Daniel James, The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, Dead Ink, 2018.
https://www.danieljameswriter.com/
Compelling and suspenseful, The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is the story of a journalist searching for the truth about a reclusive artist through 60 years of unreality. A chilling literary labyrinth, the book combines postmodern noir with pseudo-biography, letters, phone transcripts, emails and newspaper clippings. Ezra Maas is dead. The famously reclusive artist vanished without a trace seven years ago while working on his final masterpiece, but his body was never found. While the Maas Foundation prepares to announce his death, journalist Daniel James finds himself hired to write the untold story of the artist's life. But this is no ordinary book. The deeper James delves into the myth, the more he is drawn into a nightmarish world of fractured identities and sinister doubles, where art and reality have become dangerously blurred…
“A brilliant, genre-defying debut novel from a major new talent… a haunting and enigmatic noir and a stylish, multi-layered biography… a future classic.” – Bryan Talbot
Ezra Maas is one of the most significant artists of the 20thcentury, winning a whole raft of awards and critical acclaim. An enigmatic figure he is often likened to JD Salinger due to his reclusive nature. He is also entirely fictional. This novel – the debut from local author Daniel James – might initially put you in mind of William Boyd’s ‘Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960’, a book in which the Scottish author pranked several art world ponces who believed Tate to be a real person. This book, however, is a much more ambitious affair than Boyd’s rather slight effort. Here we get chunks of biographical detail on Maas, as well as an account of Daniel James’ investigations into his life (“Daniel James” the character, rather than Daniel James the author), as well as oral histories, transcripts and more. The whole noir-ish tale is pulled down several rabbit holes and viewed through multiple halls of mirrors and comes over like a literary equivalent of Orson Welles’ ‘F is for Fake’. Which is a very good thing. - www.thecrackmagazine.com/view-editorial/6082
Daniel James, 35, from Whitley Bay, will release The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas in November this year through publishers Dead Ink Books. A combination of fact and fiction, the book tells the story of a journalist searching for the truth about artist Ezra Maas, who vanished without a trace more than seven years ago. He spent five years researching and writing the book.
Scan through the website of The Maas Foundation – “the official representatives of visionary artist Ezra Maas” – and you get scant details about the man himself. It says he was born in England on 1st January 1950, that he’s not represented by any commercial gallery, and you can browse a list of works from 1966 to 2001. After that, it’s like Ezra Maas ceased to exist, gone as quickly as the strands of light that colour The Maas Foundation’s website. For most, that would be the end of the Maas trail.
Yet one night Newcastle-based author Daniel James received an anonymous phone call, challenging him to unravel the Maas mystery. The path Daniel then followed has led him to his debut novel The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, released through Dead Ink Books this month. “I knew immediately that his life would make a great story,” he explains, “but more importantly I was attracted to the way his life intersected fact and fiction.”
The book thus blends biography and post-modern detective elements, following a journalist on the hunt for Maas through a mix of letters, diary entries and phone transcripts. What unfolds is an absorbing and intriguing labyrinth that blurs the line between fact and fiction. What’s the real story behind Ezra Maas? That’s for the intrepid reader to find out. - Eugenie Johnson
http://narcmagazine.com/news-the-unauthorised-biography-of-ezra-maas-by-daniel-james/
What da cover says: Ezra Maas is dead. The famously reclusive artist vanished without a trace seven years ago whilst working on his final masterpiece, but his body was never found. While the Maas foundation prepares to announce his death, journalist Daniel James finds himself lured to write the untold story of the artist’s life – But this is no ordinary book. The deeper James delves into the myth of Ezra Maas, the more he is drawn into a nightmarish world of fractured identities and sinister doubles.
A chilling literary labyrinth, The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas deftly blends postmodern noir with psuedo-biography, letters, phone transcripts, documents, emails and newspaper clippings to create a story like no other before it.
What I says: Are you ready to go down the rabbit hole? Because that is where this book is going to take you! How to describe this book…or even put it in a genre? It is a detective novel, it is both a biography and an autobiography, it is part encyclopedia, it is full of lies and truths and there is no telling which is which, it is nightmarish, a prophecy of sorts, but most of all it is a labyrinth stalked by Ezra Maas…dare you start reading it?
On the day I started this book the following events happened. The Maas Foundation started following me on twitter, a black van parked outside my house and when I walked down the road a blacked out Mercedes slowly followed me.
I have never read anything quite like this, the whole thing is like a puzzle that draws you in and forces you to keep asking questions like, are the typos a clue? Why do some of the chapters not have “End” at the end? Who is Ezra Maas, why can’t I find him on google? Why did Google home stop recognising my voice when I asked questions about Ezra Maas? Who is Daniel James? And who the hell is “Anonymous” the person putting this manuscript together?
The book’s oddness could put a few people off, for me I struggled with the many many footnotes, that is until I realised there was a story in there too. As Shrek says this book is like an onion, it has so many layers. The main chapters are broken up with interviews, phone conversations, emails, and newspaper reports. This has a real positive effect on the book, it gives you time to take in and process what you’ve just read.
You’re never going to get the full story or all of your questions answered during the first read, this book demands you read it again and again, discovering something new each time. The next time I read this I’m going to focus on those chapters with the missing “End”, there must be clue in there.
I’ve gotta say congrats to Dead Ink books for picking up this book, I’ve read 3 of their publications (Sealed by Naomi Booth and The Study Circle by Haroun Khan) and all three have been fantastic.
Don’t be scared, give this book a go as it does what all good books should do, Take you on an adventure! - felcherman.wordpress.com/2019/04/21/the-unauthorised-biography-of-ezra-maas-by-daniel-james/
“This book is dangerous. You need to know that before you begin.”The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, by Daniel James, is an attempt by the journalist author to discover the truth behind the cult like persona of a reclusive artist known as Ezra Maas. Yet what is the truth when supposed facts are changed simply by putting them into words that rely on context and interpretation? When a man affects a persona how long will it be before they become their creation? Is the artist known as Maas a man or a myth?
Ezra Maas first came to prominence as a teenager in 1960s New York. His output was inspiring and eclectic. The tales from those times were of drugs, exploitation, and a growing number of followers attending ‘happenings’ that rode the zeitgeist.
Maas then moved cities, perhaps to Europe or elsewhere in America. He met with many of the big names of the time around the world. He is remembered without detail or clarity. He eschewed photo opportunities. For decades he was revered and remained an enigma – his life itself perhaps a PR exercise or an example of performance art.
When Daniel James is commissioned by an unknown source to write the artist’s biography he approaches the task with determination.
“He’s a writer who isn’t afraid to take risks. As a journalist Daniel James took on the newspaper industry from the inside. With his fiction he played the dangerous game of putting his own life on the page. And now, as a biographer, he is exploring the very possibility of truth and attempting to unravel one of the art world’s biggest mysteries.
A news reporter for over a decade James was best known for exploring the cult of fame and contemporary culture, questioning systems of truth and authority, and exposing the hyper-reality of modern news coverage. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction his writing questioned the representation of reality through language, and our perceptions of knowledge and power.”
Seven years prior to James starting out on his investigations, Ezra Maas disappeared. Access to his background and work are strictly controlled by the powerful and litigious Maas Foundation. People have been silenced, sometimes erased. James follows a trail through: letters, interviews with the artist’s acquaintances, leads uncovered by contacts, coded messages left by Maas himself.
