Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis scholar

[Extollager]

I'd quibble with "literary secretary" as the best term to describe Hooper's significance. Whatever term one uses, he produced a tall stack of indispensable collections of Lewis's work and saw some interesting posthumous work into print too. I particularly appreciate the three hefty volumes of Lewis's letters. Hooper's edition of Lewis's underrated poetry has been superseded by Don King's. I remember well the controversy about "The Dark Tower," seen into print by Hooper over 40 years ago, and, though I wish some remarks made at the time had been changed, am grateful to Kathryn Lindskoog for stirring up the matter of its authenticity -- forcing, at last, some people, notably Alistair Fowler, to come forward to authenticate it. The biography of Lewis by Green and Hooper is obsolete,* but (as a reader when it first appeared) I sure liked it back in the 1970s.

Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis’ Literary Secretary, Has Died (1931-2020) | A Pilgrim in Narnia

*The one I particularly recommend is by George Sayer.

 

[Ambrose]

Thanks. 'The Dark Tower' seemed a bit odd to me, if memory serves. And for the steer to the Sayer book. It's now on my wish list.

 

[Extollager]

Read George Sayer's reminiscence of Tolkien here:

"Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien" by George Sayer (swosu.edu)

This notice of Hooper's death

Died: Walter Hooper, Who Gave His Life to C.S. Lewis’s Leg...... | News & Reporting | Christianity Today

reminds one of the C. S. Lewis "Companion and Guide" volume prepared by him.

At the time of the controversy about the "Dark Tower" fragment, I regretted Hooper's failure to respond to Lindskoog's questions, which became increasingly snarky, distasteful sallies. My view was that Lewis should be seen as an important 20th-century British author, like Orwell or Virginia Woolf. If charges about the authenticity of a posthumously-published fragment by Orwell or Woolf were made, why, surely everybody would agree that the matter should be settled so that scholarship could proceed with the matter resolved as well as it could be, using the accepted norms for authentication of literary remains. A no-brainer!!

But when the whole thing got going back around 1978, Owen Barfield, at the time a literary executor for Lewis (I think), responded about how offensive it was to attack Hooper who had worked so hard, etc.; and Walter Hooper declined to respond, as I recall. The matter should have been settled sooner, as a matter of a text (actually texts, since Lindskoog raised questions about some other matters too) -- not as if Walter Hooper's character were the main issue. It was too bad. "The Dark Tower" was basically vindicated as a genuine, though minor, bit of writing by Lewis.

Lindskoog had raised questions about the text of poems by Lewis as published in a posthumous collection edited by Hooper. We now have Don King's edition, and I suppose that is the one scholars will use from now on in any event.

I'm grateful for Hooper's work and I'm sorry that, in part because of his own inaction, there has been a cloud over some of it.