CS Lewis and The Inklings: The Memories of Lewis' Secretary, Walter Hooper

Introduction by Solomon Schmidt

In November of 2020, Walter Hooper only had a few weeks left to live. This limitlessly kind and unassuming man was spending his last days in an Oxford nursing home, his body and mind weakening each hour. I gave my friend a call, and a frail voice answered the line. When I offered to read him something by C.S. Lewis, though, Mr. Hooper verbally perked up and listened for several minutes to words written by his dear friend.

That was one of the very last times I talked to Walter Hooper, after nearly two years of weekly phone conversations that sometimes lasted two hours. He was the kindest and most humble man I have ever known, and also one of the most fascinating. Having been C.S. Lewis’s secretary, friends with J.R.R. Tolkien, and an acquaintance of Pope John Paul II, Mr. Hooper had plenty of interesting (and occasionally funny!) memories to share that no one else alive today would be able to.

After C.S. Lewis died in 1963, Walter Hooper decided to devote the rest of his life to preserving Lewis’s legacy. Fast-forward fifty-eight years, and today, we can look back and see that is exactly what he did. As literary executor of the C.S. Lewis Estate, Mr. Hooper edited a multitude of previously unpublished books and essays by Lewis, wrote several reference and biographical books on Lewis, and also made sure that none of Lewis’s works ever went out of print.

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January 8, 2021, was a sad day. England had just been hit by a second wave of the coronavirus, and the country was in lockdown. Gray clouds blanketed the skies over Oxford, and a gentle rain fell as a handful of mourners gathered at St Aloysius Gonzaga Church, where J.R.R. Tolkien and Walter Hooper used to attend daily mass. As I looked at the stained-glass surrounding me and shivered inside the cold church, I thought of how sunny it was in England the last time I had visited. It was the summer of 2019, and Mr. Hooper was still alive. We visited for a while at his apartment, where pictures of him with Lewis and John Paul II adorned the walls, and then had a wonderful dinner together at The Trout, a 400-year-old Oxford pub.

On the day of his funeral, though, I felt lonely and very far away from 2019. But then, I was reminded of a wonderful story about Mr. Hooper, which one of his godsons told during a moving eulogy at the funeral. Many years back, a college student disparagingly asked Walter Hooper how he felt about having lived his life in another man’s shadow. The student was referring to C.S. Lewis, but in his reply, Mr. Hooper transcended the student’s spite and pettiness. “It feels wonderful,” he said. “And I would do it all over again, because it was a Bright Shadow.” The student did not realize it, but Mr. Hooper was referencing a phrase that C.S. Lewis used to refer to Jesus Christ. For at the end of the day, as I was reminded, Walter Hooper was first and foremost a devout, passionate Christian, whose faith fueled his entire life and work.

After the requiem mass finished, everyone filed out of the church and drove in a slow procession to Wolvercote Cemetery. My friend’s body had been placed in the ground just a stone’s throw away from where the remains of J.R.R. Tolkien lie.

Even though Walter Hooper is no longer with us, I believe that his work will live on for many generations. The paper you are about to read contains priceless memories of the time he spent with two great men who were lions of the Christian faith and dramatically changed the course of literary history. Mr. Hooper gave me this document a few years ago, and it has never been published for free access online before. I hope you enjoy reading it and basking in the bright shadow that was Walter Hooper’s life and work.

- Solomon Schmidt, December 2021

Walter Hooper with Solomon Schmidt of History Bites

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The Transcript of Walter Hooper's Oxford Lecture

"I keep telling myself that I should apologise for the amount of autobiography this talk contains. That is because my friendship with Lewis, compared to that of many others, such as his brother Warnie, Professor Tolkien, and Owen Barfield, was of very short duration. Even so, each of Lewis’s friends saw him from an individual and particular angle, and while I wish for your sake you could have had Warnie or Owen or Tolkien as your speaker, those men are in Heaven and I am grateful to you for accepting my individual and particular angle instead.

My introduction to Lewis’s writings goes back to May 1953 when I was nearing my final term at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This was the time of the Korean War and all young men were worried whether they’d be allowed to finish their degree before they were drafted into the army.

