Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  A few months later, still indignant and still convinced that they really did understand the rhythms of the nineteenth-century poet’s style, Bataille and Viala hatched a plan to prove their detractors wrong. There had long been rumours of a great lost work by Arthur Rimbaud – rumours which stemmed from comments by the poet’s ill-fated lover, Paul Verlaine. The work referred to by Verlaine was called La Chasse Spirituelle and was, he said, the greatest piece of writing Rimbaud had ever produced. Sadly, the manuscript disappeared during the two poets’ stormy spell in London in 1872 and was never seen again. So when Bataille and Viala claimed to have found this very manuscript, and took it straight to the magazine Combat, the excitement in literary Paris was palpable.

  Combat was the journal started by the French Resistance (and edited most famously by Camus) that continued to publish its left-wing cultural and political articles into the 1970s. The editor in 1949 was Maurice Nadeau, the famous historian of surrealism with a keen ear for French poetry and a commitment to modernism in all its forms. He was convinced that the verses were authentic, and so too were the editors of Le Mercure de France, a literary journal with several hundred years’ pedigree as an opinion-forming cultural gazette. Le Mercure had been approached by the writer Pascal Pia (also a former Combat editor) who had been shown the verses and, believing them to be genuine, implored its editor to release the full text of the great lost manuscript for the edification of the reading public. The novelist Georges Duhamel was another famous name who had seen the text and was convinced of its authenticity, and so with all these discerning names behind it, La Chasse found its way into print with remarkable ease.

  As soon as the two journals hit the news-stands, however, critics began to weigh in with words far harsher than those used to denigrate Une Saison En Enfer. By the spring of 1949 the comment pages of Combat and indeed most other Parisian journals were full of damning, not to say bitchy, opinions. The highly respected author and Nouvelle Revue editor Jean Paulhan wrote: ‘The work is inconsistent, the metaphors are bombastic and garish, the ideas banal . . . modern poetry as country hicks imagine it to be.’ Jean Cocteau asked: ‘Is this text authentic? Is it apocryphal? As far as I am concerned it is laborious and soulless’; and the critic Rolland de Renéville said: ‘I do not believe that one could seriously uphold the view that Rimbaud would have accepted to do in La Chasse Spirituelle what he never did elsewhere, namely mimic himself.’ At best, then, it was seen as more Rimbaudy than Rimbaud. At worse, a cobbling together of various phrases and images from elsewhere in the poet’s oeuvre by some bold pasticheur. Which is exactly what it was.

  When Bastille and Viala admitted their hoax in the summer of 1949, there were still a few enthusiastic believers who were slow to admit they had been hoodwinked, although Maurice Nadeau’s initial assertion that ‘it is not enough to claim to be a forger, one must be able to prove it’ was no doubt a rhetorical covering-up of his shame-facedness rather than a genuine statement of belief in the text.

  Certainly, the two theatrical hoaxers who called literary Paris’s bluff fell out of favour for a while with the critical establishment. But ultimately both went on to have illustrious careers in the French theatre and although neither was to perpetuate a hoax on that scale again, each must have looked back fondly on those few months in the late 1940s when no one could say they didn’t know their Rimbaud.

  JEAN SHEPHERD

  ONE OF THE most inspired literary hoaxes of twentieth-century America is remarkable for having happened backwards. It was an idea born of a ground-breaking talk radio DJ called Jean Shepherd, who in the mid-1950s had just moved to New York and started a broadcasting career on WOR-AM which would go on to make him one of the best loved humorists of his generation. His style was subversive for his time because of its stream-of-consciousness tone and decidedly non-commercial brand of humour: he was a satirist before his time, picking apart the hypocrisies and vanities of East Coast media and culture at a time when the edgy social commentary of comedians like Lenny Bruce had barely been thought of.

