As you may recall (though it won’t be on the test), I’m a long-time member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. I’ve been getting their monthly Bulletin for just as long. But the latest issue (Nov./Dec. 2023) features something novel – my name listed as an attendee in the minutes of a meeting. Being among those present was never convenient for me when they met in person, but since Covid, the meetings have been held on Zoom. The regular meeting date is, unfortunately, a night on which I usually have an obligation, but last June I finally got in, in a virtual manner.
Aside from that momentous development, this latest issue also features a headline article of considerable interest. It’s a reprint of a notable memoir by the late Alastair Fowler, originally published in the Yale Review (October, 2003). Dr. Fowler had C. S. Lewis as his dissertation supervisor while he attended Oxford University, beginning in 1952.
His memoir seems a fairly even-handed one – he clearly liked and admired Lewis very much, but he’s careful to describe his weaknesses, both as a supervisor and as a man, and to include some unsaintly details.
This article is particularly notable, though, as the one that finally exploded the unfortunate theory promoted by the late Kathryn Lindskoog in her 1988 book, The C. S. Lewis Hoax. Ms. Lindskoog insisted that Lewis’ abandoned novel, The Dark Tower, which his secretary Walter Hooper published in the collection, The Dark Tower: and Other Stories, was a counterfeit. She accused Hooper of writing it himself, and passing it off as a Lewis fragment. A lot of heat got generated by this accusation. But Dr. Fowler’s memoir states explicitly: “He showed me several unfinished or abandoned pieces… these included The Dark Tower, and Till We Have Faces. Another fragment, a time travel story, had been aborted after only a few pages.”
The Dark Tower is certainly different from Lewis’ other works, and many readers have found it distasteful. But Lewis wasn’t a one-note author, and he made conscious efforts to avoid that. Till We Have Faces, for instance, is quite unlike anything else he wrote.
There’s also a fascinating section on Lewis’ remarkable powers of memory:
Kenneth Tynan, whom Lewis tutored, tells of a memory game. Tynan had to choose a number from one to forty, for the shelf in Lewis’ library; a number from one to twenty, for the place in this shelf; from one to a hundred, for the page; and from one to twenty-five for the line, which he read aloud. Lewis had then to identify the book and say what the page was about. I can believe this, having seen how rapidly he found passages in his complete Rudyard Kipling or his William Morris.
I’m pretty sure (but here I rely on my own, far less robust, memory) that I read an account elsewhere which exaggerated this feat. That account claimed you could name a book, suggest a page and a line, and Lewis could recite it on the spot, verbatim. That always struck me as implausible, especially as Lewis often misremembers quotations in his letters. Fowler’s version seems far more likely, but still testifies to a remarkable memory.
Membership in the New York C. S. Lewis Society is not expensive, and I’ve always found it rewarding. I might also mention that our friend Dale Nelson adorns many Bulletin issues with his “Jack and the Bookshelf” column. The Society’s web page is here.