Enter a gentle Astringer
July 15, 2013 § Leave a comment
Harvey, who has written most of his books using the initials AD rather than his first name Arnold, which he dislikes, has been exposed in the Times Literary Supplement as the possessor of multiple identities in print, a mischief-maker who among other things had invented a fictitious meeting in 1862 between Dickens and Dostoevsky. This startling encounter was first written up by one Stephanie Harvey in the Dickensian, the magazine of the Dickens Fellowship, in 2002, and quickly hardened into fact, cited in Michael Slater’s biography of Dickens in 2009 and repeated by Claire Tomalin in her biography two years later.
It was only after a New York Times review of Tomalin’s book that American specialists in Russian literature started to wonder about this meeting, Dostoevsky’s account of which, according to Stephanie Harvey, had been documented in the journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi (News of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic). “In what language did Dickens and Dostoevsky converse?” asked Russian scholars. Why had Dostoevsky’s revealing portrait of Dickens – “There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite” – not been included in his collected works? And why had they never previously come across the distinguished journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi?
Doubts about the authenticity of the Dickens-Dostoevsky meeting spread, retractions were made, the Dickensian had egg on its face. But only recently did the full story of the deception emerge when Eric Naiman, a professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an immensely detailed six-page article in the TLS (“three days’ work”, says Harvey dismissively when I praise Naiman for his industry) establishing Harvey’s academic avatars – not just Stephanie Harvey, but Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham (author of Oxford: The Novel), Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra. Naiman traced the way in which, over the past 30 years, this group had been commenting on one another’s work in scholarly journals and little magazines, sometimes praising one ano ther but occasionally finding fault too. “How comforting,” Naiman commented drily, “to construct a community of scholars who can analyse, supplement and occasionally even ruthlessly criticise each other’s work.”
AD Harvey doesn’t deny he is the creator of that community. Indeed, he says there are several identities which even Naiman has failed to unearth: Stephen Harvey, author of an article titled The Italian War Effort and the Strategic Bombing of Italy, published in the journal History in 1985; the Latvian poet Janis Blodnieks (“I search but cannot find the key/ Which will unlock the glowing door/ To the life which runs parallel/ To the world in which I am trapped”); and a variety of internet personalities which he prefers not to disclose as he says they might not reflect well on his output and interests. read more
ART: Hayv Kahraman
If the director of the CIA can’t maintain his privacy on the internet, we’ve got no hope
March 28, 2013 § Leave a comment
The greatest scam of all literature (excluding those we don’t yet know about!) happened in Paris between 1974 and 1981. A well-established, widely-read novelist with an unfashionable profile among the literati of Saint-Germain-des-Prés – he was a war hero, a Gaullist, a millionaire, a jet-set celebrity, an ex-diplomat, the ex-husband of one of the world’s most beautiful women, and a journalist to boot – published a novel under a false name. In itself that is quite ordinary: Molière, Voltaire, George Sand and George Eliot didn’t use their real names either. But Romain Gary’s special twist was to make sure that his publisher didn’t know who the author of the new novel was either, and that took a good deal of extra-literary cloak-and-daggery. The manuscript was handed in by an accomplice in an envelope that purported to come from a French exile living in Brazil. Against all statistical odds, the publisher’s reader spotted the text–called at this stage The Loneliness of a Python in Paris, and recommended it strongly to the editorial board. A contract was signed by exchange of letters with a fictional entity called Émile Ajar, and Gary had another unwitting accomplice sign it, so he should not himself be guilty of forgery. Gros-Câlin – the title finally chosen by the publisher – appeared in the autumn of 1974 and was a runaway success. An entirely fictitious author-biography was circulated, and accepted as true. Gary set about writing the sequel, which turned out to be the highest-selling French novel of the twentieth century: La Vie devant soi (“Life Before Us”) by Émile Ajar, to which the Académie Goncourt awarded its 1975 prize, the greatest accolade available for a French novelist, including non-existent ones.
But what had started as a change of writerly identity and an escape from a public persona that Gary found increasingly oppressive turned into a quite different kind of experiment. Because a Goncourt Prize puts the author into the media spotlight, and because neither the publishers nor the press had yet met “Émile Ajar”, Gary decided he would create him – not on paper, but for real. He enrolled his cousin’s son, Paul Pavlowitch, to play the role of Ajar in interviews and in discussions with publishers. Gary would write the script and fund all the travel (meetings were held in Geneva and Copenhagen, as the Ajar cover story made the writer a fugitive from French justice). Pavlowitch just had to follow the instructions. But the identity of the stooge was discovered by reporters, and his relationship to Gary uncovered. What Gary then did took literary subterfuge into a different realm. Instead of giving his game away and exulting in the victory of literature over the literary establishment, he doubled the stakes and lied his head off. read more
FILM: Leigh Singer
my nerves are bad to-night 