Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era 9780748675555, 9780748675562

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Textual Deceptions

Textual Deceptions False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era

Sue Vice

© Sue Vice, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 7555 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7556 2 (webready PDF) The right of Sue Vice to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Between Text and Author

1

1 Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs

11

2 Gender Hoaxing: Rahila Khan, Anthony Godby Johnson and J. T. LeRoy

37

3 Indigenous Envy: Wanda Koolmatrie and Nasdijj

59

4 ‘Falsifying Downward’: Margaret B. Jones and James Frey

85

5 Self-Advertising Hoaxes: Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajanë

113

6 False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony

142

Select Bibliography 203 Index 210

Acknowledgements

With thanks to the following family members, friends, colleagues, present and former students, writers and editors: Jenni Adams, Peter Arnds, Amanda Bernstein, Jeffrey Bernstein, John Bradley, Joe Bray, John Broadbent, Sue Broadbent, Jayna Brown, Madeleine Callaghan, Peter Davies, Robert Eaglestone, Chris Everest, James Fitzmaurice, Susan Fitzmaurice, David Forrest, Toby Forward, Bill Freind, Alex George, Marilyn Gregory, Nick Groom, John Haffenden, Nicky Hallett, Jackie Harrison, Deborah Hill, Robert Hill, Robert Hopkins, Ian Jack, Kent Johnson, Samatha J. Katze, Teresa Kelly, Tony Kushner, Paul Leman, Agnes McAuley, Bill McDonnell, Jess Meacham, Merilyn Moos, Beate Müller, Michelle Richmond, Neil Roberts, Antony Rowland, Steve Russell, Cathy Shrank, Eli Park Sorensen, Axel Stähler, Victoria Stewart, Linda Swanson-Davies, David Turton, Bill U’Ren, Kenneth Waltzer, David Wojahn; everyone at Edinburgh University Press, including James Dale, Jenny Daly, Jackie Jones, Dhara Patel and Fiona Sewell; Elizabeth and Tony Vice, John Vice, Harriet Coles, Flossie, Luke and Nell, Pip Vice and John Slaytor, Millie and Jake, and Pete Lyons. Thanks also to the British Academy for a Small Research Grant relating to this project. Thanks also to the British Academy for a Small Research Grant relating to this project.

Introduction

Between Text and Author

Contemporary literary and cultural theory draws some of its most significant inspiration from considering the relationship between the author and the text, arguing for the priority of language and construction over any clear link between the author’s name and his or her ‘genius’.1 However, despite Roland Barthes’ argument that the author is simply a collection of codes of meaning, Jacques Derrida’s that a text’s writtenness will always become apparent, and Michel Foucault’s rhetorical question, ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’,2 the examples of literary hoaxes and false memoirs in the present study suggest that even those instances that seem to demonstrate the distinction between author and text become the very occasions for insisting upon their close relationship. The interest taken in a text, its literary and literal value, and its continued existence in the public realm, are all viewed in relation to the author’s connection to the text. Indeed, contemporary cultural theory is often viewed as the inspiration for hoaxes and fakes, and criticised as a way of excusing them. Postmodernism, seen in the sense not of an aesthetic era or a school of analysis but as a dangerously anarchic relativism, is often explicitly named as the reason why, for instance, a middle-class Californian Valley Girl should write a memoir in the persona of a mixed-race gang member, or an American lecturer publish poetry in the guise of a survivor of Hiroshima. However, the long history of literary deceptions, and the varied reasons why they occur, suggest that postmodernism cannot be to blame. By contrast, it is an imperative of extreme or unusual experience, as well as its marketability, that unites the deceptions under discussion here, giving them a readership that they might otherwise not have had. In an instance of using the postmodern technique of collage and citation against it, the physicist Alan Sokal attempted to reveal the insubstantiality of the postmodern emperor’s clothes in an article published in Social Text, entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards

2    Textual Deceptions a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’.3 Sokal describes his point thus: my concern is explicitly political: to combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist social-constructivist discourse – and more ­ generally a penchant for subjectivism – which is, I believe, inimical to the future and values of the Left.4

By exaggeratedly imitating what he took to be the style and themes of postmodern and poststructuralist writing, and falsely praising those whom he judged to be its advocates, Sokal’s aim was to parody what he calls the ‘pseudo-scientific charlatanry’ and ‘glib relativism’ of such writers as Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, not to mention the critic Stanley Aronowitz, who was one of the editors of Social Text, all of whom invoke recent developments in physics in their work.5 Sokal’s article conforms to what Brian McHale describes as an ‘entrapment’ hoax, one whose effect depends on its being uncovered.6 It also exhibits several features that are held in common by the works to be studied here. First, Sokal’s article relied upon a concealed division between the actual biographical self, the physicist who perpetrated the hoax, and the ostensible writing self, the implied author of the article. In this case, both entities have the same name. The difference between the two Sokals is clear in such claims by the article’s implied author that, for instance, a passage by Derrida is ‘perceptive’, when a later annotation on the article by the ‘real’ Sokal describes his own commentary as ‘a perfectly crafted crescendo of meaninglessness’, one that is ‘truly worthy of the Derrida quote it “explicates” ’.7 The hoax, which was revealed by Sokal himself in an article that Social Text declined to publish,8 prompted widespread debates about the ethics of the stunt as well as its alleged target, and has generated its own metacritique, most notably in the form of Sokal’s own published commentaries, including his book Beyond the Hoax, which includes a detailed explication of the original piece. Such metacritique takes varied forms in relation to other deceptions. Annotating the originary fake, as Sokal has done, is unusual, although John Bayley, the writer responsible for a novel by the non-existent Aboriginal author Wanda Koolmatrie, published an account of that imposture, as has Savannah Knoop, the woman who enacted the public face of the male novelist J.  T. LeRoy on behalf of the actual author, her sister-in-law Laura Albert.9 Memoirs that are subject to question about accuracy or authenticity often prompt the appearance of ripostes or supplements, in the form of critical works that offer the ‘real story’, either by seeking to expose untruths, in the case of Gerard Hannan and Hermann Kelly,

