The Nancy Cole Report

One of the most outrageous and amusing chapters in the saga of the Lewis forgeries is the story of the Nancy Cole report. Here is a sample of how the report used to be promoted: "What is worth making clear is how important Nancy's report truly is. [Of all reports about The Dark Tower], Nancy's is the cream of the crop." (Michael Logsdon, The Lamp-Post, Winter 1996-1997.) When I obtained a copy of the report in 1997 and saw that it was a web of falacies and falsities, I set out to discover its origin; and thanks to helpful sources and much good fortune, my sleuthing paid off. The result is summarized in the two following pieces: "The Strange Secret History of the Nancy Cole Report" and "Errors in Nancy Cole's Essay."

The Strange Secret History of the Nancy Cole Report

This is the chronology of the highly touted "Nancy Cole Report" of 1995, produced to disprove the validity of my discoveries described in The C. S. Lewis Hoax and Light in the Shadowlands. After reading the bogus report when it became public in 1997, I investigated its hidden origins and came up with a well-funded but bumbling behind-the-scenes public relations plot worthy of a comic novel. 

October 1988: Publication of Kathryn Lindskoog's The C. S. Lewis Hoax, a challenge to the authenticity of much of Walter Hooper's posthumous C. S. Lewis literature, especially The Dark Tower.

January, 1989: J. Stanley Mattson, a California public relations expert, launched a campaign to discredit The C.S. Lewis Hoax in order to defend Walter Hooper and his questionable claims. 

April 21, 1989: Stanley Mattson orchestrated a closed-door one-day trial of The C.S. Lewis Hoax. His hand-picked jury of twelve included Jennifer Larson, a rare books dealer in San Francisco. As jury foreman and judge, at the end of the day Mattson pronounced Hoax all wrong. Although publicized afterwards as an unbiased and responsible deliberation, the trial had devoted an average of less than ten minutes to each of its forty key issues. This astounding agenda meant that there could be absolutely no defense at the trial, no witnesses, no evidence, no argument, and no examination or cross-examination. There was not even any transcript, and so the proceedings remain secret.

April 23, 1989: Walter Hooper donated his Dark Tower manuscript to the Bodleian, making it available to researchers for the first time. (After allegedly finding the story at a January 1964 bonfire, he had waited years before showing a typed copy to friends. Then at an undisclosed date before July 1984 he had placed his previously unseen handwritten copy in his private cache in the Bodleian.)

Fall 1989: Jury member Jennifer Larson met a document examiner named Nancy Cole and attended a party given by Cole.

April 12, 1990: Nancy Cole wrote to Professor Don and Dr. Sharon Cregier of the University of Prince Edward Island, offering them her professional services. (A mutual acquaintance had notified her that the Cregiers were concerned about authenticity of certain C. S. Lewis documents.) Cole's credentials impressed the Cregiers, who assumed that "document examination" meant much more than handwriting analysis. They also assumed that Cole would be unbiased and objective, with no hidden affiliations or conflict of interest.

April 1990: Sharon Cregier and Nancy Cole began corresponding about possibile examination of the Dark Tower manuscript. Cole expressed enthusiasm and cited her hourly fee. The Cregiers had Lindskoog mail her a copy of The C.S. Lewis Hoax.

Circa May 1990: Jennifer Larson talked to Nancy Cole about Mattson's April 1989 trial of The C.S. Lewis Hoax, and Cole was favorably impressed with Larson. 

May 20, 1990: Don and Sharon Cregier wrote to Stanley Mattson suggesting that he co-sponsor with them an examination of the Dark Tower manuscript by an unbiased, well-qualified professional document examiner such as Nancy Cole. (Mattson's participation was needed to demonstrate the good faith and evenhandedness of the project.)

June 7, 1990: Expecting Stanley Mattson to accept their offer, Don Cregier sponsored Nancy Cole for a reader's ticket to the Department of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, so she could examine the Dark Tower manuscript and other C.S. Lewis documents during a trip to England for a conference sometime later that year.

