Title: Zadie Smith's "The Fraud" [music]

Allison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Allison Stewart live from the WNYC studio in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, John Legend will be here in studio to talk about his new album, My Favorite Dream. Artist Wagangi Mathenge joins us to discuss her new solo show at the Nicola Vassel Gallery, and documentary filmmaker Lana Wilson has a new film out titled Look Into My Eyes.

It's a behind-the-scenes look about seven New York City psychics, and she'll join us to talk about it. That's the plan. Let's get this started.

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The title of Zadie Smith's latest novel, The Fraud, could apply to several of the chapters and the characters we meet in the book, even though some of them are based on true events and real people. There's William Ainsworth. At one point in the mid-1800s England, Ainsworth was more popular writer than his friend and rival Charles Dickens. Both appear in The Fraud. In Smith's book, William Ainsworth peaked early, and his later lengthy historical novels aren't very good, even though he enthusiastically continues to write. Yet his widowed cousin, his keeper, and former lover, by the way, Eliza, continues to tell him his work is good.

Eliza is bright and opinionated, and living in that time, she is confined. She finds her mind fully engaged when she begins to attend a scandalous trial that's gripping 19th-century London. A man has come forward claiming to be the long-lost son of a baronet named Tichborne. Is the claimant the real deal or a charlatan seeking fortune? Again, this happened in real life. Google it. The claimant has one star witness on his side, a formerly enslaved Jamaican man named Andrew Bogle, who claims to have worked for the Tichborne family and insists that the claimant is the young Tichborne scion.

As Eliza spends more and more time watching the court proceedings, she becomes obsessed with learning about Bogle's story and the truth he might reveal about class, slavery, and identity. The Fraud was named one of the ten best books of 2023 by the New York Times. It was just released in Paperback this week. I spoke with Zadie when the book first came out about a year ago, and I began by asking her to talk about the challenge of writing a historical novel.

Zadie Smith: I think I didn't want it to be cozy. There's a lot of cozy historical fiction in England and we're very sentimental about the past and very fond of cozy literature. For me, it came out of a different-- maybe some historical fiction, the idea is, wasn't it so much nicer back then? That's the animating spirit of-- I don't really feel that way, but I had two linked questions in my mind.

I think the first is, when people talk about the Victorians in England, at least, they often speak about them as these repressed, backwards, unprogressive people, but I kept on realizing, particularly since I've been back in England, that all the communal spaces that I live in are Victorian. The public schools my kids go to, the hospitals where I get free healthcare, the parks where I walk, those are all Victorian gifts.

Looking at my present government, I was like, "I don't see them giving anything like that to the people, this Commons." That was the first thing I wanted to know, how the Commons was made. What kind of people made that? I guess the second question was, "What was the relationship between England and Jamaica?" That's a personal question for me, but also a historical question.

Allison Stewart: When you said cozy, another word that came to my mind right then was cobwebs. That you have to wipe away the cobwebs to get at what's real.

Zadie Smith: Right. It takes a minute. Also, there's more than you imagine. Obviously, in the Jamaica-England situation, it benefits the English elite to repress the truth of slavery, but when you repress that, you also repress something that is really interesting, which is a series of radical rejections, like abolitionists, chartists, working-class movements of all kinds, the slaves themselves. It's like you lose a double history. Not just, I don't get to know what happened in Jamaica, but I also don't get to know that radical movements do end things. I think that's almost the more important story that Britain never really wanted to teach in its classrooms, that, in fact, we have these amazing radical movements.

Allison Stewart: There's a moment later in the book, and I'm not giving anything away, but to this point, so I'm going to jump to it, is Andrew Bogle is listening to some people talk and talk around him and talk about things, and he's got this reputation for being stoic and almost accommodating. It's a little bit patronizing the way they talk about him. At the end, you realize he's been holding a glass and he's crushed it in his hand.

Zadie Smith: Right. I think that's the feeling I had a lot when I was writing. This sense of frustration that the 19th century is so badly depicted, particularly the way I was schooled, that I just had no idea of this connection between really broad working-class movements, both in England and Jamaica, that work together, or even there's a little radical group of what I would call radical Christian socialists, a few of whom were Black, in the center of town, giving speeches about property rights, about slavery.

This was all going on in England, and you miss a lot of that. There's quite a lot of it in Dickens. He's very aware, and he himself was in many ways a public activist, that there was this energy at street level for change, but it was such a revelation finding out all that stuff. I think some of the frustrations of Bogle and Eliza-- when you're working as a writer, you're working like an actor. You think, "I've never been enslaved and I've never been a 19th-century woman, but I have been frustrated, angry, bored." You use your own emotions to animate these people. I think Bogle crushing a glass, I've had that feeling for sure.

