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A Problem with Collected Letters III

The man. The myth.

A Problem with Collected Letters III

Postby larry gilman » March 16th, 2007, 1:58 pm

Hey all---

I wrote the following in a style that would befit publication in a periodical, but since its chances of getting published seem nil at this point, here it is. Some remarks on a few particular features of Collected Letters III.

Larry


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The third and last volume of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (HarperSanFrancisco) was released on January 9 after long delay. Despite its bulk it will probably sell briskly, as anything with Lewis’s name on it tends to. Readers braving the finished set’s 8,333 footnotes and 99 biographical appendices might get the notion that the editor, Walter Hooper, has included every relevant detail about the people in C. S. Lewis’s life, plus some—but they would be wrong.

C. S. (“Jack”) Lewis’s brother, Warren Lewis, is central to any account of Lewis’s life. The pair toughed out a lonely boyhood together in Northern Ireland and were housemates in middle and old age. But the relationship was tragic, too. In Collected Letters III, Mr. Hooper describes how Warren “would periodically disappear to Ireland on drinking binges, often absenting himself when Jack needed most help with Mrs Moore,” the elderly woman whom the Lewis brothers cared for. Later we are reminded that thanks to Warren’s boozing, “Jack was left to cope as best he could.” All this belongs in the book and none of it is new; Mr. Hooper and other biographers have often described Warren Lewis’s alcoholism. In the introduction to an earlier collection of Lewis letters (They Stand Together, 1979), Mr. Hooper even found occasion to tell how he, Hooper, once saved a badly soused Warren from soiling his pants in the lavatory of an Irish inn. He also offered the astonishing—and, one might think, medically improbable—information that Warren would “sit in his study chair for as long as a fortnight without getting up, eating nothing, and drinking as much as six bottles of whiskey a day.”

So, then, what’s missing? Full disclosure. Mr. Hooper served briefly as C. S. Lewis’s secretary in 1963, not long before his death. Their relationship was friendly; not entirely so Mr. Hooper’s relationship with Warren Lewis. By 1969, Warren was convinced that Mr. Hooper was a sort of secretarial Rasputin, plotting for control over Jack’s literary legacy. “In his tireless, unscrupulous busybodyness Walter is the perfect Jesuit,” he snarled in his journal; “I dread the statements he may make after my death . . . which he will have the skill to make with seeming authority. I wish J[ack] had never met him.”

Here, then, are the makings of what ethicists call “the appearance of a conflict of interest”: Mr. Hooper writes tell-all biographical squibs about a man who called him names and bitterly opposed his 1970 appointment to the literary executorship of the C. S. Lewis estate, but never shares this awkward background with his readers. One cannot learn of it from Mr. Hooper’s editorial addenda to anything in the Lewis canon, including the Collected Letters. The Cone of Silence has descended even over works not by C. S. Lewis or edited by Mr. Hooper: in the published version of Warren’s journal, Brothers and Friends (Harper & Row, 1982), Warren’s anti-Hooper rants (described only as “certain passages”) are said to have been purged “at the request of and as a courtesy to the C. S. Lewis Estate”—Mr. Hooper’s employer. To read those rants one must go either to the unexpurgated journal itself (at Wheaton College or Oxford) or to Kathryn Lindskoog’s controversial anti-Hooper tract Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (Mercer University Press, 2001), in which they are quoted. (Speaking of full disclosure, I indexed Sleuthing.)

Nor is this the only historical cleansing in the Collected Letters. Mr. Hooper’s short biography of Ms. Lindskoog in the back matter of Vol. III makes no mention that the last few decades of her life were largely devoted to charging that Mr. Hooper forged manuscripts published as C. S. Lewis’s after his death, most notably The Dark Tower (1977; see Scott McLemee, “Holy War in the Shadowlands,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2001). In fact, Ms. Lindskoog, who died in 2003, is primarily known today for her anti-Hooper books, which have attracted both vigorous criticism and admirers as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. LeGuin, and C. S. Lewis’s friend Sheldon Vanauken.