Introduction    3

writing respectively on the memoirists Frank McCourt and Kathy O’Beirne, or to offer an apologia, as does Lionel Duroy’s study of Misha Defonseca’s Holocaust testimony. At a further representational remove, the phenomenon of fictionalised versions of infamous deceptions reveals the potential these cases offer for questioning contemporary conceptions of identity. Armistead Maupin claimed that the case of Anthony Godby Johnson, a boy with a ‘sparkling’ personality on the telephone whom he never met in person, encapsulated the ‘enticing ambiguities of fiction’,10 and other writers, even when their own credulity was not involved, have responded similarly. Peter Carey’s novel My Life as a Fake was inspired by the case of invented Australian poet Ern Malley, while two plays show the subject’s potential for dramatic enactment: Rick Viede’s A Hoax draws on elements of J. T. LeRoy and Wanda Koolmatrie, while Cusi Cram’s A Lifetime Burning is about the pretend gangland member Margaret B. Jones.11 A version of Binjamin Wilkomirski, the false Holocaust memoirist and author of Fragments, appears in fictive form in Sara Paretsky’s thriller Total Recall and Benjamin Stein’s novel The Canvas.12 Lastly, and most significantly for my argument throughout this book, Sokal’s hoax was motivated by, and draws attention to, the strict divisions not only between textual genres, but between academic disciplines themselves. Indeed, as his article’s title suggests, its target was in part what Sokal saw as a voguish wish on the part of cultural critics to ‘transgress boundaries’ in a manner that simply demonstrated their own ‘sloppy thinking’.13 While the deceptions considered here have not been subject to the policing of quite the same ‘boundaries’ as those with which Sokal was concerned, all of them enact a transgression of the distinctions between memoir and fiction, and implied and actual author, thus suggesting those boundaries to be both artificial and fragile. Cultural imposture may seem to be a particularly widespread phenomenon in the age of the internet, given the possibilities it offers for anonymity and what is in effect self-publication. Such examples as Tom McMaster’s sustained online masquerade as the persecuted Syrian lesbian Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari support this view. However, not only does cultural and, more specifically, literary fraudulence have a significant history, long preceding the twentieth and twenty-first century’s online first-person fictions,14 but the most important and bestknown examples of contemporary frauds and hoaxes are those which exist, or have existed, in print form. The mediated and lengthy process of publication constitutes a first stage of scrutiny such that, when it is seen to have failed, readers’ and critics’ sense of betrayal is increased. The permanence of published works, even in cases where publishers have withdrawn books from sale or cancelled print runs, means that

4    Textual Deceptions such cases cannot be easily overlooked or forgotten. Transgressions of literary propriety range widely, and include omitting facts and telling untruths (the cyclist Lance Armstrong has admitted lying, in his autobiography It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, about not taking performance-enhancing drugs), plagiarising the work of others (David Leavitt was sued by Stephen Spender for using unattributed material from the latter’s memoirs in his novel While England Sleeps), and augmenting one’s account of events (Greg Mortenson has been accused of exaggerating his experiences in Afghanistan in his travelogue Three Cups of Tea).15 In the present study, my concern is with texts in which, in a variety of ways, there is an extreme disjunction between the work and its author, and the misrepresentation of what kind of a text that author has written. Thus the text falls outside the genre in which it should properly exist, so that memoir turns out to be fictional, or could be described as aspiring to the novelistic; apparently autofictional writing emerges as thoroughly invented; and the formal elements of poetry, including its imagery and first-person speakers, are pressed into service as figures for non-existent poets. Yet in each case a text remains, although it is in some cases now hard to come by, and I have approached these examples as literary constructs worthy of the attention of close readings. In each case, I have placed the deceptive text in its literary context, in relation to works on which it might have drawn intertextually or implicitly, as well as connections established between the deception’s author and other writers, and the context in which the text appeared. Thus Kent Johnson, widely supposed to be the actual author of Araki Yasusada’s Hiroshima-related poetry and correspondence, reveals a debt to Sylvia Plath. This debt is stylistic and also takes place in relation to what Plath referred to as poetry’s relevance ‘to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau’,16 as revealed by the poetry Johnson published under his own name that criticises the American invasion of Iraq. Textual Deceptions begins with an examination of two British and one Irish example of the contemporary genre of ‘misery memoir’. In each case, the accuracy and factual nature of the events described have been questioned, so consistently that it seems that the very act of writing about the past entails a literariness that may be seen as the equivalent of embellishment or fraudulence. The obverse of such a view is that expressed in K. K. Ruthven’s study of literary imposture, Faking Literature, in which he argues that fiction’s definitional distance from truth-claims makes the category of fake authorship disappear.17 The same narrative features were subject to suspicion in each instance of misery memoir. For Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, aspiration to a

