Lost, Stolen or Shredded

by Rick Gekoski

  Asked the question, he is curiously decisive: ‘a million four’, he predicts (in dollars).

  ‘Would you be a buyer?’

  He looks up, twinkling, instantly on the prowl.

  ‘Have you got one?’

  I’m flattered that he thinks I might, and sorry to disappoint both of us.

  ‘I’d have to find a donor,’ he says, ‘but I could.’

  Peter Selley, of Sotheby’s Book Department in London, who has handled some sensational Joyce manuscript material and letters in the last few years, is less easy about predicting a value. Auctioneers are like that. The comparators, he feels, are the erotic letter and perhaps a spectacular inscribed Ulysses. An estimate of £300,000 to £500,000 perhaps? ‘Though in an immediate sense it is a far less sexy item than the erotic letter, it does have the obvious huge draw of being absent from every major collection private and public, plus also tapping into the profound on-going interest here and in the US in Irish Nationalism.’ Which is to say, who the hell knows?

  There would be a fuss, as the proud owner – me? me! – showed off his treasure, though by a nice irony the text might not be allowed to be printed in its entirety, due to the assiduous protectiveness of the Joyce estate. The old eagle in his eyrie overlooking the world is not, in this instance, the ghost of the late Parnell but Stephen Joyce, the author’s grandson and protector of all things Joycean. So litigious is he that even Christie’s, when they illustrate a Joyce manuscript, have decided to blur the image discreetly, as if it were a model’s pubic hair in an old-fashioned nudie picture. And though Joyce’s previously published work is now out of copyright, it is unclear whether a newly discovered piece would be, or not. After all, it had been published – hadn’t it? – so copyright should have lapsed. Can you copyright a ghost?

  Never mind. Word would get out – Gekoski has a copy! – and I would have assuaged my interest, filled in the gaps and banished my ghost. The net effect of which, ironically, would be to diminish the interest of the poem, as one could see it finally for what it is, strip it of its black tulip numinosity. Bookselling fetishises objects, but usually they are more or less worth the fuss. In my office I once had – lucky me, all at the same time – Jacob Epstein’s green bronze bust of T. S. Eliot, one of six copies produced in 1951; a copy of Dylan Thomas’s first book, 18 Poems, inscribed to his wife ‘Dylan to Caitlin – lovingly, in spite’ the inscription stained with beer, or tears, perhaps both; D. H. Lawrence’s own copy of The Rainbow; a letter from Ezra Pound to T. E. Lawrence gossiping about Yeats and Conrad, and a pencil self-portrait done by Sylvia Plath at seventeen. (They’re all gone now.) I am still moved by such material: it’s stuff like this that keeps me going, makes the treasure-hunting worth the aggravation and frequent disappointments. These are objects worth making a fuss about.

  But Et Tu, Healy? Fetishisation: 100, Object: 0. This fact, for surely it is that, locates something that lurks disturbingly at the heart of my form of life. There is something dangerous in unrestrained treasure-hunting, a lurking sense of futility, which I, on its occasional outbreaks, find incapacitating. All those expensive first editions, many with prices dependent on whether they still had their dust wrappers and what condition they were in, isn’t there something ridiculous about this? Book collectors frequently remark that there is no sense in showing their collections to their friends – they just don’t get it. A copy of the first edition of Brighton Rock in a dust wrapper? Yeah, whatever … It’s not until they are told it’s worth £50,000 – largely for the wrapper – that they pay attention, but mostly to the collector’s pathology rather than to the over-valued object: ‘What’re you, crazy?’

  At least they would have heard of Brighton Rock, might even have read it. What happens when you show them the tatty, recently discovered piece of million-dollar paper that is Et Tu, Healy? What would they say then? What would I?

  Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary defines a ghost as the outward manifestation of an inner fear. This is fair enough: we are frightened of death, and those spooks in sheets are the objective correlative of our terror. As they hover in the night, hoo-ing and woo-ing, we are reminded of the evanescence of human life, its short span, the long emptiness to come. Et Tu, Healy plays a similar role in my life and is similarly charged: the rattling of its baby chains causes a frisson of anxiety in me, as if my book-dealing life had been dedicated to futile pursuits and meaningless goals. Has there been something unworthy about it, snuffling about like a pig for trifles?

