Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  One happy consequence of the hoax was that it brought out the best in reviewers, both in America and the UK. Alan Coren remarked in Punch that ‘the book fails all the tests of true pornography (there are sixty-nine). It is a victim of its own constant insistence on self-parody, and with pornography the last place the tongue should be is in the cheek.’ And Miles Kington observed that ‘the print is tolerably readable and all the pages in the last two chapters are correctly numbered’.

  It is hard to imagine and may be hard to remember now just how sex-obsessed the publishers’ lists were in the last few years of the 1960s. Apart from the slew of erotic bonkbusters about which McGrady was so disparaging, there was John Updike’s Couples, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and of course the classic Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.

  And indeed the book itself went on to spawn many imitators in the field of collaborative, jokey fiction, the most famous of which is probably the 1996 comedy thriller Naked Came the Manatee, in which Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard got together with eleven other mystery writers to produce a chapter each of a story about an environmentalist in Miami who gets a visit from a mysterious sea-creature called Booger. All proceeds went to charity.

  Identical in aim if not title was 2005’s Atlanta Nights, a book submitted by a group of sci-fi writers to the publishing house PublishAmerica. It was deliberately written as badly as possible, with two of its chapters actually generated by a computer program, and was in fact accepted for publication, but when the hoaxers revealed themselves prior to the presses rolling, the deal was scrapped and the hoaxers resorted to self-publishing under the pseudonym Travis Tea.

  Recent years have also seen Naked Came the Librarian, a project undertaken by the staffers of the library at Augustana College, Illinois; a more serious multi-author novel masterminded by the Australian publisher Di Gribble, The Stranger Inside; and Naked Came the Phoenix, a more amateurish version of Hiaasen’s. Another offering, Naked Came the Plowman, seems to have sunk without a trace; but the gory sci-fi fest that is Naked Came the Sasquatch has earned itself a devoted cult following.

  Such has been the afterlife of the title alone that McGrady’s original appropriation of it from a 1963 historical novel about the life of August Rodin was probably his smartest trick of all, and remains his most enduring gift to the Western canon of silliness.

  ROMAIN GARY

  THE PRIX GONCOURT is more than just a literary prize. It is a French institution. The convention is that winners neither make an official acceptance of the honour, nor are allowed to turn it down, and it must never be given to the same person twice. But when, in 1975, the young Algerian author Émile Ajar was given the award for his second novel La Vie Devant Soi (The Life Before Us), the judges were unknowingly breaking one of their own cardinal rules. For Ajar had taken a Goncourt before, back in 1956 for Les Racines du Ciel (The Roots of Heaven), only that time it was under a different name, Romain Gary.

  The extraordinary life of Romain Gary is one no post-war French novelist could make up, however hard they were trying to be experimental. And if it weren’t for the efforts of his biographer (and former lover) Myriam Anissimov, we would have only his own highly unreliable version of events to go on, for his talent for fantasy extended very much to his autobiography as well as his many novels. He was born Roman Kacew in Lithuania in 1914 to Russian Jewish parents. Not, as he would go on to tell it, a Cossack and a famous film star. His father, Lebja, walked out on his wife and child when Roman was only ten, and his mother, the domineering, ambitious and desperately loving Nina, took her child to France to start a new life. Having spent some time in Warsaw before this, Roman – an incredibly quick-minded child – soon added French and English to his Polish, Yiddish and Russian, and while Nina took on any odd jobs she could find to pay for their two-room apartment in Nice, Roman concentrated on his studies.

  Nina had the highest possible hopes for her son: not only that he would be a famous ambassador or politician, but that he would write great novels, be the next Victor Hugo, and have all the most beautiful women in the world ‘dying at his feet’. Unbelievably, all these predictions came very close to coming true. It would be decades before Roman’s breathtakingly beautiful film-star wife, Jean Seberg, would be found dead in the back of a car round the corner from their Paris home. But not long after graduating, he did indeed become a successful diplomat, ending up as the first secretary of the French delegation to the UN, a decorated war hero and a writer who knocked out prize-winning novels (both in French and English) at a rate of knots.

  But first, Roman decided to change his name. As he later recalled:

  I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen-name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.

  In 1935 he decided on the new spelling Romain, modifying it again while fighting for the Free French Air Force in England in 1940 to Roman Gary. After being awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur, he returned to France, this time to Paris, to embark on his dual careers in the Foreign Service and literature.

  Gary’s first published work, A European Education (1945) was hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as the best novel ever written about the Resistance. Its gripping investigation into man’s potential for evil revolves around a young boy from Lithuania who is caught up in the ravages of war, and it set the agenda for the dozens of other books he would produce throughout his life. It also won the Prix de Critiques and soared to the top of the bestseller lists.

  He continued to publish novels about war, cultural collisions, Jewishness, mothers and his own life, and although Nina had died aged fifty-nine without seeing him being awarded his first prize, her presence lingered in the form of an internalized ‘witness’ about which he would speak and write, in his classic account of their relationship La Promesse de l’Aube (Promise at Dawn) with fascination and wit.

