A Genuine Fake

THE GREAT FORGERY (501 pp.)--Edith Simon--Little, Brown ($5.95).

Matthew Gorer is a painter, but there has been no one like him since Joyce Gary's Gulley Jimson. Savage, idealistic, scruffy and lecherous, Gorer is at once a fiercely dedicated man with the humility of a prostrate priest and the arrogance that the world imposes on a neglected seer.

Scrounging Hell. The reader meets Gorer in London shortly before World War II on the night that he seduces Cassy Beaumont, which is the night that his unsuccessful one-man show closes. The teen-age daughter of an English father and a West Indian mother, Cassy is so pleased with the quasi rape and the beating that Gorer gives her afterward that she soon moves in with him. Their life together is the scrounging, violent hell without which she would have been disappointed. And Gorer keeps on painting, and cursing and talking--lewdly, sharply, wisely--and grabbing any woman who comes within his surprising reach. Commissioned by a genteel millionaire named Hanshawe to restore a mural in his country house, Gorer uses his idle time to seduce Mrs. Hanshawe. But this time Gorer gets his comeuppance. For Hanshawe retaliates by luring Cassy away from Gorer and marries her.

Lonely, embittered by disregard, Gorer decides to revenge himself on the world in one fell swipe. He sets out to forge a Holbein. The forgery is successful, critics hail the new discovery, and the picture is sold for 40,000 guineas. Then Gorer triumphantly reveals that he forged the painting.

The Maggots. Haled into court for fraud, Matthew Gorer does not defend himself; instead, he lectures the court and the public on the arid conventionality of a society that accepts art only if it has been certified by recognized authorities. "So to show you what's going on I set about painting a picture which everyone would praise without fail, for all the wrong reasons. I wanted to show up the pundits and the cranks, the speculators and the snobs, the whole bunch of maggots."

The court is properly unmoved, and Gorer is sent to prison for a year. Gorer fails, too, to make the pundits say why a "masterpiece" with a certain signature becomes worthless when the signature is changed.

This question was raised and left unanswered in actuality by the postwar trial of Holland's Han van Meegeren for forging Vermeers--the case that prompted Edith Simon to write this novel. The 44-year-old wife of a University of Edinburgh don, Author Simon was born in Berlin of German parents, did not learn English until her parents moved to Britain when she was 14. Since then, she has published ten books in English, ranging from a distinguished study of the Knights Templars to The Golden Hand, a novel of 14th century England that ranks with the finest historical fiction of this century. Altogether, Edith Simon's works comprise a virtuoso display of versatility.

Lost Ballast. Long, fascinating, witty, sometimes hilarious, The Great Forgery is a comedy only in the ironic sense. Years after, Hanshawe and Cassy visit the old man, who is holed up in a rackety studio like a frowsty old terrier. After a few obscene remarks to his ex-mistress, the irrepressible Gorer turns on the millionaire with defiant, mocking scorn: "You make your pile, and with it on your backs you know you'll never again get airborne. But old Gorer, he's got rid of all that ballast. At least you can come and watch him fly--wheee! thar he goes--! Ah! How you love me, how you envy me and hate me and therefore trust me utterly, when you come here and reassure yourselves that I've got absolutely nothing out of a lifetime's single-minded dedication!"

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