Into the Wardrobe

Lindskoog was not beyond stretching the truth herself at times though ;). She made much of the fact that she met Lewis and I got the impression that she liked to set herself up as someone who 'knew Lewis personally' when in fact as far as I know she only met him once..

If a handwritten manuscript of these short stories exists shouldn't that settle it once and for all? Can't they analyse the handwriting?

This has been (and continues to be) passionately debated.

My own perspective (for whatever it is -- or isn't -- worth) is this: while Lindskoog did, I think, clearly establish that Hooper (especially in an earlier period of his work) was not nearly as careful with some of his statements/methodologies as he could (and, likely, ought to) have been, she just doesn't make the case for establishing the inauthenticity of The Dark Tower -- her final position is too reliant on subjective sentiments along the lines of "Well, Jack just couldn't have written that!" And, with regret, I believe that Lindskoog's later work itself brings into question her own objectivity on the matter (i.e., personal animus against Hooper and the Lewis estate) as well as her own scholarly methodology.

The citations of handwriting analysis cited on her website have themselves been seriously challenged.

It's a truly sad business, to be sure.

I think that the publication of Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle-earth series sheds much light on what the Inklings were doing in the late 30s -- and that Dark Tower fits believably into that matrix of interests and efforts.

Although there, indeed, remains a fair degree of passion on the matter, it seems to me that, after taking cognizance of the issues that Lindskoog raised, the balance of Lewis scholarship now accepts that Tower is Lewis'.

(David Downing's Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy [University of Massachusetts Press, ISBN: 087023997X] comes to mind.)

I wonder if we're not getting into the logical fallacy of False Dilemma in this discussion--maybe it's not either Lindskoog or Hooper that is wrong, but that both may be, in their own individual ways, nut-jobs.

I have for some reason never trusted or warmed to Walter Hooper--can't say why, just never liked the man (though I've never met him personally--I'm talking vibes). I have no difficulty in supposing that Hooper has been less than rigorously accurate in some of his statements. But I have to say also that the few times I've tried reading Lindskoog's arguments in the case, I get the distinct impression of things fizzing and popping in her head, which makes me want to back slowly away.

I have read The Dark Tower, and have zero difficulty in believing that Lewis wrote it--it's just that it's really not very good. People who say "Jack wouldn't write something like that" don't seem to have a first-hand understanding of how things get created. Some years back, I was visiting a friend in Dallas (Texas), who was a professional photographer. I was looking at an album of slides he had taken, leafing from page to page in wonder. The photographs were beautiful, perfect. I turned to him and asked, "How did you manage to get a book full of such incredible shots?"

"By throwing these away," he said, pointing to a wastepaper basket full to the brim of rejected (and not so good) shots. "The secret to any great art," he said, "is, you just don't let anybody see the crap."

I think that with TDT, we just got a rare glimpse of the crap. Admittedly, it's Lewisian crap and much better than I could do on the best day I had, but not up to his regular standard. That's likely the reason he left it unfinished.

I have next to no trust in computer-based analyses of writing styles; these would only work in analysing the literary styles of hacks, who slavishly write formula prose and stories (any random sampling of best-seller writers will give you examples of what I mean); this is harder to manage with real writers, whose minds are alive and still responding creatively (as opposed to by rote) to the world around them.

Selah!