I never heard of James Frey until the story broke that his
memoir had been researched by The
Smoking Gun and found considerably wanting in veracity. By that
time I knew there was another literary fraud out there. Matthew
Fleischer had solicited my opinion of the identity of Nasdijj, a
purported part-Navajo memorialist. I told Matthew that Nasdijj and
Tim Barrus were one in the same, based on my reading of Nasdijj's
website, and my conviction that Barrus's style was both indelible
and inimitable. Yet I remained uncertain whether Nasdijj was
Barrus's invention or vice versa until Fleischer published the
results of his investigation in
LA Weekly. I gathered a few essentials of the fraud of J.T.
Leroy from the many stories that followed about Frey or Nasdijj or
both.
The many news stories that identified Nasdijj as Tim Barrus
invariably identified Barrus as an author of gay pornography or
euphemisms to that effect. Barrus had brought the memoir into
disrepute and had even brought gay pornography into disrepute. I
was bound to take that personally since memoir and gay pornography
are nearly the only things I have ever done. And that was not to
mention what J.T. Leroy had done to hustling. Nasdijj's first book
borrowed much from the genuine Native American writer Sherman
Alexie, who complained to Nasdijj's publisher while the book
was still in galleys, but I am told it also owes something to
Travels with Lizbeth. I do not know if that is true
because I have not read Nasdijj's book, and I know that
Travels with Lizbeth is often mentioned whenever a
more recent book touches the subject of homelessness. Homelessness,
of course, was never my identity, and indeed I have often wished I
were a little less identified with it, so I have no difficulty
deferring to Alexie in the pecking-order of the outraged, except
for the gay pornographer thing: admittedly an identification that
Barrus as Nasdijj never claimed, but managed to besmirch
nonetheless. Barrus has repeatedly denied being gay since as Barrus
he exploited the gay market.
(pullquote)
I was bound to take it personally since memoir and
gay pornography are nearly the only things I have ever done.
I am about to say a few things about the difficulty, yes even
the impossibility, of capturing some complete, ultimate, absolute
truth in literature. I know that to some readers that amounts to a
confession that all writers are liars. And to some writers the
choice seems to be between a difficult path that can at best result
in imperfection and an easier and often more lucrative path. I
still think there is a difference between imperfection and fraud,
and that one is preferable to the other.
In retrospect, I see many little odd things that occurred as
Travels with Lizbeth found its way to publication and
afterward and that seem to suggest that some literary people did
not then, a dozen years ago and more, expect outsider literature,
even an outsider memoir, to be entirely on the up and up. I have
remarked many times that those who met me seemed to believe it
happened to me, but I did not write it, and those who had not met
me seemed to believe I had written it, but it did not happen.
I recall in particular a review in, if memory serves, The
Washington Post which complained that my book was episodic
and the stories of people described in it were left unresolved. I
cannot now resist replying that any truthful account of
homelessness is necessarily episodic, and I did not tell what
became of many of the people I met because I felt constrained by
what I knew to be true about their fates, which in most cases was
nothing. If I had been writing a novel, I would have had the
liberty to tie up loose ends. (Kirkus was not
particularly kind either, for they supposed my title had invited a
comparison with Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie. In
truth, I did not know until my book was out that there ever was a
Travels with Charlie. A bit of Tortilla
Flat had been included in a high literature book which I had
been assigned and it was sufficiently dismal that I never thought
of disturbing Steinbeck again. I regret my title. I certainly would
have chosen something else, if I had known. I wish someone had told
me.)
Now calls come for better vetting by the publishing industry.
Stung by these scandals and especially the Nasdijj fraud, I agree
in the main, but I cannot suggest what the standards for vetting
might be or how they might be implemented. In the case of
Travels with Lizbeth there were plenty of people who
had many long letters and postcards from me that contained
contemporaneous accounts of events that appeared in the book, some
who had long distance bills for collect calls from me in various
places, journalists who had witnessed Lizbeth being apprehended by
the dog catcher and who had helped to bail her out, and so forth.
