Response to the July 20, 2001 Article in the Chronicle of Higher Education,
Holy War in the Shadowlands

LETTER TO THE EDITOR (SUBMITTED BUT NOT PUBLISHED)

I was much amused by the invective of James Como and Walter Hooper. They are much better at namecalling than at speaking to the questions.

CORRECTIONS

1. I did not want to be a detective when I grew up. As a child I wanted to be a GIRL detective right then, like Nancy Drew. I personally don't call the literary crime I've uncovered "diabolical." I frequently call it pseudo-intellectual buffoonery. Unfortunately, my evidence about this literary crime has not provoked intense scholarly discussion so far; I hope that Sleuthing C. S. Lewis will accomplish that.

2. The playful homoerotic insertions into the Lewis corpus are only a colorful detail of the literary crime, not, in my opinion, worthy of great emphasis. Lewis's alleged lack of any heterosexual love life and his alleged switch from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism are more important contamination of Lewis studies, in my opinion, because they were intended to falsify history.

3. Because Jim Como has enjoyed portraying me as totally devoid of intellect for decades, it would have been ideal to follow his quote "This is Jerry Springer stuff, It's good gossip, bad journalism, and not at all scholarship" with the fact that one of the 80 signatories of my petition was Christopher Ricks, the preeminent professor of English literature at the close of the 20th century. He was also co-editor of Essays in Criticism. His name alone would have meant a lot to some readers of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

4. Who are the people who say I'm prone to attributing intellectual dishonesty and low motivation to other Lewisians? Most important, who are these other Lewisians I allegedly distrust?

5. According to Scott McLemee I began a footnote with "Rumor has it." True, and amusing, but in light of the footnote's content it is rather misleading: "Rumor has it that because of the way the will was written, estate taxes had to be paid twice: once after Lewis's death, and again after Warren's death." Contrary to the implication of the article, this footnote had nothing to do with how I judge evidence,

6. I have far more interests than just C S Lewis. I have published on a wide variety of topics -- a creative writing textbook, a groundbreaking book on sleeping dreams, an in-depth survey of "fakes, frauds, and other malarkey" (excluding the Lewis fakery entirely), an original survey of children's literature, humorous essays, literary essays, etc. Plus my scholarly work on Dante. And I have taught a wide variety of college English courses, including world literature and ESL. Perhaps Hooper has a single intellectual focus, but I don't share that characteristic.

7. According to Mr. McLemee both Walter Hooper and I fell under Lewis's spell during the transitional phase between adolescence and full adulthood. In my opinion, that suggests rather prolonged adolescence; Mr. Hooper was 23 when he first wrote to Lewis. I was a mentally mature 19 when I discovered his writing and began my honors project. According to Mr. McLemee, Mr. Hooper and I both met C. S. Lewis when we were in England on summer scholarships. But I won an academic scholarship to a summer school there in 1956, and Walter Hooper attended a summer school there in 1963 without winning a scholarship. It is no doubt tempting to exaggerate the few coincidental similarities between us.

8. Mr. McLemee said I've published over a dozen books. That's OK, but I think the total is 22 now.

9. Mr. Hooper was not even close to being a priest when he met Lewis, and he was definitely not a graduate student in English. (I checked his university's archives. Apparently he had not yet passed the qualifying exams to enter the doctoral program there.) He was merely an entry-level instructor at the University of Kentucky. At the end of 1963 he applied to study at the University of Oxford and was turned down.

10. Mr. Hooper did not help Lewis with his correspondence for several weeks -- it was only two weeks. And the letters he received from Lewis in September 1963 show that Lewis had no concept of Hooper returning to be his long-term secretary. Quite the contrary.

11. My book The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land was not a revision of my thesis that Lewis commended. It is the thesis. The only change worth mentioning was that Lewis had died.

12. According to Mr. McLemee, finding one's way through the arguments in this book is no simple task. "Readers not yet familiar with the controversy may have the sense of trying to navigate their way through a landscape by Hieronymous Bosch." I'm surprised, because so many evaluations of the previous incarnations of this book have included the word "fascinated." Most readers have found the evidence easy to follow: "I have always found Kathryn Lindskoog's evidence compelling. I do hope she will be heeded."--Martin E. Marty, Professor of History of Christianity, University of Chicago; editor of Context; senior editor of The Christian Century; according to Time, "the most influential interpreter of religion in the U.S."