  Shepherd’s shift was the night-time, and broadcasting his musings about life to insomniacs, night-workers, artists, nursing mothers, drunks, people who knew they’d feel dreadful when the alarm went at seven, he knew he was talking to the margins. It was in the course of one programme in 1956 that he came up with two things which would make history: the phrase ‘night people’ and the swashbuckling historical novel I, Libertine.

  Both of these phenomena came out of a rambling disquisition on the notion that ‘there’s two kinds of people: the kind of guy who believes in the world of the office – he believes in filing cabinets and phone calls and lunches; that the time from eight a.m. to six in the evening is the time that he’s alive and the time after that is dead time – tv, beer, sleep. That is a day person. But there’s the other guy, whose world begins when he gets out of the office. He’s a night person. And they’re constantly battling but they don’t know they are.’

  Previously on that night’s show, Shepherd had observed that one of the things he had noticed about New York as opposed to Philadelphia or Chicago or anywhere else, was that the whole city was obsessed with lists. The top forty records, the ten best-dressed people, the twenty bestselling books of the decade. ‘It is,’ he now observed, ‘the day people who read lists – they are oriented to statistics.’

  But these lists are of course completely bogus. He asked his listeners to ponder how they came about: an inexperienced journalist on a tight deadline is told to come up with the ten bestselling novels of the year so far. What does he do? He calls a few booksellers. The owner of one might be desperately trying to shift the 400 copies of something nobody wants to know about, so he tells the hack that that particular book is flying off the shelves. Sure enough, when it appears at number two in the list in Saturday’s paper he can be sure of an influx of trendy shoppers asking him for that very title.

  What if, Shepherd wondered out loud to his listeners, all of you went into a bookshop tomorrow and asked for a book that you knew did not exist. The first person to ask for it would be given the brush-off and told there’s no record of any such book. The second person to come in that week asking for it would be told the book is on order. And by the third and fourth request for the book, the bookseller would be on the phone to his supplier, who would in turn consult his big list of all books scheduled to appear, and on not finding it there, start looking at where to find it. A buzz would be born. All book-buying New York would be talking about this hot new read.

  As Shepherd continued to talk through this plan, his listeners began to ring in suggesting titles for the nonexistent novel. And an author’s name was invented: Frederick Ewing. Shepherd decided that Ewing ought to be an Englishman: a lieutenant in the British Army now a civil servant in Rhodesia with his wife Marjorie. Ewing’s area of interest had long been eighteenth-century court affairs, and this first in a planned trilogy of novels on that subject was intended not for the common reader but for scholars and historians so, the story went, he was taken aback but not unpleasantly surprised by its run-away success amongst the general English reader on publication by an imprint of Cambridge University Press. The back-story now confirmed (and having a sense of the author’s life was, he reminded his listeners, prerequisite in these days of celeb writers like Faulkner), a title had to be picked from the many suggestions that had been pouring in all night. I, Libertine was born. About to go off the air at 3.30 a.m., Shepherd encouraged his devoted listeners to write in over the coming weeks and tell him how their search for Ewing’s masterpiece was going. And don’t forget, he said, ‘The day man is not listening to us – he thinks we’re nuts.’

  Neither Shepherd nor his band of followers could have foreseen the massive impact of his hoax. The next night he was able to report stories of New York’s intellectually snobbish booksellers saying things like: ‘Yes, it’s about time the general public caught on to Ewing.’ And when the more commercial shops told Ewing fans they had no record o
f the book in their lists, they were nonplussed to hear the customer say: ‘Oh never mind, I’ll go get it at Doubleday.’

  A few days later one woman phoned in to say that she had mentioned the book at her bridge club, and four of her fellow players claimed to have read it, three of them liking it immensely. A college student sent in a graded essay he had produced on ‘F. R. Ewing: Eclectic Historian’: a nine-page paper with footnotes. His professor gave it a B+ and commended him on his excellent research.

