Telling Tales Page 7

  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.

  SIR EDMUND BACKHOUSE

  TO 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?

  This good faith was made manifest just before the First World War when he was asked to return to England to become Professor of Chinese at King’s College, London. This honour was slightly less than he had hoped for, his sights having been set on a position at his alma mater, Oxford, and he blamed ill-health for only undertaking the post for a short while before returning to live out the rest of his seventy years in Peking – now living in the west of the city, where few foreigners cared to tread. However, in order to gain the interest of the universities in the first place he had some time previously begun shipping vast quantities of books back to the Bodleian Library as gifts. Thousands of manuscripts were conveyed by him from China, and as he and Bland had now published a second, well-received book, Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking, his credentials as a serious academic were hardly doubted. But the more he was thanked and lauded for bestowing upon the university these books, the more he became carried away with the idea of donating more, and so furthering his reputation as the English emperor of Chinese studies. He took cash advances for the complicated shipping arrangements, by land and sea, of something he called ‘the famous palace library’ – some 60,000 manuscripts and journals all said to be pricelessly rare and beautiful. But the palace library, like Ching-shan’s diary and the arms contracts, never existed. And the Bodleian was of course never able to trace its money.

  Despite incurring the wrath of the educational and governmental institutions whom he tricked out of money, and continual bad-mouthing by Dr Morrison, who grew to loathe Backhouse but still kept him on as an assistant, the slippery baronet was never exposed in his lifetime. And thanks to occasional bail-outs from his family back home in England he was able to continue living the life he loved. Those English diplomats and officials lucky enough to draw him out of his lodgings would describe him as an impeccably polite member of any party, especially delighting in the company of women; but the journalists and other men of lesser orders he encountered spoke of his lascivious tongue and dependence on ‘caffeine crystals’ and sleeping pills. In all his eccentricity, he became a Peking institution, much talked about but rarely seen. Even when the Japanese invaded Peking in the 1940s he was excused internment, and having refused the passage home offered by his family in England, preferred instead to remain living in a single, humble room in Peking (claiming he had been robbed of his treasures and books by dishonest staff), always dressed in Chinese robes, and attended on by one faithful Chinese servant. In the last few years of his life, although living in near total isolation, he was befriended by a Swiss doctor, Reinhard Hoeppli, who would persuade – and pay – him to complete the last, excessive flourish in his life’s work as a hoaxer: his memoirs.

  These two books, charting his life as a miserable public-schoolboy, then an oversexed undergraduate and culminating in his arrival in China and the dawn of a new, unbridled age of sexual and political exploits, stretch the reader’s credibility almost to breaking point. And after a while, their tolerance of pornography too. Hoeppli says that Backhouse’s physical health improved as he wrote these volumes, but whether that was the function of catharsis or sheer self-titillation is unclear. Backhouse claimed that his long career as an active homosexual began when the French poet Verlaine came to teach a term at his school. This might be true, but from there the account spirals off on a tangent of what can only be described as literary-historical sexual fantasy. Travelling Europe with his new friend Verlaine, he becomes intimate with almost every famous writer of the fin de siècle cultural scene: Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas; the actor Harry Stanford; Aubrey Beardsley; Ellen Terry; Henry James; Joseph Conrad; Edmund Gosse. The list goes on. Once he is established in Peking, aside from the hundreds of young men he had sex with in brothels and backstreets, he describes being summoned to the inner sanctum of the septuagenarian dowager empress herself and given the honour of engaging in a marathon of love-making, aphrodisiac-taking and general ritualized pleasure-making with her. Pure, adulterated fantasy.

