Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  Even though Oprah herself rang to check on her victim a few days later, and make sure he understood that she did what she did because she was so ‘disappointed’ in him, and Frey himself says he does not blame her for what she did, it seemed like he would never recover, professionally at least, from such a shaming. But the media is forgetful and can be surprisingly forgiving. Amidst rumours of a fall-out between Frey and Talese over Frey’s reported claims that his editor pushed him to change his book from fiction to non-fiction because misery memoirs were so much more marketable than novels, Frey quietly got on with doing what he had always wanted to do: writing fiction.

  His first official novel came out in May 2008. Bright Shiny Morning is set in Los Angeles (where he and his wife and daughter live when they are not in their very swish New York loft apartment), and revolves around a cast of a hundred, offering snap-shots of their very different lives. The opening page of the book says simply: ‘Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable’, a disclaimer which he told one journalist ‘was sort of an acknowledgement of the past, and it was also a way to be really clear – this is fiction. Don’t take anything in it literally or too seriously.’ As he acknowledged in the same interview, he ‘made some big mistakes with my first two books, and I’ve tried to learn from them and move on’.

  In interviews to promote his most recent book he seems, in the words of The Times’ interviewer Alan Franks, ‘beyond unrepentant’. Frey told Franks, in what is probably the closest he has ever come to really explaining himself:

  ‘I’ve been in conflict with everything for my whole life . . . I’m in conflict with what writing is, in conflict with what literature is, in conflict with what people’s acceptable standards are. In conflict with the idea of what fiction and non-fiction is, or are . . . I’m not done with twisting the lines of fact or fiction . . . There isn’t a great deal of difference between fact and fiction, it’s just how you choose to tell a story.’

  And for his next trick? No less than a retelling of the final book of the Bible, in which Jesus comes to New York to walk amongst crack-addicts, thieves and prostitutes. It will be interesting to see whether conservative America gets more or less ruffled by his fictional appropriation of Jesus than they did about his deceiving Oprah. It could be a close run thing.

  MARGARET B. JONES

  IF THE LA gang memoir Love and Consequences had been for real, it would have been a very significant book indeed. For the first time, a mainstream publisher would be enabling a female gun-runner and drug dealer for the notorious Bloods to tell her story. At times, Margaret B. Jones’ memoir of growing up a hustler was almost too painful to read: it told of how she, a half Native-American, half-white child from a very poor family had been removed from her parents as a five-year-old when she had turned up to school bleeding from sexual wounds. Then, under the auspices of her overworked foster mother ‘Big Mom’ in South Central LA, she had fallen into the gang culture, seeing it as a way to gain money and respect in a fractured and abusive community. In interviews prior to the release of her book, Jones told – in an African-American lilt, and peppering her speech with words like ‘homies’ – that ‘the first thing I did when I started making drug money was buy myself a burial plot’. She also spoke movingly of her foster-brothers Terrell and Taye who had also fallen in to the thug life.

  As soon as review copies were distributed, America’s literary press began heaping praise on the brave young writer who was risking serious retributions by exposing the intricacies of gang life. The Oprah Winfrey machine got behind the book too, praising it in O Magazine as ‘a startlingly tender memoir’; the New York Times called it ‘humane and deeply affecting’ and Entertainment Weekly recommended it as a ‘powerful story of resilience’. This was exactly the response the book’s publishers, Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin, had anticipated, and it seemed that the first print run of 19,000 copies had not been so ambitious after all.

  Jones’ editor, Sarah McGrath, had been working on the manuscript with its damaged young author for three years before its eventual publication in February 2008, initially having been approached by the agent Faye Bender while she was working at Simon & Schuster. McGrath was so enamoured of the plucky young Margaret that when she moved to Penguin she arranged for Jones’ contract to be transferred with her, so the two women could continue working together. Throughout this period, Jones consistently impressed her editor with her desire to get her story out at all costs, and to communicate not only the pain and danger but the unbreakable bonds forged in the crucible of gang warfare. ‘She would talk about how she didn’t have any money or heat,’ recalled McGrath, who, along with her colleagues at the publishing house ‘felt such sympathy for her’. Their sympathy was augmented by the fact that Jones was a single mother, striving to make a better life for her young daughter than that which she had endured. And when the time came to crank up the publicity machine in the months leading up to Love and Consequences’ release date, affecting photographs of the pretty, brunette author were distributed to journalists. Other pictures were made available to the press too, such as the one of Jones with straightened hair, hoop earrings and tight white t-shirt, sitting on a wall in a rough area, every bit the care-worn homegirl; and of her holding up a bandana in the blood-red hues of the gang with which she was affiliated.