  But by the late 1960s Gary was living glamorously with beautiful wife number one as an in-demand celebrity and great lover of life but felt his writing was stuck in a rut. He had been trying to escape the confines of his earlier works, which were seen as traditional and predictable, but in so doing had produced writing too strange and tricksy to be successful. His Genghis Cohn, in which the ghost of a Jewish stand-up comedian inhabits the body of his Nazi persecutor, hardly registered on the critical radar and he was considered as good as finished by the arbiters of French literary taste.

  Then he had an idea. In 1973, when he was the same age as his mother had been when she died (a marker in life which often makes people do bold things), he gave birth to Émile Ajar.

  Ajar was a troubled young Algerian with a past he was already keen to forget. A newly qualified doctor, he had come to Paris to seek a better life than his homeland could offer, but after accidentally killing a woman in a botched abortion, found himself being chased by the police. On a whim, he fled to Brazil, and it was from here that his manuscripts were now being smuggled out by an anonymous associate. Gary took two people into his confidence to help him make the hoax seem genuine, a friend in Brazil who could assist with the posting of documents and his young cousin Paul Pavlowitch, who was to play the part of Ajar on the phone and at a few rare public appearances. Dark and handsome and with a knack for accents, Pavlowitch played the part with élan, and the job sparked in him a fascination with literature and hoaxers which resulted in his writing the fictional biography of Patricia Highsmith’s famous faker-hero, Ripley. But Ajar’s writing, of course, was all Gary’s. And it was so good that as soon as Gros-Câlin came out in 1974 the plaudits were rolling in just as they had at the beginning of his career. This first novel (called Cuddles in English) was a domestic tragi-comedy about the love between a lonely office worker and his pet snake. Ajar – whose name comes from t
he Russian and Romanian words for ‘embers’ – was hailed as the freshest new voice in French literature and despite the retrospectively obvious clue of the skin-shedding python playing a major part in the story (one character comments that ‘We all have identity problems. Sometimes you have to recycle yourself elsewhere’), no one, for a while at least, suspected the author of any duplicity.

  Cuddles was an instant bestseller but the second Ajar novel, The Life Before Us, did even better. It was translated into twenty-two languages, made into a film and sold millions of copies all over the world. Its appeal was in its inimical narrator Mohammed, commonly known as Momo. Momo was a skinny orphan living in a deprived Paris suburb with the geriatric, morbidly obese Madame Rosa, a former prostitute and Holocaust survivor. Rosa had plied her trade all across Europe and North Africa after being liberated from Auschwitz, and now took in the unwanted children of other prostitutes and tried, feebly, to keep them on the straight and narrow. She spoke a mixture of Yiddish and Arabic to Momo, who, at fourteen, was exactly the same age as Gary had been when he arrived in France with his mother. Although a few critics picked up strains of anti-Semitism in the North African novelist’s Rabelaisian anti-heroine, most reviewers were in awe at this remarkable new voice. In fact, the same writer who had opined in Le Canard Enchainé that old Gary was now ‘creatively impotent’ dubbed his alter ego ‘pure talent’.

  Gary looked on at what his creation was achieving with a mixture of pride and despair. And when The Life Before Us was awarded the Prix Goncourt, he knew his hoax had truly triumphed. He tried to turn it down, communicating through a lawyer that Ajar didn’t need it, but of course that was not allowed, so he became the first and so far as we know the only illicit double-winner of that famous accolade.

  Even before the award of the Goncourt in 1975, some academics and journalists had started to wonder whether this mysterious Algerian doctor-turned-novelist wasn’t in fact someone more established writing incognito. But it was not until the publisher Lynda Noël reported seeing the a manuscript of Ajar’s in Gary’s apartment that the rumours started in earnest, and critics began to see similarities in theme and tone between Ajar and Gary. In an article in Paris Match by Laure Boulay the accusation was explicitly made, but a seemingly indignant Gary responded by accusing his alter ego of plagiarism.

  No one ever managed to squeeze a confession out of Gary, at least not until he could do it exactly on his own terms. Terms which turned out to be posthumous. In the bedroom of his elegant Paris home on a wintry day in 1980 Gary, newly widowed after the suicide of Jean Seberg and tired of a life where the only literary credibility he could get was that ascribed to a younger, more exotic man than he, shot himself in the head. He left behind a note instructing his executors to publish his final confession, The Life and Death of Émile Ajar: a memoir in which he tells the full story of the hoax for the first and last time and which constitutes one of the longest and most engaging sucide notes in history. It is remarkably full of life and ends with the words: ‘I’ve had a lot of fun. Thank you, and goodbye.’

  One brilliant and unique writer was born in Vilnia in 1914 and in Paris on 2 December 1980, in the same instant, two were lost to the world.

  ALAN SOKAL

  IN 1996 AN eminent physicist from New York University called Alan Sokal submitted a paper called ‘Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum theory’ to the journal Social Text. This was a post-modern cultural studies publication produced co-operatively under the auspices of Duke University Press and edited by, amongst other, the controversial critic Andrew Ross.

