Festschrift for Walter Hooper

So, the latest new arrival -- again appearing on my doorstep only two days after being ordered* -- is C. S. LEWIS AND THE CHURCH: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF WALTER HOOPER, ed. Judith Wolfe & Brendan N. Wolfe, a collection of essays presented to Walter Hooper in honor of his eightieth birthday. I'd heard about this from Chris Mitchell while at Wheaton a few weeks back, although modestly enough he didn't tell me he was a contributor (other familiar names include James Como and Michael Ward).

Now that I have the book in hand, it looks to be an interesting collection. For one thing, it addresses an issue that Lewis scholarship has skirted for decades: CSL's affinities with specific denominations. Lewis himself adopted the pose that his was a 'mere' (essential) Xianity, though in practice this meant conservative Anglican. In his works he was on the whole pretty successful in avoiding taking up positions identified with specific branches of the Anglican communion: neither 'High Church' (Anglo-Catholic) nor 'Low Church' (the more evangelical part of the church, and the closest to what most of us wd call Protestant) and certainly not 'Broad Church' (those who wanted to modernize the church and its theology)-- these last being the group CSL utterly opposed. And yet while Lewis himself was indisputably Anglican, many of his most devoted readers are Roman Catholic or Fundamentalists. There have been a few attempts to look at Lewis's affinity or otherwise with one particularly denomination -- most notably Derrick's C. S. LEWIS & THE CHURCH OF ROME -- but on the whole it's been a topic everyone more or less agreed to de-emphasise, until now.

Of the essays, the Introduction is of immediate interest for its account of the summer when Hooper met Lewis. After that, when I come to read the book I'll probably start with the final section, a set of four essays looking at Lewis from the perspectives of Catholicism, the Orthodox Church, and Evangelicalism. I'm curious to see if it addresses a topic Hooper spoke about when I got to see him address the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society during my 2007 visit to the Bodleian: the fact that the audience Lewis originally wrote for, his fellow Anglicans, have by and large drifted away, while he's acquired a whole new audience, mainly Evangelicals, in America.

In the meantime, here's my own little tribute to Hooper, written as part of an 'Encomium for Walter Hooper' at the time he was presented with the Wade's Lifetime Achivement award (October 2009):

How pleasant to meet Walter Hooper

Whose editing work has been super

-lative. Eight thousand pages

Of the Magdalen sage's

Thoughts on paper, now preserved for the ages.

But oh how pleasant to sit over tea

And talk of good books and of good company

He, with his "soft-spoken Southern courtesy"**

And I, with ears wide open.

--JDR

*ordered M.4/25, arrived W.4/27 -- amazon's really on the ball these days

**the phrase is Tolkien's

Warnie's Will

So, last Thursday I discovered that the Discovery Institute, the masterminds (based right here in Seattle) behind the modern Intelligent Design movement, have Warnie Lewis's will up on their website. And C. S. Lewis's Will. And Owen Barfield's Will.* I haven't tried to authenticate them but am taking it on faith that these accurately represent the original documents. All are interesting, as you wd expect, but having just spent some time at the Wade looking at Warnie's diary I was particularly interested in the provisions of his will, made in 1969.

The bequest to the Wade we all knew about,** of course, but the legacies to specific people are revealing:

--five hundred pounds to Paxford the gardener [to whom CSL had earlier given a hundred pounds for thirty years' faithful service]

-- a thousand pounds to Maureen Blake, provided she let the Millers continue to live in the Kilns for six months after the Major's death

--a thousand pounds to Frank Henry, his Irish driver

--five hundred pounds to Walter Hooper

--five thousand pounds to Mollie (Maud) Miller and her husband, Len; he later added a codicil providing an additional ten thousand pounds to Mrs. Miller to buy a house of her own with. [CSL had earlier left Mrs. Miller fifty pounds]

--and, in another codicil, a thousand pounds to Jean Wakeman, who'd taken over responsiblity for the Gresham boys after their mother died.

In addition to these, he left two dozen or so books, mostly about Ireland and Northern Ireland, to Mrs. Ruth Parker, along with his grandfather Lewis's diaries and sermons. The bulk of his estate was to be divided between three people: Mrs. Parker, Elizabeth Lewis, and Clare Clapperton, whom I suspect to be his cousins. That his main heirs were all three people I've never heard of before just helped drive home the fact about how being an Inkling scholars leads you to know aspects of a person's life, wh. shd not be mistaken for the whole life.

As I said, interesting.

--John R.

*I've always thought it a pity that the Institute never, so far as I know, made contact with Barfield, who was a longtime advocate of what's currently being called 'intelligent design' (cf. UNANCESTRAL VOICE [1965], probably his masterpiece).

**"all letters, manuscripts, etc." of CSL's "which may be found among my effects", particularly the Boxon material, plus The Lewis Papers, Warnie's own diaries, and an envelope of family photographs.

Barfield (and Hooper) Come to the Wade

So, one of the things I found out about during my recent visit to the Wade is that they'll soon be hosting two special speakers: Owen Barfield ('Owen Jr', grandson of the author) and Walter Hooper.

