KINGDOM OF THE IDIOM: How George Psalmanazar Escaped From History

by Alex Eichler, '08

Moravagine is an idiot, but he is also an idiom...a term whose meaning is established by usage, and not deducible from the meanings of its constituent parts. Idioms are the place where language shows signs of wear: those phrases have been said so many times they have fused into a single unit and can no longer be pried apart. -- Paul La Farge, "Idiots!," The Believer 1. In early 1703, a man named George Psalmanazar arrived in London and had a few discreet conversations. Within a year, he had a publishing contract and the ear of the British royal courts; not long after that he was given a post at Oxford. Psalmanazar's book, An Historical and Geographic Description of Formosa, describing the virtually unknown East Asian island society from whence he came, was read throughout Europe, and his beliefs - among them, that false accusations were worse than cannibalism, Jesuits were the ruin of pure societies, and the blood of snakes could keep a man alive for a century - were repeated as ethnographic dogma. In keeping with the traditions of his native land, Psalmanazar ate only raw foods and recorded the Lord's Prayer in an alphabet unknown to Western civilization (Aldington 44). His conversion from pagan heathenism to the Anglican Church fueled a thousand heated theological debates in learned society. Once ingratiated into European literary circles, he used his unique firsthand knowledge of Formosa to help compile one of the greatest encyclopedias British society had to that point seen (Stagl 186). When at last Psalmanazar passed away in 1763, leaving behind a small estate, a room of empty laudanum bottles, and a request to be buried in a pauper's grave, it seemed that the idiom would never be pried open. The man from another world was modestly interred and there the matter appeared to rest. In 1764 his papers were given a more thorough examination, and the following facts were discovered: - The deceased man's name was not George Psalmanazar. - In almost no way did the actual island of Formosa resemble Psalmanazar's celebrated account of it. - Psalmanazar had, in fact, been born in Europe, and never left it in his lifetime. - The society, language, history, belief system, and culture of Formosa, right down to the calendar, were products of his own invention. The strange case of George Psalmanazar lies somewhere at the uncomfortable intersection of truth and credulity. This is a man who wrote two major personal works that flatly contradict each other. Educated men and women have accepted both, at one time or another, as unimpeachably reliable. Like the alphabet of his own construction, Psalmanazar is almost pure idiom: he mapped out his own world in a language only he could read fully. What we know of him today, we know from broken translation, and our vocabulary is pitifully small; it still does not include his real identity or origins. He was a widely published and well-documented author, a darling of high society, and at one time as much a household name as any celebrity today. He is also one of history's biggest question marks. 2. Little information was available to Europe about the island of Formosa at the dawn of the eighteenth century. (A modest amount more is known today, beginning with the name natives prefer to use, Taiwan.) By 1685, some twenty-five years after Chinese forces wrestled the island away from the Dutch, the practices of the Formosan people were common knowledge to members of the Qing dynasty and a handful of missionaries, but almost nobody else (www.wikipedia.org). This included one precocious but undisciplined boy, the last of "an ancient, but decayed" family line (Psalmanazar, 60), who in 1685 or thereabouts was chafing under Franciscan monks in a school at some distance from his insolvent mother (and even greater distance from a perpetually absent father). The boy, then six years old, already had an individualist streak, at least by his own recollection some decades later. Despite a knack for languages and a gift for getting to the heart of problems, the boy found the emphasis on rote memorization stultifying, and would later decry the curriculum as "unintelligible stuff, which sooner forgot than learned, serves little purpose, except it be to take up so much of [pupils'] time" (Psalmanazar, 69). Not wishing to disappoint his pious mother, for whom her son's education was a top priority, the boy advanced through the system, but continued to find himself at odds with his instructors, which by this point included the Jesuits and members of a Dominican convent. Once a reserved but conscientious student, he began currying the favor of the most important authority figures, thus allowing himself room to slide on his studies. A "deplorable indolence" crept over him. He would later blame these schools for smothering his "natural temper and genius," which otherwise, by his own estimation, could have "easily been enabled to have overcome the greatest difficulties in almost every branch of learning" (Psalmanzar, 77). Denied this opportunity, the boy's natural temper and genius had to find other outlets. Under the weight of institutionalized learning, his talents -whose existence was undeniable, in spite of the boy's monomania - began to bend toward invention. At the same time he began to know vanity, and to develop an ambition that was at once hubristic and dangerously formless. This is how he tells it, anyway, in Memoirs of ****, the posthumously published autobiography of George Psalmanazar. (We must continue to call him this, for though he retracts the authenticity of this faintly ridiculous name in Memoirs, he fails to furnish a