Tag: fakes

Notice to mariners | Donald Barthelme

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To the Editor:

The fall 1973 number of the Carolina Quarterly contains a story called “Divorce” and signed with my name. As it happens, I did not write it. It is quite a worthy effort, as pastiches go, and particularly successful in reproducing my weaknesses. A second story, titled “Cannon,” also signed with my name, appears in the current issue of Voyages. As a candidate‐member of the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism, I would rate the second item somewhat inferior to the first, but again, I am not responsible. May I say, as a sort of notice to mariners, that only manuscripts offered to editors by my agent, Lynn Nesbit, are authentic—not good or bad, but at least authentic.

DONALD BARTHELME New York City.

(Barthelme’s letter was published in The New York Times, 23 Dec. 1963

Curse of the genuine article (William Gaddis’s The Recognitions)

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—Taste changes, he went on in an irritating monotone. —Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they’re so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse that any genuine article must endure.

From The Recognitions by William Gaddis.