  But it was an image of her posing with her young daughter, eight-year-old Rya, which would bring about her abrupt fall from grace. When the picture was published in the New York Times it was immediately spotted by a woman called Cyndi Hoffman, who recognized the faces in the picture. She recognized them because they belonged to her sister and niece. And far from being a juvenile gangbanger from the streets of South Central, her sister was the privileged daughter of wealthy, loving, white parents who had raised her in a smart district of the San Fernando Valley. She was not called Margaret B. Jones, but Margaret ‘Peggy’ Seltzer. And instead of having learnt about the world in crack-houses and stolen cars, she had been educated at the exclusive Campbell Hall, an Episcopalian private school in North Hollywood. Hoffman told all this to McGrath at Riverhead Books in a phone-call she felt duty bound to make as soon as she realized what he sister was doing. McGrath was astounded.

  Having been outed by her own flesh and blood, there was nothing much Seltzer, now living in Oregon, could do. The media were chasing her for a statement, but initially had to make do with some words from her mother, whose defence of her apparently well-meaning daughter turned on her having been caught up in the drama of other people’s lives.

  Eventually, a tearful and apologetic Seltzer herself agreed to talk to the press in a telephone interview in which she explained that during her years working in the voluntary sector to help combat the evils of gang violence, she had collected and in some way assimilated the experiences of her friends on the street.

  Seltzer’s unmasking came just days before she was due to embark on a publicity tour to promote Love and Consequences to readers all over America. The tour was hastily cancelled, the 19,000 copies of the book were recalled, and Penguin’s imprint Riverhead was left not only with egg on its face but with a genuinely hurt editor. There was no way a book so explicitly autobiographical could be quietly re-issued as fiction, and there is no way certain members of the African American community will ever forgive this poor little rich girl for aping their language, lives and stories and very nearly getting away with it. However good her intentions might have been.

  7

  POST-MODERN VENTRILOQUISTS

  FERN GRAVEL

  IN 1940, A new American poet burst on to the scene who was quite unlike any other. For one thing, she was not strictly new: her writing career had begun at the turn of the century when she was only nine years old only to burn out two years later when she took early retirement at the age of eleven. For another, her scope was parochial to say the least: all her poems were about the daily life of the small Iowa town where she lived. And almost without exception the poems are terribly
bad. Yes, she charmingly evoked the nostalgia of a forgotten America, but she was certainly no infant prodigy, as is plain from one of her more accomplished works, ‘Winter Music’:

  Oh, it is wonderful in Millersville

  On many a winter night,

  When the ground is covered with snow

  And the moon is shining so bright.

  You can hear the sleigh-bells jingling

  Everywhere around.

  I don’t think there could be

  A more beautiful sound.

  Her one and only collection was called Oh, Millersville!, after her hometown, and having been handed to an older relative for safe keeping soon after the author’s retirement, it finally saw the light of day in 1940 when it turned up in the postbag of an up-and-coming Iowa publisher called Carroll Coleman. Coleman was an interesting character himself: obsessed with the beauty of traditional typographics and often choosing to use old-fashioned manual printing presses, he had recently set up Prairie Press, one of the few independent publishing houses in the country devoted to bringing out original work instead of trusty old classics. He was madly in love with his home state, finding it every bit as charming and beautiful as Fern had a generation earlier, and was determined to help protect it from the onslaught of industrialization. Although starting up a publishing company during the Depression years brought him much financial uncertainty, he was completely committed to his regionalist agenda and launched the company in the mid-1930s with the following rabble-rousing statement:

  Here on the rolling prairies, on the hills along the rivers, in the endless fields of corn that bend before the summer wind in green waves, in the soft little cities hardening under the growth of industrialism, these writers, artists and printers might record and preserve, for all to see, the form and direction of life here in the Middlewest.

  Just five years later the poems of Miss Fern Gravel came his way. As soon as he read ‘Iowa’, the opening poem in the manuscript, he knew this was a girl who would appeal to the ladies in book groups as much as to the thoughtful country folk and academics who bought his prettily designed volumes:

  I am writing another kind of poetry,

  And some of my poems are beautiful to me.

  I hope, someday, people will travel

  To see the home of the poetess, Fern Gravel,

  Like they go to Longfellow’s home, and Whittier’s,

  And then I’ll remember the day I wrote this verse.

  Fern would never attain anything like the status of Longfellow, but she did, for a while, get an astonishingly good reception in the press. Responding not only to her youth and optimism but her delight in the simpler, quieter side of America (at a time when the rest of the country was obsessed with war and cars and money), critics decided she was destined for ‘immortality’. The New York Times jokingly called her ‘the Sappho of Iowa’, Time Magazine spoke of this ‘precocity in pigtails’ and the reviewer for Iowa’s Des Moines Register spoke of her work’s ‘warm feeling of validity’.