The biography includes: opinion pieces, published articles, transcripts, emails. What we are reading here is not all that was intended. The pages are incomplete, brought together by the anonymous curator of what remains from the original manuscript. In copious footnotes he attempts to make sense of what is described as a literary labyrinth.
How does one uncover the truth when answers to questions proliferate and contradict? This is the story of Ezra Maas. It is also the story of Daniel James.
“You assume the world, the past, is fixed and immutable, but it’s not. What if the words I am writing here, which you are reading now, are already changing things?”
How much is any person a construct? How much are they altered by each and every experience and interaction? In seeking to uncover the truth behind the legend of Ezra Maas, James faces forces that alter his perceptions. In reading this book, the reader takes the same risk.
An astonishing, mind-bending creation that defies the limitations of cliched description. Drawing on many sources from the literary canon, it will challenge understanding of how a damn fine story may be told. -
https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/2018/12/18/the-unauthorised-biography-of-ezra-maas/
Who is Ezra Maas? Is he Daniel James the author of this ambitious fiction (or is it non-fiction?)? Is he a real artist? Is it a fake name that a group of artists hide behind? Or did James make him up for this book? These are some of the questions that’ll follow you as you delve into James debut novel. The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is a twisty, mind-bending, maze feat of amazing storytelling.
Everything is up for questioning. What is true and what is false will nag at you as you plunge into James’ account of events that lead to his writing of this book. This might make your head spin at first, but you’ll soon get into the rhythm of the story and find yourself becoming as much of a detective as James is.
The first big thing we have to tackle is who is Ezra Maas. Is he a real person or just a character? This might seem like a funny thing to ask, but trust me when I say it’ll only take a few pages for you to wonder if he really is a made up character.
If he is or isn’t real, we do have some puzzle pieces we can claim to be true. We know that there are pieces of artwork that have Ezra Maas’ signature style. We know that there is an Ezra Maas Foundation. And we know that there is a person named Daniel James that was charged with writing Maas’ biography by an unknown voice over the phone. After that it is all up in the air.
James breaks the story up into multiple parts, giving us all angles of who Maas is as well as how James researched him. We get snippets of articles, emails, phone calls, and an oral history from friends, lovers, enemies, teachers, and followers of Maas. Then there are the sections of James’ actual biography of Maas, that were saved and delivered to an anonymous person. And finally there are the autobiographical sections that follow James as he tries to uncover who Maas is. The jumping back and forth between each of these sections adds tension to the mystery of what happened to James and Maas.
Strung throughout the novel is the fact that no one really knows who Maas is. Our best real world comparison is Banksy, which according to James, took a lot of inspiration from Maas. Which, if want to extrapolate from what we know of Banksy, means Maas could be multiple artists, or could be a fake name for someone else. James uses this mystery, while throwing in real world names, places, and incidents to build you into the narrative as a detective sifting through the facts.
I was so convinced that Maas was real that I tried to find his artwork online. I did find some websites, including a Maas Foundation website, and some articles about an author trying to write a biography on Maas, but I couldn’t find any of his art. Which, as you dig deeper are soon to discover that the Maas Foundation has been systematically removing all of Maas’ artwork from the internet. Does this mean Maas is really out there or did James create a really fun game of interactive fiction?
I found James’ autobiographical journey into writing the biography of Maas extremely enjoyable. Right from the start we are introduced to an anonymous person that was friends with James and through mysterious means received all of James’ notes and finished biography. This plays out like a noir novel with all the tropes of that genre (our anonymous person points out this fact multiple times throughout the story). James also throws in a bit of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo style of storytelling into the mix. James has a huge self-destruction streak that bleeds into the biography. This all allows James to stretch and play with mystery plots, biographies, and what it means to be an artist.
The chapters focusing on Ezra Maas come across as the weakest of the parts. They are interesting, adding some color and hints to the mystery, but quickly get a bit too predictable. We get that Maas is a heady artist that is perfect at everything he does, that he knew everybody, that he is a genius. So many names are thrown around that they eventually become noise. There is also a point that the sections become so fantastical that they lose the feeling of being a biography and stray a bit too far into fiction, which doesn’t help making us believe he is real.
However, we do have James’ alibis. There are notes from the anonymous person repeatedly pointing out sections of the biography and autobiography that James might have embellished to increase the noir feeling of the narrative. It’s genius. He gives himself a way out. As long as this voice keeps chiming in, mirroring our own thoughts, we can assume it was done intentionally. There are also paragraphs and chapters there were either missing or censored. We are even lead to believe that the Maas Foundation had gotten ahold of the biography. Layers upon layers.
Overall, I thought this was a well thought out experiment in fiction writing. We are constantly questioning what is real and what isn’t, what’s been tampered with and what has been embellished, who is and who isn’t who they say they are. And these questions push us deeper into the story, turning each page looking for a clue that might give us a grasp on reality.
Maybe Maas is real? Maybe he is out there right now reading this and laughing at the ultimate trick he’s pulled on me. Maybe I’m Maas and I’ve been writing reviews for STORGY for a year to get myself ingrained into your psyche, so that when I review this biography you’ll be compelled to believe I’m telling you the truth. There really is only one way for you to figure that out, and that’s for you to read the book. - Matthew Brandenburg
storgy.com/2018/12/19/book-review-the-unauthorised-biography-of-ezra-maas-by-daniel-james/
I will be honest when I was first asked by Dan James to review his book. The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas. I was unsure whether it would keep my attention. It wasn’t what I usually like to read. However, as they say don’t judge a book by its cover. So, I agreed, I am so pleased I did as it has become my book of the year so far for 2019.
From the first page I was swept into a world of red-herrings, encrypted clues, and a life that breathed as soon as you read the first sentence. What I loved most was how Dan was able to blur the lines between reality and fiction. Immersing the reader into a world of mystery and biography writing that the great Hunter S Thompson would of been proud of. It is gonzo journalism at its finest. As the pages ran away from me. I found myself constantly questioning whether I was reading about a real person. Did Ezra Maas totally exist? If so, why hasn’t his disappearance made national headlines? Why hasn’t his family been shouting from the rooftops? What do they really have to hide? These were only a sample of the questions that formed in my mind as I devoured this book in two sittings.
Dan’s voice for a debut novel is charming making you trust him, even though there’s a nagging voice in the back of your head screaming don’t he’s lying. This is a major strength of his writing, and enables him to abuse your trust leading you down paths of drama, intrigue, and double bluffs that makes for an enjoyable thrill ride. Asking you to piece together the numerous clues he presents, and decipher the deeply layered story of the mysterious Ezra Maas. From the premature death of his brother which has a profound affect upon him, to Ezra been compared to geniuses such as Einstein and Mozart. Dan shows us both sides of Ezra. This allows Dan to have your undivided attention from the off as he takes you on a whistle stop tour of Europe and beyond. Making you sprint along the banks of the Seine in Paris to escape an unseen danger to Newcastle’s northern charm. He bares it all without reducing the quality of the plot.
This book bleeds uniqueness. I adored how it was written using many different methods to entice the reader from interview transcripts, diary entries, and James’s own personal notebook where he gives you previously unseen information on the enigma that is Ezra Maas. Including unseen photos and his last known location. These clues only help to feed your excitement further. As you get closer to your goal you begin to wonder could Ezra be an alternative personality for James. A persona he uses to escape from the struggles in his own life. This is what I mean by Dan blurring the lines of reality. Ezra feels real to me. I got lost in his world feeling as though I was talking to an old friend. It makes you wonder where does Ezra Maas end, and Dan James begin or vice versa.