Introduction    5

Modernist literary style generated a clash between the text’s status as a memoir and its impressionistic first-person story told from a child’s perspective. Questions about the reliability of reconstructed dialogue and chronology were equally posed of Constance Briscoe’s Ugly, in extreme form during the court case brought against the author and her publishers by Briscoe’s mother. Lastly, the status of Kathy O’Beirne’s memoir Don’t Ever Tell has been contested on the grounds of its transformation of a turbulent Irish girlhood into the specifically located and historicised trauma of imprisonment in a Magdalene Laundry. As Susanna Egan argues, such texts elicit contradictory responses: readers are at once prompted to doubt what they read by reason of its events’ ‘implausibility’, yet the very extremity of suffering means that the reader ‘dare not doubt’.18 In the case of each of the three misery memoirs, the reader has to assess evidence of both literary and extra-textual varieties to conclude on the likelihood of the events described. This is a demand of the reader that we will see repeated in relation to all the examples analysed here, most particularly those whose status has not been clarified by the unearthing of conclusive evidence, or an author’s confession of deceit. Chapter 2 considers instances in which an author has not only written in the name of someone of the opposite gender, but has also asserted that such a person exists. These are not just pseudonyms, although that claim is made in some of the cases, but alter egos of varying degrees of embodiment. This chapter also marks the appearance of the last British text. While some critics have argued that it is possible to ‘see the faux ethnic memoir as a uniquely American genre’, arising from ‘the complexities of American identity’,19 a similar case has been made for the national specificity of hoaxes in other newly formed multicultural nations, in implicit contrast to the British model of postcolonial immigration.20 Such an emphasis on cultural imitation, arising from admiration or, conversely, a writer’s sense of disadvantage, reveals the fact that gender masquerade is the least controversial of the adoptive identities explored here, not least because it is invariably accompanied by other kinds of adoption. In the case of Toby Forward’s creation of his alter ego Rahila Khan, author of the stories in Down the Road, Worlds Away, gender masquerade went alongside that of an implied Asian Muslim background. For Anthony Godby Johnson’s A Rock and a Hard Place, a memoir about the life of a teenage boy who contracted AIDS as a result of sexual abuse, the female identity of its probable author, Vicki Johnson, is perhaps the least noteworthy element of an imposture that involved the creation not only of an implied author, but of an individual who communicated with his readers over the course of a decade by letter and in telephone conversations – albeit an author who remained i­nvisible.

6    Textual Deceptions Laura Albert’s construction of the novelist and former male prostitute J. T. LeRoy took Vicki Johnson’s ruse a stage further, in producing not only the authorial traces of photographs and a voice on the telephone, but a body double for her invented persona. Although LeRoy’s works were published as a particularly carnivalesque and transgressive kind of fiction, their appeal lay in the implication that they were, nonetheless, autobiographical. Enacting in such a way the idea that ‘authenticity is located in the body of the artist’, as Nick Groom puts it,21 might be expected to subvert, but actually reinforces, this notion. Chapter 3 continues exploration of the subject of gendered and ethnic pretence, in which once more gender is eclipsed by race, in relation to Wanda Koolmatrie’s novel My Own Sweet Time, a prize-winning work purportedly based on Wanda’s own life as a mixed-race woman of Aboriginal ancestry, but actually written by two white men who believed their own literary aspirations to have a greater chance of success in this guise. Such a ‘white backlash’ is also evident in the poetically composed memoirs of his life as a mixed-race Native American by Nasdijj, actually written by Timothy Barrus, a man of white European origin, who claimed that his invented persona was necessary for his work to be published. Chapter 4 analyses two memoirs that focus, in the case of James Frey’s embellished A Million Little Pieces, on the personal tragedy of drug addiction and rehabilitation, and in Margaret B. Jones’ Love and Consequences, on life as a gangland member. Both reveal, rather than the life of extremity that is described, a devotion to reading: in Frey’s case, the novels of Charles Bukowski, and in Jones’, memoirs of convicted or reformed gang members. Although a truism of the study of literary hoaxes and fake memoirs is Frank Kermode’s statement that ‘There is no internal property of a stretch of prose that allows it to be identified as either fact or fiction’,22 the present study shows that a comparison between texts can be just as convincing a part of the revelation of imposture as extra-textual documentary evidence or authorial confession. In Chapter 5, intertextuality offers a way of reading the poetry of Araki Yasusada, allegedly a Hiroshima survivor whose writing was published posthumously. Not only did the probable author, Kent Johnson, draw on other examples of Japanese literature, deploying this anachronistically in the form of deliberately planted clues to his aesthetic fraud, but individual poems were published at various times under different names, including Johnson’s own, constructing a revelatory literary heritage. Jiri Kajanë’s short stories about life in communist Albania seem to arise from the wish of their translators, Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren, who are in reality the stories’ authors, to develop a fictive voice and

