Faking literature

Second Take

In the mid-90s, a talented reporter named Stephen Glass, working for the New Republic, finally confessed to having invented entire articles.

At least 27 of them in a five-year career. He had a knack for making them feel real; the articles were full of dates, names of places and several quotes from people — all of it made up by him. It wasn’t very long after this sensational unmasking (filmed entertainingly as Shattered Glass) that we heard of more fake journalistic stories. This time not features, but news reports. Most famously, Jayson Blair in the New York Times; later Janet Cooke at The Washington Post, Jay Forman at Slate and Michael Finkel at NYT magazine. Both Blair and Finkel turned what happened to them into a book.

One literary hoax we are more than familiar with is literary plagiarism, brought home to us indelibly by Kaavya Vishwanathan, and earlier, Indrani Aikath Gyaltsen (who committed suicide after being charged with copying the work of Elizabeth Goudge). But recently, a more peculiar form of literary hoax abounds: the fake memoir. In almost every instance, the critics had only praise for these memoirs, until they were revealed as fabricated. The authors of these fake memoirs, then, are obviously gifted writers; they can turn in a literary work. Why fake a memoir then? Why not write a decent novel instead?

The answer to that is again obvious: memoirs are often sensational, make news quickly, and more people read a book if you say it all really happened.
The recent discovery that Angel at the Fence, a holocaust memoir by Herman Rosenblat, was partly fabricated, proves this. Rosenblat had been paid a hefty $50,000 advance, which the publisher wanted back. The book, about to go into print, was forestalled. A Hollywood movie was in the works, and surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) the producer thinks he’ll still go ahead with the film, since it makes such a good story. And that’s the rub. This is a tale of love conquering evil in a holocaust situation and has all the makings of a good novel, but Rosenblat opted to make it a memoir.

And not very long ago, we read of the most sensational case of faking a memoir: James Frey’s bestselling account of overcoming drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces. Stranger still is the case of J T Leroy, a brilliant writer who not only fooled the literary establishment, but the music and film industry as well. Young, unkempt, a survivor of child abuse and prostitution with several stories, screenplays and novels to his name, he would often turn up with his publicist, Laura Albert. When the New York Times exposed Albert as the true author of all the writing under Leroy, the literary community, which had thrown its weight behind this writer, was shocked and puzzled.

Repeatedly, Leroy had been endorsed as the most promising writer of his generation.
The literary hoax I find most beguiling is the story of Clifford Irving and his invented ‘autobiography’ of the reclusive, eccentric billionaire, Howard Hughes. Hughes had disappeared into the New Mexico desert. Even his closest staff had not seen or heard from him in decades. Enter: journalist Irving with the news that he has been contacted by Hughes to write his autobiography. Publishers fall all over themselves to sign a contract. But Hughes hears of it and exposes it as a falsehood — his first communiqué in years and years to the outside world.

Irving promptly wrote a book called The Hoax and told the story. (It was filmed with Richard Gere; much earlier, it was the subject of a fascinating documentary by Orson Welles called F for Fake). If there’s something compelling about the truth, there seems to be something more compelling about fabricated truth. Fiction, when it is very good, comes close to feeling real. Why shouldn’t non-fiction, which claims to tell all the truth, not feel fantastic?

Paul Maliszewski has a book called Fakers where he investigates forgers and hoaxers, but does so philosophically, imaginatively and forgivingly! We are so vulnerable to such con artistes, he points out, because of “our boundless optimism married to our blind ambition... our belief in hard work co-existing with our dream of never having to work again.” Literary hoaxes, he feels, are after all “not generally matters of life and death, however, much writers and editors can carry on as if they were.” Though Kaavya and Opal Mehta are not mentioned, I couldn’t help thinking that Maliszewski would have been just the writer to make a sympathetic case for her.