The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas Read online

  ‘Though of old a palace, the labyrinth, of which in spite of clearing and partial reconstruction we have only today a fragment of a fragment, is discontinuous in many directions and in places artificially linked. The visitor who wishes to explore its full circuit still needs the guidance that of old was provided by Ariadne’s clew.’

  Sir Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos (1902)

  dead ink

  Copyright ©Daniel James 2018

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Daniel James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Dead Ink, an imprint of Cinder House Publishing Limited.

  Paperback ISBN 9781911585299

  Hardback ISBN 9781911585282

  ePub ISBN 9781911585305

  Maze graphic by Tom Boyle.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.

  www.deadinkbooks.com

  THE

  UNAUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF

  EZRA MAAS

  Daniel James

  The following biography was completed without the authorisation of the Maas Foundation. Enquiries about Ezra Maas should be directed to: www.ezramaas.com.

  All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

  To Elliott and Evie.

  Foreword

  And on the threshold of being no more, I succeed in being another1

  This book is dangerous. You need to know that before you begin. Once you have turned the page, you will understand why. You could walk away now and leave the story unread, but having come this far, I suspect you will not. Only those willing to risk everything can hope to discover the truth.

  The manuscript you hold in your hands is the only biography2 of the artist Ezra Maas. It was written by my friend Daniel James, and it is a true story.

  This is the last surviving copy of a book that was originally more than 800 pages long. I have done my best to put these pages in order, but I fear I have failed both you and Daniel. I am not the writer he was. Nor do I share his unique perspective on the world. These are my friend’s words and no one else’s. Where there were gaps in the narrative I have included Daniel’s journal entries in their place, as this is what he intended himself, and where his own notes were incomplete, I have done my best to finish what he started, without interpretation. As such, I must assume some ownership of this final version of the text. This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine3.

  I’m sorry that I am not able to tell you my name, or how I came to be in possession of this manuscript. I know this may lead to speculation, but I have no intention of meeting my friend’s fate. There are people watching me as I write this, and I am not as reckless as Daniel was. He knew the risks when he began this book, and though it cost him everything, the pages I deliver into your hands are proof of his final victory. The next chapter belongs to you.

  There is nothing left to say. I have run out of time, and words betray me. All that remains is regret. I hope you will forgive me, but that may be too much to ask. If nothing else, please understand that I had no choice.

  Some stories are more dangerous than others, and true stories are the most dangerous of all.

  This is not a biography. It is a true story.

  Anonymous

  Notes

  1. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, Grove Press, (2009), p.171

  2. Note to reader: I have followed Daniel’s notes as closely as possible while reassembling this manuscript in the five years since his disappearance. The surviving pages, with their disruptions and fissures, contain at least three overlapping narrative threads. First, there is Daniel’s investigation into the life of Ezra Maas in his own words, supported by relevant news clippings, correspondence, partial footnotes, references, images, transcripts, and additional notes. Second, I have included the surviving chapters from Daniel’s biography of Ezra Maas, featuring rare and unseen interviews, letters, and archival material. Last, there are my own editorial intrusions, both within footnotes such as these and elsewhere in the text. I have taken every effort to keep these to a minimum. As publisher, you will have your own notes and you are free to alter the text however you see fit. Similarly, if you choose to publish the manuscript, every reader who purchases the book will have his or her own interpretations, along with other narrative layers that I can never hope to identify and catalogue. In this way, the voices will continue to multiply, and the manuscript will be endlessly reborn – Anonymous.

  3. William Shakespare, The Tempest.

  The Guardian online

  home culture art books

  Controversial biographer to reveal the truth about Ezra Maas?

  Daniel James denies growing speculation that he is working on a book about the reclusive artist who disappeared seven years ago in one of the art world’s biggest mysteries.

  Sarah Chandler

  guardian.co.uk Thursday 25 March 2011 10:08 BST

  Biographer Daniel James last night admitted he was working on a new book, but denied it had any connection to missing artist Ezra Maas.

  The writer and journalist, who famously turned his back on the newspaper industry after a much-publicised split with former employers News International, was questioned about the book as he left the Joseph Glass Memorial Awards in London.

  James has attracted considerable criticism during his controversial career as a journalist. His writing, modelled on the New Journalism of Thomas Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, and others, sees the line between fact and fiction blurred in an unorthodox hybrid, where the colourful events of his own life often overshadow his subject. Despite accusations of disregarding the truth and established journalistic practices, James’s boundary-breaking work has been championed by a number of literary figures, including Phillip Roth, Umberto Eco, and Paul Benjamin.