  The journal had been seeking papers for a special edition called ‘Science Wars’ which was to focus on the perceived battle between conventional scientists and those postmodernist sociologists who felt that scientific intellectual practice is marred by prejudicial attitudes to gender, race and class (social constructionists, in other words). These theorists, while writing about science, often boasted that they had no formal training in the field and even suggested that this would only hamper their thinking about the real issues at stake. They might have guessed that that sort of attitude would be a red rag to bullish scientists from America’s traditional universities. But controversy was not something the Social Text-ers feared. On the contrary, it was their stock in trade: when Ross said, in the aftermath of what would be one of the most embarrassing literary hoaxes ever to hit American academia, ‘I am glad to be rid of English departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature’, no one was much surprised.

  In the spring of 1996 Sokal turned out to be the only ‘proper’ scientist to have contributed to the ‘Science Wars’ edition. Not one of life’s natural pranksters, he was nonetheless moved to commit his hoax after being inspired by a book he had recently read which collected together all the nonsense that was currently being spoken about science by non-scientists and exposed it for the vacuous and vain cant it was. The book was Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) and it had a profound effect on the physicist and others like him. He followed up the references provided by Gross and Levitt to various famous contemporary critics (known as the Academic Left because of their sensitivity to social issues like class) who, with little or no grounding in formal science, were attacking experienced practitioners like Sokal and, what’s more, getting their findings published in famous journals.

  Armed with this information, he came up with a plan to get these charlatans to hoist themselves by their own petard. And publicly. The paper he submitted was utter gibberish. He quoted all the trendy American and French theorists beloved by the editors of the journal, flattering Social Text’s general ideology but containing jokes, bloopers and non sequiturs that any scientist or mathematician would have spotted immediately. Some of his sentences contained absolutely no sense at all, being syntactically correct but completely devoid of meaning (afterwards, he confessed that ‘I tried hard to produce [more of] them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn’t have the knack.’

  The entire paper can be read online at the website of New York University physics department (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html) and to anyone unfamiliar with the language of post-modernist scientific theory it reads about as absurdly as it ought to have done to an editorial panel of genuine sociologists.

  Unfortunately for Ross and his colleagues, part of Social Text’s ethos of broad-mindedness was that it had no peer review process – that vital safety net that prevents most academic publications from being made fools of. The periodical had been set up in 1979 as a broadly Marxist collective, its editors believing that mainstream liberal thinking was redundant and that a new Chomskyan/Lacanian/Foucaultian paradigm should be put in place to answer the crucial ideological questions of the day, it chose not to submit its contributors to the same editorial strictures that more conventional journals use.

  So, despite a few misgivings about the style in which Sokal’s paper was written, which were overlooked because the editors were glad to have the input of an experienced physicist, ‘Science Wars’ went to press in May 1996. The very same day of publication, Sokal confessed to what he’d done in another academic journal, Lingua Franca, and laid out his reasons for transgressing the bond of trust between academics.

  The reason, he said, was not to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we’ll survive just fine, thank you) but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. He described what he had done as a necessary ‘pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations . . . structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathemetics and physics’, and expressed no remorse at having pulled one over on Ross and his fellows.

  Of course, the editors of Social Text were angry with him, accusing him of having defrauded and humiliated the
m with his dishonest trickery. However, in an attempt to save face they also maintained that ‘its status as parody does not alter substantially our interest in the piece itself as a symptomatic document’.

  Sokal replied by saying his hoax article was ‘an annotated bibliography of charlatanism and nonsense by dozens of prominent French and American intellectuals. This goes well beyond the narrow category of “postmodernism,” and includes some of the most fashionable thinkers in “science studies,” literary criticism, and cultural studies’ and before long the scientific community had weighed in on both sides, with famous names such as Richard Dawkins lending his support to Sokal, who was seen as a crusader for honesty and truth in a scientific community beset by fantasy and hot air.

  A couple of years after the hoax that lifted Sokal out of his relatively unglamorous corner of scientific endeavour and made him famous even outside the scientific community, he co-wrote a full-length study of the wrongs he had tried to expose with the French writer Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (Picador USA, 1998) contains a long list of extracts of writings from well-known intellectuals containing what the authors characterize as blatant abuses of scientific terminology. The book received rave reviews from within and without the scientific community and now Sokal is a highly respected professor of mathematics at University College London as well as lecturing globally on the subject of pseudoscience. But it was the unfortunate editors of Social Text who came away from the affair with silverware. They may not have won many academic plaudits, but in 1996 they were the awarded the IgNobel Prize for Literature.

  BEVIS HILLIER

  LITERARY LONDON AT the dawn of the twenty-first century is a fairly gentle place. So when a real live literary feud bubbles to the surface (especially one which involves swearing, low-down trickery and public humiliation) journalists, readers and even sometimes the feuders themselves tend to rub their hands in glee and wallow in the excitement of it all.