That would largely establish I had been where I was when I said I
was. I really rather wished someone had vetted the fiery crash that
I witnessed north of Azusa. I suppose there were police reports if
not local news accounts. I have always wondered if my surmises from
the evidence I found were correct. Those were the two most dramatic
events in my book, and both were easily verifiable. But who in the
world could vouch for the conversations between a hitchhiker and a
driver on a stretch of I-10 in Arizona, in the middle of the night,
when no other car was in sight?
Alas, proving any memoir true in every detail or even in the
most salient parts seems an impossible task. But in the cases in
point, showing the abject frauds to be false, should not have been
very difficult. Prisons and jails have records; it would have been
an easy matter with the author's cooperation, to vet Frey's book -
had it been the truth. I do not know much about the J.T. Leroy
case, but it strains credulity that the author's sex remained a
mystery. The great detective work Fleischer did was in determining
that Nasdijj was Barrus, but some readers had detected that Nasdijj
was not who he claimed in galleys. Nasdijj played fast-and-loose
about how Navajo he and his mother were, but nonetheless how could
he have named his mother's clan without knowing Navajo clans are
matrilineal? It was not a matter of having to try to figure out how
to determine whether some particular, perhaps unwitnessed, event
had occurred. He was not who he said he was, and all the warning
flags were out, and the people who were reading them were being
ignored.
(pullquote)
I do not see that piling up all the known untruths
in indisputable literature in any way justifies the propagation of
untruth today.
Were the details of Thoreau's life at Walden Pond
entirely true? Was The Making of a Surgeon entirely
free of urban legends? I am sorry. I do not see that piling up all
the known untruths in indisputable literature in any way justifies
the propagation of untruth today. As promised I will now proceed to
say why it is impossible to tell the truth without meaning to give
license to the telling of untruth.
Art cannot capture life. This truth is so galling that it has
itself become a recurring theme of art. The physics of the
Twentieth century may or may not have provided some consolation: it
is not merely that we are bad artists, though we may be, but that
the observer cannot be divorced from the observed as a physical
fact. The error of observation is in the fabric of reality, and
that puts paid to any notion of expressing perfect truth.
Now only a little literature is devoted to the fate of subatomic
particles, so we might back up a bit and hope for Newtonian truth:
that which we know is not quite so, but works well for all
practical purposes. For that, I suggest the exercise of trying to
put on paper the reality of a quiet, furnished but uncluttered room
as it is in a period of one minute. Very dull and superficial
writers may complete this task to their satisfaction within a
volume or two. The digital age gives us a chance to make some
comparisons of amounts of information, and a single perspective
snapshot of a room, not particularly sharp and in a lossy format,
often contains as much information as a good sized novel. That is
only one visual perspective, leaving out all the other possible
camera angles, the sounds, the smells, and the human associations
of objects in the room. In short, we cannot write all the truth
even if we are rather loose about what we mean by truth.
(pullquote)
We may have seen an elephant like that, but no
elephant we have seen is like that.
I realize bringing up the truth of physics and the truth of
mathematics may seem facetious to readers who are concerned about
the truth of human experience, but the problem of portraying
reality at the physical level underlies and models the problems of
portraying reality at other levels. For example, the observer
problem crops up again in cultural anthropology. People just do not
trip over themselves to reveal the secrets of their cultures to
exotic strangers in pith helmets. What is more, it is even rather
difficult for a person native to a culture to write informatively
about it unless he is in some degree alienated from it. A fair
definition of culture is that which is commonplace and which
everyone takes for granted — or precisely the sorts of things
that naïve native writers or commentators will never think to
mention. One of the things that tripped faux-Navajo Nasdijj up was
his mention of being given mutton tacos by a supposedly traditional
Navajo woman in gratitude for reading lessons. This error was
detected by Irvin Morris who is far from naïf, but almost certainly
would never have thought to write that Navajo tacos are never made
of mutton if Nasdijj had not made the mistake.
If you ask people of a certain culture to draw an elephant, they
will draw something of an eagle-eye's view of a splayed elephant
with four legs spread out as if the elephant became a rug under
some great squashing thing from the heavens. Racists argued that
these people were too stupid to learn perspective. But they do not
use perspective because they reckon it is a lie. If you draw an
elephant in perspective, the far legs are smaller than the near
ones. We may have seen an elephant like that, but no elephant we
have seen is like that. If the elephant is in profile, the far legs
may be hidden behind the near ones. The elephant is depicted as
having two legs. No one has seen a two-legged elephant. It may be
argued just as well that no one has seen an elephant that looks
likes the splayed elephant, but it does represent an elephant as
everyone very well knows an elephant is. Western art, at least for
a time, aimed to portray what one eye sees, but Western philosophy
well knew that what one eye sees is a deception. The elephant in
perspective is a deception. The squashed splayed elephant is also a
deception, but at least it shows that an elephant has four legs,
approximately equal in size.
