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C. S. Lewis was often introduced at speaking events or described on the dust jackets of his books as “Professor Lewis.” It was only during the last nine years of his life, however, that he officially acquired the title “professor,” a prestigious rank bestowed by British colleges and universities on a select few. When at Magdalen College in Oxford, Lewis lost the election for Professor of Poetry to Cecil Day-Lewis (father of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis) in 1951. But three years later, in recognition of his academic accomplishments, he was appointed Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, a position that also included the coveted title Professor. Lewis was well qualified for his professorial rank. Although he did not hold an earned doctorate, he had received honorary doctorates from several universities.⁵⁸ His triple first honors at Oxford, along with his voluminous output as an author and scholar, and his skill as a tutor and lecturer, had firmly established his academic credentials. C. S. Lewis clearly deserved the title Professor.

But what did he profess? Lewis’s title was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, yet he had eclectic academic interests in a variety of subjects. As noted earlier, his formal education included not only classical Greek and Roman literature, typical curricular components of an Oxford education, but also philosophy and English literature. His lectures at his first teaching position for University College focused on philosophy. His writing reflects his diverse interests and ←10 | 11→broad scope of knowledge, including an interest in words, language, meaning, and philology; this book suggests that in addition to his other diverse academic interests, he was a professor of communication.

To make the case that Lewis should be embraced for his knowledge of human communication, it helpful to know how the communication discipline and Lewis’s interests intersect. The central focus of the communication discipline, according to former National Communication Association president David Zarefsky, is the study of the relationship between messages and people.⁵⁹ Meaning, messages, and the importance of language are also consistent and pervasive themes running throughout Lewis’s professional work. As this book documents, Lewis possessed a sophisticated understanding of the nature of meaning and the centrality of using language to develop human connections.

The communication discipline is interdisciplinary; it embraces several academic traditions, some as ancient as the study of rhetoric, and others more contemporary, including social media and critical cultural theory. Mirroring the multifaceted nature of the communication discipline, Lewis, too, had interdisciplinary interests; his study and writing ventured into literature, literary history, theology, psychology, philosophy and other topics found in both the humanities and social sciences. An essay or lecture about education and Natural Law blossomed into a multi-part lecture series that continues to be required reading in philosophy classes: The Abolition of Man.⁶⁰ Lewis’s writing reflects his own interdisciplinary approach to whatever topic or issue he is exploring. Ideas emanating from philosophy, literature, theology, and literary criticism are sprinkled throughout his writing and speaking.

The National Communication Association, the oldest and largest national professional academic communication association, defines communication as “how people use messages to generate meanings within and across various contexts” and “the discipline that studies all forms, modes, media, and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific, and aesthetic inquiry.”⁶¹ The U.S. Department of Education defines the academic domain of communication as including “instruction in the theory and practice of interpersonal, group, organizational, professional, and intercultural communication; speaking and listening; verbal and nonverbal interaction; rhetorical theory and criticism; performance studies; argumentation and persuasion; technologically mediated communication; popular culture; and various contextual applications.”⁶² C. S. Lewis was not just mildly interested in these topics, he had insightful and detailed observations about the theory and practice of human communication.

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The growth of the contemporary communication discipline parallels C. S. Lewis’s growing interest in language, words, and meaning. The academic discipline of communication studies has most fully developed in the United States in the years since World War II, as evidenced by the plethora of organized departments and schools of communication established in that interim. There were no U.S. departments of “speech” in 1900.⁶³ By 1930 (the same time Lewis was coming into his own as a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford), a survey of selected U. S. institutions found more than 25 U.S. departments that included the word “speech” in their titles.⁶⁴ As Lewis’s career began to soar, a 1948 survey reported 256 U. S. colleges and universities that included the word “speech” in a department title; 51 were titled “speech and drama,” 18, “public speaking,” 48, “English and speech,” and 5, “communication.”⁶⁵ Today there are approximately 2,000 U.S. colleges, universities and community colleges that include a study of what used to be encompassed by the word “speech” or “public speaking” and what today is more often labeled “communication” or “communication studies.”⁶⁶