This is a book that you could read countless times and it would still have you questioning your own sanity. I didn’t want it to end. Dan has captured the essence of what it truly means to be a gonzo writer exposing a character to the world that’s undeniably believable. Take a bow Mr James. You get 5 stars. I would give it more if I could. Simply incredible. Read it now it will blow your mind. Dan is the new Hunter S Thompson. I can’t wait to see what he produces next. A fresh new voice in the world of fiction. - Dan Stubbings
thedimensionbetweenworlds.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/review-of-the-unauthorised-biography-of-ezra-maas-by-daniel-james-written-by-dan-stubbings/
ife wasn’t linear, and if my book hoped to tell the truth it couldn’t be either… you start to lose a sense of where and when… it was a kind of possession.
The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is quite a read, one so multi-layered as to defy attempts at categorisation from all angles, or any delimiting terms such as modernist, postmodern, metafiction, biography or gumshoe noir. Daniel James successfully manages to mix the last three or four of these with biography and a crash course in art and architectural history, literature and philosophy, whilst placing a fictionalised version of himself at dead centre: all in all, it’s no mean feat. I thought at first the relentless footnotes would put me off, as they often do with David Foster Wallace, but after a short time their effect was to provide further immersion in the world of The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, implicating the reader thoroughly in the protagonist’s doomed venture and the dark mystery at the heart of it – at first you feel like you’re drowning in them, but before too long, it’s as if you need them in order to stay afloat. This is even true of the ostensibly irritating ones, the ones that tell you just where a European beer is from and exactly how it’s brewed, or how wild garlic is harvested in the Basque region of Spain for the purposes of local rustic cuisine, or even who Fluxus were. About three quarters of the way through The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, James goes full-on postmodern with a two-page footnote explaining the purpose of all the (500+) footnotes. That’s me kind of sailing close to giving too much away, but as it’s nothing to do with the plot as such, I don’t consider this to be a spoiler.
The book’s structure is, on a basic level, a documentarian one, like the packages-as-chapters concept employed by Peter Carey in A True History of the Kelly Gang taken many steps further, and those ubiquitous footnotes only serve to embellish and reinforce this. The narrative sections are the chapters from James’s book-within-a-book, and these are broken up by transcripts of telephone conversations and podcasts, recorded notes made on a smartphone, letters from the authorities concerning the protocol of how you would go about declaring a person dead absent a body, magazine pieces, redactions, oral histories and more, all wrapped up in a classic private detective noir, one with the more than a slight air of otherness, of the supernatural – in many ways it felt a little like Alan Parker’s 1987 classic modern noir movie Angel Heart.
The ostensible plot is that the Daniel James of the novel is contracted by an anonymous agent to write a biography of the reclusive conceptual artist and synaesthetic savant Ezra Mass, who has disappeared, supposedly to prepare his final artwork. The agent offers James an incredible, unspecified amount of money: James is in considerable debt and his career’s on the skids, he’s described by some as a showman and a charlatan, by the anonymous friend providing the footnotes as a man who had always had a complicated relationship with the truth; but there’s more to his taking on the job than this. He’s fascinated, and quickly becomes enmeshed, obsessed, as his mind incrementally disintegrates. The job also pits him against the sinister Ezra Maas Foundation, as well as his army of lunatic fans – notoriously litigious, the Foundation have been expunging all information on Maas from the internet since his disappearance, leaving only their own website, www.ezramaas.com. This gave the novel a slight Blair Witch Project feel, in terms of viral marketing (the website’s very convincing), at least at first, and I was also reminded of Adam Nevill’s Last Days, wherein a washed-up indie filmmaker is employed to make a documentary on an international Mansonesque apocalypse cult from the 1970s, and to uncover whatever’s happened to its surviving members, But although I did enjoy Last Days, The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is a far more accomplished novel, one that will keep you thinking of it between reading sessions, and for long afterwards too, and I’m afraid Last Days seems like pulp by comparison. As Daniel careers around Europe and the United States, meeting warning after warning, encountering horror after death after portent, and more and more disturbing pieces of information about Mass’s past and the origins of the Foundation, we are there with him every step of the way, holding his hand, telling him, no Dan, don’t look, take a step back, please, no more mate; can’t you see what going on here, knowing all the time that he can’t. Because he has to go on, he has no choice. He’s chasing, among other things, the last copy of an unnamed film Maas made, one with encoded mathematical messages that are said to drive the viewer insane and to have seizures – indeed, the first death he encounters, Jane, pleads with him via her diary/suicide note, don’t watch the film. Rarely have I felt so thoroughly involved with and hypnotised by a novel. Because this seems like more than just another book. It will not so much draw you in as drag you to its febrile core, shaking your bones to dust and robbing you of all sleep and peace of mind as you go. Really. I mean it. Five stars. - madteddyreadsomebooks.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/the-unauthorised-biography-of-ezra-maas-daniel-james/
This is not a biography. It is a true story.
…
It began with a phone call in the dead of night.
…
It is impossible to discount the possibility that some of what you are about to read may contain fiction.
…
“You know that line ‘the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist’? Well, I think Ezra Maas’s greatest trick was convincing the world he did.”
…
Some stories are more dangerous than others, and true stories are the most dangerous of all.
This book is dangerous. You need to know that before you begin.
The famously reclusive artist Ezra Maas was believed to have been born in Britain on January 1, 1950, but first made his artistic reputation (but, deliberately, not his public fame) in the New York pop art scene of the late 1960s. A man of many talents, even more legends among his cult-like followers, and multiple personalities:
the romantic artist, the withdrawn recluse, the violent, temperamental genius, the charismatic cult leader, the counterculture icon, the serial womaniser, the drug addict, the experimenter, the intense loner, the passionate collaborator, the painter, the poet, the madman.
His life story and works contains elements of those of, among others, Andy Warhol, Charles Manson, L. Ron Hubbard, Hunter S. Thompson, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Joseph Beuys, Samuel Beckett, Damien Hirst, Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, the Unabomber, Banksy, R.B. Kitaj, John Wheeler, and Rozz Williams. He worked with or influenced most of these people. Maas was an artist who was in the vanguard of many key creative trends, often years before they became a trend.
In the 1970s through to the 1990s, Maas himself became more and more of a recluse, almost a rumor, the public face of his works instead controlled by the rich and rather sinister Maas Foundation.
In 2002 Maas released, through the foundation, a statement announcing his withdrawal from public life (rather ironically given his already highly reclusive nature and ambiguous identity) to concentrate on “his final and most important creation.”
But then in 2005, Maas was officially registered as missing, his wife and controller of the Foundation, admitting he had not been seen since 2002.
In the following years, his works were bought up, removed from public display, newspaper stories about him suppressed. It was almost as if he had never existed.
In 2011, journalist and author Daniel James received a 3 a.m. phone call from the representative of a mysterious, and never identified, third party, offering him a huge sum simply to write the unauthorised biography of Ezra Maas, and to find the truth behind both his origins and disappearance. His investigations took him around the world and placed the lives of himself, and others, at risk.
Then in May 2012, when his book was about to be launched, the Maas foundation scheduled a press conference, claiming Maas was alive and well and ready to unveil his master work. The book was dropped by James’s original mainstream publisher (under pressure from the Maas foundation?).
And in 2013, James himself went missing.
The evidence suggests James tried to destroy his research and his writing. But in this book, a former close companion of James who prefers to remain anonymous, the Brod to James’ Kafka, has reassembled what survives and published it under Daniel James’s name.
