What Can We Learn From Literary Frauds? / Features / Untitled Books

"Are we blind? Can we not tell an authentic literary work from a fabricated one? The answer is: no, we cannot tell, and never could. We have no real idea how many of the works that we treasure are the fruit of a literary hoax."

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What Can We Learn From Literary Frauds?

Human speech existed for about 95,000 years before we thought to write anything down. Not content to use our new skill to record and report, the art of invention took wing. David Bellos celebrates the art of the literary hoax from Plato to the present.

In 2006, a Sorbonne professor argued in a hoax-busting book that the most eminent woman poet of the French Renaissance, Louise Labé, had never existed: her works had been cooked up by a coterie of talented leg-pullers in Lyon. Scholars with vested interests in women's writing have protested, but the Labé deception would hardly be unusual in the history of literature. Clotilde de Vallon-Chalys, dame de Surville (1405-1498) held Louise Labé's role as the "major woman poet of the Renaissance" for the first half of the nineteenth century - and she too was a fabrication invented in 1803 by Charles Vanderbourg. Shorter but equally important critical lives have been achieved by "James Clifford", an English poet invented by the Soviet writer Emmanuel Lifshitz, and by "Ern Malley", Australia's answer to T.S. Eliot. The longest-running hoax of this kind are the exquisite Letters of a Portuguese Nun that first appeared in French translation in 1669 and were read, studied, and translated until 1954, when Leo Spitzer identified them beyond dispute as the work of Guilleragues, a friend of Jean Racine, who wrote them in French.

Are we blind? Can we not tell an authentic literary work from a fabricated one? The answer is: no, we cannot tell, and never could. We have no real idea how many of the works that we treasure are the fruit of a literary hoax.

The fountainhead of the Western novel, Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605), claims to be only a rough translation of a prior work in Arabic, which it is not. The founding work of the Gothic novel, Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), was first presented as the translation of a sixteenth-century Italian text, which it is not. Ossian's Fragments of ancient poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1762), the masterwork of Gaelic poetry that so enthused Napoleon, Herder and many others for more than fifty years, was written in English by James MacPherson. In our own century, similar hoaxes abound: André Makine's first four novels, "translated from Russian by Françoise Bour" according to their title pages, were written in French; Binjamin Wilkomirski's Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) were written by Bruno Dössekker, who had experienced none of the horrors he narrates. Critics, publishers, and readers in every country have been hoodwinked in every decade since the invention of the printed book--and probably since the invention of writing itself. Should we jump to the conclusion that literature itself is a scam, and be done with it? We would be in august company: Plato wanted to keep poets out of the republic because they were liars.

But there is a difference between a lie and a literary leg-pull, and it hangs on the nature of writing itself. Human speech has existed for a hundred thousand years and maybe even longer, but writing is a recent development - only five thousand years old - and we're still getting used to it. There's no problem knowing who said something, and knowing also that the meaning, force and value of what's said depends on the person who said it. Writing was a really scary invention, because there's no real way of knowing who held the stylus, quill, or pen. The first thing you need when you have writing are devices to authenticate the identity of the writer. The Sumerians put the very first written things in clay bullae which were closed and marked on the outside with the personal emblem of the sender. Since then, signatures, countersignatures, wax seals, ribbons, feathers, special inks, embossing, rubber stamps, watermarks - every imaginable supplement to writing has been used to simulate the intimate connection of expression to personal identity that speech provides automatically. For the past few hundred years we've had named authors, and then copyright, and now we have author photos, blurbs, and all sorts of paratexts to reassure us that we can indeed know who wrote the thing that we are reading. None of these security devices is unfalsifiable. And therein lies the intimate connection between fraud and literary invention.

The elaborate structures that we now have for the publication and protection of literary works makes a heist quite difficult to pull off. But in spite of sophisticated critical tools - such as close reading, stylistic analysis, even computer-assisted stylometry - writers can and do pull the wool. As with stage magic, the trick consists mostly in misdirecting readers' attention towards features external to the text which powerfully affect the way it is read. Writers' reasons for perpetrating mystifications are many and varied - Lifshitz used his fabricated poet to write about things that would have been censored had he written under his own name, for example - but readers' wishes to unmask imposters come from a simpler and single source. We want to believe that writing is like speech - the authentic expression of a real person. It is a human need, but, given the radically indeterminate nature of written texts, it can never be reliably satisfied.

