Still Attitudinizing

This is good fun in its own right, but there is a meta-story here that nobody seems to have noticed (link here; for the meta-story, see below):

Rival biographer admits hoax Betjeman love letter

Hugh Muir
Monday September 4, 2006
The Guardian

One of the most spirited literary feuds of recent times gained momentum yesterday as the author Bevis Hillier outed himself as the writer of a fake letter published as part of a biography of John Betjeman.

One week after the love letter was exposed as a fake, Hillier is reported to have confessed that he engineered the plot as an embarrassment to his rival AN Wilson. On close inspection, the first letters of each sentence spelt out the words: "AN Wilson is a shit."

Hillier has written his own three-volume biography of Betjeman and is said to have been aggrieved at the status publishers gave to his rival's book. Yesterday, he explained how he employed the vocabulary Betjeman might have used, including words such as "Tinkerty-tonk", to fool his rival and to take his revenge.

"I wanted the acrostic love letter to spell out 'AN Wilson is a shit' and then built sentences around that," he told the Sunday Times. "I also needed to ensure it seemed valid."

Animosity between the two was heightened by Wilson's review of the second volume of Hillier's work. "This is a hopeless mishmash of a book," he wrote in 2002. "Some reviewers would say it was badly written, but the trouble is, it isn't really written at all. It is hurled together." In 2004 Wilson also wrote a newspaper article which was seen as an attack on Hillier. "How utterly pitiable to be some old bachelor in a Hiram's hospital, smock-clad like a pauper in the reign of Henry VIII, dripping resentment like the dottle from a smelly churchwarden's pipe, and with so little in his life that he has to worry his sad old head about a book review," he said.

Hillier told the Sunday Times that advance publicity for Wilson's book left him enraged. "When a newspaper started billing Wilson's book as 'the big one', it was just too much," said Hillier, 66.

The fake letter, which was sent to Wilson two years ago from Roquebrun, France, appeared to come from a woman called Eve de Harben, who enclosed what she said was a passionate love letter apparently written by Betjeman in 1944 to Honor Tracy, a wartime work colleague. De Harben said she had been passed the letter by her father, an old friend of Tracy. Wilson put the letter in his book at the end of the chapter entitled "Betjeman at War".

Meta-Story: this is a lot like the plot of Angus (sic) Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which revolves around a hoax perpetrated to embarrass a famous man. Plot (spoiler) details here. You see stuff like this on Masterpiece Theatre, you think they are just overdoing it for the American audience. But no, they really do operate in this bitchy, vindictive, houthouse manner. Thanks again, Joel