Introduction    7

subject that would distinguish their work from that of other American ‘dirty realist’ writers. As is often the case in the deceptions that take fictional form, the plots of Kajanë’s stories came increasingly to centre on motifs of trickery and untruths. In Kajanë’s case, such a development signalled a shift in the work’s origin in the authors’ disgruntlement at being overlooked in their own right, to a playfully metafictional stance. The last chapter concerns three false and three embellished Holocaust testimonies. For various reasons, imposture is judged particularly harshly in this historical context, partly because ‘revisionists’ argue that the Holocaust is itself a fiction, and partly because it is an event that is presently turning from one located in living memory, while survivors remain extant and can tell their own stories, to one of historical record. Thus a high premium is placed on both authenticity and accuracy. It may also be the case that so high a value is placed on the utterance of Holocaust survivors that they are seen almost as ‘secular saints’,23 the corollary of which is that imitating or impersonating them is judged to be akin to blasphemy. Yet in at least two of the entirely fabricated cases examined here, that of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments and Bernard Holstein’s Stolen Soul, the author appears to be in the grip of a genuinely held delusion about their childhood experiences and in which historical context these took place. In relation to the embellished testimonies, Deli Strummer ascribes the inaccuracies in her recall in A Reflection of the Holocaust to the overwhelming nature of camp existence, although this is less convincing in the case of her husband, whom she falsely declared had perished, in an effort to avoid having to admit to a post-war divorce. Martin Gray’s account of the additions to his For Those I Loved, consisting of his deportation to and taking part in the revolt in the death camp Treblinka, takes the different form of claiming that he wished to emphasise the importance of Jewish resistance, even at the cost of invention. In his An Angel at the Fence, Herman Rosenblat added an invented element of romantic salvation to the real story of fraternal protection that had led to his survival of the concentration camp of Buchenwald as a teenager. While a Holocaust narrative played a psychic role of recompense for the loss of her parents during the war in ignoble circumstances, only Misha Defonseca eventually confessed that her highly successful, if equally improbable, testimony Surviving with Wolves was made up. Mark McGurl argues of Forrest Carter, the author of sentimental stories of Native American life and the alias of former Klan member Asa Carter, whose precise motives remain opaque, that, ‘if nothing else, the man deeply understood the laws of genre’.24 It is the indeed the ‘laws of genre’ that the present study argues have played an extremely

8    Textual Deceptions significant role in accounting not only for deception itself, but for the extreme reactions it provokes. As Derek Attridge puts it, ‘The question of genre . . . brings with it the question of law, since it implies an institutionalised classification, an enforceable principle of non-contamination and non-contradiction’,25 and, as we have seen, this has sometimes literally been the case. It is to explore the laws of genre that journalists mount investigations, and over these laws’ transgression that readers express outrage, lawsuits are mounted, and books are withdrawn from sale. Yet, despite Attridge’s contention, such ‘laws’ are those of literary history and convention. Such strictures generate deceptions even as they decry them. This is perhaps most evident in relation to the embellished memoirs considered in this study, in which it may appear that a hybridity of experience is represented. For instance, while Kathy O’Beirne was briefly an inmate in a reformatory school, she did not spend the years from six onwards in the industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries as she describes. Don’t Ever Tell could thus be seen as O’Beirne’s own experience grafted onto a historicised national calamity, about which she had read and researched. Another way to characterise O’Beirne’s memoir, and the embellished Holocaust testimonies by Martin Gray, Deli Strummer and Herman Rosenblat, is in terms of generic rather than experiential hybridity. In these cases, it was invention, fantasy, fiction and exaggeration that were grafted onto documentary historical discourse, both personal and public. Yet the borders of textual and marketing genres are so strictly observed that their transgression can only result in outrage. Foucault’s observation that ‘The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning’26 could thus be rephrased to suggest that it is the strict expectations and applications of generic boundaries that act to prevent meaning’s proliferation. I began this study in response to the three wholly fake Holocaust testimonies, since the process of their being hailed and then reviled is so revealing of readerly and generic prescriptions, and because the phenomenon and texts themselves are so fascinating. As I sought comparisons for these false testimonies, it became clear that most significant historical events, particularly those which involve violent, abrupt and traumatic change, are accompanied by false eyewitness testimony. This is true of 9/11, the Vietnam War, and antisemitic attacks in contemporary France.27 In the present study, the kinds of national trauma that are coveted, and about which memoirs or literary representations are invented, include the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, AIDS in the USA in the 1990s, the fall of communism after 1989 and the legacy of Aboriginal and Native American persecution. Yet, despite this

Introduction    9

wide range of historical trauma, in many cases of contemporary deception it is the Holocaust that constitutes an implicit or explicit reference point. The model for any survivor-witness is Primo Levi, while that of the witness who did not survive is Anne Frank, and these two poles of experience are invoked in order to legitimate and render intelligible other kinds of calamity. Despite the chaos and unknowability that are often said to characterise it, the Holocaust has thus become suffering’s most typical expression, the logical conclusion of which is the appearance of invented accounts about just that survival.

Notes  1. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 124.   2. Ibid., p. 125.  3. Alan Sokal, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, Social Text, 46/47 (Spring/Summer) 1996, pp. 217–52.   4. Alan Sokal, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword’, in Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 95.  5. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science, London: Profile Books, 1998; Alan Sokal, ‘Preface’, in Beyond the Hoax, p. xv, and ‘What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove’, in Beyond the Hoax, p. 155.  6. Brian McHale, ‘  “A Poet May Not Exist”: Mock-Hoaxes and the Construction of National Identity’, in Robert Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity, New York: Palgrave, 2003.  7. Sokal, Beyond the Hoax, pp. 27, 30.  8. Alan Sokal, ‘A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies’, Lingua Franca, 6 (4) 1996, pp. 62–4.   9. John Bayley, Daylight Corroboree: A First-Hand Account of the ‘Wanda Koolmatrie’ Hoax, Campbelltown, SA: Eidolon Books, 2004; Savannah Knoop, Girl Boy Girl: How I Became J. T. LeRoy, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 10. Tad Friend, ‘Virtual Love’, New Yorker, 26 November 2001, pp. 88–99: 93. 11. Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake, London: Faber, 2003; Rick Viede, A Hoax, Sydney: Currency Press, 2012; Cusi Cram, A Lifetime Burning, New York and London: Samuel French, 2011. 12. Sara Paretsky, Total Recall, New York: Delacorte Press 2001; Benjamin Stein, The Canvas, trans. Brian Zumhagen, Rochester, NY: Open Book Press, 2012. 13. Sokal, ‘What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove’, in Beyond the Hoax, p. 155.