Shunned by the large conglomerates (again as a result of pressure from the Maas Foundation?) the book was picked up, in a crowdfunded campaign, by the brave independent press Dead Ink:
We see it as Dead Ink’s job to bring the most challenging and experimental new writing out from the underground and present it to our audience in the most beautiful way possible.
The resulting book interweaves four separate sections:
–what remains of James’s official biography, at times rather hagiographic, as much of what remains of Maas’s history has been controlled by the Maas Foundation.
–oral accounts of those who knew him (a filmed example here from Bryan Talbot, father of the UK graphic novel). Notably the picture of Maas that emerges from these different accounts — even the descriptions his physical appearance — are highly contradictory: was he one man or many?
–Daniel James’s own account of his investigations into Ezra Maas, written in a self-aware style that combines existential and metaphysical noir, auto-fiction, and new journalism.
–copious footnotes from the anonymous narrator (the anonymity presumably as he or she wishes to avoid the fate of James and Maas), both clarifying various references but also adding his own commentary on the story and the disappearance of James. But these footnotes, while answering many questions, raise a key one of their own: who exactly is the mysterious narrator? James himself? Ezra Maas? One of Maas’s representatives? Or someone else?
It is a fascinating mix. Indeed it is more than just a book, it’s a work of conceptual art.But how much is pure fiction?
Well searching for Ezra Maas on the internet, reveals very little, only interviews and articles connected with James’s book and the highly obtuse website of the shadowy Ezra Maas Foundation (here) and their twitter feed @maasfoundation, which seems mostly intent on discrediting this very book. - mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2019/02/14/daniel-james-the-unauthorised-biography-of-ezra-maas/
Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define. After spending nearly seven years in the academy, I listened to dozens of the country’s smartest people explain this slippery concept, and, in their own unique ways, every one of them failed. Maybe it’s because so much of postmodern theory is predicated on the absence of things; namely, the absence of stable referents like nature and god and history that underpinned previous epochs. So no wonder my tutors failed. After all, how do you describe something that isn’t there? How do you speak about silence? Well, as far as Daniel James is concerned, you write a debut-novel called The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas. You start with the words “This book is dangerous” and then proceed to work through every postmodern trope before ending on the most disturbing idea of all: the dissolution of the ‘I’.
That ‘I’ is also called Daniel James, the narcissistic journalist and professional outrage merchant tasked with writing the story of Ezra Maas, a kind of post-modern renaissance man who disappeared without a trace while working on his final masterpiece. In just one of the many nods to the hard-boiled detective genre, the narrative begins with a phone call in the dead of night. During his quest to uncover the truth behind Maas and his final work, James stumbles across a dead body floating in a pool, is outwitted by femme-fatales and mysterious widows, gets beaten to a pulp by nameless goons, and downs enough hard liquor to give Phillip Marlowe the shakes. Just don’t expect any nice neat endings. James stumbles across plenty of clues, but the world of Ezra Maas is one where the more you learn, the less you understand.
The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is a different kind of detective story, one that poses philosophical questions about identity, subjective experience, language, and the very nature of truth. It’s part of a rarified sub-genre that has fascinated some of the true greats of modern fiction, including Kafka, Nabakov, Auster, and Delillo. And like the most compelling characters who populate this unique genre, James’s obsession with uncovering the truth soon descends into madness and despair.
Like much postmodern fiction, James focuses on the artifice of narrative and, by extension, the artifice of meaning. However, like the very best postmodern fiction, he goes one step further. He applies the same logic to the idea of self, which, when reduced to just another ‘concept’, disappears from underneath his narrator’s feet – and with disastrous consequences. At the end of the novel, the narrator Daniel James, a self-confessed ‘man of letters’, shatters into a million tiny pieces. His inverted epiphany that words are only words means he is lost forever in silence, leaving the reader to contemplate their own ‘existence’ (or even ‘non-existence’) within the tangled web of language and signs. The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas follows a strand of postmodern theory to its logical endpoint; but be warned, this particular thought experiment is especially unsettling.
However, it is also oddly exhilarating. Closing the book for the last time reminded me of that glorious moment when the mind begins to reorder itself after an intense psychedelic trip. You breathe a sigh of relief, thankful that you’ve made it back to reality. But in the next blink of the eye, you realise that the world you’ve returned to is ever so slightly different from the one you left. It’s as if an extra layer of meaning has revealed itself, a new dimension of experience where silence is the only language. And isn’t this, in the end, what all great books are supposed to do?
The Unauthorised biography of Ezra Maas is a complicated, compelling, and highly accomplished debut. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in fiction that explores the deepest and most disturbing aspects of what it means to be a “modern” human being. - Ashley Murphy
www.subscript.it/book-review-the-unauthorised-biography-of-ezra-maas-daniel-james/
Everyone and everything seems to have a website these days, especially if they’ve something to sell. Why should Ezra Maas be any different?
But click on www.ezramaas.com and you’ll find not the man himself but The Maas Foundation, the “official representatives of visionary artist Ezra Maas”.
The website, with its backdrop imagery of some swirling elemental activity – could be deep underwater or in outer space – gives little away.
It tells us Maas was born in England on January 1, 1950. There’s a list of his works from 1995 to 2001, the last of them titled Absence II – but it is just a list of titles. There are no links to any images.
Maas, we learn, is represented by no commercial gallery. All enquiries must be directed to info@ezramaas.com. There are, however, addresses in London, Paris, Berlin and New York – all places where artists congregate and big art world deals are done.
But what’s the big deal with Ezra Maas?
Daniel James is the author of a new book called The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas.
He is able to put a little flesh on the bones of this mysterious Maas character.
It seems he hit the big time early, falling on his feet aged 16 when his street art caught influential eyes in New York’s Greenwich Village.
“He became famous but never gave interviews or allowed himself to be photographed,” says Daniel in the coffee shop.
“He was a bit of a JD Salinger figure (that’s Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye, who shunned fame to the point where he all but melted away).
“He retired from public life very early and then, in the early 2000s, it was rumoured he’d disappeared and was no longer in the studio where he’d been for years.”
Six years after Maas was officially registered as missing in 2005, Daniel received a late night phone call from a mysterious third party and embarked on his life story of Maas.
In 2012 the book was ready to go – and then, out of the blue, the Maas Foundation scheduled a press conference.
Could it have been to declare that the artist was dead... or alive? Or could it have been to unveil the masterpiece that he allegedly went into seclusion to work on? An extra chapter, it seemed, could be required.
Daniel James’s unauthorised biography is a first book by this one-time newspaper journalist who is currently working in the PR and media office of Northumbria University – where, it happens, he once studied for an MA in creative writing.
It is one of five titles that have been picked up by Dead Ink which describes itself online as “a small, ambitious and experimental literary publisher based in Liverpool”.
Supported by Arts Council England, it develops the careers of new and emerging authors through its Publishing the Underground programme which depends on the support of potential readers.
On its website it explains that the five novels, including Daniel’s, are edited, designed and ready to go.
But for one month, until August 31, Dead Ink are crowdfunding via their website. Pre-order a books or books and when the goal of £5,000 is reached, they will be printed and released, one per month.
For 36-year-old Daniel James, born and brought up in Newcastle but now a father-of-two living in Cullercoats, this is the latest step towards the realisation of a dream.
“My parents remember me writing stories from the age of six and the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do was write books,” he says.
He reckons he gets a bit of this from them, both “natural storytellers”.
“My dad knows about a lot of things, especially popular culture, and filled my head with all sorts of knowledge.”