July 24, 1990: Nancy Cole wrote to the Cregiers inquiring pointedly about the status of the proposed investigation. Cregiers were still waiting for a response from Stanley Mattson, and so the co-sponsored project seemed increasingly unlikely. Cole never communicated with Cregiers again, and communicated with Mattson instead.

August 27, 1990: Sharon Cregier sent Stanley Mattson a letter restating the invitation to co-sponsor an unbiased examination. He never answered, and has never corresponded with Cregiers. But he did correspond with Nancy Cole in 1990, and the nature and extent of their communication has never been revealed. In her 1995 essay Cole would thank Mattson for his help.

December 21, 1990: Walter Hooper wrote a letter to Nancy Cole. The nature of that letter has never been revealed. In her 1995 essay Cole would thank Hooper for his help.

December 1992: Michael Logsdon, a friend of Stanley Mattson, began publishing the Salinas Lewisian, a quarterly newsletter focused on defending Walter Hooper and assuring readers there are no forgeries in the Lewis canon. 

October 1994: In late October Kathryn Lindskoog published a greatly expanded, updated version of The C.S. Lewis Hoax, titled Light in the Shadowlands: Protecting the Real C.S. Lewis. 

November 1, 1994: Michael Logsdon, who had first learned about Nancy Cole in 1994, wrote to Don Cregier about their co-funding a forensic study of the Dark Tower manuscript. Cregier agreed but said he would want to be consulted about the methods and the choice of analysts; by then he thought there should probably be more than one investigator, without previous familiarity with the controversy. Logsdon did not reply. 

December 2, 1994: Stanley Mattson's lawyer threatened Lindskoog's publisher with a nuisance suit. 

Circa January 3, 1995: Stanley Mattson presided over a dinner party for six in a Berkeley restaurant, with Nancy Cole and Jennifer Larson as special guests from Palo Alto. Enthusiastic Mattson supporter Luci Shaw was there also. The purpose of the meeting was defense of Walter Hooper and opposition to the idea that the Dark Tower document might be forged. Needless to say, this pivotal meeting of key players was supposed to remain secret.

January 1995: According to the strong implication in a footnote in Nancy Cole's essay, it was in January that she made her journey from Palo Alto, California, to Oxford, England, to examine the handwriting on the Dark Tower document. Odd as it seems, that was the only hint in her essay about when the examination took place.

April 4, 5, 6, 1995: Nancy Cole visited the Department of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian to look at C. S. Lewis documents. (A researcher located these dates in a registry at the Bodleian.)

August 1995: Nancy Cole read her essay about the Dark Tower document at a forensics conference and sent a copy to Michael Logsdon. She declared that the Dark Tower manuscript could not possibly be a forgery because the handwriting looks just like Lewis's. Although Cole and Lindskoog are strangers, Cole repeatedly scoffed at Lindskoog's character, personality, and intelligence. She ended her essay with a sentiment that Stanley Mattson had expressed in writing in January 1989 - that Lindskoog owes Hooper an apology for questioning the authenticity of "The Dark Tower." 

January 18, 1996: The Into the Wardrobe web site (about C. S. Lewis) included an item from Michael Logsdon and news that Nancy Cole had published an essay proving the Dark Tower manuscript genuine. (Because Michael Logsdon, Nancy Cole, Stanley Mattson, Jennifer Larson, and Walter Hooper are all connected in an informal web of overlapping friendships, it is reasonable to assume that they keep abreast of some of each other's ideas and activities.)

January 30, 1996: Thanks to the Internet announcement, Kathryn Lindskoog learned there was a Nancy Cole essay and faxed her a request to purchase a copy with a query about the content. Cole replied that the essay had been submitted to a journal, and when it was published it would speak for itself.

April 1996: Michael Logsdon suddenly discontinued the Salinas Lewisian without announcing there the news about Nancy Cole's essay. Instead, he announced that there is "nothing really new." He devoted three pages of his last issue to an erroneous article by his friend Juan Fajardo, accusing Lindskoog of intellectual incompetence and possible falsification of sources. 

