Читать книгу C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication - Steven Beebe - Страница 28

When Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on Tuesday, November 29, 1898, his parents, Flora and Albert Lewis, and his two-and-a-half-year older brother Warnie, lived in the Dundela section of Belfast. Although 47 Dundela Village is the address listed in most Lewis biographies, census records document that the address was actually 21 Dundela Village. At any rate, neither dwelling still stands.

Our early relationships with our parents and siblings (if we have them) provide seminal life experiences that influence how we express ourselves to others. Lewis was no exception. His parents and brother Warnie, as well as the boys’ nurse, Lizzie Endicott, were foundational to who Lewis was, how he related to others, and who he would become, including his skill as a communicator. As Lewis scholar Jerry Root observed, “Certainly, there were early formative experiences that shaped Lewis as a rhetorician. He was raised in an environment where a rhetorical approach to life was as native to him as the Irish air he breathed.”¹¹

Lewis’s mother Flora had a quick mind and a talent for mathematics—a skill that was apparently not hereditary since Lewis struggled with math and made miserable math scores on the entrance exam to Oxford University. Had it not been for Lewis joining the Army in 1917, which allowed him to bypass the math examination, he never would have been admitted.

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Lewis adored his mother. By every indication she was patient, and kind, and loved spending time with both her sons Clive and Warren. Her patience and indulgence are evident from the account that one day four-year-old Clive decided that his name would be “Jacksie” and thereafter simply would not respond to any other name.¹² Jacksie was soon shortened to Jacks and eventually reduced to Jack—the name his closest friends, family, and colleagues called him for the rest of his life.¹³

Flora loved to read and modeled this pleasure that was to fill Lewis’s time when he was not writing or interacting with others. She enjoyed her children and encouraged their innate abilities to express themselves. In a letter to her husband Albert, who was away at the time, she described how Clive would stand on top of a piano stool and imitate others, an early foray into public speaking.¹⁴ Lewis biographer and former student George Sayer interprets the scene as “revealing his precociousness and an early talent for mimicry.”¹⁵ Lewis’s public presentation proclivities were thus evident early on.

In addition to Flora, Lizzie Endicott and Warnie were important early influences in Lewis’s life. He wrote that, as well as “good parents, good food, and a garden (which then seemed large) to play in, I began life with two other blessings. One was our nurse, Lizzie Endicott … The other blessing was my brother.”¹⁶ Lewis describes Lizzie as someone “in whom even the exacting memory of childhood can discover no flaw—nothing but kindness, gaiety, and good sense.”¹⁷ Flora did not spend much time reading to her children or teaching them classic tales and nursery rhymes; those tasks fell to Lizzie. His nurse was affectionate and nurturing, comforting him when there were frightening storms at night and especially attentive when Jack was ill.¹⁸ In short, Lizzie joined Flora at the center of young Jack’s universe.

Warnie was a constant companion and confidant, and would remain so throughout Lewis’s life. Jack and Warnie enjoyed reading, making up stories, and joyful, childhood play—activities that nurtured both of their imaginations. Lewis describes Warnie affectionately: “Though three years my senior, he never seemed to be an elder brother; we were allies, not to say confederates, from the first.”¹⁹ Thus from his earliest years Lewis learned the importance of having empathic listeners.

While his mother Flora was cool, nurturing, and rational, Lewis’s father, Albert James Lewis (1863–1929), was irascible and quick to express emotion when he became impatient or upset.²⁰ Sayer suggests that Lewis inherited his talent for using words well and structuring logical arguments from Albert, whose speeches showed an authentic “rhetorical gift” and who “spoke in admirably rhythmic ←38 | 39→sentences, was shrewd in his attack on his opponents, convincing in his show of moderation, and above all, had the gift of presenting a complex argument in convincingly simple terms. Both his sons inherited the gift of simple exposition.”²¹ Albert joined the Belmont Literary Society in 1881, where he was considered one of the best speakers in the society.²² Yet while Albert Lewis had the gift of speaking, his communication skills did not transfer to interpersonal interactions with his sons. His strong personality, emotional outbursts, and temper, as well as frequent trips resulting in absences from home, made him a less nurturing presence than Flora and Lizzie.

