[I can't remember when, or indeed why, this was first published. I'm not even sure who Carl Stensson is. But here it is anyway...]
Lucas de Boer is dead. No honestly, he is. Certifiably dead. I have a framed copy of the death certificate on my wall, signed by four respectable doctors, the victim’s wife and his mistress (the latter of whom would certainly not have mistaken his body for anyone else’s).
Trust me: Lucas de Boer is dead. But no, I won’t put any money on it. I’ve seen the body, comforted the mourning women (someone’s got to do it), taken home the funeral cold meats for my daughter’s birthday party, received my share from the will (his Maurice Orbęz first editions, if you must know) and placed a bouquet of half-price lilies beside the gravestone. I’ll tell you again: Lucas de Boer is very much dead. But no, I still won’t put any money on it. It’s not that I don’t feel certain: it’s just that I can’t. Call me a cynic, but I stopped believing in certainty at the age of six.
It was around this same time that de Boer died – for the first time. I was on holiday with my family in Northern Denmark. My father announced the news at breakfast, reading the obituary with what seemed to me to be a manic grin. My brother and I – unsure of who de Boer was in the first place – thought little of it. But my father was clearly adamant that we should, taking us aside that afternoon and forcing us to engage with the details. De Boer was a young writer, he told us. He had, it transpired, only written one book, but it was an important one – and the critics had been mildly impressed. The book was political in nature but also, said my father, ‘full of youthful exuberance’. My brother and I nodded, but we still weren’t much interested. This de Boer person was no superhero, not even a minor one. In fact, as a writer, he was about as far away from a superhero as we could have imagined. ‘How did he die?’ asked my brother, shortly, no doubt in the hope that this dull story might have a suitably gory ending. As it turned out, it did. De Boer had shot himself through the head, revealed our father. ‘Did he not like himself?’ asked my brother. ‘Oh, sure he liked himself’ replied our father – ‘He killed himself for political reasons’. My brother and I caught each other’s eyes. We both knew that politics was an Important Thing, if not Deeply Significant – but neither of us had ever imagined that someone would shoot themselves on its behalf. We were stunned. Father, however, merely laughed.
A couple of hours later we were summoned to the car. We were going on an ‘adventure’ said father. Mother was staying behind – which was in itself promising (for love her as we did, we all knew that mother wouldn’t be much help to anyone in an adventure). Where this adventure was going to take place we weren’t told, but we had high hopes nevertheless, which were in no way lessened when our father began to lecture us as the journey started. In no way, he said, were we to reveal to anyone what we were going to see that evening. We nodded solemnly, before taking an oath. Over my dead body, we chanted in unison, will we tell anyone about anything. And so it was.
Half an hour later we stepped out of the car onto a gravel drive. A large beach ball of a man in a badly fitted suit came to meet us. My father greeted him and they conversed alone for a minute or two. At first the fat man looked angry, pointing to us and shaking his chubby little head. After a while, however, his expression lightened. At this point, my father turned around to us and said ‘Meet your Uncle Alain’, whereupon we were clasped tight to the fat man’s cushion-like stomach, in whose folds we both feared we might lose ourselves. We did not bother to question why it was we had never been told about Uncle Alain before – we merely accepted our father’s word, collecting the queries like coppers in the piggy banks of our mind, ready to be released at an appropriate juncture.
Me and my brother now followed our father and his brother across the gravel, around the side of a large cream house and into an extremely large garden. On one of the many terraced levels, there were several very elderly men sitting about on white garden furniture. Elsewhere in the garden younger men walked around, involved in serious discussion of some sort. ‘Welcome to hell,’ said our uncle, asking us whether we would appreciate a glass of lemonade. ‘How about molten lava?’ said my brother – always the first to crack a joke. My uncle laughed like a broken trombone. Personally, I was not overly sure what was going on, but I accepted the offer of lemonade – and sat down promptly upon the freshly cut grass, waiting to see what was going to happen next.
The lemonade arrived accompanied by a young man – probably in his mid-twenties. All the while my father was grinning like a street urchin; my uncle like a clownish oaf. The young man, on the other hand, was not smiling. Or was he? It was hard to tell under that messy beard of his.
