The great Australian poet Ern Malley. During World War II, two conservative Austrian poets decided to take the piss out of the young editor of a literary magazine and cobbled together a bunch of poems using whatever materials lay at hand, including a U.S. Army manual on mosquito eradication.
They then shipped the materials to the editor along with a letter from Ern’s sister. She explained that Ern died, leaving her these poems, and could the editor take a look at them and possibly print them?
The editor read them, thought they were very good, and printed them. The hoax was revealed and the resulting brouhaha became front-page news in Australia (this is not only during World War II, but the Normandy invasion, mind). Far from being embarassed, the editor defended the poems.
There’s more to this somewhat silly story. The editor was arrested and charged with obscenity due to some relatively tame suggestions in the poems, found guilty and fined, but he had the last laugh in the end. Ern Malley’s poems are still in print.
This from Dr. Bergen Evans, Northwester University, in his book The Spoor of Spooks
"The unveiling in 1950, at the Spaarndam Lock in Ho!land, of a statue of the little Dutch boy who held his finger in a hole in the dike and so saved the town of Haarlem was a remarkable triumph of stubborn fiction over yielding fact. The boy, who is nameless in the story, first appeared in an interpolated episode in Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, in 1865. Mrs. Dodge, who was editor of St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, obviously knew very little about dikes but, equally obviously, a great deal about the common reader. The story was immensely popular, and within a generation was generally assumed to have been a historical fact. The Dutch, who had a vast and painfully acquired knowledge of real dikes and actual inundations, were exasperated by the demand of Americans to be shown the spot where the heroic lad had “with a chuckle of boyish delight” put “his chubby little finger” in the hole and held it there. For almost a century they did everything they could to dissipate Mrs. Dodge’s preposterous fantasy, but at last apparently decided that this was a flood they could not stop—or perhaps that tourists were as much a source of wealth as dikes—and put up a statue of the boy. Queen Juliana, who attended the unveiling, sought to pacify the more rational of her subjects by insisting that she was there solely as the mother of four children.
The citizens of Spaarndam, according to all accounts, are pleased with the statue. It draws tourists and gives the inhabitants something to talk to them about—namely, that it never happened[sup]5[/sup].
5 "The Hero of Haarlem,” Chapter 14 in Mary Mapes Dodge: Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates (New York: O’Kane; (1866) See the New York Times, June 8, 1950, p. 5; August zo, 1950, Pt. z, p. 21 And see Time, June 19, 1950, p. 35.
The footnote is from Dr. Evans book.
This illustrates how hard it is to quash such fiction, if quashed it needs to be. In order for anyone to convince themselves that the statue was actually erected they would have to go to the archives of the two publications listed in the footnote and look it up themselves. And then you would have to believer the “liberal rag” Times and the semi-fictional Time.
Another famous fiction, although not a person, is H.L. Menken’s account of the first bathtub in America. He was spoofing all the way and said so on several occastions in newspapers which he said had, “… , by their publishers sworn statements of circuilation, several millions of readers.” but he couldn’t stop people citing the story as true and so he gave up.
Shakespeare’s company was based in London and wouldn’t have traveled much (although it’s sometimes speculated that they might have toured when the theaters were closed on account of plague). Nor was he a lead actor – it’s generally believed he played prominent supporting parts, such as the Ghost in Hamlet. And his output was something like two plays a year, or thereabouts, which isn’t unreasonable even if it’s material as great as Shakespeare’s plays.
Also, Shakespeare had no part in the compilation of the Folio, as he died in 1616, and the Folio wasn’t published until 1623 (it was assembled by his colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell).
Reminds me of a phrase from the letter of James: “Well, the tongue is a fire.”
who would know better than Mencken what can ensue from reckless remarks?
I think it would be much more accurate to say that there was a real Vlad Tepes, and that the fictional character was based in part on him. Far as I know, Vlad wasn’t a vampire.
I agree. I don’t believe the novel Dracula ever refers to Vlad by his real name, it just says that Count Dracula was, in life, a great warrior prince in Wallachia. I think it would be a stretch even to say that Count Dracula is a fictionalized version of Vlad the Impaler. Stoker doesn’t seem to have known much about Vlad (perhaps not even the impaling business), and the historic figure and the fictional character really have nothing in common except for nationality and nickname.
I should’ve said something about that. I read Dracula a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure you’re right. I guess what you might say is that the fictional character was later conflated with a historical figure to whom he bore a little resemblance. Local legends about Vlad may have played some small part in the equation, but I’m sure if they had anything to do with Stoker’s Dracula or just the decision of later storytellers that Vlad was the ‘real’ Dracula.
How about that nice person who sends you all those letters from Reader’s Digest. I have heard there is no such person but the names were chosen because they sounded so reassuring.
FriarTed - are you sure there wasn’t a historical Sweeney Todd, whose exploits were simply embellished over time? (There’s a new Sweeney Todd film in production, but I’m not sure of its current status. Jack Black was mentioned for the role of Todd, which I think would be a great choice, particularly if it’s a musical.)
I agree that pen names shouldn’t count, but house names should. That said, there’s “Franklin W. Dixon” and “Carolyn Keene” - the “authors” of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries. I was quite annoyed when I discovered that Dixon was a work of fiction himself - years after doing a bio report on him in elementary school.
What about Paul Bunyan? There wasn’t a real historical person behind those stories, was there? And then there’s Jean-Guy Rubberboot. (Okay, I’m sure nobody around here believes Mr. Rubberboot existed. At least, I hope not. Nice guy, though. )
AFAIK, Paul Bunyan was the literary creation of a logging company’s ad campaign. I don’t have a link, at the moment, but I do recall reading something to that effect. <shrug>
I think that’s in Dictionary of Misinformation, or * More Misinformation,* by Tom Burnam, under the heading of “Paul Bunyan as mythic folk hero.” In other words, he’s much like Ronald McDonald, Betty Crocker, Speedy Alka-Selter, or Dan Quayle.
(Okay, I’m sure nobody around here believes Mr. Rubberboot existed. At least, I hope not. Nice guy, though.