Every so often the rendering flakes off the exposed wall of British literary life to reveal the light, bright vein of eccentricity that courses beneath. I noticed this not long ago in a biography of the late J L Carr, winner of the 1980 Guardian fiction prize, who apparently deployed some fake 15th-century statuary in the graveyard of his local church on the grounds that it would give architecturally minded passers by "summat to think about"; and I noticed it again only this week in the revelations surrounding Mr Justice Smith, presiding judge in the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case.
Mr Smith, whose capacity for whimsy suggests that he is wasted in the high court and should immediately set up as a novelist, disclosed that his 71-page judgment contains a code of its own, a devious acrostic composed of carefully concealed italic letters. "I can't discuss the judgment," he mischievously explained, "but I don't see why a judgment shouldn't be a matter of fun." By making this claim, our man instantly taps into two of the most elemental traditions in English literature: on the one hand revealing himself as the latest addition to that fine old line of Dickensian legal eminences; on the other declaring himself as a talented exponent of that literature's most characteristic procedural trick.
When not engaged in writing novels and biographies, how does the average professional writer conduct the rest of his or her literary life? The answer, broadly speaking, is: obliquely, cryptically, frequently concealing identities and affiliations beneath a smokescreen of anonymity and aliases, taking a positive pleasure in the abstruse and the leftfield. Halfway through the second world war, for example, George Orwell and the young pacifist Alex Comfort conducted a controversy in the pages of the leftwing weekly Tribune, not through an exchange of letters or the writing of accusatory essays but by trading mock-Byronic stanzas. However bizarre this may have seemed on the surface ("O poet strutting at the sandbagged portal," Orwell's effort began), this struck me as absolutely typical of the ways in which the literary community goes about its business: with a subtlety so acute that occasionally the joke has to be taken out and explained to an otherwise uncomprehending public.
In most cases the cryptic strand in English letters confines itself to low-level practical joking - sending a cutting to Private Eye's Pseuds Corner, for instance, under the signature of someone known to be a friend of the cutting's author. In the right hands, alternatively, it can metamorphose into a gargantuan obsession. British writers are wonderfully keen on counterfeit correspondence - William Donaldson's Henry Root letters to credulous public figures, or Humphrey Berkeley's Rochester Sneath, a fictitious 1950s headmaster who wrote to other headmasters about the disreputable former members of his staff who might be applying to them for jobs. In case this sounds like a last resort for the hard-pressed hack, it should be said that in the 1960s the Spectator printed a series of communications about Oxford academic life by Mercurius Oxoniensis - the alter-ego of no less a grandee than Hugh Trevor-Roper, then regius professor of modern history.
What might be called "the lizard in the text", the hidden agenda glimpsed beneath the surface of a book review, the almost impenetrable private joke, slithers all over newspaper book pages. British writers - again - like using pen-names, either to notice their own books (Anthony Burgess) or to trash the works of their enemies or, occasionally, as a way of making extra money by reviewing the same book twice. In less well-off days I used to practise this deception in the guise of Felix Benjamin - the Christian names of my two elder children lashed together - in addition to creating author bylines suggesting that Felix was about to publish his first novel or had just been appointed literary editor of an internet magazine. Graham Greene, even more shamelessly, once came second in a New Statesman competition calling for opening paragraphs of a novel written by himself.
There is a serious point here, lurking amid the letters to editors signed Daphne Burgess or Montagu Bream (well-known pseudonyms of recent years) and it has to do with irony, not taking yourself with undue solemnity - a lesson some writers find oddly painful to contemplate - the thought that playfulness sometimes produces a better return than the full-frontal assault. There is a wonderful scene in Malcolm Bradbury's Stepping Westward where an English creative writing professor brought to an American university tries to explain Swift's A Modest Proposal - a satire that proposes ending hunger by the mass consumption of babies - to a roomful of students. All are disgusted, except the class anarchist who wonders whether we shouldn't re-evaluate our attitude to cannibalism. If Professor Bradbury were still with us, a letter inviting Mr Justice Smith to join the University of East Anglia's creative writing course would already be in the post.
· DJ Taylor is a novelist and critic
davidjtaylor@btinternet.com
