- 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.
His Family: Flora, Albert, and Warnie
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