His mother, meanwhile, would spark his fertile imagination with early trips on the Metro, turning mundane journeys into fantastic adventures.
Alongside his career in journalism and PR, there was always fiction; the point where those worlds blur and overlap always a source of fascination.
“I wanted to mix fact and fiction and this is a biography crossed with a novel,” he says of the Ezra Maas title.
“I’ve always been interested in detective fiction and the structure of those books.
“You’re playing a detective as you read, looking for the clues. The reader is a detective and the author is as well, in a way.
“I had the idea for this book and knew, almost from the beginning, how it would end but there was definitely a sense that the story knew where it wanted to go and I was following it.
“It seemed to take on its own twists and turns to the extent that sometimes I’d be connecting so much to the material that I’d be waking up and hearing lines of dialogue.
“It sounds strange but it was almost as if the story was already written somewhere. It was out there and I was discovering it in the same way the readers will discover it.
“I wrote the first draft very quickly and then, seeing the scope of it and the potential, realised I needed to do research.”
He read “hundreds” of books on art history, went on research trips to Bruges and the Scottish Highlands and quizzed a knowledgeable friend in New York about the city’s cultural scene.
Now all that effort and invention has been distilled into this tricksy but intriguing book with its chapters alternately dedicated to Maas and to Daniel James’s efforts to pin him down. - David Whetstone
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/after-early-fame-what-became-13421004
As you can see from the title it is quite a challenge to shoehorn this book into any particular genre. It is certainly a classic detective novel in the style of Chandler or Hammet, even though there is no ‘real’ detective as such. It is also certainly a biography, a factual retelling of the background of one of the 20th century’s most iconic (and unheard of) artists who influenced the likes of Warhol, Basquiat, Beuys and Banksy. It asks more questions than it gives answers. Ezra Maas was apparently something of an enigma. Fiercely private, he was surrounded by mystery, and then disappeared without a trace several years ago. And not just he did - his legacy did too. All apparently protected (destroyed?) by the foundation set up to manage his estate, which has been so thorough I’ve been unable to find any coherent info on him, let alone examples of his artwork. It gets more intriguing. This is an unauthorised biography. The Maas Foundation apparently fought tooth and nail to stop the book from being published - there were rumours the initial print run of it disappeared last year ahead of Daniel James’ appearance at the Books on Tyne Festival. James himself was hired by an unknown client to write this biography - to uncover the truth. A task that proves challenging to a degree of carrying great personal risk, which becomes more and more palpable throughout the book. It is structured in interweaving narratives of journalistic chapters on the life of Ezra Maas and chapters written in the first person in which James recounts his process of retracing Ezra Maas’ footsteps, in the hope of solving the puzzle that is Maas. Newspaper clippings, telephone transcripts, reports, interviews and email correspondence intersperse this. However, nothing is quite as it seems - and how much of it is real? The book is meticulously researched - it is evident James has a background in journalism. The footnotes themselves are a story within the story, interwoven voices of two, three, multiple narratives. It will leave you changed, baffled and in awe. I devoured it in two sittings. - Tokimeki
www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/the-unauthorised-biography-of-ezra-maas,daniel-james-9781911585299What you need to know before your trail
Ezra Maas is a reclusive British artist who first became famous in New York in the 1960s. Unlike his contemporaries, Maas rejected the cult of celebrity, never giving interviews and refusing to be photographed, insisting that his radical artwork speak for him. He was intensely private and his exhibitions were surrounded in secrecy. This created a kind of anti-fame around him and he quickly gained a cult following as a result.
From the 1980s onwards, he was rumoured to be working from a studio mansion in the Hertfordshire countryside, but as ever with Maas, nothing could be sure. Maas disappeared under mysterious circumstances from his studio in the mid-2000s after announcing plans for his final and most important artwork. Many believe Maas is dead, but others claim he’s simply in seclusion and will return when his final work is complete. more here
When did you become interested in the life of Ezra Maas?
I first heard the name Ezra Maas when I was at university, but I can’t remember the exact context. A few of my friends were studying Fine Art and liked to name drop their favourite artists, so I suspect Maas’s name came up then, alongside the likes of Picasso, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I just recall being intrigued by Maas’s sinister artworks and his reputation as a recluse. He seemed like a genuine enigma. Years later, when I was working as an arts and culture journalist, Maas’s name would come up every now and then, but his life and work were always just on my periphery. He was never my actual focus. The artists, writers and musicians I interviewed would occasionally mention him in passing when they talked about their influences, but I didn’t really give Maas a second thought. I had no reason to at the time. Of course, this all changed about eight years ago when I received a phone call late at night asking me if I would be interested in writing his biography.
At what point did you realise your research into his life could become a book?
Almost immediately. It didn’t take long for my research to reveal a number of contradictions and inconsistencies in the authorised version of Maas’s life and, naturally, the journalist in me began asking questions. The more I asked, the more secrets I uncovered, and I soon found myself being warned off the story. Of course, as soon as that happened I knew I had found something special and there was no turning back.
Was it a big jump going from journalist to author?
Journalism teaches you a lot about storytelling, both from a technical perspective – structure, clarity, economy, accuracy – but also how and where to find stories, what things to look and listen out for, and what questions to ask. You develop a different kind of awareness, you notice fine details, see and hear things that others wouldn’t, and all the time you’re filing it away for future reference. You become like a magpie, collecting the parts of people’s lives that appeal to your storytelling instincts, so that you can refashion them into something else.
In a newsroom, you have to absorb and process information very quickly in order write confidently about a topic before moving straight onto the next story. It’s very fast-paced, but these are great research skills to have. The pleasure about being a novelist is that you can take your time and go deeper – spending weeks, months, or even years researching a subject. Journalism also teaches you to write to a deadline and that is something every writer needs.
Finally, one of the most important lessons I learned as a journalist was to keep asking questions. Even when you think you know the whole story, keep going until you’re certain you’ve got the truth. Nine times out of ten, if you keep digging there’s always something hidden under the surface and it’s usually worth finding.
How much of the book is fiction?
We’re living in a very dangerous time where it is increasingly hard to tell truth from fiction. In some ways, my novel is very much of the moment, even though it is largely set in the past. It was a conscious decision to structure the book like a detective story, while also using newspaper clippings, letters, emails and phone transcripts to tell the story. I think the result is quite a unique experience, somewhere between fact and fiction, where the emphasis is on the reader to piece together the clues and ask themselves what’s real and what’s not. One of the reasons I chose this format was to explore the ambiguous relationship between truth and fiction – I find it fascinating. The other reason was my love of detective fiction. It occurred to me as I was researching the book that a biographer – in trying to reconstruct someone’s life after they’ve gone – is essentially a literary detective trying to solve a missing persons case.
As such, half of the book follows my investigation into the truth about Ezra Maas in the style of a mystery thriller, as I travel around Europe and America, visiting the galleries and studios where he worked, and interviewing his friends and collaborators.
The other half is Maas’s biography – from his birth in 1950, to his fame in the ‘60s and ‘70s, right up to his disappearance in the present day, complete with reproductions of authentic documents and correspondence. It’s very much based on a true story, which meant I had to seek permission from the estates of a number of famous people, alive and dead, who knew or worked with Maas at some point in the last six decades. This was a complicated process and led to a number of delays. The Maas Foundation refused to cooperate of course, but I’m very grateful to those who allowed me to include their stories in the book. The award-winning writer and artist Bryan Talbot (who now lives in the North East) tells a brilliant story about working with Ezra Maas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he kindly agreed to let me print the tale in full. Similarly, Professor Brian Ward – one of the UK’s most respected American Studies academics – gave me permission to include a great anecdote involved Maas and the US author Thomas Pynchon from the 1970s. I think both stories prove the point that life is stranger than fiction.
