Telling Tales (34 page)

America, he decided, needed cheering up. So he put pen to paper and began to write an article under the heading ‘A Neglected Anniversary’:

On December 20 there flitted past us, absolutely without public notice, one of the most important profane anniversaries in American history, to wit, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub into These States. Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day.

He went on to describe, in a piece of 1,780 entirely mendacious words, how the great American bath had been created by a Cincinnati cotton dealer called Adam Thompson who, on a business trip to England in the 1830s, had picked up the habit of taking a regular bath for the good of his health and wellbeing. Thompson had a sideline in inventing useful things (it was he who pioneered the cotton bags in which legs of ham and bacon are hung to this day). When he decided to bring this invention back home, he commissioned the grandfather of all modern baths – a huge vessel made of Nicaraguan mahogany – and had it installed in his home. Dignitaries from far and wide came to marvel at the invention, and before long the idea caught on, spawning imitators all over the land. But some states began to raise heavy taxes on bathtub owners ($30 a year in Virginia!) and health officials, concerned that plunging one’s whole body into warm water every day would bring about a generation plagued by respiratory disease, tried to have bathing stopped by law. But America was by this time in love with bathing, and tubs private and public proliferated, ensuring that the bid to have them outlawed failed. The fame of this newfangled domestic contraption was sealed, Mencken told his readers, when, in 1850, President Millard Fillmore himself visited the original Thompson bath on a tour of Cincinnati and resolved to have one brought into the First Family’s official home. Accordingly, he instructed his secretary of war, General Charles Conrad, to put the job out for tender and a year later the Philadelphia engineering firm Harper & Gillespie had won the contract and installed a fine cast-iron bath in the White House. There it remained until the Cleveland administration, when it was upgraded to an enamel one. Finally, after years of dispute, the country was in agreement that having a bath was a good thing, and in 1862 the army even made bathing compulsory among soldiers.

How diverting all this must have seemed to the good people of New York and the other towns to which Mencken’s article was syndicated. After all, most people had never stopped to think about the history of this ordinary household object – and why should they? It is, after all, not a very important subject; which is exactly why Mencken had such fun with it. Every detail of his history was fabricated, from the ham-holding sack supposedly invented by the American bathtub’s progenitor to the attempted bill to outlaw them heard before Congress. He was, he would protest, just having a bit of fun.

However what happened next he could not have foreseen. The whole story was taken as gospel truth by everyone who read it, and facts from it began appearing whenever the subject of the history of sanitation arose in an article, paper or book. After a few such citations of the Thompson bath, or Fillmore’s role in popularizing it, Mencken thought he had better make it clear that he had invented the story to bring a bit of much needed silliness and Christmas cheer into people’s lives. So he wrote a confessional article in the
Chicago Tribune
on 23 May 1926 under the headline ‘Melancholy Reflections’, lamenting the fact that he had deceived so many of his readers but also pointing out that the American public were a gullible lot who would swallow whatever was fed to them. He was particularly annoyed, he wrote, that among the many people who had used his hoax article for their own ends were quack medicine sellers and chiropractors, who used it as an example of ‘the stupidity of medical men’ and indeed medical men themselves, who used its statistics about the number of private baths in use in 1917 as evidence of a mighty improvement in public sanitation that had not in fact taken place.

Unfortunately, this article was largely ignored. Not only did the public continue to talk about baths as being from Cincinnati, but the junior writers in the very newspaper his confession appeared in continued to quote spurious facts from the original piece whenever a news story about plumbing or engineering or the White House called for fleshing out with historical data. This drove Mencken mad. There was nothing he could do, it seemed, to put the genie of misinformation back in the bottle, and the fact that it was not about anything of great consequence was neither here nor there: it brought it home to him just how gullible not only readers but editors, publishers and writers are too.