Whether you pick out a stereo based on a photograph or a
schematic very much depends upon whether you think of it as
furniture or as electronics, and of course whether you have the
knowledge to make any sense of a schematic. Neither the picture nor
the schematic is the stereo, neither completely represents the
stereo. Yet, in many cases, neither is a lie. And so it is in all
of art, including literature.
Yes, it is hopeless, as anyone facing a blank piece of paper or
more often nowadays a blank screen, to put the truth in letters.
And a certain sort of mentality will, having realized that, think:
if it cannot be the truth, then why shouldn't it be the lie most
likely to profit me. To be charitable, I think, probably there are
also people who write lies because they live lies, because they are
entirely composed of lies, because all the truth they know is lies.
Not all of them have Korsakov's syndrome, but I am convinced that
many of them have never made the conscious decision to lie. They
simply know nothing else.
But many of us, whether we faced the terror of the blank screen
for years or only for a moment, try to make the best of it and to
muddle through however we can, which is what people do once they
accept that a situation is utterly hopeless.
Literature has several main lines of muddling. One of them is
fiction. I will not say much about fiction because essentially
fiction is fraud-proof. I will not accept complaints about fiction
even if the dust jacket stuff about the supposed author is
completely unrelated to events on this planet. Fiction can convey
truth or can be vacuous. The problem today is that the market for
general fiction is very soft. And indeed, that seems to have played
a part in the frauds of the moment, for at least in a couple of
cases the authors are said to have tried to present their works at
first as fiction but were persuaded that it was unpublishable as
such. If only we had a genre for depressing agony fiction.
Evidently people will buy agony literature if they are told it is
true.
When we try to muddle toward the truth and mean to be understood
to be aiming in that direction, we call it nonfiction, which covers
much territory. We might take, as the model of nonfiction, a
mathematics text which barring error could be said to perfectly
true except that it rests upon its axioms which are axioms
precisely because they cannot be shown to be either true or false.
History is reckoned nonfiction too, but histories often reach
opposing conclusions upon the same source material. Modern
historians despise mere lists of events and dates and such as we as
school children struggled to memorize when we thought we were
learning history, and there is something to be said for the modern
view, since we hardly gained any appreciation of the past from
learning 1066 by rote, and all the accounts of palace intrigues
tell us so very little about the past, while modern intrigues
differ so very slightly from those of yore. Whether history should
tell more about the past than about the present is a nice
question.
(pullquote)
In reality people disagree, and that is a thing
apart from the limitations and distortions that may be introduced
by art
And so we might go through all the catalogue of nonfiction and
at each stopping place discover that no type of work expresses
perfect truth until we come to the sort of accounts which most
interest us: the stories of more-or-less contemporary events on the
human scale. Here the facts are as much against us as the literary
form. The facts are that witnesses to any given event are almost
never in perfect agreement as to what they have witnessed, and
apart from the attempt to render events in writing, such
disagreements occur through the range of human events from the
simplest domestic discussion to famous murder trials to
international incidents upon which turn decisions of war and peace.
The issue may be whether a spouse asked for a loaf bread to be
fetched from the store or whether the getaway car was tan or green
or possibly dark blue or who launched the poison gas attack:
disagreement about what has actually occurred is commonplace. What
is more, although we may think we understand it when accounts
differ so that each is to the best advantage of the teller, the
remarkable thing is how often there are serious disagreements among
wholly disinterested parties who have no discernible reason to lie
and who appear in every respect to be earnest and sincere. We can
often guess how or why some or all of the witnesses went wrong,
when stories change we can sometimes explain it, but that many
witnesses who tell untruths have never intended to deceive is a
disturbing but inevitable conclusion.