10    Textual Deceptions 14. See for instance Nick Groom, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature, London: Picador, 2002; K. K. Ruthven, Faking Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Jack Lynch, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Farnham: Ashgate, 2008. 15. Lance Armstrong, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, London: Yellow Jersey, 2001; David Leavitt, While England Sleeps, New York: Viking, 1993, revised and reissued 1995; Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea, London: Penguin, 2008. 16. Sylvia Plath in interview with Peter Orr, in The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press, and Ian Scott-Kilvery, London: Routledge, 1966, p. 169. 17. Ruthven, Faking Literature. 18. Susanna Egan, Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011, p.  2. Thanks to Nina Schmidt for this reference. 19. Laura Browder, ‘Racism and Identity Collide: Tackling The Reconstruction of Asa Carter Meant Tracking a Slippery Mystery’, on the documentary film The Reconstruction of Asa Carter (Mario Ricci, ITVS/Square 2 Entertainment, USA, 2012), http://houston.culturemap.com/news/entertainment/04–23–12–racism-and-identity-collide-tackling-ithe-reconstruction-of-asa-carteri-meant-tracking-a-mystery, accessed 18 March 2014. 20. Maggie Nolan and Carrie Dawson, eds, ‘Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crises in Australian Literature’, special issue of Australian Literary Studies, 21 (4) 2004, pp. v–xx: vi. 21. Groom, The Forger’s Shadow, p. 13. 22. Frank Kermode, quoted in Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 125. 23. C. Jan Colijn, ‘Toward a Proper Legacy’, in Carol Rittner, ed., Anne Frank in the World: Essays and Reflections, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998, p. 100. 24. Mark McGurl, ‘Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 18 (2) 2005, pp. 243–67: 248. 25. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 221. 26. Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, p. 137. 27. See respectively Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr, The Woman Who Wasn’t There: The True Story of an Incredible Deception, New York: Touchstone, 2012; B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation was Robbed of its Heroes and History, Dallas: Verity Press, 1999; and André Téchiné’s 2009 film La Fille du R.E.R (Saïd Ben Saïd, France), based on the story of a woman who fabricated the story of an antisemitic attack on a commuter train.

Chapter 1

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs

The contemporary genre of ‘misery memoirs’ is contradictorily named, since the narrative trajectory of such works is one of eventual redemption rather than irremediable descent. This is implied by the perhaps more accurate alternative description of the genre as one of ‘inspirational life stories’, where the use of the ambiguous term ‘stories’ reveals the misery memoir’s appeal as both history and narrative. However, some critics argue that, since such memoirs have less of a ‘cathartic or motivational function’ than an ability to offer readers a ‘vicarious and voyeuristic experience’ of the most appalling suffering, it is indeed in terms of misery rather than inspiration that they should be described.1 In this chapter, I will introduce some different forensic approaches that have been taken towards three misery memoirs. While questions about the reliability of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, his account of a poverty-stricken upbringing in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s, have been evaluated in literary terms, similar concerns in relation to Constance Briscoe’s Ugly were approached litigiously, when the author was sued for libel by her mother, whom Briscoe described in her memoir as violent and neglectful. Kathy O’Beirne, the author of Don’t Ever Tell, initially agreed to undergo an MRI brain-scan to determine the nature of her truthfulness, which has been contested by a wide range of commentators including members of her own family.2 Such a variety of responses, ranging from the intertextual to the legal and medical, reveals the high cultural significance of establishing reliability, if not veracity, in such cases. These are stark and literal instances of the critical and interpretive approaches that have been adopted towards all the texts that feature in this study. These narratives of misery recalled are sufficiently united in formula and appeal to be seen in relation to the morphology of another genre in which the reader knows to expect the overcoming of vicissitudes, that of the folk- or fairytale, as outlined by the formalist critic Vladimir Propp.

