Imposture Read online

  by the same author

  The Syme Papers

  Either Side of Winter

  IMPOSTURE

  Benjamin Markovits

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York • London

  To Sam

  CONTENTS

  Begin reading.

  He felt his fisted grip on the world being prised loose finger by finger until the last easing away seemed an almost welcome and deliberate release.

  The Physician (unfinished), by J. W. Polidori, 1819

  PROLOGUE

  SOME YEARS AGO I TAUGHT at a private school in New York. One of my colleagues there was an English teacher called Peter Pattieson; I had a dim sense, as I met him, of having heard the name somewhere before. Mr Pattieson kept up an air of considerable mystery around the school halls. He was unhealthily thin, with a sparse billowing beard and tall head of hair; if you looked closely you could almost see beneath it the face and head of a childish, smooth-skinned man. I was too young at the time to guess the age of anyone of Peter’s generation. He might have been forty, for all I could tell; he might have been deep into his sixties. I didn’t at first have much chance of a close observation. Over a decade before my arrival, he had decided to stop talking – to everyone, that is, outside of the kids in his classrooms.

  There were a number of rumours about him. That he used to pitch for a minor-league baseball team; that he once played Hamlet at the National Theatre in London; that he almost became the drummer for the Ramones. He had overdosed the night before their first gig, or so the story went; by the time he recovered, he had been cruelly and casually replaced. Whichever of these were true (maybe all of them were), nobody could doubt that the shore on which he washed up had been beaten in its day by a sea of drugs. With English teachers, you can always spot the hedonists. The ones who teach Bellow are not; the ones who teach Pynchon are. The ones who teach Wordsworth and Tennyson are not; the ones who teach Coleridge and Blake, obviously, are. Mr Pattieson taught Pynchon and Huxley and Dowson and Beddoes and Byron: he couldn’t have announced his past any clearer if he’d worn a tie-dyed bandana, black shades, and a handlebar moustache to class. (What he wore, in fact, was an unwashed white shirt with a black jacket, covered in pipe ash.) His students, needless to say, adored him. Members of the cult of Pattieson were easy to recognize: the boys with their wispy whiskers and dirty, unfashionably formal clothes; the girls wearing black make-up and white foundation, collared shirts and velvet cardigans.

  He was, as I’ve mentioned, a hard man to get to know. If you said something friendly to him in the hallways, he might volunteer a grunt in response. The grunt, I noticed at once, had something of an Irish depth to it, but whether he’d grown up in Ireland, or simply in Irish New York, I couldn’t have said. The school was full of Irish New Yorkers, many of whom had never left the Tri-state area; their voices seemed to hum a little between the pull of different accents. If you asked Peter a question directly, something that needed an answer, he’d nod or shake his head. Demanding more than a yes or no from him earned you only a solid stare from eyes that rather bulged under the thick lenses of his glasses. At lunchtime, between classes, and sometimes (when I woke early), in the morning before assembly, I’d see him standing in the driveway just outside the school – smoking on the grounds was forbidden for student and teacher alike – with a pipe in his mouth and heavy earphones on. A walkman, at least ten years out of date, jutted from the front pocket of his jacket. I remember, once, as I passed him, catching the tones of Fauré’s Requiem coming out of his ears; another time, I was amused to hear the cheerful rising beat of ‘In the Summertime’.

  One of the privileges of the first-year teachers was that we were allowed to sit in, whenever we had a free period, on the classes of our more experienced colleagues. Towards the end of the spring semester, I finally drummed up the courage to sit in on Peter’s. I left him a note in his box (according to the protocol). There was nothing he could do about it that didn’t involve some kind of a conversation with me – which was, as I’d practically reckoned on, the one thing he’d stop short at. It was one of those April New York days when the snows blow suddenly in. The heating had been shut off for the week of fine weather preceding; nobody, it seemed, could get it to come back on. The classroom was freezing; though the warmth of our bodies was just sufficient to steam up the windows. Sometimes, as a run of drips cleared a path in a misted pane, we caught a glimpse of snowflakes, as often as not whirling upwards in a gust of wind. Peter, I remember, kept his overcoat on: it gave him a Gothic dignity that rather suited the topic of discussion.