‘Meet Lucas’ said my uncle. I shook the young man’s hand. My brother did the same. ‘Lucas de Boer, that is’ added my father. My brother and I looked at each other, not exactly sure how we were meant to react. Lucas de Boer? What was that supposed to mean? Did this guy just have the same name as that guy who had died, or was it the same guy? Maybe it was a ghost. But did ghosts exist? There wasn’t much to go by, but he did at least look like a writer who might want to hang himself. In fact, he didn’t look far off being a dead man altogether. But who were we to know?
Over the next fifteen minutes or so, however, things became a little less opaque. Slowly but surely our uncle explained to us the basics of what it was that was going on. Needless to say, we hung like clothes pegs onto his every word. I used to wonder why it was that my uncle and father took such enjoyment from revealing the set-up to two little boys – now I think I know.
The whole thing was nothing but a little boy’s dream really, simply one that had been put into practice by grown men. As such, we were the best audience for it – though we naturally missed out on some of the nuances. My contact with the literary world, as already noted, was at this time light. The same applied to the art world. Thus when I was introduced to the three elderly men sitting nearby, I was at first a little less impressed than I ought to have been. But the idea struck me straightaway. It was common trickery on a grand scale. It was a joke (comedy) about death (tragedy). It was a simple concept, pulled off remarkably well. Lucas de Boer, pronounced dead by that morning’s newspapers, was sitting beside me, with the same newspaper on his lap, re-reading his own obituary in a comic cartoon voice. I was too young to see the cruel crust of the joke. It was pure jam-centred hilarity. He was dead, but he wasn’t. And yet they thought he was. ‘What’s more’ said my uncle ‘He’s going to make a fat wad of cash from this. I’ll bet his novel has already sold more copies today than the whole of the last year’. To which my brother and I smiled, just like everyone else. Fat wad of cash. Now there was a tasty phrase.
The story of Lucas de Boer’s first faked death is of course no longer news. The man himself wrote about it later on, shortly after his second faked death in 1987. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t stay true to the facts, but then he wasn’t claiming to write an autobiography. The End, The End, The End was always meant to be a novel, only loosely based on the truth (or, as the book’s cover had it, ‘the truth about lies’). It was a watered down version of events: a satirical romp disguised as an exposé. And naturally, it was centred on the figure of de Boer himself – or his fictional counterpart, at least – the cheeky Franz van Müder. So though it revealed the nature of Uncle Alain’s ‘business’ in all its disgusting glory – it nevertheless remained only a version of the truth. De Boer was, after all, never the slightest bit interested in ‘truth’. For him, there were only two things worth pursuing in life: Comedy and Money. ‘It doesn’t matter how badly you behave’ he once said, ‘so long as you can make people laugh, you’ll be forgiven’. And as much as I dislike this advice, I find it hard to deny. Having lied about his death twice, de Boer did not die – for the third and last time – a hated man. By turning all of his deceitfulness into comedy, he somehow saved himself from mass detestation. He also made more than a fat wad of cash along the way.
However, I must refrain from giving the man too much credit. He learned his craft, after all, from other people. He was not alone in faking his death; nor was he the only success story. He was simply the only one who went public with his deceit: a decision which quite rightly cut him off from his peers. My Uncle Alain had rules, to which de Boer did not keep. The joke was meant to have a single punch line: de Boer gave it several, making it a different joke altogether. Therefore, though he owed his career to my uncle, he was not my uncle’s product. When I met him at the age of six, he was just one of the many: the latest addition to a large group. Later on, he became his own product – defacing my uncle’s handiwork in the meanwhile.
‘I learnt all that I know from Van Gogh’
Spoken by Franz van Müder in The End, The End, The End, this line is no more than de Boer’s sentiment filtered through another mouthpiece. They are also much misunderstood words, as I well know. Generally speaking, they have been interpreted broadly as referring to de Boer’s artistic ambitions: his desire to break boundaries; maybe even his brief (pre-meditated) flirtation with Christianity in the early 90s. This is hardly surprising – after all, how many artists have expressed admiration for Van Gogh? Unless you’re a millipede, don’t try and count them on your fingers. The comment is certainly un-shocking enough not to demand further explanation. Unless, that is, you had been where I was and seen what I saw in my uncle’s garden in Denmark at the age of six.
