Living in fantasy

IMPOSTERS: SIX KINDS OF LIAR True Tales of Deception by Sarah Burton (Viking, 15.99)

LOUIS de Rougemont's account of his time spent among the cannibals of Australia was greeted with great excitement when it was published in Wide World magazine in the 1890s. After being shipwrecked, de Rougemont had been taken in by members of an aboriginal tribe, who believed him to be the "Supreme Spirit" from another world. Several blissful years followed. But after the death of his beloved wife, Yamba, he decided that he'd had enough and headed back to civilisation.

However, certain details in de Rougemont's account caused confusion - even scepticism. In particular, his description of "clouds of wombats rising into the evening sky". Yet the wombat, as one baffled reader wrote, is an animal roughly the size of a badger, a burrowing creature whose diet consists mainly of tree roots. Never before had a wombat been reported as attempting to fly, let alone succeeding.

De Rougemont was exposed as a liar - he turned out to be a former travelling servant called Henri Grin.

Like all the people in Sarah Burton's study of imposters down the ages, he'd made himself up, improved on reality by adding several striking embellishments of his own.

Here are some champion dissemblers, both familiar and unfamiliar: David Hampton, who passed himself off as the son of actor Sidney Poitier; Ferdinand Waldo Demara, who adopted a host of different guises from surgeon to prison warder; and Old Charlie Parkhurst, famous grizzled stagecoach driver of the American Gold Rush. After a lifetime of cracking the whip and shouting "Git alang, my beauties!" Old Charlie almost made it to his grave when an observant mortician noticed that he had a funny bumpy chest and must have been Old Charlene all along.

The urge to cast off one identity and try on someone else's is widespread, of course. But while many dream of doing so, comparatively few put their fantasies into practice. Those who do tend to come from similar backgrounds.

Many male imposters are the sons of fathers whose social rank has plummeted; the children growing up in an atmosphere of disappointment and thwarted ambition. The fledgling imposter soon divides himself into two: the fantasy self who dreams of restoring lost fortunes and the real self who bumps resentfully along the bottom. In time, the real self proves no match for its more exotic twin and shrinks further and further into the background.

The good news for those who are sick of their own personas is that assuming another can be surprisingly easy. Much depends on basic dos and don'ts. It helps to give yourself a title, but one should be wary of anything too flashy. Remember too that people will invariably take you at your word unless there's a glaring reason not to, so confidence is all-important.

If they do grow suspicious, however, all is not necessarily lost. Look at the case of the German, Harry Domela. After the standard rootless and unhappy childhood, Domela found work as a gardener. However, this was not to his liking and he soon reinvented himself as Prince Lieven of Latvia. Within months he was a big hit in 1920s Heidelberg society.

But increasingly people began to wonder if the Prince was really who he claimed to be. Why was he so reticent about his background? There could be only one explanation. He wasn't Prince Lieven at all. No, he must be the Kaiser's grandson, Prince Wilhelm of Hohenzollern - a vastly more eminent figure.

This is a delightful book, crisply written, well-researched, commonsensical in approach and perceptive in attitude. One may quibble with the omissions - no place, alas, for my own favourite imposter, the Tibetan sage, Lobsang Rampa, who proved to be a former surgical-truss salesman from Thames Ditton called Cyril Hoskins. But never mind, there's still plenty here to fill the heads of armchair fantasists with all sorts of dangerous ideas.

The only sadness is that so many imposters end up being unmasked.

Prince Lieven eventually fled Heidel-berg and joined the Foreign Legion.

As for Henri Grin, aka Louis de Rougemont, he ended his days "a lank and stooping figure", selling matches in the wombat-less wastes of Shaftesbury Avenue.

Copyright 2000
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