by Alex Palmer
With rare exception, this trend has continued. Partly due to the changed media landscape, but perhaps also because publishing is an industry where literary merit and self-promotion tend to be seen as inversely proportionate, authors of the past several decades have generally avoided star status. The era of literary celebrity seems to have gone out with Norman Mailer.
The Anti-Celebrities
Literary stardom may not be what it used to be, but authors looking for attention might consider another way to get attention: avoid the spotlight completely. Authors such as Emily Dickinson, J. D. Salinger, and Thomas Pynchon fascinate readers not only because of their work but also because of the limited information anyone has about them. Pynchon offers an interesting example of a recluse who still likes to pop his head up now and then in often bizarre places:
A 1976 article in Soho Weekly offered the theory that Pynchon was actually J. D. Salinger. The author wrote to the editors, “Not bad. Keep trying.”
After NBC’s The John Larroquette Show made several references to him, Pynchon reached out to the show through his agent, offering a couple pointers, such as, “You call him Tom, and no one ever calls him Tom.”
He made two cameos on The Simpsons, one in which he sports a brown paper bag over his head shouting blurbs for Marge’s book (“Thomas Pynchon loved this book, almost as much as he loves cameras!”) and another where his lines are made up of puns on his novel titles (“These wings are ‘V’-licious! I’ll put this recipe in ‘The Gravity’s Rainbow Cookbook,’ right next to ‘The Frying of Latke 49.’”). This is one of only two times a recording of his voice has been released on a mainstream outlet.
He wrote an amusing article in honor of the tenth anniversary of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which postulates that Stewart is actually the reincarnation of his evil TV exec character in Death to Smoochy (2002). Critic Arthur Salm reflects that, “If Pynchon and Paris Hilton were ever to meet—the circumstances, I admit, are beyond imagining—the resulting matter/antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV.”
DID ROBINSON CRUSOE TEACH JAMES FREY TO LIE?
The long history of fake memoirs and literary hoaxes
James Frey made a huge splash in the literary world; first, when his Oprah-endorsed memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003) sold millions of copies, and more so when it was suddenly revealed to be little more than a tall tale of tough-guy exaggeration. Frey’s epic flameout drew headlines, but it was far from the first literary hoax. Since the early days of novels, literature’s greatest writers have tricked audiences into believing unbelievable stories, often for their own amusement.
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which many consider to be the first novel in English, was presented as autobiography. He took pains to make it look like Crusoe’s work, leaving his own name off the first edition, leading some to believe that Robinson Crusoe actually existed and that the story was true. The hack writer Charles Gildon (who was likely looking to get a little profits of his own from Defoe’s impressive sales) actually went to the trouble of publishing Robinson Crusoe Examin’d and Criticis’d (1719), which accused Defoe of lying.
This wasn’t a one-off for Defoe, and he followed it up with several other works that used the conventions of memoir to give his works a sense of authenticity, with the stories often presented as collections of letters or journals, including Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), Captain Singleton (1720), and Moll Flanders (1722). Moll opens her book with a boast that sounds like something Frey might have made: “My true name is so well known in the [prison] records, or registers at Newgate, and in the Old-Baily ... that it is not to be expected I should set my name, or the account of my family to this work.” Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is written as a real account of London in 1665 during the Great Plague, discussing specific locations, casualty figures, and anecdotes to add credibility.
Quick Quotes
“I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.”
—Philip Roth
“People think that because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.”
—Anthony Powell
“All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies; I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth himself during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his family and friends and colleagues. And no man is good enough to tell the truth in a document which he suppresses until there is nobody left alive to contradict him.”
—George Bernard Shaw
As the novel was beginning to evolve, the traditional categories of fiction and nonfiction were not easily distinguished, and writers sought only to tell a compelling story, putting it in terms that a reader would be familiar with—letters, journals, and autobiography. Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and John Cleland all wrote fiction in the form of autobiography, whether about women of society, criminals, or prostitutes.
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) was similarly attributed to Lemuel Gulliver, and framed as a true account of his voyages at sea, though its fantastical situations made it unlikely to be mistaken for fact by the intelligent reader. Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” (1729) was taken seriously by many readers, who missed his satirical point and believed he was actually recommending classbased cannibalism.
Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto (1764) under the pretense that it was a manuscript from the sixteenth century that had just been recently discovered. It was soon exposed, and Walpole indicated he was in fact the author in the book’s second edition.
