by Dale Nelson » March 21st, 2007, 12:20 am
From Owen Barfield’s letter to the journal Christianity and Literature 29:2 (19179) pp. 9-10, referring to Kathryn Lindskoog's article"Some Problems in C. S. Lewis Scholarship."
“… The two executors appointed by C. S. Lewis under his will were myself and Alfred Cecil Harwood. After the administration of his estate had been completed (subject only to the life-interest of his brother, Major W. H. Lewis) we ceased, by law, to be executors and became trustees of the estate … Shortly afterwards, at my suggestion and with the approval of the life-tenant (Major Lewis), we appointed Walter Hooper, who had for some time been rendering invaluable assistance in an unofficial capacity, to be an additional trustee. In doing so we had in mind that both his enthusiasm and his proven abilities rendered him especially fitted to carry much of the heavy editorial work which the administration of the literary estate involved. Since that time Walter Hooper has borne a responsibility for decisions in all matters relating to the estate neither more nor less than that of his co-trustees; or now (since Mr. Harwood died in 1975) of his co-trustee. We are jointly accountable for each one of them.
“…. The substance of the article is aimed point-blank at Walter Hooper himself, and he will no doubt make up his own mind whether it is worth his while to concern himself with the mass of inaccurate statements, ingenious speculations, and waspish innuendo of which it largely consists - - the latter including such offensive and probably libellous insinuations as, that he has deliberately misled the public regarding his academic and clerical qualifications and that he invented a fictitious bonfire to account for the disappearance of certain MSS!
“There are however one or two remarks I should wish to add. A large part of the article is devoted to Mrs. Lindskoog’s speculations concerning occurrences during the period between C. S. Lewis’s death in 1963 and that of Major Lewis in 1973, and to unfavourable conjectures touching the relations between the latter and Walter Hooper. While I feel no obligation to expose in detail the flimsiness of the evidence on which these conjectures are based (I suppose it might take another nineteen of your pages to do so), I desire to place on record: (1) that to describe them as wide of the mark would be a polite understatement; (2) that I was personally in touch with both men during that period; (3) that, among much else, I had the painful experience of watching Walter Hooper wear himself to the verge of breakdown in the excruciating and well-nigh impossible task of tending, and indeed nursing, Major Lewis during the earlier part of it; and (4) that it would be difficult to overstate the distaste with which I respond to your contributor’s idea of what constitutes Lewis scholarship.
“Owen Barfield”
Comment by Dale Nelson:
I don’t think Barfield’s letter holds up very well.
It doesn’t address Lindskoog’s evidence. It basically just wishes it away.
The letter implies that Barfield would be willing to get in there and do the work of defending Hooper except that to do so would be to take up too much space in the pages of the journal. This seems pretty obviously insincere. (Surely decisions about the allocation of the pages of the journal could have been left to its editors.) In any event, given that the Lewis estate has never, to my knowledge at least, sponsored the work of needed for an authoritatively examination of Lindskoog’s claims and their refutation, Barfield’s suggestion that taking pages of Christianity and Literature to do, so back at the time when those claims were first published, has turned out to be painfully ironic; for consider how many hundreds of additional pages have been written about the matter, with no doubt more to come.
The letter could be considered as bluffing and trying to intimidate - - here’s Barfield, a lawyer, saying “probably libellous” - - as if to warn people from involving themselves in the matter. Barfield alludes to a “mass of inaccurate statements” - - then leaves this “mass” on the public record, unanswered, putting on record instead fairly vague remarks about his being “in touch” with Hooper and Major Lewis, and his dislike of the article.
It’s because this letter is so unsatisfactory and because, unless I’ve missed or forgotten something, it was about all Barfield ever said about the matter, that I’ve ventured to suggest that Barfield sounds frightened, as if he’d been caught at not having quite fulfilled his lawyerly duties, and was embarrassed. Of course I'm not saying that he was embarrassed, let alone that he had done anything unwise. But he kind of sounds as if he were embarrassed.
I continue to have a lot of regard for Barfield (and for Hooper), as I have said; but I don’t think this situation brought out Barfield at his best.
