Photo illustration by Dave Allen; C.S. Lewis photo from Corbis

Holy War in the Shadowlands

A new book revives old allegations and the struggle for the intellectual legacy of C.S. Lewis

By SCOTT McLEMEE

Kathryn Lindskoog always wanted to be a detective when she grew up.

ALSO SEE: Colloquy Live: Join a live, online discussion with Joe Christopher, a professor emeritus of English at Tarleton State University and an expert on C.S. Lewis, on the revived debate over the author and his legacy, on Thursday, July 19, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time. Online Resources on C.S. Lewis and the Debate Over His Legacy The 3 Sides of C.S. Lewis

And that dream has, in its own way, come true. An independent scholar living in Orange, Calif., Ms. Lindskoog has for many years been gathering evidence of what she believes to be a truly diabolical literary crime. Her book Sleuthing C.S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands (Mercer University Press, August) contends that several literary and theological works attributed to the British author are, in fact, the product of systematic forgery. Her arguments are well-known in Lewisian circles, where they have provoked intense scholarly discussion, not to mention a certain amount of litigation.

Sherlock Holmes determined that the source of most wrongdoing in the world was the sinister Professor Moriarty. And Ms. Lindskoog has found her nemesis in Walter Hooper, who bears the formal title of literary adviser to the estate of C.S. Lewis. Mr. Hooper was a graduate student in English at the University of Kentucky when he met Lewis in 1963 and served briefly as his secretary. Mr. Hooper now lives in Oxford, England. He has edited numerous posthumous editions of the Cambridge don's writings, including works of poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and personal correspondence.

Whatever the merits of the case against Mr. Hooper, a great deal is at stake for

Online Resources on C.S. Lewis and the Debate Over His Legacy The best place to start exploring Lewisian matters online is a comprehensive and well-organized site called C.S. Lewis: 20th-Century Christian Knight, compiled by Dave Armstrong. This site provides a considerable amount of information about Lewis -- including extensive bibliographies of primary and secondary materials. It also provides links to numerous Lewis societies, online journals, and discussion groups. Lewisian concerns predominate at Lindentree: The Literary Works of Kathryn Lindskoog. Besides information about Ms. Lindskoog's books, the site offers a number of her articles and essays, including her reminiscence titled "Meeting C.S. Lewis." Ms. Lindskoog edits a quarterly newsletter, The Lewis Legacy, largely devoted to the controversy over the author's estate. Selections appear in the online edition, including a number of articles about The Dark Tower. No comparable site exists for critiques of Ms. Lindskoog's theories. However, back issues of The Salinas Valley Lewisian (1992-95), a quarterly journal devoted primarily to discussions of her work, are available from the publication's editor.

admirers of Lewis. While his fantasy novels set in the land of Narnia are widely regarded as classics of children's literature, the rest of Lewis's work occupies an ambiguous status: Specialists tend to regard Lewis as either old-fashioned (in the case of his critical writings) or an inspired amateur (in the field of Christian theology), but his entire oeuvre is studied closely by people of the most diverse backgrounds. To many, Lewis's gifts seem more than literary or intellectual; some readers think of him as divinely inspired. The possibility that his canon has been tampered with, then, proves deeply troubling to true believers.

But Ms. Lindskoog's book also raises some of the most fundamental questions in literary scholarship. What are the criteria for including a work in the body of an author's writings? What's the status of a manuscript that a writer might want destroyed? And, most passion-inducing of all: Who is entitled to speak on behalf of an author, to defend the spirit, as well as the letter, of the work?

Ms. Lindskoog first expressed concern about Mr. Hooper in her 1978 paper "Some Questions in C.S. Lewis Scholarship" in the journal Christianity and Literature. She argued that Mr. Hooper had circulated misleading stories about the duration and extent of his contact with the author, that he acquired unpublished manuscripts through suspicious means, and that his editions of certain Lewis writings had taken liberties with the original text. Through a steady flow of articles and books, Ms. Lindskoog has expanded the bill of complaints considerably. She now argues that the posthumous Lewis canon includes spurious works, which may be recognized by what she calls their "un-Lewisian" style and content. Ms. Lindskoog also contends that Mr. Hooper has abused his position to plant homoerotic insinuations in editions of Lewis's work.

