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Part Nineteen
"And so ... as the sun rose over the island of cheese, casting long shadows through the sausage bushes, illuminating the tops of the honey trees, and warming the fields of smoked salmon, I, Baron Munchausen, who am renowned, first and foremost, for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ..." Opening lines to the Adventures of Baron von Munchausen, scripted by Charles McKeown and Terry Gilliam
Jasper Maskelyne's reputation as a war magician still endures. Even, posthumously, he appears to have pulled off the long con. I was dismayed to find yet another uncritical reference to Maskelyne in what should have been a dependable work, "The Oxford Companion to the Second World War," reviewed recently in the Australian as "an extraordinary book.... judicious, authoritative, fascinating." This massive encyclopaedia, 1300 pages plus, published in 1995, contains an article on 'Deception' written by M.R.D. Foot. Jasper Maskelyne receives a prominent and favourable mention, and "Magic Top-Secret" is cited. In contrast to the irrepressible gullibility and naivety of 'expert' historians, this series has frequently used words such as exaggeration, inaccuracy, distortion, and fabrication. To what extent was Jasper Maskelyne a relentless mythomaniac? Was he an opportunistic hoaxer? Should he be condemned as a master of make-believe rather than be praised as a genuine master of deception ? Maskelyne's tendency to recount tall stories appears to overstep the contentious border which separates rich imagination from mental disturbance. Did Jasper Maskelyne develop the intriguing disorder known as 'pseudologia fantastica' ? This curious syndrome has been neglected by modern mainstream psychology. I believe, however, that it is a widespread psychological disorder. A useful working definition is given by the medical authorities, Feldman and Ford : "Also known as mythomania, pseudologia fantastica has such well-defined characteristics that some researchers believe it is a sickness unto itself, deserving of further specific study. Typified by enduring stories that are often built upon some element of truth and which become self-aggrandizing, pseudologia fantastica is seldom used for profit or material gain, but for the kind of intangible benefits which underlie factitious illnesses." "As intense and outlandish as pseudologia fantastica is, these stories don't cross the line into the realms of delusions because the tellers of these tales understand the difference between fact and fiction and know when they are lying. They believe their own lies only to the extent necessary to be totally convincing, and upon confrontation they will acknowledge, at least in part, what they have lied about.." I believe that Jasper Maskelyne fits this description beautifully. Of course, Maskelyne faced financial hardship throughout his career and frequently came up with creative solutions to overcome these difficulties. However, the need for money does not seem to be the only motive for his construction of falsehoods. It merely fuelled Maskelyne's natural tendency to make up fantastic, extraordinary stories. The collaboration of a ghost-writer amplified the lies. In my opinion, Jasper Maskelyne could be re-named Jasper Munchausen. Baron von Munchausen was a German cavalryman in the 18th century, renowned for his amusing and colourful tales. Rudolf Raspe, a contemporary of the Baron, developed the Munchausen legend by writing "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" in 1786. He embellished the Baron's own anecdotes, and also invented new ones and included fables drawn from ancient folklore. David Fisher, author and fabricator, is to Jasper Maskelyne what Rudolf Raspe, author and fabricator , was to von Munchausen. (Note: The modern medical meaning of Munchausen syndrome is quite different. It is a restrictive definition and refers to patients who fake or engineer physical symptoms of illness to gain sympathy and attention. Munchausen by Proxy is a bizarre and cruel variant where the person deliberately induces illness in others, especially dependent children. ) It is surprising how many intelligent, talented, articulate individuals succumb to pseudologia fantastica. A modern example of elaborate impostership is the novelist Jeffrey Archer, a highly verbose and energetic mythomaniac, who has reconstructed his life with little regard to accuracy or truth. In the early 1980's, I attended a Michael Parkinson chat show recorded at a Sydney TV studio. The main guest was Jeffrey Archer. I had not heard of this writer before, but I was highly suspicious of his 'modest' claims, e.g. fund-raising for Oxfam, attending Oxford University, meeting the Beatles. He came across as an unscrupulous mythomaniac or, less politely, a consummate bullshit artist. I believe Private Eye, the British political satire magazine, was the first to attack Archer in print. There have now been two critical biographies: "In For a Penny : The Unauthorised Biography" by J. Mantle and, more recently, "Jeffrey Archer : Stranger Than Fiction" by Michael Crick. These unsympathetic portraits would serve as good examples in support of my argument several months ago that the aim of critical biography is to penetrate the public façade. The properly researched biography frequently evolves into a 'pathography'. I am not sure why talented people resort to autobiographical fabrication. Are they playing a joke on their