For John Lithgow, art is a confidence trick. ‘I’m an actor,’ he said. ‘I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well that it isn’t.’ It’s a pithy phrase, but actors are pawns in the hands of playwrights – a troupe of Ted Baldwins jigging at Moriaty’s pleasure. This made me consider literary con artists.
Fresh from the success of The King’s Speech, Geoffrey Rush is in New York, playing Poprishchin, the deluded protagonist of Nicolai Gogol’s Diary of Madman. Giles Harvey has reviewed the adaptation for the New York Review of Books and he says that Gogol is ‘literature’s great confidence man’, whose ‘best work is founded on the cornerstone of deceit.’ The Inspector-General and Dead Souls are examinations of venality. In the former, a rake cons a town into thinking he’s a government stooge official and then takes advantage of more than the naivety of its virgins. In the latter, a lurid shell of a human buys the identities of dead serfs to pose as a man of property and breeding.
Gogol identified money and sex as the prime inspiration for dishonesty and manipulation. It may seem obvious, but he struck at something fundamentally human: even the innocent tell whispered half-truths of love and money. With such fertile and varied ground to graze, other authors followed Gogol’s lead. Count Fosco is the unlikely villain of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. Urbanely corpulent and fond of animals, Fosco is seemingly innocuous, a human macaroon. But his genial crust constrains inner viciousness. With a mixture of nefarious chemistry and subtle sexuality, Fosco intends to steal the inheritance of Laura Fairlee, who has quelled with his gentle charm. Fosco’s villainy is disquieting because it is so unexpected, so artful. Never has the concertina been played by such malevolent fingers.
Perhaps I’m alone this, but I see parallels between Fosco and Fielding Goodney, the sly manipulator in Martin Amis’ Money. Both characters exploit trust. Goodney is the great facilitator; the golden arm to deliver John Self’s dreams of wealth and fame. But he is nothing of the sort. He’s an agent of the age in every sense. He spots Self’s vainglorious lust for consumption and, whilst licking Self’s ego, ransacks his wallet. Again, sex and money are inseparable and not just because Self wants both in triplicate. The more Goodney promises, the more Self snorts and sucks; and Goodney penetrates further. This perpetuating spiral leads to Self’s eventual humiliation. Money is, of course, a postmodern confidence trick at the reader’s expense, and Goodney is one of its most elaborate devices.
Amis’ deceits are intellectual; Romain Gary’s were real. He won the Prix Goncourt in 1956 for The Roots of Heaven. No one had heard of him and critics complained about his grammar and many assumed that the book had been rewritten by Albert Camus. Gary responded by writing five books in English before translating them into French and trying to pass them off as originals. He failed and his reputation disintegrated. Then he began to write what biographer David Bellos terms ‘a comic rip-off of Gogol’s Diary of Madman’. Bellos continues:
‘It occurred to him that he could use this new book to become someone else. The manuscript was sent to Gary’s publisher under a false name, Émile Ajar, with a fictitious author biography to match. It was noticed by a sharp-eyed reader; a contract was promptly issued by a subsidiary. Gros-Câlin (‘Cuddles’ might be an English title) was a runaway success. Outside Gary’s closest associates, nobody knew or guessed. It was a first-class con of the literary establishment – but still it was not enough. Gary was intent on creating not just an oeuvre under a new name, but a new author as well – an author to be born of his work, not the other way round.
The second Ajar novel was even more beguiling than the first. The Life Before Us shot up the charts and was heading straight for the Goncourt — whose rules stipulate that it cannot be awarded to the same writer twice. Gary inveigled a relative, Paul Pavlowitch, into helping him out. Pavlowitch only had to masquerade as Ajar in interviews with the press, which Gary would script in advance. But things did not turn out as planned.
The true identity of Ajar was unearthed and the media besieged Gary in his Paris flat. He could not now stop The Life Before Us winning the Goncourt – and found he had cornered himself into being a crook.
Gary forged ahead with barefaced lies. For safety’s sake he also penned a madcap confession by Ajar that his real name was Paul Pavlowitch, that he lived in an asylum and suffered
delusions. Hocus Bogus, the strangest metahoax in literary history, convinced everyone that Ajar was Pavlowitch and that Pavlowitch was mad. Game, set and match.’
Quite. Game set and match Gary. Gary was also a diplomat. The mind boggles.
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