different one.) Psalmanazar remains evasive about his early life even in a confessional memoir undertaken in the "true, sincere spirit of a person awakened by a miracle of mercy," as he describes himself in the preface (6). Adverbs, then, become unavoidable: he was born around 1679, probably, in the Languedoc county of southern France, most likely, to a poor but religious family, presumably (Aldington, 35). (Psalmanazar himself claims his parents were Roman Catholic tenant farmers, and it is difficult to see why he would lie about this. Some scholars have advanced the theory that he hailed from a politically prominent family and withheld his real name as a means of protecting household honor (Aldington, 36), but it seems unlikely that a Comte's son could have risen to the prominence he did without being recognized, at least by his own parents. Indeed, it would make little sense for somebody of relatively comfortable means to resort to chicanery on this scale at all, no matter how big of an academic washout they were.) Psalmanazar had some bad experiences as a schoolboy; of that there can be no doubt. The rancor with which he describes his boyhood in various classrooms rings much more genuine than the piety coloring his self-flagellating preface. He could not have been a completely inert student, as his early multilingualism shows, but his relationships to teachers were at best strained. Once schooling had done all for him that it could do, Psalmanazar found work as a tutor for some younger boys; his claim is that the boys' mother took an interest in him that was rather more than polite, and his own honorable nature bade him leave. (While such a scenario is far from inconceivable, it becomes more dubious in light of the claims Psalmanazar would later make, among them that the inhabitants of his native land made an annual sacrifice to their dark gods of eighteen thousand prepubescent boys. The author of Memoirs had spent a lifetime honing an ear for scandalous details, and he knew how to make people pay attention.) He could not or would not find employment elsewhere, and felt unprepared to return to his mother, who would surely want to see all the things her distantly educated son was doing with his life. By age sixteen, then, George Psalmanazar was a wanderer in Europe, a restless itinerant with seven languages under his belt and almost no ties to anyone. It was in this vacuum of concrete connections that the boy from Languedoc began to undergo what would be the first of many personal renaissances. 3. One of the most infuriating things about Psalmanazar, from a researcher's perspective, was his habit of routinely giving contradictory versions of events, down to something as seemingly benign as the year of his birth; as a result, it is very difficult to say definitively how he spent the next few years. This is a shame, because whatever his moral shortcomings, the man knew how to tell a story. (One example of this will probably serve for all: During one of his trips across the continent, a starving, rag-clad Psalmanazar, then assuming the identity of student of theology making a pilgrimage to Rome, decided his progress would be easier if he were dressed for the part. To that end, he entered a church where was kept an authentic cloak and staff from a missionary of centuries past. These items he walked out with in broad daylight and continued on his way. Did this actually happen? No one can know for sure. The responsible historian is torn between wanting to believe such a display of chutzpah could have occurred and recalling that Psalmanazar has accounted for almost every year of his life in at least two different ways at various times.) Most researchers, even those who make no secret of their distrust for their subject, agree that Psalmanazar probably simply pinballed around Europe. On the advice of his mother, he visited his father, who was then seeking his fortune in Germany. The last tenuous bond of the wandering teenager to his family was broken when the elder Frenchman's modest circumstances appalled even road-dirty George, and he lit out again, begging his way between cheap inns. He toyed with personae, switching back and forth between languages and personal histories when the impulse took him; many of his assumed identities, from the idealistic Irish Catholic scholar to the bishop-in-training who spoke only Latin, took religion as their major motivation. Somewhere along the line he decided to pose as a recently Christian East Asian immigrant; he chose Japan as the best country to be from. What this young vagabond knew about Japan was mostly pieced together from half-remembered missionaries' tales, but he also knew that the Jesuits cornered the market on such information, and even a blond-haired, round-eyed, fair-skinned man such as he could capitalize on the general drought of knowledge. Carving out a credible niche would be difficult but not impossible -- the right level of challenge. Scraping the seal off his old passport and reaffixing it to a fresh counterfeit, Psalmanazar struck out for the western end of the continent, evidently on the theory that the Europeans farthest from Japan would also be the most ignorant of it. Psalmanazar worked to fortify this, his greatest role yet, over a period of months that were surely among the worst of his life (Stagl, 179). Skin inflammation, imprisonment, brief stints in various armies, and an endless series of sordid jobs presented themselves, but Psalmanazar remained largely untouched by it all, preoccupied with shoring up a plausible cover story. His initial efforts were out of all proportion to the attention he received: when he attempted to present his painstakingly forged