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Clifford Irving: I've known Elmyr for about eight years. We met when I was broke. When I was writing fiction. I wasn't selling it very well.
Orson Welles: His fiction didn't sell. Elmyr's biographer's a highly gifted writer. Does it say something for this age of ours that he could only make it big by fakery?
Elmyr de Hory: Le grande surprise!
Orson Welles: Cliff Irving's caper may well be the hoax of the century, but, really, this is not, you know, in any way the century of the hoax. We hanky-panky men have always been with you.
Elmyr de Hory: That's a fact.
Orson Welles: What's new?
Clifford Irving: The experts.
Elmyr de Hory: The so-called experts...
Orson Welles: Experts are the new oracles.
Elmyr de Hory: - are greatly pretentious...
Orson Welles: They speak to us with the absolute authority of the computer.
Elmyr de Hory: - pretend to know something what they only know very superficially.
Orson Welles: And we bow down before them. They're God's own gift to the faker.
Clifford Irving: All the world loves to see the experts and the establishment made a fool of.
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Orson Welles: With your permission, a bit of verse by Kipling: When first the flush of a new-born sun fell on the green and gold / Our father Adam sat under the tree and scratched with a stick in the mold / And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart / Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, 'It's pretty, but is it Art?'
Laurence Harvey
Extended Reading
