The newest scandal in the British publishing industy involves two warring John Betjeman biographers, a love letter hoax, an acrostic, and everyone’s fair dose of public shame. Who wants the film rights?

For A.N. Wilson, whose biography of the former British poet laureate came out this year to honour the 100th anniversary of of Betjeman’s birth, the story began about two years ago, when he recieved a copy of a document in the mail from a mysterious Eve de Harben. The document appeared to be a love letter from the late Mr. Betjeman to real-life friend Honor Tracy, and the sender purported to be Tracy’s cousin. Wilson, having no cause to believe that the letter was a fake, and no doubt ecstatic to have proof that Betjeman had a passionate affair 11 years after he had married his wife, gaily published the letter at the close of a chapter entitled “Betjeman at War.”

The letter theoretically might have stayed unquestioned for years, had not Eve de Harben sent a letter into The Sunday Times several weeks ago, exposing the letter as a fake. She explained it was revenge for an attack on a friend, the writer Humphrey Carpenter, who died in 2005. But curioser and curioser: no Eve de Harben was found at the return address on her letter to the Times, and when Wilson had tried earlier to return the copy of the letter to her, it came back to him stamped ‘addressee unknown.’ Furthermore, Mr. Carpenter’s widow, when contacted, insisted that her husband knew no one by the name of Wilson.

The time had come to realise that the name ‘Eve de Harben’ is an anagram for ‘Ever been had?’ (as the Press everywhere has been pointing out with glee). After all, the ‘letter’ sent to Mr. Wilson was revealed as containing an acrostic–that’s right, those things that primary-school teachers use to introduce ‘poetry’ to you and make you write a poem about yourself using the the letters of your name, and I rued the day that I was ever given one with so many letters. In the hoax epistle, the first letter of each sentence, with the exception of the first and the last three sentences, spells out ‘A.N. Wilson is a shit.’

Until Sunday, the perpetrator of the hoax remained at large, but speculations flew and largely settled on Bevis Hillier, who had spent 25 years amassing information and composing a biography on Betjeman, only to discover that Mr. Wilson was publishing one, too. Hillier finally confessed to authorship of the letter, conceding with the words “It’s a fair cop.”

For Hillier, then, the story obviously stretched back much further, to allow him to concoct such an elaborate imposture. It was not the discovery of Mr. Wilson’s feuding biography, however, but rather an unflattering review that Wilson published in The Spectator, condemning the second volume of Hillier’s biography as “a hopeless mishmash.” Hillier consequently dubbed Wilson “the playground bully of contemporary English literature,” thus, perhaps, unwittingly referencing the theme of delightfully child-like pranks to come. He was not actually pushed to creating the encoded insult until he read a favorable review of Wilson’s Betjeman: A Life in a national news paper.

Sophomoric? Perhaps. Hilarious? Without a doubt. Hillier’s inclusion in the letter of phrases like ‘Tinkerty-tonk,’ which only a Betjeman biographer could use, adds a degree of brilliance to the existing amusement that it supplies the ‘T’ in the final expletive. During Hillier’s brief but fervent period of denial, he said that the letter was “not the sort of lark I’d do,” but then added: “But it’s very Betjemanesque.”

Indeed. I am not without sympathy for Wilson, who finds himself in a rather sticky situation. On the other hand, I confess a bit of schadenfreude at the expense of literary biographers, always so eager to unveil scandal in their subjects, not to mention one who failed to do a little bit more research about his source once the letter came back to him marked ‘adressee unknown.’ At the very least, it’s a secret delight to see “the old, learned, respectable bald heads,” to quote Yeats’s “The Scholars,” walk in the ways of their Catullus—or Betjeman.

You can see a copy of the letter at Ultrabrown (with some other amusing acrostics); read a blog discussion at Kitabkhana.