Who Are You Going to Believe?
In a later edition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiography, an odd footnote appeared. Following the author’s assertion, “With her, for the first time in my life, I really fell in love!,” the editor added an asterisk and comment that “Here Goethe was in error.”
As the novel became more firmly established, writers looking to take some poetic license turned to the newspaper. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a number of sensational, and completely fake, stories over a period of years which he presented as fact:
The story of Hans Pfaall in an 1885 issue of Southern Literary Messenger, about a man in a balloon who dropped a note to onlookers that described his five years spent on the moon.
Tales of the North Pole adventures and death of Arthur Pym, originally published as serialized news feature in the Southern Literary Messenger, would later come out as the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).
“The Great Balloon Hoax” about a famous balloonist who had flown across the Atlantic (at the time a first) in the New York Sun.
During the 1849 gold rush, Poe published a story in The Flag of Our Union about a German chemist who had figured out how to transform lead into gold. He later described his amazement at the speed with which the newspapers were snatched up.
These inventions would have gotten Poe fired immediately today, but in the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers were extremely competitive and writers were encouraged to write the stories that would give them the edge over competitors, sacrificing complete accuracy if need be (Poe’s own Sun editor is suspected of having invented the famous “Great Moon Hoax” of the same period, which described life on the moon complete with huge beavers and winged humans). It was believed to be the discerning reader’s responsibility to call out the fake stories and those who were hoodwinked had only themselves to blame. No wonder that Poe later referred to this period as the “epoch of the hoax.”
Pseudo-Science
More recent writers have used fake science to give their works an added narrative thrust. In Enduring Love (1997), a novel about a science writer, Ian McEwan
included a fraudulent article from a fake medical journal. Many critics assumed the work was real and had even inspired the novel, with The New York Times even commenting that, when readers discover the case history, they will likely conclude: that, “Mr. McEwan has simply stuck too close to the facts and failed to allow his imagination to invent.”
Mark Twain, working as a reporter at Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise in the 1860s, played the same game, though his stories were less about science and adventure and more about blood and guts. He would later describe with amusement the “feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling slaughter, mutilation and general destruction.” His fake stories included accounts of a group of Native Americans who had suffocated in a tunnel, a petrified man found sitting upright in the mountains, and a father who scalped his wife and killed six of his children (described in graphic detail).
Choosing a lighter topic, H. L. Mencken tested his readers with his 1917 article, “A Neglected Anniversary” in the New York Evening Mail, which outlined a fictitious history of the bathtub in America. It explained that while there were major concerns with the invention, it was broadly embraced after President Millard Fillmore installed one in the White House in 1850.
Ralph Waldo Emerson stated that, “Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.” While authors have created some beautiful baloney in the past, it’s hard to say if he would extend such kind words to Frey and the spate of other fake memoirists that have proliferated in recent years. Among them:
JT LeRoy—Drug addicted, sexually confused male prostitute who made public appearances in an Andy Warhol wig and dark sunglasses. In fact it was sometime rock musician Laura Albert who wrote the memoirs and her close friend Savannah Knoop who posed in public.
Margaret B. Jones—Alleged half-white, half–Native American woman writes about her life growing up as a foster child in Los Angeles gangs. She was in fact Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in the well-off Sherman Oaks, and was outed when her sister spotted a profile on her in The New York Times.
Misha Levy Defonseca—Lost her parents in the Holocaust and trekked 2,000 miles searching for them, killing a Nazi soldier and being adopted by wolves—but was actually raised by a pack of loving grandparents in Belgium, safe from the terrors of World War II.
Nasdijj, Herman Rosenblat, Helen Darville, Michael Pellegrino, Anthony Godby Johnson ... the list of recent memoir frauds goes on. Today’s fake memoir craze may be only the latest in a grand tradition of literary cons. But LeRoy, Frey, and the other latter-day deceivers seem to lack what Swift, Twain, and Poe had in spades: a sense of humor. Perhaps that may explain why a humorist like David Sedaris, who openly acknowledges exaggerating elements of his bestselling memoirs, continues to sit comfortably on the nonfiction shelves. In the meantime it’s the writers of overserious “misery lit” who have been publicly castigated and promptly tossed into the fiction section, if not the trash.
WHO’S AFRAID OF JANE AUSTEN?
