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In addition to the detective side of this hermeneutic endeavor, there is the straightforwardly academic side: giving the sources of the quotations with which Lewis liberally sprinkled his sentences; identifying the (sometimes extremely obscure) allusions to Euripides or Mrs. Humphrey Ward or the Second Book of Kings or what you will; translating the frequent phrases in Latin, Greek, French, or Italian. And so on and so forth. The amount of help that Hooper gives to the reader on every page is deeply impressive.
I emphasize the editor's role here for two reasons. First, because it is more evident in this collection than in the two previous volumes which cover the years when Lewis was less famous and writing to a smaller circle of people. There were 775 letters in Volume 2 and only 457 letters in Volume 1, but Volume 3 contains almost exactly 2,000; inevitably then, Hooper's function as epistolary circus-master becomes much more important. He has to give due weight to big-name interlocutors such as J.B. Priestley and Mervyn Peake and Austin Farrer, without overlooking the numerous minor figures who have no other literary memorial.
It ought to be admitted at this point that quality has not kept pace with quantity; the letters here feel typically less rich and rewarding than they do in the first two volumes. However, although there are fewer individual plums, there is, all told, a greater sense of the man in the round. We see Lewis negotiating with publishers, correcting proofs, exchanging ideas with scholarly colleagues, advising other writers. (The most interesting letter, to my mind, is the lengthy critique he gives of the manuscript of Barfield's Saving the Appearances, a model of forceful, detailed, but inoffensive counsel.) That is the "professional" Lewis. Then there is the "pastoral" Lewis, the saintly sage giving encouragement and insight to struggling fellow Christians, amongst whom were more than his fair share of lame ducks and hypochondriacs. It is poignant to see how this Lewis becomes mellower and more reflective as the years go by. There is also the "personal" Lewis, both commonplace and intimate: sending out that tedious thing, the round-robin change-of-address note after his move to Cambridge, but also telling his young Narnia readers how he likes to wallow in his bath with only his nostrils sticking out, and lamenting to his new wife ("well, darling?") that his tonsils and glands are sore and that he wants to be fussed over. As we switch back and forth between these different Lewises—the busy professor, the conscientious "hot-gospeller," the anxious paterfamilias, in addition to the belletrist known to us from the earlier volumes—Hooper's dexterity in meshing the gears shows its worth.
But there is a second reason for emphasizing Hooper's editorial role, and that relates to his treatment of one Kathryn Lindskoog, a Californian to whom Lewis wrote letters on seven occasions during these years. Readers of Books & Culture are probably aware that the late Mrs. Lindskoog, having employed Hooper to write a preface for her first book on Lewis way back in the 1970s, then turned against him (for reasons which may one day become public knowledge) and started a long, noisy campaign of vilification. She accused him of forging Lewis manuscripts (most notably The Dark Tower) and of committing various other remarkable misdemeanors, such as speaking with an English accent despite being American. Yes, seriously. Needless to say, her allegations are fantastic and Hooper has always declined to dignify the charges with any kind of written public response. Here, however, he comes close to responding, but one needs to be attentive to notice it. In a footnote to page 891, he shows, as a simple matter of fact, that Lindskoog knew Lewis' works less well than she thought she did. In a sketch of her in the biographical appendix, he politely overlooks all the titles she published in her efforts to ruin him and praises the "wonderful fortitude" with which she bore her multiple sclerosis. And on page 1669 he points out (again, with devastating matter-of-factness) that Alastair Fowler, writing in The Yale Review, disclosed that he had seen the manuscript of The Dark Tower in Lewis' company before Hooper had met either Lewis or Fowler.
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