Van Gogh was more than a sight to behold. I have yet to come across a more skeletal body outside of a morgue. My brother and I hardly knew what to do. We feared that if we shook his hand it might fall off in front of us. His artistic reputation meant nothing to us; but hell were we impressed by his ghoulish looks. And yet, he was no monster. In fact, as it transpired, he was a rather jovial old fellow. So his hearing wasn’t so good (naturally) and he could barely move his limbs, but heavens he knew how to talk. After all, what did he have to complain about? He had had an extremely successful life. The first part of it had been testing, fair enough, but following his ‘death’ things had run pretty smoothly. All thanks, as it turned out, to my grandfather. It was from him, after all, that my uncle had inherited the skills integral to his ‘business’. He was the source of all the trouble: Van Gogh his first lucrative pupil. And what a pupil! Things could hardly have worked out better. And, as Van Gogh was fond of arguing, it was a plan in which there were few losers, except perhaps the value of ‘truth’. He was granted a second life in a quiet house in Denmark, his board and lodging paid for by money received from those in on the hoax. Meanwhile, the world was given a good story, to which many people still cling like limpets. Ah, you say, but what about Vincent’s brother Theo? Surely he lost out? On the contrary, he was my grandfather’s second pupil; his death having been manufactured only months after his brother’s. Theo died at the age of seventy five – years before I was in on the act – but he had many years of happiness before this.
Truth be told, there were few if any failures. The ‘deaths’ were almost always perfectly managed. On the odd occasion an artist’s career failed to take off after this vital kick, but usually they had little to complain of. My grandfather was always happy to take the financial burden of his failures. At the same time, he had built up an attractive community of artists at his house such as any young fellow would wish to join, regardless of the consequences. Who would not kill himself to join such company as Van Gogh?
At the risk of ruining your day, I will not reveal all the figures I met that day – or even those who were to join my uncle’s extended family in the near future. Neither shall I lose the respect of my family by revealing to you the dark secrets surrounding the manner in which so many deaths were faked. Fascinating as they are, I will leave these revelations aside for another day. Sufficed to say, I do not even know all the details myself. My grandfather passed on the business to my uncle. My father, whilst not unconnected, was in the main uninvolved. My visit to the fabled Danish house as a six year old was in fact my only visit. I never saw Van Gogh again (he was to die shortly after my visit, anyway, at the age of ninety nine) nor his two elderly friends, who introduced themselves as Amedeo and Henri – and who turned out to be the artists Modigliani and Gaudier-Brzeska. I heard of them from time to time, but I never returned to that house.
The young man with a beard, however, I was to see again. For Lucas de Boer, as I have noted, was never prepared to honour the rules of my uncle’s business. Having ‘died’, the idea was that the pupils would effectively retire from life, living out the rest of their days in the Danish mansion. This, however, was too much for de Boer. He enjoyed dying far too much the first time around. He wanted to die again.
And so he escaped from my uncle’s mansions and went out into the world. Not only into the world, but into society. He was back, with a vengeance – which came as somewhat of a surprise to all of those who’d thought he’d blown his brains out. ‘Blown my brains out?’ answered de Boer, ‘whatever gave you that idea?’ They handed him the newspapers, the funeral programme and the art journal articles. ‘Fancy that’ said de Boer, with a smile. ‘And yet, here I am’. And here he was – no one could argue with that. In fact, he was more than just ‘here’. He was here, there and everywhere. No one could even try and deny his existence. Nor could they work out exactly what had happened. For now, at least, de Boer was revealing nothing. And though trickery was, of course, expected – and de Boer repeatedly denounced for it – it made little effect to his appeal. He was writing more than ever, with more and more success. Just as his death had paid off, so had his return from death. His 1975 novel, Garden of Heathens, sold close to a million copies. Enough to satisfy its author? Almost…
All that was left for de Boer was to die again. This he did in 1987, when he was run over by London bus. His squashed body was pulled out from under the vehicle in front of many witnesses, none of whom were prepared to doubt the reality of his death. This was it, people thought: now he really is dead. So out came all the obituaries again; his novels were reprinted and the critics attempted to arrange his messy life into some sort of pattern. Eight months passed and even I was beginning to believe that de Boer had actually died this time. Then one day he reappeared at his publishers, holding the first draft of The End, The End, The End. The third – and maybe even the most profitable – life of Lucas de Boer had begun.
