Master and mistress of ambiguity
Dot Wordsworth
WHO WAS DR CHARLOTTE BACH? by Francis Wheen Short Books, £9.99, pp. 141, ISBN 1904095399 Charlotte Bach was unusual even in those who stood by her: Don Smith, a gay sado-masochist with whom she was collaborating on a book called Se, Sin and Evolution; Bob Mellors, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, who had custody of her papers until he was murdered in his Warsaw flat; a man whose name she never knew who met her every Wednesday for several years for a meal at a Wimpy bar and a trip to the cinema, where she would play with his 'thing' during the trailers — although this regular engagement came to an end in 1979 when she bought a colour television and forsook the cinema; and Colin Wilson, the author of The Outsider, who took her scientific theories seriously.
According to an advertisement she placed on the Court Circular page of the Times in 1971, Dr Bach had elaborated a theory by which evolution (largely of a Lamarckian nature) proceeded thanks to 'sexual deviations' and 'in particular the phenomenon at present misleadingly termed "transsexuality"'. Colin Wilson, in bed with flu, read through the preliminary 521-page typescript in capital letters on orange paper and found his 'unpleasant first impression was outweighed by a sense of tremendous intelligence and an impressive grasp of European cultural history'.
His surprise was as nothing to that of Charlotte Bach's Highgate neighbours ten years later when this ageing woman with a Hungarian accent, a commanding presence and a penchant for chunky jewellery to set off her sensible twin-set was found to be a man.
Ordinarily I find transvestism unenticing and of little interest psychologically. Charlotte Bach was more. She was an impostor — a thoroughgoing one, if not on the grand scale of Trebitsch Lincoln or George Psalmanazar (although, like them a foreigner). And Francis Wheen has knitted an entertaining account of her — or his — life of deception.
She was born the son of a tailor near Budapest in 1920 and baptised Karoly Hajdu. In 1942 he forged a birth certificate as a baron; but there was no opportunity to use it before he was called up into the Hungarian army. In 1948 under the communists he escaped and landed in Harwich, speaking English and claiming to have been a university lecturer. From then on he lived off shady earnings: exploiting fellow immigrants in an illegal accommodation agency, changing his name after bankruptcy to Michael Karoly; collecting money for the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956 and being unable to account for it: setting up as a hypnotherapist (even writing a book, Hypnosis, published by Paul Elek); contributing to Today magazine ('Should big girls be spanked?'); running Divorcees Anonymous; two-timing his wife; stealing books from Highgate library; serving short spells in jail. He was part Joe Orton, part a character in Nabokov.
The transvestism began in earnest in 1968 after the death of his estranged wife and stepson within weeks. He put on her clothes and recorded the effect in colour snaps of himself, hulking and dark-jawed. He sent his girlfriend a black-edged letter from his 'sister' telling her of his own death. Once he had mastered the mannerisms, it was time for Charlotte Bach PhD to begin her series of lectures, pamphlets and begging letters.
Perhaps Dr Bach believed some of her pseudo-science. To me it reads like a sort of schizophrenic construct — a theory that is always on the verge of explaining everything and putting Einstein in the shade. Not that Charlotte Bach was mad. An English psychiatrist of the old school wrote a report: 'There is nothing very much wrong with him and I believe he is a bit of a sponger and suffers from a bit of pseudologia.' Certainly Hajdu/Karoly/Bach could be pretty unpleasant, blackmailing and cajoling for money, showing sympathy for no one who came close to him. What the inside story of his mind was Francis Wheen does not pretend to say; his account is the more convincing for its objectivity.
I feel sorry for anyone who trusted this strange person with their love. It fell on stony ground. As a child Karoly had run away from home a couple of times. 'You always tried to escape from something,' his mother remarked, 'and you would never say what that something was.' He never stopped running.
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