13. Mr. Hooper claimed that the gardener, not Warren, set aside a pile of manuscripts for him. Mr. Hooper claimed to have dragged them away in some suitcases or a trunk. There was no box.

14. I absolutely don't believe there were any suspicions of Mr. Hooper in the 1960s. Not until the mid-1970s, when Warren's charges against Hooper were discovered in his diaries, which he had willed to the Lewis collection at Wheaton College.

15. There was no Kilbyite circle at Wheaton College believing that Hooper was a latecoming interloper who pushed his way into undue influence in shaping the Lewis legacy! That is rewriting history to cast Hooper as the victim of a group of jealous people. It's a fantasy. I was indeed working alone in my investigation of Walter Hooper's claims.

16. It is not true that "To those already suspicious of [Hooper]" the bonfire story sounded like a cover-up. No one doubted his bonfire story when he first told it. No one suspected him of anything.

17. Hooper dated The Dark Tower in 1938 or 1939, not in the 1940s. And the hideous villain was not called the Stingerman.

18. I don't "contend" that the two very different computer analyses of the Dark Tower text confirm my suspicion that this text is not by Lewis. The developers of these two complex programs themselves reported these results. Actually, it was the researcher who was running the first of these tests who contacted me in 1986 with the idea that the text was not by Lewis; that's where I got the idea, as I explained in my book.

19. Some Lewis scholars doubt the validity of these tests simply because they were performed ten years ago? The tests have not been refuted in the past ten years, and none of my opponents have been willing to sponsor further tests. Ignoring the computer analyses for ten years and then dismissing them because they are ten years old sounds like a twist in a satirical comedy.

20. The fact that Don King thinks my case against various posthumous texts is ultimately stylistic, and that the appearance of the handwriting is evidence for the authenticity of the text, demonstrates that he is not familiar with the case I've made and thus unequipped to understand it.

21. The Lewis Foundation's 1989 "hearing" (kangaroo court) on The C. S. Lewis Hoax was not composed of a dozen Lewis experts. Several of the twelve knew little or nothing about Lewis, and none came adequately prepared. I don't know who the evangelical contingency is for whom it is particularly troubling that I found gay references planted in the Lewis canon. I happen to know that one of the twelve Mattson jurors was gay.

22. It is true that the temporary management team at Questar foolishly stopped selling Light in the Shadowlands the day Stan Mattson threatened to sue them. But as soon as they returned the rights to me, Hope Publishing House started distributing it and has done so ever since. Mr. Mattson threatened to sue again, but Hope simply ignored him because there is no libel in that book according to U. S. libel laws.

23. My lawsuit against Westmont College was taken on contingency because of libelous published claims that the college refused to correct. My lawyer assured me that the preposterous $1 million claim was only a formality to get things launched. It was not a $3 million claim so far as I knew, and it was not dismissed twice. It was a one-time suit, and the judge dismissed it on the grounds that by publishing a book I had forfeited my right to protection from false claims about me. (A highly questionable judicial position.)

24. The Salinas Lewisian was a far cry from a peer review. It was a one-man production openly and honestly undertaken to defend Hooper.

25. "Every attempt to 'answer' the lady," [Hooper] 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." In fact Hooper has refused to answer even one question.

26. "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." I wonder what he meant by "a full-time living." I've made no money from my research on him; it has been an expensive avocation undertaken in loyalty to Lewis and as public service.

27. Mr. McLemee stated twice that I am sometimes almost totally paralyzed.. The "sometimes" is untrue. The paralysis is constant. I not only keyboard while lying flat on my back, but with one hand. Like my legs, the other arm and hand have not moved in years.

28. Mr. McLemee completely left out the number one evidence of forgery -- lack of provenance. That was his most serious error because it misrepresented my method of evaluating authenticity.

29. I think the most serious omission in the article is the 1964 Waltering of Lewis's poetry, which I started discovering in 1995. This can't be passed off as my theory. I have located the original versions of many of Lewis's poems published in Lewis's lifetime and compared them to the inferior versions published by Mr. Hooper, and the changes are often shocking.

Kathryn Lindskoog

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