much information to justify teaching a communication class focused on Lewis.” And even “Beebe is just using his interest in Oxford as an excuse to teach a course about Lewis.” Well, it was true that I had a passionate interest in the City of Oxford and Oxford University. And it was also true that I found C. S. Lewis intriguing—not just because of what he wrote, but because his own life story captivated me. Yet I also firmly believed that Lewis had something to say about human communication.
←xix | xx→
Despite the collegial criticism, I forged ahead and continued to teach the Honors class about Lewis. Although I still did not comprehend what that manuscript was, its content formed a key part of the information I shared with my students about Lewis and communication. In the manuscript fragment, Lewis develops an interesting definition of language, a definition I have not seen in any of his other published works. He further presents a thoughtful discussion of the nature of meaning, including how we derive meaning from language. (These ideas will be discussed in Chapter 5.) What is most interesting to me, as a professor of communication, is Lewis’s focus on the oral nature of language. Each of his examples and illustrations are about spoken rather than written language—unusual since he specialized in sixteenth century English literature and spent so much of his time writing.
Earlier on the morning of my laundromat epiphany, as my wife Sue and I left our house because our home washing machine had broken, I had randomly grabbed a book from my bookshelf—The Company They Keep, by Diana Pavlac Glyer—to help pass the time. It is a well-researched and masterfully written book that I had read a couple of years prior, but I thought I would re-read it.11 Glyer’s book chronicles the relationships among the Inklings, a group of Christian writers who met together weekly in Oxford, England, beginning in the 1930s and continuing for several decades. Glyer was so thorough that she read all 365 books written by Inklings authors, in order to better understand their collaborative alchemy. The two lead Inklings were C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. As Glyer has documented, the Inklings served as resonators, collaborators, opponents, and editors for one another’s writing.12 Tolkien read part of The Hobbit to the group, as well as chapter installments of The Lord of the Rings. Lewis read serialized portions of his first science fiction book, Out of the Silent Planet,13 along with many other now-classic works.
My wife Sue and I were both reading silently as our clothes tumbled in the laundromat dryer on that bleak March Saturday afternoon. It was only when I came to page 146 of Glyer’s summary of Lewis and Tolkien’s planned collaboration about a book called Language and Human Nature that it hit me.14 Like rusty tumblers of a combination lock clicking into place, I suddenly recognized what I had meticulously transcribed those past seven years: Lewis’s opening chapter of Language and Human Nature! I paused. I set the book down. I looked up. My eyes widened. I smiled broadly and much too loudly blurted, “I KNOW WHAT IT IS!” My wife, used to my non-sequiturs, and looking only slightly embarrassed, coolly deadpanned, “What what is?” To the bewilderment of fellow laundry patrons mindlessly folding their clothes, I ear-splittingly burbled, “I KNOW ←xx | xxi→WHAT THE LEWIS MANSUCRIPT IS! IT’S THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK LEWIS WAS PLANNING TO WRITE WITH J. R. R. TOLKIEN!”
All the scholars who were aware of the planned Lewis-Tolkien collaboration had concluded that the book was likely never started and certainly never completed. Although the publisher announced the Lewis-Tolkien book as forthcoming in 1949, Tolkien seems never to have started work on the project. According to a November 29, 1944, letter J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher, Tolkien and Lewis were “to begin to consider writing a book in collaboration on ‘Language’ (Nature, Origins, Functions).”15 Perhaps Tolkien would like to have written the book but simply was too busy or distracted working on The Lord of the Rings and a myriad of other projects. At any rate, Tolkien seemed to recognize that he had more ideas than time; after telling Christopher about the planned book about language with Lewis, he wrote, “Would [that] there were time for all these projects!”16 In conversations I have had with J. R. R. Tolkien’s daughter, Priscilla, she does not recall seeing her father work on the planned Lewis and Tolkien book.
In a 1950 letter to a friend, Lewis confided his own doubts that the book with Tolkien would ever be written. He added a few unflattering remarks about Tolkien’s procrastinating writing habits and then added in exasperation, “My book with Professor Tolkien—any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man—is dated, I fear to appear on the Greek Kalends!”17 Walter Hooper, who expertly edited the Lewis letters for publication, provides a footnote to explain that “Augustus [and apparently Lewis] used ‘on the Greek Kalends’ for ‘Never.’ ”18
So why did this manuscript fragment survive, while drafts of other manuscripts, including manuscripts of The Chronicles of Narnia, did not? Lewis himself wondered, “Is there a discovered law by which important manuscripts survive and unimportant perish? Do you ever turn out an old drawer (say, at the breakup of your father’s house) without wondering at the survival of trivial documents and the disappearance of those which everyone would have thought worth preservation?”19 Hooper speculates, “This one survived because the notebook in which it was written contains notes on English literature that Lewis made a point of preserving.”20
After experiencing my laundry eureka moment, and having other Lewis scholars confirm my conclusion, I sent a manuscript detailing my claim that this was the collaborative Lewis-Tolkien book to SEVEN, the premier journal of C. S. Lewis studies published by the Marion E. Wade Center. I received a polite response from the editor indicating that there was a publishing backlog; it could be up to nine months before I would hear back from them. So I waited. But not for ←xxi | xxii→long. I received an email the next week confirming that my find was important and informing me that my manuscript was accepted.21 I have had many publication acceptance letters, but this notice was the most thrilling of my career! Once I had strong corroboration that the manuscript fragment was indeed Language and Human Nature, my university disseminated a news release about the discovery, and newspapers and blogs around the world picked up the story. When I was in Oxford later in the summer, I was invited to participate in a couple of BBC radio interviews describing my discovery. The interview with BBC Ireland seemed especially apropos, given that Lewis was born in Belfast.
Although Lewis once described himself in a letter to his father as “a born rhetorician … I love to ‘ride like a cork on the ocean of eloquence,’ ”22 there is no evidence that he ever explicitly referred to his professional expertise as including “communication,” “speech,” or “rhetoric.” This book, however, suggests that C. S. Lewis should be considered for his knowledge, insight, and expertise as a communication scholar. His life’s work, what he wrote about, as well as his application of communication principles, provides evidence of his communication expertise.
C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication is not only about C. S. Lewis and his communication principles and practices. It is also about you. My hope is that this book will facilitate your learning lessons from Lewis about how you can enhance your skill as a communicator. Chapter 9, “How to Communicate Like C. S. Lewis,” offers several specific applications about communication competencies inspired by what Lewis
