CS Lewis Mystery Solved? - Walter Hooper and The Dark Tower

Charn_Tim

Charn_Tim

The Scholar, O.L.
Knight of the Noble Order
Today as I was home at my parents' house for Christmas break, my eyes fortuitously landed on an article from a Feb. 2007 edition of Christianity Today, entitled: Shedding Light on The Dark Tower: A C.S. Lewis mystery is solved. The link to the CT magazine article is here-I believe it is publicly accessible.

Here is my brief summary of the article:

Walter Hooper, currently literary trustee of Lewis' literary estate and formerly his secretary for a brief time, has previously been accused of plagiarism and literary scandal. He released several works which he claimed were from Lewis' journals, yet no one else close to Lewis had heard of them. These released stories, among them The Dark Tower have received less than flattering critical acclaim, and to some, it did not seem like typical brilliant Lewis writing. So Walter Hooper had been accused by Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog (among others?) of fabricating this story along with some others published under Lewis' name in an attempt to sell more books.

But in 2003, Alistair Fowler, who studied under Lewis starting in 1952, wrote an essay for the Yale Review about Lewis as a doctoral supervisor. In this essay, Fowler discussed that Lewis, while helping Fowler overcome writers' block on a fantasy work, showned him several unfinished fantasy pieces of his own including The Dark Tower and Til We Have Faces.

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So it seems to me that this is a closed case. Walter Hooper should be "acquitted" in our eyes (so to speak) of plagiarism right? Are there any other ethical-literary uncertainties surrounding Hooper?
 
I read The Dark Tower and found it quite captivating. It seemed like the kind of rough drafted thing one might expect from C.S. Lewis. I never understood why Lindskoog couldn't accept Hooper as Lewis's literary executor.

I'm not sure this makes it a "closed case", but the testimony of this one scholar may help in resolving this matter, which is needed so that the works in question can get a serious look as do Tolkien's previouly unpublished materials.
 
Lindskoog wasn't the only person, or even the only Lewis scholar, who had questions about Hooper. I had personal conversations and correspondence with Sheldon Vanauken, who had his reservations about Hooper, but not as far as to accuse him of plagiarism. I don't think Hooper made many friends by showing up so late in Lewis' life, playing a small part in his work (Lewis went most of his life without a secretary), and then coming out after his death as if they'd been bosom buddies and confidantes for years. (I understand that Hooper began downplaying that as time went by.)

I don't know Hooper or any of the other major players in this drama personally, so everything I'm going on is second- or third- hand. I appreciated Lindskoog's devotion to Lewis and the integrity of his work, but it also seems clear that the "Hooper issue" became a hobby horse that she rode literally to her grave. I'm glad that this titbit of history came out to clear up some of the murk - I'd much rather believe that Lewis had "bad days" and inferior stories than that someone would publish their work under his name posthumously.

One thing this helps me with is the question of the "blasted timeline". That thing is historically weak and contradicts the stories in several places, and I haven't known what to do with it. Was it a later attempt by Lewis to impose some order and context to his imaginary world? Or was it a construct of someone else being published under Lewis' name? As long as the Dark Tower question was open, the latter seemed more likely, since someone willing to plagiarize a novella would not hesitate at a timeline. But if we can lay the Dark Tower controversy to rest, I can more satisfactorily embrace the former alternative: that the timeline was at least sketched out by Lewis, but could not of itself resolve the contradictions and inconsistencies he'd written into the stories over the years.
 
littlemanpoet said:
Pardon my ignorance: to what timeline are you referring?
Click to expand...

There was a discussion of the timeline in this thread. Apparently, Hooper released a previously unpublished timeline of the England/Narnian history, which he found in some journal or notes of Lewis and there are clear contradictions between this released timeline and the books.

Regarding the timeline, and Walter Hooper's involvement: in my mind, it's unjust to accuse Hooper of forging it (and as for the rest of it I do view Fowler's testimony as confirmation that Hooper was innocent in the case of the Dark Tower and other short stories of Lewis). However, if Hooper released the timeline claiming it has authoritative status, then he should be accused of nothing more than naiveté. In other words, if he thinks a sketched out timeline in some notes which disagrees with published material is an accurate potrayal of what Lewis thinks, then he is completely naive. Anyhow, I agree with POTW that the most likely scenario is that CSL was just toying around trying to impose some temporal order, but in the process he surely must have realized that this postulated timeline is contradictory to events in his stories and given up, leaving it unpublished for good reason.
 
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