James Como, a professor of rhetoric and public communication at York College of the City University of New York, is appalled that such accusations will have the imprimatur of an academic press. A founding member of the New York C.S. Lewis Society and the author of a monograph on the author's work, Mr. Como dismisses Ms. Lindskoog's work. "This is Jerry Springer stuff," he says. "It's good gossip, bad journalism, and not at all scholarship."

			Kathryn Lindskoog has continued her work on C.S. Lewis despite her multiple sclerosis, which sometimes leaves her unable to move. (Photograph by Tim Rue)

But Ms. Lindskoog has her academic supporters. Dozens of them have added their names to a petition calling for the estate to answer the charges. (Other signatories include the science-fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as Richard Wilbur, the former U.S. poet laureate.) "Can any of Lindskoog's arguments be dismissed?" asks Joe Christopher, a professor emeritus of English at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Tex., in his introduction to Sleuthing. "Perhaps some can. But their power is in their accumulative weight. I do not think, overall, that they can be dismissed. Any ad hominem attacks on Lindskoog will not eliminate her textual and historical arguments."

Supporters portray Ms. Lindskoog as a scholarly David, armed with little more than a keyboard and her close knowledge of Lewis's work, fighting to bring down a Goliath of international corporate power. That imagery of mismatched combatants is reinforced by reference to Ms. Lindskoog's physical condition. She has multiple sclerosis and requires 24-hour medical care. The disease at times leaves her almost completely paralyzed, forcing her to write on her back with a keyboard propped above her.

			Cartoons from an earlier book by Ms. Lindskoog illustrate her concerns about Mr. Hooper's bonfire story and the worldly motivations of some Lewisians -- and her hunch about who most enjoys The Dark Tower.

Even her toughest critics marvel at her ability to keep writing, in extraordinarily trying circumstances. But they also say that Ms. Lindskoog is prone to attributing intellectual dishonesty and low motivation to other Lewisians. Her approach to judging evidence does not always win high marks, either. Granted, the difference between gossip and literary history is sometimes one generation. But few scholars would begin a footnote, as Ms. Lindskoog does, with the phrase "Rumor has it ..."

In any case, the timing of her book is remarkable. According to an internal HarperCollins memo, leaked to the press this spring, the publisher wants to capitalize on Harry Potter-mania by repackaging the Narnia books to minimize Lewis's religious imagery. For instance, the death and resurrection of Aslan, a lion who frees the land of Narnia from the dominion of the White Witch, is unmistakably a reference to Christ, "the lion of Judah." In the proposed sequels that the publisher wants to commission, such theological overtones would be carefully avoided -- making Narnia a secular (and no doubt more profitable) place for young consumers to visit.

HarperCollins responded to the furor over the leaked memo with a short statement promising to publish the works of Lewis "as written by the author, with no alteration," but not addressing the various proposed Narnia spinoffs. Many Lewisians remain outraged; the sheer opportunism is breathtaking even to a nonbeliever. More clearly than any accusation in Ms. Lindskoog's book, the "de-Christianizing" of Narnia's landscape confirms the suspicion of some admirers that C.S. Lewis the author is ill-served by the company known as C.S. Lewis, Pte Ltd. (The abbreviations stand for Private Trade Entity Limited.)

As for Mr. Hooper, he has refused to respond publicly in any detail to Ms. Lindskoog's accusations -- a silence that her partisans insist is tantamount to a confession of guilt. When asked by e-mail about the recent Narnia controversy, he makes it clear that he is an employee of C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd., not a policy maker. (Just who does control the Lewis estate is, for outsiders, a puzzling matter. It appears to be run as an international corporation, and Sleuthing C.S. Lewis includes speculation on its activities. Questions posed to C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd. were referred to HarperCollins, which had not responded at press time.)

			Walter Hooper, right, served briefly as C.S. Lewis's secretary shortly before the writer died, in 1963. Now literary adviser to Lewis's estate, he replies to charges that he has fabricated works: "There are no forgeries."