Allison Stewart: For sure. The name of the novel is The Fraud. When talking about what we learned in school, when did you first learn about the Tichborne corruption trial?

Zadie Smith: That is a hard question. There was a movie, but I don't remember seeing it. It came to me through Andrew Bogle. The name Bogle is meaningful for Jamaicans because we have this wonderful hero, Paul Bogle, who's on our money, who was involved in a great slave mutiny.

It's actually a trade dispute that became a mutiny. The Bogle name meant something to me, and I put it in NW. One of my characters is a Bogle in there. There's a Nathan Bogle. I think it must have been through hearing about Andrew Bogle in a short story by Borges, and then I was just fascinated. Who was this 19th-century Jamaican in a courtroom giving testimony for almost three years? That's an incredible resource. Just a transcript of a recently enslaved man speaking in a centre of London for three years.

Allison Stewart: Eliza becomes really obsessed with him and also with getting to know him, which are two different things. Let's start with the first one. What is it about Andrew Bogle that is so interesting to her and specifically her?

Zadie Smith: I think maybe these days we've come to think that you can't work in solidarity with people unless your politics and situation perfectly align, but in the Victorian period, there's this idea of analogy. For instance, in Liverpool and Manchester, poor cotton workers in both places made an analogy with what was going on in the Caribbean. They knew that their situation was not the same as the enslaved, but they understood that they were both living under the same system of capital, so they could conceive of this solidarity between them.

I think Eliza, in her own incredible frustration about her life, her creative outlets, her sexuality, everything, sees some analogy with a man who is also not able to express or be himself fully in civil society. I was just interested in the moments of connection and also the limits. Bogle has no interest in being friends with her. [laughs] That's a funny thing that runs through the book, that she so wants this intimate relationship.

She so wants to know what other people are like and to know them from the inside, and Bogle is a man who has really had enough of trying to make friends with people he doesn't trust. He's not interested in that relation.

Allison Stewart: There's one moment when she realizes that she's the odd person out as a white person, and she writes she was unable to shake a sense of conspiracy between them, people, directed towards her own person. A conspiracy of laughter, of pity. All the way home, the ideas pursued her like shame.

Zadie Smith: I was always interested in that. I'm so used to living in a majority-white country. I moved to all these spaces all the time. I have since I was a kid, but sometimes when you see white people in completely Black countries, you see they have this experience of otherness, and it can happen in many different ways. I remember when my mother went to China. I've never been to China. My mother's a very dark-skinned woman with long Rastafarian dreads.

She really felt herself other in a way that she'd never experienced before and not the otherness of the binary Black-white relation. Some completely new concept which was fascinating to her. I think it's sometimes an incredibly healthy experience to suddenly be put in the position of being completely alienated. It's a shock. Mrs. Touchet, who considers herself quite alienated anyway, is suddenly in a new situation involved with people who just don't really want to be in relation with her.

Allison Stewart: The other thing I thought was so interesting about Andrew Bogle as a witness is that he seems to be the one witness in this whole trial that even if you don't believe the claimant, you recognize that he is an honorable person. He's a person of integrity and that a "Negro" would be the person of integrity in the center of this trial is interesting.

Zadie Smith: It's so striking. Obviously, this is a thing in 1873 that couldn't have happened in America. You wouldn't have been allowed as a Black man to walk into a courtroom and give testimony of any kind. This is a situation unique to England, but not only was he in the courtroom, he was a celebrity. People loved him and made plates with him on it and made mugs with his face and interviewed him.

It was so interesting, even though I feel that the great mass of the British working-class public are not fools, and they knew he was lying, but I think they also were able to see that he was making a different argument like, "I am owed something here." They felt they were owed something too, and particularly from these aristocratic courts, which were so prejudiced against them. That was another case of an analogy being made between people who were quite unlike each other.

His transcript is all real in the book, is so solid, honest, witty, often ironical. I just began to think of him as a really great storyteller. That person is someone I'm always fascinated by.

Allison Stewart: My guest is Zadie Smith. We're discussing her new novel, The Fraud. William Ainsworth was a real person. Eliza Touchet was as well.

Zadie Smith: Yes, they're all real.

Allison Stewart: We know you can get a sense of William, I'm sure, through his writing. Did he leave letters and the [crosstalk]?

Zadie Smith: Yes, a load of letters.

Allison Stewart: I can imagine. I was wondering about Eliza Touchet. Did you know much about her, because the name is so perfect?