In reality people disagree, and that is a thing apart from the
limitations and distortions that may be introduced when art
attempts to capture the reality. Literature has two broad
approaches in the attempt to muddle through, in spite of the
factual disagreements and its own limitations. One we may call
journalism, and the other, memoir.
The approach of traditional journalism — before so-called
advocacy journalism — was simply to try to record so many of
the differing accounts as possible. This is: what he said, what she
said, and the third person could not be reached for comment. The
hope was to produce a fair account, in which each side had had its
say, and although often it was impossible that all accounts were
true, still it might be that the survey would produce a broad
agreement on the boundaries of the truth, and readers could make up
their own mind about the finer details. If there were no agreement
as to what was said, we might know at least that there had been a
conversation and might have a notion about its subject. If there
were four accounts of who fired the fatal shot, at least the fact
of a corpse would be revealed.
The principal limitation of the journalistic approach is that in
many cases all accounts are treated as if they were equally
credible or at least respectable. The ridiculous extreme of this
would be that the journalist should solicit a comment from the Flat
Earth Society whenever someone else is quoted as saying the earth
is round. That does seem thoroughly ridiculous, except history is
replete with examples in which the tiny crank minorities have been
proven correct. And of course, if nine witnesses say the getaway
car was green and one says it was blue, sometimes it turns out the
culprit boarded a crosstown bus.
Memoir hopes to come at a rather different sort of truth by a
rather different method. If journalism can be compared to the
splay-elephant drawing, memoir is the perspective view. The truth
of memoir — that is the truth that memoir muddles toward
— is the truth of experience. That five people attending the
same event have five experiences that differ in greater or lesser
degree is rather beside point and taken for granted. If the danger
of journalism is that the truth may be lost in babel, the danger of
memoir is that it will slip into solipsism. The memoir ought to be
one honest account, not all accounts however honest.
(pullquote)
many uncritical readers have never understood that
what I have written is only my side of the story
I do not mean in any way to shift the responsibility for the
honesty of the memoir to anyone other than the author and
especially not to the reader. Nonetheless, all the worth of even
the most honest memoir — if it have any — depends upon
the reader knowing what it is and how to understand it. The
perspective view of the elephant does not seem absurd when we know
it is a perspective drawing, and neither does the schematic when we
understand the schematic approach. I do not blame credulous readers
for the frauds that have lately come to light, but I know from
questions I receive about my own work, that there are many
uncritical readers who have never understood that what I have
written is only my side of the story. I do not see that it
compromises my belief in the honesty of my story to acknowledge
that others did not see things as I did and that many of them may
be as honest and sincere as I feel myself to be. No doubt novelists
are similarly frustrated when they have been at pains to create an
unreliable narrator and find that there are nonetheless readers who
believe whatever the narrator says.
Then of course there are readers who, when confronted with
categorical evidence of abject fraud, say "What does it matter? It
was a good story." But if that was their attitude, why wouldn't
they buy it as a novel? or at least why did people whose
livelihoods depend upon such judgments think the books would not
have sold as novels? Oprah's first response to the Frey scandal was
of the "it doesn't matter whether it was true" sort. But would she
have put forth the book if it had been presented as a novel?
Oprah's approval means hundreds of thousands in sales which can
hardly be a bad thing for an author, or for publishing in general
especially as one suspects those sales come from a market that
would otherwise be buying pulp novels at the supermarket or no
books at all. Yet from her mentions
from 2004, long before the trouble, it is hard to pick out a
significant novel — certainly nothing of the caliber of Alice
Walker's novel The Color Purple. Plenty of the
nonfiction, of course, is fluff: wedding planners, self-help books,
and so forth, but it is hard to find admitted fiction even of the
fluffy kind.
To some extent I blame required reading. Required reading in
high school tends to be the most bloodless, which is to say
lifeless, sort in order to avoid the school board's receiving
complaints from born-again parents, and this situation is going to
get worse as theocracy tightens its death grip on America. Required
reading in college includes stuff that is no longer quite so spry
as it was when it was written and stuff that appeals to scholars
whose sense of pertinence is usually at least a generation behind
the times. So if someone pronounces a new novel "serious," the
crepe hangers are overjoyed. That does not make lying okay or
excuse fraud, but I think it has something to do with why people
try to pass off novels as memoirs.
