I acknowledge that Fowler's testimony should be weighed in the balances with all the other evidence, and certainly works in favor of the authenticity of TDT, but I do not take it as definitive for several reasons.
First, pro-Hooper folks have never taken Fred Paxton's word that the "bonfire of [CSL] papers" from which Hooper says he rescued the Dark Tower MS and many other papers never occurred, so why this sudden rush to cite someone's unsupported, 50-year-old reminiscence as definitive truth? Human memory is fallible. We recall memories that we have repressed, but we can also manufacture memories of what never happened.
I find it bizarre that Fowler only spoke up about seeing the TDT manuscript in 2003, some 26 years after the whole broo-ha-ha about TDT began in the late 1970s. Fowler was of course aware of the publication of TDT, since a piece of his writing appears in the book (comments on "After Ten Years," pp. 157-158). In those comments Fowler did not say when he had seen that MS; nor did he mention having seen any other MSS, such as that of
The Dark Tower. Both editor Hooper and the two authors discussing "After Ten Years," Green and Fowler, seem to have been unaware of any contradictions or confirmations afoot.
Fowler is now a quite elderly man and his 55-year-old memories of Lewis seem questionable on several points:
First and most importantly, Fowler says that he saw the "After Ten Years" fragment on the same occasion he saw the Dark Tower MS. But Roger Lancelyn Green says that Lewis began that fragment in 1959 (
The Dark Tower, p. 155). If Green is correct---and he says he remembers Lewis reading him the first chapter aloud, and having extensive conversations with Lewis on the subject---Fowler
could not have seen the "After Ten Years" fragment in the early or mid 1950s, when he was a graduate student of Lewis's.
Interestingly, on pp. 1668-9 of Collected Letters III, Hooper quotes Fowler's 2003 statements about seeing manuscripts and says that "Of great importance and interest is the discovery that the manuscripts of 'After Ten Years' and
The Dark Tower . . . were examined by Dr Fowler in Lewis's company as far back as 1962." First, note that 1962 is a typo for 1952 (compare p. 1667 and Fowler essay: also,
Till We Have Faces, which Fowler also remembers seeing in MS form on the same occasion, had already been published in 1956, and so would not have been displayed as an incomplete manuscript in 1962!). Hooper seems not to recall, here, that Green was of the opinion, when
The Dark Tower was published in 1977, that "After Ten Years" was commenced in 1959. Whose account is inadvertently distorted, Green's or Fowler's? Do we just authorize the one we prefer?
Second, Fowler says he remembers Lewis being engrossed in
Astounding Science Fiction during the visit when he saw the Dark Tower and other incomplete manuscripts. Now this was in the early 1950s. I happen to have read a great deal of that magazine from that period (for 20 years I owned most of the issues). It contained none of that mythopoeic science fiction that Lewis reveled in, but was almost exclusively devoted to that "engineer's fiction" which Lewis said (in the essay "On Science Fiction") he had no interest in at all. On the other hand, Lewis praised
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (founded 1949) as the best of the genre. If Lewis was engrossed in any science-fiction magazine on a random winter morning in the early 50s, it is highly probable that it was
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I think it likely---though of course there is no proof in such a thing---that Fowler is misremembering this detail too.
Third, Fowler remembers (
http://www.solcon.nl/arendsmilde/cslewi ... fowler.htm) that "Lewis saw the theory of natural selection as threatening religion." This directly contradicts what Lewis said in print on several occasions (references available on request). He also remembers Lewis doubting that fossils are real: yet Lewis repeatedly wrote as if the "prehuman past" were an established scientific fact. All this, again, sounds to me like Fowler's memory is suspect.
Finally---this is a relatively minor point----in the same
Christianity Today article that has brought Fowler's 2003 reminiscences to fresh attention, he says that "Like many fantasy writers, Lewis wasn't much interested in the question of the literary quality of his writing." Indeed? That seems to me not only a condescending and silly thing to say about fantasy writers, at least those in Lewis's league (Wm. Morris? Tolkien? Eddison? Lord Dunsany?), but in contradiction to everything we know about the pleasure Lewis took in language, his reading his stories aloud for hard-hitting criticism by the Inklings, and his belief (viz. "Good Work and Good Works" essay) that Christians should do all their creative work as well as possible, whether it was explicitly religious or not.
Sorry, it won't do. Fowler's reminiscences are not definitive. They are evidence, but not
conclusive evidence, not proof---far from it. It seems quite possible to me that he was indeed shown some manuscript material, but that half a century later his memories MAY be mingled with later ones.
Larry
PS. The sexuality of the imagery in the Dark Tower is beyond dispute because the text itself draws attention to the obvious: see page 63 of the book.