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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The Education of a Master Communicator
C. S. Lewis’s education could be described as having a disastrous beginning with a glorious conclusion, punctuated by unevenness in educational quality. His education had really begun at home. He refers frequently in his autobiography to “Little Lea,” (formally known as Leeborough) the grand Belfast home into which the family had moved from Dundela Village in 1905, with its cozy little “end room” where he and Warnie would read, dream, and play. Little Lea was almost like another character in his life. Biographer A. N. Wilson notes that “In memory, [Jack and Warnie] returned to it again and again …”39