What do Matt Groening and Jack Clemo have in common?
At the beginning of 1994, the year of Jack Clemo’s
death, the active but ailing poet received a surprise letter from Neustadt in
Germany. It was from a man named Rainer Böhlke, who wrote to say that he was a
great admirer of Clemo’s work and that he would very much like to help Jack
with his writing. Böhlke said he was a lonely and wealthy man and that
he would like to bequeath Clemo his ‘considerable fortune’. He did not want
anything in return for the money, he said, except perhaps a couple of handwritten lines
from the author and an autograph. Innocently, Jack replied at length to Böhlke,
thanking him for his generous offer and explaining that he could not commit to
any large sum of money at his age. He said such an amount would be too
much of a responsibility and would only complicate affairs for him and his wife this late in life.
He said that he and Ruth lived modestly and comfortably on their pensions, so
that ‘I would have no personal use for a large bequest of money: I might even
die before you do’.
Today, an
approach like Böhlke’s would make most of us suspect a scam. And we would be
correct. Rainer Böhlke sent a great many such letters, including to musician
Frank Zappa, novelist Amy Tan, Nobel-winning DNA discoverer James Watson and The Simpsons creator, Matt Groening. According
to newspaper reports, Groening used the fraudulent approach and the character
of Böhlke in his comic strip series, Life
in Hell, while Tan incorporated the character into her ‘The Year of No
Flood’, an unpublished novel she was working on in 1993.
Böhlke
can be looked up online, and with a little persistence you might find many writers
and artists who were sent similar letters from Neustadt. Many saw through the
scam immediately and either ignored the letters, engaged facetiously or
responded creatively. Others fell for it and replied. To my knowledge, Jack Clemo
is the only one to have naively and open-heartedly accepted the authenticity of
the sender and then declined the bequest. One wonders what ‘Böhlke’ thought when he read it: double the fool or double the saint?