In discussing Ms. Lindskoog's work, Mr. Hooper sounds both bitter and weary. "For the record," he states to The Chronicle, "there are no forgeries."

Even apart from l'affaire Lindskoog, one thing is clear: C.S. Lewis inspires great passion. Some atheists have converted under the influence of Lewis's religious writings -- which directly challenge the assumption that Christian doctrine is antiquated or irrational. (Lewis has been called "an apostle to the skeptics.") Other readers are transfixed by his fiction, with its visionary sense of a hidden universe-next-door, available to the imagination. And Lewis remains a figure of vital significance to some Christian academics for whom the author is not just a topic of study, but a beloved role model.

One result has been the emergence of a thriving Lewisian subculture, particularly in the United States. There are countless reading groups, many of them connected with churches of diverse denominations.

A number of Lewisian organizations have sprung up, often with a quasi-academic flavoring. They sponsor lectures and seminars on the author's work, and a number of them publish journals to which both professors and amateur scholars contribute.

This following is the legacy not only of Lewis himself but of the late Clyde Kilby, a professor of English at Wheaton College, in Illinois. Frustrated that both the secular and evangelical worlds alike treated "Christian intellectual" as a contradiction in terms, Kilby sought to foster an academic milieu in which born-again writers and scholars could thrive. "As long as we suppose writing to be an after-dinner exercise in sentimentality," he once said, "we shall continue to produce trash." Well before Time magazine put Lewis on its cover in 1947, Kilby was encouraging his students to emulate the author's vigorous prose and "sanctified imagination."

Besides offering a popular course on Lewis, Kilby published some of the earliest scholarship on the author. His impressive collection of Lewisiana (including their correspondence from 1953 through 1963) is housed at Wheaton. And in 1956, he helped organize the Conference on Christianity and Literature, which still exists; since 1967, it has held its annual meetings in conjunction with the Modern Language Association.

While Kilby's proselytizing laid the groundwork for Lewisian studies, the author's significance to his readers remains an intensely private affair. "C.S. Lewis is one of those writers who takes hold of a person's intellect and imagination, and rearranges the furniture," as Mr. Como puts it. "The inner landscape changes. With some readers, that experience leads to a kind of proprietary attitude, a feeling that 'he's mine.'"

			James Como, a professor at the City University of New York, on Kathryn Lindskoog's work: "This is Jerry Springer stuff. It's good gossip, bad journalism, and not at all scholarship." (Photograph by Frank Fournier)

Few literary scholars have devoted their lives so completely to a single author as Kathryn Lindskoog and Walter Hooper. Each American fell under Lewis's spell during that transitional phase between adolescence and full adulthood. Both corresponded with Lewis. Both treasure memories of time they spent in his company. (Those encounters took place during the summer, when each of them was visiting England on scholarships.) Over the past five decades, each has built a sense of personal identity around that formative moment of contact with Lewis. They feel that their writing on his work is, in a strong sense, "authorized" by what the author himself gave them, spiritually and intellectually.

Ms. Lindskoog still recalls the circumstances vividly. In 1954, as a junior at the University of Redlands in Redlands, Calif., Kathryn Stillwell (as she was then known) was looking for a topic for her English honors thesis. By coincidence, a young man named John Lindskoog was seeking to win her affections, and he hoped that lending her some books might help his case. One of them was a title by Lewis. She describes her response as "instant affinity." Over the next year and a half, she immersed herself in the author's work, writing an analysis of the Narnia stories in relation to the rest of Lewis's writings. (As for John, he still receives a portion of her attention; they have been married since 1959.)

When she sent Lewis the thesis, the author responded warmly, saying that he read it with pleasure. "For one thing, you know my work better than anyone I've met; certainly better than I do myself. ... But secondly, you (alone of all the critics I've met) realize the connection or even the unity of all the books -- scholarly, fantastic, theological -- and make me appear a single author, not a man who impersonates half a dozen authors which is what I seem to most." This passage soon becomes familiar to readers of Ms. Lindskoog's work. The afternoon she spent with Lewis in 1956 made no less strong an impression. Seeing her off, the author shook Ms. Lindskoog's hand, which she did not wash for two days.

