Among the ghosts

Does it matter who actually wrote a novel – or a political speech?

What’s the most distinguished ghost-written book? John F. Kennedy, while still a postgraduate student, put his name to a book that went on to win the Pulitzer. Decades after his assassination it emerged that it was substantially ghosted. Should not the keepers of the records, as with sportsmen caught out doing their great things on steroids, affix an asterisk to his name? After his death in 2002 the Nobel Prize-winning Spaniard Camilo José Cela was accused of using the services of two (also now dead) ghostwriters. The jury remains out, but another asterisk may be hovering. Two asterisks, perhaps, since Cela is also under suspicion of having been a plagiarist.

We learned a while ago that the Swedish academy, asterisk at the ready, is investigating the case of a living author suspected of ghosting. What, one wonders, will they do if they find it to be true? My guess is they’ll do nothing, perhaps not even make public their findings. The wise men of Stockholm are notoriously reluctant to withdraw awards: so far, they even stick by the one they gave in 1949 to Antonio Egaz Moniz, a pioneer of pre-frontal lobotomy. Moniz only stopped scooping brains out of luckless human beings when one of his former patients, less tolerant than the Nobel committee, shot him.

The general rule about ghosting is that the lower the literature, or the aspiration, or our esteem for the author, the less we’re upset. It’s said that Donald Trump will emit a ‘heavily ghostwritten’ book as a consequence of his brief presidential campaign. One no more expects genuine writing from him than a genuine coif. When Katie Price admits that hands other than her own create her bestselling works, we smile indulgently. No one expects a model to write her own books any more than they expect her to sew her own clothes.