BRITAIN: One of the most spirited literary feuds of recent times gained momentum last weekend as the writer Bevis Hillier admitted being the author of a fake letter published as part of a biography of the poet John Betjeman by rival AN Wilson.
A week after the love letter was exposed as a fake, Hillier was reported to have confessed that he had engineered the hoax to embarrass Wilson.
Hillier has written his own three-volume biography of Betjeman and is said to have been aggrieved at the status publishers gave to his rival's book.
Two years ago, AN Wilson, who has recently published a one-volume biography of the late poet, received a transcript of what appeared to be a passionate letter, written by Betjeman, to a woman called Honor Tracy.
It was no secret that Betjeman had worked with Tracy during the second World War, but the letter suggested for the first time that the two were lovers.
Last month, however, the Sunday Times pointed out that the whole thing was a hoax, with the capital letters at the beginning of each sentence of the letter spelling out "AN Wilson is a shit".
"I wanted the acrostic love letter to spell out 'AN Wilson is a shit' and then built sentences around that," Hillier told the Sunday Times. "I also needed to ensure it seemed valid."
Animosity between the two was heightened by Wilson's review of the second volume of Hillier's work.
"This is a hopeless mishmash of a book," he wrote in 2002. "Some reviewers would say it was badly written, but the trouble is, it isn't really written at all. It is hurled together."
Hillier said the advance publicity for Wilson's book left him enraged.
"When a newspaper started billing Wilson's book as 'the big one', it was just too much," he said.
The fake letter, which was sent to Wilson two years ago from an address in France, appeared to come from a woman called Eve de Harben, who enclosed what she said was a passionate love letter apparently written by Betjeman in 1944 to Honor Tracy, a wartime work colleague.
De Harben said she had been given the letter by her father, an old friend of Tracy. Wilson put the letter in his book at the end of the chapter entitled "Betjeman at War".