  Some of Shepherd’s listeners were in fact writers and media people themselves, and true to their favourite DJ’s injunction that they should pull out all the stops to make I, Libertine the most talked about book in town, one reviewer even got a piece published in one of the weekend literary supplements, and one PR man engineered it so that one of the city’s leading gossip columnists, Earl Wilson, claimed to have had lunch with Freddie Ewing and his wife Marjorie who were passing through town on their way to India.

  But the crunch came for Shepherd when a prominent Boston church had the book put on their list of proscribed books. He was starting to worry, he said later, that soon the president would be talking about it and then he wouldn’t be able to believe in anything. Just as he was wondering how to out his listeners as the perpetrators of the hoax, one listener phoned in revealing himself to be a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He had, he said, been following the prank from the outset and felt that a very important thing had been happening. Wasn’t it time to reveal all in the newspaper? Shepherd, feeling that his prank was spiralling out of control, agreed that it was.

  The story hit the news-stands at three p.m. the next day, and as Shepherd remembers it, three minutes later he had six countries on the phone seeking an interview. The foreign press had already picked up on the latest big novel to be wowing New York, so when they found out it was a hoax they were desperate to get a quote from the horse’s mouth. British newspapers loved the story, being on the whole in agreement with Shepherd that popular culture in New York was a phoney and vain thing. Even the anti-American Russian newspaper Pravda took the story almost word-for-word from the pages of the Wall Street Journal – a highly unusual and probably unprecedented act on their part.

  The New York press was not so delighted with the deception however, and mostly wrote up the story as one about a mean radio DJ having pulled one over on his listeners by telling them to go out and ask for a book that didn’t exist.

  It may not have existed then, but a few years later it would. In 1956 Shepherd’s friend, the sci-fi author Ted Sturgeon, called him up and told him that there was a publisher trying to get his hands on the paperback rights to I, Libertine. This publisher was Ian Ballantine, and as soon as he realized the non-existent book could be put together quickly by the combined writing team of Sturgeon, Shepherd and Ballantine’s wife Betty, and given a cleverly illustrated jacket by the sci-fi artist Frank Kelly Freas, he drew up a contract.

  So, finally, the book became a reality. It did indeed sell enough copies to be called (legitimately, no doubt) a bestseller. Nowadays editions are prized amongst book collectors, and its cover art has achieved cult status itself: a gaudy scene from the eponymous rake’s progress featuring the strap-line ‘Gadzooks! quoth I, “but here’s a saucy bawd!” ’ over an image of a busty wench, a pub called the Fish & Staff whose sign references the two main authors’ names, and Shepherd’s well-known catchphrase ‘Excelsior!’ concealed in the ruff of the heroine’s dress.

  The proceeds of the real I, Libertine were donated to charity, as is the norm for the intellectual twentieth-century hoaxer, and although the whole affair is less well known now than others of its time and ilk, there can be no one to rival Shepherd, before or since, in encouraging ordinary people to beat the media at its own game. Soon after his grand hoax, WOR tried to sack him for not being sufficiently commercial. His protest was immediately to record an advertisement for a rival company (he was sacked but a public outcry brought him back). Shep, as he was better known to his thousands of devoted listeners, maintained his commitment to storytelling with a purpose, and his broadcasts on the days of Martin Luther King’s rallying speech and the funeral of Kennedy will always be remembered by those who heard them. Although best known now for writing The Christmas Story, which became one of the favourite holiday movies of all time, there is a generation of New York radio fans who love him best for just one thing: pulling off the cheekiest hoax of the post-war period.

  MIKE MCGRADY

  IF THE ERN Malley poems were aimed at sending up the avant-garde of Australian letters, the Naked Came the Stranger hoax was intended to ridicule an entire nation’s literary mainstream. Advertising itself as a saucy erotic novel by a glamorous new author called Penelope Ashe, the work was in fact the brainchild of Mike McGrady, a well-known columnist for Newsday in America in the mid-1960s, and had nearly as many authors as the Bible. McGrady was hardly the stuffy reactionary that the Malley hoaxers were, but as a lover of literature and believer in the power of the great American novel, he found himself increasingly vexed at publishers’ promotion of trashy authors like Valley of the Dolls writer Jacqueline Susann and Irving Wallace (whose The Chapman Report was a Kinsey-influenced look at female sexuality in suburbia) over better written but less saucy works.