Mid-1996: Michael Logsdon became interim editor of The Lamp-Post, quarterly journal of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society.

Late March 1997: In the Winter 1996-7 issue of The Lamp-Post Michael Logsdon announced "What is worth making clear is how important Nancy's report truly is. [Of all reports about The Dark Tower], Nancy's is the cream of the crop." Logsdon featured a four-page promotional article about it by Juan Fajardo. Logsdon praised both Cole's essay and Fajardo's article and urged readers to order copies of the full essay from him at cost. Although he did not say so in The Lamp-Post, he had already decided not to publish any detailed rebuttals to the allegations in Fajardo's article and Cole's essay.

Early April 1997: Nancy Cole's essay arrived at the homes of Lamp-Post readers who had ordered it. There Cole presented a misleading version of events. (See Lindskoog, "Errors in Nancy Cole's Essay.") Cole claimed that four (sic) years after her correspondence with Cregiers, "[her] attention was brought to Light in the Shadowlands." She says she independently decided "to pursue the examination myself." Readers would never guess that Cole "pursue[d] the examination" three months after an important 1995 dinner meeting with Stanley Mattson and Jennifer Larson. In fact, from her account readers would not guess that Cole knew Mattson and Larson.

April-May 1997: Don Cregier submitted a response for publication in The Lamp-Post, and Michael Logsdon informed him that it would not appear there. Logsdon posted Internet "advertisements" (his term) for the Cole essay, praising it and urging people to order copies.

May 1997: The spring issue of the Lewis Legacy offered to anyone who sent a SASE a six-page list of errors in the Nancy Cole essay.

June 1997: Michael Logsdon's announced target date for launching an Internet web page for Nancy Cole's essay.

June 16, 1997: Kathryn Lindskoog began asking Michael Logsdon for the exact dates of Nancy Cole's 1995 examination of the Dark Tower document. He passed the question on to Cole, with no result.

June 23, 1997: Michael Logsdon suddenly notified Kathryn Lindskoog that he was dropping out of the controversy.

June 30, 1997: Although Kathryn Lindskoog had not communicated with Nancy Cole since early 1996, in response to Jill Farringdon's forwarded open letter to her, Cole faxed a warning that she would not enter a correspondence "regarding TDT or related research." Three years later she and Logsdon were both remaining mute about the subject.

Errors in Nancy Cole's Essay

This is Kathryn Lindskoog's analysis of Nancy Cole's unpublished 20-page essay written in 1995 and first circulated in manuscript form in March 1997. Section 6 is the most amusing section and the most important. Nancy Cole is a California member of the Association of Forensic Document Examiners. She begins her essay by thanking the staff of the Bodleian Library for enabling her to see documents there. "I am also indebted to Dr. J. Stanley Mattson, President of the C. S. Lewis Foundation, Redlands, CA, and to Mr. Walter Hooper of Oxford, U.K." Her list of acknowledgments ends with Michael Logsdon, editor of The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society, who in 1997 heaped accolades on her report and offered copies of the essay to readers at cost.

"An Investigation into the Authorship of The Dark Tower" 
by Nancy H. Cole, M.A.

Cole's Section 1: "Scope of this paper"

Here Cole states the assumption behind her report: "questions raised concerning authorship [of The Dark Tower] could be answered by visual inspection [of the manuscript]." She does not try to explain or defend this assumption, which flies in the face of today's balanced forgery detection procedures.

Cole's Section 2: "Background"

After identifying C. S. Lewis and The Dark Tower in her first three paragraphs, Cole launches into a series of errors. 

She says The Dark Tower is a sequel to the science fiction trilogy. But it is presented as a sequel only to Out of the Silent Planet.

She claims that authenticity of The Dark Tower was disputed shortly after publication. But it was first disputed in 1988, not 1977. She claims that the dispute was "partly due to the fervid devotion of Lewis fans to whom he had become almost a cult figure." But she does not identify those legendary fans and does not explain how their fervid, almost cultish devotion contributed to the authenticity dispute. She adds "There were and are numerous Lewis societies, not only in the U.K. and the United States, but also throughout Europe, in Canada, and in Asia-all of them peopled by vocal fans." If that were true it would be irrelevant to her subject, but it is an exaggeration.

