The phantoms of the opera

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  Allan Massie

  The phantoms of the opera

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

There is nothing new in the use of ghosts. Dumas for instance employed them to make drafts of novels or write those passages that bored him. In 19th-century France ghosts were known as nègres; suitably enough, since negritude then still connoted slavery. I doubt if the term is now permissible, though such is the admirable conservatism of France that it may yet be employed, if only surreptitiously. Dumas used ghosts to save time and enable him to meet all his commitments. Other novelists have done so, reluctantly, because their talent was exhausted. Francis King revealed in his autobiography, Yesterday Came Suddenly, that he had ghosted substantial parts of some of L. P. Hartley’s last books.

The greatest of ghost-masters was Colette’s first husband, the extraordinary Willy. Start- ing out as a poet (bad career choice), he became a literary capitalist, an entrepreneur of letters who would supply columns, essays, paragraphs of gossip, dialogues and eventually novels, books of scandalous history and spurious memoirs; and of these he would  write scarcely a line himself. Colette’s Claudine novels were first published under her husband’s name. Most of his other poor ghosts are now forgotten, except perhaps for Marcel Boulestin, restaurateur and author (under his own name) of cookery books. The ghosts were driven hard. In Mes Apprentissages Colette wrote, ‘Whenever we veterans of the old gang meet and talk of our duped and despoiled past, we always say, “in the days when we worked in the factory”.’  Willy himself developed an utter aversion to writing. Yet his case was not that ‘of an ordinary man who engaged other men to write the books he signed’, for ‘the man who did not write was more talented than the men who wrote in his stead’. Not so with our modern celebrity authors. The other remarkable feature of Willy’s factory was that he gave his ghosts the most detailed, copious and intelligent instructions and subjected their work to close criticism, before perhaps passing it to some other spectre to revise. He often spent more time cajoling work from others and indicating how it must be revised than would have been necessary for him to do himself. But that was just what he found beyond him. Later Colette attributed this inability to ‘an undeniable condition of morbid laziness and a timidity of expression’. But I suspect he enjoyed the pleasures of intrigue and found the organisation of his factory of ghosts more rewarding, not only financially.

Colette escaped the factory to become an author in her own right whose fame and achievement far surpassed Willy’s; his most successful ghost put on flesh. If we are to believe the Baconians or (if you prefer) the Oxfordians, the man of Stratford pulled off the most remarkable of coups in the world of spectral authorship. Hired to put his name to the plays that Bacon (or the Earl of Oxford) wrote, he convinced all but the most alert detector of conspiracies that he was indeed their author. This, if true and not a flight of fancy from the wilder shores of lunacy, would be an extraordinary inversion of ghostly relationships. Believe it if you must, though to my mind if you can suppose Bacon (or Oxford) to have written the plays ascribed to Shakespeare, you ought to be able to picture Wayne Rooney at typewriter or computer.

Be that as it may, these are good years for ghosts. There can scarcely be a successful publisher who doesn’t believe in them. Without the work of ghosts, publishers might not afford their subscriptions to the Garrick, might even, horrible thought, be unable to lunch. ‘Old mole,’ says the prudent publisher, ‘canst work i’ the earth so fast as to get the book out in time for the Christmas market?’ And if he can’t? Then hire a second ghost and a third, till the line stretches on to the crack of doom and the book is done.