Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  So it was in August 2006 when the Sunday Times revealed that one of the nation’s best loved poets, John Betjeman, had become posthumously embroiled in a literary hoax which brought shame to one of his biographers and sheer delight to another.

  The two biographers were A.N. Wilson, a London journalist and writer known for his sharp-tongue and scattering caricatures of his fellow literary players, and Bevis Hillier, the official biographer of Betjeman whose lifelong dedication to his subject has produced three volumes of well-received biography and landed him, in his retirement, in the very genteelly poor surroundings of the medieval almshouse of St Cross in Winchester. Hillier first approached Betjeman about writing his life in 1976. He was a young journalist who, after Oxford, had worked on The Times before becoming editor of the Connoisseur magazine but whose real loves were poetry, art and design. A colleague had introduced him to the aged poet in the mid-seventies and the two had got on well. Betjeman was happy to authorize this enthusiastic young man to write about him, but could not have anticipated the single-mindedness and passion with which the project would be pursued. For the next twenty-eight years Hillier would live and breathe his beloved subject, and in 1988, 2002 and 2004 his hard work was rewarded with ecstatic reviews as each volume was published. Professor John Carey in the Sunday Times referred to ‘a model of biography’, John Bayley called it ‘brilliant . . . utterly utterly compelling’ and the Financial Times’ reviewer recommended volume three as a ‘magnificent . . . cultural monument’. Others followed suit, but the exception to these encomia was one influential London magazine which poured scorn on the work from a great height: the Spectator gave volumes one and two blisteringly rotten reviews, and the two men who wrote them were A. N. Wilson and Richard Ingrams.

  As soon as Hillier, in the bucolic surrounds of his Winchester almshouse, saw those articles calling his work ‘a hopeless mish-mash’ and ‘undercooked’, his hackles rose. He knew both men to be friends with Betjeman’s daughter, Candida Lycett-Green, and he knew that she was no fan of his. (She disapproved of his take on her father’s life and her daughter had even written a thinly disguised put-down of a man with ‘no social graces . . . let’s call him Bevis’ in the Oldie, Richard Ingrams’ magazine.) The Wilson review particularly irked Hillier because he had long considered the man to be something of a bully and a snob and had been engaged in low-level feuding with him for some time. He therefore delighted in getting back at him by selecting Wilson’s books The Victorians and My Name Is Legion as his ‘non-books of the year’ in the very magazine which had published the bad reviews. This act unleashed a brace of bitchy attacks on Hillier in Wilson’s column in the Telegraph, referring to his rival as ‘old, malignant and pathetic’.

  If they were rivals then, they would become more so shortly after when, just as Hillier’s final volume of Betjeman’s biography – the crowning glory of his life’s work, no less – was ready for publication Wilson announced that he, too, would be presenting a biography of the poet. Hillier’s blood, quite understandably, began to boil when he heard this. Not only was his well-connected, high-profile enemy threatening to steal his fire in the very year of Betjeman’s centenary, 2006, but he thought it unlikely that Wilson would have time to do much in the way of original research and so would draw heavily on his own three volumes of work, even though he had derided them in the books pages of the Spectator. Hillier decided, therefore, to orchestrate a grand literary hoax to show Wilson up as the careless and opportunistic writer he suspected him of being.

  It was the work of moments to have some writing paper and visiting cards printed up bearing the name of an imaginary lady called Eve de Harben who lived in a flat in Roquebrune on the Côte d’Azur. He decided, correctly as it turned out, that although this name was unusual, Wilson would not immediately notice it is an anagram of ‘Ever Been Had’, and he proceeded to concoct a false and saucy piece of evidence about Betjeman’s love life which he felt sure would make it into Wilson’s book.

  The love-letter was from Betjeman to an Irishwoman called Honor Tracy during the war, and although the original had, according to Eve, been sold to an American autograph dealer, a copy had been passed down to her father, and she now enclosed that facsimile for Wilson’s use. The letter reads as follows:

  Darling Honor,

  I loved yesterday. All day, I’ve thought of nothing else. No other love I’ve had means so much. Was it just an aberration on your part, or will you meet me at Mrs Holmes’s again – say on Saturday. I won’t be able to sleep until I have your answer.

