Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  IN THE EARLY 1990s, the work of a unique poet began to appear in American literary magazines. He was Araki Yasusada and, although he had died in 1972, his son had found his notebooks in 1991 and had them translated into English. The central theme of his work, and the cataclysmic centre of his tragic life, was the bombing of his hometown, Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945. Although his son was out of town that day, Yasusada had watched his beloved wife and youngest daughter die horrific deaths, only to lose his older girl to radiation poisoning a few years later. He himself fought a long battle with the carcinogenic effects of the bomb until his death in the 1970s.

  His writings – called, collectively, Doubled Flowering – replayed the world-changing events of that day again and again, reframing the experience with a variety of seemingly typical Japanese images, such as flowers, lakes and clouds, and in styles like the haiku which immediately speak – to Western readers – of all things Eastern. But Yasusada’s imagination and intellectual life were far from parochial – trilingual in English and French, he had studied Western literature at Hiroshima University and developed an interest in the works of Roland Barthes and the developing avant-garde poetry movement. Traces of these influences can be seen in works like ‘Dream and Charcoal’, which opens with that typical cipher of poetic modernism, the word ‘And’:

  And then she said: I have gone toward the light and become beautiful.

  And then she said: I have taken a couple of wings and attached them to the various backparts of my body.

  And then she said: all the guests are coming back to where they were and then talking.

  To which she said: without the grasp-handle, how would you recognise my nakedness?

  To which she replied: without nothing is when all things die.

  It was to respected modernist journals like Conjunctions, arts magazines like Grand Street and even the Japanese quarterly Abiko that the poems were initially sent, appearing on the editors’ desks in packages postmarked London, Tokyo, Chicago or California. Covering letters said that several translators had worked on bringing Yasusada’s oeuvre to English readers, and the editor of American Poetry Review even got a portrait of the author with which to illustrate his work.

  Over the next few years, Yasusada began to be seen as the only true poetic voice to have survived the devastation of Hiroshima. This was ‘witness poetry’ at its most raw and personal, and thanks to the biographical details with which his anonymous editors had seen fit to annotate his poems, lines like ‘You are a little girl with blistered face, pumping your legs at a great speed beside the burning form of your Mother’ from ‘Suitor Renga’ took on a horrible poignancy. Critics the world over praised these remarkable evocations of the horrors of war, and as more of his notebooks began to leak out of Japan, everything from his thoughts about Zen Buddhism and rough drafts of letters were pored over by an increasingly devoted band of readers.

  It became obvious that there was enough interest and more than enough material to justify a book-length edition of Yasusada’s work, and Suzanna Tamminen, the poetry editor of Wesleyan Press, the Connecticut University’s famously au courant publishing arm, put herself forward for the job. She set about collecting all the known poems and notebooks, which would amount to more than a hundred pages, and also sought more information about the author himself. But the book would never come to light, and Tamminen would speak of ‘a personal feeling of being humiliated’; because long before the presses started rolling, rumours about the Yasusada poems’ true authorship became too loud to ignore.

  Key figures in the avant-garde poetry world had been hearing stories for some time about the real origins of the work, and the finger of suspicion pointed most directly at a language teacher at a very minor university in Illinois who had written very knowledgably about Yasusada and even composed some similar poems himself. An article in the Boston Review by the respected critic Marjorie Perlof made the accusation directly. This man was Kent Johnson and, despite officially being a Spanish teacher, he was known to have a strong interest in oriental literature, to be a keen contributor to debates on subjects like witness poetry, to be something of a joker and in fact to have told various poetry editors that he knew who the real Yasusada was.

  Johnson initially responded to the claims that he was the real Yasusada by asking, wide-eyed, how on earth ‘a community college Spanish teacher with little poetic talent could have produced work that caused fairly unbridled admiration amongst such a range of well-placed arbiters in the world of poetry’. Pressed further, he claimed that the real poet was in fact his old flat-mate Tosa Motokiyu, a secretive poetic genius (also pseudonymous and also now dead) who wished, for complex creative reasons, to be known only as the work’s translator and not its author, and for Johnson to help deliver it to the world. Pressed even further, and shown the startling similarities between the Yasusada poems and his own ‘From the Daybook of Oshimora Okiyaki’ – a series of verses written many years before in the voice of a Hiroshima survivor – he was forced into an even tighter corner. The reason he gave this time was that Motokiyu had been so impressed with Johnson’s Hiroshima poems that he had asked permission to include them in his ‘hyper-authored’ Yasusada collection. At this point, a resounding ‘Hmm’ could be heard emanating from editorial offices and lecture theatres across the American poetry scene.

