Thought we’d had enough what with James Frey (who’s suddenly everywhere, and what’s up with that?) J.T. Leroy and Nasdijj, not to mention a certain young lady named Kaavya? Well add the prankster who fooled A.N. Wilson so badly that the biographer of noted poet Sir John Betjeman published went so far as to publish a letter in the book, calling it “evidence of the poet’s previously unknown ‘fling'” when really it was all made up. The dead giveaway? As the Times reports, the capital letters at the beginning of the sentences in the letter spell out “A N Wilson is a shit”.
The Times’ arts editor, Richard Brooks, broke the story and goes into lots more detail about how the hoax stayed undetected for so long. Basically, it was all about sex – or Bejetman’s obsession with having so little. So when a missive purporting to be from one “Eve de Harben” arrived at Wilson’s door with a heretofore undiscovered letter from Bejetman to Honor Tracy, an Anglo-Irish writer with whom Betjeman worked at the Admiralty during the war, Wilson took it at face value – and only discovered the lie when Brooks told him.
The paper found out when a journalist also received a letter from de Harben, which had the same French address and the same story that she had married a Frenchman. In the letter, de Harben confessed the love letter she had sent to Wilson was “spurious.” She had made the whole thing up – including the rude message – to avenge an attack which Wilson himself had made some years ago on Humphrey Carpenter, a “dear friend of mine” – but in an additional twist, Carpenter’s widow Mari said this weekend she had never heard of de Harben. She also said Wilson and Carpenter had patched up their differences not long before her husband’s death.
So the bottom line? It’s all a big crazy mystery, and though Wilson has an idea who it is, he’s not naming names. “All I’d say is this person must know an amazing amount about Betjeman and his life.”