There are several reasons to consider C.S. Lewis a communication educator and scholar—a Professor of Communication. First, applications of communication ideas and principles, as well as explicit observations about words, meaning, messages and human behavior, can be found in virtually everything he wrote. C. S. Lewis was a meta-communicator. He communicated about communication; he wrote about the process of writing and speaking. His principles of how to communicate well are found in many of his works. Although some well-known authors write about the writing process (such as Stephen King⁶⁷), only a handful of celebrated and prolific writers have described in such considerable detail how they developed their communication craft. Lewis’s title “Communication Professor” is appropriate because of the number of words he devoted to writing about how he communicated. His former student V. Brown Patterson noted that Lewis “loved to talk about the sheer mechanics of turning thoughts into sentences.”⁶⁸ Had Lewis been only a popular author, or only a successful writer and teacher, this book probably would not have been written. But he made copious comments about the communication process. In addition to being an effective communicator, Lewis also discussed how to be an effective communicator. The chapters ahead, especially chapters four–eight, document the numerous principles, suggestions, and observations that he had about the human communication process.

A second reason to consider Lewis a professor of communication is that communication studies scholars historically tend to emphasize oral communication. Lewis was interested in writing and speaking, both in theory and in application; he gave special attention to the oral nature of messages. Lewis’s academic training ←12 | 13→focused on English literature and the written word, but there is evidence Lewis was especially interested in oral communication, as evidenced by his definition of language as “spoken language.”⁶⁹ Reflecting Lewis’s holistic interest in communication and supporting his Professor of Communication title, he was interested in both.

Lewis was a skilled writer and speaker. Gervase Mathew, who for nine years coordinated his lectures for the English faculty with Lewis, confirms, “His influence on his contemporaries was at least as much as orator as writer.”⁷⁰ In response to suggestions that Lewis thought lectures and tutorials a waste of his valuable time, Mathew vehemently disagreed: “No travesty could be further from the truth.”⁷¹ In describing Lewis’s oratorical skills, Mathew notes,

He took a vivid, perhaps rather sporting, interest in the numbers who came to him, and he was depressed when he failed to repeat his Oxford triumphs at Cambridge. At times he lectured from skeleton notes, at times from a written text; on occasion he improvised; it was hard to tell which method he was following. But always he forged a personal link with those who heard him.⁷²

Lewis liked a good-sized audience. He was a popular lecturer who often had standing-room only audiences.

In addition to the evidence that he often wrote about communication and had a keen interest in oral communication, a third and final reason to consider Lewis as a Professor of Communication is that he applied communication principles to several communication contexts, including interpersonal and small group communication. He was a “catholic communicator” in the sense that he was interested in a variety of communication contexts and genres, from friendship to classical rhetoric.

Interpersonal communication is defined as a “distinctive, transactional form of human communication involving mutual influence, usually for the purpose of managing relationships.”⁷³ The study of human relationships is at the heart of the interpersonal communication context. C. S. Lewis was clearly interested in the quality of interpersonal relationships. Several of his books, including The Four Loves, Till We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters, and all three of the books in his Ransom trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) include both implicit and explicit observations about the nature and importance of human relationships.

He not only wrote about interpersonal communication topics, but also loved the joy of just visiting with his friends. Lewis was known to close friends as a marvelous conversationalist with a wonderful sense of humor. His good friend Owen ←13 | 14→Barfield describes how Lewis liked to tease by playing insulting word games with his friends:

It was much more like a ‘language game,’ particularly so in the case of sarcasm. There the object of the game was to come as near as possible to formulating an insult as if it were intended, while at the same time choosing one which would be particularly telling if it were. He once carried this so far, or I was so stupid, that I thought it was meant; and, for a time after that (but this was rather in correspondence than in conversation) we would preface with a solemn rubric to the effect that “this is a joke.”⁷⁴

