Telling Tales (37 page)

So, despite a few misgivings about the style in which Sokal’s paper was written, which were overlooked because the editors were glad to have the input of an experienced physicist, ‘Science Wars’ went to press in May 1996. The very same day of publication, Sokal confessed to what he’d done in another academic journal,
Lingua Franca
, and laid out his reasons for transgressing the bond of trust between academics.

The reason, he said, was not to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we’ll survive just fine, thank you) but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. He described what he had done as a necessary ‘pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations . . . structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathemetics and physics’, and expressed no remorse at having pulled one over on Ross and his fellows.

Of course, the editors of
Social Text
were angry with him, accusing him of having defrauded and humiliated them with his dishonest trickery. However, in an attempt to save face they also maintained that ‘its status as parody does not alter substantially our interest in the piece itself as a symptomatic document’.

Sokal replied by saying his hoax article was ‘an annotated bibliography of charlatanism and nonsense by dozens of prominent French and American intellectuals. This goes well beyond the narrow category of “postmodernism,” and includes some of the most fashionable thinkers in “science studies,” literary criticism, and cultural studies’ and before long the scientific community had weighed in on both sides, with famous names such as Richard Dawkins lending his support to Sokal, who was seen as a crusader for honesty and truth in a scientific community beset by fantasy and hot air.

A couple of years after the hoax that lifted Sokal out of his relatively unglamorous corner of scientific endeavour and made him famous even outside the scientific community, he co-wrote a full-length study of the wrongs he had tried to expose with the French writer Jean Bricmont.
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science
(Picador USA, 1998) contains a long list of extracts of writings from well-known intellectuals containing what the authors characterize as blatant abuses of scientific terminology. The book received rave reviews from within and without the scientific community and now Sokal is a highly respected professor of mathematics at University College London as well as lecturing globally on the subject of pseudoscience. But it was the unfortunate editors of
Social Text
who came away from the affair with silverware. They may not have won many academic plaudits, but in 1996 they were the awarded the IgNobel Prize for Literature.

L
ITERARY LONDON AT
the dawn of the twenty-first century is a fairly gentle place. So when a real live literary feud bubbles to the surface (especially one which involves swearing, low-down trickery and public humiliation) journalists, readers and even sometimes the feuders themselves tend to rub their hands in glee and wallow in the excitement of it all.

So it was in August 2006 when the
Sunday Times
revealed that one of the nation’s best loved poets, John Betjeman, had become posthumously embroiled in a literary hoax which brought shame to one of his biographers and sheer delight to another.

The two biographers were A.N. Wilson, a London journalist and writer known for his sharp-tongue and scattering caricatures of his fellow literary players, and Bevis Hillier, the official biographer of Betjeman whose lifelong dedication to his subject has produced three volumes of well-received biography and landed him, in his retirement, in the very genteelly poor surroundings of the medieval almshouse of St Cross in Winchester. Hillier first approached Betjeman about writing his life in 1976. He was a young journalist who, after Oxford, had worked on
The Times
before becoming editor of the
Connoisseur
magazine but whose real loves were poetry, art and design. A colleague had introduced him to the aged poet in the mid-seventies and the two had got on well. Betjeman was happy to authorize this enthusiastic young man to write about him, but could not have anticipated the single-mindedness and passion with which the project would be pursued. For the next twenty-eight years Hillier would live and breathe his beloved subject, and in 1988, 2002 and 2004 his hard work was rewarded with ecstatic reviews as each volume was published. Professor John Carey in the
Sunday Times
referred to ‘a model of biography’, John Bayley called it ‘brilliant . . . utterly utterly compelling’ and the
Financial Times’
reviewer recommended volume three as a ‘magnificent . . . cultural monument’. Others followed suit, but the exception to these encomia was one influential London magazine which poured scorn on the work from a great height: the
Spectator
gave volumes one and two blisteringly rotten reviews, and the two men who wrote them were A. N. Wilson and Richard Ingrams.

