Reviews, Interviews, News, Commentaries, Excerpts, My Top 5 Books, Wilson's Bookmarks, Book AwardsShedding Light on The Dark Tower
Alastair Fowler, Regius Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, may have inadvertently settled the biggest Christian literary scandal of the last 50 years.
In 1988, Kathryn Lindskoog accused Walter Hooper, who was briefly C. S. Lewis's secretary and later a trustee of his literary estate, of forging a number of manuscripts that he attributed to Lewis, in particular The Dark Tower, an unfinished science-fiction novel.
"If Lindskoog is wrong," said Don King, author of C. S. Lewis, Poet, "[then] Lewis wrote some pieces that were stillborn at best or just plain bad at worst. If she is right, then someone is a forger." Indeed, Lindskoog's allegations raised doubts about anything ascribed to Lewis but not published in his lifetime.
The History of a Mystery
In 1966, Hooper announced the existence of The Dark Tower in the preface to Of Other Worlds. He had rescued the unfinished science fiction novel in early 1964, he said, along with several other unpublished manuscripts. They'd been in a pile of Lewis's old papers that Lewis's brother and their gardener were burning a few months after Lewis had died. In 1974, Roger Lancelyn Green included a synopsis of The Dark Tower in the Lewis biography he wrote with Hooper. In 1977, Hooper published The Dark Tower in a collection of Lewis fiction that included another manuscript he'd also saved from the fire, "The Man Born Blind."
For years, Walter Hooper said, he and Lindskoog carried on a very friendly correspondence. But "then in 1978," Hooper related, "she wrote critically of me in a magazine article to which Owen Barfield responded. After that, she became quite bitter. She accused me of taking the money from the sale of the film rights to the animated ...
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Jason Pratt
I wouldn't call it "settled" exactly. What Professor Poe dosen't mention (perhaps because he isn't aware of it), is that Kathryn didn't consider a mere argument from silence to be her strongest evidence (or even particularly strong evidence at all.) She believed Walter Hooper's own provenance trail, as described by himself in various public accounts, to be highly problematic. It was this which originally set her on the hunt, after a mere initial curiosity about the material; and it is this she primarily focuses on in her books.
Michael Covington
As a computational linguist, I don't trust Morton's cusum analysis. It's one thing to show that the style varies from text to text; it's quite another to conclude that the variation is due to a different author. Besides, why shouldn't Lewis's style be different when he's having trouble than when he's writing successfully? If nothing else, the aborted fragments would never be reworked by the author to perfect the style. Having said that, until I read about Fowler's evidence, I sat on the fence regarding the controversy about The Dark Tower. Something is badly wrong with it. But if nothing else, it pokes some well-deserved fun at the architecture of the Cambridge University Library, whose shadow I (literally) lived in for a year as a graduate student.
Kelly
I do believe, after reading several books by the same author from more than one author, that you can have a great writer write something really bad once in awhile. More power to the ones who recognize it before it gets published! As for Ms. Lindskoog's time spent trying to prove Mr Lewis didn't write it, think what could have been there for us to read had she spent the same amount of time writing something worth reading!