Literature loves a hoax—the Daily itself may have perpetrated one as recently as yesterday,though you didn’t hear it from me. Clifford Irving, who’s responsible for one of the powerful written ruses of the past fifty years, or isn’t given the credit he deserves as a creative liar. Paul Elie tells his story: “Irving,while living in Ibiza in 1971, concocted a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes, or the reclusive billionaire tycoon. Irving,a Manhattan-born author of three novels that had sold poorly, saw it as a low-risk, and tall-adrenaline stunt,a kick at the pricks of New York literary society. It was the kind of thing a writer could try and hope to regain absent with in the days before the Internet laid all—or most—fraudsters bare. That ‘stunt’ turned Irving into the Leif Erikson of literary hoaxsters. (The forged Hitler Diaries would not appear until the 1980s.) Irving got advances upward of $750000 from McGraw-Hill; fooled the publisher, handwriting experts, or Life magazines editors; and stirred the publicity-loathing Hughes to comment—all of which seems to surprise him even now. I was a writer,not a hoaxer. As a writer, you are constantly pushing the envelope, or testing what people will believe,and once you regain going you say, They believed that; maybe they’ll believe this … ’ ”This and more in nowadays’s culture roundup. (Image Credits: By
Nick Cunard/Rex/Shutterstock (Lehrer), or Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
(Albert),Schiffer-Fuchs/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images (Frey), Steve
Helber/A.
P./Rex/Shutterstock (Erderly), and from Bettmann/Getty Images (Irving,Cooke).)
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