In short, Mr. Hooper has made a habit of selectively sanitizing history. He continues to do so in Collected Letters III by omitting all mention of serious charges made against him by two fellow players in the Lewis story, Warren Lewis and Ms. Lindskoog—players whose biographies he handles here and whose charges go straight to his own reliability. It hardly seems cricket. Surely it should not be up to the target of such charges, regardless of their merit, to decide whether their existence deserves mention?

But what does it all matter, if one is not a Lewis-worshipper committed to one side or another of the Hooper-Lindskoog wars? It matters because Lewis is one of those literary oddities whose readership continues to grow relentlessly decades after their death. Tens of millions of people read him yearly. Many people have their first, primary, or only contact with myth, literary criticism, literary history, philosophy, and theology through his writings. It’s a legacy worth keeping squeaky clean. That is why it is so unfortunate that Mr. Hooper, who has enjoyed a near-total monopoly on editing the Lewis oeuvre since Lewis’s death in 1963, covers with silence certain controversies in which he has himself been tangled. It is hard to overstate the importance of Walter Hooper in the Lewis-reading world. Nobody can edit Lewis without the permission of C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd, which owns Lewis’s works, and they have rarely given that permission to anybody but Mr. Hooper. His writing is attached to many Lewis books; he is the Lewis gatekeeper par excellence. When he endows the canon with Bowdlerized history, leaving fuller truths to be told by fringe figures or the dead, it matters.

His motive cannot be a modest reluctance to insert himself unnecessarily into the record, for if he felt any such reluctance, we would never have been regaled with anecdotes like the Irish pants-wetting episode (and many others). But it needn’t be sinister, either: it might be simply a misguided urge to purge all ugliness from the wonderful world of C. S. Lewis (an urge that does not extend to the misbehaviors of Warren Lewis). Whatever their cause, the result of these omissions is that the Collected Letters’ historical completeness, and therefore its historical credibility, and therefore its value as a resource is lessened. That is the problem with even apparent conflicts of interest: the appearance itself does damage.

In a case like this, where disclosure has gone quietly AWOL, one is forced to wonder: is anything else missing?
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Postby A#minor » March 16th, 2007, 4:00 pm

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Postby Esther » March 16th, 2007, 7:46 pm

Very intersting and well-written essay, Larry; you make some good points. I wonder, though, if perhaps you might be coming down a little too harshly on Walter Hooper. While the information regarding Warren's feelings about him was new to me (and should not be disregarded), I do believe that Douglas Gresham considers Hooper a close friend, and surely the Lewis Estate is doing their best to be conscientious in the treatment of Lewis's work. Furthermore, whether or not one agrees with Hooper's amount/lack of personal/historical disclosure, do you think The Collected Letters, Vol. 3 would be the best place to address that issue? It seems as though it might be more of a distraction to the rest of the content. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that if Hooper were to address that issue, it would be better handled seperately from Lewis's writings themselves.
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Postby Dale Nelson » March 16th, 2007, 8:14 pm

I'm afraid there are questions that will never be resolved. It's too bad. I have come around to believing that The Dark Power is indeed by Lewis, or at the least that much or most of it is, despite Lindskoog's view - - thanks to Alastair Fowler's comments (see the recent book of reminiscences of Lewis edited by Poe). I would like to see Hooper thoroughly exonerated. As it is, though, these "issues" just won't go away. It seems to me that if there were comparable questions about, say, Lewis's contemporary George Orwell, more would be done to resolve them. But it seems that Lewis is not regarded as a major 20th-century British author... by his publishers... and so the matter just hangs on.
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Postby Dale Nelson » March 16th, 2007, 8:16 pm

Whoops - - I meant Dark TOWER.
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Postby Stanley Anderson » March 16th, 2007, 9:01 pm

…on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.
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Postby larry gilman » March 20th, 2007, 5:06 pm

Dear Esther,

Many thanks for your intelligent questions. Here’s a sort of quick point-by-point reaction:

Douglas Gresham may well consider Hooper a close friend, but frankly, what is that to me? When I pick up a definitive biographical resource, I do not become part of a network of personal friendships. I am interested in it first as a reader and second as a scholar. The defects I address here go to the credibility and completeness of this volume as a permanent, definitive Lewis resource.

