Telling Tales (3 page)

The way we use literature to communicate will change in unimaginable ways, but it will also stay the same. Books – whatever form they take – will always ask us to enter into a contract of trust with them. For as long as there are publishers to bestow upon an author the incredible power of seeing their work in print, there will be writers who abuse, pervert and wilfully misconstruct the printed word. But you only have to read the stories of fantastic literary hoaxers like Grey Owl or Romain Gary to know that the world would be a much duller place without them.

N
OT MUCH IS
known of the early life of the angry young Scotsman William Lauder, least of all his date or place of birth. What is known is that ever since meeting with an unfortunate golfing accident on the Bruntsfield Links just outside Edinburgh, which led to the amputation of one of his legs in the early 1730s, he became a bitter and resentful man with ‘a sallow complexion and rolling, fiery eyes’, hell-bent on stirring up trouble and knocking down literary icons. The accident (in which he took a rogue ball to the knee, causing an injury which, due to lack of proper care, went septic) was only the first of a series of disappointments which led him to turn his talents to a most audacious hoax, and one which, if it had succeeded, would have ruined the reputation of the finest religious poet in the world, John Milton.

Lauder’s talents were undeniable. Always a keen scholar, he had been taken on after graduating from Edinburgh University as an assistant teacher to his ailing master, Professor Adam Watt, in 1734. Trusted to teach Latin to Watt’s students, he assumed he would take over his position after the old man died, but in fact was passed over after his superiors decided he was too inexperienced for the job. He also seems to have been someone whom it was difficult to get on with, judging by the total lack of kind words from his contemporaries. Accounts of his difficult personality abound in the conscientiously kept diaries and correspondences of mid-eighteenth-century Edinburghians, including his colleague, the well-known classicist Thomas Ruddiman, who recalled being ‘so sensible of the weakness and folly of that man, that I shunned his company, as far as decently I could’.

Reduced to applying for non-academic positions, he sought a job at the University Library but this too was unsuccessful, so instead he decided on a career in the publishing and translating of holy Latin texts. In 1739 he worked on a book of religious poetry with Ruddiman which not only got published but was recommended for use in schools, and buoyed by this success he managed to amass enough references to support an application to the faculty of religious history at the university, but it was, alas, turned down. On receiving this bad news, he flew into an indignant rage and fled, as did so many others before and since, to London, where he felt sure his talents would be recognized.

Perhaps, even with his awkward personality, he could have made it as a littérateur if he had not become gripped by what was, according to his peers, an unquenchable obsession with doing down Milton. Although univer sally praised as a poet of genius, there was at that time a strong vein of antipathy to Milton’s republican politics, and one of the chief proponents of this was Samuel Johnson, who would become awkwardly entangled in Lauder’s hoax. Lauder’s theory was this: that Milton had drawn so closely on other contemporary religious sources for his great work
Paradise Lost
that it was time he were outed as a fake. As evidence for this claim he cited a series of passages, which he had translated (badly) to seem almost identical to verses of Milton’s, from a range of not very well known Latin works such as
Adamus Exul
by Hugo Grotius,
Sarcotis
by Jacob Masen and even the Scottish writers Andrew Ramsay and Alexander Ross.

All this evidence was described by Lauder in a submission to the
Gentleman’s Magazine
and initially, at least, it was accepted by his readers, including Johnson, who was happy to be associated with the young Milton sceptic. However, on closer inspection the passages Lauder had cited as lifted from others’ works were found either to be such bad translations as to be effectively made-up, or copied from a Latin version of the very Milton text it was supposed to be exposing.

One reader of the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, Reverend Richard Richardson, wrote a letter to the editor in January 1749 pointing out that some of the passages Lauder claimed to be from Grotius were in fact from William Hog’s Latin translation of
Paradise Lost
, and others were nowhere to be found at all. But it was Dr John Douglas, later Bishop of Bath (although at that time a not very committed churchman) who spent the season in London hob-nobbing with fashionable bookmen, who ultimately confirmed the hoax. Johnson immediately reneged on his support of the thesis, admitting he had been duped, but claiming that it only happened because of his ‘thinking the man too frantic to be fraudulent’.

However, Lauder was unwilling to go quietly and immediately set about publishing a rebuttal of the accusations made against him, producing, in 1750, his essay ‘On Milton’s use and imitation of the moderns, in his
Paradise Lost
’. But with the whole of literary London on his tail, and his excitable and increasingly bizarre accusations against Milton beginning to make him look quite mad, he wrote a letter of apology to Douglas (on Johnson’s instruction, and some say with Johnson’s help) explaining the peculiar psychological circumstances leading up to the hoax.

He was, he said, a man made miserable and ground down by repeated rejections and dismissals from a literary and scholastic establishment which would never give him a fair trial. He had, he lamented, seen no other way to gain the respect he longed for than to massage Milton’s texts to his own ends. He hoped, of course, for forgiveness and understanding.

So poor was the quality of the faked material he created, so unlikeable was he and so rude were his suggestions about Milton, that he in fact found very little support at all after the exposure of his hoax. He decided to flee Europe altogether and ended up working as a schoolmaster in Barbados where, his neighbours recorded, he was as illtempered, hot-headed and badly behaved as he ever was at home. When he died in 1771 fewer people will have mourned him even than poor Thomas Chatterton, who had died the year before.

T
HERE CAN BE
nothing so conducive to planning a grand literary hoax than waking up one morning and realizing you’re a supply teacher in rural Scotland instead of the cutting-edge poet your university chums had had you down for. So it is perhaps not surprising that James Macpherson, who had published a few verses when he was at Edinburgh and made no secret of his high literary ambitions, suddenly ‘found’ some miraculously on-trend manuscripts which he knew would have all the critics in the country jumping up and down with excitement.

