Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  I accepted him to come into my office on a basis of trust . . . I frankly admit that Hofmann tricked us. He also tricked experts from New York to Utah, however . . . I am not ashamed to admit that we were victimized. It is not the first time the Church has found itself in such a position. Joseph Smith was victimized again and again. The Savior was victimized. I am sorry to say that sometimes it happens.

  He would admit to no sense of satisfaction – or even divine retribution – when it was revealed that Hofmann had lost the use of his forging hand in an accident shortly after his arrest; but no doubt other humiliated bibliophiles of the American Church of the Latter Day Saints were more forthcoming on the subject.

  10

  ENTRAPMENT HOAXES

  ENTRAPMENT HOAXES ARE the easiest to enjoy. Not only because within us all there is a naughty school-kid sitting at the back of the class asking the teacher how to say ‘tail’ in Latin, but because when highly intelligent people turn their talents to mischief-making, the results can be pretty spectacular. In some cases, like that of the Spectrist school of avant-garde poetry in Australia and Romain Gary’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel, the hoax text can actually have considerable literary merit in its own right. In others, like the extraordinary case of I, Libertine – the book that never was but which had all of New York raving about the made-up Englishman who wrote it – important hypocrisies in the way literary fashions are created are exposed for the first time. Another good thing about hoaxes like these, which are designed specifically to be debunked, is that the perpetrator is usually willing and able to write about what they did and why, giving a valuable insight into the effects hoaxing can have on a writer. But as H.L. Mencken (phoney historian of the American bathtub) and William Boyd (biographer of a non-existent artist) both make plain in their eloquent explanations of the hoaxer’s craft, practising to deceive can sometimes be more trouble than it’s worth . . .

  HAROLD WITTER BYNNER AND ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

  THE GREAT SPECTRIST poet Emmanuel Morgan, along with the flame-haired Hungarian beauty Anne Knish, exploded on to the American modernist scene in 1916 with a collection of work – and a manifesto – inspired by imagism, futurism and, well, -isms generally. Spectrism was a hoax from the Ern Malley school of intellectual-baiting, and although it has never enjoyed the popular afterlife that the Australian poetry-hoaxers did, it was, while it lasted, a jolly good laugh for all involved, and had unexpected consequences for the two poets who came up with it.

  The perpetrators were Witter Bynner and Arthur Ficke, two poets in their thirties who had been best friends since meeting at Harvard in 1900. As typical frat boys they had always been keen on pranks, but when they both became poets after graduating and found that their traditional tastes in verse were at odds with the prevailing modernism of the day, they saw that the time was right for their grandest trick yet.

  Bynner had had a job at McClure magazine but given it up to write poetry full-time in 1908, and that same year Ficke made the decision to practise law full-time and make writing his second career. But both were deeply committed to and involved in the literary scene. So when Bynner had the idea for the Spectra hoax in 1916 it was only natural that he would call on his friend to collaborate. They had worked together before on more serious joint literary ventures and, lubricated by whisky and laughter, they holed up in Ficke’s house in Davenport, Iowa, making occasional forays into Chicago to socialize with the poets and novelists who congregated there. In little over a week their work was complete, after which time Ficke’s wife became sick of them prancing around her home talking in Spectrist-speak and advised them to move into a hotel if they had any more to do.

  The slim book they came up with was authored by Morgan and Knish and opened with the Spectrist Manifesto. This statement of poetic intent was a pastiche of the various new schools of poetic thought that were emerging, seemingly by the day, all over the English-speaking world. This new ‘ism’, Knish wrote in her introduction, had a complex tripartite definition: to ‘speak to the mind of that process of diffraction by which are disarticulated the several colored and other rays of which light is composed’, to illustrate ‘reflex vibrations of physical sight . . . and, by analogy, the after-colors of the poet’s initial vision’ and to connote ‘the overtones, adumbrations, or spectres which for the poet haunt all objects of both the seen and the unseen world’.

  The poems, which were given opus numbers rather than titles (and what could be more pretentious than that?) were all redolent with the imagists’ shifting visions of the natural world, and Knish’s, in particular, were possessed of an edgily female sensibility. While Morgan’s free-spirited romances spoke of things like ‘the liquor of your laughter/And the lacquer of your limbs’ (Opus 6), Knish inhabited a darker domestic world, as evidenced by her Opus 118:

  If bathing were a virtue, not a lust

  I would be dirtiest.

  To some, housecleaning is a holy rite.

  For myself, houses would be empty

  But for the golden motes dancing in sunbeams.

  Tax-assessors frequently overlook valuables.

  Today they noted my jade.

  But my memory of you escaped them.

  The pair of hoaxers had no trouble getting their work into print, and as soon as it was in the public domain it began to attract attention – as would any new poetic movement in those fecund days. Publication was supported by a number of poems being submitted to fashionable literary magazines such as Others, the Little Review and the highly-respected Poetry. To the authors’ delight, the big-name poets and critics weighed in with their responses, and they were largely positive. William Carlos Williams admired their work ‘sincerely’, the Pulitzer-winning poet Edgar Lee Masters wrote to Morgan praising his work highly but admitting he felt Knish’s output was rather bogged down in theory; Amy Lowell and the famous editor Harriet Monroe were both beguiled.