As for the Lewis Estate (actually C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.), it is a for-profit business that has been anything but conscientious in its treatment of Lewis’s work. It gives none of its royalties to charity (unlike Lewis, who gave handsomely) and is extremely secretive. Back in 1976 it authorized Hooper to put out a mangled, Americanized version of the Screwtape Letters, with Lewis’s original language altered at numerous points (e.g., and most bizarrely, Lewis's reference to the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain replaced by a reference to Lewis himself). That sort of impudence horrifies the scholar, Lewisian, and general reader in me all at once. More recently, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.'s conscientious treatment of the Lewis heritage has brought us the complete line of The Chronicles of Narnia McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys.

I absolutely think that Letters III is the place for full disclosure! Hooper prints biographies of Warren Hooper and Kathryn Lindskoog here---the very people with whom he has been most unpleasantly embroiled. Offhand, I can't think of an occasion where disclosure would be more ethically mandatory than writing someone’s biography---unless it's sitting as a judge on a lawsuit involving that person, in which case outright recusal would be the only ethical option. And if not disclosure in Letters III, then when and where? Is there any book about Lewis, any guide to Lewis’s writing, any introduction or afterword attached to any Lewis book, where Hooper has disclosed the dark side of these relationships?

It looks to me like historical cleansing with a strong conflict-of-interest element.

None of this goes to the debate about the authenticity of The Dark Tower, by the way. Just to make it clear that I do not intend any innuendo about that. The questions are quite separate.

Sincerely,

Larry
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TDT issue resolved? Not so fast

Postby larry gilman » March 20th, 2007, 5:38 pm

Stanley, I find it very dismaying to think that any actual history would be "washed away" and forgotten. As a scholar, that just seems----well, heretical to me. Reality should be remembered as accurately as possible. That is what printed works like the Collected Letters are FOR. I do not desire a pretty, smoothed-over past, but the real past.

In any case, whether Hooper should practice disclosure here has nothing to do with the accuracy of the charges made against him!

As for Fowler's reminiscences about The Dark Tower, I do not take them as definitive resolution of the TDT problem. I find it bizarre, for example, that Fowler only spoke up in 203, some 15 years after the whole broo-ha-ha about TDT began in the late 1980s. Fowler is now a quite elderly man and his 55-year-old reminiscences about Lewis seem questionable on other points, at least: in the same Christianity Today article where he recalls seeing TDT, 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 in general (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 philosophy (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.

Incidentally, the Christianity Today writer---and perhaps Joe Christopher as well---seem to be uninformed about the question of quantitative technical analysis. The cusum method used by A. Q. Morton and cited (unfortunately, in my opinion) by Lindskoog has for years been discredited in the literary computing community (viz. David Holmes, "The Evolution of Stylometry in Humanities Scholarship," Literary and Lingustic Computing Vol. 13 No. 3 1999). More objective, validated methods can and should be applied to the text. Much progress has been made in this field, as the pages of Literary and Lingustic Computing will confirm.

I acknowledge that Fowler's testimony should be weighed in the balances with all the other evidence, and definitely works in favor of the authenticity of TDT, but I do not take it as definitive, for the reasons given above.

Larry
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Postby Dale Nelson » March 20th, 2007, 5:45 pm

Thanks, Larry.

I am inclined to fault Lewis Pte. more than Hooper. They ought to do the ethical thing and pay independent scholars to sift the evidence relating to the issues that have arisen about the integrity of the posthumous Lewis publications and about the editing of poems, some of which were published in Lewis's lifetime but now are given in book form in differing versions. Obviously they show no inclination to do that.