  Yet still, Johnson would not admit the hoax was all his own doing, and does not to this day. And in the years since Doubled Flowering was revealed as a hoax, the evidence has mounted up spectacularly. Firstly, there are a number of basic historical errors in Yasusada’s notebooks, such as the fact that he claimed to have attended Hiroshima University twenty-four years before it existed, and read Roland Barthes’ The Empire of Signs before it ever came out. Then there was the poetry itself: critics argue that it misunderstands basic elements of Japanese style and culture as only a foreigner could, for example figuring the act of bowing as humiliating rather than merely polite. Were these textbook errors planted deliberately to test editors and readers? Or were they genuine mistakes which must have left the American author of the poems kicking himself in annoyance? Until Johnson reveals the extent of his involvement in the project, we shall never know. And it seems unlikely that he ever will now, partly because the moment for a dramatic revelation has passed as interest in the work has dissipated, and also because he is so busy writing long, strange, obscene, gossipy poems as part of the new post-avant-garde poetry movement. And therein lies the final piece of evidence that suggests he wrote Yasusada’s work: his current output, published by online post-avant-garde journals and the experimental publishing house Skanky Possum (yes, really), seems more Yasusada-like than ever. Take his recent Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek. These are loose translations of sexually and scatologically explicit works unearthed in an archaeological dig in Egypt and translated by Johnson and a mysterious woman who was then, allegedly, murdered. Or his new poems on the theme of war and torture in Iraq, which revisit a distinctly Yasusada-like propensity for detailing America’s appalling degradations of the human body under foreign suns.

  Today, as in the early 1990s, the idea of a privileged Western orientalist hijacking the experiences of real historical sufferers is not popular with many, if not most, people who encounter fake witness poetry like Yasusada’s. The motivations behind the hoax may indeed have been intellectual rather than financial or playful, but, unlike the fake oeuvre of Fern Gravel, the ten-year-old bard of Iowa who wrote mostly about dear little sunbeams, these works force us to confront some difficult questions about our roles as readers and observers of history: how does suffering improve art? Is it ever OK to lie about being tortured? And, most importantly, has the idea of ‘the death of the author’ stolen literature’s conscience?

  ANDREAS KARAVIS

  ‘I remember the wine was

  sweet

  and the bread always fresh.

  We conversed in Lyric, rich

  and passionate,

  and the
young girls, intact

  for marriage,

  blessed their men in every

  dialect.

  In the village

  curling like a sprig of

  jasmine by the sea

  it was almost impossible

  to imagine betrayal: sour

  wine, stale bread,

  bad verse, unfaithful wives.

  THIS IS THE work of the Greek fisherman-poet Andreas Karavis who was, for a brief period at the turn of the twenty-first century, hailed as the modern Homer and a strong contender for the next Nobel Prize. His poems had been translated and presented to the Canadian literary journal Books in Canada by the poet and critic David Solway, who also wrote a companion piece outlining Karavis’ autobiography. He was, Solway wrote, a sixty-year-old native of Chania in Crete who had spent his life sailing between islands selling poems along with the fish he brought into port each morning. After years of peripatetic writing and fishing, he landed upon the island of Lipsi in the Dodecanese and settled into the life of a well-regarded, if reclusive, national bard (his verses were apparently much anthologized by Greek poetry presses and a regular feature on the national curriculum). It was to Lipsi that his fan and future translator Solway travelled to track Karavis down, offering to translate his work into English and bring it to the wider international audience it deserved. Although the sea-worn poet shied away from the limelight himself, he was, apparently, happy to have this adoring Canadian represent his work abroad and even gave a rare interview and supplied a photographic portrait to the editors of Books in Canada.