passport to Dutch officials, they looked at the ragged, vermin-covered beggar waving papers at them and motioned him along (Penzer, ix). Eventually Psalmanazar grew confident enough to approach the Cologne Elector and apply for service. The emaciated vagrant did not last long in the ranks before his condition became grounds for discharge, but it was long enough for Psalmanazar to do a bit of what we would in a later day and age call networking. He charmed his way into a predominantly Lutheran regiment with which he moved all over northwestern Europe, sharpening his story and facilely defending heathenism in religious debates he seems to have started solely to amuse himself. By 1702 the young man and his unit were in the Dutch town of Sluys, and one Major-General George Lauder demanded to see this exotic convert. Psalmanazar, never one to turn down a performance, submitted to an inquiry that was apparently two steps down the road to interrogation. He fooled Lauder and almost every man in Lauder's company, but there was one witness, a chaplain of another regiment, who suspected something was off, and requested a private audience. The final element necessary for the biggest career move of George Psalmanazar's life had fallen into place. 4. The Reverend Alexander Innes sat down with a young Oriental one day and asked him to translate a passage from Cicero into Japanese. The boy made a show of concentrating and produced a page of satisfyingly unintelligible verbiage. Innes took the paper from him, tucked it away, and then asked the boy to do it again. The boy handed over a second translation that contained fewer than half the words found in the first. And thus was George Psalmanazar's ruse deflated. What we know of Innes, we know largely through Psalmanazar, and so as with almost everything else about our idiom, we have to qualify and scrutinize and doubt. Most of Innes's early life has not been recorded, or at any rate the records have not survived. He was a man of the cloth but possibly not a very good one. Like Psalmanazar, he was willing to play fast and loose with the truth; unlike Psalmanazar, he had an ulterior motive we can guess easily enough. Alexander Innes saw in his faux-Asian an opportunity for fame, possibly riches, certainly career advancement. It was he who advised the younger man to change his birthplace from Japan, about which very little information was known, to Formosa, about which there was practically none; it was he who gave him the name George Psalmanazar, in an elaborate conversion ceremony staged for the benefit of the Dutch Army (Penzer, xi). God alone knows what name Psalmanazar had been using up to that point, but when he took the name by which he would be known to history, he cemented the bond between himself and Innes. They knew each other's secrets: the wanderer who was not what he claimed to be and the servant of God who served only himself. If we can learn anything from Psalmanazar's charge through life, it is to take purportedly historical documents with a grain of salt; in the case of the man himself, the whole lick might be better advised. The complicity of Innes in the case of the false Formosan cannot be doubted, but in his Memoirs, Psalmanazar gives the chaplain the lion's share of responsibility for what followed: it was Innes who wanted to approach the British royal courts, Innes who engineered the publicity coup, Innes who rigorously drilled him every day until he had developed an actual artificial language, not unlike Esperanto, so detailed and internally consistent that it would fool Oxford scholars. It may well have been Innes; then again, maybe not. We won't know for sure unless new information surfaces. By the time Memoirs appeared, Innes had been dead for at least ten years. 5. Whoever was pulling the strings, they had a deft touch; Innes and Psalmanazar appeared in London in 1703, and the result was celebrity. Everyone wanted to meet the exotic creature and hear his sensational accounts of Formosa. To Psalmanazar's credit, he was well studied and committed to the role; there were to be no more translation slip-ups. He rewrote the Lord's Prayer in his "native" alphabet, which actually borrowed from Greek, Hebrew, and a few other languages Psalmanazar had picked up along the way (Stagl, 174). He did not wash or cook his food. He invented centuries' worth of culture on the spot and, having said a thing was so, never contradicted it again. He was to regret often the momentary absent-mindedness that produced the statistically impossible chestnut about eighteen thousand annual sacrifices, but he never went back on a bit of minutiae about his assumed homeland. This was apparently less a pathological compulsion than a mark of personal pride. He had his detractors, of course. Bishop Gilbert Burnet once entreated Psalmanazar to prove that he was Formosan and not, say, Chinese. (The fact that Psalmanazar did not look even vaguely Asian should give the reader an idea of how smooth his overall course was; the people he was trying to fool knew nothing.) Psalmanazar reminded the company that he had been forced to flee the country, and had not obtained any letters of identification; he then calmly asked how the bishop would prove his own English citizenship were he to travel to Formosa in similar circumstances, since he looked as Dutch as any Hollandaise the island had ever done business with. Burnet had no answer (Stagl, 183). Psalmanazar handled nearly every challenge just as deftly; when someone, apparently better informed than most, asked the pretender to explain his white skin, he explained that men and women of his social class lived underground, and never spent enough time in the sun to grow