Zadie Smith: Yes, I know. It's rediculous.

Allison Stewart: Did the name inform the way you developed her?

Zadie Smith: That's all I really knew about her. I knew that the men around the table often mentioned being scared of her, which fascinated me, but I didn't know that much. I really felt that I loved her and wanted to do right by her. I went to her grave a lot during this process, which is hard to find because it's one of those graveyards where everything's overgrown and her stone has fallen and been buried under a man's stone. So annoying.

I could never even physically get to her, but I just felt that she was the spirit of this book and she meant a lot to me. It was also teaching me something about people who aren't necessarily perfect. She's in no way perfect and has so many blind spots, but she's doing something. The value of doing something instead of nothing in the world of practical politics means a lot to me.

Allison Stewart: Say more about that.

Zadie Smith: There's a line she has where she says, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." I think that's a good political principle. At the same time, she fails in so many places. She could do more, she could engage more. She defends herself so much. When she meets with Andrew's son, who's a young biracial radical called Henry, that's really where her limits are revealed. There's things that she can't imagine doing. There's places she can't imagine going.

I think that's true of a lot of us. A lot of us won't go absolutely to the barricades. A lot of us won't do what she's asked to do, which is beyond the political. At the end, she's asked to do something which I would call almost purely Christian in its selflessness, but at the very radical end of this socialist Christian gospel that was being spoken of in the Victorian period is Jesus saying, "Even if it's the last thing on your back, you have to give it away. Even if it's the last penny you have, you have to give it away. If you have any land, relinquish it. You shall own nothing."

How many of us can pass that test, whether radical Christians or radical socialists? It's a bar that's beyond us. There are many, many, many degrees of action before that which are still worth doing.

Allison Stewart: It's interesting, you talk about how we should give away money and we should give away things that we own because that's at the center of this trial. The money.

Zadie Smith: It's all about money and land.

Allison Stewart: It's all about money and land. The claimant says he is the son of this family. It becomes pretty clear he's lying. There's all kinds of reasons why it becomes clear he's lying. So interesting to me is that in the book, we watch as large groups of people are mad for him. They on some level recognize he's a liar, but they know that he's their liar.

Zadie Smith: Yes.

Allison Stewart: Which reminds of a certain political situation in the United States. You have in here, "Cabinet makers unite for Tichborne. The Whitechapel debating club has no faith in the Tattoo Humbug." He doesn't have a certain tattoo. "Might against right is always wrong. Working men are lovers of fair play." First of all, did our political climate in the United States for the past few years inform this part of the story at all for you?

Zadie Smith: It's true their structural position is the same in that they're portraying themselves as almost impossible paradoxes. Trump is a rich poor man. That's basically his selling point. "I'm one of you, but I'm also a billionaire," and Tichborne was an aristocrat, but also a man of the people. OJ, you could say, is another example of, "I'm a Black man, but I'm a white man." I think the difference with Tichborne compared to Trump is that the Trump is a right-wing populism, and Tichborne was left-wing populism.

Tichborne was really a working-class hero on the left, and the argument was about, whose land is this? I guess when I was trying to answer that question about Jamaica and England, one of the things that became clear in my mind is that the original land grab in Jamaica, which is basically an island, being given to 20 Cromwellian soldiers, and then also the murder of a whole population of Taíno Indians, that crime just reverberates for 400 years.

It's just a series of thefts from the Jamaicans themselves, but also from working-class British people who were part of this industry, also the secondary developers of this sugar, who were also not making money, who also did not have land, who did not have property. It's a very long fraud, and it's had reverberations in English society that have never really ended. This is also the point in Victorian English life where the one thing Victorian working-class people did have, which was the Commons land, was beginning to be enclosed and to disappear.

That was the final thing that was being taken from them. I was so moved in this period, watching the moment where Chartists and abolitionists come together and say, "No, you won't have this park," and "No, you can't have this land. We'll have a school here," and "You won't have this. We'll have a hospital here." I am literally living in that action. My life, and many people in London would not have the reasonable lives we have without somebody saying, "No, not that, too."

Allison Stewart: It's a little bit of a tangent, but it is related. When you talked about a grab, I started thinking about all of the art and the artifacts that should be repatriated to countries from the British museum. How is that treated in the British press currently?

Zadie Smith: I think there's a lot of agonizing about it. For me, it's not a one-rule-fits-all. I think it's something you have to think about through each case, where these things came from, in what state. I have always, when it comes to African religious fetish items in particular, found it very strange to see them outside of a community context or religious context. To me, they're sacred things, but that is, of course, true of an enormous amount of Christian European art as well, which is all over the place and are actual sacred objects. I think it's a deep discussion about where you want these sacred objects to be, what they mean, what they mean to the people.