12    Textual Deceptions Misery memoirs are versions of the eighth of Propp’s thirty-one folktale functions, in which a ‘villain’ causes ‘harm or injury’ to someone of the same family, a villainy that is ultimately and triumphantly vanquished.3 Thus these memoirs are comedies rather than tragedies in the formal sense, as works in which, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, ‘the characters ultimately triumph over adversity’, even if the journey to triumph is arduous and the suffering cannot easily be consigned to the past. Such a comparison with literary genres is not meant to imply the necessary fictionality of misery memoirs, but to emphasise the consistency and popularity of their qualities as accounts of great hardship that has been overcome. As Primo Levi observed of If This is a Man, his testimony of existence in Auschwitz, using a formulation that is itself quoted by commentators on such memoirists as Frank McCourt, the stories of those who ‘drowned’ are lost, and we read only about those who survived.4 Levi’s observation has been amended in relation to the misery memoir, to suggest that its very existence implies that the ability to narrate ‘successful’ survival actively ‘writes out those who don’t survive and don’t fight back’, such as individuals who are killed, commit suicide or suffer incurable mental illness.5 The memoirs that do exist are even titled in a way that reveals the reversibility of bad fortune. Constance Briscoe’s Ugly is so named after the insults levelled at the child by her mother, as well as in general description of her unhappy home life. However, the reader is able correctly to anticipate the eventual ‘beautiful’ outcome for the narrator, who became the UK’s first black judge and whose radiant photograph appears on the cover of some editions of the memoir, alongside a generic image of a sorrowful black child whose face is hidden. The title of Kathy O’Beirne’s Don’t Ever Tell likewise quotes the words of its protagonist’s abusers, and even more explicitly redeems its own premise by defiantly ‘telling’ the reader of just those affronts that were supposed to remain secret. Clearly, to be able to tell at all is a mark of survival. The genre has been described as both ‘conservative’ and ‘reassuring’,6 since its plot typically consists of the re-establishment of those moral and emotional certainties that have been threatened within the narrative. Yet the misery memoir is not usually polemical or cautionary, in the manner of confessions of addiction that urge temperance, or accounts of life under slavery that aim to persuade the reader to support emancipation.7 Rather, its goal is twofold: to engage the reader, and to do so by means of an assertion of authenticity. It is the latter which is paramount. The function of ‘misery’, that is, a first-person voice relating its own bodily and psychic suffering, is simply to establish the impression of that authenticity, by constituting its most extreme and paradigmatic

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    13

instance. The absence of the moral or political goal that characterised first-person accounts of addiction or enslavement means that the effects of the misery memoir are individualised to the point of being described as ‘pornographic’.8 While such a characterisation is an attempt to convey the genre’s appeal to a readership wedded to the emotionalisation of power relations, to amend a definition of pornography,9 it does not account for other distinctive features of the genre. These include the fundamental pastness of the events related in the misery memoir, most apparent in the division between the adult narrator in the present and the suffering subject in the past. Such a narrative and temporal division is emphasised in such memoirs at the very moment when it appears to be erased by the construction of a child’s-eye viewpoint, as we will see in relation to each of the three examples discussed here. Although it may be subject to the disjunction between trauma and narrative, meaning that personal trauma cannot be related at all,10 the misery memoir is an analeptic and mediated genre. On the other hand, since it is the claim for authenticity that fundamentally characterises the misery memoir, it is distinct from the utterance of such aestheticised genres as that of confessional poetry, and more akin to a form of negative or dark autobiography, focusing on the narrator’s youth. At trial, Briscoe described Ugly as ‘a journey’, as if it were a version of a Bildungsroman: ‘ “the abuse of me, which involves my mother, is just one tiny part of the book. It’s about looking forward” ’ (399). The genre’s assertion of an authentic link between narrator-protagonist and author at once raises the opposite possibility, that there is no such link. The stakes for the misery memoir of betraying its version of Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact are high,11 precisely because of the demands made by the text on the reader in terms of their investment in the protagonist’s suffering and the belief that such suffering is real. That reader is sometimes even constructed as someone who shares or has shared the narrator’s plight. Briscoe’s and O’Beirne’s accounts both conclude with the details of such organisations as, respectively, Southall Black Sisters and Childline, and the Residential Institutions Redress Board, implying that the reader might finish the book and proceed to formulate their own effort to confront past suffering. As the structural likeness between these two memoirs implies, the elements of authenticity’s construction remain the same whether the text itself is wholly reliable or not: while Briscoe’s claim for the factual status of Ugly was vindicated in a court of law, that of Don’t Ever Tell has been widely questioned. In the case of both accounts, the lists of external agencies exist for rhetorical as well as factual purposes. While Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life has been described as the first

14    Textual Deceptions ‘contemporary literary memoir’, it is Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, his account of childhood suffering in pre-war Ireland, which has been credited with founding the genre of misery memoir.12 So familiar has the category of ‘memoir’ become that it is hard to recall the innovative nature of the term’s use in its singular form, used to refer to a ‘new confessional form of autobiography’,13 as a contrast to the more public connotations of the plural form ‘memoirs’.14 Since political or war memoirs have been the paradigmatic instance of that genre, the contemporary misery memoir can be seen as the late twentieth-century equivalent, as narratives about triumph over ‘outrageous adversity’, albeit ones which focus on private and domestic battles.15 Thus in the very moment of its establishment by McCourt’s memoir, the genre, or marketing category, of the misery memoir was revealed to be a hybrid of autobiography with imaginative fiction, since Angela’s Ashes relies upon exaggerated or unlikely fact that is often advertised within the text as such. Being subject to scrutiny and refutation could itself also be described as foundational to the genre, as shown by the debate over such examples as Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called ‘It’ and Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors.16 Pelzer’s siblings and other family members have taken up varying attitudes of confirmation or denial of the extreme abuse recounted in his memoir, and Burroughs has been subject to a court case alleging invasion of privacy and libel by the real-life foster-family with whom he lived as a teenager, and who contested his version of events.17 While reviewers may argue of memoirs such as Burroughs’ that, given its subjective and literary qualities, ‘veracity is irrelevant’,18 the outcome of the trial had significant implications for memoirists.19 The settlement decreed that Running With Scissors was to be called a ‘book’ rather than a ‘memoir’, signalling precisely the possibility of contesting the veracity of past events. A prefatory author’s note to the memoir was amended to include the caveat that Burroughs recognises the fact that the family’s ‘memories of the events described in this book are different than my own’,20 in phrasing that shifts the emphasis from fact to memory. Critics have argued that, since the memoir is in general an ‘intersubjective mode’ and records ‘an emotional experience’, it ‘lies outside a logical or judicial model of truth and falsehood’, offering instead ‘a different kind of “real” ’ from one that is ‘legally verifiable’.21 However, as the present study will show, lawsuits such as that levelled against Burroughs, as well as other attempts at definitive social judgement including lie-detector tests and documentary evidence, have played a significant role in responding to and determining the genre of memoir.