Lewis seemed to take pleasure from the joy of conversation with his friends. Walter Hooper appreciatively recalls, “C. S. Lewis was the best listener I have ever talked with in my life. He was actually very interested in what you had to say.”⁷⁵

In addition to interpersonal communication, Lewis made astute observations about small group communication, defined as “communication among a small group of people who share a common purpose, who feel a sense of belonging to the group, and who exert influence on one another.”⁷⁶ The dynamics of what causes groups to form, stay together, and accomplish specific tasks through communication, are key elements of group communication study. As with applications of interpersonal communication, Lewis was ahead of his time when discussing group interaction. Although books with “group discussion” in the title were published in the 1930s, group communication textbooks that referenced social-psychological dynamics of groups emerged only after Lewis’s death.⁷⁷

In noting a standard observation of contemporary group communication textbooks, Lewis knew that “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”⁷⁸ For Lewis, friendship among a group of people, in contrast to friendship between only two people, adds a new dynamic to the relationships. The 1945 loss of his friend Charles Williams gave Lewis insights about the collaborative nature of friendship. As Lewis put it, “[I];f, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but ‘A’s B.”⁷⁹ Lewis understood the dynamic of group interaction and the influence of individual members on the group. He adds, “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”⁸⁰ The loss of his dear friend Williams (friend A) meant that he also lost observing the rich interaction between Williams and J. R. R. Tolkien (friend B). Without using the term synergy or referring to systems theory, Lewis illustrated a sophisticated understanding of group dynamics.

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His address “Membership,” given to the Society of St. Alban and St. Sergius in February 1945, is chock full of observations about the nature of groups, societies, organizations, and communities. For example, he makes a comparison between group membership and family membership with this observation:

How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense) precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable.⁸¹

Although he doesn’t use contemporary communication terminology, he goes on to describe the nature and function of roles, norms, and other classic group communication variables. Diana Pavlac Glyer’s award-winning book Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, masterfully describes how the Inklings literary group illustrates principles and practices of group communication and collaboration.⁸² C. S. Lewis was interested in more than speaking and writing; he was also a keen observer of communication in several contexts.

Applications of communication ideas and principles, as well as explicit observations about words, meaning, messages, and human behavior, can be found in virtually everything he wrote, especially his scholarly publications such as A Preface to Paradise Lost. His friends and colleagues, J. R. R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield, were both celebrated philologists and Lewis was a philological scholar in his own right. Lewis wrote, “This book has grown out of a practice which was at first my necessity and later my hobby; whether at last it has attained the dignity of a study others must decide.”⁸³ This thesis sentence from Studies in Words, published in 1960 that evolved from a lecture series titled “Some Difficult Words,” offers evidence of Lewis’s life-long love of language and how words affect and reflect human nature.⁸⁴ Lewis believed that through language we articulate our longing for joy and acknowledge objective truth. Therefore, a prime argument for viewing Lewis as a communication professor is both his “necessity” and “hobby” of thinking and writing about language and meaning.

Although Lewis wrote about words, meaning, and messages, he did not set out to develop a theory of communication. As noted earlier, it is unlikely that he studied contemporary communication theory—an area of study that has more fully blossomed in academia since his death in 1963. Lewis was known for applying principles rather than proposing new theories. Rhetorical scholar James Como suggests that when studying rhetoric, “[Lewis] had no grand theories and ←15 | 16→did not follow schools or invent intricate methodologies.”⁸⁵ In fact, Como argues that Lewis “did not lend himself to rhetorical theory with the same characteristic thoroughness that marked his other reading.”⁸⁶ Rhetorical scholar Greg Anderson chronicles Lewis’s rhetorical roots and reaches this conclusion: “The extant evidence shows that Lewis did take rhetoric seriously as a student but even more so as a young don.”⁸⁷ Anderson additionally notes, “His focus was not so much on classical as on medieval and even modern rhetoricians.”⁸⁸ Regardless of the extent of his academic interest in and study of rhetoric, Lewis could have had little formal training in communication as presented in contemporary departments of communication studies.⁸⁹ Yet Lewis was keenly interested in Communication Studies from the perspective of meaning, the nature of words, and the function of language.