Not long before his death in 1956 H.L. Mencken tried one last time to put his hoax to rest. In his book
A Mencken Chresthomacy
, he observed sadly that:

The success of this idle hoax, done in time of war, when more serious writing was impossible, vastly astonished me. It was taken gravely by a great many other newspapers, and presently made its way into medical literature and into standard reference books. It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity . . . Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.

To this day, examples persist of ‘A Forgotten Anniversary’ being taken seriously, not least by compilers of information about Millard Fillmore, whose famously lacklustre presidency was so devoid of interest that the possibility of him being associated with something so exciting as a cast-iron bathtub is an on-going gift to quiz masters and trivia buffs the world over. And in 1998, the car-maker Kia launched a marketing campaign based on the idea of ‘Unheard-of Presidents’: they gave away bath-soaps shaped like busts of Fillmore to publicize the fact that that particular unheard-of president’s claim to fame was to have run the first ever bath in the White House. The Sage of Baltimore would not be amused.

T
HE FRENCH THEATRE
director Nicolas Bataille was famous for two things: directing and starring in the longest-running play at a single venue anywhere in the world, and ‘discovering’ the esteemed Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco. Ionesco’s play,
The Bald Prima Donna
, has been running for more than half a century at the Theatre de la Huchette in Paris and until shortly before his death in 2008 Bataille could be seen in the role of Mr Martin. It was in 1949, however, some years before that production made its debut, that Bataille accepted a work by the unknown immigrant dramatist Ionesco that would mark the beginning of the Romanian’s stellar rise through the ranks of European drama. And if it hadn’t been for reflected glory from bringing Ionesco to the world’s attention, Bataille might never have shaken off the critical mud that stuck to him when he humiliated the Parisian cultural elite with a literary trick of a most daring sort.

Bataille was a rookie director who had teamed up with the actress and writer Akakia Viala (aka Marie-Antoinette Allévy), hoping to take the brave new world of avant-garde theatre by storm with their rehabilitation of late-nineteenth century literary symbolism. In 1948 their hard work and ingenuity paid off when their production of
Une Saison en Enfer
, based on Rimbaud’s symbolist prose-poem of the same name, won them an award and a small measure of celebrity. While some applauded the efforts they were making to revolutionize the staid French theatrical tradition, other more vociferous critics were less impressed by their attempts at recapturing Rimbaud’s idiom and, despite having won a prize, the two young dramatists found themselves pilloried from all sides by condescending Rimbaud scholars.

A few months later, still indignant and still convinced that they really did understand the rhythms of the nineteenth-century poet’s style, Bataille and Viala hatched a plan to prove their detractors wrong. There had long been rumours of a great lost work by Arthur Rimbaud – rumours which stemmed from comments by the poet’s ill-fated lover, Paul Verlaine. The work referred to by Verlaine was called
La Chasse Spirituelle
and was, he said, the greatest piece of writing Rimbaud had ever produced. Sadly, the manuscript disappeared during the two poets’ stormy spell in London in 1872 and was never seen again. So when Bataille and Viala claimed to have found this very manuscript, and took it straight to the magazine
Combat
, the excitement in literary Paris was palpable.

Combat
was the journal started by the French Resistance (and edited most famously by Camus) that continued to publish its left-wing cultural and political articles into the 1970s. The editor in 1949 was Maurice Nadeau, the famous historian of surrealism with a keen ear for French poetry and a commitment to modernism in all its forms. He was convinced that the verses were authentic, and so too were the editors of
Le Mercure de France
, a literary journal with several hundred years’ pedigree as an opinion-forming cultural gazette.
Le Mercure
had been approached by the writer Pascal Pia (also a former
Combat
editor) who had been shown the verses and, believing them to be genuine, implored its editor to release the full text of the great lost manuscript for the edification of the reading public. The novelist Georges Duhamel was another famous name who had seen the text and was convinced of its authenticity, and so with all these discerning names behind it,
La Chasse
found its way into print with remarkable ease.

