Telling Tales (10 page)

This good faith was made manifest just before the First World War when he was asked to return to England to become Professor of Chinese at King’s College, London. This honour was slightly less than he had hoped for, his sights having been set on a position at his
alma mater
, Oxford, and he blamed ill-health for only undertaking the post for a short while before returning to live out the rest of his seventy years in Peking – now living in the west of the city, where few foreigners cared to tread. However, in order to gain the interest of the universities in the first place he had some time previously begun shipping vast quantities of books back to the Bodleian Library as gifts. Thousands of manuscripts were conveyed by him from China, and as he and Bland had now published a second, well-received book,
Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking
, his credentials as a serious academic were hardly doubted. But the more he was thanked and lauded for bestowing upon the university these books, the more he became carried away with the idea of donating more, and so furthering his reputation as the English emperor of Chinese studies. He took cash advances for the complicated shipping arrangements, by land and sea, of something he called ‘the famous palace library’ – some 60,000 manuscripts and journals all said to be pricelessly rare and beautiful. But the palace library, like Ching-shan’s diary and the arms contracts, never existed. And the Bodleian was of course never able to trace its money.

Despite incurring the wrath of the educational and governmental institutions whom he tricked out of money, and continual bad-mouthing by Dr Morrison, who grew to loathe Backhouse but still kept him on as an assistant, the slippery baronet was never exposed in his lifetime. And thanks to occasional bail-outs from his family back home in England he was able to continue living the life he loved. Those English diplomats and officials lucky enough to draw him out of his lodgings would describe him as an impeccably polite member of any party, especially delighting in the company of women; but the journalists and other men of lesser orders he encountered spoke of his lascivious tongue and dependence on ‘caffeine crystals’ and sleeping pills. In all his eccentricity, he became a Peking institution, much talked about but rarely seen. Even when the Japanese invaded Peking in the 1940s he was excused internment, and having refused the passage home offered by his family in England, preferred instead to remain living in a single, humble room in Peking (claiming he had been robbed of his treasures and books by dishonest staff), always dressed in Chinese robes, and attended on by one faithful Chinese servant. In the last few years of his life, although living in near total isolation, he was befriended by a Swiss doctor, Reinhard Hoeppli, who would persuade – and pay – him to complete the last, excessive flourish in his life’s work as a hoaxer: his memoirs.

These two books, charting his life as a miserable public-schoolboy, then an oversexed undergraduate and culminating in his arrival in China and the dawn of a new, unbridled age of sexual and political exploits, stretch the reader’s credibility almost to breaking point. And after a while, their tolerance of pornography too. Hoeppli says that Backhouse’s physical health improved as he wrote these volumes, but whether that was the function of catharsis or sheer self-titillation is unclear. Backhouse claimed that his long career as an active homosexual began when the French poet Verlaine came to teach a term at his school. This might be true, but from there the account spirals off on a tangent of what can only be described as literary-historical sexual fantasy. Travelling Europe with his new friend Verlaine, he becomes intimate with almost every famous writer of the
fin de siècle
cultural scene: Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas; the actor Harry Stanford; Aubrey Beardsley; Ellen Terry; Henry James; Joseph Conrad; Edmund Gosse. The list goes on. Once he is established in Peking, aside from the hundreds of young men he had sex with in brothels and backstreets, he describes being summoned to the inner sanctum of the septuagenarian dowager empress herself and given the honour of engaging in a marathon of love-making, aphrodisiac-taking and general ritualized pleasure-making with her. Pure, adulterated fantasy.

It was not until Hugh Trevor-Roper (who we will encounter again later in connection with some other more famous bogus journals) discovered these later diaries and made their author the subject of one of his brilliant studies in the mid-1970s that the full story of Backhouse’s extraordinary, playful powers of illusion were exposed. While the memoir seen by Trevor-Roper contains nothing like an explicit confession, enough of it is the work of a blatant fantasist to warrant calling his entire oeuvre into question. An openly gay Englishman who claims to have had sordid sexual liaisons with the ageing Empress Cixi herself, as well as being an intimate of her Grand Eunuch is, by anybody’s standards, something of a loon. But what a successful loon he was. Deluded, greedy, desperate for recognition from the university at which he had failed so conspicuously to shine as a young man, yes, but ultimately one of those inimitable eccentrics without whom the history of English letters – and Englishmen abroad – would be a far less colourful place.

W
HITE AMERICA’S RELATIONSHIP
with her native population is complex and only relatively recently beginning to get away from the stereotypes of cowboys ’n’ Injuns. But as with Americans of African origin, the figure of the native American is still bound up with any number of insecurities and simplifications which result in him being seen as either unrealistically strong and capable (the warrior king of the plains, preternaturally skilled in bushcraft and ancient lore) or hopelessly feeble (the unemployable drunk languishing on a reservation). Nowadays many white Americans look for Indian blood in their heritage as keenly as they once delved into their Celtic or northern European provenance, while other more reactionary types rue the positive discrimination they see their native countrymen receiving. All these tensions combine in the literature of First Nation America, but for every fine authentic novelist like Sherman Alexie there is a Nasdijj – the unfortunate white man who decided to hijack the identity of a Navajo and pass it off as his own to capitalize on the vogue for confessional autobiographies and the romance of the Indian. But long before he put mendacious pen to paper, there were other hoaxers whose immersion in their assumed native identities were even more comprehensive and often done for a far better cause than mere self-promotion. The greatest of them all was Grey Owl.

I
N LONDON IN
1937 a weathered-looking Apache Indian stood in long hair, skins and moccasins before the entire royal household in Buckingham Palace and spoke movingly about the urgent need to protect the natural world from greedy developers. He was one of the world’s first naturalists (just the sort of man, in fact, that the future heir of the young Princess Elizabeth would adore), and a tireless campaigner, through his books and lectures, for the land he loved best: the Canadian wilderness. Only on his death the following year would questions about his true identity begin to be raised. Who was Grey Owl? And how should the answer to that question affect the way his books are read?

