Telling Tales (33 page)

Schmidt, the LDS historian, was being asked for a piece of Mormon gold in return for the letter, but after consulting with Hinckley, made a lesser offer, which Hofmann, acting through an intermediary, Lyn Jacobs, turned down. He then offered it for sale to two prominent critics of the church, thinking they would jump at the chance to have ‘proof’ that Smith was not as saintly as people said. These two potential buyers, however, immediately suspected it was a fake. Finally, an agreement was reached in January 1984 with a Utah collector called Steven Christensen who bought the letter for $40,000. Christensen’s aim was to have the document authenticated then sell it back to the church at a profit, but a year later he was still unable to have its provenance verified. Only a few months later, Christensen would be dead.

What turned Hofmann from an angry hoaxer into a murderer is not clear, but his childhood passion for making incendiary devices, coupled with his increasing feeling of isolation, raises the question of psychopathic tendencies. Certainly, by the time he resorted to manufacturing a series of bombs in his basement studio, he was a man at the end of his tether: after failing to sell the Salamander Letter to his first choices of buyers, questions about the provenance of his discoveries were beginning to be asked publicly and it must have seemed to him that it was only a matter of time before he was unmasked. And like other hoaxers before him, he had promised his demanding clients marvellous new items for sale (such as the famous McLellin collection of papers, pertaining to one of the church’s earliest apostles) which he did not have the time or ability to produce. Added to this, the hefty income he was making from the forged texts was not enough to finance his increasingly lavish lifestyle and his passion for collecting rare and antiquarian books. Debt collectors were closing in and in order to divert attention from himself and his crimes, on 15 October, 1985, he took the drastic step of sending the letter-bomb that would kill Christensen. Later that day, he sent another which took the life of Christensen’s associate’s wife, Kathleen Sheets.

Christensen and Sheets were involved in an investment project together which had gone badly wrong, and Hofmann apparently hoped to make the attacks look like they were related to that. But when a third bomb exploded accidentally in Hofmann’s own car, it was not long before police raided his home workshop which contained not only bomb-making equipment but the tools with which he had created his many forged items. Aided by the FBI’s new forensic analysis techniques, the police were able to prove that the inflammatory documents Hofmann had sold to members of the LDS church were hoaxes. Seemingly unrepentant for the crimes he committed, it was decided in court that life should mean life for this particular hoaxer, and he languishes to this day in a Utah state penitentiary. Gordon B. Hinckley, the church leader who believed in Hofmann’s literary discoveries, said afterwards:

I accepted him to come into my office on a basis of trust . . . I frankly admit that Hofmann tricked us. He also tricked experts from New York to Utah, however . . . I am not ashamed to admit that we were victimized. It is not the first time the Church has found itself in such a position. Joseph Smith was victimized again and again. The Savior was victimized. I am sorry to say that sometimes it happens.

He would admit to no sense of satisfaction – or even divine retribution – when it was revealed that Hofmann had lost the use of his forging hand in an accident shortly after his arrest; but no doubt other humiliated bibliophiles of the American Church of the Latter Day Saints were more forthcoming on the subject.

E
NTRAPMENT HOAXES ARE
the easiest to enjoy. Not only because within us all there is a naughty school-kid sitting at the back of the class asking the teacher how to say ‘tail’ in Latin, but because when highly intelligent people turn their talents to mischief-making, the results can be pretty spectacular. In some cases, like that of the Spectrist school of avant-garde poetry in Australia and Romain Gary’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel, the hoax text can actually have considerable literary merit in its own right. In others, like the extraordinary case of
I, Libertine
– the book that never was but which had all of New York raving about the made-up Englishman who wrote it – important hypocrisies in the way literary fashions are created are exposed for the first time. Another good thing about hoaxes like these, which are designed specifically to be debunked, is that the perpetrator is usually willing and able to write about what they did and why, giving a valuable insight into the effects hoaxing can have on a writer. But as H.L. Mencken (phoney historian of the American bathtub) and William Boyd (biographer of a non-existent artist) both make plain in their eloquent explanations of the hoaxer’s craft, practising to deceive can sometimes be more trouble than it’s worth . . .

T
HE GREAT SPECTRIST
poet Emmanuel Morgan, along with the flame-haired Hungarian beauty Anne Knish, exploded on to the American modernist scene in 1916 with a collection of work – and a manifesto – inspired by imagism, futurism and, well, -isms generally. Spectrism was a hoax from the Ern Malley school of intellectual-baiting, and although it has never enjoyed the popular afterlife that the Australian poetry-hoaxers did, it was, while it lasted, a jolly good laugh for all involved, and had unexpected consequences for the two poets who came up with it.

The perpetrators were Witter Bynner and Arthur Ficke, two poets in their thirties who had been best friends since meeting at Harvard in 1900. As typical frat boys they had always been keen on pranks, but when they both became poets after graduating and found that their traditional tastes in verse were at odds with the prevailing modernism of the day, they saw that the time was right for their grandest trick yet.

Bynner had had a job at
McClure
magazine but given it up to write poetry full-time in 1908, and that same year Ficke made the decision to practise law full-time and make writing his second career. But both were deeply committed to and involved in the literary scene. So when Bynner had the idea for the Spectra hoax in 1916 it was only natural that he would call on his friend to collaborate. They had worked together before on more serious joint literary ventures and, lubricated by whisky and laughter, they holed up in Ficke’s house in Davenport, Iowa, making occasional forays into Chicago to socialize with the poets and novelists who congregated there. In little over a week their work was complete, after which time Ficke’s wife became sick of them prancing around her home talking in Spectrist-speak and advised them to move into a hotel if they had any more to do.