Do you have any future projects in the works?
Yes. I’m halfway through a second book, with several more planned for the future. I’m also working with a filmmaker to turn some of the interviews we filmed during my research for the book into a feature-length documentary about Ezra Maas. The book may be finished, but I don’t think Maas is done with me yet.
Who are your literary inspirations?
James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Pullman, Philip K Dick, Jorge Luis Borges, and David Lynch.
What’s your favourite book?
I love so many books that it’s really hard to pick a favourite. I would struggle to name my top 10 to be honest, but here are a few books that I love in no particular order: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, The Big Sleep and other novels by Raymond Chandler, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, Watchmen by Alan Moore, Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg, Dracula by Bram Stoker, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Eye of the Beholder by Marc Behm, The Collected Short Stories of Philip K Dick, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, and Lanark by Alasdair Gray.
- https://www.livingnorth.com/northeast/people-places/interview-daniel-james
Tell us about your book.The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is based on the real life story of Ezra Maas, a British artist who became famous in the late 1960s, but who turned his back on fame and created his greatest artworks from the shadows, before eventually disappearing altogether in mysterious circumstances in the early 2000s. I became interested in telling the true story of Maas’s life and presumed death, but nothing could have prepared me for the truth that the book uncovers.
It quickly occurred to me that in searching for the true story of Maas’s life, travelling around the world to the cities he lived, visiting the galleries where he created his work, and interviewing those who knew and collaborated with him, that my role as biographer was essentially a kind of literary detective. As such, I consciously decided to write these chapters of the book in the style of a detective story, a page-turning mystery thriller through a postmodern, existential lens. However, the book is also very much a biography and there are chapters dedicated to documenting Maas’s life from 1950 onwards in a more journalistic style, accompanied by reproductions of authentic archival material and correspondence, including news clippings, letters, emails, phone transcripts and more. If one half of the book is like a detective story, the other half is a biography written by an investigative journalist. There are a lot of different styles and techniques being employed throughout the text, but they come together to create a new kind of book where readers are challenged to become detectives themselves, following in the footsteps of my investigation, as I attempt to separate fact from fiction and history from myth, page by page, chapter by chapter.
What inspired it?
Ezra Maas’s incredible life story was the inspiration. In 2011, I received an anonymous phone call suggesting the true story of Maas would make an interesting biography and everything led from there. It didn’t take long for my research to reveal a number of contradictions and inconsistencies in the authorised version of Maas’s life, and naturally, the journalist in me began asking questions. The more I asked, the more secrets I uncovered, and I soon found myself being warned off the story. Of course, as soon as that happened, I knew I had found something special and there was no turning back.
Alongside that, I’ve always been interested in the relationship between truth and fiction, the self and reality, as a writer. And in many ways, Maas’s life was the perfect gateway into those subjects and themes. His life, and my interests as a writer, were perfectly aligned and the phone call that set me on the path to writing his biography couldn’t have come at a more ideal moment. I was in the right place at the right time.
I recently read an interview with a writer who described her latest work as ‘existential noir’ because of the way it used the structure of a traditional mystery story to explore unanswerable questions of being and knowing – what can we ever know with any real certainty, about ourselves or the world – and that’s very much the territory I like work in – crafting stories around questions of identity and reality that lead us down the rabbit hole, and force us to confront our deepest subconscious fears.
What do you like most about writing? What do you dislike (if anything)?
I’m happiest when I’m writing regularly because it feels like I’m fulfilling my potential and doing what I’m supposed to be doing with my time. Kafka supposedly said that ‘a writer who isn’t writing, is a monster courting insanity’ and I completely understand what he meant. Whenever I’m not writing, I feel like I should be, and when it’s going well, it’s like electricity flowing through me – it’s a serious high, but more than that, it also provides a deeper sense of purpose and satisfaction.
And on a lighter note, it’s great fun. Who doesn’t want to make up stories and let their imagination run free? I love the freedom that writing gives me. I can create entire worlds, people, and histories. I’ve always been a daydreamer and writing allows me to share my dreams and imaginings with others.
I don’t really dislike anything about writing itself, but like any physical or mental endeavour, there are days when it can really feel like hard work. Over the last few years, I’ve learned to listen to my body and not force myself to write when it isn’t flowing. You can still work on your book without actually writing. You can read for research, visit a location, watch a film, listen to music, take a walk. Professional athletes warm up before an event, they stretch, eat and drink the right things, and get their bodies ready to perform. Writers need to do the same with their minds. Sometimes it’s about clearing your mind to allow space for the ideas to come in, other times it’s about tuning into a certain frequency, atmosphere or mood, and channelling a particular character or scene.
Do you find time to read, if so what are you reading at the moment?
I love reading. It’s one of my great pleasures in life and it’s ultimately the reason I wanted to become a writer myself. I try to get through a novel every couple of weeks if I can. The books I return to the most are detective novels – Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, James M Cain to modern greats like James Lee Burke – and also postmodern works. At university, I specialised in fiction from 1940-1990 and that’s the era I find myself returning to the most when I’m looking for something new to read. I read a lot of comic books and graphic novels too (I practically grew up on Marvel Comics in particular). I’m a fan of Science Fiction and many other genres, and I read quite a bit of non-fiction, mostly literary and cultural theory, but it depends on what I’m working on at the time. I read a lot of books on contemporary art history, biographies and journalism when I was researching Ezra Maas, and I can imagine I’ll do the same with future novels.
Currently sitting at the top of my to be read list currently are two excellent new novels – Three Dreams in the Key of G by Marc Nash and The Study Circle by Haroun Khan. The last book I bought before those was by the late, great Mark Fisher, a cultural theorist who blogged under the name K-Punk. I highly recommend his work to anyone who has yet to come across it. Mark’s writing introduced me to the concept of Hauntology, which I touch on in my own book.
Earlier this year, I also read the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer after being intrigued by Alex Garland’s adaptation of the first in the series, Annihilation. I’ve got a huge stack of books waiting to be read though. I love buying books and I love reading, but I do take long breaks when I’m actively writing myself, so this has resulted in an increasingly expanding To Be Read pile that I’ll probably never get through!
Which author(s) has/have had the biggest influence on your writing?
Paul Auster. Raymond Chandler. Samuel Beckett. James Joyce. Thomas Pynchon. Philip Pullman. Philip K Dick. Jorge Luis Borges. Alasdair Grey. Flann O’Brien. David Lynch.
Where do you get your ideas from?
Everywhere. My life. Other people’s lives. History. Dreams. Music. Films. Ideas are all around us, all of the time. You’ve just got to open your eyes, listen and be in the right frame of mind to be inspired.
Do you have a favourite scene/character/story you’ve written?
Well, the novel is the best piece of work I’ve written so far and Ezra Maas is probably the most complex character I’ve brought to life, not just because he is a real person, but because there are so many conflicting stories about him. I’ve tried to reflect this in the book by capturing the multiple, overlapping narratives and descriptions, allowing them to coexist alongside each other so that the emphasis is on the reader of the book to play detective themselves and separate fact from fiction in Ezra’s life.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m about halfway through a second novel, which I hope to finish within the year. I actually started working on it in 2013, but Ezra Maas took over my life , so I put the other book on hold temporarily. Now that the Unauthorised Biography’ is out, I can focus on new projects, including returning to my work-in-progress second novel. Once that’s completed, I plan to work my way through the other novels I have planned, although I wouldn’t rule out one of those new ideas becoming my second novel – it just depends which idea excites me the most.
