This kind of jape I like to see
On Betjeman’s anniversary —
A cunningly acrostic hoax
To bring a smile to simple folks.
From Daymer Bay to Potters Bar
We giggle in the dining-car . . .

Sorry. Irresistible. For connoisseurs of John Betjeman, his centenary has brought many blessings. For one thing the 100th birthday itself fell on a drizzly Bank Holiday Monday, enabling true believers to eat damp fishpaste sandwiches on the prom before retiring to hold hands in tea-shops. To improve the occasion two biographers are sparring viciously over their hero: Bevis Hillier, who over 25 years wrote a magisterial three-volume authorised biography, and A. N. Wilson who obliges us this year with a briefer, elegantly readable one of his own. Hillier is quoted condemning Wilson as “despicable . . . a playground bully” and Wilson says Hillier is “old and malignant”. Hoorah!

But even better, The Sunday Times unveils a splendid hoax perpetrated on the hapless Wilson. The paper reveals that a 1944 love letter, used in his book as proof of an apparent affair, is a fake. It was sent to the biographer by a person calling herself Eve de Harben, of an untraceable address in the Cote d’Azur. She sent a typed version, claiming that the original belonged to an equally untraceable American collector. Wilson, all unsuspecting, welcomed the document and included it in his book. Now, close examination reveals that the opening letters of each sentence spell out the message “A. N. WILSON IS A SHIT”. To add to the joy of onlookers, the “T” comes from a parodically Betjemanesque 1940s signoff — “Tinkerty-tonk, my darling”.

The hoax was unveiled by a letter from the mysterious “Eve de Harben” to the newspaper, claiming that it is her revenge for something terribly rude that A. N. Wilson once said about the late Humphrey Carpenter, yet another literary biographer. Mr Wilson, says the paper, admits that he should have asked more questions, especially as, when he returned the typescript to de Harben, it came back marked “Addressee and address not known”.

The response of all right-thinking people will be to roll around on the carpet shrieking with laughter. Not from any particular malice: I certainly feel none. A. N. Wilson is a moderately spiteful newspaper diarist but in his books is interesting, readable and idiosyncratic: I like his C. S. Lewis biography and his Victorians. Moreover, he made up his spat with Carpenter (never a man to bear grudges) well before the latter’s death, and at Humf’s funeral looked as stricken as the rest of us.

The glee, rather, is at the debunking effect this shenanigan will have on the whole trade of popular literary biography. Sometimes it seems from the book pages that modern British readers are far keener to read clever-dick analysis and Hello!-style gossip about great writers than we are to approach their actual works, laying ourselves innocently and humbly open to what they have to say to us. It is good for publishers’ profits but less good for our souls. I was lucky enough years ago to study literature under tutors who demanded that we acquire only the most basic historical context and sketchy personal information about the masters, but who insisted that we knew each text and judged it by its intended meaning, its truth and the skill of its execution.

However good a biography, you still get closer to a writer’s heart and spirit by going back to the works themselves. It really is not necessary to know whether Jane Austen was a virgin, or which of T. S. Eliot’s wives it was who slept with Bertrand Russell. Interesting, but not essential. In youth I learnt much formative wisdom from Howards End before I ever found out that E. M. Forster was gay, or indeed a bloke at all; I read Evelyn Waugh at 12 in an equal state of uncertainty about the author’s gender, and nonetheless revelled in the acid beauty of the prose.

Later, in long university months of studying Paradise Lost, I dutifully checked up on the politics and religion of the time but felt only a passing interest in the fact that the blind poet dictated it to his daughters (and that interest was mainly because my tutorial partner and I had a theory that the damn thing was meant to be six times as long, only the duty daughter sometimes got bored and sneaked out of the room for a nap leaving Milton orating to the cat). As for Betjeman’s sex life, I find I can read Death in Leamington or In a Bath Teashop without giving a hoot whom he slept with.

The best of the literary lives — and there are many — are the ones that give a social and historical context, unarguable biographical facts, and enough enthusiasm to send you straight back to the work itself (sometimes before you have even finished the biography: Carpenter’s book on Auden took me ages to finish because I kept rushing back to the poems and falling asleep dreaming them). In dealing with the distant past a degree of imaginative reconstruction may be useful; but then again, it may not. In this century Greenblatt and Ackroyd have given us enjoyable and fascinating books reimagining Shakespeare, but in the end one has to admit that they add nothing in particular. As to the moderns, I must have read four or five lives of George Orwell over the years, but none of them gave me a tenth as much as the man himself.

So the bamboozling of a modish author by a fake Frenchwoman is a salutary reminder that lives, however picaresque, matter less to posterity than works. It is cause for a toast to Sir John, a quiet chortle, and a trip down the garden with the Collected Poems. Tinkerty-tonk!

Read recent columns by Libby Purves here

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