Review: The Fraud by Zadie Smith

I've previously talked on this blog about the writings of William Harrison Ainsworth and some writings about him. He features prominently in Zadie Smith's newest novel, The Fraud. 

 I love Zadie Smith in concept, she often sets her books in places I know intimately. The school I used to work at was mentioned in her novel NW, and I met her and she was lovely. But I’ve never got on with her work, I reckon it’s because one of her biggest influences is Henry James and I’ve never got on with him either. Yet The Fraud is almost designed to appeal to me, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The Fraud is partially about the Tichbourne claimant, a man who said he was the lost heir to a large inheritance, despite being obviously (and I mean ludicrously obviously) not. This was a story that took the Victorian era by storm and it’s one of those little stories I’ve long been interested in, I love a bold con-artist and have read and written about Psalmanazar, Princess Caraboo and Martin Guerre. The claimant, Arthur Orton, was buried in St Pancras Cemetery, one of my lockdown haunts.

The story of the Tichbourne claimant is told through its impact on the Ainsworth family. This consists of fading writer, William Harrison Ainsworth, his two grown daughters, his new wife (previously his maid) their daughter and housekeeper Mrs Touchet, who is the point-of-view character. I’m a big fan of William Harrison Ainsworth and have enjoyed all of his books I have read. I also find him an interesting person and loved Shark Alley, a novel written by his modern biographer, Stephen Carver. (Who is mentioned in the acknowledgements).

Through the experience of Mr Bogle, a key witness in the Tichbourne case, the reader is taken to Jamaica in the era of slavery, a section of the book that is striking in its offhand brutality. People are mutilated, boiled alive and subject to a terrifying disease called yaws but these horrors are everyday events and more powerful for the lack of drama attributed to them. It’s also interesting how confused Bogle is when the English complain about being ‘made slaves’ when arguing over the finer details of representation.

While the title of The Fraud seems to put the Tichbourne claimant story at the centre of the book, it’s easily the weakest element. Mrs Touchet, our viewpoint character, is dragged along to the trial by William Harrison Ainsworth’s second wife but becomes deeply engaged and invested in the witness, Andrew Bogle. The absolute strangeness of the case is touched upon, the fact that Arthur Orton is nothing like the missing claimant in body or education. That he speaks no French, when the person he’s claiming to be grew up with it as a first language, that he’s missing a tattoo, that he’s of a completely different build. The book also goes into the delusional nature of his supporters, people like Ainsworth’s second wife Sarah, believe in Orton as a bizarre statement of class consciousness. She’d probably be an anti-vaxxer these days.

If anyone in the book is designated the fraud (though most of the characters are conning themselves or others about something) it’s probably William Harrison Ainsworth. He’s depicted as a man who had initial success as an author because he was so liked and likeable, with a gift for joy, but not one for writing. Touchet often talks about how she pretends to read his books, groans at the historical details in them and finds his books terribly dull. She says that he’s easy to like, his books are not. I happen to disagree. I find him to be an author who is very good at creating vivid images and set-pieces, but not so good at dialogue. He’d have been a killer silent film director. There is a sense that he and Arthur Orton have both managed to fail up, where any failure would be disastrous for Bogle or Touchet.

Mrs Touchet is a really interesting figure. Seemingly puritanical and frosty, she is also the lesbian lover of Ainsworth’s first wife, Frances and a BDSM mistress to Ainsworth himself. She’s tetchy, irritable and I loved her line about living in the countryside, “the lamb didst bore her.” She’s an abolitionist because she’s drawn into it to impress Frances but is then horrified at the real stories she hears from Bogle. In some ways she is the real fraud of the book, as the real Mrs Touchet died before most of the events in the book even happened. The character is integral to the novel but in reality was not even there.

The most mysterious character, fraud-wise, is Andrew Bogle. The courtroom and the book initially place him in the position of loyal servant, but how much of what he does is driven by survival or even hatred? He seems the most clear and transparent of the characters even as he is the least.

