Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

    As any sensible reader will be well aware, not everything in literature is quite what it appears to be. Whilst the vast majority of our noble writers strive to deposit honesty at the centre of their mostly futile endeavours, there are other, slightly more spurious, characters floating about, the fruit of whose work is indubitably strewn across the orchard floor of the contemporary book scene. The works of Hermann Husch spring to mind. Mr Fenman’s Farewell to His Readers, by Michael Allen, is just another case in point.

    This short book purports to be a genuine memoir by Thomas Fenman (1761-1837), a long-forgotten English writer.  We may say with some confidence, however, that Thomas Fenman is a fictional character created only recently by Michael Allen, a 68-year-old writer who is perhaps best known for his blog on books and publishing, the Grumpy Old Bookman.

    Mr Fenman’s Farewell to His Readers was published by Kingsfield Publications in April 2007. Kingsfield Publications is a small press owned and operated by Michael Allen.  Many of the firm’s books are available through normal trade channels, but in printed form the Farewell can only be obtained through Lulu.com (http://www.lulu.com/content/622204).  However, a PDF copy of the text is available as a free download from the publisher’s web site, where it is listed, incidentally, as fiction.

    The publication is in two parts.  The first part is an introduction by Allen.  In it, he tells us how he bought, from a secondhand-book dealer, an old and previously unpublished manuscript by one Thomas Fenman, 1761-1837.  This proved to be a ‘brief memoir’, and the second part of the book is the alleged memoir itself, describing his first visit to Venice in 1786, and also referring to his second visit, fifty years later.

    Fenman, we learn, was a prolific novelist, with over a hundred books to his credit.  Widely read in his lifetime, he was soon forgotten after his death.

    The unwary reader could be forgiven for assuming, at first, that Allen is telling us the truth: that he really did buy an old manuscript by a long-forgotten writer, and that he is now publishing it for the first time. However, the documentary evidence provided by Allen himself reveals that none of this is true, and that the entire publication is a fabrication.

    More detailed research shows that the catalogue of the British Library has no trace of any books written by a Thomas Fenman, let alone one hundred of them.  Furthermore, all other references to Fenman’s name, in the text of Allen’s book, are also invented.  For example, there is no 1953 book, by James Staveley-Wilson, entitled A Preliminary History of the English Novel.  Some of the other books referred to do exist, but their indexes contain no mention of Fenman’s name.

    In short, what we have here is a conceit: we have a short work of fiction masquerading as a piece of history.  It is a literary equivalent, one might say, of the movie This is Spinal Tap or the Report from the Iron Mountain.

    In the UK, this kind of ‘spoof’ as the English call it, is very much in favour at the moment. Georgy Riecke, for one, thinks this to be an apt cultural manifestation of the British inclination towards underhanded deception. He may well be right. One thinks, for example, of the spoof chat shows hosted by Alan Partridge, Mrs Merton, and the Kumars at no. 42 - or of the much-lauded The Office and, more recently, the work of one Sacha Baron Cohen. Beyond this, one would suppose the internet to be a fertile ground for further deceptions: one can only imagine (with due dread) how many so-called informative websites are fleecing their readership with 'spoofs' of one sort or another. None of which is to say, however, that Mr Fenman’s Farewell to His Readers (for all its deviousness) is without interest.

    Mr Fenman purports to tell us how, on his first visit to Venice, in 1786, aged twenty-five, he met a mysterious lady, Madame de Mentou.  This lady, a mature and handsome woman, was widely travelled and extremely knowledgeable about the arts; she took Fenman under her wing, and proceeded to coach him in the art of writing fiction. 

    The story that Fenman tells is a strange one, with a streak of fantasy or mystery in it.  Fenman himself swears that he is telling the truth, but he admits that, if the world is as we think it is, the story cannot be entirely true.  He offers various explanations for this discrepancy: that he is deliberately lying, as he would in any other work of fiction; that he is beginning to go senile; and so forth.

    Those who have studied Allen’s blog, the Grumpy Old Bookman, will soon realise that Madame’s advice about how to write fiction closely follows that offered by Allen himself.  She shares his belief, for instance, that the chief purpose of the novel is to arouse emotion in the reader.

    Readers are invited by Allen/Fenman to reach their own conclusions about who and what Madame de Mentou is.  But most sophisticated readers will soon guess that the most obvious explanation is that Madame is an incarnation, in human form, of the Muse – or one of the muses, for in Greek mythology she sometimes took several forms, specialising in one or other of the arts.

    A clue to this interpretation is provided by the lady’s two names: Madame de Mentou (1786) and Mrs Mentorn (1836).  The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the word ‘muse’ may ultimately be derived from the Indo-European base of ‘mind’, which is in turn linked to words such as ‘mental’, in the sense of ‘relating to the mind’.

    If we assume that this interpretation is correct, then not the least of Allen’s hidden jokes is that, in Mr Fenman’s Farewell, the Muse chooses to give her benisons not to some famous poet or literary genius, but to a man who is, by his own admission, a literary hack: a manufacturer of commercial frippery; a novelist who was despised by the serious critics of his lifetime, and was forgotten by the reading public almost immediately after his death.

    As a literary device, Allen’s chapbook is modestly entertaining.  But as a piece of literary history it is entirely falsified.

R. Gowan Haverges

Notes on Professor Haverges:

b. Cambridge 1925.  Haverges’s father was Master of University College, Cambridge, and was famous chiefly for his atheism.  His mother, by contrast, was intensely religious.  As Haverges’s father lay dying, his mother was heard to complain to various members of the College.  ‘I don’t know why it is,’ she said, ‘but I just can’t get George to take any interest in his funeral arrangements.’ 

After distinguished war service in military intelligence (he was a friend of both Graham Greene and Kim Philby) Haverges pursued an academic career.  He was a long-standing lecturer at Trowbridge technical college, where he specialised in introducing young plumbers to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  The college later became the West Wiltshire Polytechnic, and later still merged with the University of Salisbury.  Haverges, being the sole member of staff with a PhD (from the University of Life Experience, Stanfordville, New York), was appointed to the University’s first chair in literature.

From that point on, Haverges became a prolific contributor to journals in the field of artificial semiotics and pseudo-intelligence.  Now retired, he concentrates on reviewing books which are published through the new publishing paradigm of universal authorship, seeking, as he puts it, to prick his fingers on the occasional needle within the haystack. So far, he reports, no blood has actually been drawn, but he lives in hope.

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