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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 Several years before my laundry insight, in Oxford University’s 400-year-old Bodleian Library, I had stumbled on an unpublished, unidentified partial book manuscript by author C. S. Lewis.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. As I more systematically studied Lewis, I became aware of his frequent references to language, meaning, 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 find such occasional comments as: “Why is he making his hobby about C. S. Lewis into a communication class?” Or “Not really 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.

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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 said about communication.

Lewis was a quintessential educator who would want his lessons about communication to endure. On describing the role of a good teacher, Lewis wrote, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”²³ This book is written to irrigate your understanding of communication. By better understanding Lewis’s principles of communication, each of us can learn strategies to enhance our own ability to write, speak, and relate to others so that we, too, can become master communicators.

Steven Beebe

San Marcos, Texas

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