"One of the loudest and most fervent of these voices is that of... Kathryn Lindskoog." My authorial voice has been commended for its civility, its friendly wit, and its pleasant tone. In contrast, a "loud" authorial voice from a female is assumed to be strident, overbearing, and even bombastic.

"She first expressed this view [that The Dark Tower is not by C. S. Lewis] in an article in 1979..." Cole is evidently referring to a 1978 article unrelated to The Dark Tower, and she is confusing it with the 1988 book where I first expressed this view.

"She reiterated her theories and expanded upon them in the far more strident volume, Light in the Shadowlands." By calling Light in the Shadowlands "strident" Cole contradicts the judgment of Richard Wilbur printed on the third page: "I much admire the tone of humane amusement..." Wilbur is the second United States Poet Laureate, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the National Book Award and the Bollinger Award.

"An entire volume, Fakes, Frauds, and Other Malarkey (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1993,) sets forth her theories..." To the contrary, in that book there is not one reference of any kind to The Dark Tower or to my forgery charges. The book does not even mention my opinion that there are deceptions in Lewis affairs.

"Ah, [Lindskoog] replies, ... she will go back to her special knowledge of what Lewis could have done or might have included in content. If she considers an inclusion 'not like Lewis,' it can't be his." Cole has a right to resort to the rhetoric of sarcasm if she chooses, but this grotesque caricature flatly contradicts both my position and my sentiments. 

"TDT is a handwritten manuscript. Has Mrs. Lindskoog seen it? No, she says she requested it in 1984 at the Bodleian and was told she could not have access to it. Dr. Judith Priestman, the Keeper of the Keys at the Bodleian, says that she never requested it." During the noon hour on June 22, 1984, Dennis Porter, Keeper of Western Manuscripts, informed me that I could not see the Dark Tower manuscript because it was the personal property of Walter Hooper and not available to researchers. Bodleian records prove that Porter's claim was true and that Hooper did not allow researchers to see the manuscript until 1989. (For me to see the manuscript in 1984 would have been pointless anyway, because as I explained in Light in the Shadowlands, the idea that the story was forged never crossed my mind until 1986. Since then I have seen the manuscript in photocopy and discovered an atypical letter I near the beginning.)

"Since no one except Gervaise [sic] Mathews [sic], a friend of Lewis who had died before TDT's publication, may have seen the work prior to publication, Lindskoog thinks this proves it didn't exist during Lewis's lifetime." Cole goes on to remind readers that there is no reason to think Lewis always read his work aloud to friends. But Cole is confused; it is clear in The Dark Tower and in Light in the Shadowlands that Hooper claims that Gervase Mathew heard Lewis read a portion of The Dark Tower at an Inklings meeting, not that he saw the handwritten manuscript. And I have never thought that anything about this proves anything about The Dark Tower.

"No agreement was reached [about Cregiers' attempt to co-sponsor an objective analysis of the Dark Tower manuscript], nor was the matter of my investigation pursued. Four [sic] years later, after my attention was brought to Light in the Shadowlands, I decided to pursue the examination myself, and the result is this paper." The idea that an agreement was attempted is an error; Stanley Mattson refused to acknowledge or respond to the 1990 letters from Cregiers proposing unbiased manuscript analysis. Five years later he had dinner with Nancy Cole in an upscale Berkeley restaurant to discuss his opposition to Light in the Shadowlands. As a result, she prepared and submitted for publication an essay defending the Dark Tower manuscript. This is not what her statement "I decided to pursue the examination myself" means to most readers.

The predominance of error in Cole's section called "Background" does not bode well for the rest of her essay. It could get better, but it's going to get worse.