  When the journal appeared, in October 1999, it advertised Karavis’ evocations of island life as the output of ‘Greece’s modern Homer’ and not only were critics and readers bowled over by his timeless romantic lyrics but academics began to speak of organizing Karavis conferences and inviting papers on this mighty, newly discovered talent. Soon after that first outing of Karavis’ oeuvre, Solway, who had only admitted privately to a few close confidantes that Karavis’ life and work was a complete figment of his imagination, published An Andreas Karavis Companion which contained quotes from critics, further examples of his writing and anecdotes such as the rather cheeky one about the time when he showed the grizzled old Greek a photograph of Andrea Dworkin, by way of explaining something of the North American critical landscape, and Karavis nearly died laughing. Solway was no doubt emboldened to carry on his hoax this far by the earnest pledges of Karavis-philia he kept hearing from fellow poets: at least one correspondent said he had loved the man’s work for years and expressed heartfelt thanks that someone had finally brought him to wider notice. But a letter to Books in Canada from one Fred Reed which controversially suggested that Karavis had in fact plagiarized his work from the Canadian poet David Solway, was by an amused co-conspirator.

  As the months went on, Solway took more and more people into his confidence, one of whom was the press officer to the Greek cultural attaché in Canada, Giorgos Chouliaris. Chouliaris thought Solway’s hoax was not only thoroughly amusing but a rather admirable – if elaborate – way of celebrating Greek literary culture. Part of Chouliaris’ job was to stage events to promote Greek culture in Canada, so it was easy for him to collaborate with Solway on the event that took his hoax to the next level: a celebration of Karavis’ work that would feature a live appearance from the poet himself. The party was also to be the official launch of Saracen Island, the book-length translation of Karavis’ work which Solway had been working on.

  On the night of the party at the Hellenic embassy in Montreal, journalists and critics waited with bated breath to find out whether the elusive scribe would indeed appear. After several hours of quaffing and gossiping, a swarthy old man appeared in the midst of this gathering of well-turned-out Ottawans. He wore a fisherman’s cap and muttered enigmatically in Greek. Even before he introduced himself as Andreas Karavis, there was no doubt about who he was. He seemed somewhat bemused by the attentions of his glittering new fan-base, but accepted drinks and praise for the duration of the evening.

  But the following day, a columnist called Matthew Hays from the newspaper the Globe and Mail looked back on the party with perplexity. Something was not quite right. And of course it only took a modicum of journalistic poking around to unearth a distinct lack of information about this so-called Bard of the Cyclades from his native Greece. Far from being the toast of syllabus-writers and anthologists across the Hellenic world, Karavis’ reputation was notable only by its absence. The resulting article, which ran with the headline ‘Karavis: Greek god of poetry or literary hoax?’ marked the final undoing of Karavis as a supposedly real man of letters.

  Solway admitted, not ungleefully, that he had fooled the editor of Books in Canada. And he conceded that many other readers had been hoodwinked too. But, he said, he had not done it to make people look stupid, but rather for a combination of two very pressing intellectual reasons: that he felt ‘exhausted and in need of replacement’; and that, much as he loved living and working in Canada, he had come to the conclusion that ‘Canadians are not a very exciting people . . . they need to be poked’.

  Whether playfulness or the desire for a new poetic voice was the main motivation behind the Karavis hoax will only ever really be known to Solway himself. But considering the energy he devoted to creating eighty pages of poetry and thousands of words of commentary, it is safe to assume that the latter reason was the most pressing. For a poet in his sixties to have found a second wind by, as he says, ‘creating a style’ rather than ‘perpetuating a deception’ is actually rather heartening. And as with many hoaxes, most of those who were wounded by it were the ones who were pompous enough to have pretended to have known about the poet for years. And the character who turned up at the book launch? That was none other than Solway’s dentist in a funny hat.