  It was not until Hugh Trevor-Roper (who we will encounter again later in connection with some other more famous bogus journals) discovered these later diaries and made their author the subject of one of his brilliant studies in the mid-1970s that the full story of Backhouse’s extraordinary, playful powers of illusion were exposed. While the memoir seen by Trevor-Roper contains nothing like an explicit confession, enough of it is the work of a blatant fantasist to warrant calling his entire oeuvre into question. An openly gay Englishman who claims to have had sordid sexual liaisons with the ageing Empress Cixi herself, as well as being an intimate of her Grand Eunuch is, by anybody’s standards, something of a loon. But what a successful loon he was. Deluded, greedy, desperate for recognition from the university at which he had failed so conspicuously to shine as a young man, yes, but ultimately one of those inimitable eccentrics without whom the history of English letters – and Englishmen abroad – would be a far less colourful place.

  3

  NATIVE AMERICANS

  WHITE AMERICA’S RELATIONSHIP with her native population is complex and only relatively recently beginning to get away from the stereotypes of cowboys ’n’ Injuns. But as with Americans of African origin, the figure of the native American is still bound up with any number of insecurities and simplifications which result in him being seen as either unrealistically strong and capable (the warrior king of the plains, preternaturally skilled in bushcraft and ancient lore) or hopelessly feeble (the unemployable drunk languishing on a reservation). Nowadays many white Americans look for Indian blood in their heritage as keenly as they once delved into their Celtic or northern European provenance, while other more reactionary types rue the positive discrimination they see their native countrymen receiving. All these tensions combine in the literature of First Nation America, but for every fine authentic novelist like Sherman Alexie there is a Nasdijj – the unfortunate white man who decided to hijack the identity of a Navajo and pass it off as his own to capitalize on the vogue for confessional autobiographies and the romance of the Indian. But long before he put mendacious pen to paper, there were other hoaxers whose immersion in their assumed native identities were even more comprehensive and often done for a far better cause than mere self-promotion. The greatest of them all was Grey Owl.

  GREY OWL

  IN LONDON IN 1937 a weathered-looking Apache Indian stood in long hair, skins and moccasins before the entire royal household in Buckingham Palace and spoke movingly about the urgent need to protect the natural world from greedy developers. He was one of the world’s first naturalists (just the sort of man, in fact, that the future heir of the young Princess Elizabeth would adore), and a tireless campaigner, through his books and lectures, for the land he loved best: the Canadian wilderness. Only on his death the following year would questions about his true identity begin to be raised. Who was Grey Owl? And how should the answer to that question affect the way his books are read?

  The story begins in Hastings, Sussex, at the turn of the twentieth century, when young Archie Belaney was twelve years old. The child of a dissolute father and under-age mother, he was raised by his maiden aunts, who sent him to grammar school and hoped for a good steady office job for him afterwards
. But Archie had only one passion – the Indian warriors of the Wild West. He devoured books about heroes like Buffalo Bill, and soon his obsession with the Aboriginal way of life extended to his eschewing his bed for the hard floorboards (because no good backwoodsman can sleep on a soft bed), camping out overnight in the garden and collecting such specimens from nature as the Sussex countryside would offer up. And just as much as he loved this alternative world, he hated and feared the one marked out for him at home. His terror of ending up an office worker led him to run away to Canada in 1906 at the tender age of sixteen.

  Arriving in Ontario, Belaney soon made his way to the beautiful wilderness of Temagami, the home of the Ojibwa nation. Amongst the expansive woods and lakes of this unspoilt territory the boy who had felt so cooped up and misunderstood in the suburban streets of East Sussex finally breathed a sigh relief. He was happy, relaxed and inspired. And, like many a young traveller, in the mood for love. So he swiftly found and married a local girl and began to make it known that he was the son of a Scotsman and an Apache woman from New Mexico who had come north to live off the land and learn more about the way of the Ojibwa. Despite having blue eyes, his tanned skin and increasingly long hair allowed him to pass as mixed-race, and his boundless enthusiasm for bushcraft saw him first employed as a trainee guide then a fire ranger, and eventually he was taken in by the Ojibwa, who taught him their language and customs. They even gave him a ceremonial name.