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By Clifford Irving

.Publisher: terrificbooks.com

.Number Of Pages: 403

.Publication Date: 1999

.ISBN-10 / ASIN: B0006R7OO2

.ISBN-13 / EAN:

We've all heard the story of the biggest literary hoax of all time - such a mind-boggling story that it tends to overshadow the work itself. Clifford Irving's "Autobiography of Howard Hughes" never made it to print in 1971, which is a shame, because it's a damn good read. We finally know this because some 10 years ago Irving made the book available for Buy It at Lowest Price on Amazon

download on his website, for the modest sum of $5.95. And if you read it - minus the context of the story behind its creation - you can't help but be enthralled. Let's just say that it's a hundred times the book Howard himself would have written.

We have a worldly and successful man, with his fingers in everything, who tells his story and tries to make sense of his life. He doesn't entirely understand his afflictions - the obsessive-compulsive disorder, his isolation and everything else - but he's honest enough to tell us about it. And he speaks with a consistent voice throughout. It all makes sense. Irving himself is a character in the book, posing questions that frequently challenge Hughes, and spinning a yarn of his clandestine and secretive meetings. I've read several books about Hughes, among them the Noah Dietrich biography from which this book borrows many of its facts. (It hadn't been published at the time Irving turned in his manuscript.) And I have to say that the Irving version is the most compelling of them all. Of course, you'd expect that - because so much of it is Irving's own fantasy, and he is a novelist, after all. But still. I should point out one bonehead mistake - Hughes tells an anecdote of his childhood, at age six or seven, in which he was playing in the garage, fiddling with a radio. Ahem. This would have been approximately 1912, when radios were enormous and expensive things used mainly for morse-code ship-to-shore communications. Radio broadcasting didn't start until the twenties. Though Hughes' wealthy father was mechanically minded, it's kind of hard to believe that he would have had a radio, that it would have been left in the garage, and that young Hughes would have been allowed to fiddle with it. And then we have Irving's less-obvious inventions - like Hughes' friendship with Ernest Hemingway, who would have been ten years in the grave at the time Irving submitted the manuscript, and unable to challenge the story - the sort of thing where we have to say, well, it could have happened that way. Hughes has a long-term affair with a mysterious woman named Helga - well, maybe that could have happened, too. And naturally we have to be suspicious of the parts where Hughes describes his first sexual experiences and so forth - these sorts of stories aren't the sort that Irving might have found in an old newspaper clipping file somewhere, and no doubt were baldfaced fabrications. But so much of the story is true that we can only be astonished at Irving's research. This book couldn't have been easy to write. If Irving had changed the names and turned his book into a roman a clef, we'd be able to see it in an entirely different light. So how should we regard the book? As fact-based fiction? A new sort of literary experiment? Or should we simply dismiss it as so many have done over the years, as the product of an enormous hoax? Irving's criminal intentions aside, I am inclined to regard his book as a sort of literary invention - a experiment in biography, sort of like the more recent biographies of Ronald Reagan and Ted Kennedy that have gotten so much derision in the press, because they mingle fiction and fact, treat the subjects' lives with a novelist's approach, and challenge our notions of the form. Irving published his book between hard covers a few years ago, but the book has fallen out of print, which explains why copies now sell for hundreds of dollars. Only his website makes the book accessible. Pity that no one saw fit to give it a wide release when the film "The Aviator" came out, or later, "The Hoax" - interest in Hughes and Irving's book no doubt peaked at that point. The book has merit; it deserves better than the obscurity in which it languishes, and someday ought to return to print.

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