Warnie would muse in later years that “some awareness of my father’s smothering tendency to dominate life and especially the conversation of his household is necessary to an understanding of Jack’s mind and life.”²³ Lewis himself seemed to understand that he inherited his rhetorical talents from his father. Regarding his father’s approach to reprimanding his sons, Lewis recalls, “He therefore relied wholly on his tongue as the instrument of domestic discipline. And here that fatal bent towards dramatization and rhetoric (I speak of it the more freely since I inherit it) …”²⁴ Lewis notes in his autobiography Surprised by Joy that his father had “a fine presence, a resonant voice, great quickness of mind, eloquence, and memory.”²⁵ He adds that Albert “was found of oratory and had himself spoken on political platforms in England as a young man; if he had had independent means he would certainly have aimed at a political career.”²⁶ Lewis also says that his father “was fond of poetry provided it had elements of rhetoric or pathos, or both …”²⁷

Although he seemed to admire some of his father’s rhetorical attributes, Lewis was not always laudatory of his father’s approach to communication. In Surprised by Joy Lewis writes that his father provided “simile piled on simile, rhetorical question on rhetorical question, the flash of an orator’s eye and the thundercloud of an orator’s brow …”²⁸ And although a hallmark of Lewis’s communication is his ability to connect with his audience, whether through the written word or during a lecture or sermon, he apparently did not learn this skill from his father. Lewis recalled that when his father disciplined him, Albert “forgot not only the offense but the capacities of his audience. All the resources of his immense vocabulary were poured forth.”²⁹

Both Jack and Warnie sometimes wearied of their father’s presence and intrusion. Lewis describes one occasion with too much togetherness with his father as unnecessarily stressful:

For the whole rest of the day, whether sitting or walking, we were inseparable; and the speech (you see that it could hardly be called conversation), the speech ←39 | 40→with its cross-purposes, with its tone (inevitably) always set by him, continued intermittently till bedtime … It was extraordinarily tiring.³⁰

For most of Lewis’s life, the relationship between himself and his father would remain strained. In an essay titled, “The Failure to Communicate: The Communicative Relationship Between C. S. Lewis and his Father,”³¹ Michael McCray writes, “It is ironic that Jack Lewis, one of the most effective communicators of this century, and Albert Lewis, an eloquent court solicitor and pubic speaker known for his gift of simple exposition, struggled in their own communicative relationship.”³²

Then, in 1908, Lewis’s childhood took a dramatic turn for the worse. Lewis writes, “There came a night when I was ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. That was because she was ill too …”³³ Flora’s illness proved to be terminal cancer. After writing a passage in his autobiography extoling the virtues of a life of books and nurturing, Lewis says, “I cannot be absolutely sure whether the things I have just been speaking of happened before or after the great loss which befell our family and to which I must now turn.”³⁴ The “great loss” was his mother’s death. He describes in detail the heartbreaking scene when he was taken into the bedroom “… where my mother lay dead; as they said, ‘to see her.’ In reality, as I at once knew, ‘to see it.’ There was nothing that a grown-up would call disfigurement—except for that total disfigurement which is death itself. Grief was overwhelmed in terror.”³⁵ This previous sentence from his autobiography, published in 1955, foreshadowed another famous sentence, the opening line in his book A Grief Observed: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”³⁶

Lewis also echoes his mother’s death in The Magician’s Nephew, where he depicts a poignant scene where Digory’s mother is dying and he feels helpless that he has no powers to stop it.³⁷ Lewis wrote clearly and eloquently about pain, grief, loss, and longing because he experienced all of these feelings. He learned how to communicate about these universal emotions and experiences not by dictating how someone should feel, but by describing the situation and letting the reader bring her or his own experience to the scene.

Lewis reflects that when his mother died, “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”³⁸ Not only had Albert lost his wife, but also his own father earlier in the same year. And just ten days after Flora died, Albert’s brother Joseph died. With so much sadness in his life, Albert knew that he could not fulfill both the role of mother and father to Jack. With Warnie already at boarding school, it seemed an obvious and simple solution: Send Jack to boarding school with Warnie.

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