If we were to enter a classroom with Lewis as our communication professor, we might not be immediately impressed, at least by his appearance. William Griffin describes Lewis as an unassuming persona: “[He was] something of an Everyman in that he was just a bloke.”⁹⁰ He apparently didn’t look like a university don. Griffin continues,

Some thought he looked like a farmer, and he certainly enjoyed a ploughman’s lunch as much as the next fellow, especially with a pint of cider or a bottle of stout … at The Trout, a public house near Oxford. But he was just one of the millions, trying to make his own spiritual way, and it was well known that he was not the best map-reader in his brigade.⁹¹

Based on photos and descriptions of those who knew Lewis during his years as a Fellow at Magdalen, he was slightly overweight and balding, with a ruddy complexion. Walter Hooper described him as just under 6 feet tall.⁹² Lewis usually dressed in baggy flannel pants and an old elbow-patched tweed jacket. (Some wondered if he only owned one jacket.) One of his students described him as “verging on the shabby.”⁹³

Just as Lewis was not a fashion icon, he was not always a perfect communicator. Even though he was valued as a friend and listener, at times he was perceived as distant and aloof.⁹⁴ He was also known to sometimes withhold affection from those who sought a closer relationship with him. For example, his strained relationship with his father, as acknowledged in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, does not always reflect positively on his family communication skills.⁹⁵ There were clearly times his father wanted a closer relationship with Lewis, but Lewis kept his distance. To be fair, there were also times when Lewis sought greater intimacy with his father and his father did not reciprocate, such as the time after Lewis was ←16 | 17→wounded in World War I and his father did not come visit him as Lewis requested. He sometimes felt his father was more a caricature of a father, acting the part of an irascible and eccentric parent rather than providing genuine support and affection.⁹⁶ Reflecting Lewis’s impatience with his father’s inelegance and irritability, Lewis scholar Crystal Hurd suggests Lewis had “a straightforward and down-to-earth condemnation of the ‘pseudo’—the shoddy and the insincere” in reference to his relationship with his father.⁹⁷ Consequently, Lewis did not always evidence warm, supportive communication responses from or to his father.

It was not just with his father; there is evidence that he could be less than immediate with his students—some describing him as being belligerent at times.⁹⁸ As a tutor he was occasionally perceived as a bully because of his perhaps too enthusiastic application of his debating skills. He famously did not respond charitably to John Betjeman, a student of Lewis’s who eventually became the beloved Poet Laureate of England. He found Betjeman immature, unprepared, and non-responsive.⁹⁹ Rather than modeling grace and an understanding of how students can often be impertinent, Lewis’s verbal and nonverbal behavior did not always demonstrate grace. I once met an elderly couple in Oxford who had both been tutored by Lewis. They said that although they thought Lewis was brilliant, he could be tediously exacting as a tutor and sometimes unnecessarily harsh with students—although, they added, only with those whom he thought could take pointed criticism. So perhaps Lewis thought Betjeman could take his criticism.

George Bailey, an American student of Lewis’s, observed that as a tutor Lewis was “interesting, colourful and lively” but then added, “but he was not a good teacher.”¹⁰⁰ Bailey’s personal perception was that “Lewis lacked the warmth to fire his students with enthusiasm.”¹⁰¹ In addition, Lewis apparently sometimes couldn’t figure out who was who. Bailey notes, “Lewis consistently mistook me for Geoff Dutton, an Australian and an excellent student, and Dutton for me.”¹⁰² Yet Bailey found a benefit in the mislabeling: “For three years I basked in my misgiven status of a talented dominionite while Dutton groaned in durance vile as the only American in the college—if not, indeed, in the university—with the temerity to read English.”¹⁰³ Bailey added, “Lewis credited Dutton’s performances to me and penalized Dutton for mine.”¹⁰⁴

