Fakes, Fantasies & Forgeries
Written: Sep 29 '04 (Updated Sep 29 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Lotsa details and well-written
Cons: The scholarly British humor went way over my noggin.
The Bottom Line: "We know how to tell many lies, which seem true; and we know, when we want, how to tell the truth.": Hesiod (Greek poet ca. 700 BC)
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| ed_grover's Full Review: |
After I read Dragon Lady I felt bound to find out more about the man who manufactured all those lies. Off I went to our Central Library and came home with Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse by Hugh Trevor-Roper (T-R from now on), a professor of Modern History at Oxford. It seems that one day in 1973 he received two elegantly cased manuscript volumes from a slightly nervous Swiss executive. The idea was to have him read and review them before they were found suitable to be deposited in the Bodelian Library at Oxford.
They turned out to be the unpublished memoirs of Edmund Backhouse (EB), who died under reduced circumstances in Peking in 1944. What T-R found were documents that told in explicit detail, "the story of a man who had not only been acquainted with, but was the lover of, dozens of the most prominent figures of his time . . .both male and female. That turned out to be untrue, and it also turned out that the majority of the Chinese printed books and manuscripts (some 27,000 volumes) he donated to the Bodelian Library were fakes.
The author worked from four sources: The Bodelian papers, the correspondence and diaries of Dr. George E. Morrison (the Times correspondent from Peking), J.O.P. Bland (EB's co-author of two books on China, one of which slandered the Dowager Empress) and a Dr. Reinhard Hoeppli (the Swiss consul general of Peking and the recipient of the memoirs that eventually found their way into the author's hands). To add to all the intrigue in Peking, it seems that Edmund Backhouse had been a secret agent of the British government. He was involved in the secret purchase of arms during the First World War (there's even a warship involved). There are paper trails all over the place and a lot of the writing is, if not technical, rather tedious to read through and keep track of.
T-R says that Edmund Backhouse was:
a spendthrift aesthete of the 1890s who became a sinologist [a study of the language, literature, history and culture of the Chinese people] and recluse of the next century . . . the brilliant linguist who used his gifts to diddle successive patrons; the enchanter whose spells softened the hard heads of businessmen and diplomats; the collector whose generosity enriched his old university and unexpectedly abandoned his own papers to meaningless destruction; the secret war-time agent who led his own government on a wild-goose chase; the scholar who produced a masterpiece of historical writing and a masterpiece of forgery and on and on and on.
In an early chapter titled "The Wild Oats" we find out that Edmund hated his parents. When his mother died he screamed oaths over her body in a multitude of foreign languages. We find out that there was also a gay uncle in the family who had a strong taste for homosexual pornography and was the recipient of Baron Corvo's infamous "Venice Letters." He may have corrupted his nephew, but there's a good chance that that happened earlier at the fashionable St. George's School and at Merton College at Oxford. There, Edmund discovered his linguistic genius and began his study of Asiatic and European languages.
It was at Oxford that EB incurred debts amounting to £23,000, a considerable sum in the late 1800s. He never finished his degree, but instead declared bankruptcy and disappeared to Peking where he tried to secure a job in the department of Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. He never got the job and it seems he was an interpreter of sorts . . . finally for George Morrison, who wrote those revealing personal diaries separately from the (unknown to him) falsified reports he sent to the Times in London.
Another chapter is called "The Scholar" and the following one is called "The Historian." In those two chapters we get the background on EB as a future Sinologist and his partnership with Bland and the two books they co-authored: China Under the Empress Dowager and Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking.
One of the manuscripts included The Diary of His Excellency Ching-shan. Ching-shan was a Manchu scholar who Backhouse and Bland insisted "had exceptional opportunities of knowing all the gossip at court." Sir Reginald Johnston, the tutor of the last Emperor, Pu-Yi (played by Peter O'Toole in the movie The Last Emperor), says this was incorrect; Ching-shan was never more than assistant secretary. Johnson and Backhouse never got along and avoided each other at all times. All of Johnston's papers were destroyed at his death so there was no cross-referencing there. Later on Morrison claimed the diary was "faked" and that Backhouse had done it with the aid of his Manchu teacher. A great flack arose over this accusation and the final word was finally made in 1963 when is was said that the "document was a forgery by persons unknown."
The final two chapters cover "The Memoirs." They relate mostly to EB's personal experiences and are amusing if outrageous reading. It seems that Sir Edmund had a severe psychological problem. He wanted to have people believe that he had been intimately involved with everyone from Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm and their circle to the poet Paul Verlaine, and on to Lord Rosebery, a British Prime Minister and finally, Tsu-Hsi, the Dowager Empress of China.
I read this book was because I wanted more detail on Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse. I can't say I'm sorry I read it, but I didn't find it as "altogether irresistible" as the reviewer from the London Sunday Times did, nor did I find it as "wonderfully witty" as the reviewer from the New Statesman. I did, however, find that I had to agree with the reviewer from The Observer that it was an "extraordinary book" and "a very well told story."
Aside from Backhouse's own self-serving diagnosis of his affliction, his memoirs are a mixture of truth and fantasy, I never found anything concrete or an outright diagnosis. All of the above certainly didn't fit into any of the "irresistible and absorbing" raves from the British reviewers and I had to read most of it twice to make any sense of it. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to ask my "friendly neighborhood shrink" what the problem was in modern terms, and after a day or two, I got an e-mail that said:
"Generally it’s claimed that a regular criminal has profit as his motive, is aware that he is committing a crime, and knows it’s illegal and “wrong.” A "Sociopath" (or one with an anti-social personality disorder) is a person with an intact intellect, who seems to lack a conscience about “right and wrong” and often shows a peculiar disregard for what is real and what is a fantasy. They often claim outrageous things to be so, yet and can be so believable that they convince others of the truth of their claims. They have no regard for the feelings of others, are glaringly insensitive to the effects their own behaviors have on others, are facile with alibis and excuses, yet can be exquisitely sensitive to rejection directed towards themselves. They are the con-artists of the world."
I Googled the term "Anti-social personality disorder" and found out a lot. You can, too!
In a very complex and lengthy sentence, T-R compares Backhouse to not only "the most learned of forgers, T. J. Wise, and the most aggressive of sexual pretenders, Frank Harris. He also compares him to a man who is known for a multitude of reasons including pornography: Frederick J. Rolfe, self-styled Baron Corvo. He suggests that the two memoirs should be re-named "The Imaginary Life & Times of E.T. Backhouse, I): In The Literary And Political World of the 1890s and 2): In the Court of Tzu-Hsi.
The book contains 296 pages of text with two appendices and an index. There are four pages of pictures, one showing EB at age 45 and one at the end of his life with a long white beard and a Chinese robe. (Borzoi, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN 0-394-41104-8).
Ed Grover – September, 2004
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: Ed Grover
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