As I've said, I really hope that Walter Hooper's editing will be cleared of the late Mrs. Lindskoog's charges. But it is not acceptable that people wanting to do scholarly work on lewis (and general readers too) should be dependent, for their texts, on literary works whose authenticity has been questioned as these have. (I much regret Mrs. Lindskoog's departures into innuendos about cover art and so on, which weakened her case about the texts, making it easier for those so inclined to write her off as a kook.)

Again: Lewis is a major 20th-century British author. I do not see why we should be expected to use questionable texts, where no one would expect readers of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, or Virginia Woolf to do so if comparable questions had been raised.
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Postby larry gilman » March 20th, 2007, 6:46 pm

Dear Dale,

I agree with all you say. The fact that this debate has been relegated to fringe figures like Lindskoog (and me) is pathetic; Lewis is an important author and deserves really close scrutiny on these issues.

Frankly, I would love it too if Hooper could be vindicated and the book closed on the debate about the Dark Tower and othe ther challenged texts. I still think he's been a careless, selfish caretaker of the Lewis ouevre---no one but him to blame for that mangled edition of Screwtape, he edited it!---but that's a different matter.

By the way, I've posted longer critique of the Fowler claim on the Wardrobe's Apologetics forum, the thread "Dark Tower now verified as authentic?" The most imporant thing is that Fowler says he saw the MS of "Ten Years Later" on the same occasion in the early or mid 50s that he saw the Dark Tower MS, but he couldn't have---not if Roger Lancelyn Green [earlier misstated by me as Hooper] is correct in saying that the "Ten Years Later" fragment was written in 1959 (see p. 155 of The Dark Tower). A half-century later, is Fowler inadvertently manufacturing memories? It seems possible, at least. We need more than dubious 50-year-old reminiscences to resolve this issue.

Sincerely,

Larry
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Postby Dale Nelson » March 20th, 2007, 8:08 pm

Owen Barfield seems to have impressed innumerable people as a gentleman, and I will always remember him with affection and appreciation because he responded kindly to me with several letters late in his life. But, having said that, I have wondered if part of the problem we now deal with, vis-a-vis the integrity of Lewis's literary remains, is due to Barfield.

Barfield was Lewis's legal advisor and, I suppose, the most legally-qualified person to have anything to say about the Lewis estate right after Lewis's death. But it appears to me that it approximately in the years after Lewis's death that Barfield launched his sort of second career as speaker, guest professor, and essayist. I've wondered if Hooper's presence in some ways enabled Barfield to give less attention to the literary remains than he might otherwise have done, and more attention to his own interests. Is it completely clear, how it came to be that Hooper was entrusted with custody and editing of Lewis's literary remains? He had not established strong credentials as an editor, that I know of. But he was on the spot. The question arises, then: Might Barfield have done well to require that someone other than, or in addition to, Hooper, be involved - - someone who might have done a really good job of assuring readers of the integrity of those posthumous publications?

I do think it likely that, eventually, we'll all see that Lewis's readers have been very well served by the industrious Mr. Hooper. His editions of the letters in many ways seem to be just outstanding. Also, although I have never met him or corresponded with him, he seems to have impressed many Lewis researchers with helpfulness. I will go so far as to say that many of those researchers are Americans - - we Americans seem to value Lewis more than the British do - - and perhaps Hooper has been a lot more accommodating to them than some British figures would have been.
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Postby larry gilman » March 20th, 2007, 8:56 pm

Dear Dale,

On the mark, again. Mostly. I have reservations, of course, when you say "I do think it likely that, eventually, we'll all see that Lewis's readers have been very well served by the industrious Mr. Hooper. His editions of the letters in many ways seem to be just outstanding."