Cole's Section 3: "Examinations and reports"

Nancy Cole says that before she examined the Dark Tower manuscript it was necessary for her to discover all the previous examinations and reports. She does not say why this was necessary, why she never looked at some of the most important ones, and why she devotes well over one-tenth of her essay to inconsequential data about most of them. Therefore I summarize all of Section 3 in the order she follows.

First Cole sought information about the much-publicized Warner Report, commissioned by Stanley Mattson and signed on January 24, 1989, by Francis Warner and R. E. Alton. The two affirmed the manuscript's authenticity, but Cole found their written report devoid of meaningful information. When she interviewed Mr. Alton for details, he resolutely declined to give any information about the examination except to reveal that the two men did not lay out the Dark Tower manuscript next to unquestioned Lewis documents to compare the handwriting as the report seemed to indicate. He would not say what they did instead; he told Cole he would reveal that only in a court case. Cole inexplicably changes Dr. Alton's name to Dr. Wood in the midst of her account, and concludes, "the thrust of the Warner report remains hidden."

Cole neither examined nor mentioned the first report commissioned by Stephen Schofield in 1991, from a Cheshire detective named Pearson. Next, Cole examined the second report commissioned by Stephen Schofield in 1991, the one by Jacqueline Sawyer of Bristol. Sawyer was in favor of the manuscript's authenticity, but Cole found her report unprofessional, "cursory, and a little silly."

Next, Cole mentions Stanley Mattson's 1990 "colloquium." In fact, this bizarre "trial" was neither an examination nor a report, and it took place in April 1989, not in 1990. Cole summarizes it as "[a colloquium] which found TDT genuine and which, of course, Lindskoog discounts for various reasons." This use of "of course" as a rhetorical device indicates erroneously that my critical analysis of the Mattson jury proceedings was reflexive rather than reasoned.

Next, Cole examined Stanley Mattson's report from Julius Grant written in June 1990. (She seems to think it was dated 1989.) Grant was in favor of the authenticity of the Dark Tower manuscript, but his report was completely confused and insubstantial. Cole theorizes that Grant was saving his information for a possible court case in the future, but that idea seems untenable. Grant was was 88 years old, and no court case was ever considered anyway.

Next, Cole considers the opinion of Nicolas Barker, Keeper of the British National Library, who looked at the manuscript in 1989 and considered it authentic. All she says at this point about Barker's findings is that he found some post-1950 ink on the manuscript. She notes that perhaps the manuscript was written in 1950 or later rather than in 1938 as otherwise indicated.

Finally, Cole considers the two formal examinations that provide evidence against the authenticity of The Dark Tower. She fails to point out that these two examinations have nothing to do with her subject area, which is authentication of physical documents. (Instead, they are products of the discipline of ascertaining authorship of texts directly, and no original documents are involved in that task.)

First Cole dismisses Carla Faust Jones's published 1986 computer analysis of letter and letter-pair frequencies in Lewis texts by claiming that it "only proves what the average reader could discern" about style. This statement shows that Cole has not read Jones's article, which is readily available and clear, and if she read about it she thoroughly misunderstood what she read. 

Next, Cole dismisses A. Q. Morton's 1991 cusum analysis of The Dark Tower by claiming that although Morton's complex statistical technique of author identification is admissable in British courts, it only works on everyday speech (as in written confessions), not on literary compositions. But that is like claiming that fingerprints only identify people in everyday clothes, not those dressed in their Sunday best or costumes. Cole seems unaware that most of Morton's cusum analysis work is in the field of literature (including ancient Greek texts as well as old and modern English texts). 

Cole's Section 4: "Weight of Handwriting Opinion"

Cole begins this section with a personal slur: "One cannot, of course, hope to convince Kathryn Lindskoog that an identification of the writer of TDT would hold any water at all." She mistakenly claims twice that TDT fills "64 long pages." (It fills 62 pages.)

