These foolish things | 30 March 2017

In Competition No. 2991 you were invited to submit an April Fool disguised as a serious news feature that contains a startling revelation about a well-known literary figure.
 
The top-ranked April Fool of all time, according to the Museum of Hoaxes, was Panorama’s 1957 report on how Swiss farmers on the shores of Lake Lugano were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop thanks to the elimination of the dastardly spaghetti weevil and one of the mildest winter in living memory. Gullible viewers, convinced by a charming video showing peasants harvesting strands of pasta, flooded the Beeb with queries as to how they might grow their own spaghetti tree.
 
It was a smallish entry, carbohydrate-free but with an unusual degree of overlap. (Barbara Cartland made several appearances.) George Eliot was revealed to be a man; Philip Larkin, it turns out, was a woman; and Emily Dickinson, the Nun of Amherst, was a rollicking good-time girl. Who knew? The winners earn £30 each. Adrian Fry takes £35.

Finnegans Wake was penned, it can now be revealed, not by James Joyce, but by the young Anthony Burgess. According to Dr Avril Fo of the Textual Autopsy Unit at the University of Ancoats, ‘Joyce, ageing and losing his sight, subcontracted the writing of this extraordinary work of modernism to ardent fan, Anthony Wilson, who would later change his name to Burgess and write A Clockwork Orange. Mancunian polymath Burgess shared Joyce’s taste for multilingual obscurantism and puns too erudite to elicit laughter. We ran the text through our analytic computers backwards, forwards, even diagonally, until proof emerged: Burgess places three Mancunian street names in the text, albeit rendering them phonetically in ancient Aramaic and pidgin Malay. This is typical of his ludic desire to signal authorship without owning up. Burgess knew the work would have greater cachet as the supreme work of Irish blarney than just another whimsical English pastiche.