After receiving her master's degree, Ms. Lindskoog spent many years teaching high school and serving as an adjunct at a number of colleges and seminaries. Despite the multiple sclerosis that began affecting her in the 1960's, Ms. Lindskoog, now 66, has published more than a dozen books -- most either devoted to Lewis or mentioning him prominently. In recent years, her scholarly attention has turned to one of Lewis's favorite authors, Dante; her three-volume "retelling" of the Divine Comedy in prose has won some favorable reviews.

Around the time Ms. Lindskoog was discovering his work, Lewis began corresponding with another young American, Walter Hooper, who in later years said that he spent his time in the army with a rifle in one hand and a copy of Lewis's Miracles in the other. By 1963, when he finally met the author at his home in the village of Headington Quarry, Mr. Hooper was studying to be an Episcopal priest and was doing graduate work in English. (He later converted to Roman Catholicism.) For several weeks that summer, he assisted Lewis with his correspondence. When he headed back to the University of Kentucky for the fall semester, it was with the understanding, Mr. Hooper says, that he would soon return to become Lewis's full-time secretary.

Following Lewis's death in November 1963, Mr. Hooper returned to England anyway -- encouraged, he says, by friends of the author. Over the next few years, he assisted the literary estate in readying Lewis's poetry and essays for publication. By the early 1970's, he was employed as a literary consultant to the estate, a position he has held ever since. He co-wrote the first biography of Lewis, and a memoir of his time with the author appears in C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (Macmillan, 1979), a collection of reminiscences edited by CUNY's Mr. Como.

Between 1964 and 2000, Mr. Hooper prepared editions of 27 books by Lewis. His introductions to those volumes run to exactly 308 pages, according to Ms. Lindskoog, who has been keeping count.

Ms. Lindskoog sometimes refers to Mr. Hooper as her friend. They began corresponding in 1965, exchanging dozens of letters over the years. When a revised version of her honors thesis appeared as The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land: The Theology of C.S. Lewis Expressed in His Fantasies for Children (Eerdmans, 1973), Mr. Hooper even wrote what Ms. Lindskoog now describes, by e-mail, as "a delightful (but not at all true) preface." When they finally met in 1975, she recalls, Mr. Hooper embraced her as if she were a dear old companion. ("I liked her at that time," recalls Mr. Hooper.)

Their face-to-face encounter occurred at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., during MythCon, the annual convention of the Mythopoetic Society. It is an event that can only be called fateful, for it was during Mr. Hooper's talk at MythCon that Ms. Lindskoog first heard about the bonfire.

Now, finding one's way through the arguments in Sleuthing C.S. Lewis is no simple task. The accusations concerning Mr. Hooper's role in the posthumous estate are many, and complexly related. Readers not yet familiar with the controversy may have the sense of trying to navigate their way through a landscape by Hieronymous Bosch. Yet at the center of the painting is one definitive scene: an afternoon in 1964 when, Mr. Hooper says, he rescued some manuscripts from a blaze.

As Mr. Hooper tells it, a grief-stricken Warren Lewis purged the home he and his brother shared of an enormous mass of paper. The resulting bonfire, tended by the groundskeeper, lasted for three days. Warren had separated out a box of materials he thought Mr. Hooper might want to look over; fortunately, the young American arrived just in time to keep them, too, from being consigned to the fire.

He kept both the manuscripts themselves and the story of the bonfire a secret until after Warren Lewis's death in 1973. The box included a number of works that Mr. Hooper has published since then.

The scene of a posthumous literary legacy plucked, almost literally, from the flames is certainly dramatic. But Ms. Lindskoog says it never happened. She obtained a signed statement by the groundskeeper saying that Mr. Hooper's story is untrue. Ms. Lindskoog believes that Mr. Hooper has a knack for telling colorful but misleading tales about his connection with Lewis. In particular, she points to occasions when Mr. Hooper has described himself as the author's "companion-secretary" and implied that they worked together for years, rather than a few weeks. Mr. Hooper's writings do contain a conspicuous abundance of anecdotes from their time together; he has suggested that Lewis regarded him as the son he never had.