Owen Jr.'s talk about his grandfather's life and works will be at the Wade tomorrow evening (Tuesday October 6th, at seven o'clock). I missed a similar talk in Oxford in 2007, having arrived from Heathrow just shortly before the event started and being too jet-lagged from transcontinental + transatlantic travel to take in a lecture that same evening. A bad call on my part, I've since concluded. Now I miss it again by just a week and a day. Ah well; someday. In the meantime, for anyone interested in the most overlooked of all the major Inklings, this is an event you shd take the extra effort to attend if at all possible.

Nor is that all: on the 26th -- that is, three weeks from today -- Fr. Hooper will be speaking about his forty-six years spent editing C. S. Lewis. I suspect this will be similar to the talk I got to hear him give on the same topic the last day I was in England (in fact, the evening that I shd have spent packing), wh. I enjoyed v. much. There aren't many people left who knew Lewis, and Hooper knows more about him than any other person living, so this shd be quite an event.

Here's the official announcement from the Wade Center website:

http://www.wheaton.edu/wadecenter/news/news.html

And for those who don't know enough about Barfield yet, here's the official website, which shows their progress so far in their welcome campaign to get all of OB's books back in print:*

http://www.owenbarfield.org/

--John R.

*my own two small recent contributions to Barfieldology are having provided the foreword to EAGER SPRING (having years ago provided the executors with a copy of the text itself) and writing a review of Simon Blaxland de Lange's biography of OB. I still long for the day when ENGLISH PEOPLE sees print, and still hope to get my essay on the Burgeon trilogy (THIS EVER DIVERSE PAIR, WORLDS APART, & UNANCESTRAL VOICE) written up and published ('The Importance of Being Burgeon'). --JDR

Swiftboating: The Lesson Scholars Must Learn from Politicians

I. The Whisper Campaign Against Obama
So, recently I was reading a piece about a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Albert Einstein's old stomping grounds) who decided to study how viral e-mail attacks work by trying to trace back the 'Obama is a Muslim' chain e-mails to their source. The article* makes for interesting reading because, despite her ultimate failure to identify the author(s), she did work out the methodology involved, which relies upon online discussion sites or mailing lists of like-minded individuals. Essentially one group who is passionately anti-Obama generates the lies and smears, while another who is just as self-motivated circulates them as widely as possible. There's no fact-checking, no attempt to separate fact from fiction: if a new story clicks with their preconceptions they embrace and dissimulate it.

Obama's Response
Obama had two models for fashioning his own response to lies. The Bill Clinton model calls for an immediate all-out battle against the liars. The John Kerry model calls for staying out of the fray. Mr. Obama noted who became president and made his choices accordingly.

Obama's Result
We're months away from the election but we can already see the positive results Obama's approach is having. By vigorously attacking lies he has remained a viable candidate among voters willing to make decisions based on evidence.



II. The Campaign Against Walter Hooper
Now, all this sounds remarkably familiar, because I see the same pathology over in Lewis studies behind the thirty-year slander campaign against Walter Hooper. Hooper's case is a bit different, in that we know Kathryn Lindskoog is the person responsible for inventing the slanders and the people who circulate her libels usually post online under their own names. But otherwise the two cases are markedly similar: Lindskoog invented the lies and her adherents circulated them as widely as possible, adding to them as they went. Even Lindskoog's being caught forging evidence to support her theories and, when caught, lying about it, and her death a few years back, has done little to stem the tide: new permutations of the same old slanders continue to be posted and re-posted at every opportunity, smuggled into reference books (most recently the four-volume set C. S. LEWIS: LIFE, WORKS, & LEGACY [2007], more notoriously the C. S. LEWIS READERS' ENCYCLOPEDIA [1998]), and in general persist in a sort of toxic half-life.


Swiftboating Hooper
Part of this no doubt is due to Hooper's decision not to sue Lindskoog when she first started printing her libels. Thus we were spared the spectacle of a priest suing a woman in a wheelchair -- which the English tabloids would no doubt have loved but could hardly have reflected well on Lewis's reputation. But, just as with Jn Kerry's failure to respond to Karl Rove's smear machine, some mistook Hooper's hesitation for an admission of guilt. In retrospect, we can see that Fr. Hooper was 'swiftboated' before we had a word for it.



III. Indifference to Evidence
It's unfortunate but not surprising that Hooper shd have suffered baseless attacks -- the phenomenon is a familiar one in our times. What is surprising is the degree to which the smear machine continues to spit out attacks even now -- for they still pop up on a regular basis on discussion lists, often gratuitously inserted into quite unrelated discussions. When confronted with evidence that supports Hooper's position, his detractors dismiss it out of hand but offer no evidence to support their own positions.

The Lesson
If someone disagrees with your thesis, look forward to a stimulating intellectual debate. If someone lies about you or your work, squash the lie fast and hard. Your happy peaceful life depends upon it.

--JDR & JC.



*www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062703781_pf.html