As soon as Hillier, in the bucolic surrounds of his Winchester almshouse, saw those articles calling his work ‘a hopeless mish-mash’ and ‘undercooked’, his hackles rose. He knew both men to be friends with Betjeman’s daughter, Candida Lycett-Green, and he knew that she was no fan of his. (She disapproved of his take on her father’s life and her daughter had even written a thinly disguised put-down of a man with ‘no social graces . . . let’s call him Bevis’ in the
Oldie
, Richard Ingrams’ magazine.) The Wilson review particularly irked Hillier because he had long considered the man to be something of a bully and a snob and had been engaged in low-level feuding with him for some time. He therefore delighted in getting back at him by selecting Wilson’s books
The Victorians
and
My Name Is Legion
as his ‘non-books of the year’ in the very magazine which had published the bad reviews. This act unleashed a brace of bitchy attacks on Hillier in Wilson’s column in the
Telegraph
, referring to his rival as ‘old, malignant and pathetic’.

If they were rivals then, they would become more so shortly after when, just as Hillier’s final volume of Betjeman’s biography – the crowning glory of his life’s work, no less – was ready for publication Wilson announced that he, too, would be presenting a biography of the poet. Hillier’s blood, quite understandably, began to boil when he heard this. Not only was his well-connected, high-profile enemy threatening to steal his fire in the very year of Betjeman’s centenary, 2006, but he thought it unlikely that Wilson would have time to do much in the way of original research and so would draw heavily on his own three volumes of work, even though he had derided them in the books pages of the
Spectator
. Hillier decided, therefore, to orchestrate a grand literary hoax to show Wilson up as the careless and opportunistic writer he suspected him of being.

It was the work of moments to have some writing paper and visiting cards printed up bearing the name of an imaginary lady called Eve de Harben who lived in a flat in Roquebrune on the Côte d’Azur. He decided, correctly as it turned out, that although this name was unusual, Wilson would not immediately notice it is an anagram of ‘Ever Been Had’, and he proceeded to concoct a false and saucy piece of evidence about Betjeman’s love life which he felt sure would make it into Wilson’s book.

The love-letter was from Betjeman to an Irishwoman called Honor Tracy during the war, and although the original had, according to Eve, been sold to an American autograph dealer, a copy had been passed down to her father, and she now enclosed that facsimile for Wilson’s use. The letter reads as follows:

Darling Honor,

I loved yesterday. All day, I’ve thought of nothing else. No other love I’ve had means so much. Was it just an aberration on your part, or will you meet me at Mrs Holmes’s again – say on Saturday. I won’t be able to sleep until I have your answer.

Love has given me a miss for so long, and now this miracle has happened. Sex is a part of it, of course, but I have a Romaunt of the Rose feeling about it too. On Saturday we could have lunch at Fortt’s, then go back to Mrs H’s. Never mind if you can’t make it then. I am free on Sunday too or Sunday week. Signal me tomorrow as to whether you can come.

Anthony Powell has written to me, and mentions you admiringly. Some of his comments about the Army are v funny. He’s somebody I’d like to know better when the war is over. I find his letters funnier than his books.

Tinkerty-tonk, my darling. I pray I’ll hear from you tomorrow.

If I don’t I’ll visit your office in a fake beard.

All love, JB

As well as not noticing the anagrammatic nature of his correspondent’s name, Wilson had no reason to look closely at the first letters of each sentence in the body of the text and see that, taken as an acrostic, they spelled out ‘
A N WILSON IS A SHIT
‘.

(It is unknown how Hillier decided upon that phrase in particular, but he may well have been inspired by the diary entry of one of Wilson’s more famous enemies, which described him in such terms after accusing him of the most ungentlemanly act an Englishman can commit – making public a private conversation between members of the royal family at a dinner party.)

