Telling Tales (9 page)

Can you see what it is yet? This was far from the only story in which Twain slyly thumbed his nose at his readers. Another, under the compelling headline ‘
HORRIBLE AFFAIR
’, was also entirely fictional, and includes teasing allegations of a hoax-within-a-hoax in the opening paragraph on 16 April 1863:

For a day or two a rumor has been floating around, that five Indians had been smothered to death in a tunnel back of Gold Hill, but no one seemed to regard it in any other light than as a sensation hoax gotten up for the edification of strangers sojourning within our gates. However, we asked a Gold Hill man about it yesterday, and he said there was no shadow of a jest in it – that it was a dark and terrible reality. He gave us the following story as being the version generally accepted in Gold Hill: That town was electrified on Sunday morning with the intelligence that a noted desperado had just murdered two Virginia policemen, and had fled in the general direction of Gold Hill. Shortly afterwards, some one arrived with the exciting news that a man had been seen to run and hide in a tunnel a mile or a mile and a half west of Gold Hill. Of course it was Campbell – who else would do such a thing, on that particular morning, of all others? So a party of citizens repaired to this spot, but each felt a natural delicacy about approaching an armed and desperate man in the dark, and especially in such confined quarters; wherefore they stopped up the mouth of the tunnel, calculating to hold on to their prisoner until some one could be found whose duty would oblige him to undertake the disagreeable task of bringing forth the captive. The next day a strong posse went up, rolled away the stones from the mouth of the sepulchre, went in and found five dead Indians! – three men, one squaw and one child, who had gone in there to sleep, perhaps, and been smothered by the foul atmosphere after the tunnel had been closed up. We still hope the story may prove a fabrication, notwithstanding the positive assurances we have received that it is entirely true. The intention of the citizens was good, but the result was most unfortunate. To shut up a murderer in a tunnel was well enough, but to leave him there all night was calculated to impair his chances for a fair trial – the principle was good, but the application was unnecessarily ‘hefty.’ We have given the above story for truth – we shall continue to regard it as such until it is disproven.

The hesitant disclaimer in the last line was never going to put off readers who wanted to believe in the dangers of underground suffocation, murder and Indians. Another hoax article that played on the bloodthirstiness of the
Enterprise
’s fans was his piece ‘
BLOODY MASSACRE
’ of 28 October 1863:

It seems that during the past six months a man named P. Hopkins, or Philip Hopkins, has been residing with his family in the old log house just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s. The family consisted of nine children – five girls and four boys – the oldest of the group, Mary, being nineteen years old, and the youngest, Tommy, about a year and a half. Twice in the past two months Mrs. Hopkins, while visiting in Carson, expressed fears concerning the sanity of her husband, remarking that of late he had been subject to fits of violence, and that during the prevalence of one of these he had threatened to take her life. It was Mrs. Hopkins’ misfortune to be given to exaggeration, however, and but little attention was paid to what she said. About ten o’clock on Monday evening Hopkins dashed into Carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia saloon. Hopkins expired in the course of five minutes, without speaking. The long red hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of Mrs. Hopkins. A number of citizens, headed by Sheriff Gasherie, mounted at once and rode down to Hopkins’ house, where a ghastly scene met their gaze. The scalpless corpse of Mrs. Hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split open and her right hand almost severed from the wrist. Near her lay the ax with which the murderous deed had been committed. In one of the bedrooms six of the children were found, one in bed and the others scattered about the floor. They were all dead. Their brains had evidently been dashed out with a club, and every mark about them seemed to have been made with a blunt instrument. The children must have struggled hard for their lives, as articles of clothing and broken furniture were strewn about the room in the utmost confusion. Julia and Emma, aged respectively fourteen and seventeen, were found in the kitchen, bruised and insensible, but it is thought their recovery is possible. The eldest girl, Mary, must have taken refuge, in her terror, in the garret, as her body was found there, frightfully mutilated, and the knife with which her wounds had been inflicted still sticking in her side. The two girls, Julia and Emma, who had recovered sufficiently to be able to talk yesterday morning, state that their father knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on them. They think they were the first attacked. They further state that Hopkins had shown evidence of derangement all day, but had exhibited no violence. He flew into a passion and attempted to murder them because they advised him to go to bed and compose his mind.

