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In 2001, Lindskoog reissued her book again, adding another two chapters. In this volume, titled Sleuthing C. S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands, she added the C. S. Lewis Estate and the two stepsons of C. S. Lewis to her investigation, which had grown to conspiratorial dimensions. She portrayed Hooper in particular and the Lewis Estate in general as issuing bogus Lewis material for the money they could make.

Hooper never answered Lindskoog in print. He explained, "It would have been like fighting with the Tar Baby. Whatever I said, she would say something back."

Kathryn Lindskoog died October 21, 2003, but not before convincing many that The Dark Tower was not true Lewis.

Enter Alistair Fowler. He has worked for many years as a Renaissance scholar, devoting his life to Milton and Renaissance literature rather than to C. S. Lewis studies—although in 1967, he did edit Lewis's lecture notes on Spenser and publish them as Spenser's Images of Life with Cambridge University Press.

In 2003, Fowler wrote an essay for the Yale Review about Lewis as a doctoral supervisor. (I included his article in C. S. Lewis Remembered, a collection of essays by former students of Lewis.) Fowler began studies with Lewis in 1952. In describing how Lewis lectured, read, and supervised, Fowler also discussed how Lewis wrote.

In the Yale Review article, he mentioned that their relationship went to a different level when Lewis discovered that Fowler had writer's block with a piece of fantasy he was attempting. Lewis helped Fowler through his block and continued to ask how Fowler's fiction was coming. Fowler then added this about Lewis's writing habits:

Not that he always wrote without difficulty; sometimes he had to set a project aside for a long period. He showed me several unfinished or abandoned pieces (his notion of supervision included exchanging work in progress); these included "After Ten Years," The Dark Tower, and Till We Have Faces. Another fragment, a time-travel story, had been aborted after only a few pages.

Lewis told Fowler that getting to another world was a particular problem that had forced him to give up on several stories.

"Lewis certainly talked about TDT [The Dark Tower]," Fowler wrote to me. "He said he had been unable to carry it further. He didn't say when he had written the fragment. I got the impression that tdt had been meant as a sequel, but I have no idea at what stage in the development of the published trilogy."

"Like many fantasy writers," Fowler wrote, "Lewis wasn't much interested in the question of the literary quality of his writing."

It is not difficult to imagine how The Dark Tower originally fit into Lewis's science-fiction corpus. Rather than a fourth novel after That Hideous Strength, it probably began as a sequel to Out of the Silent Planet, with Ransom back on Earth and the space ship destroyed.

But several things happened to redirect Lewis's thoughts and interests: The war began, Charles Williams moved to Oxford and began lecturing on Paradise Lost, a publishing house asked Lewis to write The Problem of Pain, and the bbc asked him to speak to the nation about Christian faith. These events changed Lewis's writing program. In the course of dealing with pain, evil, and the Devil, he wrote The Screwtape Letters, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and a new sequel to Out of the Silent Planet that retold the story of the Fall. By then, The Dark Tower's storyline held less interest for him.

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February 2007, Vol. 51, No. 2