  Perhaps if Et Tu, Healy rejoined the world, I might look it in the eye, make an adjustment in our long relations and rid myself of my obsession. I wonder what it would look like? What title might it bear? Who would be named as the author? My bet is on Jas. A. Joyce, the name under which, some ten years later, he published his first few articles. James Joyce sounds a little, well, old for a nine-year-old. And surely not Jim Joyce, though that is how he was known in the family.

  And what would we be left with? Just a rare piece of paper, a poem written by a little boy and published by a proud father, transformed too quickly from a touching memento to a scrap under the removal men’s boots. A lovely thing in its way, with its loss built into its very nature, and once found, thoroughly forgettable. Just the only known copy of Et Tu, Healy, nothing haunting about that.

  Perhaps then that quaint perched eyrie on the crags of time will trouble me no more. And if that happens, I will, perversely, rather regret it. Being haunted by a lost scrap and occasionally tormented by a repetitive inner tune is small enough price to pay for the delight of the chase, however futile it occasionally feels. That excitement is strong enough to resist its shadow, and the continued absence of Et Tu, Healy animates and amuses me, when it isn’t a source of depression.

  I hope it never gets found. I prefer it lost.

  Unless, of course, it’s me who finds it.

  5

  Do It Yourself: The Oath of a Freeman

  Though I can accept the absence Et Tu, Healy with a degree of equanimity, I am still tempted to go out and hunt for one. The world of dealing and collecting, of museums and curators, of connoisseurship and scholarship, rests on an underlying and animating archetype. Many essential human activities are like that. For schoolteachers, it is passing on the wisdom of the tribe to the young; for lawyers, ensuring that justice and representation are widely available; for doctors, that all are entitled to healthcare. And for a serious dealer or collector? That the treasure hunt must go on: there are buried, unlocated, misunderstood, misrepresented objects of every kind which are of value both commercial and cultural, and are essential to our understanding of ourselves. It is our job to find, to understand, and to preserve them.

  Where to look for an Et Tu? I might, after all, apply to the Vatican Library and do whatever they would allow in the way of poking about. They have, after all, recently opened their enormous archives to the public. Maybe it’s in there? Or I might wangle myself onto the news and TV in Ireland by offering a substantial reward for anyone who could locate a copy. A million dollars might concentrate a lot of minds.

  There is one further possibility, of course. I might make one myself. Though I once contemplated writing my Et Tu, Borys thriller, I never got far enough in my wayward imaginings to work out how such a forgery might be produced. But how difficult can it be? (There is the nice precedent of a similar fantasy in Doris Langley Moore’s 1959 novel My Caravaggio Style, in which a forged copy of Byron’s Memoirs enters the market.) So all I would need to do is to find a competent and impecunious Irish poet – plenty of those about – and get him to compose some childish pastiche on the death of Parnell. Obtain some paper stock – simply remove a blank page or two out of a book published around 1890 – and make sure the ink and typefaces are contemporary with it. After printing, let the finished article sit in the bright sunlight for a few hours to age a bit. Rub a bit of dust onto it. Fake up some sort of provenance (found between the covers of an old Dublin almanac!) Hey presto: a million doll
ars plus, with a following wind and a sufficiently enthusiastic buyer.

  There can be no one in the rare book and manuscript world – dealer, collector, curator or auctioneer – who has not occasionally pursued a similarly criminal line of thought, though (of course) in fantasy we always assume someone else is doing the forging and gorging, and secretly rather admire them. The nerve, the resources, the vision! In an environment in which the quiet pursuit of scholarship dominates, and commerce is conducted with discreet gentility, it is nice to imagine a little covert mayhem. We’re always too nice to each other, rare book people. There is very little by way of blackmail, and though we can envy each other to the point of vice, we are rarely homicidal.