Ms. Lindskoog is not alone in keeping tabs on Mr. Hooper. Suspicions about him emerged during the 1960's, in the circle around Clyde Kilby, who acquired Wheaton College's impressive Lewis collection from the author's brother. For the "Kilbyites" (as one Hooperite has dubbed them), the former secretary was a latecoming interloper who pushed his way into undue influence in shaping the Lewis legacy.

To those already suspicious of him, the bonfire episode sounded like a cover story: They suggested that Mr. Hooper had actually stolen manuscripts, then concocted a tale to explain how he had come to possess them.

Following Kilby's death in 1986, Ms. Lindskoog (who lauded "the dean of American C.S. Lewis studies" as "a good-natured man with clean hands and a pure heart") carried the doubts about the bonfire story to a new level.

In 1988, she began arguing that Mr. Hooper had not simply stolen manuscripts, but was actually forging them.

She cites testimony from sources who indicate that Mr. Hooper now identifies very strongly with Lewis. They report that he has cultivated a British accent, and professes himself unfamiliar with the ways of citizens of the United States, addressing them as "you Americans." His handwriting has also come to resemble that of Lewis, as has been noted by Nicolas Barker, a scholar from the British Library, in an otherwise highly unfavorable discussion of Ms. Lindskoog's work in the journal Essays in Criticism.

Ms. Lindskoog expresses concern over the authenticity of several titles that Mr. Hooper says he rescued from destruction. But one posthumous work especially troubles her: an unfinished piece called The Dark Tower, first published in 1977.

Mr. Hooper has indicated that the Dark Tower manuscript might have been drafted in the late 1930's, as a continuation of Lewis's science-fiction trilogy about the cosmic voyages of a don named Ransom.

The Dark Tower is a time-travel adventure in which Ransom encounters a hideous villain, the Stingerman, so-called because of a large, red protuberance on his forehead. He uses this horn to inject poison at the base of the spine of his (mostly male) victims, thereby transforming them into automatons. The piece is fragmentary and, in the opinion of most readers, simply awful. It is seldom discussed in the scholarly literature on Lewis. Until Ms. Lindskoog began questioning its legitimacy, the critical consensus was that the author himself abandoned the story out of embarrassment.

Beyond her doubts about the provenance of the manuscript, Ms. Lindskoog argues that both its pulp-fiction style and homoerotic content are "un-Lewisian." Two computer analyses have compared The Dark Tower with the prose of Lewis's other science-fiction writings; Ms. Lindskoog contends the results confirm her suspicion that Tower is by a different author.

She also reports that a document-authentication expert has stated that the ink on certain pages is of a variety not manufactured before the early 1950's.

That simply means that the manuscript was written later than Mr. Hooper first surmised, reply some Lewis scholars, who also have doubts about the reliability of those computer studies, which were performed more than a decade ago.

"I have great respect for Kay," says Don King, a professor of English at Montreat College in Montreat, N.C., "but I don't find her theory about The Dark Tower very convincing." Mr. King, who is editor of the Christian Scholar's Review, concedes that he is not a document-authentication specialist. But on two occasions, he has examined the manuscript, now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. "The handwriting there is consistent with the countless other documents by Lewis that I have examined over the last seven or eight years," he says, referring to work on his book C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent State University Press, 2001).

Mr. King thinks that Ms. Lindskoog's claim is ultimately stylistic: Lewis was a talented writer, but Tower is lurid and clumsy, hence it must be by someone else. He does not find this argument persuasive. "No one, even a great writer like Lewis, can write golden prose or poetry all the time," he says. "Even Homer nodded."

Not all of the debate over Ms. Lindskoog's ideas has been strictly scholarly. When she first made charges of forgery against Mr. Hooper in her book The C.S. Lewis Hoax (Multnomah, 1988), they provoked heated discussion in evangelical Christian magazines -- and among supporters of the C.S. Lewis Foundation, based in Redlands, Calif. The foundation's mission statement calls for it "to encourage a renaissance of Christian scholarly and artistic expression within the mainstream of the contemporary university," mainly through seminars and retreats.