  I don’t know what I’d expected from him: some sort of transformation, I suppose. Perhaps, that behind closed doors, his clubbable self would emerge: secretive, naturally, but warm and generous and expansive, if only, from the contrast, to prove how much the world was the loser by his constant suppression of his own personality. Well, there was no transformation. Of course, he couldn’t keep quiet in class, but his voice, when I heard it, seemed only in some hard-to-name way the natural eruption of his general silence: mumbling; reluctant; low; compelling. He stared as he always stared; his arms, as always, hung frozen by his side. It made sense, I saw that at once; he was silent because it suited him. That was the real personality. What the classroom brought out in him was only the conscience of duty: he talked because he had to, for once, and somehow the force of that obligation made itself felt. What surprised me, from the teacher’s point of view, was how persuasive that force proved to be: his dirty, dishevelled kids slouched forward in their chairs, hoping, from their quiet attention, to catch every word.

  The class was a senior elective on Byron – Peter had reached that stage in his stubbornness, or his career, when he could teach whatever he liked. I’d come to the school straight from a masters degree at Oxford, on the Romantics. It was the magic of Oxford, to an American ear, just the name of it, I think, that got me the job. In any case, Byron had been the subject of my thesis; I had picked Pattieson’s class partly in the hope of showing off to him, a little, my professional expertise. I didn’t often get the chance; and there was something in Peter’s disciplined solitude that I found very seductive. Young men are often, I believe, only confident from their desire for praise; their confidence, at least the outward show of it, begins to wane as they wean themselves from the praise. At least, that’s how it was with me. I wanted Peter to admire me; I wanted him to talk to me.

  Most of the classrooms in that school, including my own, were set up like seminars around a very expensive cherry-wood table. We fancied ourselves as being almost collegiate; that was the tone we took to justify, among other things, the fees we took. Peter, however, had refused his expensive cherry-wood table and the cherry-wood chairs that went with it. His class was arranged, as it always had been, in institutional rows of narrow desks, which faced the teacher, who stood at a chalkboard. I took my place at the back where I could stretch my legs and observe all the greasy haircuts of the students in front of me. I was hardly, in the scale of things, much older than they were, and began to feel the force of my alignment. I belonged clearly to the ranks of brazen, uncertain boys and girls whose lives, regardless of the disaffection they pretended to, were all before them; rather than to the lecturing loneliness of a teacher who, whatever else was mysterious about him, had clearly come to terms with the fact that the best of his life lay behind him.

  The lesson, as it happens, was on a story called The Vampyre, which had been written, Mr Pattieson said, in the same burst of inspiration that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: they were begun in the same country villa, overlooking Lake Geneva, during the same bout of miserable weather, in the summer of 1816. Lord Byron and his occasional lover Clare Clairmont, Mr and Mrs Shelley, and Byron’s doctor, a young man by the name of Polidori, had been holed up together for a week. To relieve the boredom, they began to recite ghost stories to each other, and it was only a matter of time, among so many writers, before they attempted their own. Frankenstein appeared in 1818, to a considerable sensation; and the following year a rumour went around the booksellers of London that Lord Byron was about to make his own contribution to the contest. Though the question of an imposture was obviously in the air, nobody had much interest in the answer. The scandal of Byron’s separation, just three years old, had not died but faded into softer recollection. Rumour alone would have been enough to sell his books. Only John Murray, Byron’s old publisher and friend, had much stake in insisting that it wasn’t true.

  What came out in the end, anonymously, in April 1819, was the little pamphlet that Mr Pattieson began to distribute among the class. I turned it over in my hands. The Gothic frontispiece, the play on fonts, the thickening of the ink around the date, all suggested the painstaking copy of an original issue – though dog-ears and soda-stains revealed the generations of students who had thumbed our booklets before us. Mr Pattieson recounted, for my sake perhaps, the tenets of New Historicism. (It was the kind of high school where such terms belonged to the general currency of ideas.) What mattered to Pattieson about a work of literature, more than anything else, was the history of its publication. The Vampyre had first appeared in Henry Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine. It had sold as only Byron could sell, five thousand issues in a day: this fact alone seemed to give the poet away.