  “His writing is the only journalism I read,” Benjamin states. “Where others see only the author’s narcissism intruding into the text, I see James’s unique combination of biography, auto-fiction, and the historical novel as questioning the representation of lived experience through language. I find his deviations on the form a radical dismantling of how identity and fiction are constructed, and a unique commentary on the disintegration of subject and object, as well as the collapsing distinctions between life and art.

  “If the sense of unreality running through his work is disconcerting, it is because his writing portrays life, not as we may want it to be, not how it used to be, but as it is now. His work is giving us a new kind of biographical fiction for the 21st century. James has surpassed both the biography and the historical novel in his search for literary truth.”

  Others have been less favourable, including former Culture Minister Patrick Vasey, who famously branded James an “egomaniac” and claimed the writer had “never seen a mirror he didn’t like.” In 2008, Tate Modern boss Alan Leibniz accused James of plagiarism, while News International executive director John Atkins, unhappy with James’s vicious attack on the news industry, described him as “a minor talent with a major gift for self-promotion”. Literary agent Alex Renner, who parted company with James in 2009 after a protracted legal battle, said the former journalist was “obsessive and unstable”, adding: “It’s only a matter of time before he self-destructs”.

  As divisive as the writer has become in recent years, if the speculation is accurate and James has landed the job of writing the biography of Ezra Maas, it would easily be his most intriguing project to date. Reclusive artist Maas has not been heard from since 2002 when he announced via his website that he was withdr
awing from public life to begin his “final and most important work”. In the years that followed, the artist’s estate, managed by the Maas Foundation, categorically refused to elaborate on the status of the artist other than to say he was “in seclusion” and that he would re-emerge when his work was complete.

  However, in November 2005, after police were called to a reported disturbance at the Maas estate, Helena Maas, the artist’s estranged wife and official spokesperson for the Maas Foundation, was forced to admit that the artist had been missing for three years. The hugely influential and radical artist, who first became famous in the 1960s before going on to win, and receive nominations for, a host of prestigious awards – including the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Turner Prize – is notoriously reclusive. Little is known about his private life and very few photos of him exist. His refusal to give interviews or make public appearances since he first emerged on the art scene has only increased interest in his personal life and methods. There has even been speculation that the name Ezra Maas is a pseudonym for another famous artist or collective. Unsurprisingly, a number of biographers have attempted to tell his story in the past, without success. BBC Head of Arts George Wallas puts this down to a combination of legal threats, confidentiality clauses, and the intense loyalty of the artist’s family, friends, and supporters.

  “Ezra Maas was a reclusive genius, an outlier and iconoclast even amongst the avant-garde. Today, his name has all but disappeared from the public consciousness, but in the art world, and especially to his followers, he is regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century,” Wallas said.

  “From his early fame in the late 1960s, Maas immediately distinguished himself from his contemporaries by rejecting celebrity. He took the New York art scene by storm, exhibiting a series of radical conceptual and guerrilla artworks at live happenings in the East Village, while choosing to remain anonymous and unseen. Maas was known to be intensely private in person and relentlessly controlled his own narrative by refusing to give interviews or have photographs taken. Naturally, this only added to the intrigue surrounding him and helped further capture the imagination of a disenfranchised generation. He was hailed as a prodigy by a number of respected critics and developed a cult-like following.”

  Wallas added: “At the time, Maas was compared to reclusive writers and artists like Thomas Pynchon and JD Salinger, with a touch of Howard Hughes’s eccentricity. For contemporary audiences he is probably best described as the ‘original’ Banksy, as famous for the speculation around his identity as he was for his artworks.

  “To this day, very few photographs of Maas exist, and the rare insights given into his life and art are either impenetrable or contradictory. Combine this with wildly different stories about his background, nationality, age, and physical appearance, and it’s not hard to see why so many believed that his story would never be told.”

  All this changed recently, however, as rumours grew that the Maas Foundation were set to officially announce the artist’s death following news of a scheduled inquest. James’s interest in the artist is the latest twist in the tale. His publisher, William Wilson and Company, last night issued a brief statement confirming that James had been working on a new book for the last three months, provisionally for release later this year, but denied any connection to Maas. A spokesperson for The Bleed magazine,4 where James was former editor, said it had no knowledge of the book. The Maas Foundation declined to comment.

  Note

  4. The Bleed was an independent, multidisciplinary arts magazine founded by Daniel James in Newcastle upon Tyne in the mid-2000s.

  Daniel James5

  Chapter One

  Nothing is more real than nothing6

  It began with a phone call in the dead of night. A client with no name, offering me a deal that seemed too good to be true. Everything I had ever wanted. All I had to do was write a book. The true, untold story of the artist Ezra Maas. There was never any doubt in my mind that I would say yes. It wasn’t the money. It was the chance to make history. I had been a writer for hire, a ghost for so many years, but through Ezra Maas I would live again. I would be the one to uncover the truth about him, no one else, and it would make my name. It was the moment I had been waiting for my entire life.

