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Thursday, August 31, 2006

A Tad Too Baroque

Longtime readers of UD know she loves a good hoax. This latest one, though, is a bit baroque for her taste. Hoaxes, in her experience, should be relatively straightforward to be enjoyable; one shouldn't have to expend any real brainpower figuring out their tricks. Who, for instance, beyond the editors who published it, has read in its entirety the Sokal essay, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"? It's enough to enjoy its title and renown.

In order to get at the current John Betjeman hoax, though, you have to assimilate a good deal of information, rumor, documentation, and commentary. It lacks the pie-in-the-face reward of a direct hit.

Furthermore, the Betjeman hoax seems to have been motivated by egotistical rage against a particular person, whereas the best hoaxes, like Sokal's, and like, for instance, the Ern Malley hoax, are motivated by calm, serious, displeasure with a general trend, coupled with a desire to make oneself laugh, and these are both commendable impulses. They allow us to like and to laugh along with the hoaxer.

Anyway, here are a few details of the Betjeman thing -- click on the link for more information.




For connoisseurs of John Betjeman, his centenary has brought many blessings. For one thing the 100th birthday itself fell on a drizzly Bank Holiday Monday, enabling true believers to eat damp fishpaste sandwiches on the prom before retiring to hold hands in tea-shops. To improve the occasion two biographers are sparring viciously over their hero: Bevis Hillier, who over 25 years wrote a magisterial three-volume authorised biography, and A. N. Wilson who obliges us this year with a briefer, elegantly readable one of his own. Hillier is quoted condemning Wilson as “despicable . . . a playground bully” and Wilson says Hillier is “old and malignant”. Hoorah!

But even better, The Sunday Times unveils a splendid hoax perpetrated on the hapless Wilson. The paper reveals that a 1944 love letter, used in his book as proof of an apparent affair, is a fake. It was sent to the biographer by a person calling herself Eve de Harben, of an untraceable address in the Cote d’Azur. She sent a typed version, claiming that the original belonged to an equally untraceable American collector. Wilson, all unsuspecting, welcomed the document and included it in his book. Now, close examination reveals that the opening letters of each sentence spell out the message “A. N. WILSON IS A SHIT”.

... The hoax was unveiled by a letter from the mysterious “Eve de Harben” to the newspaper, claiming that it is her revenge for something terribly rude that A. N. Wilson once said about the late Humphrey Carpenter, yet another literary biographer. Mr Wilson, says the paper, admits that he should have asked more questions, especially as, when he returned the typescript to de Harben, it came back marked “Addressee and address not known”.


It looks very likely as though the hoaxer is, of course, Bevis Hillier.