What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given (and who was it from)?“Write the books you want to read.”
Philip Pullman said that to me when I met him at the Durham Book Festival in 2015. It was very reassuring advice to receive from such a master storyteller, particularly as that’s exactly what I’ve always tried to do. I’ve been writing stories since the age of four or five and have always written for myself. If the story excites and interests me, if I want to keep turning the page to find out what happens next, if I find myself disappearing into the world of the book and thinking about it every waking second, then I know I’m on the right track.
Are you a plotter or a pantster?
I’m somewhere in between. Generally speaking, I like to follow my intuition and let the story guide me, rather than plotting the entire book out in advance. I have a destination and a road map in my mind, but it has enough wide-open space to allow me to go off on unexpected adventures and detours as and when I need to. I might be the author of the book, but it’s a process of discovery for me too. An author is almost like a pioneer heading off into the wilderness. They discover the trail and share it with the readers who follow them.
Of course, The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas is based on real events, so it required several years of research, travel, interviews, and quite meticulous planning. At the same time, I remember the moment when I decided to write the book very vividly and I could already see the story fully formed in my mind. It all came to me in an instant. It was a Big Bang moment. One second there was nothing and then… everything. I knew where to start, how I wanted to present the story, with letters and emails and phone transcripts, and I knew exactly how it would end. But it also surprised me on multiple occasions. It kept me guessing all the way through with its twists and turns. It genuinely had a life of its own, sometimes in quite scary ways, almost as if the story couldn’t be contained on the page and wanted to bleed out into the world. Perhaps because it’s based on a true story, it has a special kind of power that makes it dangerous. I may have written it, but I don’t think even I know the book’s true potential.
This book, more than any other idea I’ve ever had, felt like it had already been written in a strange way and I was simply receiving it, like a transmitter, from somewhere out in the ether and it was my job to put it on the page; bring it to life.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
If writing books is really what you want to do, if it’s genuinely your dream in life, then don’t ever, ever give up. Keep going, keep believing in yourself, and keep writing, no matter what. You can and will make it happen, but only if you keep believing and keep writing.
What’s been your proudest writing-related moment?
The moment I found out the book was going to be published will always stand out in my mind. I didn’t tell anyone – not a single person – for about a week as I was worried I would jinx it somehow. It was something that I wanted so much and so badly that I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise it. About two years after that, I walked out onto the stage at the Newcastle Book Festival in front of a crowd of about 80 people, including my family and friends, and I read an extract from the book for the very first time. I was introduced on the night by Professor Brian Ward, we premiered a documentary video about Ezra Maas featuring the award-winning writer and artist Bryan Talbot, and we finished up with a Q&A where I was interviewed by Dr Claire Nally. Everything went as planned and afterwards we celebrated with cocktails created especially for the book at a late night after-party in a speakeasy-style basement bar called The Poison Cabinet in Newcastle. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect night and it was definitely one of my proudest moments.
https://elementaryvwatson.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/getting-to-know-you-daniel-james/
Fiction is the real truth
There is a question I’ve always been interested in as a writer, perhaps more so than any other. What is real? To be specific, my interest is in the questions arising from the relationship between fiction and reality.
I explore these questions in my debut novel and it is a common thread in the literature and art that I am drawn to. When I look out at the world, when I gaze into the mirror, when I experience anything at all: what is real?
Lately, it seems harder than ever to be sure.
We live in a time when world leaders can dismiss proven facts as fake news while simultaneously alluding to terrorist attacks that never happened, where the free press is owned by the same, small group of white male billionaires, and where hundreds of millions of people experience reality not with their own eyes but through the filter of electronic devices – watching live concerts through their phone screens as they record it or missing a beautiful sunset because they’re busy putting it on Instagram.
They call it the ‘post-truth’ era. The world loves a label, but is life today really that different to any point in the last century? Haven’t politicians, celebrities and the world’s media always lied to us? Before Trump there was Nixon (or perhaps more fittingly, Hitler), before Rupert Murdoch there was William Randolph Hearst, before the Daily Mail and right-wing parties were blaming immigrants for society’s problems, you had countless other persecuted minorities wrongly turned into scapegoats throughout history by one bigoted group or another.
My interest is less in the cyclical nature of history, however, and rather in the elusive nature of truth. I think it was the genius Science Fiction writer Philip K Dick who said that at the core of his books was ‘not art, but truth’. I set out to find the truth in my new book as if it was a precious stone that could be located, unearthed and studied. A prize that, once found, would give up its secrets. The truth I was seeking was a simple one. The story of a man’s life – who he was, where he came from, and what happened to him. And yet, when it came to the famously reclusive artist Ezra Maas, my task was far from simple and nothing was as it seemed.
I didn’t set out to write a biography. I let the story dictate the form. And the true story of Ezra Maas’s life, it seems, was too big for any one genre. You could say it had a mind of its own. It also demanded something from me. If I wanted to know the truth about Ezra Maas – a man of who so few facts were known – I had to be willing to set foot within the pages of the book myself.
Life-writing is a term originally used by Virginia Woolf in A Sketch of the Past, her autobiographical novel which incorporated diaries, letters, travel writing, memoir and more. Interestingly, in the novel Orlando Woolf also merges fiction and biography, blurring the lines between fantasy and her real-life relationship with Vita Sackville-West.
When I set out to write The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, I wasn’t thinking about ‘life-writing’ or ‘auto-fiction’ (to use a term that has become popular in recent years to describe heavily autobiographical novels). Yet, the story demanded I share my own experiences searching for the truth alongside the chapters of his biography. The result is a narrative that cuts back and forth between past and present, biography and auto-fiction. It was only after I’d written the book that I began to see how it crossed over into so many different genres and how they were all connected by the question of truth.
Historical fiction is a hugely popular genre right now. Some argue it has supplanted actual history books, while others warn against the danger of mistaking fiction for fact. Would I advocate reading historical fiction over a history book? No. That’s not the argument I’m making. I’m saying read both. But do so in the knowledge that they are both stories. One of them is just being a little more honest than the other in acknowledging its status as fiction.
History, after all, is simply the authorised version of events. It doesn’t tell us the whole story. Even if we take history at face value, it is still just a record of ‘one thing after another’ to paraphrase Alan Bennett. This is where fiction comes in. History tells us the ‘what’, but it is only through stories that we can begin to understand the ‘why’. It is no coincidence that in cultures all over the world, elders have passed down knowledge in the form of stories for thousands of years.
Bu who can we trust to tell us the truth in today’s world?
I don’t know about you, but more than ever, I’m inclined to turn off the news and open a book. I’d rather knowingly escape the real world than play along with this facsimile of reality. Beyond mere escapism however, I believe there is far greater truth to be found in a story or a work of art than in every social media newsfeed combined.
Stories are not just about sharing knowledge between generations, they have proven psychological benefits as well as their value culturally and historically. Philip Pullman has written how stories are essential for human survival and I wholeheartedly agree. In a world of fake news and alternative facts, stories might just be the key to unlocking ‘real’ truth.
This is just scratching the surface when it comes to the ‘truth’ of course. There are other, more troubling questions if you want to go deeper still. As dangerous as their lies are, most of us know not to trust the words of politicians or the media, but what about ourselves? Can we trust our memories? Our individual perceptions? Does a singular, objective truth even exist?