The slim book they came up with was authored by Morgan and Knish and opened with the Spectrist Manifesto. This statement of poetic intent was a pastiche of the various new schools of poetic thought that were emerging, seemingly by the day, all over the English-speaking world. This new ‘ism’, Knish wrote in her introduction, had a complex tripartite definition: to ‘speak to the mind of that process of diffraction by which are disarticulated the several colored and other rays of which light is composed’, to illustrate ‘reflex vibrations of physical sight . . . and, by analogy, the after-colors of the poet’s initial vision’ and to connote ‘the overtones, adumbrations, or spectres which for the poet haunt all objects of both the seen and the unseen world’.

The poems, which were given opus numbers rather than titles (and what could be more pretentious than that?) were all redolent with the imagists’ shifting visions of the natural world, and Knish’s, in particular, were possessed of an edgily female sensibility. While Morgan’s free-spirited romances spoke of things like ‘the liquor of your laughter/And the lacquer of your limbs’ (Opus 6), Knish inhabited a darker domestic world, as evidenced by her Opus 118:

If bathing were a virtue, not a lust

I would be dirtiest.

To some, housecleaning is a holy rite.

For myself, houses would be empty

But for the golden motes dancing in sunbeams.

Tax-assessors frequently overlook valuables.

Today they noted my jade.

But my memory of you escaped them.

The pair of hoaxers had no trouble getting their work into print, and as soon as it was in the public domain it began to attract attention – as would any new poetic movement in those fecund days. Publication was supported by a number of poems being submitted to fashionable literary magazines such as
Others,
the
Little Review
and the highly-respected
Poetry
. To the authors’ delight, the big-name poets and critics weighed in with their responses, and they were largely positive. William Carlos Williams admired their work ‘sincerely’, the Pulitzer-winning poet Edgar Lee Masters wrote to Morgan praising his work highly but admitting he felt Knish’s output was rather bogged down in theory; Amy Lowell and the famous editor Harriet Monroe were both beguiled.

Out in Wisconsin, the
Literary Magazine
even published a spoof of the Spectrists, with a manifesto written by ‘Manuel Organ’ and ‘Nanne Pish’ who solemnly delineated the artistic aims of ‘the Ultra Violet School of Poetry’. Fan letters poured in to the borrowed address in Pittsburgh that the Spectrists gave as their HQ – a town sufficiently obscure to make them seem as marginal as possible – and as the imagined back-story of Knish’s tempestuous love-life and flame-headed beauty became well known, it was not uncommon to find a young poet or critic who claimed to have met her and revelled in her gorgeousness. And though her made-up name, Knish, would be instantly recognizable to a New Yorker today as a popular Jewish snack-food, it raised no doubts amongst the less worldly readers of 1916 who were all hungry for exoticism of any sort.

Keen to have a real live woman in the movement and aware that the success of Spectrism might justify enlarging their school, the two men approached another poet of their acquaintance, Marjorie Allen Seiffert. She was a writer of independent means with the time and naughtiness of spirit and disregard for trendy poetic ‘isms’ to devote herself wholeheartedly to the project. Indeed she had already submitted some hoax poems to a literary journal in the past under the made-up name Angela Cypher. She was an enthusiastic co-conspirator, using her considerable talent as a literary mimic to produce work under the name of Elijah Hay which was as well received as Morgan and Knish’s had been.

In 1918, while Spectrism was still being talked about in reverent tones throughout literary America, Ficke was called to France to serve in the First World War. Although he would return intact shortly afterwards, the hoax would not. At one point the subject of modern poetry came up in conversation with an army brigadier and he was directly asked what he thought of the Spectrist poet Anne Knish. He could not contain his amused pride at this question and revealed himself to his astonished inquisitor there and then. Bynner was no more capable of keeping it a secret that he felt he had come up with the hoax to end all hoaxes, and by the time
Dial
magazine ran a story revealing that ‘the interruption of the war . . . gave “Miss Knish” a commission as Captain Arthur Davison Ficke’ the true nature of the Spectrists was already an open secret.

The literary luminaries who had been fooled had to admit they had been had, but most echoed Carlos Williams when he said; ‘I was completely taken in by the hoax, and while not subscribing in every case to the excellence of the poems admired them as a whole quite sincerely.’

But the life of the hoax was not extinguished by its debunking. Although the Spectrists’ poems were never themselves to enter the canon in any meaningful way, as literary sensibilities developed in America, the work eventually came to be considered by Bynner, Ficke and their critics to be some of the best work they had ever made. Although they had been joking when they wrote it, they later came to see that in amongst the dross there had been lines and expressions that were far purer and more elegant than anything they had written in their immature incarnations as formalists. And although Ficke was to die too young in 1945 after a protracted illness, Bynner went on to travel the world writing about the things he saw and felt, and ultimately settle in Santa Fe and write poetry – modernist, imagist, not at all un-Spectrist-like poetry, until his death in 1968.

T
HE WINTER OF
1917 was not a happy one in America or Europe. Casualties in the field in France and Belgium were stupenduously high after the battles at Ypres, and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the biggest man-made explosion ever (until Hiroshima) had just killed thousands when two tankers collided in the harbour. Journalists struggled to find any good news with which to lighten the hearts of their readers, so some took a page out of Mark Twain’s book and made it up.

H.L. Mencken was one such writer, and the fake news story he published in the
New York Evening Mail
on 28 December would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life. Known as the Sage of Baltimore, Mencken was at this point halfway through a life which would see him crowned as America’s best loved critic, editor and social commentator. He lived almost all his life in the same house in Union Square, and wrote every week for the
Baltimore Sun
for nearly fifty years, covering a range of local and international issues in his famous opinion-editorial pieces, and attracting as much controversy for his political views as he did praise for his witty prose style.