The three elements of this book don’t dovetail into each other but rather reflect and rub each other in strange ways. The William Harrison Ainsworth frame story seems to be particularly disconnected from the Tichbourne case and Bogle’s narrative and really only makes sense as a narrative choice in allusive or eliding ways, only really seeming to fit when thought about. In some moods this strikes me as more satisfying than if there had been clear links, and in other moods it strikes me as less. It does mean I’m happy to give some of Zadie Smith’s other novels a second go. 

A tête-à-tête between Johnson and AI

For some reason I’ve been getting lots of adverts of for AI tools, especially ones for writers. The ones on Facebook are ver funny, they have hundreds of comments but are all hidden because each one is pointing out that using AI to write something for you is not writing. Youtube has taken its own turn, deciding to advertise programmes that can write, package and release your book in under an hour. I thought I’d have a little play. 

I picked www.tinywow.com because it was free. 

First I asked it to write a short story of three paragraphs and used as a prompt ‘Samuel Johnson’s relationship with his little brother’, as that’s the theme of the novel I’m currently writing. 

Aside from the fact that this isn’t really a story, it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end, the AI made up Samuel’s previously unknown younger brother, Thomas. I did actually try and name Sam’s brother in my prompt but there was a character limit to the prompt and Nathaniel didn’t fit.

Unlike Nathaniel, Sam was really nice to Thomas, becoming his mentor and becoming a ‘testament to the power of sibling love and the joy of intellectual companionship’. It’s almost the exact opposite relationship to the one I’m writing about.

Next I asked it to write a 15,000 word essay about what Samuel Johnson would have thought about AI. Aside from the essay being a but cluttered for the short word count (with a new subheading every hundred words) the piece reads pretty well at first glance.

 It introduces Samuel Johnson as ‘an 18th-century English writer, poet, and moralist, was known for his keen intellect and wit. He is best known for his compilation of the first comprehensive English dictionary. Johnson's work often reflected his views on morality, society, and human nature.’ Interesting that some of the phrases used to describe him are exactly the same ones from the ‘story’, that must be all this particular algorithm knows of Samuel Johnson. The piece then often talks about Samuel’s beliefs in ‘honesty, integrity and compassion’ and says that his ‘philosophy centered around the idea that individuals have a moral duty to uphold principles of decency and kindness in their lives.’

The AI uses these generalities throughout to make it sound like the ‘essay’ is about something without it having to have any real content. I think it could be argued that Johnson did have a very strong belief in the moral duty to uphold principles of dignity (kindness perhaps being a little less certain). However, most writers and thinkers could be described as having those same beliefs. This is especially true of Samuel Johnson, who was a masterful repackager of standard moral teachings but not a hugely original thinker in himself. 

A more sophisticated AI might have used some more particularly Johnsonian phrases and ideas. His notion of ‘the vacuity of life’, that life is essentially an empty hole we fill with the things that are important to us, could have had some really interesting interplay with the notion of AI. Would Johnson have viewed AI as a way of filling this hole, or as something pernicious, taking away the important things that occupy us?

The ‘truest’ paragraph of the piece was the one about Johnson’s perspective on scientific progress; ‘Johnson viewed scientific progress with a mix of curiosity and caution. While he appreciated the pursuit of knowledge, he also warned against the dangers of unchecked technological advancement that could lead to moral dilemmas and societal disruptions.’ This is very true. Johnson loved science and had his own shed where he did dangerous chemical experiments. Yet, social stability was his big shibboleth, even as he tweaked the nose of the gentry, he believed in the arbitrary hierarchy because to shake it was to threaten that stability. 

Oddly, the piece becomes more casual as it goes on, with many exhortations to imagine Samuel Johnson doing various things.  ‘Picture Samuel Johnson scratching his head…Imagine Johnson scrolling through his Twitter feed…let's envision Johnson perched on a virtual soapbox…If Johnson sat down for tea with Siri, what discussions would unfold?’ I think these are probably pre-programmed methods to make an essay more engaging, yet I can’t help but wonder if they also have something to do with his imagine being used in a popular meme. (I remember once, volunteering at Doctor Johnson’s House and some students came in out of curiosity and were very excited that it was the house of ‘that meme guy’.)