The story begins in Hastings, Sussex, at the turn of the twentieth century, when young Archie Belaney was twelve years old. The child of a dissolute father and under-age mother, he was raised by his maiden aunts, who sent him to grammar school and hoped for a good steady office job for him afterwards. But Archie had only one passion – the Indian warriors of the Wild West. He devoured books about heroes like Buffalo Bill, and soon his obsession with the Aboriginal way of life extended to his eschewing his bed for the hard floorboards (because no good backwoodsman can sleep on a soft bed), camping out overnight in the garden and collecting such specimens from nature as the Sussex countryside would offer up. And just as much as he loved this alternative world, he hated and feared the one marked out for him at home. His terror of ending up an office worker led him to run away to Canada in 1906 at the tender age of sixteen.

Arriving in Ontario, Belaney soon made his way to the beautiful wilderness of Temagami, the home of the Ojibwa nation. Amongst the expansive woods and lakes of this unspoilt territory the boy who had felt so cooped up and misunderstood in the suburban streets of East Sussex finally breathed a sigh relief. He was happy, relaxed and inspired. And, like many a young traveller, in the mood for love. So he swiftly found and married a local girl and began to make it known that he was the son of a Scotsman and an Apache woman from New Mexico who had come north to live off the land and learn more about the way of the Ojibwa. Despite having blue eyes, his tanned skin and increasingly long hair allowed him to pass as mixed-race, and his boundless enthusiasm for bushcraft saw him first employed as a trainee guide then a fire ranger, and eventually he was taken in by the Ojibwa, who taught him their language and customs. They even gave him a ceremonial name.

He and his wife Angele and their children were living a Walden-like dream, but in 1914 his happy life was interrupted by the First World War. Grey Owl, as he was now called, enlisted in the Canadian Army and was shipped out to France to fight. So began a hiatus of several years during which time he was injured by shrapnel and mustard gas and sent to hospital in England to recuperate. Here, he rekindled an old love with a girl from Hastings and even made a brief bigamous marriage, but as soon as he was well enough he returned to Canada and his first love: not Angele, for he was to marry more than once again, but the life of the tepee-dwelling, beaver-trapping, fire-making brave.

Then along came Pony. Her real name was Anahereo but everyone called her by her nickname. She was a charismatic, very beautiful Iroquoi woman who was destined to change him from a trapper to an animal-lover, and from a runaway to a celebrity. She was not yet twenty when she met the tall exotic Grey Owl (by now in his late thirties) but her passion for nurturing animals convinced him to move in with her and a pair of rescued baby beavers, give up trapping and start writing and lecturing about the precious and dying way of life of the Indians, whose lives were already becoming fatally tainted with the greedy unsustainable ways of white men.

Perhaps because he had read so much as a child and an invalid, Grey Owl was able to write engagingly enough about his experiences of life on the reservation for editors to take notice. His first pieces were for magazines such as
Country Life
and the publication of the Canadian Forestry Association (CFA),
Forests and Outdoors
. His pieces were on such subjects (as enthralling to deskbound readers then as now) as ‘The Perils of Woods Travel’, ‘The King of the Beavers’ and ‘A Day in a Hidden Town’. The CFA took him up as something of a mascot and encouraged his burgeoning media career, even making a film about his life with Pony and their pet beavers. By the time he became the subject of the 1935 bestseller,
Grey Owl and the Beaver
(Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd), he had started the lecture tours that would make him famous all over the world. First in America then Europe, he would attend societies and educational institutes dressed in full Ojibwa regalia, promoting not only his writings but a general ethos of sustainability and respect for nature. By now an ardent critic of trapping, which had, he felt, become something done more for financial gain than necessary subsistence, he was beloved by women and children (as well as the usual adventure-minded males) as a kind and philosophical noble savage. It would be a long time, of course, until the Native American world would find a critical voice loud enough to speak out against this sort of objectification.

Amazingly, on one of his lecture tours to England Grey Owl gave a talk at a hall in his hometown of Hastings, which was attended by the very aunts who had tolerated his boyish obsession with all things Indian several decades previously. They of course recognized the nephew they had raised from birth, but out of love and respect for a boy who finally seemed to have found happiness and success, kept his secret to themselves. How very English.

When Grey Owl finally died in 1938, his lungs weakened from mustard gas and his constitution not up to the years of travelling and working outdoors, his true identity was quickly revealed to a disbelieving public. He had looked and acted – and, crucially, written – the part so completely, that it was hard to believe this tall, craggy-faced, wise old Indian was in fact no more than a fanciful lad from Hastings.

The pattern of the hoaxer as a fatherless child who retreats into an imaginary world and ends up involving the public in his fantasies is becoming a familiar one. But there is a new significance, in terms of the way we think about authorship, in Grey Owl’s story. In a sense, the books and articles he wrote were not hoaxes at all, because although they were the work of Grey Owl and Grey Owl did not exist (in that that was the name given to the imagined Apache character he presented to the Indians he met in Canada), the content of the writings was absolutely true. The author’s knowledge of the environment he called home was profound. His passion for the traditional ways of life he advocated was real, and strong. And his radical message, that the whole world should join in protecting faraway wildernesses, was based on an understanding of the deleterious effects of global industrialization that was quite ahead of his time. So when a young Queen Elizabeth and her sister listened to this strange visitor speak his creed in Buckingham Palace in the 1930s, they were in the presence of an inspired man who, despite not having the origins he claimed, came with an important and undeniably true message.