Because Lewis’s handwriting is sometimes difficult to read (my friend and Lewis scholar Charlie Starr labels Lewis’s handwriting “villainous”),7 I had actually hoped the manuscript was already published. I scoured his published works, searching for it. And given that this was the beginning of a book about language and meaning, a topic right up my alley, I was keenly interested to find out what he had to say on this topic. Because of my impatience, I did not want to spend time trying to decode Lewis’s penmanship; I wanted to get on with reading what he wrote, to learn his communication insights.
No luck in finding the book in print. I was disappointed because that meant I would have to decipher Lewis’s “villainous” handwriting myself.8 But my research did uncover references to the manuscript. It was catalogued by Lewis manuscript curator, Dr. Judith Priestman. Walter Hooper, Lewis’s former secretary, editor, and literary executor, made a brief reference to the little notebook in his book Past Watchful Dragons, describing it as a manuscript about “English literature” and even suggesting that Lewis saved the little notebook of miscellaneous ideas because of the “English literature” essay.9
Because some of the handwriting was challenging to read, three years after first seeing the manuscript, I received special permission from the library (thanks to Walter Hooper, the original depositor of the manuscript) to make a photocopy. Walter and I met in 2002; he invited me to his home for tea, and we have been friends ever since. Being able to take a photocopy of the manuscript back to Texas was a great help in scrutinizing the scribbles I could not quite decipher. With the photocopied manuscript in hand, Hooper, who came to Texas State University to give a lecture five years after I started decoding the manuscript, helped me figure out a few additional illegible words. Another good friend and prominent Lewis scholar, Dr. Michael Ward, who also guest lectured at Texas State (and is the author of the groundbreaking books Planet Narnia and The Narnia Code) kindly helped me decipher a few remaining puzzling words. But even after painstakingly transcribing the manuscript, I still did not realize that it was the beginning of the book he had planned to write with Tolkien. It would take me a couple more years to connect those literary dots.
←xviii | xix→
When I left Oxford to return to Texas after this second sabbatical, I did not fully understand the significance of what I had found, but I did have a bolstered belief that Lewis was interested in communication. Based on the content of the manuscript, I proposed an honors course at Texas State called “C. S. Lewis: Chronicles of a Master Communicator.” My colleagues in the Honors College liked the idea. The course filled on the first day it was available to students, and more students wanted to enroll; I soon had more than 70 students on a waiting list hoping to take the course. I learned that C. S. Lewis generates interest. In addition to teaching a Lewis course on the Texas State campus, I also started teaching the course during the summer at Oxford University for Texas State students.
When in Oxford, I rarely held class in one of the well-appointed Victorian seminar rooms in St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where we were based. Instead, we used the city of Oxford as our educational canvas. (St. Hilda’s College was the site of a famous debate between C. S. Lewis and philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe held on February 2, 1948).10 We took walking tours of notable Lewis sites, including the numerous pubs he and his fellow Inklings used as locations for their literary conversations. For example, the day we talked about Lewis and interpersonal relationships, we held class in the room in the Eastgate Hotel, where some claim Lewis initially met his wife Joy. We visited his home, “The Kilns,” toured University College, where Lewis was a student (and where President Bill Clinton later studied as a Rhodes scholar), and spent an afternoon at Magdalen College, the Oxford college where Lewis taught from 1925 to 1954. A highlight for many students (and for me) was the Bodleian Library, where they saw original Lewis manuscripts, including his own hand-drawn map of Narnia and, of course, the orange-colored paper notebook labeled “SCRAPS.”
Despite the success of the Honors course, and although I had received encouragement and interest from many people to pursue investigating Lewis from a communication angle, some of my communication faculty colleagues from my home department were at first less impressed. On my annual faculty evaluations, written anonymously, I would find such occasional comments as: “Why is he making his hobby about C. S. Lewis into a communication class?” Or “Not really much information to justify teaching a communication class focused on Lewis.” And even “Beebe is just using his interest in Oxford as an excuse to teach a course about Lewis.” Well, it was true that I had a passionate interest in the City of Oxford and Oxford University. And it was also true that I found C. S. Lewis intriguing—not just because of what he wrote, but because his own life story captivated me. Yet I also firmly believed that Lewis had something to say about human communication.
←xix | xx→
Despite the collegial criticism, I forged ahead and continued to teach the Honors class about Lewis. Although I still did not comprehend what that manuscript was, its content formed a key part of the information I shared with my students about Lewis and communication. In the manuscript fragment, Lewis develops an interesting definition of language, a definition I have not seen in any of his other published works. He further presents a thoughtful discussion of the nature of meaning, including how we derive meaning from language. (These ideas will be discussed in Chapter 5.) What is most interesting to me, as a professor of communication, is Lewis’s focus on the oral nature of language. Each of his examples and illustrations are about spoken rather than written language—unusual since he specialized in sixteenth century English literature and spent so much of his time writing.
Earlier on the morning of my laundromat epiphany, as my wife Sue and I left our house because our home washing machine had broken, I had randomly grabbed a book from my bookshelf—The Company They Keep, by Diana Pavlac Glyer—to help pass the time. It is a well-researched and masterfully written book that I had read a couple of years prior, but I thought I would re-read it.11 Glyer’s book chronicles the relationships among the Inklings, a group of Christian writers who met together weekly in Oxford, England, beginning in the 1930s and continuing for several decades. Glyer was so thorough that she read all 365 books written by Inklings authors, in order to better understand their collaborative alchemy. The two lead Inklings were C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. As Glyer has documented, the Inklings served as resonators, collaborators, opponents, and editors for one another’s writing.12 Tolkien read part of The Hobbit to the group, as well as chapter installments of The Lord of the Rings. Lewis read serialized portions of his first science fiction book, Out of the Silent Planet,13 along with many other now-classic works.
My wife Sue and I were both reading silently as our clothes tumbled in the laundromat dryer on that bleak March Saturday afternoon. It was only when I came to page 146 of Glyer’s summary of Lewis and Tolkien’s planned collaboration about a book called Language and Human Nature that it hit me.14 Like rusty tumblers of a combination lock clicking into place, I suddenly recognized what I had meticulously transcribed those past seven years: Lewis’s opening chapter of Language and Human Nature! I paused. I set the book down. I looked up. My eyes widened. I smiled broadly and much too loudly blurted, “I KNOW WHAT IT IS!” My wife, used to my non-sequiturs, and looking only slightly embarrassed, coolly deadpanned, “What what is?” To the bewilderment of fellow laundry patrons mindlessly folding their clothes, I ear-splittingly burbled, “I KNOW ←xx | xxi→WHAT THE LEWIS MANSUCRIPT IS! IT’S THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK LEWIS WAS PLANNING TO WRITE WITH J. R. R. TOLKIEN!”