In the opening pages of Mary Morrissy's fine new novel, The Pre- tender, based on the life of Anna Anderson, who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, only survivor of the slaughter of Tsar Nicholas II and his family by Red Guards at Yekaterinburg in 1918, there is a moment when Anna, being cross-examined on a television programme, turns on the interviewer:
`How shall I tell you who I am?' she demanded crossly, when asked to declare herself. `In which way? Can you tell me that?' She buttonholed the reporter. `Can you really prove to me who you are?'
Well, could you? Could I? In her entertaining and creepily fascinating study of impostors, Sarah Burton poses the same question in rhetorical mode: "Are we who we say we are?" She goes on to worry at the fact that we present different versions of ourselves to suit this or that situation, and concludes: "The impostor, it could be argued, simply goes much further down a road that we are all of us already on." We moderns have an unshakeable sense of individuality, our own and that of others. But the concept of the individual, as we know it, is relatively recent. Indeed, the critic Harold Bloom contends that it was Shakespeare who single-handedly invented, or discovered, human personality. This is a little extreme, perhaps, but it is true that even the most cursory study of the Renaissance will show that something profound in human beings' conceptions of themselves and who and what they are began to occur somewhere around the middle of the 14th century. With the decline of the feudal system, which was essentially the system of the beehive, and, later, the great discoveries in cosmology by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, European society began to fragment in ways that were not always destructive. Pushed out of the centre of creation, where he had believed God had set him, Man suddenly saw the possibilities of individual freedom, with all the benefits and the terrors it entailed.
One of those terrors was, and is, that freedom to be oneself must also require us to be worthy of ourselves; it is not enough for me to be - I must also be somebody. Sarah Burton cites a study by the psychologist Helene Deutsch which offers a psychological profile of the typical imposter, who is usually the child of a more or less privileged background; such children:
may feel that nothing bad can happen to them, with the result that when something bad does happen, they are ill-equipped to deal with it, and instead retreat from reality . . . Where other children might respond by a single-minded pursuit of academic or athletic excellence, for example, or collapse under the weight of their own inertia and feelings of worthlessness, the child who will become an imposter has no patience with working his way up the conventional ladder of effort, achievement, reward. He feels entitled to go straight in at the top and claim the status and success he feels he deserves.
It is a persuasive thesis, but there is a simpler one, stated with characteristic force and jauntiness by Ferdinand Waldo Demara, the greatest impostor of them all: "One man's life is a boring thing. I lived many lives. I'm never bored."
In her book, Sarah Burton has assembled a large and exotic cast. She opens with an account of Louis de Rougemont - "A Sort of Wizard" - who in the 1890s published his memoirs in World Wide magazine, describing his "incredible adventures" as a castaway first on a tiny desert island, then in the Australian outback, which included being saved from drowning by his dog, being revered as a god by a tribe of cannibals, and diverting himself from his troubles by riding on the backs of giant sea turtles. "Incredible" it all may have been, but millions believed him, as the gratified editors of Wide World discovered, when circulation shot up. In fact, as the Daily Chronicle discovered - more rocketing sales - de Rougemont was really one Louis Grin, a Swiss former servant and drifter. As Burton has it, "In the age of the pioneering self-made man, the footman made himself a king." Grin lost his throne, however, and despite having demonstrated his turtle-riding skills at the London Hippodrome in 1906, he ended up as a match-seller on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Grin/de Rougemont was simply an adventurer and showman; others among Sarah Burton's cast of misfits and self-promoters are far more mysterious in their desires and motives. A surprising number of them did great good by their deceptions. Among his countless manifestations, Ferdinand Demara was a teacher - parents claimed he was the best their children had ever had - a prison psychiatrist, a monk, and a navy doctor, in which last capacity he operated on and saved the lives of two badly wounded sailors aboard a battleship pitching in high seas: "He cut through the skin, the fat, the connective tissue, and found himself calling for `clamps' and `rib-spreaders' and, more surprisingly, knowing what to do with them." Having laboured all night at the operating table, he looked up in surprise to see the dawn light and discover he was a hero. Yet it was only as someone other than himself that he could perform such self-transcending feats. When another of his personae, "Dr French", was exposed as a fraud, Demara was bitter. "I really hated not being French. No. What I hated most was being Demara again. Who was Demara? Anyway you looked at it, French was somebody, good or bad. Good or bad, Demara - that guy was a bum."
Impostors presents a wonderful cross-section of life's variousness. Here is "Doctor" James Barry, who practised from South Africa to the Crimea to Napoleon's isle of St Helena, who saved countless lives, who bullied the British army into cleaning up its medical act - Florence Nightingale hated him; perhaps she was jealous - and who after "his" death was discovered to have been a woman; here is the 24-stone butcher from Wapping who in 1866 claimed and was very nearly taken to be the slightly built Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne fortune, lost at sea 12 years previously; here is Brian MacKinnon, who in his thirties passed himself off as the Canadian teenager Brandon Lee in order to sit for high school examinations and go on to be the doctor that he knew he had it in him to be; and here are dozens of others, some of them pathetic failures, some possessed of genius. And they are only the ones who were found out. As Sarah Burton rather chillingly observes:
A successful impostor will never be known as such. The impostor does not occupy some cloak and dagger world apart from the rest of us but exists very much in the everyday, in the here and now. He or she may be about to take your temperature or hear your confession. Perhaps he or she is sitting next to you on the Tube or lying next to you in bed. Or even, maybe, reading this book.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times