In this diverting, well-written history of deceitful and counterfeit literature through the ages, Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis chronicles a variety of fraudsters and fibsters, and their motives for hoodwinking the public. The earliest known literary hoaxer was the philosopher Dionysus the Renegade, who inserted a number of unflattering acrostics — ‘HERACLES IS IGNORANT OF LETTERS AND IS NOT ASHAMED OF HIS IGNORANCE’ — into his trumpery Sophocles play, Parthenopaeus.
Dionysus had acted in a spirit of mischief. Recent spoofers have been motivated more by the promise of celebrity. In 2001, Michael Gambino published his bestselling memoir, The Honoured Society, which purported to reveal the ‘innermost workings’ of the American Cosa Nostra. In ghost-written journalese the author described a 12-year apprenticeship in pornography, strip clubs and cocaine-dealing, and claimed descent from the feared Gambino family of New York.
Unfortunately Mr Gambino was a fraud. Michael Budaj — his real name — was a Chicago factory-hand of German immigrant origin. All his life he had idolised Cosa Nostra wiseguys, and coveted their camel- hair overcoats and custom-made shoes. Long after Budaj/Gambino’s unmasking, interestingly, ‘insider crime memoirs’ by self-proclaimed Mafia hustlers, hoods and other gangland cuties continued to flood American bookshops. There will always be another dissembler to fill Gambino’s shoes, Katsoulis suggests; and the publishers will make him an offer he can’t refuse.
Elsewhere, Katsoulis considers revenge as a motive for hoaxing. In 2006, John Betjeman’s official biographer, Bevis Hillier, concealed the insult ‘A. N. WILSON IS A SHIT’ in a cod Betjeman love-letter which he submitted to his rival biographer under the name ‘Eve de Harbden’ (Ever Been Had); the letter was unthinkingly included by Wilson in the first edition of his life of the poet.
Who has not tried a leg-pull at some time? Twenty years ago I invented a Mediterranean island for a guidebook on Italy I had been commissioned to write. Palinura (population 150) had been named after the captain of Aeneas’s ship, who apparently drowned at sea somewhere off the coast of Sicily. To my astonishment, the Palinura hoax was later reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, in other guidebooks on Italy, among them the Rough Guide, who said the island was accessible by hydrofoil. I owe an apology to those who tried to get to the island.
The Hitler Diaries rank as an egregious hoax (‘Must get tickets for the Olympic games for Eva’), as do the Ossian poems and William Ireland’s Shakespeare papers. Katsoulis might have mentioned Graham Greene, who in 1953 co-founded the spoof Anglo-Texan society — a prank which got out of control when enthusiastic Texans queued up to sign as members. Other of the fraudsters here ended their lives tragically. Earlier this year, in January 2009, the phoney SAS memoirist Tom Carew was found dead in an Antwerp garage lock-up, a couple of years after Newsnight had exposed his blockbuster Jihad! as a fake. Carew was a Walter Mitty-type fantasist, suggests Katsoulis, for whom suicide offered an alternative to ignominy.
No less a fantasist, Thomas Chatterton committed suicide in 1770 by taking arsenic, apparently reduced to despair by poverty and his own exposure as a forger. (A decade earlier, Chatterton had ‘discovered’ the work of the non-existent 15th-century Bristol poet Thomas Rowley, and even had it published.) Happily, he was resuscitated posthumously by the Romantics, for whom he was ‘the marvellous Boy’. Others have been less indulgent of literary forgers. One of the most famous of all 20th-century hoaxes — the fabricated life and works of the Australian modernist poet Ern Malley — left its intended hoaxee outraged and embittered. Still the world would have been a worse off place without Malley (or Palinura, for that matter): long live fibbers and their fibs.
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