  So he hatched a plan to prove once and for all that as long as a novel had at least one sex scene per chapter, such conventional literary qualities as plot, character development and fluency of style could go out the window. Working for Newsday, of course, he had a host of versatile writers of all ages and descriptions at his fingertips, so he asked twenty-five of them to help him perpetrate what he hoped would be the literary hoax of the decade.

  It would be a novel about a sexy married woman who resolves to avenge her cheating husband by receiving as many gentleman callers at their suburban home as possible and entertaining them in any number of ingeniously erotic ways. And in true porn-film style, each candidate would have his own clearly defined look and character: a boxer, a mobster, even a progressive rabbi and a gay man who fancies a bit of subversive straight sex. Throughout, she drinks, smokes and swears, and generally disports herself in a way that is carefree to say the least.

  Each of the group was commissioned to write one chapter, and told to take special care to make the writing frightful. Although some contributors initially had their attempts returned by their demanding editor on the basis that they weren’t bad enough, before long a manuscript heavy on soft-porn nonsense and light on good writing was ready to be submitted to New York’s lucky publishing houses. It was sent off in late 1966 with a covering letter about Penelope Ashe, claiming she was a ‘demure Long Island housewife who thought she could write as well as J. Susann’.

  The publishing house Stuart Lyle Inc. took the bait, and, as predicted by McGrady, threw a huge amount of money into promoting it prior to publication in August 1969. Interestingly, this was after McGrady had decided to come clean and confess to the director of the company that the book was a hoax title: obviously, the last thing he wanted was to be accused of fraud. Stuart Lyle was so keen on the idea, and so sure that the unusual nature of the book’s authorship would not impact on its sales one jot and might in fact increase it, bringing the book to a wider audience than would normally buy his racy paperbacks, that he signed McGrady up without even having read the book.

  In advance of publication in the summer of 1969, Lyle threw his publicity machine into overdrive. With risqué advertisements featuring some of the book’s authors dressed up as characters from particular sex scenes Naked was big news even before anyone had bought it, with more than $50,000 spent on publicity for what promised to be the year’s most outré title.

  As soon as it hit the bookshops, copies flew off the shelves. Its success was due in part to the seductive figure of Mrs Ashe herself, who was played by McGrady’s sister-in-law Billie Young at a number of personal appearances and signings, and gave sterling performances as the lusty housewife and outspoken commentator on
the sexual liberation issues which were at the forefront of everyone’s minds that summer in 1969. Almost immediately, two things became clear to the authors: their hoax had worked perfectly – sales figures were even better than imagined. And because of this, the perpetrators stood to make quite a lot of money. Keen to retain credibility as intellectual pranksters rather than get-rich-quick con-artists, and emboldened by their publisher’s assertion that no one would mind if the book turned out to be a joke, they decided to come clean. Being journalists, they were well able to orchestrate a mass outing in the local New York and national press, and on 7 August 1969 the New York Times, Newsweek and the Washington Post were among the publications who ran stories on the real authors of the book everyone was talking about. Then one night on the David Frost Show, the host announced that his next guest would be the popular erotica writer Penelope Ashe, and out trouped the whole group of mostly male writers, led by McGrady.

  As predicted, sales began to soar, the hoaxing aspect lending Naked an even more cultish identity – and, no doubt, enabling high-minded littérateurs and armchair critics legitimately to go out and buy a trashy book with a naked lady on the cover in the name of current affairs. By the middle of October that same year, 90,000 copies had been sold, according to Publisher’s Weekly, and with almost constant print runs for months afterwards, this bold collaborative hoax quickly took its place on the bestseller lists. In the years that followed, it was translated into all the languages a 1970s porn-watcher might expect: Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish and French.