Next, she states that my case against The Dark Tower is based upon a fallacy. After mentioning my "lack of understanding of a document examiner's discipline" (a major error in itself), Cole explains the fallacy underlying my forgery charge:

A) Hooper could write like Lewis (at least his signature)

B) TDT looks like Lewis writing

C) TDT must have been written by Walter Hooper

(I'm not making this up; it is her exact words.) My fallacy, she continues, is much like that of the schoolchild who states:

A) Harry has hair

B) horses have hair

C) Harry is a horse

At this point Cole mentions the unresolved dispute about whose writing hand appeared in Hooper's 1979 film "Through Joy and Beyond." She says that I insist the hand signing Lewis's name was Hooper's. But the hand was writing a poem rather than signing Lewis's name, and I was in no position to insist. I was able to show that Hooper's hand was not too bony and hairy in 1978 to be the one in the film (as he claims) and that he refuses to identify anyone else as owner of the writing hand.

Next, Cole refutes my claim that successful forgeries are not unusual. "[Lindskoog] fails to note that the ones she cites (the Hitler diaries, the Mormon papers, the Hughes Will, etc.) have all been exposed at the time of her writing." She seems to believe that no matter how much a forger gains and how many people he fools, or for how long, once the forgery has been exposed it can't be counted as a successful forgery. (And until it has been exposed, it can't be counted as a forgery at all.) Needless to say, this unusual approach turns the term "successful forgery" into an oxymoron. Document authenticators like Cole can always assure the public that no such thing exists if they define the term away. 

Cole tries to estimate how long it would take a forger to produce the suspect Lewis manuscripts. She does not say if she is imagining a gifted master forger at work or an average person without much skill. Her estimate is staggering: "A forger would have had to have been locked in a room for years to turn out the body of painstaking work that Lindskoog attributes to Hooper." But the main part of that work, the Dark Tower manuscript, is only 62 pages long; and Konrad Kujau's forged Hitler diaries were 64 volumes long. An array of handwriting experts vouched for the diaries, along with the German FBI, the former head of forensic services in Zurich, historian H. Trevor Roper, and the world's foremost Hitler scholar, Gerhard Weinberg of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (alma mater of Walter Hooper and Stanley Mattson). Weinberg reasoned as Cole does; the diaries looked genuine, and it seemed implausible that anyone would forge so much. Thus handwriting examiners can be fooled by long, daring forgeries. I suspect that Cole wildly overestimates the time it takes an accomplished forger to create such a product. 

Cole concludes this section by referring to evidence about style, content
and provenance as "nearly weightless arguments" in contrast to handwriting
analysis. (She prefers the term "document examination," but handwriting is
all she includes in her report.) Perhaps her statement "document
examination produces demonstrable evidence that cannot and should not be
dismissed out of hand" is understandably defensive. In the University of
Pennsylvania Law Review (summer 1989), law professor Michael Saks pointed
out that there is no academic training for handwriting experts, no
evaluation of their competence, and no certification. When proficiency
tests were given to handwriting specialists by the Forensic Sciences
Foundation, only 45 percent of the test cases were correctly analyzed. 
Saks has found no evidence that handwriting experts can do what they claim.

                Cole's Section 5: "Materials Examined"

Cole's list of 14 items is amazing, in that she travelled all the way from
California to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, and did not look at
even one of the many, many genuine Lewis documents there. All four that she
chose to see were on Lindskoog's list of forgeries, yet Cole listed three
of them as her chosen exemplars of genuine Lewis handwriting. 

An intriguing item on her list is K-6, "Letter to Nancy Cole from Walter
Hooper, typed with signature and four line handwritten note. Dated '21
December 1990.'" This is the only indication that Cole and Hooper had such
a long association. She fails to mention the nature of the letter and how
or why she used it.

                Cole's Section 6: "Examination and Findings"

On p. 11 of her report Cole states that although Lewis's handwriting was
remarkably consistent throughout his career, it varied sometimes according
to its content. "When Lewis was translating a classical poem, for instance,
his writing assumed a more formal look, a more vertical slant and exhibited
an even more regular rhythm." Unfortunately, Cole does not reveal when or
where she saw "a classical poem" that Lewis had translated into English
using this alternative style of penmanship, so there is no way to check on
its provenance (or its existence).

