Fake Folks

"If Allegra Coleman did not exist, someone would have to invent her."

- Esquire magazine

If you've ever wanted to make a name for yourself, you're bound to take some inspiration from the stories of people who took things one step further and manufactured entire selves.

Fictional characters have been known to walk the earth, either when allegedly real folks like you and me have taken on assumed identities, or when whole people have been invented for one use or another. Of course, there's a long tradition of using pseudonyms or noms de plume, so it will take something exceptional to be worth a mention here.

Unanimously elected to the Bullshitters Hall of Fame on the first ballot was a fellow who called himself George Psalmanazar (I don't think anyone knows what his real name was). In the late 17th Century, George wandered around Europe pretending to be a cannibal prince from the exotic orient. He made up an alphabet and lectured widely about the pagan practices and exotic wildlife of his home nation, even teaching at Oxford on the subject. In 1704 he compiled these observations into the book "An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa."

When Psalmanazar died in 1763, his memoirs, in which he confessed to the decades-old hoax, were published. His life was revealed to have been one long work of amazing improvisational dramatic fiction.

In 1817, a poor British lass named (perhaps) Mary Baker managed to pass herself off as a shipwrecked "Princess Caraboo" of "Javasu," with the help of a Portuguese sailor who claimed to understand her invented language. The media attention her act captured caused many jewelers and such to shower their wares on her in hopes of impressing the royals of that fantasy land.

One of my favorite examples (although it perhaps deserves its own category) is of a San Franciscan named Joshua A. Norton who, in 1859, declared himself to be Emperor of the United States (and Protector of Mexico). It appears to have been a creative solution to being dead broke after some financial speculation had soured. Astonishingly, and as a credit to his character, it worked like a charm.

The Emperor's visionary proclamations were printed up in the papers, his self-issued currency was often honored, he corresponded with other heads of state, and his renown was such that tens of thousands of people turned out at his funeral.

Players who are inspired by Norton's story might want to look into Lord Buckley, the swingingist cat that ever did deliver the scratch to the itch. He encouraged people to storm the aristocracy by taking on titles that reflected their actual nobility rather than their inheritance or ancestry.

The "multiple name" is a device that's been used successfully for several years now, particularly by the neoists. The idea is that multiple people publish and/or act under the same name, creating a (multiple) personality out of thin air. Good examples include Karen Eliot, prolific graffiti artist Kilroy, recidivist criminal John Doe, Klaos Oldanburg, Monty Cantsin and Luther Blissett.

In 1952, the best-selling book The Search for Bridey Murphy told of a woman who, under hypnosis, channeled the personality of a Irish woman from the previous century. (Well, so maybe under further investigation she didn't, so what?) The New Age wasn't invented in the 1970s, kids.

Literary types, already well-versed in the arts of creativity and fiction, can be excused for wanting to take that extra step and fictionalize a whole author. If you believe in your art, it seems a logical step to take advantage of the fact that your reader has probably already suspended disbelief about your identity even before the reading begins!

Of the odd schools of poetry that flourished in the early years of the twentieth century, perhaps it is an oversight only the Spectrists are mentioned here. But if their hoax was only more obvious, it was also most curious and surrounded itself with oddity.

James Norman Hall, author of Mutiny on the Bounty, invented the poetical prodigy "Fern Gravel," whose inspired young musings were published as "Oh! Millersville" to rave reviews in 1940.

In 1944, a literary magazine called Angry Penguins published a series of poems by Ern Malley, a poet whose early death would have made his amazing work forever obscure had it not been unearthed by the magazine. The works were then published elsewhere, and are today included in anthologies such as the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. The poor editor of Angry Penguins was prosecuted and convicted by an Australian court when the poems were found to be obscene. Ah, but alas, Ern Malley was just a convincing invention of a couple of poets who wanted to play a prank, and invented both Malley and his corpus in a single afternoon. "Literary fashion," they noted, "can be so hypnotically powerful that it can suspend the operation of critical intelligence."

These sort of literary inventions are becoming more and more popular, it seems. The world of Australian letters was more recently rocked by Ukranian author Helen Demidenko, who won literary awards for The Hand that Signed the Paper, but who was later found to be Australian writer Helen Darville, and by Wanda Koolmatie, the eloquent aboriginal writer whose autobiography, My Own Sweet Time, turned out to be a fictional work by Leon Carmen.

Not to let wordsmiths get all the credit, one Elizabeth Durack passed off her paintings as the work of "Eddie Burrup," a nonexistant aboriginal artist. As the director of Flinders Art Museum put it, the thousands of people who saw the "Native Title Now" exhibition of aboriginal art became "directly involved in the deception."

William Boyd and Karen Wright invented Nat Tate and foisted the ottabe famous painter on the New York cultural elite. And Paul Jordan Smith fooled art snobs with his faux "disumbrationist movement" painter "Pavel Jerdanowich."

I'm sure to be leaving out many worthy entries in this subcategory, but I'll wind up the list with Araki Yasusada, a survivor of Hiroshima whose poetry has been published in major journals, but who doesn't appear to have ever walked this Earth, and Binjamin Wilkomirski, a similarly fictional literary-award-winning Holocaust survivor.

Moving away from the literary world and into the domain of celebrities, Esquire magazine recently played off of the supermodel hypesteria by inventing one from scratch, slapping her on the cover, and writing a feature article about her as if everyone important already agreed she were the most amazing up-and-coming new thing. Allegra Coleman (or the model who was photographed in her place for the hoax) apparantly got quite a career boost from being invented (no surprise there). Suck magazine commented on the hoax in their typically witty way.

As an April Fool's prank, George Plimpton wrote an article for Sports Illustrated about an up-and-coming baseball pitcher by the name of Sidd Finch who utters koans, pitches barefoot, plays french horn, and has a fastball that approaches 170 miles-per-hour.

Psalmanazar's book

Angry Penguins

Esquire's Supermodel

See also:

  • Literary Forgeries
  • Impostors
  • News Hoaxes
  • Cryptozoölogy
  • Archeological Forgery
  • Art Forgery
  • Pages referenced here:

  • Orientalism as Performance Art: The Strange Case of George Psalamanazar
  • Emperor Norton's Archives
  • Emperor Norton
  • Lord Buckley Online
  • Multiple Names
  • Karen Eliot
  • Fluxus and Postal Ephemera
  • Monty Cantsin
  • The Ultimate Luther Blissett Website
  • Bridey Murphy
  • Ern Malley: The Darkening Ecliptic
  • Heyward reviewed by Brooklyn
  • Eddie Burrup - A Profile
  • Nat Tate: An American Artist (1928-1960)
  • Work of fiction fools literary world
  • The Araki Yasusada Hoax
  • Turning Japanese: The Hiroshima Poetry Hoax
  • Forrest Gander reviews Yasusada
  • Holocaust survivor's memoir revealed as a hoax
  • On Hyper-Authorship
  • Esquire's sexy starlet is the hoax with the most
  • Dream Girl
  • The Curious Case of Sidd Finch by George Plimpton
  • Return to the index