QI The Book of the Dead

and the land they wanted to protect. Anahareo, the woman to whom he had been closest, always maintained she had never doubted his story. The initial shock was hard for his friends to take. Lovat Dickson, who at first valiantly tried to defend Grey Owl’s reputation, was forced to concede that he, too, had been fooled: ‘We had been duped,’ he wrote in Wilderness Man , his definitive biography of Belaney. ‘There was no Arcadia.’ Grey Owl’s books stopped selling and the conservationist causes he had championed fell out of favour.
    But when the dust had settled, people began to reassess his reputation. In 1940 Anahareo published a remarkably positive autobiography, reminding Grey Owl’s huge fan base just howmuch good he had done. He had cared nothing for money; he had used his fame only to help raise awareness of the threatened habitats of his friends: the beavers, eagles and bears.
    Did Grey Owl’s deception really matter? There is something magnificent in his refusal to conform to modern life. And his achievements, at least, were real: he lived an authentic life among native Canadians, his knowledge of their lore and culture second to none. Most of all, his work as a conservationist changed the thinking of an entire generation:
    The voice from the forests momentarily released us from some spell. In contrast to Hitler’s screaming, ranting voice and in contrast to the remorseless clanking of modern technology, Grey Wolf’s words evoked an unforgettable charm, lighting in our minds the vision of a cool, quiet place, where men and animals live in love and trust together .
     
    No one captures the double life of the impostor better than Archie Belaney. On the one hand, an abandoned child, seeking refuge in the company of animals and dreaming of being a ‘Red Indian’, growing into a man unable to form a stable relationship with a woman; a loner who drank too much and was capable of acts of cruelty, ‘almost a madman’ on occasions. On the other hand, the powerful and admirable hero, the first eco-warrior, whose books and talks offered a new and genuine connection with nature. You can see how two such complex characters inhabiting a single body might easily drive a man to an early grave. But, to produce a human being as singular as Grey Owl, perhaps you can’t have one without the other.

     

    The label ‘impostor’ is invariably meant as an insult, and when contemplating the character of a Titus Oates or an Ignácz Trebitsch Lincoln, or Lobsang Rampa’s claim’s to be transcribing the thoughts of his Siamese, seems well deserved. But it is not easy to judge all impostors so harshly. Surely we all feel a sneaking admiration for the survival strategies of a Cagliostro or a Mary Baker, or a straightforward respect for the heroism of a James Barry? And when Archie Delaney tells us, ‘My heart is Indian’, we know he is pointing to an inner transformation that is more complex than simple lying. Impostors unsettle us because they remind us how fragile our own identities can be, and how much of our time is spent fulfilling the expectations of others. As the essayist William Hazlitt observed in his Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1826): ‘Man is a make-believe animal – he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.’

CHAPTER NINE
     

Once You’re Dead, You’re Made for Life
     
     
    One may see the small value God has for riches by the people He gives them to .
ALEXANDER POPE
     
    W e could all use a bit more cash. As Spike Milligan put it, ‘All I ask is a chance to prove money can’t make me happy.’ Even Oscar Wilde ruefully admitted that it is ‘better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating’. There are many ways to become rich – noble birth, fame, genius, hard work, good luck – but getting wealth is no guarantee of keeping it. Someone in the world today goes bankrupt every four seconds and history is littered with extraordinary men and women who at first carried all before them but went to the grave unable to pay their own funeral expenses. Mozart, Rembrandt and Napoleon all died without a penny to their names – although Napoleon simply ignored the technicalities, bequeathing millions of imaginary francs in his will. The father of printing, Johannes Gutenberg, was ruined by his own investor; Georges Méliès, the Frenchman who invented the cinema, was reduced to selling toys in a Paris railway station; Frank X. McNamara, creator of the first