Had he taken it too far? My uncle had long since broken off all contact with him. He was threatening to ruin the business, stretching the system as far as it could possibly go. It is for reason that I suspect that my father did not entirely dislike him. To a certain extent, the same applies to me. For all his natural charm, de Boer was a thoroughly unpleasant man: selfish, immoral and repugnantly flamboyant. Wicked as he was, however, he at least had the advantage of being in many ways unbeatable. In some senses, he was the greatest and, as such, the last. He was reprehensible to the point of disallowing future deceit. By taking fake death to an entirely new level, he threatened – and arguably succeeded – in destroying it. He was therefore both the pioneer and opponent of the same business. Was this deliberate? It may well have been.
This theory comes with personal parallels. I have already questioned why it was that my father chose to take me and my brother to see Uncle Alain that day. I suggested that he thought we would, little boys as we were, appreciate the joke. This may have been part of it. But I also believe that he was trying to teach us a lesson. He had promised us an ‘adventure’. What we got was, I believe, a ‘moral adventure’. After all, had not my father rejected the opportunity to join the business when he was younger? It may have made him laugh once or twice – but did he completely agree with it? No – he had his doubts, I am sure of it. He wasn’t going to blow his brother’s cover, but he wasn’t necessarily on his side. This is why I believe that he gave us – his dear sons – the opportunity to see it for ourselves. He was challenging us to do what he was himself too scared to do. This is never more evident than in the ironic and knowing phrase he asked us to repeat in the car beforehand: ‘over my dead body’. In light of what we were about to see, there was surely a double meaning concealed here, inviting us confront what it was we thought at first we ought to conceal. This is surely why we never returned to the Mansion of the Dead; either our father thought the lesson was over, or our uncle suspected that the visit was not worth repeating.[1]
My response to this moral adventure is to some extent laid out in this article, though it is clear that I am in many ways too late. Suggestions as to the existence of my grandfather and uncle’s ‘business venture’ were initially provoked by Lucas de Boer’s novel The End, The End, The End. Though this told only half of the story, it still went further than I was prepared to go at that time. That de Boer should have been the one to blow the cover on the system to which he owed so much is typical. He was born to bite the hand that was feeding him. However, he did leave out some facts, a fair proportion of which I have readdressed here, in particular the relevance of his references to Van Gogh. On the other hand, I too have left out some facts. The time has not yet come for the ultimate truth.
Indeed, that which I have revealed might be said to have less to do at this point with my desire to expose my family’s dirty dealings than to clear up problems relating to the specific nature of Lucas de Boer’s life. This article is, in the end, about him. It is a tribute to him, compulsive liar and cheat that he was. I would even go so far to say that it is written in memory of him, dead man that he is – but no, I still won’t be putting any money on it. Goodness knows, he may yet be living. He is at least the age in which a natural death could have occurred (he would have been seventy seven today) but then you can never be too sure. De Boer was always far too fond of testing the limits, of stretching the boundaries, of layering up the ironies on top of each other. For this reason, he was abhorrently untrustworthy: the arch-enemy of truth. And yet, there is much to admire in his recklessness, not least the suspicion that through constantly riding the system, he was in fact secretly destroying it. After all, though he himself faked his death two times, he was yet the first man to reveal that such things had been done by many others. Either you could say that his burgeoning ego got the better of him, or you could argue that deep below the surface he saw the immorality of his actions and, by playing them up, led them on the path to eventual self-destruction. Sufficed to say that we will probably never let another artist fake his death two times. De Boer truly was the worst, the best and, I hope, the last. Rest in Peace – it’s about time you did.
[1] Interestingly enough, my brother and I seem to have responded in different ways, just as my father and his brother did before us. Where I have followed my father in remaining suspicious of the family business, my brother (Eric Stensson) has never shown any such reluctance. As many of you may know, he was arrested last year for trying to pass off his own manuscript as an original novel by Tolstoy. Needless to say, careless planning ensured that no one much was fooled by More War and Peace. Where he may have inherited the desire to fool people, it seems that my brother has not inherited the talent required to do so.
By Carl Stensson.
Further Reading:
