Clifford Irving, Master of Fiction
I saw him again thirty-six later, last autumn in fact, when I was going through a serious Orson Welles phase, renting from Netflix the restored Magnificent Ambersons, Chimes at Midnight, and Othello, among other treasures. I also finally decided to sit down and finally watch Welles’s last film, an audacious experiment in editing and narration called F for Fake, which got scathing reviews when it first came out in 1974. No one knew what to make of it at the time, but film critics have favorably re-evaluated the film since then. Featured among Welles’s fun-loving cast of jetsetters, world-class actors and dazzling frauds was Clifford, looking as suave and cocky as the day they carted him off to jail.
It got me curious. Was he dead? Was he still around? If he was, he’d have to be in his late seventies. I poked around the net and discovered that yes, he’s still around, still cocky, hale and hearty, being rediscovered by a new generation of artists, and still writing. People forget that when the Howard Hughes scandal broke, Clifford had already four novels and three books of nonfiction under his belt. It was the last book, Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time, that got him in with the Orson Welles crowd, in fact was partially the basis for Welles’s film about De Hory.
Now here’s the thing. Clifford is an exceptionally good writer. In the 1950s he was one of the more promising young novelists of the postwar set, but a few things got in the way of greatness. He couldn’t get enough of the opposite sex (the ladies loved him), he was a wee bit lazy (he wrote with enviable ease and drafted very little), and his main aim in life seems to have been to be a Player Who Lives Large. In spite of that, the strength and assuredness of his prose and his novelist’s intuition remain. It continues to impress people who read his refurbished “autobiography” of Howard Hughes—now being properly marketed as a novel—as well as his other new works, both fiction and non.
His kind of confident writing, though, I’m afraid, has been deemed a little too out-of-date by the gatekeepers of New York publishing. Mastery of your craft is just not cutting edge—look at Dave Eggers. And admittedly, his non-trendy subject matter relegates him to the (now non-existent) midlist. There are no blockbusters in his resume, except for his fake Hughes autobiography. (And that’s a blockbuster of another sort: There’s some evidence to indicate that President Nixon believed potentially damaging material in the book was leaked to the Democratic Party National Committee, which worried him enough to order the burglary of their headquarters in a dull building called Watergate.)
In my literary quarterly, Cantaraville Five, there’s an excerpt from Clifford’s as-yet unpublished novel, I Remember Amnesia. You’re warmly invited to download this issue and let me know what you think.
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