The sheer unbridled naughtiness of Twain’s prose, and the fact that he readily admits to being drunk while writing much of his journalism of this period, makes it hard to judge him as we might judge a mendacious journalist today. The mitigating circumstances of the crazy times in the crazy town in which he and his readers were living make his hoaxes far less serious than others of their ilk. Moreover there is the absence of a formal debunking in which the caught-out author was forced either to admit his crime or foolishly protest his innocence; rather, Twain cheerfully admitted when asked years later that
of course
these tall tales were made-up. Indeed, putting the responsibility on the intelligent reader to determine the truth of a text is a canny trick that many subsequent hoaxers would have done well to learn from Twain. It might have saved them, and their readers and publishers, a great deal of trouble if they had.

T
O BE AN
Englishman in turn-of-the-century Peking (today’s Beijing) was to have unbridled access to a range of luxuries, pursuits and services unimaginable to those at home in Victorian Britain. And to be fleeing debt, an aristocratic family you loathed and a boyhood full of homosexual confusion would seem to lay perfect foundations for a life of secrecy, intrigue and devil-may-care carnality. So it was for Sir Edmund Trelawney Backhouse, 2nd Baronet.

Backhouse (pronounced Bacchus, as he liked to remind people) was born in Darlington to a rich Quaker family of long and illustrious standing whose sons had latterly forgone pacifism for military careers (his brother would go on to become the First Sea Lord). At first Backhouse followed the predestined path of St George’s, Winchester and Oxford. An unstable and highly emotional child, he always felt he was the black sheep of the family, and was said to nurture a particular resentment towards his mother, over whose corpse he reputedly screamed curses (in several languages). He did however have a fond homosexual uncle who may or may not have introduced him to the voracious love of men which would characterize his later life. Although a brilliant linguist, the young Backhouse never managed to complete his studies in Asiatic languages at Oxford, instead passing his days in a recreational splendour he could ill afford and incurring phenomenal debts of more than £20,000. Still an undergraduate, and not daring to stick around long enough to complete his degree, he fled the country to seek his fortune elsewhere.

That was in 1895. Four years later he arrived in Peking, almost fluent in Russian, Japanese and Mandarin, and found work as a translator for the Australian-born
Times
journalist Dr George Morrison. The city at that time – especially the ex-pat south-eastern district where Backhouse lived when he first arrived – was alive with music, food, art and, most appealingly to Backhouse, flesh. For the wealthy and curious there were brothels full of boys and girls where long, lazy afternoons could be spent not only fornicating but drinking tea, bathing and watching others disport themselves similarly. Out in the open, the business of modernization in imperial politics was rumbling on, with the royal household doing its best to quash the anti-Western feeling that would soon lead to the famous Boxer Rebellion. Journalists and businessmen from Europe had their work cut out in this extraordinary city and, before long, Backhouse, who had more or less decided to remain in this charmed place for the rest of his life, saw that he could capitalize on this period of change. Having cemented his image as a well-bred, well-dressed, well-connected (he arrived in China with a letter of recommendation from the prime minister, Lord Salisbury) linguist and Sinophile, he set about planning the first of a number of daring hoaxes.

Not all his cons would be literary. All his life he exploited his connections with the English establishment for financial and reputational gain, at one point faking long correspondences between Chinese arms dealers and the British government which led to huge sums of money being forwarded to him for deals that would never take place. But his greatest talent was for making up stories and characters of just the sort his less clued-up fellow Englishmen wanted to hear. He was, those who knew him agreed, possessed of a vivid imagination and a wickedly colourful turn of phrase and honed his skills for salacious reportage by feeding questionable stories to British journalists.