Into Wilson’s biography the letter went. And on the day of publication, as his friends were congratulating him on his timely and jolly book, an anxious sexagenarian in Winchester ran down from the Hospital of St Cross to the old bookshop behind the college to see if his ruse had worked. Barely able to breathe for fear that the letter would not have made it in or, worse, that Wilson would have abridged it somehow and ruined the all-important acrostic, he purchased a copy of his enemy’s book. Out in the street he turned to the index. The entry for Honor referred him to page 154, and there it was in all its splendour.

Passers-by might have mistaken the jig-dancing, air-punching gentleman in the street for a lunatic, or a drunk waiting anxiously for the nearby Wykeham Arms to open. But for Hillier this was the greatest trick he had ever played in his life; he immediately felt the weight of Wilson’s snobbism and unkindness lifting from his shoulders and dissolving in a delightful cloud of comic retribution.

Hillier is not alone in feeling that Wilson, although a talented and popular writer, has something of the naughty playground bully about him, so it is unsurprising that the English (and indeed American) press seized on this hoax with glee. The
Sunday Times
broke the story when somebody recognized the return address on Eve’s letter to be the same as Hillier’s sister’s in the south of France. Gladly, Bevis Hillier admitted what he had done. And publicly, at least, Wilson took the hoax in good spirit. But of course he removed the offending item from the next edition of his book and declined the invitation to bury the hatchet at a ceremony to unveil a blue plaque outside Betjeman’s childhood home, where the two rival biographers could have met and shaken hands. But how much more fun for both of them, and us, that this feud should continue into the second decade of the century.

And there is little doubt that Betjeman himself would have loved every minute of it.

T
HE GLITTERING PARTY
in Manhattan was still in full swing as the clock struck midnight and the date rolled over to the first of April, 1998. The date on the invitation obviously had not deterred such cultural luminaries as Jay McInerney, Siri Hustvedt and Julian Schnabel, who had all turned up at the undeniably hot spot that is Jeff Koons’ studio to celebrate the launch of the biography of Nat Tate, forgotten star of abstract expressionism and a martyr to the cause of artistic celebrity.

The book,
Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960
was by the celebrated English novelist William Boyd who had long been interested in the vibrant art world of New York in the 1950s and, while researching the potent mix of fame, money and intoxicants that propelled painters like Jackson Pollock on to the scene in the post-war period, had, he told interviewers, come upon the tragic life story and intriguing canvases of Tate. In 1960 Tate had killed himself by jumping off the Staten Island ferry after visiting Georges Braque and realizing he would never attain anything like the renown of the Frenchman. He was only thirty-one when he died, had destroyed most of his work in a fit of pique and left not a single known relative, his only family having been the mother who was run over by a bus when he was still a child. But in his short lifetime he had known Picasso, partied with Gore Vidal, made love to Peggy Guggenheim and created work which Boyd, for one, and David Bowie, for another (who happened to be a director of the company who published the biography) thought had real power. Some of his rare, remaining canvases were reproduced in the book, and at the launch party people cooed over the artist who, although admittedly marginal, was clearly a significant member of America’s most turbulent school of painting. At one point in the evening David Bowie got up and read from the book, and afterwards more than one critic was heard to say they had known about Tate’s work for years. Which was quite some achievement considering he was a figment of William Boyd’s imagination.

Boyd, however, had not been motivated by the desire to expose
le tout
New York as celeb-hungry gulls, although that was an inevitable side-effect of the prank. He was, as he explained later in the
Sunday Telegraph
, attempting ‘to make something entirely invented seem astonishingly real’ in a writerly exercise of fictionalized biography. ‘And the fundamental aim of the book,’ he went on, ‘was to destabilise, to challenge our notions of authenticity.’

Boyd had begun practising this art in his 1987 novel
The New Confessions
and finally perfected it in his brilliant journal of the (imaginary) minor cultural figure Logan Mountstuart,
Any Human Heart
. Indeed Mountstuart, who first appeared in a short story in 1995, appears, in his incarnation as a 1960s New York art dealer, as a key commentator in Tate’s biography.