“Narnia Born Again”

The Nation, 2 February 1999

BOSTON JOURNALIST Michael Gross attended Stanley Mattson’s Oxbridge C. S.. Lewis conference in 1998, then visited the Wade Center and wrote a 3,000-word article for the 2 February 1999 issue of The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/). He begins and ends in the Sheldonian Theatre. (See John Bremer’s “C. S. Lewis and the Ceremonies of Oxford University” in Legacy 79.)

Gross’s article (see pp. 16-19) includes a report on Walter Hooper, who revealed for the first time at the conference that in 1963 he sold his most prized possession, a used Mercedes-Benz, in order to buy a plane ticket to England to meet C. S. Lewis.

Hooper described pressing Lewis’s doorbell. “I remember this well — I’m not making this up — I saw myself as I really was. I thought, ‘I am just a country bumpkin.’ And I wished the ground would open up beneath me.”

“He struck me as a godlike man…. He was six feet tall. And I’ve always loved tall men because they’re so magnanimous.” “Oh, my heart sank. I wished I had not come, because I had never met somebody I loved so much, and I wondered if I would ever see him again.” (On p. 33 of The Dark Tower Hooper has Lewis writing that he loved a certain young man at first sight.)

According to Gross, “Hooper says he saved scores of manuscripts from destruction in a bonfire. He also says he ‘raided the dustbins’ to save watches, pipes and other effects, and he tracked down the nurse who took care of Lewis in his last days, from whom he acquired a lock of Lewis’s hair. Today Hooper describes himself, proudly, as a ‘relic keeper’.” (Just three months before his public claim about the lock of hair, Hooper wrote to an inquirer that he had been unable to locate Lewis’s male nurse.)