  Within hours of the call, I knew something was different. I felt the change in the air. The world was new again; alive with possibilities. I retraced Maas’s footsteps and relived his past, from the day he was born through nearly seven decades of secret history. Every step towards the truth took me deeper into the darkness. Every discovery brought me closer to the end, sat at a typewriter in a burning room, with the pages of the manuscript strewn around me like fallen leaves. A burning room, where the air shimmers, the walls blister and bubble, and the ceiling writhes like a living thing, a sea of black smoke. The walls are full of cracks. Eyes and ears move from gap to gap, ceiling to floor, watching me, willing me to write the final words.

  Outside my window, the city is on fire. Buildings fold in on themselves like fists and the only landmarks are those of the dead. Across the street, they are nailing someone to a cross. They knock another man’s head off his shoulders and kick it along the road. In the trees, ugly spirits7 whisper,8 waiting for me to make my move.

  Sleep is dangerous. That’s how you lose time, and I have so little left. I need to stay awake in these final hours, counting down the clock until the end. All through the night the clock ticks and the typewriter clacks. Click clack, click clack, click, click, click, ding, all through the night. I slide pages under the door each morning, but at the end of every day they reappear in the book, sometimes just as they were, other times marked with savage red hieroglyphics that I don’t understand.

  There was a woman here earlier, more than one in fact, but they’ve all gone now. All the pretty birds have flown. I can’t remember their names. It’s no longer important. All of the women were the same woman in the end.9 I remember each of them, but I try not to feel anything, anymore.

  I can’t let a little thing like pain distract me now. Not so close to the end. Not when the pages of the book are almost full. Even now, I wonder whether there will be a last page, or will the book keep writing itself after I am gone? It’s always changing. Sometimes I forget how it began.

  It started as a biography.

  Just as we can never know what someone else is thinking, biography can never be true. Its limitations and thresholds mirror the boundaries of our own minds. We can never know another person’s thoughts the way we know our own. Each mind is a locked room.10 We can put our ear to the wall and our eye to the keyhole, we can speculate about what could be inside, and the secrets it might contain, but we can never open the door. Not your mother or your father. Not your children or your closest friends. Not your lovers or your enemies. No one. Their inner lives will always be a secret to you. Biography will always fall short of reality.

  I had made a career out of turning people’s lives into newspaper and magazine articles, but it was just an illusion. If biography was a simulation, then my work was no more than a convincing facsimile. At worst it was a lie. And that was not the legacy I wanted. I dreamt of creating works of art, not fiction masquerading as reality. I became obsessed with creating the perfect replica, more real than real, and in doing so became afflicted by what Umberto Eco11 termed ‘reconstructive neurosis’. I wanted to walk through the door into someone else’s life, enter the locked room, and return with the truth.12

  Ezra Maas was the one. I knew it instinctively. No one had told his story. His art was filled with strange, autobiographical fragments and symbols that said everything and nothing, so dense with meaning that it overflowed, haemorrhaging in possibilities. Maas didn’t have to hide his secrets, he casually scattered them on the ground for all to see and watched the trees grow up around him. For in a forest of signs13 nothing could be seen clearly at all.

  I believed I could navigate my way through and return home. I was different from the others
who had come before me, from everyone. I was special.14 And maybe I was right. It led me here after all, to this burning room and the pages you hold in your hands right now.

  It was only much later that I realised the price of my ambition. To throw open the door and enter another mind, to inhabit someone else’s life so completely, to wear their skin and speak with their voice, to feel their thoughts and know their secrets as well as you know your own, to cross this boundary…Pour voir Dieu, c’est de mourir.15

  In my arrogance I walked through the door, but when I turned back the entrance had disappeared. Inside there was a mirror, but I didn’t recognise the face looking back.16 I spoke, but I couldn’t hear my voice. I looked into my eyes, and for the first time I didn’t know what I was thinking. Where once there had been a constant sea of voices, all flowing together like instruments in a symphony, now there was only silence. I looked into the mirror, and for the first time I didn’t trust my own face. I had trapped myself in a locked room full of mirrors and endless reflections. She was right after all. I was a million broken pieces, reflecting nothing. I picked up a shard of myself and began to cut…

  It began as a biography, but it became so much more.17 All that matters now is how it ends. Every word is true, but each page undoes the one before it. The book is a living void,18 recovered from the edge of absence, visible more in its influence on the things around it than in itself. Only I can end it.

  The final chapter is in my head, but before I can write another word I must go back to the beginning, and this time you will come with me. Every reader changes the story, bringing it to life and making it real, every reader plays their part, just as I have played mine. I must remember my lines, one last time, and recite them once more without feeling.

  * * *