Hi--
The
Dark Tower controversy is an interesting one. Feelings sometimes run high: Hooper has published hundreds of pages of prefatory writing in Lewis books since the 1960s, some of it helpful, and many of us (including me) grew up thinking of Hooper as
the guide to C. S. Lewis. Indeed, Hooper has enjoyed a virtual one-man monopoly on editing C. S. Lewis books since Lewis’s death. It is a shock when someone like that is accused of forgery, which Lindskoog (now deceased) accused him of doing.
Lindskoog never made a stand-up-in-court case that Hooper had forged documents. However, she raised a number of points that are really worth considering---enough to justify convening a grand jury, so to speak---and managed to convince me, for one, that (a) her charge is not impossible, though we can’t know for sure, and (b) at the least, Hooper has demonstrably been a poor editor of Lewis’s material and has made many statements that can be most mildly described as wild exaggerations. For instance, he has claimed that Warnie Lewis, CSL’s brother, kept a “bonfire of papers”---Lewis’s papers---burning for three days after Lewis’s death. That’s absurd on the face of it: it would require truckloads of paper to keep a “bonfire of papers” (Hooper’s words) going for three days. And Hooper is our only witness to the alleged bonfire: Warnie never mentioned it and the Lewis's gardener, Fred Paxford, has denied in writing that such a bonfire ever occurred. Hooper says that the
Dark Tower manuscript (which is in the Bodleian, with a photocopy at Wheaton College) was one of a heavy stack that he rescued from that blaze. He has even described these papers, in writing, as a “pile of scorched manuscripts,” implying that he actually pulled them out of the flames---but none of the manuscripts that he has released that supposedly were in the bonfire-rescue batch, including the
Dark Tower MS, show any scorch-marks, that I have ever heard mention of. If no "scorched" manuscripts exist then that remark, at least, can be fingered as a fabrication on physical evidence. Hooper has also made bizarre statements about Warnie Lewis, who later came to distrust Hooper and wrote against him in his diary (but those passages were censored out of the published version of Warnie’s diary,
Brothers and Friends, "at the request of and as a courtesy to" the C. S. Lewis Estate, apparently Hooper's employer at that time: the deleted passages can be read in Lindskoog’s book or in the original diary in the Wheaton College collection). Many other examples of weird claims and behavior by Hooper could be given---including his clumsy Americanizing of the language in one edition of
The Screwtape Letters (which offends me to my bookish soul).
Did Hooper forge? He has had the opportunity, being the sole gatekeeper of the Lewis mansucript heritage from 1963 to the present. He has regularly claimed to “discover” a new fragment or essay or the like, or announced that he knew of such-and-such a piece and then not let anyone see the piece until years later. In 1980, he claimed that he had learned to forge Lewis’s handwriting. Hooper’s friend and roommate Tony Marchington wrote a pseudoscientific hoax letter to
Christianity and Literature in 1979---typed on Hooper’s own typewriter---claiming that chemical analysis of ashes had
disproved Hooper’s bonfire story. The letter was published in good faith before the hoax was discovered.
Most computer analyses of the style of
Dark Tower have concluded that it is not by Lewis. However, I wouldn’t put too much weight on that sort of thing: not unless it is done much more extensively and rigorously and in a peer-reviewed context. It’s a shame that scholars with real resources haven’t systematically tackled the quantitative-methods approach to this whole controversy.
Putatively written between
Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and
Perelandra (1943),
The Dark Tower (1938?) consists in large part of explanations of pseudo-science, which Lewis said in an essay (“On Science Fiction”) he had learned not to bother with after arranging for Weston’s solar-powered spaceship to transport the hero in
Out of the Silent Planet: “I took a hero once to Mars in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus.” Why then the huge burst of pseudoscience in
Tower (about 19 pages out of 75, a fourth of the manuscript)? But Tony Marchington definitely liked cooking up pseudoscience. Hmm.
Tower could still, after all, be by Lewis, no matter how silly or fishy or secretive Hooper has been in other respects. My world would not crumble. After all, if it
is by Lewis, he gave it up as a bad job and wrote
Perelandra instead. Huzzah for his judgment, in that case.
But why would someone, as Sarah N. asks, “write something, and not finish it, and have it published under Lewis' name?”
Potentially, lots of reasons. Literary forgeries happen all the time. As for not finishing the piece (just assuming for the sake of the argument that it’s fake), an unfinished fragment is easier to do, and more realistic-looking. One doesn’t have to produce something that looks believably like a whole C. S. Lewis novel (which would require you write as well as C. S. Lewis), only like an abortive C. S. Lewis fragment---Lewis on a bad day. And as for motive, the psychology of forgery and deception is rich and strange. People often create literary forgeries, apparently, not for money but simply in order to enjoy a sense of power over those whom they dupe, including scholars. And scholars and experts can certainly be fooled. Read the history of the Hitler Diaries, for one egregious example (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_diaries). According to the
Los Angeles Times for Dec. 8, 1992, “Research shows that, in general, people want to believe what they are told, even if it is an outlandish lie. Complicating matters is the fact that many compulsive liars have a sense of how far to push their lies.” By the way, Lindskoog did not claim that Hooper himself necessarily wrote
Tower. Hooper might have done it (she said), but so might Marchington or someone else---or there might have been a collaboration of talents.
Scholars could do much to tackle this question. Exhaustive, comparative, quantitative textual analysis of the
Tower’s prose might settle the question, for example. But of course one would want to see a string of blindfold test cases where the method in question successfully distinguished Lewis’s writing from attempted imitations, colleagues’ writings, and things by random third parties.
Regards,
Larry Gilman
PS. I should note, in the interests of full disclosure, that I was the indexer for the 2001 edition of Lindskoog's
Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (Mercer University Press). I receive no royalties from the sale of that book or any other book relating to Lindskoog, Lewis, or the like.