“There’s money in poverty,” a well known professor said to me many years ago after he had won a large research grant to study the living conditions of the less fortunate. We both laughed, he at the irony and I at the absurdity of a policy whereby the well off prosper under the guise of helping the poor.
At least the professor did not pretend that he was poor, which is more than can be said for several prominent novelists who have been caught fabricating their life stories in published autobiographies. What is striking about this trend among novelists is that in almost every case well-off and well-educated writers sought literary fame (and money) by passing themselves off as victims of one kind or another. The made-up characters are poor, of course, or addicts, prostitutes or victims of sexual abuse – victims of society, assuredly, or, in some cases, of the Nazis. These writers were not content to write fictional accounts in novel form; rather they insisted (falsely) that these accounts were tales of their own lives – a pose which, if accepted, would turn them into literary heroes of a certain kind as the subjects of their own fiction.
The New York Times has been on this case, publishing two informative articles in the last week under the titles of “Lies and Consequences: Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud” and “A Family Tree of Literary Fakers.” The articles make for fascinating reading about the subjects that animate contemporary writers, along with readers and reviewers.
Among the hoaxes listed by the Times are these:
Binjamin Wilkomirski, who in a memoir titled Fragments, described (as quoted in the Times) “how he survived as a Latvian Jewish orphan in a Nazi concentration camp.” The memoir was later shown to be a fake by a Swiss historian who showed that it was in fact written by a man who had spent the war in relative safety in Switzerland.
Misha Defonseca, who published a book titled Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, depicting her life as a Jewish child on the run from the Nazis during the war and in search of her parents (who had been deported and were eventually killed by the Nazis). She also published a companion volume, Surviving With Wolves, highlighting a period when she lived with wolves while hiding out from the Nazis. Such accounts proved difficult for many to believe. As it happens, the author recently confessed that the story was made up, that in fact she was not Jewish at all but was born in Belgium as a Catholic.
Nassdijj (according to the Times) “wrote three books that were supposedly based on his life as a troubled Indian man who was raped by his white father, and who later adopted a Navajo child who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and cared for another with AIDs.” The accounts in these books turned out to be false. Nasdijj was really a white man named Tim Burrus who was known as a writer of gay pornography.
J. T. Leroy wrote a novel titled Sarah and a collection of short stories which, as the Times says, were written “in the persona of the son of a West Virginia truck stop prostitute.” According to the Times, the real author was Laura Albert, a 42 year old white woman originally from Brooklyn and now living in San Francisco. Ms Albert, playing her hoax to the limit, arranged for an acquaintance to portray her character in public appearances; her alter ego soon became a celebrity in his own right. A production company signed a contract to make a film based on the novel. When the deception was exposed, Ms Albert was ordered by a court to pay damages and legal expenses to the company.
James Frey wrote a best-selling novel, Million Little Pieces, depicting in rich detail his life as a drug and alcohol addict. The book was a feature selection of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club in 2005. It was revealed after publication that Mr. Frey had embellished many of the details in the book.
The latest case of literary fakery hit the news last week when the author of Love and Consequences, a novel published by Riverhead Books (a division of Penguin), confessed that she had made up her memoir of her life as a foster child in the gang underworld of South Central Los Angeles. The novel was published under the authorship of one Margaret B. Jones, a pseudonym for the real author, Margaret Seltzer, who told her publisher that she needed to use a pseudonym because, according to the Times, “it was the name she was known by in the gang world and because she was trying to reconnect with her birth mother.” Ms Seltzer further claimed in the novel that she was part-Indian and had been shunted among foster homes as a child in “the hood.”
The Times delivers the punch line: “In fact, as she admitted on Monday, she grew up with her biological family in the prosperous Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles and graduated from an Episcopal Day School.” Her novel was not a product of her life but of her imagination.
Ms. Seltzer obviously had a creditable imagination for just a few weeks ago the Times itself gave her novel a most enthusiastic review. It was, as its reviewer wrote, “a remarkable book” about the violent life in the underworld of Los Angeles. According to the review, “Ms Jones’ portraits of her family and friends are so sympathetic and unsentimental, so raw and tender and tough minded that it’s clear to the reader that whatever detachment she learned as a child did not impair her capacity for caring.” All in all, according to the Times, “Ms Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood.”
The novel plainly contains a cavalcade of politically correct notions about the inner city crafted to appeal to middle class readers and reviewers for whom poverty and violence fills an imaginative space that in past generations was occupied by more elevated images of kings, courts, and far-off battles. Ms Jones claimed she had been abused as a child, saw her brother sent to prison and later killed in a gang slaying, and had been diagnosed with a string of emotional maladies, including attention deficit disorder, reactive attachment disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. At length she is encouraged by a counselor to apply to college, eventually graduating from the University of Oregon with a degree in ethnic studies.
Ms Seltzer, along with her partners in literary crime, deserves some credit at least for crafting a hoax that she must have known would appeal to the sentimental sensibility about the poor and downtrodden that is pervasive among reviewers at publications like the Times. It is more than a little interesting that contemporary novelists, when they stoop to such fabrications, invariably come up with harrowing stories about addiction, mental illness, sexual abuse, family dysfunction, prostitution, gang wars, and life on the run or among the down and out. On rarely hears of fabrications from the poor (or even by the rich) about life in the suburbs, boardrooms, or country clubs. Our novelists, even when they lie or especially when they lie, reveal what sells among publishers, reviewers, and contemporary readers.
It is sometimes said that what artists esteem is a sign of what is valued in a society. If that is so, then we may be more trouble than we think.