The back of the ‘essay’ is also filled with rhetorical questions. Presumably, this is a way to pad the word count without having to make any conclusions or say anything definitive. It ends by bidding adieu to our imaginary tête-à-tête between Johnson and AI - becoming oddly Frenchified . Aside from anything, it shows that the AI has clearly not yet gobbled up the works of Johnson or even the Samuel Johnson Quote Page. No writer about Samuel Johnson could write a whole piece about him without one quote. 

Of course, it is impossible to know what Samuel Johnson would have made of AI, it’s quite a silly question (and so perfect for this blog). As someone who said that, “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors”, I imagine that a machine that steals from them to create contentless waffle would not appeal to him. 

The picture at the top was an image generated on the same site of 'Samuel Johnson playing ping-pong'.

Review: Sterne's Memoirs

 “Laurence Sterne springs a new surprise, read the envelope that had landed on my doormat. 

It’s not exactly a new surprise, the book came out in 1985. A leaflet in the back includes a Shandy Hall appeal, designed to help Kenneth and Julia Monkman, who were live-in, unpaid curators. The leaflet points out how Kenneth is now isn his mid-seventies and look for money to establish a paid curator, ‘not quite yet perhaps, but eventually’. Kenneth seemed to be something of an obsessive, he was eventually buried at the foot of Sterne’s grave, I hope Sterne gave him a warm welcome. His wife, Julia, planned out a famously beautiful garden which is the home to a huge amount of moths, she took over from Kenneth and then when she died, was replaced by Patrick Wildgust, who is still the curator.

Sterne’s Memoirs was the first book ‘to come out of Shandy Hall since A Sentimental Journey’. Many books have come out (or been republished) through Shandy Hall since. I’ve been a punter for a few of them, including being part of the crowdfunding for the re-publication of ‘Caine’s Jawbone’, which has since become a tik-tok viral hit. They only printed 500 copies and it’s beautifully done. A delicately marbled cover, thick paper with an introduction and commentary and then the work itself, reproduced in Sterne’s own handwriting, with his crossings out and crammings in - he was more a crammer inner than a crosser outer. 

The downside of this gorgeous presentation is the effort it takes to read his writing. There is a printed insert with the version of his memoirs presented by his daughter in her edition of his letters. The surprise mentioned on the envelope are the little differences between the edited, printed version and the manuscript. Key among them, the date of composition. Sterne started writing these before he was a celebrity and not as he was dying. 

To be honest, a lot of the differences, whether he mentioned a Herbert or Hobert, did not mean much to me, being a fond reader of Sterne but not all that knowledgeable about him and his life. I can see how someone who is as indebted in the weeds of Sterne’s life as I am in Johnson’s or Kit Smart’s, the details would be invaluable and very exciting.

As such, a few memories of Sterne were interesting in themselves to me. I was aware his father had been in the army but not quite how enmeshed into army life the Sterne’s had been in. Not only had his father been involved in battles all over the globe, but Laurence found himself all around the British isles. from Dublin to the Isle of Wight. His father’s biggest injury came, not from battle, but a duel fought. He was later shipped off to Jamaica, where he died of fever. Laurence lovingly describes his father as someone “so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no-one, so that you might have cheated him for ten times in a day if nine had not been insufficient.” - A similar sentence later used to describe Uncle Toby.

While it’s clear from Tristram Shandy that Sterne favoured his father than his mother, we find out a little more about her. Laurence’s father was her second husband, her first has also been in the army. She had many children, most of them were sickly and few survived. We learnt about the deaths of little Joram, Mary, Anne and Devischer. We also learn that Laurence became a bit of a celebrity in Ireland as a child when he fell through a mill-race, while the mill was turning. 

No mention is made of the fake memoirs of Sterne created by Richard Griffiths under the name of Tri-juncta-in-uno. Griffiths claimed to have seen some notes Sterne made about his life, maybe he saw these? Well… I’ve seen them now, and in a lovely edition. I’ll gladly read them again and probably a number of times. 

The Journey to 'Death of a Dream-Pedlar'

Death of a Dream-Pedlar had a long and tortuous journey to the place it is now - a brilliant book available to buy in ebook, paperback and hardback form.