Among the foundation's projects has been an effort to turn the author's home, called the Kilns, into a center for Lewis scholars. Given Mr. Hooper's prominence in the Lewisian world, some members of the foundation wanted him to be involved in the Kilns restoration project. But once the fraud allegations surfaced, says Stan Mattson, the director of the foundation, there was concern that Mr. Hooper's participation would violate the integrity of the effort.

In 1989, at a hearing conducted by the foundation, a dozen Lewisian experts examined the charges in Ms. Lindskoog's book. Particularly troubling for an evangelical constituency was her charge that Mr. Hooper might be planting gay references in the Lewis canon. For example, Ms. Lindskoog claims that They Stand Together, the title of a collection of Lewis's adolescent correspondence with a friend, edited by Mr. Hooper, "happens to be a little-known homosexual euphemism on both sides of the Atlantic."

To check this theory, Mr. Mattson, whose Ph.D. is in American history, says that he contacted gay history groups in both the United States and Britain. No one had heard of it. But Mr. Mattson points out that one scholar did find that Lewis himself used the phrase: In The Four Loves (1960), describing two close friends, Lewis said, "They stand together in a silent world."

The foundation concluded that Ms. Lindskoog had not proved her case. While conceding that Mr. Hooper may have embellished his resume somewhat, the dozen participants voted to clear him of the charges of forgery and editorial malfeasance.

Ms. Lindskoog was not satisfied. In 1994, she reissued her book with a chapter criticizing what she saw as a coverup of Mr. Hooper's wrongdoing. She hinted that the nonprofit foundation was, like the literary estate itself, a money-making operation -- and that they might not be altogether distinct enterprises. As Ms. Lindskoog portrayed him, Mr. Mattson became a figure only slightly less culpable than Mr. Hooper himself in the corruption of the author's legacy: a servant, not of God, but of Mammon.

Mr. Mattson threatened to sue Ms. Lindskoog's publisher, which then withdrew the book.

Representatives of Mercer University Press say they received "veiled threats" of legal action against them from a couple of Lewisians after sending out a detailed press release about Sleuthing C.S. Lewis. Mr. Mattson told The Chronicle that he has warned Mercer not to publish anything "repeating the libels in her earlier book."

The lawyers should not plan vacations anytime soon; the chapter about the foundation in Sleuthing C.S. Lewis is, in all essentials, identical to the 1994 book.

Ms. Lindskoog's supporters portray Mr. Mattson's threatened action against her publishers as the disgraceful legal harassment of a heroic individual whose literary research is threatening vested interests. But the complete picture is a bit more complex. Ms. Lindskoog, after all, ushered in the 1990's with a lawsuit of her own.

Following the 1989 inquiry by the foundation, two academics from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., gave an interview about their participation in the hearing. Thomas Schmidt and David Downing -- at that time professors of religious education and English, respectively -- discussed Ms. Lindskoog's book at some length; a transcript appeared in the alumni newspaper. Besides finding her charges against Mr. Hooper to be groundless, they spoke of what they considered lapses in her documentation and argument.

In October 1990, Ms. Lindskoog filed a libel suit against the professors and the college, asking for damages of $3-million. Besides having what she calls her "impeccable" scholarship libeled before the 8,000 readers of Westmont's alumni newspaper, she claimed that the distress worsened her health. The case was dismissed, but Ms. Lindskoog appealed. In November 1992, it was dismissed again -- this time with prejudice, meaning Ms. Lindskoog was barred from filing it a third time.

Mr. Downing, now a professor of English at Elizabethtown College, in Elizabethtown, Pa., remains reluctant to discuss the case. Mr. Schmidt, currently a freelance writer, says that even a nuisance suit can have a chilling effect on academic discussion. "Scholars are often introverted people," he says. "The thought of being attacked in court and having your institution dragged into it tends to make you shy away from controversy. I think that for people associated with the Lewis legacy, the whole thing has been an embarrassment."