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    15

Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes Angela’s Ashes is the story of Francis McCourt’s poverty-stricken childhood in Limerick, as related by the oldest son of parents who had returned from the USA to Ireland in the late 1930s after the death of their baby daughter Margaret. It concludes with Francis’ re-emigration to New York at the age of nineteen. In Ireland, the McCourts also suffered the deaths of twin boys Eugene and Oliver and Francis’ own near-death from typhoid at the age of eleven; the family existed so precariously that they were reduced to begging for bread from unsympathetic priests, and to burning the wooden beams of the family’s rented accommodation for heat. The father of the family, Malachy McCourt, failed to find work in Ireland and, when he left for England to do so, did not send back his wages, so that, in return for a place for herself and her four sons to live, his wife was obliged to offer sexual services to her cousin Laman Griffin. The success of McCourt’s memoir could be seen as a positive omen for the genre of memoir by what he called the ‘ordinary person’: it is a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography in 1997, and has been adapted as a feature film (Alan Parker, 1999); the Frank McCourt Museum in Limerick is housed in his former school, while the Frank McCourt Chair of Creative Writing was established in his memory at the University of Limerick after his death in 2009. However, the memoir has also attracted such extreme negative controversy that the author had to be protected by extra security when receiving an honorary degree from the university, and a ceremonial burning of copies of the book took place in 2000 on Long Island, New York, organised by expatriates from Limerick.22 The criticism levelled at McCourt’s memoir is of two apparently contradictory kinds, one centring on style, the other on history. While the text’s literariness, in terms of its debt to such writers as James Joyce, Sean O’Casey and Charles Dickens, is taken to imply both its ‘derivative’ nature and its fictionality,23 the memoir’s aspiration to fact is seen as so insufficient that it amounts to a betrayal of personal and historical truth. McCourt is accused by Terry Eagleton of a ‘prolier-thanthou sentimentalism’ in his portrayal of life in Limerick of the 1930s and 1940s; Roy Foster also claims that McCourt exaggerates the grimness of his family’s circumstances, citing as evidence such details as boys going barefoot, being driven by hunger to milk cows illicitly, and floating toy boats on open sewers.24 More specifically, McCourt is said to have misrepresented and fictionalised his mother Angela, as well as inventing such central episodes of the story as her liaison with her cousin, and ­amplifying other incidents including his own sexual encounter with the terminally ill Teresa Carmody, and another in which Francis and other

16    Textual Deceptions boys spy on the sisters of a friend as they get undressed.25 McCourt’s accusers have included the Limerick-born actor Richard Harris,26 as well as his own mother, who infamously interrupted the stand-up routine devised by her sons Francis and Malachy about their miserable childhood in a New York theatre, in protest at its inaccuracy.27 While some of these objections are based on contestations of fact, others seem to be motivated by concerns about propriety, the reputation of individuals accused of ‘sexual transgressions’, as well as the ‘contempt’ shown towards Limerick, the Catholic church and its charitable institutions.28 The playwright Chriostoir O’Flynn’s memoir There Is An Isle: A Limerick Boyhood is, as its title implies, a ‘corrective’ to McCourt’s. O’Flynn even describes the memoirist as ‘not a native of Limerick’. By contrast to McCourt, O’Flynn claims that he recalls ‘very little that savours of pervasive discontent, recurrent unhappiness, or real deprivation’ in his own boyhood.29 In a different mode of response, various parodies of Angela’s Ashes have been published,30 whose existence implies both the imitability of the ‘miserable childhood’ genre that McCourt’s memoir initiated, and envy of the writer’s success. In all of these instances of contestation, apart from those which involve comparing Angela’s Ashes with literary texts where the evidence can be assessed directly, the reader is faced with making judgements based simply on rival claims that cite circumstantial evidence, as the refutations of the episodes concerning Laman Griffin and Teresa Carmody suggest: Gerard Hannan argues that the McCourts never stayed with Griffin and that Carmody died long before Frank could have met her.31 As we will see in relation to Constance Briscoe’s Ugly, there may be qualities of the narrative voice itself, including its apparent trustworthiness and consistency, which prompt particular conclusions. Yet the two kinds of apparently opposite accusation made against McCourt’s memoir, the historical and the literary, are related. Both reveal that the text’s critics cannot applaud its hybridity but expect the memoir to conform strictly either to fictional or to factual norms. Angela’s Ashes opens with an apparently self-reflexive observation: It was, of course, a miserable childhood: a happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish-Catholic childhood. (1)

This passage suggests the questioning or subversion of the very genre the text inaugurates, although it constitutes, rather, what turns out to be a statement of intent. It is succeeded by the delineation of a cultural template which is then followed in almost every detail, including the naming of the memoir after the ‘ashes’ of Francis’s mother’s fireside suffering:

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    17 Nothing can compare to the Irish version [of a miserable childhood]: the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. (1)