His best customer was the reporter John Otway Percy Bland. Bland, who was a minor diplomat and composer of light verse as well as deputy to
The Times
’ Dr Morrison, enjoyed a similarly charmed existence to Backhouse, albeit with his wife rather than a bevy of rent-boys. They started working together on pieces of journalism, for which Backhouse would provide the anecdotes which Bland’s
Times
style would shape into publishable form. Before long, the two men set about executing two works of fascinating contemporary history about the bizarre world of the Forbidden City and the ways of the irascible Empress Tsu Hsi (better known nowadays as Cixi) which would bring them instant recognition and sell in their thousands.

Their books continue to fascinate historians and general readers today, and much of what is written there about daily life in the corridors of power stands – after all, both Bland and Backhouse did have rare access to some high-ranking players in the Ch’ing court. The first book,
China Under the Empress Dowager: Being the History of the Life and Times of Tsu Hsi
(1910), provides an extensive overview of the country at the turn of the century, and by far the most intriguing chapter of it is that entitled ‘The Diary of his Excellency Ching-shan: Being a Chinese Account of the Boxer Troubles’. This is fifty pages of what purports to be the gossipy journal of a Manchu soldier at the heart of the royal household and it was this chapter which sold the book to the English publisher William Heinemann when Backhouse returned to England with a sample, promising as it did a rare peek into the inner sanctum of one of the most mysterious palaces in the world.

With his fantastical imagination running at full throttle, Backhouse told Bland he had stumbled upon the diaries just as a band of Sikh soldiers were looting the recently dead Ching-shan’s house during the Boxer Rebellion. He wrote to Bland that the manuscript had been in a ‘camphor-wood Chinese escritoire which stood on the k’ang on the old man’s inner room. That leaves were all strewed on the k’ang and some had already been used by the Sikh for packing papers and other base purposes.’ This was some years previously, in 1900, and Backhouse had, he claimed, spent the best part of the last decade translating it.

It is true that Ching-shan had indeed existed, but in fact he was only an administrative assistant on the periphery of court affairs, and not the confidant of anybody important. And he certainly never kept a diary full of well-informed, perfectly pitched journalistic observations about the rebellion as seen from the empress’s side. Still, there was at that time no known record of any private writing from the inside of the empress’s court, when half the court was in favour of the Boxer movement, and half against. Any inside information would have been gold dust to contemporary historians. As one leading commentator of the day, Sir Robert Hart, said at the time: ‘It would be interesting to get a really reliably account of the Palace doings – and Peking doings – during 1900. As it is, we are all guessing and inferring . . . but we have not got the facts yet.’ Backhouse would have heard similar things being said all over Peking and London, and he knew full well that one of the most hotly contested issues surrounding the fall of the Manchu dynasty was whether the empress’s grand secretary, Junglu, was really as pro-Western as he made out. This became one of the central revelations in the fifty-page Diary. It testified to Jung-lu’s consistently moderate ideology and his wholehearted attempts to stop the violence of the rebellion.

This fanciful creation was to be only the beginning of Backhouse’s career as a hoaxer. It is now believed that almost all the research he supplied to writers and academics in the form of reportage and interviews was made-up by him, often with the assistance of a calligrapher. He did of course have the language skills and cultural immersion to base his fictions on a keenly observed reality, and this – even now – is enough for many scholars to consider his papers worthwhile historical documents.

It seems remarkable that a man with so profuse an output could have got away with it for so long, but the main reason for his hoax not being debunked sooner than the twentieth century was the linguistic and social exclusivity of his subject. Meeting – let alone speaking to – members of the royal household would have been such a complex undertaking that no sceptical English inquisitor would have been able to saunter up to Cixi’s cohorts and ask them what they thought of it all. It is telling that only Dr Morrison – the one Englishman with language skills and personal connections in Peking to rival Backhouse’s – accused him of fakery from the outset. To the general English reader and publisher, however, Backhouse was a gentleman and polyglot who had made his life among the upper echelons of Peking society. He also had the trust of several internationally respected foreign correspondents. Why doubt him?