tan. But what about your chimneys? the inquirer said. They twist and turn, Psalmanazar told him, so that the sunlight never reaches our homes (Aldington, 49). Innes cannot be credited or blamed for this extemporal creative genius; here was the raffish student up to his old tricks, dancing around those who wanted to cut him down to size. The critics one would expect to give Psalmanazar the most difficulty turned out to be the most easily dismissed: the Jesuits. In early eighteenth-century Britain, Jesuits were the favorite cause of all that was wrong with society. Their missionaries had been to Formosa, and they could have gouged a thousand holes in Psalmanazar's story, but he was able to deflect them more or less by reminding his audience that the interrogators were, after all, Jesuits. Psalmanazar derided their clumsy attempts to graft Christianity onto Formosan practices and blamed them for causing unrest on his home island; this demonizing tactic did much to win him sympathy in the eyes of his public. (Incredibly, in Memoirs, where he laments his own "unaccountable pride, folly, and stupid villainy" (55) every few pages, Psalmanazar does not extend much in the way of an apology to the Jesuit community; he retracts specific lies he once told about them, but does not go so far as to ask their forgiveness, or even recognize any validity to their beliefs. Burning religious iconography was something of a lifetime habit for Psalmanazar; in this way, too, he was still very much the schoolboy.) Lurid stories of cannibalism, polygamy, bloody sacrifice and religious struggle kept Europe listening. An Historical and Geographic Description of Formosa, An Island subject to the Emperor of Japan was reprinted in multiple editions and translations across Europe; it was taken as an imperishable reference work despite the fact that its very title contradicted the one thing most Europeans thought they knew about the island. (Psalmanazar once said that the Japanese controlled Formosa. In fact it was the Chinese, but once the thing was said, it could never be retracted, and so Psalmanazar bold-facedly informed everyone, including missionaries who had lived there, that they were wrong.) His fame was undeniable; in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, you will find a half-jest referring the reader to "famous Psalmanazar" as the man to ask about cannibalism (Stagl, 202). He went to Oxford for six months; his assignment was to teach missionaries the language. Records differ on how many lectures he actually gave, but there is a delicious sort of irony in the image when one recalls Psalmanazar's criticism of his own education as "unintelligible stuff" "sooner forgot than learned"! In fact, Oxford represented something of a turning point for the young charlatan. A fire seems to have gone out. Perhaps he saw in himself the things that made his own boyhood so unbearable, or perhaps (more likely) it was the fact that when he returned to London, Alexander Innes had left for greener pastures. The new Chaplain General of the British division in Portugal, Innes had gotten the career boost he'd wanted out of a sensational heathen-turned-Anglican and was now ready to leave before the charade imploded (Stagl, 185). With Innes gone, Psalmanazar lost direction, and while he still maintained his story - remember, never go back - his fend-offs of skeptics and satirists grew increasingly halfhearted. By 1720 or thereabouts, the noble savage had dropped off most people's radar screens. Psalmanazar tried his hands at a number of disciplines but found the prospect of steady employment no more exciting than he had as a teenager. He lived off charity for some time, going to lengths to obscure his celebrity. He kept close counsel with few people. He did not speak of Formosa. He lived quietly, and eventually, by the evidence of history, his conscience began to bother him. The unexpected third act of Psalmanazar's life is the least interesting but possibly the most revealing. By the age of fifty or so, he had turned back to publishing. A lot of what he did was anonymous translating and binding, but he had a few minor works that were and are still considered respectable pieces of scholarship: writings on the Old Testament, etymology, and the peculiar nonaffiliated spiritualism that he evidently found late in life. Similar in some respects to Methodism, it is this relationship to God and the unseen world that informs much of Memoirs. That by itself would not be proof enough, of course, but Psalmanazar is documented as having performed many unprompted acts of charity in his declining years, and Samuel Johnson, with whom he became friends toward the end, described him as "the best man whom he had ever got to know" (Stagl, 187). His embrace of religion, though admittedly late-hour, appears genuine. There is one more piece to the denouement of George Psalmanazar. Work began amongst a group of scholars in 1736 on a massive encyclopedic compendium, the Universal History, later described by one scholar as the "first world history which at least to some degree merits its name" (Stagl, 186). It was a titanic undertaking to which British historians were still referring well into the twentieth century, and not a few of the entries - including the history of Judaism, the particulars of ethnography, and some statistics on the far-distant island of Formosa - came from one G. Psalmanazar. They were modest, sober pieces, and they were as factually accurate as anything written at the time could have been. There is little else to tell. George Psalmanazar died on May 3, 1763. He was given a pauper's burial as per his request, not that he could have afforded much else, and his passing did not make headlines. Things were quiet for a few months, and then the dead man's maid found a manuscript locked in his desk drawer. The title was Memoirs of ****, and the last reinvention of the boy from Laungedoc was complete. 