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September 1, 2002
SYNDICATED: The brothers of invention
“Can you imagine a whole new world?” this book asks flirtatiously as an opening. “Wonderful,” we think, as we settle back into our metaphorical aircraft seats, “a Thomas Cook holiday of a read.” Nick Groom’s chapter headings promise deft academic insight delivered with elan and exoticism; ‘Wright’, ‘Villain’, ‘Ghost’, ‘Lunatic’, ‘Demon’, ‘No one’. Forgery sounds like a subject of high drama and intrigue, of men in leather aprons counterfeiting nervously in backrooms, always expecting the dreaded knock on the door that leads to transportation or the gibbet.
The forger’s shadow does deliver some of this. Groom is preoccupied with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and explores the lives and works of four different authors and forgers, all of them shadowy, marginal figures. There is Thomas Chatterton, Wordsworth’s ‘marvellous boy’: inventing the opus of a fifteenth-century monk while still a teenager, only (apparently) to kill himself shortly afterwards with arsenic and opium to avoid starving in his London garret. It was his personality, his inspired verse, his fatal precocity that so influenced the romantics; ‘young, brilliant, poverty-stricken, proud, mad, suicidal’, he was ‘the paradigm of the romantic genius’.
He is the figure in Keats’s ‘To autumn’, ‘sitting careless on a granary floor’. Coleridge, rather overly affected by poppies himself, was ‘quite literally haunted by Chatterton’.
Next in Groom’s line of brilliant forgers comes James Macqpherson, that red-headed, Scottish enemy of Samuel Johnson, who conned the fashionable literary salons into accepting his fictional Celtic bard, Ossian. Acclaimed in Britain — Victoria and Albert were enthusiastic Ossianists — his creation was even more of a sensation abroad. Goethe added the whole of Ossian’s ‘Songs of Selma’ to the end of The sorrows of Werther, Thomas Jefferson read Ossian every day; Napoleon carried him into battle.
Then there is William Henry Ireland, who started by ‘discovering’ copies of Shakespeare’s signature and ended up adding disastrously to Shakespeare’s canon, in the process inventing an episode of the bard’s life in which Ireland’s own ancestors became Shakespeare’s beneficiaries.
Last, but not least, we are taken on a nineteenth-century visit to Newgate prison with Charles Dickens and friends. One of the inmates seems both aristocratic and oddly familiar: “A shabby-genteel creature, with sandy hair and a dirty moustache, who had turned quickly round with a defiant stare at our entrance, looking at once mean and fierce, and quite capable of the cowardly murders he had committed.”
One of the friends had formerly frequented this sinister character’s dinner parties. He was Thomas Wainewright the poisoner, who murdered his relations for the insurance money and who infamously explained the killing of his sister-in-law by alluding to her ‘thick’ legs. But he was also Wainewright the art critic, conman, painter, writer and connoisseur.
This literary felon in turn crept into literature, occupying the imaginations of Dickens, De Quincey, Edward Bulwer Lytoon, becoming for Wilde the ‘prototype of the dandy aesthete’, and now the subject of Andrew Motion’s reimagined biography.
With personalities as grotesque and uncanny as these, Groom’s book ought to be a riveting and bizarre tour of literary counterculture, but underneath the minimalist chapter headings, its structure is uncertain and circuitous. As readers, we seem more to have been deposited guideless in a magic roundabout land than shown around the exciting destinations the book has promised. Instead of delivering gripping and colourful literary and historical findings, it often feels like a whistlestop tour of academic critics and theorists.
Groom also presupposes an extensive academic knowledge: something like ‘transcendental philosophy’ is assumed to be a given. So it’s not a book that works particularly well for a general audience. Groom’s exotic landscape gets lost in the unnecessary and digressive establishing of the exact and changing usage in classical times of all too similar words like ‘forgery’, ‘counterfeit’ and ‘mimesis’. Pace and excitement are sacrificed also because he tends towards the long, inconclusive, philosophical answer when the solution is short and obvious.
A somewhat confused and parched traveller reaches the end of this account, staring around and trying to find out which tour he has actually been on, which country he has explored. The answer is by no means certain. Groom seems to like to avoid concluding passages, and when he does submit to them, they contain his most opaque language.
The forger’s shadow is patently an exploration of the very nature of fiction and selfhood. Its core idea seems also to constitute a paradox: that authenticity depends on the existence of forgery and vice versa. Groom would like to imply that the main idea of romanticism, the inspired and authentic genius, would be impossible without the prior influence of literary forgers like Chatterton. Perhaps this is indeed the case, but beyond that, it is possible that writers were drawn more to tales of scandal and crime than the act of forging per se.
If he wishes to imply that the idea of forgery is essential to twentieth-century literary culture, he could have entered into a proper discussion of the Hitler diaries. This book seemed to promise Marrakesh, but ends up in Minehead. — Dawn/Observer service
The forger’s shadow: how forgery changed the course of literature
By Nick Groom
Picador
ISBN 0330037432X
351pp. £20
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