  8

  HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS

  THE DISCOMFORT INSPIRED by the Yasusada poet’s use of Hiroshima in his hoax is as nothing compared to the fury invoked by literary hoaxers who pretend to have suffered in the Holocaust. It is hard to believe that anyone would want to spend their time making up stories about Nazi horrors, but to go out into the world pretending they happened to you – to point at the scar on your arm and whisper ‘Mengele’s child’, as Misha Levy Defonseca apparently did – is surely the work of a damaged mind. Certainly, the writers in his category have all had some traumatic childhood experiences which merged with their interest in the events of the Second World War and resulted in them feeling entitled to use the Holocaust as a cipher for their personal pain. This was what Binjamin Wilkomirski, the most famous of them all, explicitly said, and what the others have implied. Facts were not checked and vulnerable people – not least the genuine victims of the horrors these phoney memoirists describe – were undermined.

  BINJAMIN WILKOMIRSKI

  IN 1994, A Zurich literary agent, Eva Koralnik, received in the post a manuscript from an unknown writer called Binjamin Wilkomirski. What she read had her captivated from the first page. It was the heartrending memoir of a boy, too young to understand what was happening to him, being taken from his Latvian home by Nazi soldiers and moved through a series of concentration camps where he was experimented on, beaten and abused, and where he watched his mother die. The simple, crystalline prose and the author’s perceptive afterword about how children, back then, were not supposed to have a voice, much less speak of the horrors of the Holocaust after the war ended.

  Wilkomirski, now in his sixties, had worked as a professional clarinet player and musical instrument maker in Switzerland all his adult life but had only now, after years of analysis, been able to articulate what happened to him during those dark years. Only now, he said, could he divest himself of the memories so painfully written down in his book, which he called Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939–1948). There were memories of seeing a man who may have been his father crushed to death against a brick wall by a mob of German soldie
rs; of glimpsing his dying mother for one last time in a concentration camp; of rats feasting on corpses; and then, after liberation, of experiencing the loneliness of being an unwanted orphan as he was passed around foster homes in Switzerland. Throughout, there is an overwhelming feeling of young Binjamin’s powerlessness at the hands of the adult forces – both evil and good – who have total control over his fate.

  Piecing together these fragments may have taken him a whole lifetime, but it was the work of moments for Eva Koralnik to see that this was a book that had to be published. In no time at all, she had secured him a publishing deal with the very highly respected Jüdischer Verlag. Fragments appeared in German in 1995 and Carol Janeway’s English translation was released soon after by the Jewish publishing house Schoken Books.

  Fragments was, as Koralnik had predicted, an overnight success. Laudatory reviews compared Wilkomirski’s slim but weighty 155-page volume to the works of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, the two acknowledged stars of Holocaust memoir, and sales figures across Europe and the English-speaking world were impressive. It won the prestigious Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France, the Jewish Quarterly’s prize in London and also its American equivalent, the National Jewish Book Award. Feted by critics, historians and book-buyers alike, Wilkomirski found himself fending off interview requests from television, newspaper and magazine editors, and for the next three years rose to become one of the most sought-after and well-loved survivors of Hitler’s atrocities. He was even sent on a lecture tour of America by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

  It was not until 1998 that a Swiss journalist called Daniel Ganzfried – himself the child of a survivor – began to go public with his suspicions about Wilkomirski. Writing for the news magazine Weltwoche, he presented his dossier of research into the man he had been secretly studying for over a year: a close reading of Fragments, he argued, showed that the author had not actually been in the camps at all – his accounts of the workings, layouts and customs of those places simply did not chime with the testimonies of those whose presence in them could easily be verified (which Wilkomirski’s could not). He also put it to his readers that if indeed Wilkomirski was born in 1939, he would have been far too young to process or even correctly identify the horrific sights he claimed to have seen in camps such as Auschwitz. Furthermore, he wrote, after a thorough investigation into the clarinettist-turned-memoirist’s background, the man’s true identity seemed to be Bruno Grosjean, not Binjamin Wilkomirski. And Bruno Grosjean was not a Jew. He was not even born in Riga, as the book claimed. Rather, he was a Swiss-born child of Christian parents who had abandoned him to an orphanage as a baby. An uncle, Max Grosjean, had been found who hinted at Binjamin/Bruno’s involvement with the unsavoury Swiss post-war practice of putting orphans to work (‘verdingkinder’) as indentured domestic servants, and suggested that this might be what damaged the young boy and left him feeling abused.