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Christianity Today, February, 2007 |

Shedding Light on The Dark Tower

A C.S. Lewis mystery is solved.

Harry Lee Poe | posted 2/02/2007 09:17AM

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Lewis After All

Joe Christopher, for many years professor of English at Tarleton State University, wrote the foreword to Lindskoog's C. S. Lewis Hoax. Christopher corresponded with Fowler after his Yale Review article, and he found that Fowler had clear memories of the Stinging Man in chapter one, which statistician Morton had declared Lewis did not write.

Lindskoog had to be wrong when she claimed that Lewis wasn't involved at all in the book's first part, Christopher now believes. It is a work by Lewis, he says, but it "may have been reworked in part."

Fowler's account also raises doubts about the validity of Morton's statistical analysis. According to Christopher, Morton "didn't say anything about more than one writer for the first passage, just for the book as a whole. Fowler's article and his letter to me show that some version of the Stinging Man opening was by Lewis, so either someone else wrote the opening of the current work (the first 23 sentences) as an introduction to Lewis's material, or Morton's analysis was wrong."

In sum, everyone—including Kathryn Lindskoog—is right to be passionate about the integrity of Lewis's body of writing. But we know now that worries about The Dark Tower were unfounded and that the bitter divisions they caused were unwarranted.

Perhaps we too easily idolize an important thinker like Lewis, thinking he never had a bad day, never struggled to write, and never committed a flawed plotline to paper. Fowler's revelation of Lewis's struggles to write and his shifting priorities should help us be more realistic in our appreciation of this modern saint.

Harry Lee Poe is Charles Colson professor of faith and culture at Union University, Jackson, Tennessee. He and coeditor Rebecca Whitten Poe recently published C. S. Lewis Remembered (Zondervan, 2006).

Related Elsewhere:

Christian History & Biography's has two issues on C.S.Lewis (1985 and 2005), who was also one of their ten most influential Christians of the 20th century.

C.S. Lewis Superstar, the cover article for Christianity Today's December 2005 issue, focuses on Lewis' literary career and influence.

Kathryn Lindskoog published her website before her death (2003); it has many of her articles on Lewis.

Other articles that talk about the The Dark Tower controversy include:

C.S. Lewis: Mere Marketing? | Publisher, estate under fire for handling of C. S. Lewis's identity. (August 6, 2001)

Weblog: The War for C.S. Lewis: The Prequel | Gabriel's blessing for the Guthrie family (July 1, 2001)

The Dark Tower , Sleuthing C.S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands,and C. S. Lewis Remembered: Collected Reflections of Students, Friends, & Colleagues (edited by Harry Lee Poe, contains Alastair Fowler's essay on The Dark Tower) are available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

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February 2007, Vol. 51, No. 2

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Jason Pratt

Posted: February 12, 2007 3:02 PM

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

Posted: February 10, 2007 9:15 PM

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

Posted: February 07, 2007 9:02 PM

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!

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