Con Mandarin

By Stuart Schoffman

HERMIT OF PEKING: THE HIDDEN LIFE OF SIR

EDMUND BACKHOUSE

by HUGH TREVOR-ROPER

316 pages. Knopf. $ 10.

Oscar Wilde sometimes complained of historians who had fallen into "careless habits of accuracy." He would have relished the work of the British recluse Edmund Backhouse, celebrated in his day (1873-1944) for his translations from the Chinese and his vast Sinological contributions to Oxford's Bodleian Library. The Backhouse oeuvre is filled with an amalgam of profound insight, scholarship and, it now appears, pornography; all it lacks is a single component: truth.

That ingredient can be found throughout Hermit of Peking, a model of historical detective work. The unfailingly literate sleuth is Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler and The Rise of Christian Europe, who has ventured far from his customary turf. In 1973, Trevor-Roper came upon two volumes of unpublished memoirs by Sir Edmund. The work appeared so outrageous, so incongruent with the accepted character of the author--it chronicled, in obscene detail, his amours with Chinese eunuchs and such European celebrities as Poet Paul Verlaine --that Trevor-Roper felt compelled to investigate the Backhouse background.

Sir Edmund's autobiography scarcely seemed an ironclad source, so Trevor-Roper conducted his hunt elsewhere: in dusty Foreign Office records, in letters now reposing in Toronto, in files of U.S. and British companies. The expose searched for an aberrant scholar and turned up a consummate rogue. Trapped by bad debts, Backhouse had dropped out of Oxford. In 1898 he showed up in China with faked references; 15 years later he shipped the Bodleian some 17,000 volumes of chinoiserie; later he contributed 18 manuscripts that were blatant forgeries and promised other treasures that did not exist. During World War I, as a sub rosa operative, he embroiled high British officials and even the King in a plot to procure from neutral China at least 200,000 rifles. They never materialized. A few years later, he flimflammed an American firm that sought to print banknotes for the Chinese.

And then came one of the grandest scams of all. In 1910, Backhouse and J.O.P. Bland, a London Times China watcher, published China under the Empress Dowager. The memoir was based on the diary of Ching-shan, a fin de siecle Manchu courtier. Backhouse claimed to have found this trove of gossip and intelligence in its author's house during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The diary became the jewel of the Oxford collection; scholars may have debated its authenticity, but hardly a soul dared suggest that Backhouse himself had written it. Now Trevor-Roper, revealing for the first time the backdrop of quiet scandals that made up Backhouse's life, concludes that the Sinologist was one of the greatest forgers of all time. His memoirs too were made of whole cloth, the lubricious dreams of a suppressed old Victorian.

Glib, gracious, consistent to the end in his lavish fabrications, Backhouse retired with honors and became a snobbish recluse. "While his successive victims sank spluttering in his wake," writes his biographer, Backhouse "sat benign, complacent . . . like some heaven-protected sage in a Chinese tale." The motive? Backhouse reaped barely a farthing from his lies. Perhaps it was his admiration for the elaborate academic joke: his Chinese aristocrats mouth an aphorism of Talleyrand's and the last words of Catherine of Aragon. Or maybe, muses Trevor-Roper, "it was mere love of fame." The book is enhanced by this unwillingness to speculate; only the flat pronouncement that Backhouse was sane seems questionable.

Hermit of Peking is the best sort of psychohistory--free of jargon and clinical categories. Among its many rewards is an opulent commentary on the decadence of Manchu China--and of the Europe that produced a generation of jaded would-be aesthetes. For lagniappe, Trevor-Roper tosses out a disturbing suggestion: How many other pathological liars have left scholars--and readers--with fraudulent documents long since accepted as fact?

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