  In a canny editorial, Colburn had hesitantly announced its authorship. Pattieson read it out. He wanted us, particularly, to note how skilfully the publisher
had hinted at what he didn’t dare to name: ‘We received the following tale in the course of last autumn from a Friend travelling on the continent – in the company of an Individual, the stamp of whose Genius it is impossible to mistake.’ Peter’s reading voice was like his lecturing voice, only lower still, and still more enslaved to the rhythms. It took me a second to realize that he’d broken out of it: a delay, I think, that proves how little, to a man like Pattieson, the English language has changed in the past two centuries. He spoke Romantic like a mother tongue. Colburn, he continued, had touched on something that had always titillated Byron’s public: the idea that the poet’s best work would lie just outside the edge of what he dared to publish himself. The suggestion was that the present story had been stolen from him: it had the fascination of something overheard. Anonymity seemed the real proof of authenticity.

  Mr Pattieson called on us to read in turn (it allowed him to retreat into silence) and yes, my heart did flutter a little when my own chance came. The Vampyre told the story of a young man, Aubrey, making his way into society. (Among the heap of manuscripts that came to me on Peter’s death, I discovered one of the original pamphlets, which is now lying beside me on my desk.) Aubrey is taken under the wing of a prominent aristocrat named Lord Ruthven, who invites his protégé to accompany him on a tour of the continent. They set off and begin to see the world. A band of brigands stops their path outside of Athens. Fighting them off, Ruthven receives a fatal wound; and he begs his young friend to conceal, for the space of one year, all news of his death. Aubrey swears to it, and buries his companion under a pile of rocks among the dry foothills of the city, before continuing his travels alone.

  This, I remember, is where my own reading took over. When Aubrey at last returns to England, he is astonished to find his mentor, brilliantly alive, restored to his place at the heart of society. But the young man is bound by his oath and keeps silent, even when Ruthven begins to court his sister, the darling of Aubrey’s youth, his constant playmate. Horrified, Aubrey succumbs to madness and awakes to reason only on the morning of their wedding, when he threatens his former protector with exposure. Ruthven retorts that if the marriage is put off, Miss Aubrey will be ‘dishonoured. – Women are frail!’ (It was my last line, and I gave it not a hiss but a deep austerity of intonation. The soul of a vampyre is his respectability; I wanted to show Peter that I knew it.) The tie is solemnized, and the bride and bridegroom leave for their honeymoon in Brighton. Aubrey, heartbroken, reveals what he knows to his sister’s guardians, who promptly institute a search. But Ruthven has fled; and they discover, instead, that Aubrey’s sister has ‘already glutted the thirst of a Vampyre’.

  Well, that was the story; and we sat for a minute in something like stunned amusement when it was over. The reviews – Pattieson broke our silence at last – had for the most part been critical. ‘But,’ as he said, ‘it was their business to be.’ Translations were almost instantly begun, into French and German. Goethe declared it to be a masterpiece. An opera, several dramas, and a novel grew out of it. In John Murray’s backroom, poets and politicians debated its authenticity. ‘The feeling, on the whole,’ Peter added, in that soft Irish cadence which gives to any literary discussion a kind of native authority, ‘was that Byron’s most singular characteristic, his ability to please – in other words, his lucky instinct for the mood of the times, the way of the world – couldn’t be shammed; that the reception of the book was sufficient proof of its author’s genius.’