As soon as the two journals hit the news-stands, however, critics began to weigh in with words far harsher than those used to denigrate
Une Saison En Enfer
. By the spring of 1949 the comment pages of
Combat
and indeed most other Parisian journals were full of damning, not to say bitchy, opinions. The highly respected author and
Nouvelle Revue
editor Jean Paulhan wrote: ‘The work is inconsistent, the metaphors are bombastic and garish, the ideas banal . . . modern poetry as country hicks imagine it to be.’ Jean Cocteau asked: ‘Is this text authentic? Is it apocryphal? As far as I am concerned it is laborious and soulless’; and the critic Rolland de Renéville said: ‘I do not believe that one could seriously uphold the view that Rimbaud would have accepted to do in
La Chasse Spirituelle
what he never did elsewhere, namely mimic himself.’ At best, then, it was seen as more Rimbaudy than Rimbaud. At worse, a cobbling together of various phrases and images from elsewhere in the poet’s oeuvre by some bold
pasticheur
. Which is exactly what it was.

When Bastille and Viala admitted their hoax in the summer of 1949, there were still a few enthusiastic believers who were slow to admit they had been hoodwinked, although Maurice Nadeau’s initial assertion that ‘it is not enough to claim to be a forger, one must be able to prove it’ was no doubt a rhetorical covering-up of his shame-facedness rather than a genuine statement of belief in the text.

Certainly, the two theatrical hoaxers who called literary Paris’s bluff fell out of favour for a while with the critical establishment. But ultimately both went on to have illustrious careers in the French theatre and although neither was to perpetuate a hoax on that scale again, each must have looked back fondly on those few months in the late 1940s when no one could say they didn’t know their Rimbaud.

O
NE OF THE
most inspired literary hoaxes of twentieth-century America is remarkable for having happened backwards. It was an idea born of a ground-breaking talk radio DJ called Jean Shepherd, who in the mid-1950s had just moved to New York and started a broadcasting career on WOR-AM which would go on to make him one of the best loved humorists of his generation. His style was subversive for his time because of its stream-of-consciousness tone and decidedly non-commercial brand of humour: he was a satirist before his time, picking apart the hypocrisies and vanities of East Coast media and culture at a time when the edgy social commentary of comedians like Lenny Bruce had barely been thought of.

Shepherd’s shift was the night-time, and broadcasting his musings about life to insomniacs, night-workers, artists, nursing mothers, drunks, people who knew they’d feel dreadful when the alarm went at seven, he knew he was talking to the margins. It was in the course of one programme in 1956 that he came up with two things which would make history: the phrase ‘night people’ and the swashbuckling historical novel
I, Libertine
.

Both of these phenomena came out of a rambling disquisition on the notion that ‘there’s two kinds of people: the kind of guy who believes in the world of the office – he believes in filing cabinets and phone calls and lunches; that the time from eight a.m. to six in the evening is the time that he’s alive and the time after that is dead time – tv, beer, sleep. That is a day person. But there’s the other guy, whose world begins when he gets out of the office. He’s a night person. And they’re constantly battling but they don’t know they are.’

Previously on that night’s show, Shepherd had observed that one of the things he had noticed about New York as opposed to Philadelphia or Chicago or anywhere else, was that the whole city was obsessed with lists. The top forty records, the ten best-dressed people, the twenty bestselling books of the decade. ‘It is,’ he now observed, ‘the day people who read lists – they are oriented to statistics.’

But these lists are of course completely bogus. He asked his listeners to ponder how they came about: an inexperienced journalist on a tight deadline is told to come up with the ten bestselling novels of the year so far. What does he do? He calls a few booksellers. The owner of one might be desperately trying to shift the 400 copies of something nobody wants to know about, so he tells the hack that that particular book is flying off the shelves. Sure enough, when it appears at number two in the list in Saturday’s paper he can be sure of an influx of trendy shoppers asking him for that very title.