Winston Smith, call your office

[calimac]

Another trivial project: a revised edition of R.L. Green and Walter Hooper's 1974 biography of C.S. Lewis has been published in Britain, and I got it from A British Mail-Order Book Service. (Publisher HarperCollins; ISBN is 0-00-715714-2.) Unlike a supposedly revised edition in the US several years ago that only added a few photos, this one genuinely is revised. So I'm comparing the two editions to see what changes there are. I had great fun doing this with the two editions of Daniel Grotta's stunningly inept biography of Tolkien, and this, though hardly inept, is being fun too. So far my favorite change in this one is in the supposedly unchanged "Preface to the First Edition". In the original sentence "Walter Hooper's personal acquaintance with Lewis was shorter - fewer months indeed than Green's years - but much more intimate during that brief period," the last phrase has been removed. Oh ho, if only Kathryn Lindskoog, Hooper's scourge, were still alive to see that.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I sometimes wonder if Lindskoog's homophobia has unduly distracted attention from things she's right about.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Kay's revulsion at phantom signs of homosexuality was hardly her only problem. Her insistence that, if a posthumous work was badly written, it couldn't really be by Lewis, flew in the face of some of the stuff he actually published. Nor did the incoherent organization of her books work in her favor.

It's very hard to pick out her legitimate charges against Hooper from all that mess, which is a shame because she had some valid points to make: foremost that he vastly exaggerated his acquaintance with Lewis, and that therefore nothing he says can be trusted. It seems to me that Hooper's been much more careful in recent years. Deletion of this phrase suggests increased honesty about his past, but doing it at the expense of the integrity of the text amuses me.