(70) Tue 21 Apr 98 21:20 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: 'Nat Tate' hoax St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:dadf 2495aa80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00181f48 Books: Sting in Manhattan The tragic life of New York artist Nat Tate is celebrated in a new book by William Boyd. Or so the art world believed. The art and pleasure of the hoax 04/09/98 The Guardian The best hoaxes are at least a little unkind. William Boyd has shown the admirable cruelty of parodists with his new `biography' of the brilliant but neglected New York artist Nat Tate, and with his arrangement of its launch. Leading writers, painters and journalists were invited to the studio of artist Jeff Koons, where they were entertained by readings from the book by David Bowie. The extracts were fascinating but melancholy. Tate was an orphan, a shy depressive and an alcoholic (`an essentially dignified drunk with nothing to say', recalls Gore Vidal). He produced a `once legendary, now almost entirely forgotten series of drawings inspired by Hart Crane's great poem, `The Bridge' '. (Boyd reproduces a couple of these.) He mixed awkwardly with the bohemians of 1950s Manhattan - briefly he was Peggy Guggenheim's lover. In 1959, he visited Georges Braque and, Boyd surmises, was crushed by this encounter with a greater artist. He destroyed as much of his work as he could find, and leapt to his death off the Staten Island ferry. His body was never found. With the aid of some blurred old photographs and his own `artworks', Boyd concocted Nat Tate: An American Artist (1928-1960). Co-conspirator Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters magazine, tells the press that `we never meant it maliciously'; she is surely being disingenuous or unperceptive. The delight of the spoof is exactly its malice. We enjoyably imagine those `art lovers', a parcel of pseuds, gathered in the New York loft to revere the memory of someone who never existed. Edited highlights appeared in last Sunday's Telegraph, although here it is not so clear who was being made to seem foolish. The newspaper claims to have known it was publishing a fake, in which case it was a bit rough to foist the April Folly on its readers on April 5. The article becomes something of a joke against these readers, dutifully taking an interest in modern art. Few perhaps caught Boyd's signpost absurdities - like Tate's explanation of his interest in bridges: `so strong, so simple - but imagine what flows in the water underneath'. The thought of the Manhattan cognoscenti not daring to say `Never heard of him' is pleasing. It is the story of the Emperor's new clothes, most satisfying when it involves `intellectuals'. Comparably credulous were the Australian publishers and critics who acclaimed the modernist poetry of Ern Malley, `discovered' by his semi-literate sister Ethel after his tragic death aged 25. In fact `The Darkening Ecliptic', as his collection called itself, had been cobbled together in deliberately nonsensical fashion by two antagonists of poetic modernism. It was widely published and praised in part because Australian literati wanted their own Waste Land - especially if the author were a dead garage mechanic. The pleasure of Boyd's fake is that it also belongs to an older tradition of mock-books. It is hilarious quite apart from the fact that it has fooled anybody. It is made with loving care for particulars: the Zelig- like photographs (Tate snapped indistinctly, next to Madame Braque); the attention to eccentric minor characters; the straight-faced parody of much that distinguishes writing about art - especially an utter obliviousness to the ridiculous. This delight in the business of making (or indeed reading) a mock-book used to be more common. In the 18th century, the fake became a literary art form, of which Gulliver's Travels is the most famous example. Works like Pope's Dunciad or Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy were full of bogus erudition, often beyond the knowledge of their readers. Gothic novels were inaugurated in 1765 by Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto purported to be a story written in the time of the crusades, `Translated by William Marshall, Gent. from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto'. Reviewers who celebrated this amazing discovery were furious to find it was a jeu d'esprit, and Walpole had to publish an apology. Some readers do not enjoy spoofs. Daniel Defoe made his name with a pamphlet, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, that was such a good parody of religious intolerance that high Tories everywhere hear-heared enthusiastically. Their anger when they discovered that they were in fact the targets of the publication was such that Defoe was put in the pillory - thereby becoming a hero to the London mob. Anonymity and pseudonymity made trickery common and elaborate. Alexander Pope published `keys' to his own poetry, `proving' its sinister political subversiveness. Sir Walter Scott (anonymously) reviewed his own (anonymous) fiction. Jonathan Swift attacked astrologers through a series of pseudonymous `predictions', which included the death of leading astrologer John Partridge. After Swift's subsequent account of the fulfilment of this prophecy, Partridge desperately published pamphlets trying to prove that he was still alive. Yet some of the most (inadvertently) satirical fakes have been in earnest. The late 18th century saw Chatterton's `discovery' of the medieval poems of Thomas Rowley, Macpherson's `Translation' of the Gaelic epic poetry of Ossian, and even the publication, by William Henry Ireland, of a previously unknown play by Shakespeare: `Vortigern and Rowena'. None was meant as a joke, yet all showed up the credulity of readers who wanted these works of genius to exist. The Ossian poems were admired throughout Europe, rated alongside Homer by critics for many years. Macpherson became, by mistake, a satirist of the modish primitivism that made his fakes accepted. A more recent satirist by default was the Brighton clergyman Toby Forward, who, in the guise of a reclusive young Asian woman called Rahila Khan, had a collection of stories accepted by Virago Press. When he told the publishers of his true identity, they pulped all copies of the book. Yet, far from using his hoax to mock feminist correctness, Rev. Forward earnestly regretted the loss of his fictional voice. `Rahila Khan was me', he wrote, in a bathetic echo of Flaubert's `Madame Bovary, c'est moi'. His high-mindedness was as ridiculous as the preconceptions of Virago. Better, as Boyd has recognised, is a low instinct for mockery, elaborately pursued. Nat Tate: An American Artist (1928-1960) is published by 21 Publishing Ltd ( pounds 9.95). It is distributed by Fourth Estate. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, the Lyin' King --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ Brooklyn,NY 718 692-2498 (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 218/890 1001 278/15 230 396/1 3615/50 51 3804/180 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001