The letters HAVE been good: but with faults, I think, such as the historical cleansing that I have noted, where Hooper disappears ugly details about his own relationship with figures in the text (Warren Lewis, Lindskoog). Also with the fault (at least, I think it one: Stanley Anderson disagrees) that in Vol. I of the Collected Letters, as in the original publication of the CSL-to-Greeves letters (in They Stand Together), Hooper sees fit to highlight all the embarrassing sexual passages that Warren Lewis inked out when the letters were in his keeping, after CSL's death. As far as I know this a completely unique editorial choice---neither the author nor recipient of the letters had anything to do with highlighting the passages in question---and has no editorial justification that I can think of.

Hooper has indeed done some good work. He's also done some sloppy work and inserted some very questionable and exaggerated personal anecdotes into his wordy introductions. (My favorite is his bizarre claim that Warnie Lewis would sit in the same chair for two weeks without getting up, consuming nothing but whiskey.) He's also kept all the work to himself. Why is his editorial byline, and his alone, on virtually every posthumous Lewis work there is, with very few exceptions? It rankles. I don't like the exclusiveness of it. I don't like that Hooper has acted since 1963 as if he owned Lewis. Nor the way he has trickled out Lewis MSS from his secret hoard over the years, never making an all-at-once, finall, systematic, scholarly disclosure of the texts in his hands. That secretiveness has had a lot to do with generating suspicion about the authenticity of those texts. Surely some or all of them are authentic---at least, so I would bet if I had to bet---but he has created an unnecessary appearance of something going on.

And I for one will not declare the Dark Tower completely vindicated until something better than some apparently muddled geriatric memories can be adduced in its favor!

Best wishes,

Larry
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Postby Esther » March 20th, 2007, 9:21 pm

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Postby Dale Nelson » March 20th, 2007, 9:40 pm

Larry wrote, "Hooper has indeed done some good work. He's also done some sloppy work and inserted some very questionable and exaggerated personal anecdotes into his wordy introductions. (My favorite is his bizarre claim that Warnie Lewis would sit in the same chair for two weeks without getting up, consuming nothing but whiskey.) He's also kept all the work to himself. Why is his editorial byline, and his alone, on virtually every posthumous Lewis work there is, with very few exceptions? It rankles. I don't like the exclusiveness of it. I don't like that Hooper has acted since 1963 as if he owned Lewis. Nor the way he has trickled out Lewis MSS from his secret hoard over the years, never making an all-at-once, finall, systematic, scholarly disclosure of the texts in his hands. That secretiveness has had a lot to do with generating suspicion about the authenticity of those texts. Surely some or all of them are authentic---at least, so I would bet if I had to bet---but he has created an unnecessary appearance of something going on."

I'm afraid these remarks are basically correct. I'd add to them this one: have y'all seen the letter that Barfield wrote to the journal that published the original version of Lindskoog's inquiry? I haven't looked at that letter recently, but my memory of it is that it almost comes across like the frightened objections of a man who perhaps sensed that his own involvement in the matter was not impervious to question.
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Postby larry gilman » March 20th, 2007, 9:51 pm

Ah, that would be Barfield's 1979 letter to the journal Christianity & Literature. I have not read it; those issues are difficult to get (but the staff of the journal, which is still in business, will photocopy them for you for a reasonable fee). And some college libraries, somewhere, must have those issues in bound copies.

That's also when Hooper's roommate Tony Marchington wrote a fraudulent letter to the same journal, pretending to be a scientist who had analyzed soot on the Lewis property and disproved the bonfire-rescue story. Probably the idea was to get Lindskoog to fall for the phony science and then expose her as unreliable---but it didn't work.

I misspoke earlier---the imbroglio about the authenticity of the posthumous Lewis texts actually began in the late 1970s, not the late 1980s. So it's been almost 30 years now; Fowler didn't see fit to say anything about his memories of the Dark Tower MS until 2003, about 25 years after it all began! Odd. Notably odd.
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