Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Nat Tate

The True Story

The origins of “Nat Tate” go back a fair distance. In 1987 I published my novel The New Confessions which took the form of a fictional autobiography. Reviewing it, Bernard Levin said, “hypnotised by its autobiographical form I found myself riffling through the pages for the photographs.” “Photographs …?” I thought, “I’ve missed a trick there.” Then some years later I was invited to contribute to a book called David Hockney’s Alphabet, in which twenty-six writers were asked to provide a short text — of any sort — to accompany Hockney’s graphic depictions of each letter. I was given the letter “N” and wrote a biographical memoir of a wholly fictional francophone Laotian writer called Nguyen N, who had briefly flourished in Paris between the wars. I quoted a letter from N to André Gide and I cited his celebrated work of aphoristic philosophy, Les Analects de Nguyen N (Monnier, Toulon, 1928). At the launch party for the book I was engaged in protracted conversation with a guest who claimed to remember reading about N, and indeed had a French bookseller searching for a first edition of Les Analects. It was an awkward few minutes and I thought it best to leave enlightenment for another day.

In both cases it was not the idea of a hoax that intrigued me so much as the ability to make something entirely invented seem astonishingly real. I began vaguely to formulate the idea of taking the fictional biography mode even further into the area of verisimilitude and, some years ago, started collecting discarded photographs — from junk shops, house-clearance sales, brocantes in France — with a view to one day writing a “life” tricked out with all the artefacts of a real biography — illustrations, notes, bibliography, index and so on.

Thus when, last year, Karen Wright, the editor of Modern Painters magazine (on whose editorial board I sit), started talking to me about the forthcoming New York issue — and was wondering if there was a way of getting fiction into the magazine — I realized immediately that here was the perfect opportunity. “Why don’t I invent a painter?” I said, knowing I already had the raw materials to hand. And so I duly did and so Nat Tate was born, lived for three decades and died.

I placed Tate in a period of twentieth-century artistic history that I was already fascinated by — namely the 1950s in New York, which saw the emergence of the New York School of artists and the birth of Abstract Expressionism. This was the era of Jackson Pollock and Action Painting, of de Kooning, Kline and Motherwell. It was the first time that the full glare of hype and media interest transformed a group of impoverished, unknown artists almost overnight into national and international celebrities, and with that renown came the more destructive elements of sudden wealth, notoriety, groupies, drugs, booze, jealousies, acrimony and premature death. This background had everything I needed for Nat and as I began to evolve the details of his brief life I began to invent characters — his foster parents, fellow artists, gallery owners — whose personalities would fit the photographs I had collected.

It was a complex process — but hugely enjoyable — and as it enlarged I started factoring real people into the Nat Tate story — the poet Frank O’Hara, Georges Braque, Franz Kline, Picasso and Larry Rivers amongst others. I began to feel like Dr Frankenstein. Nat Tate became my benign, doomed monster: I had his photo in front of me, I had put together all the ingredients of his short, tragic life; he seemed, even in manuscript stage, almost to live and breathe. The search for authenticity went further — some of Nat Tate’s drawings were created, and a large abstract oil. I approached Gore Vidal and John Richardson (Picasso’s friend and biographer), both of whom I knew, and asked them to “reminisce” about meeting Nat in the 1950s — which they sportingly and readily agreed to do.

But at the same time as I worked to provoke immediate credulity I knew that the story could not withstand sustained analysis — far too much was invented. Indeed one of the key witnesses to Nat’s life — an English writer called Logan Mountstuart — was a character taken from one of my short stories published in The Destiny of Nathalie X in 1995. The book was, in the end, studded with covert and cryptic clues and hints as to its real, fictive status. For me, the author, this was part of the pleasure — a form of Nabokovian relish in the sheer play and artifice — and the fundamental aim of the book, it became clear to me, was to destabilize, to challenge our notions of authenticity. First would come belief — the thing looked so wonderfully genuine, beautifully produced, full of photographs — then doubts would set in, alarm bells begin distantly to ring. But then the reader would come across — say — Gore Vi-dal’s recollections, and there would be a picture of Frank O’Hara and a Frank O’Hara poem mentioning Tate and credulity would be established again for a while — before suspicions crept back in. What was created was a form of reverse propaganda. Not truth disguised by lies, but “Truth” peeled away to reveal the true lie at the centre.

But we — the key conspirators and 21 Publishing — decided to present the book absolutely straight, deadpan. People had to be seduced — deluded — at first in order for the plan to work. The Sunday Telegraph joined the inner circle — an extract would be published, again in deadpan, orthodox manner, on the arts pages. Launch parties were planned, a week apart, in New York and London. We synchronized our responses and waited to see what would happen.

My own expectations were that we would experience a form of slowly mounting scepticism ending, on our part, in candid confession. But in fact the projected slow burn became a loud detonation when a journalist on the Independent, who had overheard two conspirators’ loose tongues wagging, decided to blow the whole thing wide open.

I wasn’t there. When the “hoax” was exposed I was in Paris promoting the French edition of my new novel, Armadillo, hearing everything at second hand. The unspooling of the Nat Tate story was always intended to be something far more subtle and intriguing, but I must confess to a strange frisson when I read, in Paris, an account of the affair in the Herald Tribune. There was the name “Nat Tate” printed in bold alongside other celebrities — Eva Perón, Jimmy Stewart, the Rolling Stones. Perhaps, I thought, poor Nat would, in a curious way, endure — and Nat Tate would have a sort of life, after all.

1998