This eighteenth-century Scottish ne’er-do-well is one of the most famous of all literary hoaxers. Of course, he did do well in one sense – well enough to fool a continent of burgeoning Romantics and make himself a tidy sum while he was about it. But the famed Highland ‘translator’ of the Ossian poems never really succeeded at his game, because even though his work is still studied and even read for pleasure by some, there is a general agreement that he was never a good enough writer to achieve the immortality he craved. Like William Lauder, he was also said by almost all who knew him to be a thoroughly unpleasant man. But, unlike Lauder, his work has been the subject of a storm of controversy that has only recently died down.

His personal story is the first in the history of hoaxers to be available to us in full detail, thanks to his being taken up by all of Scotland’s and much of Europe’s intelligentsia which, in the mid-eighteenth century, consisted of such trustworthy and prolific writers as Hume, Carlyle, Johnson and, perhaps most famously, Goethe.

Born in 1738 in the Scottish Highlands to an old and influential family, James Macpherson was, it seemed, destined for the priesthood. But this clever little boy, educated first at Inverness and then at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, had a passion for old Gaelic folk tales and a love of language which did not go unobserved by his family, who began to realize that something a little more creative than the kirk might be his destiny.

At Edinburgh University he wrote and published a few poems which were generally considered to be quite terrible, including one called ‘The Highlander’, an ambitious and interminable heroic poem which appeared in 1758 and which he later tried to suppress. The pattern of attempting to publish something as fiction which you later bring out as objective fact (or at least a literary
object trouvée
) is typical of the literary hoaxer, and its implication of a last-ditch attempt of a would-be writer to make his name is as pertinent to Macpherson as it is to the twenty-first-century’s James Frey.

After graduating, the only gainful employment Macpherson could find was a post as a tutor for the staid and isolated Balgowan family. He hated it. Spending long dark evenings cloistered with the offspring of a family of uninspiring dullards and no prospect of the literary success he still longed for, it is perhaps no wonder that he resolved to make his mark on Scottish letters by any means necessary. So, in 1760, still resident at Balgowan, he produced the first of the manuscripts which would make him famous. These
Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland
were, he said, great Gaelic poems by a bard called Ossian which he had collected and translated on his lonely travels around the Highlands. The hero was Fingal (
Fionnghall
meaning ‘white stranger’) and they told:

A TALE
of the times of old! The deeds of days of other years.

The murmur of thy streams, O Lora! brings back the memory of the past. The sound of thy woods, Garmaller, is lovely in mine ear. Dost thou not behold Malvina, a rock with its head of heath! Three aged pines bend from its face; green is the narrow plain at its feet; there the flower of the mountain grows, and shakes its white head in the breeze. The thistle is there alone, shedding its aged beard. Two stones, half sunk in the ground, show their heads of moss. The deer of the mountain avoids the place, for he beholds a dim ghost standing there. The mighty lie, O Malvina! in the narrow plain of the rock.

A tale of the times of old! The deeds of days of other years!

Who comes from the land of strangers, with his thousands around him? The sunbeam pours its bright stream before him; his hair meets the wind of his hills. His face is settled from war. He is calm as the evening beam that looks from the cloud of the west, on Cona’s silent vale. Who is it but Comhal’s son, the king of mighty deeds! He beholds the hills with joy, he bids a thousand voices rise. ‘Ye have fled over your fields, ye sons of the distant land! The king of the world sits in his hall, and hears of his people’s flight. He lifts his red eye of pride; he takes his father’s sword. Ye have fled over your fields, sons of the distant land!’

What might seem like a fairly trite piece of pseudomythological arcana to our cynical modern ears appeared just at the right moment to be taken seriously. It was a time when all Europe’s young countries were madly trying to clothe their cultural identities with any tattered bits of history they could find, so the idea of an ancient Scottish Homer was too good to be true. This was Rousseau’s moment, and alongside his ‘noble savage’ stood Macpherson’s hero of the Highlands, a creature of windswept splendour imbued with an innate sense of chivalry and order. Here was an earthy soldier, schooled by mother nature, who would fight for the reputation of rural Scottish culture and give readers a good many thrills besides.

And if a side-effect of Macpherson’s fortuitous discovery was great riches, glory and, eventually, a seat in the House of Commons, well, those were crosses he was willing to bear.

When
Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland
was an instant success for its publisher, earning its ‘translator’ the ultimate accolade – a letter of recommendation from the philosopher David Hume – Macpherson did what all literary wunderkinds must do: he quit his job and set off to find more inspiration. Luckily for him, it took no more than a few sallies forth into the heathery countryside to miraculously come upon enough material to fill two more books of Erse verse,
Fingal
(1762) and
Temora
(1763).

It was around this time, however, that eyebrows began to be raised over the authenticity of Ossian’s work. Samuel Johnson, never a man to mince his words, claimed that not only could any man have written this doggerel, but many children could have done so too. Yet the books had been translated into several European languages and, as with so many hoaxers, the juggernaut must have seemed to Macpherson to be impossible to stop now. And anyway, why would he want to? His attitude to his doubters was relaxed, even when all the major names in publishing and criticism were at war over the veracity of his poems. He claimed to have the original manuscripts of much of the work, but declined to share them with his readers. (Years later, one of his supporters did publish the ‘originals’ but they were Gaelic poems written in Macpherson’s hand, and only sparked off a new controversy over whether they hadn’t been translated from English to Gaelic in the first place.)