  Out in Wisconsin, the Literary Magazine even published a spoof of the Spectrists, with a manifesto written by ‘Manuel Organ’ and ‘Nanne Pish’ who solemnly delineated the artistic aims of ‘the Ultra Violet School of Poetry’. Fan letters poured in to the borrowed address in Pittsburgh that the Spectrists gave as their HQ – a town sufficiently obscure to make them seem as marginal as possible – and as the imagined back-story of Knish’s tempestuous love-life and flame-headed beauty became well known, it was not uncommon to find a young poet or critic who claimed to have met her and revelled in her gorgeousness. And though her made-up name, Knish, would be instantly recognizable to a New Yorker today as a popular Jewish snack-food, it raised no doubts amongst the less worldly readers of 1916 who were all hungry for exoticism of any sort.

  Keen to have a real live woman in the movement and aware that the success of Spectrism might justify enlarging their school, the two men approached another poet of their acquaintance, Marjorie Allen Seiffert. She was a writer of independent means with the time and naughtiness of spirit and disregard for trendy poetic ‘isms’ to devote herself wholeheartedly to the project. Indeed she had already submitted some hoax poems to a literary journal in the past under the made-up name Angela Cypher. She was an enthusiastic co-conspirator, using her considerable talent as a literary mimic to produce work under the name of Elijah Hay which was as well received as Morgan and Knish’s had been.

  In 1918, while Spectrism was still being talked about in reverent tones throughout literary America, Ficke was called to France to serve in the First World War. Although he would return intact shortly afterwards, the hoax would not. At one point the subject of modern poetry came up in conversation with an army brigadier and he was directly asked what he thought of the Spectrist poet Anne Knish. He could not contain his amused pride at this question and revealed himself to his astonished inquisitor there and then. Bynner was no more capable of keeping it a secret that he felt he had come up with the hoax to end all hoaxes, and by the time Dial magazine ran a story revealing that ‘the interruption of the war . . . gave “Miss Knish” a
commission as Captain Arthur Davison Ficke’ the true nature of the Spectrists was already an open secret.

  The literary luminaries who had been fooled had to admit they had been had, but most echoed Carlos Williams when he said; ‘I was completely taken in by the hoax, and while not subscribing in every case to the excellence of the poems admired them as a whole quite sincerely.’

  But the life of the hoax was not extinguished by its debunking. Although the Spectrists’ poems were never themselves to enter the canon in any meaningful way, as literary sensibilities developed in America, the work eventually came to be considered by Bynner, Ficke and their critics to be some of the best work they had ever made. Although they had been joking when they wrote it, they later came to see that in amongst the dross there had been lines and expressions that were far purer and more elegant than anything they had written in their immature incarnations as formalists. And although Ficke was to die too young in 1945 after a protracted illness, Bynner went on to travel the world writing about the things he saw and felt, and ultimately settle in Santa Fe and write poetry – modernist, imagist, not at all un-Spectrist-like poetry, until his death in 1968.

  H.L. MENCKEN

  THE WINTER OF 1917 was not a happy one in America or Europe. Casualties in the field in France and Belgium were stupenduously high after the battles at Ypres, and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the biggest man-made explosion ever (until Hiroshima) had just killed thousands when two tankers collided in the harbour. Journalists struggled to find any good news with which to lighten the hearts of their readers, so some took a page out of Mark Twain’s book and made it up.

  H.L. Mencken was one such writer, and the fake news story he published in the New York Evening Mail on 28 December would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life. Known as the Sage of Baltimore, Mencken was at this point halfway through a life which would see him crowned as America’s best loved critic, editor and social commentator. He lived almost all his life in the same house in Union Square, and wrote every week for the Baltimore Sun for nearly fifty years, covering a range of local and international issues in his famous opinion-editorial pieces, and attracting as much controversy for his political views as he did praise for his witty prose style.

  America, he decided, needed cheering up. So he put pen to paper and began to write an article under the heading ‘A Neglected Anniversary’:

  On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.

  He went on to describe, in a piece of 1,780 entirely mendacious words, how the great American bath had been created by a Cincinnati cotton dealer called Adam Thompson who, on a business trip to England in the 1830s, had picked up the habit of taking a regular bath for the good of his health and wellbeing. Thompson had a sideline in inventing useful things (it was he who pioneered the cotton bags in which legs of ham and bacon are hung to this day). When he decided to bring this invention back home, he commissioned the grandfather of all modern baths – a huge vessel made of Nicaraguan mahogany – and had it installed in his home. Dignitaries from far and wide came to marvel at the invention, and before long the idea caught on, spawning imitators all over the land. But some states began to raise heavy taxes on bathtub owners ($30 a year in Virginia!) and health officials, concerned that plunging one’s whole body into warm water every day would bring about a generation plagued by respiratory disease, tried to have bathing stopped by law. But America was by this time in love with bathing, and tubs private and public proliferated, ensuring that the bid to have them outlawed failed. The fame of this newfangled domestic contraption was sealed, Mencken told his readers, when, in 1850, President Millard Fillmore himself visited the original Thompson bath on a tour of Cincinnati and resolved to have one brought into the First Family’s official home. Accordingly, he instructed his secretary of war, General Charles Conrad, to put the job out for tender and a year later the Philadelphia engineering firm Harper & Gillespie had won the contract and installed a fine cast-iron bath in the White House. There it remained until the Cleveland administration, when it was upgraded to an enamel one. Finally, after years of dispute, the country was in agreement that having a bath was a good thing, and in 1862 the army even made bathing compulsory among soldiers.

