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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.

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 He had rescued the unfinished science fiction novel in early 1964, he said, along with several other unpublished manuscripts.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 version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and putting it in my bank account."

Ten years after her original article, Lindskoog published her formal allegations against Hooper in The C. S. Lewis Hoax. She considered The Dark Tower to be "inferior writing … a blemish on [Lewis's] otherwise stable intellect." Furthermore, she believed that she detected in it "a suspicious echo" of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which was not published until 1962, the year before Lewis died. In addition, Lindskoog thought that the story did not match Lewis's other writing in "style, content, and sexual orientation." Her strongest argument, and the one upon which her other allegations depended, was that none of Lewis's friends had ever seen or heard of The Dark Tower. In his notes to The Dark Tower, Hooper mentioned that Gervase Mathew remembered Lewis reading from the manuscript at a gathering of the Inklings in 1939 or 1940. But Mathew had since died, and Lindskoog discounted this claim because Hooper could no longer confirm the story. She concluded that Hooper had forged the manuscript and lied about rescuing papers from a fire.

With the 1994 release of the movie Shadowlands, Lindskoog reissued her book as Light in the Shadowlands, adding two new chapters. In this edition, she reported on a new study by the Rev. A. Q. Morton, which employed cusum (cumulative sum) statistical analysis of the first 23 sentences of chapter one of The Dark Tower, the first 24 sentences of chapter four, and the first 25 sentences of chapter seven, comparing them with similar passages from Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength. This type of style analysis has been used to prove that Shakespeare did not write his plays, that Paul did not write some epistles attributed to him, and that Jesus did not speak some sayings attributed to him. It assumes that a person's use of language remains constant over one's lifetime and in all situations. Morton concluded that Lewis could not have written chapters one and four, but that he did write chapter seven. Therefore, The Dark Tower was "a composite work."

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February 2007, Vol. 51, No. 2

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