The Dark Tower: Nine "Proofs" That Didn't Prove Valid

From 1978 to 1999 nine different proofs about the C. S. Lewis manuscript bonfire and the Dark Tower manuscript emerged, each one by a supposed authority.

1. In 1978 Anthony Marchington published in Christianity & Literature a formal, signed letter on official Oxford University stationery, describing the alleged analysis of 1,300 pounds of the Lewis bonfire soil at Oxford's Physical Chemistry Laboratory. Marchington claimed that he did not know Hooper, but in fact he was Walter Hooper's roommate and sometime co-author and was typing his bogus bonfire report on Walter Hooper's typewriter. Marchington is a genuine scientist, but his bonfire letter was a preposterous hoax apparently based on the mistaken assumption that I am naive about science and would take it seriously.

2. The first two Lewis "handwriting experts" were Francis Warner (a friend of Hooper's) and R. E. Alton (friend of Warner's and authority on antique calligraphy), who looked at the Dark Tower manuscript for Hooper's public relations agent Stanley Mattson in January 1989 and assumed it was by Lewis because the handwriting looked like Lewis's. (Of course it did; that's what forgeries are like.) The silly, slipshod report was widely publicized by Stanley Mattson (in London's Sunday Times, for example) but poved too embarrassing for him to publish as he continually promised to do.

3. The third expert was Stephen Schofield, editor of the Canadian C.S. Lewis Journal, who was also invited by Mattson to view the manuscript in January 1989. Schofield said he knew at first glance that it was in Lewis's handwriting. (In a futile attempt to acquaint Steve with the nature of forgeries, I composed for him a letter with his own signature stating that the Dark Tower was forged. To my dismay, he was positive that he had written the letter and forgotten about it. He explained that the words really meant the opposite of what they said.)

4. The fourth expert was Jennifer Larson, document dealer, owner of an antiquarian bookstore, and friend of Stanley Mattson. In 1989 he invited her to judge the matter, and she said publicly that she found my challenge to The Dark Tower "irresponsible and very damaging." Mattson touted her as proof of Hooper's manuscript's authenticity, athough she never saw it and made no report on it.

5. The fifth expert was Mattson's friend Julius Grant, a famous forensic paper chemist. In 1990, thirteen months before he died at 89, Grant looked at a manuscript's handwriting for Mattson and described it as an essay about philosophy that Lewis wrote circa 1960 -- not a 1938 fantasy novel! Grant completely ignored the chemistry of the manuscript. He was so mentally confused that Mattson never published his embarrassing report, but claimed publicly that Grant had proved the Dark Tower manuscript genuine.

6. The sixth expert was a Cheshire detective named R. Morrison whom Stephen Schofield found in a telephone directory. In May 1991 Schofield paid him 305 sterling to determine from a brief handwriting sample whether the Dark Tower manuscript was genuine or not, and he assured Steve that it was. He knew so little about forgeries that he didn't realize that the Hitler diaries were forged. (All England knew.) I obtained a copy of Morrison's report, but it was so embarrassing to Hooper's defenders that it was never published. 

7. The seventh expert was English handwriting analyst Jacqueline Sawyer, paid 363.53 sterling by Schofield in July 1991 and advised by Walter Hooper. She knew so little about forgery that she claimed in writing that unless two people have identical anatomical hand structure and identical normal handwriting, one cannot forge the other's writing. Sawyer's report was so embarrassing to Hooper's defenders that it was never published.

8. The eighth was expert was Nancy H. Cole, a California handwriting analyst. Cole was a friend of Jennifer Larson's, an acquaintance of Stanley Mattson's, and a correspondent of Hooper's. In early January of 1995 Mattson appointed her to travel to the Bodleian in Oxford to see for herself that the Dark Tower manuscript was genuine and to write a report. Three months later she did so, and in a few months her report was being publicized on the Into The Wardrobe website, the Merelewis listserve, and The Lamp-Post journal as final proof that the Dark Tower manuscript was genuine. It was supposed to debut on its own website in June 1997. In April I obtained a photocopy of this tangle of errors and baseless insults, and wrote a detailed factual response that a reader put on his website. By June Nancy Cole had withdrawn her report from circulation, copies were no longer available, and the Cole Report website idea was scuttled. 

9. The ninth expert emerged in 1999, an e-mail correspondent of Ed Brown whom he does not identify. This person "related how Walter later came to the shop [where this man worked] early in 1964, in a mild state of panic, to ask if he might use the copier at the shop (one of the first xerographic copy machines in Oxford), because Warnie Lewis was burning many of his brother's papers, and Walter wanted to make copies of those that had not yet been destroyed... He said that Walter would show up with stacks of papers day after day, which he and his colleague helped Walter copy." That story has fatal logical flaws, and there is no way to check the identity of the storyteller.

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Related article: The Nancy Cole Report