Novelists’ battle for respectability
2009’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was a bizarre twist on the Jane Austen classic, the original work may actually have been even more unsettling to critics two centuries earlier. At the time of its publication, Pride and Prejudice (1813) was lumped in with many other (often quite enjoyable) novels deemed to be “trash” by the cultural and religious authorities. The novel was a target of derision throughout its formative decades.
Before the nineteenth century, reading had largely been an aristocratic activity, restricted to a small segment of the population. This slowly shifted as individuals began to have more leisure time in which to read, and it became more affordable.
The increasing popularity was aided by “circulating libraries,” established by publishers and literary societies, which took off toward the end of the eighteenth century. These served as something of a combination library and bookstore, where visitors could borrow books for a negligible price—a popular idea, because a book could cost as much as a week’s salary for an average worker. By far the most popular works in these libraries were novels, and 70 to 80 percent of all books borrowed were fiction.
These libraries were subsequently mocked by the upper classes and elites as selling “trash literature,” and critics complained that they degraded works of true value by offering mostly contemporary fiction and targeting women and lowerclass readers. Fiction was not studied in universities, and novels were seen as merely an amusement or worse.
Did You Know?
One of the most vocal critics of novels and novel-reading was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who stated in 1808 that, “where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind.” He added that novel reading “is such an utter loss to the reader that it is not so much to be called pass-time as kill-time.”
Novels were also attacked by religious critics, who felt the works’ exciting content promoted superficial pleasure and titillation, rather than self-improvement. Novels were seen as causing corruption and immorality, and were even described as “poison” that could corrupt those who took them in. Some evangelicals contended that the Bible held support for their anti-fiction beliefs. Jane West, a conservative writer who was popular in her day, captures this negative attitude toward novels, a bit ironically, in her introduction to The Infidel Father: A Novel (1802), as she laments that the form is likely not going away, but could at least be used to more edifying ends:
The rage for novels does not decrease; and, though I by no means think them the best vehicles for “the words of sound doctrine,” yet, while the enemies of our church and state continue to pour their poison into unwary ears through this channel, it behooves the friends of our establishments to convey an antidote by the same course.
A notable hint of sexism can be sensed in these diatribes against novels. The majority of readers of fiction were women, with favorite books serving a special value in their social circles as they traded with one another. Critics derided the novels as “women’s literature.” As the Church of England’s Quarterly Review condescendingly put it in 1842, trying to explain why the bulk of readers were women, “they are more naturally sensitive, more impressionable, than the other sex; and secondly, their engagements are of a less engrossing nature—they have more time to indulge in reveries of fiction.”
Did You Know?
As she was considering leaving her teaching career behind, Charlotte Brontë wrote to poet laureate Robert Southey asking if he thought she could earn a living as a writer. He responded: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it.”
The works of Jane Austen were lumped together with these “women’s novels” and received little critical notice during her time, with none of her novels being reprinted until 1831. Ralph Waldo Emerson commented that her books, “seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow.” Mark Twain offered that, “Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”
All these protests took a toll on novelists. In The Reading Lesson, critic Patrick Brantlinger explains, “As a genre, the modern novel was born with an inferiority complex: it wasn’t classical, it wasn’t poetry, and it wasn’t history.” Novels began in a vague, ill-defined format, with writers making up the rules as they went along. There is a self-consciousness in many early novels, with writers satirizing the form, offering an acknowledgment of and something of an apology for its shortcomings.
In his essay “Novel Reading,” Anthony Trollope points out the central role that novels had gained in popular literature, and in their ability to shape mass opinion. He writes that, “At different periods
in our history, the preacher, the dramatist, the essayist, and the poet have been efficacious over others.... Now it is the novelist.” The essay may sound like a full-throated defense of novels, but he adds, “There are reasons why we would wish it were otherwise. The reading of novels can hardly strengthen the intelligence.”
Austen herself takes a more defensive stance for the novel in Northanger Abbey:
Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried ... there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.
The idea that reading novels and romances can lead to delusion goes at least as far back as Don Quixote’s misguided quests, and novelists as well as critics discussed how reading them could lead readers to believe they lived in a fantasy world. Characters like Austen’s Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey and Flaubert’s Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary (1857) take ill-advised actions as a result of the books they read. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the title character epitomizes this through the impact that the “yellow book” that Lord Henry sends over has on him. He describes it as a “poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain,” which leads him down a path of crime and self-destruction.