  But validity, at least in the conventional sense, was the last thing Oh, Millersville!’s readers were getting. For after six years of excellent sales for Prairie Press, the true author of the poems decided the time had come to reveal himself. As it turned out, he was indeed a proud native of the Tall Corn State, but not only was he not a girl called Fern, he was a rather successful writer of adventure stories and First World War memoirs. In fact, he was none other than James Norman Hall, the well-known author of the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy, Falcons of France and regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, in whose pages he eventually made his confession.

  He began with the customary self-flagellation of the guilty hoaxer, saying he was ‘shame-faced’ at having misled people for so long. But he went on to account for himself in most unexpected terms. He had been motivated not, he said, by a love of mischief or a bet with a fellow writer or any of the other usual reasons an author might perpetrate a deception. Instead, little Fern had come to him ‘in a dream’ and started dictating her poems to him. Now, Hall was not, as far as anyone knew, at all mad. But he was a prolific and sensitive writer who had perhaps become trapped in a Boy’s Own genre not entirely of his choosing. He was also someone who cared so deeply about the changes overtaking his beloved Iowa and other rural places like it that he could not bear to live in America any longer and was relocating to Tahiti, where the pace of life was slower and more natural. It seems, then, that Fern was in a way quite real to this clever and highly creative man, albeit as a semi-mystical facet of his subconscious.

  Just like Carroll Coleman, Hall longed so much to make people see the evils of industrialization that he believed in ends justifying means. He explained how he had been musing on his idyllic childhood days back in Colfax (‘All my roots are still in the prairie country of the Middle West’) when this little, very local girl started to invade his thoughts, not only when he was asleep but when he was at his desk, too: ‘She dictated so fast that I got writer’s cramp . . . She told me things about people in our hometown that I had completely forgotten, or thought I had.’

  Clearly, Hall’s imaginary dictator is intricately bound up with his literary identity and methods, and although it seems strange for a writer who is not a raging post-modernist to play with ideas of real and unreal in this way, his entire life story betrays a talent for using imaginary sources to create good works.

  In the 1910s, Hall was studying for a master’s degree at Harvard while working as a social worker in some of Boston’s more impoverished communities. Each experience fed into the other, and he seemed well on the way to getting his first stories published when, in 1914, the First World War broke out. It just so happened that Hall was on holiday in England in July that year and, seizing the opportunity for adventure, he pretended he was a Canadian and signed up with the Royal Fusiliers. He fought bravely at the Battle of Loos but when his true nationality was discovered he was sent back home to America, where he found he had more than enough to put into his first published book, the gripping war memoir Kitchener’s Mob (1916). As soon as he could, he joined the US Army and when they entered the theatre of war he returned to France, achieving the rank of Air Captain and being awarded a Croix de Guerre for his good work. Towards the end of the war he was captured by the Germans and incarcerated, during which time he bonded with another American writer-pilot, Charles Nordhoff. The two men kept their spirits up by planning the books they might write together, and after their release in 1919 they launched a collaborative career that would make them both, for a while, household names. Their three books Mutiny on the Bounty, Men At Sea and Pitcairn’s Island are still enthusiastically read by fans of adventure fiction today.

  Hall would go on to write a dozen more books on his own, many of them inspired by his life in the South Seas, where he settled in a humble wooden house with his half-Polynesian wife Lala and became increasingly preoccupied with the lost innocence of pre-war America. It was into this middle-aged homesickness for a world that no longer existed that Fern Gravel appeared. She had the power to take him right to the heart of the kind of simple family home he had loved and felt safe in while at the same documenting the irrevocable social changes affecting Midwestern society in the new century. In these terms, a poem like ‘Visiting Cards’ starts to seem less like doggerel and more like a cunning and very modern piece of artistry:

  My mother has had some calling-cards printed.

  The reason is Mrs Smouse.

  She thinks she ought to leave one

  When she goes to their house.

  Mrs Smouse was the only one

  Who had calling cards before;

  But now that my mother has them

  I expect there’ll be more.

  My mother has put a little table

  In our vestibule.

  You leave your card there, in a cut-glass dish;

  That is the rule.

  Will Hall/Gravel one day be lauded as a radical, ventriloquistic sage of his times? A strange hy
brid of Garrison Keillor and Daisy Ashford with a message for the America of tomorrow? If so, critics and literary historians will have to work hard to pluck him out of the near total obscurity into which he has sunk. But you never know, perhaps in a hundred years’ time the tattered manuscript of Oh, Millersville! will turn up on the desk of some unsuspecting young publisher and Fern Gravel will live again.

  ARAKI YASUSADA