pages include one of the only existing fragment drafts for The Chronicles of Narnia held in the Bodleian Library. Early ideas for The Magician’s Nephew can be found beginning on page 9. This early fragment of The Magician’s Nephew is called “The Lefay Manuscript” because of a character named Mrs. Lefay that appears in the story.5
It was on the first page of the notebook—actually the first page when I turned the book upside down and read it back to front—where I read the words, “In a book like this it might be expected that we should begin with the origins of language …”6 I froze. I held my breath. “What’s this?” Having already read the ←xvii | xviii→manuscript of Studies in Words, I knew that it did not start this way. I knew immediately that these words were important. What I did not realize at the time was that they were the beginning of a planned collaborative book with none other than J. R. R. Tolkien. In fact, I was slow to make the connection. Very slow. It took seven years for my laundry room insight to occur. The manuscript I was reading was intended to be a collaboration between Lewis and Tolkien that scholars had assumed was never started.
Because Lewis’s handwriting is sometimes difficult to read (my friend and Lewis scholar Charlie Starr labels Lewis’s handwriting “villainous”),7 I had actually hoped the manuscript was already published. I scoured his published works, searching for it. And given that this was the beginning of a book about language and meaning, a topic right up my alley, I was keenly interested to find out what he had to say on this topic. Because of my impatience, I did not want to spend time trying to decode Lewis’s penmanship; I wanted to get on with reading what he wrote, to learn his communication insights.
No luck in finding the book in print. I was disappointed because that meant I would have to decipher Lewis’s “villainous” handwriting myself.8 But my research did uncover references to the manuscript. It was catalogued by Lewis manuscript curator, Dr. Judith Priestman. Walter Hooper, Lewis’s former secretary, editor, and literary executor, made a brief reference to the little notebook in his book Past Watchful Dragons, describing it as a manuscript about “English literature” and even suggesting that Lewis saved the little notebook of miscellaneous ideas because of the “English literature” essay.9
Because some of the handwriting was challenging to read, three years after first seeing the manuscript, I received special permission from the library (thanks to Walter Hooper, the original depositor of the manuscript) to make a photocopy. Walter and I met in 2002; he invited me to his home for tea, and we have been friends ever since. Being able to take a photocopy of the manuscript back to Texas was a great help in scrutinizing the scribbles I could not quite decipher. With the photocopied manuscript in hand, Hooper, who came to Texas State University to give a lecture five years after I started decoding the manuscript, helped me figure out a few additional illegible words. Another good friend and prominent Lewis scholar, Dr. Michael Ward, who also guest lectured at Texas State (and is the author of the groundbreaking books Planet Narnia and The Narnia Code) kindly helped me decipher a few remaining puzzling words. But even after painstakingly transcribing the manuscript, I still did not realize that it was the beginning of the book he had planned to write with Tolkien. It would take me a couple more years to connect those literary dots.
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When I left Oxford to return to Texas after this second sabbatical, I did not fully understand the significance of what I had found, but I did have a bolstered belief that Lewis was interested in communication. Based on the content of the manuscript, I proposed an honors course at Texas State called “C. S. Lewis: Chronicles of a Master Communicator.” My colleagues in the Honors College liked the idea. The course filled on the first day it was available to students, and more students wanted to enroll; I soon had more than 70 students on a waiting list hoping to take the course. I learned that C. S. Lewis generates interest. In addition to teaching a Lewis course on the Texas State campus, I also started teaching the course during the summer at Oxford University for Texas State students.
When in Oxford, I rarely held class in one of the well-appointed Victorian seminar rooms in St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where we were based. Instead, we used the city of Oxford as our educational canvas. (St. Hilda’s College was the site of a famous debate between C. S. Lewis and philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe held on February 2, 1948).10 We took walking tours of notable Lewis sites, including the numerous pubs he and his fellow Inklings used as locations for their literary conversations. For example, the day we talked about Lewis and interpersonal relationships, we held class in the room in the Eastgate Hotel, where some claim Lewis initially met his wife Joy. We visited his home, “The Kilns,” toured University College, where Lewis was a student (and where President Bill Clinton later studied as a Rhodes scholar), and spent an afternoon at Magdalen College, the Oxford college where Lewis taught from 1925 to 1954. A highlight for many students (and for me) was the Bodleian Library, where they saw original Lewis manuscripts, including his own hand-drawn map of Narnia and, of course, the orange-colored paper notebook labeled “SCRAPS.”
Despite the success of the Honors course, and although I had received encouragement and interest from many people to pursue investigating Lewis from a communication angle, some of my communication faculty colleagues from my home department were at first less impressed. On my annual faculty evaluations, written anonymously, I would