  Love has given me a miss for so long, and now this miracle has happened. Sex is a part of it, of course, but I have a Romaunt of the Rose feeling about it too. On Saturday we could have lunch at Fortt’s, then go back to Mrs H’s. Never mind if you can’t make it then. I am free on Sunday too or Sunday week. Signal me tomorrow as to whether you can come.

  Anthony Powell has written to me, and mentions you admiringly. Some of his comments about the Army are v funny. He’s somebody I’d like to know better when the war is over. I find his letters funnier than his books.

  Tinkerty-tonk, my darling. I pray I’ll hear from you tomorrow.

  If I don’t I’ll visit your office in a fake beard.

  All love, JB

  As well as not noticing the anagrammatic nature of his correspondent’s name, Wilson had no reason to look closely at the first letters of each sentence in the body of the text and see that, taken as an acrostic, they spelled out ‘A N WILSON IS A SHIT‘.

  (It is unknown how Hillier decided upon that phrase in particular, but he may well have been inspired by the diary entry of one of Wilson’s more famous enemies, which described him in such terms after accusing him of the most ungentlemanly act an Englishman can commit – making public a private conversation between members of the royal family at a dinner party.)

  Into Wilson’s biography the letter went. And on the day of publication, as his friends were congratulating him on his timely and jolly book, an anxious sexagenarian in Winchester ran down from the Hospital of St Cross to the old bookshop behind the college to see if his ruse had worked. Barely able to breathe for fear that the letter would not have made it in or, worse, that Wilson would have abridged it somehow and ruined the all-important acrostic, he purchased a copy of his enemy’s book. Out in the street he turned to the index. The entry for Honor referred him to page 154, and there it was in all its splendour.

  Passers-by might have mistaken the jig-dancing, air-punching gentleman in the street for a lunatic, or a drunk waiting anxiously for the nearby Wykeham Arms to open. But for Hillier this was the greatest trick he had ever played in his life; he immediately felt the weight of Wilson’s snobbism and unkindness lifting from his shoulders and dissolving in a delightful cloud of comic retribution.

  Hillier is not alone in feeling that Wilson, although a talented and popular writer, has something of the naughty playground bully about him, so it is unsurprising that the English (and indeed American) press seized on this hoax with glee. The Sunday Times broke the story when somebody recognized the return address on Eve’s letter to be the same as Hillier’s sister’s in the south of France. Gladly, Bevis Hillier admitted what he had done. And publicly, at least, Wilson took the hoax in good spirit. But of course he removed the offending item from the next edition of his book and declined the invitation to bury the hatchet at a ceremony to unveil a blue plaque outside Betjeman’s childhood home, where the two rival biographers could have met and shaken hands. But how much more fun for both of them, and us, that this feud should continue into the second decade of the century.

  And there is little doubt that Betjeman himself would have loved every minute of it.

  WILLIAM BOYD

  THE GLITTERING PARTY in Manhattan was still in full swing as the clock struck midnight and the date rolled over to the first of April, 1998. The date on the invitation obviously had not deterred such cultural luminaries as Jay McInerney, Siri Hustvedt and Julian Schnabel, who had all
turned up at the undeniably hot spot that is Jeff Koons’ studio to celebrate the launch of the biography of Nat Tate, forgotten star of abstract expressionism and a martyr to the cause of artistic celebrity.

  The book, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960 was by the celebrated English novelist William Boyd who had long been interested in the vibrant art world of New York in the 1950s and, while researching the potent mix of fame, money and intoxicants that propelled painters like Jackson Pollock on to the scene in the post-war period, had, he told interviewers, come upon the tragic life story and intriguing canvases of Tate. In 1960 Tate had killed himself by jumping off the Staten Island ferry after visiting Georges Braque and realizing he would never attain anything like the renown of the Frenchman. He was only thirty-one when he died, had destroyed most of his work in a fit of pique and left not a single known relative, his only family having been the mother who was run over by a bus when he was still a child. But in his short lifetime he had known Picasso, partied with Gore Vidal, made love to Peggy Guggenheim and created work which Boyd, for one, and David Bowie, for another (who happened to be a director of the company who published the biography) thought had real power. Some of his rare, remaining canvases were reproduced in the book, and at the launch party people cooed over the artist who, although admittedly marginal, was clearly a significant member of America’s most turbulent school of painting. At one point in the evening David Bowie got up and read from the book, and afterwards more than one critic was heard to say they had known about Tate’s work for years. Which was quite some achievement considering he was a figment of William Boyd’s imagination.

