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	The Making of a Master Communicator

“[T];he only thing of any importance (if that is) about me is what I have to say … I can’t abide the idea that a man’s books should be “set in their biographical context” and if I had some rare information about the private life of Shakespeare or Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works. All this biographical interest is only a device for indulging in gossip as an excuse for not reading what the chaps say, [which] is their only real claim on our attention. (I here resist a wild impulse to invent some really exciting background—that I am an illegitimate son of Edward VII, married to a chimpanzee, was rescued from the practice of magic by a Russian monk, and always eat eggs with the shells on.)”¹

- C. S. Lewis

“In his rooms in the New Building … I found a medium-size, rather stout, ruddy-faced man with a fine, large head (what the Germans call a ‘Charakterkopf’), and a booming voice much given to what someone once called ‘rhetorical guffawing’ (‘Ho, ho, ho, so you think Milton was ascetic, do you? Ho, ho! You are quite wrong there!’). Lewis looked—and often acted—like the book description of Friar Tuck. His general manner was pronouncedly and—it often seemed—deliberately hearty. But he displayed no heartiness during my first interview with him. Just as I was about to take my leave, Lewis said to me: ‘Are you aware, sir, that your fly is open?’ My surprise was so great that it precluded embarrassment: “If I had been, sir, I should never admit it.’ ”²

- George Bailey

“I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.”³

- C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis would not have approved of this chapter. In fact, he would have hated it. He did not think it was helpful to delve into the personal background, especially the personality, of an author to understand the author’s work. His point: If you want to interpret someone’s work, just read what he or she has written; the writing should stand on its own merits. Echoing excerpts from the letter that opens this chapter (“[T];he only thing of any importance (if that is) about me is what I have to say”)⁴ is Lewis’s contribution to The Personal Heresy, published in 1939 and written in point-counter-point with Milton scholar E. M. W. Tillyard. It was one of Lewis’s few co-authored works.⁵ (Tillyard’s first name was Eustace; although Lewis had great respect for Tillyard, some speculate he was the namesake of Eustace Clarence Scrub, a sometimes-obnoxious character featured in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair.) In contrast to Lewis, Tillyard’s belief is that all poetry is about the poet’s state of mind.⁶ Tillyard argues that to interpret any text, including Milton’s Paradise Lost, insightfully and accurately, the reader must see the work as an expression of Milton’s personality.⁷ The fact that this chapter appears in this book reflects a nod toward Tillyard’s argument; understanding the background, experiences, and personality of an author can help put a work, or in this case, a communicator, in context.

Lewis, on the other hand, maintained that the poet’s personality and personal life are superfluous: “I … maintain that when we read poetry as poetry should be read, we have before us no representation which claims to be the poet, and frequently no representation of a man, a character, or a personality at all.”⁸ In other words, let the work speak for itself, or as Lewis put it: “I look with his eyes, not at him.”⁹ Lewis added, “The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him.”¹⁰

Although Lewis and Tillyard were primarily debating the merits of delving into an author’s background in reference to poetry, Lewis felt the argument applied to all literary genres. He wanted the reader’s gaze to be directed toward what the author wrote, rather than at the author’s psychological profile or family. However, although Lewis disapproved of biographical criticism as a means of interpreting a literary work, the fact that he wrote and published his autobiography in response to those who wanted to learn more about his journey to faith, suggests that he was not completely against providing context for the development of an author’s ideas.

Many of Lewis’s writings included autobiographical elements. Lewis appears as a character in The Great Divorce. Glimpses of Lewis as the patient emerge in The Screwtape Letters. The Four Loves includes many personal reflections from the ←36 | 37→author. Lewis’s personal experiences echo through The Chronicles of Narnia. His trio of science fiction books and his novel Till We Have Faces also reference Lewisian life elements. Lewis certainly used his own personal experiences to illustrate his ideas, both in his fiction and his non-fiction. But Lewis was not against placing the development of a work in context only so long as such commentary didn’t impinge on how the work was interpreted. He would nonetheless argue that the written or spoken word should stand on its own.

Notwithstanding Lewis’s contempt for looking at the personality of an author to help better understand the author’s meaning, this chapter identifies factors that helped to make C. S. Lewis one of the most popular communicators about Christian theology in the twentieth century. Of the many influences on Lewis as a communicator, chronicled here are seven influences that include his (1) family, (2) education (including his friendship with Arthur Greeves), (3) WWI experiences, (4) “adopted mother” Mrs. Moore, (5) friend and colleague J. R. R. Tolkien, (6) conversion, and (7) late-in-life marriage to Joy Davidman.