I first heard of George Psalmanazar the same place I heard of Robert ‘Romeo’ Coates and William McGonagall, Banvard’s Folly by Paul Collins. I was also aware that the young Samuel Johnson was friends with him during Johnson’s Grub Street years. My interest in him was re-ignited when I read a number of books and saw the film about Princess Caraboo - both were claimed to be foreigners from distant lands and both created their own distinct writing styles and languages to convince others of their foreignness. The main difference was, Psalmanazar wrote his own confession.
The book starts with Psalmanazar’s will, where he entrusted his executors with a number of papers, some work on the Hebrew language and his memoir. He hopes the publication of the papers will pay off any remaining debts and also the cheapest funeral possible, desiring to be buried in ‘the common burying ground, and there interred in some obscure corner of it’, ‘performed in the lowest and cheapest manner’ and without a coffin. These instructions may be reflective of his financial situation, his guilt over his imposture or even for a slightly more ghoulish reason. Before this quiet burial he wishes that his body be ‘kept so long above ground, for as long as decency or conveniency will permit’, in other words, till he is not fresh enough to be taken by bodysnatchers. The formally famous Formosan fraud may well have been a tempting proposition to a resurrection man and keeping the body out for a while before dumping it quietly and unmarked in a common grave may have been the best preventative.
The work proper starts with a lengthy preface, which I imagine is often skipped over but I found a fascinating piece in itself. What starts as an account of his state of mind in beginning his memoirs becomes a sermon about the possibility of repentance and change. These ideas feel honest and are beautifully expressed, it seems he felt real shame for his lies and that they’d been eating him up inside his whole life. One of the reasons he wanted the memoirs published posthumously was the embarrassment of admitting that he’d lied about who he was and been believed by some truly good people whom he couldn’t face. He seems more repentant than his acts really deserve, as most of the public would have either forgotten about him or remembered the brief Formosa craze as a fun memory.
It’s also in the preface where he talks about his drug addiction. That he first took Laudanum to look cool and debonair, finding that he was pretty resistant to its more pernicious effects. When asked about his habit in the past, he’d recommended taking it with orange juice, having heard that the acid dialled down the mania but maintained the high. He recounts how he tried to go cold-turkey, which was okay in the summer but he found hard in the winter. In the end he settled on twelve drops (just under a grain of opium) in a mug of punch at the end of a long day writing. He claimed this not only kept him going but may be responsible for his good health, after all, he did die at the age of eighty-four.
Psalmanazar fails to give the main details of his life in the memoirs. He never says exactly where he was born and grew up (though it’s supposed somewhere in the Gascon region of France) or what is actual name is. He says this is so that his family would never have to hear of his shame. He does say that his father was of a noble family that had lost its fortune and had gone to Germany to seek work while he stayed at home with his mother.
A bright child, Psalmanazar took to Latin very quickly and was soon at the top of the top class, outperforming students twice his age. Given this aptitude, his mother sought places to further his education. The first was in a private school where the tutor was very knowledgeable about logic but found it harder to lecture on metaphysics or ethics. However, the tutor was really taken by the young prodigy and signed papers to say he had passed the courses, which allowed him to go to university at the age of sixteen. University was very different and there were no allowances given to his youth or the gaps in his knowledge, which made him give up on them. His later self declares that he was lazy and proud, the two faults which were to drive his life. Even at this later date, he mainly blames the teachers and institutions he fell into for not helping or inspiring him to do better - which to be fair is pretty much my feelings about my own university experience. (Though I am aware that this is quite a childish notion for both Psalmanazar and I to have held, if we had both been less lazy or proud, we could have worked harder).
Psalmanazar wanted to return home but was in no financial state to do so. He hit upon the idea of playing a pilgrim, stealing a staff and cape from a church and forging a document that said he was an Irishman on his way to Rome. He then specifically begged clergymen and monks in Latin, telling of the persecution he endured back in the home country. By doing this, he managed to get back home and then, on his mother’s recommendation, to go all the way to Germany to see if his father could help him. Unfortunately, his father was in no real state to lend any assistance but advice, telling him to go to Holland, where his skill with Latin would open tutoring jobs. Having a few near misses with his Irish persona, he altered the document to say he was Japanese and then created his own constructed alphabet, which he grew very fluent in.
His journeys didn’t turn out as he wished and Psalmanazar found himself in military service, though never in active duty. He noted the rowdiness of the soldiers, was horrified at their swearing, drunkenness and assignations with prostitutes. For a while he kept the lie that he was a converted Japanese person but began to have more fun pretending he was not a christian. He claimed to worship the sun and even wrote a whole prayerbook in his invented language. The joke for him was that despite being a ‘heathen’, he lead a more Godly life than the christians around him, he also enjoyed it when clergymen tried to convert him as his previous studies allowed him to walk theological rings around them.
One such clergyman was Alexander Innes, a Scottish padre attached to a Dutch legion. Rather than try to convert Psalmanazar, he got him to translate the same part of Horace into his fake language twice. When these two ‘translations’ were obviously different, he didn’t immediately expose Psalmanazar but told him to be more careful. The two constructed a plan to ‘covert’ and baptise Psalmanazar into the Anglican faith and to use this as a way into British society. Thus Psalmanazar was given the first name George and his nationality became Formosan (from Taiwan) as it was an even harder place to disprove.
In part two, Psalmanazar's adventures in England
No comments:
Post a Comment