A few colleagues not in his inner circle reportedly perceived Lewis as impersonal. Lewis researcher Stephanie Derrick, after reviewing Lewis’s perception among some of his colleagues, concluded that Lewis could sometimes be “a divisive person in the cultural life of his peers.”¹⁰⁵ She explains his sometimes “negative critiques” from his colleagues “in light of Lewis’s persona of aggressive bravado and his platform as someone who looked back, to the authorities and ←17 | 18→sensibilities of a past age.”¹⁰⁶ Although, it should be noted, Derrick’s description of Lewis has not been uniformly supported by other Lewis scholars. Lewis author and scholar James Spencer notes, “Derrick’s insinuations are poorly supported by a fair reading of Lewis’ voluminous correspondence, the common witness of a wide range of his friends and even critical biographers …”¹⁰⁷

Yet one former Lewis student confirms Derrick’s conclusions about his relationship with his colleagues. George Bailey concludes, “Lewis was not popular among his fellow dons. My impression was that he kept almost as aloof from dons as from undergraduates.”¹⁰⁸ Although Bailey suggests the underlying reason for the perception of relational coolness may have been jealousy and the fact that Lewis wrote books about Christianity: “The lack of rapport between Lewis and the dons at Magdalen, on their side, was due not only to their envy of his fame but also to their distaste of the nature of his fame …”¹⁰⁹ Bailey speculates, “As popularizer of Christian dogma, Lewis was embarrassing to the academic community.”¹¹⁰

Lewis’s friend Own Barfield noted that when Lewis was ready to end a conversation he would betray his boredom nonverbally. Barfield notes, “For casual acquaintances he had a peculiarly, perhaps deliberately, expressionless stare to show when the limit had been reached.”¹¹¹ Famed zoologist Desmond Morris, who attended Magdalen College in Oxford and occasionally saw Lewis in the dining hall, told me Lewis could be standoffish and difficult to get to know well, often keeping to himself.¹¹²

Lewis also sometimes exhibited unusual, norm-violating, abrupt leave-taking cues. As reported in detailed notes, while meeting with some academics and publishers in the summer of 1955 at the Eastgate Hotel in Oxford about the possibility of Lewis serving as editor of a book series, Lewis was described as cordial, pleasant, and engaged in the conversation. Geoffrey Shepherd, a member of the editorial board for a publication for which they wanted Lewis to serve as General Editor, summarized the conversation as follows: “… we found ourselves talking about Tolkien and fairy stories and ancient Egyptians. We got rather noisy too and I saw a pale-faced solitary drinkers pressed back all round the sides of the room as if they were expecting an explosion.”¹¹³ While in the middle of the conversation Shepherd noted, “… then suddenly at five to one CS stood up, wrapped himself up, shook hands and suddenly shot off like a cork out of a bottle.”¹¹⁴ When it was time for Lewis to leave there was no pleasantries or dithering. Lewis simply left. Lewis had the same exiting approach when ending his academic lectures. Often, at the conclusion of an academic talk he would edge toward the door, pick up his hat and coat, and, while delivering his closing line, leave the ←18 | 19→lecture hall thus concluding the lecture and avoiding any questions or post-lecture conversations.¹¹⁵

It is easy for books about Lewis to be labeled mere hagiography, providing praise and adulation without noting his faults. Although Lewis was popular, professional, and professor of communication principles, he was also very human. He did not always demonstrate effective communication applications with his family, students, or some of his acquaintances. Yet perhaps his authentic struggles and challenges in his own personal and professional life helped him empathically connect with those who heard his lectures and broadcasts or read his works. C. S. Lewis was not a perfect communicator. In part because of his own grappling with the challenges of making human connections, he understood and applied principles of human communication that help explain his popularity, prolific output, and professional acumen.