  There is, after all, the case of Mark Hofmann. Reasonably well known as a dealer and sometime collector in the rare book and manuscript world in the early 1980s, Hofmann was universally regarded as a queer fish, later described in the New York Times as a ‘scholarly country bumpkin’. Selfeffacing, and with a creepy limp handshake, he was nevertheless more than tolerated in the rare book trade. He was quite active at the major book fairs, and had a knack of ‘regularly producing’ (as one rare book dealer put it) just what people wanted. He seemed to have both a good eye and good sources of material, and such dealers always do pretty well, however unprepossessing their characters. Maybe, in fact, such an ineffectual persona is a positive advantage, in that it makes your fellows and customers confident that they are not in the company of a shark. Surely such a Caspar Milquetoast (a 1920s’ American cartoon character described by his creator as ‘the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick’) was both harmless and trustworthy?

  Would you buy a used manuscript from this man? The forger and murderer Mark Hofmann.

  Neither of the above. (I’ve always suspected that Caspar Milquetoast would have made a good serial killer.) And Mark Hofmann had plenty to hide. He has been described as ‘the most skilled forger this country has ever seen’ by the manuscript dealer and expert on forgery Charles Hamilton, who added ruefully, ‘He fooled me – he fooled everybody.’ This must have been extra-pleasing to Hofmann, for Hamilton’s book Great Forgers and Famous Fakes was one of his most valued reference books. Presumably he learned a lot from it.

  He was in a distinguished tradition, and at the top of his trade. The only other possible contender for the Oscar for Best Forger would be T. J. Wise, the eminent bibliographer and scholar of the late Victorian world, who was only unmasked as an assiduous forger after his death, so eminent was he, and so anxious were his accusers that his old age be unperturbed by scandal. The neutrally titled An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, by John Carter and Graham Pollard, was therefore only released (in 1934) after Wise’s death. It established beyond doubt that the old scholar was a fraud and a criminal. But Wise, though undoubtedly a biblio-scoundrel of the highest order – forger of pamphlets ostensibly by great English poets (including Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Meredith, Ruskin, Shelley, Tennyson and Thackeray), some of the pamphlets wholly ‘new,’ others with false dating – was a rank amateur compared to Hofmann, limited in range and ambition. He may have razored out pages of Shakespeare’s First Folio from the copies at the British Library, in order to complete copies that he later sold, but, all in all, he was a petty criminal.

  Hofmann, in his more ambitious way, was something of a genius, the kind of worthy antagonist Sherlock Holmes would have been glad to unmask: The Case of the Murderous Forger. Born in 1954 (on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor), the young Hofmann was the son of devout Mormons, an Eagle Scout, and by all accounts, a curious and active child, interested in chemistry and magic, as well as collecting stamps and coins. His description of his early years is fascinating:

  As far back as I can remember I have liked to impress people through my deceptions. In fact some of my earliest memories are of doing magic and tricks. Fooling people gave me a sense of power and superiority … When I was about 12 years old I began collecting coins. Soon afterwards I figured out some crude ways to fool other collectors by altering coins to make them appear more desirable. By the time I was 14 I had developed a forgery technique which I felt was undetectable.

  When you add to these precocious interests and abilities the fact that he also enjoyed bomb-making with his friends, setting off the occasional explosion in the safety of the desert, all of the skills and indicators were in place for an interesting future. In 1973 he began a term of duty for the Mormon Church knocking on doors in search of English converts, though he later claimed he had lost his faith some years earlier and had only gone to England because it had been expected of him. From his base in Bristol, Hofmann began exploring the local bookshops, collecting material relating to the Mormons, schooling himself in the major antiquarian texts and their authors.

  If you are going to become a forger, start with what you know. After a brief and unpromising period as a medical student, Hofmann soon reverted to his interests in Mormon documents and in forgery. In 1980 he ‘discovered’, neatly tucked into a copy of the King James Bible, a letter supposedly by the prophet Joseph Smith, in his ‘reformed Egyptian’ hieroglyphic hand, which according to some authorities went some way to confirming the truth of the Book of Mormon. Hofmann got $20,000 for it, and established his reputation.