Everything about the world would suggest otherwise, from language to light. Words are effectively a ‘stand in’ for the real thing. They’re part of an arbitrary system we invented to communicate the world to each other – they are not the truth. Like smart phones – or any intermediary for that matter – language also keeps us once removed from reality. In a different way, light itself hints at a world more complex and more than strange than we realise. It has been shown to exist in multiple potential states simultaneously until it is observed, demonstrating that reality is not fixed, but has many faces depending on who is looking, and that it is strangely linked to perception. If this is accurate, how can there possibly be one truth?
I found myself exploring these questions again and again in The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas. In fact, you could say the very structure of the novel was shaped by such questions. It is an unorthodox hybrid of literary fiction, biography and detective story, written by a former journalist and told through a combination of prose fiction, biographical chapters, news clippings, academic footnotes, emails, phone transcripts and more. Given these origins, the novel occupies a unique space at the intersection between truth and fiction, history and myth.
In order to write such a book, I had to take on different roles, each linked to aspects of my own past lives and former identities – author, journalist, academic researcher and biographer – each offering a unique and alternate perspective on the truth. During the writing of the novel, I had to switch between these roles. As I mentioned, I also found myself playing detective at times, but I’ll come back to that particular role later.
As an author, my primary interest was the story itself. What happens in the beginning, middle and end, who is telling the story and why, and perhaps most importantly, what does it mean? One of my primary goals as a writer is to create a world for readers to explore. When I read a great story, the world around me disappears and my mind is transported to another time and place. It’s one of the most beautiful, magical experiences and it has long been my dream to create a world of my own for others to read about and escape into.
The journalist in me on the other hand has a responsibility to verify the facts and a duty to communicate them plainly to my readers. It’s no secret that journalism is in crisis, from within and without. The industry (even the best examples of it) are discredited on a daily basis by world leaders, it has been rocked by internal scandals and corruption, its aforementioned ownership and the agendas of those pulling the strings are dubious to say the least, and the physical medium it has traditionally been associated with – print – is supposedly dying out.
Despite all of that however, the ideals of journalism and the notion of a free press remain vitally important. True, it’s almost hard to even say the phrase ‘journalistic integrity’ un-ironically these days, but without the few, independent news outlets we have left, we really would be at the mercy of lies and propaganda.
The skills of a journalist are useful to any writer, from an understanding of structure and economy, to the art of good research. This is essential to ground your story in historical reality – very important for a novel set between 1950 and the present – and to provide the kinds of authentic details that will help make the more imaginative sections feel more real.
However, like biography, my book was not content with journalism alone. It had to go further. Just as I never set out to follow in the footsteps of writers like Woolf, I also didn’t knowingly embark on an experiment in ‘gonzo journalism’ – as defined by writer and journalist Hunter S Thompson – by putting myself in the novel (Virginia Woolf’s Orlando crossed with Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – now there’s a pitch!).
If the author is interested in the story and the journalist wants to know the facts, when it comes to the biographer, it is about the life. In particular, it is about recreating a life on the page – a kind of resurrection through words.
Faced with the prospect of writing a biography for Ezra Maas, one of the 20th century’s most secretive and elusive figures, I immersed myself in the genre. I read interviews with celebrated biographies such as Leon Edel, Hermione Lee, David McCullough and Robert Caro (who famously said ‘There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts.’) to study their methods and techniques, learning the rules of the game so I could subvert them. Each biographer described their process differently, for some it was like a love affair, for others a literary transfusion, but one commonality was the need to unravel the public and private ‘life-myths’ of your chosen subject to break through to the ‘real’.
Hilary Mantel recently wrote an interesting piece for the Guardian about the ‘myth’ of Princess Diana, an ‘icon only loosely based on the woman born Diana Spencer’. There are countless other examples of course from JFK to Marilyn Monroe. I’ve cited Ernest Hemingway recently as another example of a figure in which the public myth and the private life became blurred. Hemingway, as a writer and self-mythologist, had a part to play in that himself. We’re all guilty of self-mythologizing, but not all of us will find ourselves the subject of a biography. How can a biographer reconcile public and private myths? If we exist in the minds of others as a public figure, if we create and buy into our own personal myths; if people, like reality itself, have many faces, who decides which one is real?
Biographies can be especially difficult when your chosen subject does not want to be written about. Ted Hughes’ legacy has been shielded by a fiercely litigious estate, Byron’s secretary burned his personal letters and Kafka asked for all of his writing and personal correspondence to be destroyed after his death. The subject of a biography can sometimes become the story’s antagonist. Ezra Maas – and certainly his representatives The Maas Foundation – took on this role in my own book.
Ezra Maas himself was challenging because of his absence. He follows a long list of artists and writers who turned their back on fame and disappeared, from literary giants like JD Salinger to lesser known mysterious like 1960s spy writer Adam Diment who reportedly gave Ian Fleming a run for his money only to never be seen again or the lost poet Rosemary Tonks who stopped writing completely and lived in anonymity the rest of her life. Maas was perhaps more like the reclusive writer Thomas Pynchon who did not stop producing art, but chose to do so behind closed doors. (If this is the first time you’ve come across Ezra Maas, you should visit his website www.ezramaas.com or read this excellent feature by David Whetstone for The Journal as an introduction. However, for the full story you’ll have to pre-order my novel.)
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that ‘truths are illusions’ and we have simply forgotten that is what they are. Is truth just an illusion? If we peel back the layers of the onion, one by one, is there nothing at the centre? Why search for something that doesn’t exist at all? And what good are all these abstract questions, however interesting, when as Madonna famously said, we live in a material world? Well, as a writer I believe these questions, abstract or not, are key to breaking through the listless apathy of modern life to ‘the real’. Now, more than ever, we need to shock ourselves into action and ideas that challenge the way we think and force us to question the world we’re presented with can only be a good thing.
As for why search for something that might not exist? First of all, I can’t tell you if the truth does or doesn’t exist. I think that’s something we each have to find out for ourselves, on our own paths to our own particular truths. Secondly, I think we search because the act of searching itself is important. We must continue to question the world and look for answers. We must not take anything for granted, whether it’s the words of politicians, the physical world as we perceive it, or even our own memories.
I mentioned earlier that I found myself playing detective during the writing of my book. There is much we can learn from detectives and the way they question the world. Their investigations echo the work of both writer and reader as they search for the truth, connect the evidence and attempt to uncover what has been lost or concealed. I have written an article specifically on this subject, and my love of detective fiction generally, for my publisher Dead Ink Books. You can read it here.
In the end, it comes back to the truth. By drawing on my past and present as a writer and journalist; taking on the roles of accidental biographer and literary detective; and drilling down through 70 years of myth and history, did I discover the truth about Ezra Maas?
You didn’t really think I was going to tell you here, did you? You will, of course, have to read the book to find out – and if you’re interested you can pre-order it here until 31 August, or buy it in all good book shops later in the year. Maybe you’ll find the truth inside its pages, perhaps you’ll find more questions, but either way I hope you enjoy the search. Just like the truth itself, I believe everyone makes a book their own and creates their own personal connection to the text. Above all else, if you happen to find yourself holding a copy of The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, I hope you will discover the one thing everyone should find waiting for them inside a book – a great story; the kind that takes you far from the hollow shores of the everyday in search of forbidden knowledge and hidden truths. - Daniel James
http://newwritingnorth.com/journal/article/fiction-real-truth/ttp://ezramaas.com/
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