6. What was George Psalmanazar? We cannot ask "who." He no longer exists as a person, if he ever did, but as a kind of possibilities frontier. It would be almost impossible to do today what he did in 1704: arrive from nowhere, invent a life from the ground up, and leave no clues as to one's real identity. We can only feel around his character for seams that might let us understand him. The kindest thing one can say about Psalmanazar is that he was irrepressibly creative. Certainly he was a liar, but if his prevarications were intended to bring him wealth and fame, then he was, for most of his life, a very bad one. It seems more likely, though, that this was never the plan at all. Memoirs of ****, for all its autocastigation, is a self-serving book, but the constant reader of memoir eventually develops an ear for when the author is offering nothing but the truth, and this passage struck at least one reader as the real article: "[Innes] had at least more worldly prudence than I, in that he laid the foundation for some considerable preferment of himself; whilst I, like the stupid abandoned wretch I had been hitherto, looked no farther than a little vain satisfaction for the present, or, at most a deliverance from the soldier's life" (Psalmanazar, 156). That Psalmanazar enjoyed commanding people's attention, at least as a young man, there can be little doubt. Greater dreams of notoriety seem to have escaped his notice. From the beginning he was a restless dreamer who would much rather weave and wear fictions than suffer the mundane niceties of life. He was not dissociative or delusional, as best we can tell: "I seldom found myself at a loss for a quick answer, which, if satisfactory, I stored up in my retentive memory." By contemporary psychological standards, his behavior was not distressful, dysfunctional, or dangerous in the classic sense; it could be seen as deviant, but it is awfully easy to sympathize with. Today's analysts would call Psalmanazar's behavior this side of sane. At no point was he not fully aware of what he was doing: playing an elaborate and at times euphoric game with life. This account of his early days of vagary provides perhaps the clearest look at the manically inventive young man who would one day tell all of Europe that what it thought it knew was wrong. Éhad I the least propensity to provide for hereafter, I might easily have saved a good deal of money, and put myself in a much more creditable garb, before I had gone through a score or two of miles; but such was my vanity and extravagance, that as soon as I had got what I thought a sufficient viaticum, I begged no more, but viewed every thing worth seeing, then retired to some inn, where I spent my money as freely as I got it...(100) It should be noted that the thing at which Psalmanazar most excelled in his life, and the only thing he ever pursued with any real enthusiasm or flair, was writing about journeys: first a description of an imagined island, then various histories of major concepts, then a travelogue of his tetherless life through miles and identities, all of which are all, hundreds of years later, compulsively readable. Even his description of religious rapture in Memoirs's prologue feels like a guidebook: this is what you will see when you accept God; this is what will happen; this is the price you will have to pay. In his blithe rejection of institutions, money, and responsibility, George Psalmanazar exercised a degree of control over his own life that would be virtually impossible today. Were he alive in 2004, he would most likely be in some field that would allow him to "view every thing worth seeing"; he would be an out-of-work poet, or a struggling novelist...or a travel writer. Surely his life was lonely, and marked by uncertainty and hunger, but that seems to have been the way he liked it. History tries to capture as much as it can, but Psalmanazar executed a daring jailbreak. He has left behind a life of idiom and possibility, an afterimage of searing kinetic creativity, a narrative at once tragic and comic whose central character was moving too fast to notice. WORKS CITED Aldington, Richard. Frauds. Windmill Press, Great Britain, 1957. Aldington does not even bother with a pretense of impartiality -- his distrust of Psalmanazar is evident on every page -- but he's still a good read. La Farge, Paul. "Idiots!: How Someone Else Wrote Blaise Cendrars's Classic 1926 Novel," The Believer, vol. 2, issue 9. Psalmanazar, George. An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, An Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan. Giving an Account of the Religion, Customs, Manners &c. of the Inhabitant. Reprinted as Vol. II of the Library of Imposters (N.M. Penzer, ed.), Hazell, Watson & Viney Ld., London, 1926. The watermark of the Library of Imposters is beyond description. Psalmanazar, George. Memoirs of **** Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar, A Reputed Native of Formosa. Publisher and year unknown, but the edition I found was positively ancient -- I was afraid to exhale too sharply while reading it. Stagl, Justin. A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550-1800. Harwood Academic Publishers, Chur, 1995. A really good book, actually. http://www.wikipedia.org. Support your local wiki. http://www.mcsweeneys.net. Support your local independent publishing house. Special thanks to Paul Collins for inspiration, awesome writing, and actually responding to my e-mail.