  That was the question Pattieson finally put to us. Had Byron written it? ‘You’ve been studying him for four months now,’ he said. ‘You should be able to recognize the way he writes; it’s like learning to spot your lover by her walk. How long does it take to acquire the trick of that? A day, a week?’ Yes, that was the way he talked. It was the kind of thing he used to say – the kind of thing, which, if anyone else had said it, would have roused the girls against him. But Peter could get away with anything like that; the girls loved him. He passed around a few samples of Byron’s prose, for points of comparison: one of his letters from Venice to Thomas Moore, the preface to the first two cantos of Don Juan. And for the second half of that double period, the class, as teachers sometimes dream of saying, practically taught itself. Peter sat in his grey overcoat beneath the grey chalkboard in stony silence. He had got what he’d wanted, what he’d worked for: a return to it. It was a lesson to me, at the time, of how much a teacher can quietly accomplish by simply asking the right question. Even when the heating came on again, with a stertorous succession of clanks, his students gave only a brief sarcastic cheer; before coming back, quickly, respectfully, to ‘discussing amongst themselves’ the problem he’d set them.

  I remember thinking, even at the time, that the subject might have had a more than simply academic appeal to a man like Peter. Of course, he was an old, or rather a New, romantic; and vampyrism was in some respects only the nineteenth-century metaphor for drug-abuse. Both proceeded from an appetite for life that couldn’t be satisfied, whose limit was really the approach of death. Byron himself, famously, died a martyr to it – to his hunger for experience. But the larger questions, of anonymity, of authenticity, must also have played their part in a history as mysteriously vague as Peter Pattieson’s. He had the air, among all his other airs, of a man to whom justice had not been done – whose gifts had time and again failed of their recognition. That Peter himself was complicit in that failure, I couldn’t doubt; but he must have taken a private and perverse pleasure in setting us the task of distinguishing between the prose of Lord Byron, the most celebrated poet of his age, and the work of some anonymous nineteenth-century impostor. How much, Peter was subtly asking, can you tell about a life, from the living of it?

  Towards the end of that class – and the students, by the way, decided at last that Byron had written the ghost story – I finally remembered where I had heard Peter’s name before. I really should have spotted it earlier. It was something of a relief: a word at the tip of my tongue had tripped free at last. But I was sensible, too, of a sly and secret appeal to my vanity: I had gotten the joke. That appeal (imaginary, of course) still had its force. His secret seemed too small to be given away; in any case, I had determined to keep it to myself. Or rather, I was willing to wait until a more intimate opportunity arose, to let him know I knew. I hoped, with a funny sort of humility, that it might be my ticket to a conversation.

  The year was almost over before that chance came up. I had been kept late at school. One of my students had said she was having trouble with an essay, only it turned out to be trouble of a different nature, and I had needed all of my youthful professional tact to emerge from the conference unscathed. It was a warm, enveloping Friday afternoon, at the close of May. From the football field, I heard the shouts of a game of Frisbee. The chestnut trees lining the drive up the hill had filled out beautifully; the view of the city below them was smothered in green. And the sound of the leaves, restlessly layered, almost made up for the absence of cool in the breeze. As I walked down the hill to the subway stop, I saw Peter standing at the gates and beginning to stuff his pipe. For once, his headphones lay loosely around his neck; the trees were music enough. I had my line ready – I had been steadily rehearsing it from a copy of Old Mortality I found in the English staff room. ‘Most readers,’ I said to him; it took all my courage to keep my voice up, while he kept his head down, ‘must have witnessed with delight the joyous burst which attends the dismissing of a village-school on a fine summer evening.’ He stared at me now, as I continued my little recitation: ‘The buoyant spirit of childhood, repressed with so much difficulty during the tedious hours of discipline, may then be seen to explode, as it were, in shout, and song, and frolic, as the little urchins join in groups on their playground, and arrange their matches of sport for the evening.’

  Peter picked up the speech, at last, in his reluctant brogue. ‘But there is one individual who partakes of the relief afforded by the moment of dismission, whose feelings are not so obvious to the eye of the spectator, or so apt to receive his sympathy. I mean the teacher himself’ – but he broke off then to smile at me, with something like the weightlessness of relief. It was rather a gruesome smile, I must say, exaggerated by the spread of his moustache and beard across his cheeks, and hardly improved by the fact of its rarity. But it was better than anger, which is what I had partly been fearing. ‘You have found me out,’ he said.