Fortunately, however, she includes in her report a photocopy of three lines
of this alternative penmanship; it is from an essay that Walter Hooper
allegedly rescued from the 1964 manuscript bonfire, published in 1985 as
"Encyclopedia Boxoniana." This is one of the documents that I have
challenged and that Nancy Cole is defending. The thrust of her defense is
that the challenged documents display typical Lewis handwriting, and yet
she openly admits that the handwriting on this one is atypical. She gives
no indication that she notices the contradiction. (In my opinion the overly
neat "Encyclopedia Boxoniana" document appears to be an early example of
forged Lewis handwriting, before practice made it perfect.)

On p. 12 Cole says "The closest Lewis exhibits to a careless scrawl was
found in the 'LeFay fragment'." Again she provides a three-line sample.
Like "Encyclopedia Boxoniana," the "LeFay fragment" is a document I
consider an early  forgery. For some reason Cole seems to consider these
divergences from Lewis's normal penmanship as evidence that the documents
in question are genuine rather than as evidence that they are early
forgeries.

On p. 13 Cole describes the appearance of the Dark Tower manuscript,
including the writing on the backs of pp. 1 and 2 in post-1950 ink: "the
odd bits of Narnia and, I believe, Boxonian commentary that appear on the
verso pages..." But there is nothing remotely connected to Boxen on those
pages, and there are no "odd  bits of Narnia." There is an alternative
opening paragraph of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (already
published in 1950) and a very peculiar opening paragraph for Lewis's
autobiography. These are clear on the manuscript Cole examined in the
Bodleian and clearly described in the book she is refuting, Light in the
Shadowlands. 

On the left side of p. 15 Cole displays  photocopies of 16 handwritten
words from the Dark Tower manuscript, and on the right she displays 34
words from "known" Lewis documents to show how well key letters match. But
11 words on the right are from documents on the forgery list, and 15 others
were provided by Hooper. The other 7 are from copies of unidentified Lewis
letters. Few readers will get out magnifying glasses to try to decipher
Cole's miniscule, carelessly scribbled notes that reveal what a farce the
illogical comparison is. (Why didn't Cole use unquestioned sources and
identify them?)

On p. 16 Cole says "Lewis makes his commas backwards. Find another author
who has this habit and another forger clever enough to notice and replicate
it!" One might wonder what kind of forgers Cole is used to dealing with if
they are not clever enough to spot distinctive characteristics and
replicate them. That is usually assumed to be the very nature of forgery.

Cole devotes the culmination of her report, pp. 13-17, to showing exactly
what everyone has always agreed upon: that if the Dark Tower manuscript is
a forgery it is an extremely good one, and that Walter Hooper's usual
handwriting differs from Lewis's. (Perhaps Cole assumes that people think a
forger's usual handwriting does not differ from that of the person he
forges. Surely she herself doesn't really believe that, although she
actually implies that she does.) 

On p. 17 she states as her conclusion the same premise with which she
began, that it would be impossible for anyone to be such a talented forger.
She says she is sure Walter Hooper could not have produced these documents,
that there is no base for such a charge. (I consider this begging the
question.)

Cole concludes that if I had engaged the services of a handwriting analyst
before making charges of literary forgery, a great deal of grief could have
been avoided. Whose, she does not say.
 

                NOTE

Although the Nancy Cole essay has been thoroughly discredited, not everyone
who has heard about it knows that. For example, in 2000 John Rateliff
published his essay "The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club
Papers: Tolkien and Lewis's Time Travel Triad" (in a book titled Tolkien's
Legendarium). There he claims that Lewis wrote The Dark Tower in 1946
rather than  1939. He adds, "Some have questioned the authenticity, in
whole or in part, of The Dark Tower. This is not the place to examine the
claims and counterclaims; suffice it to say that I have thoroughly examined
the evidence (including consulting the original manuscript) and concluded
that there can be no reasonable doubt that the story as we have it is
entirely the work of C. S. Lewis. Those interested in investigating the
matter further are invited to read... the forensic examination by Nancy H.
Cole."
 
 
 

Top of Page