audience or their readership? Are they even aware of their own deception? Do they deceive themselves in the very telling of their 'achievements'? I, too, have been severely duped. In late 1994, I attended a presentation by a young female novelist at Varuna writers centre in the Blue Mountains. Helen Demidenko was a somewhat cold but compelling speaker. She spoke of her difficult upbringing as an outsider and a migrant growing up in Logan, the working class area of Brisbane. She mentioned she had graduated with honours in law, and had worked for a year in a leading law firm in Brisbane. I should have been more alert to this egotistical discrepancy. However, my irritation was set aside when Helen drew the interesting analogy between writing a book and researching a legal case. Her award winning book was titled "The Hand That Signed the Paper'" and she read extracts to us. The intellectual issues — was her novel anti-semitic?, was she an apologist for war criminals? — were debated , but we took at face value the underlying claim that she was from Ukrainian descent, that she had based the novel on anecdotes from close relatives. These biographical 'facts' we did not question. I immediately bought her novel and eagerly read it. In turn, I have discussed the book with a female Jewish friend whose parents survived Auschwitz. As it turns out, most of what Helen said that night was utter invention, and she had us completely fooled. Her identity has now been exposed in the media. She is actually Helen Darville, an English migrant, from a middle-class background, with no ties to the Ukraine, and no legal qualifications at all. What then were her sources for the novel ? Has she plagiarised her material ? Or has she invented her anecdotes? I should have paid more attention to my own writing (e.g. January 1995) where I warned that a skilled writer could convincingly reconstruct 'eyewitness history'. The Demidenko/Darville case remains an unresolved enigma, but I believe that her bizarre masquerade is another astonishing example of 'pseudologia fantastica'. Where are the boundaries to deception and fabrication? Who verifies the genuine elements of the fabricator's life? In Article Three, I mentioned a deception plan implemented in 1917 against the Turks. The main credit for this ruse went to a Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. He worked for Allenby in the Middle East and devised the 'fake plans in the abandoned briefcase' scam to fool the Turks as to the main thrust of Allenby's forces. A similar scam was employed by British Intelligence against Rommel on the eve of the battle of Alam Halfa in 1942 (see Article Eleven ). In regard to his later pursuits, Meinertzhagen has recently been exposed as an eccentric fraud. After retiring from the military, he built up an unusual collection of stuffed birds which were eventually donated to the British Natural History Museum. It appears that he falsified his notes regarding the birds' origins, and stole many of the specimens. The moral of this tale is that a deceiver may turn into a fabricator...
AFTER THE WAR
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Jasper Maskelyne in later life, taken at The Arts Ball held at a Nairobi hotel | ||||
Jasper Maskelyne's career after the war is more depressing than David Fisher's epilogue suggests. I will quote from Alistair Maskelyne's own reminiscences. In his first letter, Alistair wrote: "My father returned to England and was demobilised in 1946. My mother had by then returned from New Zealand and was undergoing treatment for terminal cancer. My father revived his pre-war magic show. There was plenty of money and not much entertainment in those days, and for two years my father's shows did well and he was able to live in good style. However, my mother died in 1947 after a long and painful illness. I found the time rather traumatic. Father quickly found a lady in a small night club whose name was Mary. I honestly cannot remember her second name. She had links with Kenya, and a liking for the bottle. They married in 1948. (In the epilogue to "The War Magician", Fisher blundered by confusing Maskelyne's second wife with his first. ) "Father had some successful seasons at Christmas time renting a small theatre near Buckingham Palace called the Westminster Theatre. I assisted for a short time as stage manager, but after his remarriage I left England for good and virtually severed my connections with him."In 1950 he was in the position of owing more tax than he could pay, and left England with his second wife. He tried touring in South Africa with his magic show , but without much success. I believe he made the mistake of trying to carry on his Army career in his later days ; he was de-mobbed with the rank of acting Major. In all his later social correspondence he styled himself as Major Maskelyne. He carried this attitude through to the stage where he had his assistants dressed in Army uniform. This went down like a lead balloon after the war. He retained a fondness for army accoutrement and guns, and came into his own during the Mau Mau campaign in Kenya, when he commanded a mobile squad of police. When the troubles were concluded he continued his affair with cars by founding a very successful driving school in Nairobi. The profits were large, but so was his appetite for gin, and he finally consumed all the proceeds and his own life at the age of 72. I had a communication with solicitors to inquire whether I had any