Even so, Ms. Lindskoog's work has undergone a sort of peer review at the hands of other independent Lewisian scholars, thanks to the efforts of Michael Logsdon, an office technician at the Monterey County Water Resources Agency. Between 1992 and 1995, Mr. Logsdon published a quarterly journal called The Salinas Valley Lewisian. Each of the 13 issues consisted mainly of evidence and debate among Lewisians concerned with the forgery charge. Ms. Lindskoog was invited to reply, and she did, at length.

The journal's audience might be called self-selecting. The circulation, Mr. Logsdon says, numbered in the low two figures. A complete run of the publication is available at major Lewisian archives at the Wade Center at Wheaton College and Oxford's Bodleian Library.

One debate concerned an essay, "Modern Man and His Categories of Thought," that first appeared in one of Mr. Hooper's posthumous editions of Lewis's work. Mr. Hooper reported that it had been written in 1946 at the request of the World Council of Churches, and that it existed only in typescript. Ms. Lindskoog regarded the essay as possessing "un-Lewisian" features and called it a likely forgery.

Mr. Logsdon did a little detective work of his own. Contacting the World Council of Churches, he confirmed that the organization had indeed asked Lewis for a paper of that title in 1946. Furthermore, the council had a copy of the typescript in its archives. Comparing this text to the printed version, he found that Mr. Hooper had made only a few very minor editorial changes in publishing the text.

Ms. Lindskoog's response in the pages of The Salinas Valley Lewisian was to suggest that the text may, nonetheless, be corrupt. Her grounds for this judgment are unclear. Mr. Logsdon's archival research is not cited in Sleuthing C.S. Lewis, though Ms. Lindskoog refers to him, in passing, as a "supporter of Walter Hooper." The new book does mention "Modern Man and His Categories of Thought," however. It remains on the list of possible forgeries.

If Mr. Hooper adopted his policy of public silence with the hope that Ms. Lindskoog's charges might eventually just go away, he misjudged her staying power. In discussing the situation with a reporter, he seems both angry and resigned.

"Every attempt to 'answer' the lady," he writes by e-mail, "is like battling the Hydra. You answer one question, only to find it replaced by a dozen more. And so on and on. In fact, there isn't a question, or even a dozen questions, that Ms. Lindskoog and her sect ask, but thousands.

"She's made a full-time living out of me," Mr. Hooper says, "but I'm far too busy to give the equivalent time to her." Now 70 years old, he is in the middle of work on a three-volume edition of Lewis's letters -- a project that will undoubtedly command the closest possible attention of Lewis scholars and Hooperologists alike.

Meanwhile, Ms. Lindskoog's suspicions about the integrity of Lewis's legacy are no longer a tempest in a marginal subculture. Her influence is conspicuous throughout The C.S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia (Zondervan/HarperCollins, 1998). Most contributors are academics. Entries cover the full range of Lewis's writings and thought, with many of them reflecting Ms. Lindskoog's concerns. The chapter on Mr. Hooper states that "serious allegations about tampering with the Lewis canon are not likely to go away quickly or quietly," while many posthumous works are identified as "controversial."

Two contributors to the Readers' Encyclopedia subsequently published a statement that they had participated "without knowledge of the extent of editorial influence exercised on that volume by Ms. Lindskoog."

In Sleuthing Ms. Lindskoog points out that she had no hand in editing the Readers' Encyclopedia; its criticisms of Mr. Hooper, she says, reflect the influence of her books and articles on other scholars. Since then, a competing reference work, The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia (Crossway Books, 2000) has appeared, bearing an endorsement by Mr. Hooper.

All this conflict might leave a mere reader wondering just what C.S. Lewis himself would think. As it happens, a conversation he had with two other writers suggests that he might not have been that surprised.

"Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion," the Christian traditionalist remarked. "It has, and it's taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. And a sacred text is always exposed to the most monstrous exegesis. ... It's the discovery of the mare's nest by the pursuit of the red herring."

The transcript shows that the other writers laughed at the comment. Perhaps they were unaware that Lewis had become, at just that moment, a true prophet. "This is going to go on long after my lifetime," he told them -- adding, "You may be able to see the end of it. I shan't."

Easy-to-print version

E-mail this article