If people are saying to you, "This is my sacred object that is meaningful to my community, that has a role for my people," I think it's very hard to resist that case.

Allison Stewart: My guest is Zadie Smith. The name of the new novel is The Fraud. She'll be speaking tonight with Books Are Magic, and tomorrow at Cooper Union with Panamerica. The Books Are Magic event's at St. Anne's by the way. There's also this theme, or this question of, are novels worth it? What is the role of storytelling? Are novelists to be admired?

Zadie Smith: They're definitely not to be admired, not excessively, because it's something they can't help but do most of the time. There are these unique cases, like in the case of Dickens, that you are dealing with someone who didn't just sit around in radio stations talking about their book, but actually changed the labor law. No matter what you think of Dickens, I don't know many novelists who had claimed that.

It's an extraordinary case. I will always admire him for that, if nothing else, and also for this incredible energy and will to give voice to working people in England in a way which was not patronizing or criminalizing or even glamorizing the way William did it. He really was interested and was of those people and wrote about them so well. He's always someone to admire. A novel is a complicated art form, but for me, I can't always defend it as a writer, but as a reader, I do find them transformative.

Right now, I'm reading a book not published yet, but it's called Blessings by a queer Nigerian young writer. It's a coming-of-age story. It's beautifully and simply written, but novels do bring a kind of news that I can't find anywhere else. I can read about punitive laws against gay people in Nigeria in the New York Times, but when I'm reading this novel, I'm reading it from the inside. Something different happens to me. It's an all-round experience, political, personal, ethical, and I personally can't find that anywhere else.

Allison Stewart: I started reading novels with a highlighter. I used to only do that with nonfiction, things I wanted to remember, but now I've really found in the past few years that there are lines in novels that I want to remember and I want to come back to. I don't want to forget. I want to read them in context. I want to think about them in relationship to current events.

Zadie Smith: This is it. For me, they've changed my life and changed my thinking. I just feel incredibly grateful, particularly when I'm reading young people's fiction right now, that I get to make a connection with someone I might not meet otherwise and really experience the world not just through their eyes sentimentally, but the way they're thinking. I want to know.

Allison Stewart: The novel's funny.

Zadie Smith: Yes, but it sounds so serious.

Allison Stewart: I just want to point that out, that the novel truly has jokes, but they're also jokes within the time period.

Zadie Smith: Right.

Allison Stewart: What is something you learned about Victorian humor or the rhythm of Victorian humor that you had to use or you wanted to use?

Zadie Smith: I think there's a lot of ridicule and a lot of satire. I think, for me, the funny part was thinking about someone like Mrs. Touchet, all the things that you can't say to people's faces because she doesn't want to hurt their feelings, but that repression of that kind also creates a lot of humor because there's a disconnect between the way you behave and what you really think. That, to me, is inherently funny. She's a constant split consciousness.

On the surface, she seems to be this quite repressed housekeeper, devoted to her stepchildren, they are almost, and her cousin. In reality, she really doesn't care about these children at all. She's very bored most of the time. She's very sexual. She has all these wild desires. That, to me, was inherently comic, this living of two lives. It doesn't only have to be tragic, I mean by that idea.

Allison Stewart: Why does she think she wants to write? She ultimately decides she thinks she might want to write.

Zadie Smith: I think in my own experience, you take in so much, you read so many books, and so much experience comes to you, and it builds up and it needs an outlet. I think one of the most inspiring things for writers sometimes, I think this is Mrs. Touchet's case, is reading bad writing. You read so much of it until you're like, "Enough. Enough of this."

Allison Stewart: You wrote some bad writing. You had to write bad writing for Ainsworth.

Zadie Smith: I have to say, unfortunately, that's not me. That is him.

Allison Stewart: That's his writing?

Zadie Smith: That's literal. That's verbatim.

Allison Stewart: I feel better now.

Zadie Smith: I only put one page of it in, and I didn't want to expose him in that way because I actually love him. It is not a crime to have no talent. I think that's an important thing to remember. You can be a kind, generous, interesting, sweet person and still not be able to write. It's not a big deal. Writing is quite a fluky type of thing to be able to do, and it also doesn't elevate you into suddenly being a nice or interesting person. The combination in William of real goodness, I think he was a good man, and inability to do what he most devoted himself to is comitragic. I think that's the best way you can put that situation.

Allison Stewart: That was my conversation with author Zadie Smith about her latest novel, The Fraud, which is out in Paperback this week.

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