  Boyd, however, had not been motivated by the desire to expose le tout New York as celeb-hungry gulls, although that was an inevitable side-effect of the prank. He was, as he explained later in the Sunday Telegraph, attempting ‘to make something entirely invented seem astonishingly real’ in a writerly exercise of fictionalized biography. ‘And the fundamental aim of the book,’ he went on, ‘was to destabilise, to challenge our notions of authenticity.’

  Boyd had begun practising this art in his 1987 novel The New Confessions and finally perfected it in his brilliant journal of the (imaginary) minor cultural figure Logan Mountstuart, Any Human Heart. Indeed Mountstuart, who first appeared in a short story in 1995, appears, in his incarnation as a 1960s New York art dealer, as a key commentator in Tate’s biography.

  The story of how Boyd came to conceive the Tate hoax is fascinating in itself. Years before, he had been asked, along with twenty-five other writers, to contribute an entry to David Hockney’s illustrated Alphabet, and came up with the non-existent Laotian philosopher Nguyen N, whose aphoristic jottings had been briefly popular in interwar Paris. He referred to his seminal work, Les Analects de Nguyen N, and much to his amazement found himself talking to someone at the book’s launch party who not only claimed to know Les Analects, but had recently heard of a wealthy book-buyer who was after a first edition. This gave Boyd pause for thought. He realized that it would be entirely possible to construct a plausible life through things like fake library records, old photographs, quotes from well-known writers and academic-style citations, and create an enjoyable book in the process.

  A few years later, as an editorial board-member of the magazine Modern Painters, he found himself discussing ways in which the magazine might start publishing fiction as well as criticism and interviews. It suddenly occurred to him that he was looking at the ideal opportunity to perform his biographical magic trick. So, with the collusion not only of the magazine but with Picasso’s biographer John Richardson and Gore Vidal (who both gave fake quotes about Tate for the book), David Bowie and the editors of the Sunday Telegraph (who agreed to run an extract), the hoax began to take shape.

  21 Publishing, the firm who finally brought out the book in 1998, were perhaps even more excited than Boyd about seeing the effect this new lost celebrity would have on the current show-offs of the art world. As its director Karen Wright said: ‘We were very amused that people kept saying “Yes, I’ve heard of him.” There is a willingness not to appear foolish. Critics are too proud for that.’

  As for the debunking of this gentle yet culturally significant hoax, Boyd said that he had hoped the truth would slowly dawn on readers as they picked up on the many ‘covert and cryptic clues and hints as to its real, fictive status’ he had planted in it. The subject’s name alone should have rung bells for anyone familiar with the two most famous art galleries in Britain. As it was, a journalist from the Independent overheard two people who were in on the deception discussing it shortly before the London launch and forced a swift admission from Boyd after exposing him in print.

  Although the fawning guests at the New York party might have been a little embarrassed about being duped, the fact that Boyd is that rare thing, an entirely serious but very well-liked and indeed fun writer (and that no one who was going to either earn or spend money on the book had been deceived) meant no one could complain seriously about the literary daedalics which turned out to be as equally edifying as diverting for all concerned. However, as he admitted recently in a Guardian article recalling those days in April 1998, even this most intellectual brand of hoaxing began to tax his conscience rather unpleasantly by the time of his unmasking:

  For any hoax to work there has to be a great deal of convincing mendacity. Things had got out of hand – it had all got too big and high profile. Angst had set in. Duplicity, pretence, obfuscation, covering tracks, ambiguities and evasions are all polite descriptions of ‘telling lies’.