The draft board had promised to leave me alone for a few months, and in that happy place during a happy time of my life, I was introduced to J.B.Phillip’s Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles (1947). It contained an Introduction by C.S. Lewis. I’d never heard his name before, and I read the Introduction simply because it was there. It made a total conquest of me. [[I’ve been trying ever since 1953 to explain to others why that brief article – now published as ‘Modern Translation of the Bible’ in God in the Dock – had such a powerful impact. What came through the introduction was not simply information about the Epistles but something about Lewis.]] I believe now, and I think I sensed it in 1953, that I’d stumbled upon someone whose faith was as certain as that of the Apostles. Lewis believed – or so it seems to me – with the certainty of St Peter and those who had been with Jesus.

After a number of deferments I finished my degree and I went straight into the army and Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Days before I was drafted I found a copy of Lewis’s Miracles, and this went with me. During basic training I kept Miracles hidden beneath my shirt, which made for a good deal of discomfort during callisthenics and bayonet practice. However, in those little ten-minute breaks between firing bazookas and throwing grenades, I managed to read a page or so. If a book can hold your interest during all that excitement, and while you’re crawling under barbed wire in a muddy trench, it is a very, very good book.

I began corresponding with Lewis shortly after this. In that first letter from Lewis, dated 30 November 1954, he emphasised this very thing. I don’t think he wanted me to think too highly of him because he began by saying, ‘I am glad if I have been the instrument of Our Lord’s help to you: in His Hands almost any instrument will do, otherwise none. We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves.’

We continued to correspond, and it was while I was lecturing on English Literature at the University of Kentucky at Lexington in the early 1960s that I began writing an academic book about Lewis – never completed. This led Lewis to invite me to come and see him if I should come to Oxford. Up until this time I would have been a very happy and contented young man if I could but see Lewis. But this was a chance to actually meet him.

I went to Oxford in June 1963. I had an appointment with Lewis at the house – The Kilns, Kilns Lane in Headington Quarry – on Monday the 10th June. However, I’d been warned that his house, some five miles from Oxford, was very difficult to find, and on Friday afternoon, the 7th June, almost as soon as I’d arrived in Oxford, I went out to see if I could find his house. No one in Kiln Lane could tell me where he lived, but someone showed me where his housekeeper lived, and I went there. The housekeeper, Mrs Miller, said she’d just seen him arrive back from Cambridge, and she urged me to go and call on him.

I arrived at The Kilns about 4 o’clock. The house face uphill, and when I walked round to the front door I saw a man with his back to the window reading. I rang the bell and regretted bitterly that I was bothering Lewis. Never had I seen myself in so unfavourable a light – an ignorant, provincial Tar Hell calling on this great man! But it was too late to flee. Someone was unlocking the door, and there stood C.S.Lewis.

It turned out that I’d arrived at tea time, a favourite time of the day for Lewis who was a great, a monumental tea drinker. ‘You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me,’ he said one time. I too was a lover of tea, but my intake had never been as gargantuan as his. As soon as we’d finished one pot of tea, Lewis would go to the kitchen and make another, and another. I was quite a shy young Southern American at that time, but after what seemed gallons of it, I asked if I might be shown the ‘bathroom.’ Remember, I’d only just arrived in England, and I did not then know that in most homes the bathroom and the toilet are separate rooms.

With a touch of mock formality Lewis conducted me to what was really the bathroom. He flung down several towels, produced several tablets of soap, and before closing the door on me he asked if I had everything I needed for my ‘bath.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ I said with some alarm. By this time I was very uncomfortable, and I finally got up enough nerve to go back in the sitting-room and say that it was not really a ‘bath’ I wanted. Lewis was roaring with laughter, and he said, ‘Now that will break you of those silly American euphemisms. Let’s start over again. Where do you want to go?’

There I was, catapulted right into a far more interesting life than I’d imagined was to be had, and pretty soon we were talking about everything under the sun, Lewis constantly making verbal distinctions, and catching me out on logical points. I remember a valuable distinction he made that afternoon. I asked which of his books he thought ‘best,’ and his answer was Perelandra. He then asked which I ‘liked’ the most. Thinking we were talking about the same thing, I said, ‘Well, I a