France’s most public intellectual, Bernard Henri-Lévy, has lately become the laughing stock of Paris. In his newly published book, the philosopher cites The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant, a fictional account by Jean-Baptiste Botul, himself a fictional creation of a literary journalist, Frédéric Pages. As we will learn, Henri-Lévy had fallen victim to an inadvertent entrapment hoax.
Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis’ new history of the genre, explains that academics divide literary hoaxes into three particular categories.
First, there is the ‘genuine hoax’, such as the Hitler Diaries or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, forgeries meant to remain unexposed. Next, the ‘mock hoax’ is the brainchild of genuinely experimental writers playing conscious tricks with the notion of authorship. Finally, the ‘entrapment hoax’ aims to trick and embarrass a begrudged academic, publisher or literary community.
When A.N. Wilson announced his intention to write a biography of John Betjeman, Bevis Hillier, authorised biographer of Betjeman and official adversary of Wilson, fabricated a scandalous love-letter from Betjeman, complete with false provenance, and sent it to Wilson under the guise of a lady named Eve de Harben, an anagram of ‘Ever Been Had’.
On publication of Wilson’s biography, the scandalous letter, the first of letter of each sentence spelling ‘A N WILSON IS A SHIT’, was revealed as a fake. Hillier had executed the entrapment hoax perfectly.
Telling Tales is a comprehensive enough tour through the history of literary hoax. But Katsoulis is no more than a tour guide. Her prose is clumsy throughout (“the money began rolling in in earnest,” “[they] were sick of this pair of time-wasters, and wasted little more attention […]”), and never shows the courage of its convictions (“perhaps unsurprisingly”).
Katsoulis is completely reliant on the opinion of others, and is wholly unphilosophical about her subject. She threads no line of argument or analysis, and entertains no consideration for the possibility of currently undetected forgeries.
Telling Tales is not worthy of the tales it tells.