designs upon his estate, which consisted of one residential house in Nairobi. My reply was in the negative, but I put in a claim in favour of my sister, who had been in poor circumstance most of her life. The reply from Nairobi was distinctly unfavourable." Maskelyne's involvement against the Mau Mau movement is also mentioned by Booth in his Linking Ring Article, the original stimulus to my own research. (The Mau Mau movement has gone down in history as a cruel, irrational, barbaric terrorist cult. Some have attacked this stereotyped western view of the cult , rejecting it as a convenient myth, and arguing instead that the Mau Mau was "an integral part of an ongoing, rationally conceived nationalist movement." ) While filming in Kenya, Booth met with Maskelyne in a hotel bar in Nairobi most afternoons:"He always arrived in military uniform. Around us, drinking quietly in the reduced lighting, sat armed men, some with rifles leaning against their chairs, others with revolver at hip like Maskelyne. Murders were reported almost every night. Jasper described coming upon one victim in the street after midnight. A single shot to the head had killed him just as he was lighting a cigarette. The man's hand was still up to his mouth, the cigarette clipped between his fingers when Maskelyne examined him." Is the dramatic discovery of the fresh corpse a genuine incident or has Jasper Maskelyne again embroidered the truth to impress Booth ? One is left to speculate. In a later letter, Alistair Maskelyne added more interesting details about the post-war years: "There was , in the 1940's, an American religious movement known by the name of its founder, Buchmanites. The movement was also known as 'Moral Re-Armament". After the war the sect, which seemed very wealthy, acquired a theatre in London in which to present their uplifting parable plays. Most of them enough to make you throw up, unless you are of their persuasion. During the times they were not bothering God with their message type presentations they wanted a harmless apolitical type entertainment to make some money for them by using their theatre. The theatre was the Westminster, just around the corner past Watneys brewery and Buckingham Palace, and my father was the presenter of the harmless entertainment. It was a charming little place, seating only five or six hundred, ideal for its purpose, with only one big draw back : a small stage and a curved cement back drop, immoveable of course." "The Christmas shows at the Westminster Theatre were a great success and made my father and the Moral re-Armament group a good amount. After this success my father took the show on the road as a vaudeville performance travelling the music hall circuit for Lew and Leslie grade, both of whom I met. My own function was very peripheral : preparing props, drapes, illusions and scene changing. Just a stage hand. My reason for being there at all was that I wished to be near my mother during her final illness; I had left my ship and resigned from the NZCo in London for this reason, but it was already plain that my future did not lie in England at all. My time in the shipping company had made clear that I wished to live in Australia, where I had had such a good time during my visits to the east coast cities." "After the death of my mother in 1947, I moved out of the flat that my sister and I still shared with my father in Kensington. He had rapidly found a female friend who joined him in his love of the bottle at a small and seedy club called the "white Room" somewhere in Soho. A few months after becoming a widower, he re-married. The lady's name was Mary, and she had connections in Kenya, which accounts for his later move. During this period the travelling magic show gradually moved to, firstly the second layer or level music hall circuits, and later, still further to the third level, in small towns like Minehead in Somerset and industrial towns like Wigan and Chester. it was then the conjunction of the strip artiste and magic show took place: the lady who stripped was no longer young, and the whole presentation was tawdry. (Here, Alistair's memories were jogged by an article sent to me by our editor Brian McCullagh from the magic magazine, Abracadabra, which mentioned a striptease 'artist' who toured with Jasper Maskelyne). "By this time I , through my father's influence I must admit, had obtained a job as a sound camera operator at the Gaumont British Instructional film studio at Elstree. My technical knowledge gained at sea helped me in the job... However, I was never admitted as a full member of the Association of Cine Technicians, a closed shop union, and the pay was very low: five pounds per week. Two years after my mother's death, I believed there was an opening in the same job at Pagewood studios in Sydney, where they were about to commence shooting "Long John Silver", with some of the camera crew from GBI. I travelled on the off-chance ,but found the job was taken. One of the amplifiers in the studio at Pagewood had a technical fault which caused the chassis to make a 1,000 cycle tone when touched. While wistfully discussing the slim chances of employment with my former mates from Elstree, I started to idly tap morse symbols on the side of the amplifier. One of the Australian technicians looked up and said " what the hell are you doing wasting your time here? Go to the airport, they are crying out for communication blokes in DCA".
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