  He continued, for the next few years, to mine this rich seam of Mormon forgeries – he was both the coalminer and the coal – selling documents that were dangerous to the Mormon faith even more profitably than ones that appeared to confirm it. The major purchasers of this material were the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Utah and Missouri, who were gullible, rich, acquisitive and discreet. It’s a tempting combination of attributes to a man like Hofmann. He had discovered within himself, he bragged, a capacity to ‘menace and manipulate its leaders with nothing more sinister than a sheet of paper’. Anxious to get such stuff out of the public domain, the Mormon hierarchy were unprepared to come forward when questioned about their purchases, even after Hofmann was exposed.

  But you can only ‘discover’ a limited number of new Mormon documents, and people were beginning to be suspicious of Hofmann. What could be more sensible than to expand his range? Over the next few years autographs from figures as diverse (and saleable) as John Quincy Adams, Daniel Boone, Mark Twain, John Hancock, Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere and George Washington flowed from his pen and (like the Mormon material) fooled customers and experts alike.

  Not enough, never enough. As the income poured in, expenditure rose alarmingly, as Hofmann and his wife soon began – a nice irony – to collect rare children’s books, those emblems of nostalgic innocence. At the 1984 Antiquarian Book Fair in New York he began buying heavily from Justin Schiller, America’s leading dealer in children’s books, and a respected authority on bibliographic matters.

  As both his income and his debts rose, Hofmann conceived the most ambitious of his projects, which, if successful, might well have netted him a million dollars. No copy of Hofmann’s document had been located, though there was ample evidence that it had been printed, because various reprints occurred not long afterwards. So – unlike Et Tu, Healy – there was no need to seek (or to make up) the content: all you had to do was make up the object itself.

  The content of Hofmann’s audacious new project ran to a single page, and is known as the Oath of a Freeman, a Puritan document which was drafted in 1631 and first printed by Stephen Daye in 1639. No copy of this first printing has been located, though there are examples dated 1647 and 1649. It reads like this:

  I, A. B. &c. being by the Almighty’s most wise disposition become a member of this body, consisting of the Governor, Deputy Governor, Assistants and Commonalty of Massachusetts in New England, do freely and sincerely acknowledge that I am justly and lawfully subject to the Government of the same, and do accordingly submit my person and estate to be protected, ordered and governed by the laws and constitutions thereof, and do faithfully promise to be from
time to time obedient and conformable thereunto, and to the authority of the said Governor and Assistants, and their successors, and to all such laws, orders, sentences and decrees as shall be lawfully made and published by them or their successors. And I will always endeavor (as in duty I am bound) to advance the peace and welfare of this body or commonwealth, to my utmost skill and ability. And I will, to my best power and means, seek to divert and prevent whatsoever may tend to ruin or damage thereof, or of any the said Governor, Deputy Governor, or Assistants, or any of them, or their successors, and will give speedy notice to them, or some of them, of any sedition, violence, treachery, or other hurt or evil, which I shall know, hear, or vehemently suspect, to be plotted or intended against the said commonwealth, or the said Government established. And I will not, at any time, suffer or give consent to any counsel or attempt, that shall be offered, given, or attempted, for the impeachment of the said Government, or making any change or alteration of the same, contrary to the laws and ordinances thereof; but shall do my utmost endeavor to discover, oppose and hinder all and every such counsel and attempt. So help me God.

  This doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, but for an itinerant pilgrim in the 1630s, quivering with scripture and stricture, embarking upon a precarious new life amongst the savages and turkeys, it would have been pretty stirring stuff. Not because of what the oath maintains and requires, but because of what it omits.

  Some 140 years later, the framers of the keystone document of American life spoke with similar confidence, though they wrote better prose: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident … that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ It sounds like a standard Enlightenment claim, but it sneaks in something relatively new (‘the pursuit of happiness’?) and leaves out something large. All men? Unless, of course, they are brown. Or women. Never mind, everyone would have sort of understood that, and the more conditions you put into a proclamation, the more it’s hedged about with exceptions and counter-examples, the less rhetorical power it has.