The greatest scam of all literature (excluding those we don't yet know about!) happened in Paris between 1974 and 1981. A well-established, widely-read novelist with an unfashionable profile among the literati of Saint-Germain-des-Prés - he was a war hero, a Gaullist, a millionaire, a jet-set celebrity, an ex-diplomat, the ex-husband of one of the world's most beautiful women, and a journalist to boot - published a novel under a false name. In itself that is quite ordinary: Molière, Voltaire, George Sand and George Eliot didn't use their real names either. But Romain Gary's special twist was to make sure that his publisher didn't know who the author of the new novel was either, and that took a good deal of extra-literary cloak-and-daggery. The manuscript was handed in by an accomplice in an envelope that purported to come from a French exile living in Brazil. Against all statistical odds, the publisher's reader spotted the text--called at this stage The Loneliness of a Python in Paris, and recommended it strongly to the editorial board. A contract was signed by exchange of letters with a fictional entity called Emile Ajar, and Gary had another unwitting accomplice sign it, so he should not himself be guilty of forgery. Gros-Câlin - the title finally chosen by the publisher - appeared in the autumn of 1974 and was a runaway success. An entirely fictitious author-biography was circulated, and accepted as true. Gary set about writing the sequel, which turned out to be the highest-selling French novel of the twentieth century: La Vie devant soi ("Life Before Us") by Émile Ajar, to which the Académie Goncourt awarded its 1975 prize, the greatest accolade available for a French novelist, including non-existent ones.

But what had started as a change of writerly identity and an escape from a public persona that Gary found increasingly oppressive turned into a quite different kind of experiment. Because a Goncourt Prize puts the author into the media spotlight, and because neither the publishers nor the press had yet met "Emile Ajar", Gary decided he would create him - not on paper, but for real. He enrolled his cousin's son, Paul Pavlowitch, to play the role of Ajar in interviews and in discussions with publishers. Gary would write the script and fund all the travel (meetings were held in Geneva and Copenhagen, as the Ajar cover story made the writer a fugitive from French justice). Pavlowitch just had to follow the instructions. But the identity of the stooge was discovered by reporters, and his relationship to Gary uncovered. What Gary then did took literary subterfuge into a different realm. Instead of giving his game away and exulting in the victory of literature over the literary establishment, he doubled the stakes and lied his head off. No, he was not Emile Ajar And yes, it was quite flattering that his younger second cousin had been influenced by his own writing. Even so, the bloodhounds seemed too close to the kill, so Gary holed up in his retreat in Geneva and dashed off a double-hoax to put them off the scent for ever. Calling it Pseudo - a flagrant use of a literal truth to mislead the reader entirely - Gary penned a feverish, lunatic, fabricated confession by Paul Pavlowitch, saying that he was indeed Emile Ajar, and that he was insane. The fictional (but also real) Pavlowitch of Hocus Bogus (the English title of Pseudo) purports to be an inmate of an asylum in a Copenhagen suburb, where his bills are paid by a sleazy, cigar-chomping war hero he calls Uncle Bogey, and who resembles the public image of Romain Gary to a tee. Even more to the point: in his worst paranoid delusions Pavlowitch-Ajar suspects that Uncle Bogey is his real father - his onlie begetter, to borrow a phrase from another dubious author. In this meta-fraud of a book, Gary tells the strict truth - but by packaging it as the ravings of a pseudonymous lunatic he persuaded everybody that Émile Ajar was indeed Pavlowitch and that Pavlowitch was mad. Gary could not possibly have penned such an unflattering portrait of himself! But as he had done just that, he was now safe, and free to lead two entirely different literary lives side by side.

The Ajar adventure allowed Gary to succeed in an ambition that has as much to do with Mephistopheles as with literary leg-pulling: to make an author into the child of his work: to be the father of himself through a work of creative invention, thereby blurring entirely the boundary between literature and life.

The secret was kept until after Gary's death. When the truth about Ajar was revealed in the spring of 1981, critics turned away. It was altogether too embarrassing. In the US and the UK, Gary's works (which had all sold well there for three decades) rapidly went out of print. It took a new generation of readers to see that the Ajar novels represent the quintessence and pinnacle of Gary's literary achievements. When you know, you can find excellent reasons for such knowledge in a close study of the texts. When you don't - and when your critical attention has been skilfully diverted by fabricated "facts" about the author - you really can't. At any rate, nobody did.

Literary heists exist because we still do not really know how to read. If we granted no importance at all to the identity of the creator of a written text, no Romain Gary would ever need to invent an Émile Ajar, and nobody would be interested if he did. But we still want and need to know for sure just who is "speaking" through written signs printed on a page. But the fact is, nobody is speaking. Literary fraudsters remind us every time just how fragile and imperfect our grasp of literature really is.

Princeton, November 14, 2010.
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David Bellos is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary writing as Émile Ajar, translated by David Bellos, is published by Yale University Press.

Romain Gary. A Tall Story, by David Bellos, is published by Harvill Secker.

His irreverent new book on translation, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? will appear with Penguin Press in 2011.
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Thursday, 25 November, 2010