Many authors embellish their own pasts ...

[Dave Monroe]

'Many authors embellish their own pasts; some make
them up entirely'
By Ben Macintyre

HENRI CHARRIÈRE, THE FRENCH convict whose experiences
in the penal colony on Devil’s Island furnished the
basis for his best-selling novel Papillon, has turned
up in Venezuela, 32 years after he was supposed to
have died of throat cancer. True, no one has actually
seen him, but there he appears on the electoral
register: Henry Charriero (the name he adopted in
1945, after finally settling in Venezuela), voter
number 1,728,629.

Papillon’s sudden “reappearance” has provoked
questions about the reliability of the Venezuelan
electoral system, but it has also renewed speculation
over exactly what happened to the French
convict-writer. Papillon was an instant bestseller in
1969 and was adapted into a film starring Steve
McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in 1973, but the last years
of Charrière’s life remain cloaked in mystery. There
were rumours that the great escaper was not dead at
all, merely lying low, in South America or Spain. If
he is still alive today, Papillon would be 99 years
old.

To add to the puzzle, another elderly French convict
has come forward, insisting that he is the real
Papillon ...

[...]

The most celebrated literary escaper is, of course, J.
D. Salinger, who has published nothing since
withdrawing to his fortified compound in New Hampshire
in the 1960s. The author of The Catcher in the Rye
continues to write, we are told, but will publish
nothing. Salinger sees almost no one, but he is in
excellent company: here is Harper Lee, who has said
and published nothing since To Kill a Mocking Bird in
1960; Thomas Pynchon, jealously guarding his
invisibility; Don de Lillo, who once greeted a
persistent interviewer who had tracked him down to
Greece with the words, scribbled on a piece of paper,
“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Some have managed to defy identification altogether,
simply disappearing into the literary ether, leaving
only their words. The real identity of B. Traven,
author of The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1927), whose
novels have sold more than 25 million copies in 30
languages, has never been established. For many years
he was thought to be one Berwick Torsvan, a
half-Norwegian, half-English writer who settled in
Mexico; some believed Traven was a pseudonym for Jack
London, or Ambrose Bierce, or Adolfo Lopez Mateos, a
former President of Mexico. He was also rumoured to be
Otto Feige, the anarchist son of a German pottery
worker, or Ret Marut, a revolutionary who fled Germany
after the First World War, or the illegitimate son of
the Kaiser....

[...]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1771080,00.html


	
		
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