  How diverting all this must have seemed to the good people of New York and the other towns to which Mencken’s article was syndicated. After all, most people had never stopped to think about the history of this ordinary household object – and why should they? It is, after all, not a very important subject; which is exactly why Mencken had such fun with it. Every detail of his history was fabricated, from the ham-holding sack supposedly invented by the American bathtub’s progenitor to the attempted bill to outlaw them heard before Congress. He was, he would protest, just having a bit of fun.

  However what happened next he could not have foreseen. The whole story was taken as gospel truth by everyone who read it, and facts from it began appearing whenever the subject of the history of sanitation arose in an article, paper or book. After a few such citations of the Thompson bath, or Fillmore’s role in popularizing it, Mencken thought he had better make it clear that he had invented the story to bring a bit of much needed silliness and Christmas cheer into people’s lives. So he wrote a confessional article in the Chicago Tribune on 23 May 1926 under the headline ‘Melancholy Reflections’, lamenting the fact that he had deceived so many of his readers but also pointing out that the American public were a gullible lot who would swallow whatever was fed to them. He was particularly annoyed, he wrote, that among the many people who had used his hoax article for their own ends were quack medicine sellers and chiropractors, who used it as an example of ‘the stupidity of medical men’ and indeed medical men themselves, who used its statistics about the number of private baths in use in 1917 as evidence of a mighty improvement in public sanitation that had not in fact taken place.

  Unfortunately, this article was largely ignored. Not only did the public continue to talk about baths as being from Cincinnati, but the junior writers in the very newspaper his confession appeared in continued to quote spurious facts from the original piece whenever a news story about plumbing or engineering or the White House called for fleshing out with historical data. This drove Mencken mad. There was nothing he could do, it seemed, to put the genie of misinformation back in the bottle, and the fact that it was not about anything of great consequence was neither here nor there: it brought it home to him just how gullible not only readers but editors, publishers and writers are too.

  Not long before his death in 1956 H.L. Mencken tried one last time to put his hoax to rest. In his book A Mencken Chresthomacy, he observed sadly that:

  The success of this idle hoax, done in time of war, when more serious writing was impossible, vastly astonished me. It was taken gravely by a great many other newspapers, and presently made its way into medical literature and into standard reference books. It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity . . . Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.

  To this day, examples persist of ‘A Forgotten Anniversary’ being taken seriously, not least by compilers of information about Millard Fillmore, whose famously lacklustre presidency was so devoid of interest that the possibility of him being associated with something so exciting as a cast-iron bathtub is an on-going gift to quiz masters and trivia buffs the world over. And in 1998, the car-maker Kia launched a marketing campaign based on the idea of ‘Unheard-of Presidents’: they gave away bath-soaps shaped like busts of Fillmore to publicize the fact that that particular unhe
ard-of president’s claim to fame was to have run the first ever bath in the White House. The Sage of Baltimore would not be amused.

  NICOLAS BATAILLE AND AKAKIA VIALA

  THE FRENCH THEATRE director Nicolas Bataille was famous for two things: directing and starring in the longest-running play at a single venue anywhere in the world, and ‘discovering’ the esteemed Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco. Ionesco’s play, The Bald Prima Donna, has been running for more than half a century at the Theatre de la Huchette in Paris and until shortly before his death in 2008 Bataille could be seen in the role of Mr Martin. It was in 1949, however, some years before that production made its debut, that Bataille accepted a work by the unknown immigrant dramatist Ionesco that would mark the beginning of the Romanian’s stellar rise through the ranks of European drama. And if it hadn’t been for reflected glory from bringing Ionesco to the world’s attention, Bataille might never have shaken off the critical mud that stuck to him when he humiliated the Parisian cultural elite with a literary trick of a most daring sort.

  Bataille was a rookie director who had teamed up with the actress and writer Akakia Viala (aka Marie-Antoinette Allévy), hoping to take the brave new world of avant-garde theatre by storm with their rehabilitation of late-nineteenth century literary symbolism. In 1948 their hard work and ingenuity paid off when their production of Une Saison en Enfer, based on Rimbaud’s symbolist prose-poem of the same name, won them an award and a small measure of celebrity. While some applauded the efforts they were making to revolutionize the staid French theatrical tradition, other more vociferous critics were less impressed by their attempts at recapturing Rimbaud’s idiom and, despite having won a prize, the two young dramatists found themselves pilloried from all sides by condescending Rimbaud scholars.