Roy Foster argues that the fact that the rest of the text simply fulfils its own apparently satirically described premise transforms such apparent self-consciousness into a double bluff.32 However, what this distinctive opening signals most clearly is the construction of the memoir’s narrative voice, which the explicitly retrospective utterance – ‘it was . . . a ­miserable childhood’ – ushers in. After this point, the narration takes place in the present tense and in the voice of a child, enabling the text’s ‘readability’33 as well as constituting its literariness. The gap between adult and child is significant in Angela’s Ashes, consisting of a textual division between Francis, the youthful Irish focaliser, and Frank, the adult American narrator.34 This division is perceptible especially where the adult’s language exceeds the experience of the youthful protagonist, for instance in relation to the appearance of Modernist literary techniques: as well as Joyce’s, McCourt claims the influence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.35 The use of American English – Frank observes that a Redemptorist sermon is one which ‘saves millions of Chinese and other heathens from winding up in hell with the Protestants’ (163, emphasis added) – itself implies, as Foster puts it, that ‘Ireland and the writer’s youth are both lost demesnes’.36 At times, the shifts between youthful focaliser and adult narrator take place abruptly in order to realise both the pathos of misunderstanding and the sophistication of judgement. For instance, while still in New York, the narrator describes a visit to his father’s workplace in a child’s stylised discourse shot through with the worldly perceptions of an adult: We come to a big gate where there’s a man standing in a box with windows all around. Mam talks to the man. She wants to know if she can go inside to where the men are paid and maybe they’d give her some of Dad’s wages so he wouldn’t spend it in the bars. The man shakes his head. I’m sorry, lady, but if we did that we’d have half the wives in Brooklyn storming the place. (19)

The child’s inability to name the factory buildings, relying instead on impressionistic description – ‘a big gate’, ‘a box with windows all around’ – is followed by a contrastingly knowing representation of the significance of this scene, which is to convey Malachy McCourt senior’s drinking and his wife’s failure to prevent it. This is a dynamic crucial to the memoir’s representation of misery. The ‘voicing’ of Angela McCourt takes place in a free indirect style, so that the child’s voice is mingled with

18    Textual Deceptions hers: in this rendering, Malachy is ‘Dad’, not ‘my husband’. However, it is the adult narrator who orchestrates the overall effect, as revealed by the free direct version of the factory guard’s speech. This aims for comic as well as emotive effect in its worldly refusal of Angela’s request: ‘we’d have half the wives in Brooklyn storming the place’. Such a sudden shift from a child’s subjectivity to an adult, detached perspective could be seen as an emulation of Joycean literary technique, that of a narratorial ‘anatomist’ observing characters and events from a distance. The distance is temporal as well as aesthetic, since the narrator describes events in literary terms which imply a kind of learning not represented during the era of Francis’s Limerick boyhood.37 However, such homage to the ‘scientific modernity’38 of Joyce’s novels has a different effect in a nonfiction work. The terms of the autobiographical contract mean that the memoir’s narrator must be identified with the grown-up protagonist, so that detachment takes on the aura of personal coldness. In a scene set in a classroom in Ireland, we learn that Francis’s fellow pupil Fintan Slattery is the only one who can answer correctly the irascible teacher’s question about who stood at the foot of the cross at the Crucifixion. Yet is not the teacher’s unsympathetic behaviour that is conveyed, but that of the narrator: Of course Fintan knows who stood at the foot of the cross. Why wouldn’t he? He’s always running off to Mass with his mother, who’s known for her holiness. She’s so holy her husband ran off to Canada to cut down trees, glad to be gone and never heard from again. (173)

As in the scene at the factory gate, a sudden shift takes place here from a child’s to an adult’s perspective, conveyed in a cynically comic pun: ‘running’ to Mass will drive a man to ‘run’ away from his wife. Although such a perspective could be ascribed to a widely held social viewpoint, with its typical utterances – ‘She’s so holy her husband ran off to Canada’ – ventriloquised by the narrator, it does not seem that Frank is exposing the injustice of such judgement,39 but relying on it for black comedy. The crossover of the popular and the stylised that such techniques embody is apparent throughout Angela’s Ashes. It is in part the source of its divided reception, since even the text’s ‘imaginative’ embellishments40 can be seen to arise equally from the impulse to make the text literary and to make it accessible. The construction throughout of the ‘voicing’41 of characters takes place, as we have seen in relation to Angela McCourt’s dialogue with the factory guard, by means of abandoning the use of inverted commas for quoted speech, signalling both

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    19

the approximations of Frank’s memory and his debt to Joyce’s similar avoidance. Such awareness of reconstruction is at its clearest in Frank’s representation of his own conception, which took place up against a wall on the night his parents first met. While the elaborate rendition of this episode serves the development of McCourt’s comic voice and testifies to the story’s oral origins,42 it also furthers the cause of misery, in setting the scene once more for the extreme ‘fated haplessness’ on which the memoir depends: Malachy had just been released from prison when Angela met him at a party, and the event forced them into an ill-advised shotgun marriage. While the impossible nature of Frank’s account of his conception and birth is quite clear,43 the sense that it imparts of constructedness and of an equally apparent indebtedness to literary forebears affects other episodes too. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy opens with an account of its narrator’s conception, while a scene in which Malachy McCourt, Frank’s father, introduces the myth of Cuchulain to his son consists of a blend of reconstruction with homage to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: My father is in the kitchen sipping tea from his big white enamel mug. He lifts me to his lap. Dad, will you tell me the story about Coo Coo? Cuchulain. Say it after me. Coo-hoo-lin. I’ll tell you the story when you say the name right. Coo-hoo-lin. (13)

This scene is reliant on the opening of Joyce’s novel, not least in its reproducing the scenario of the storytelling father in the company of his infant son: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . . His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.44

Such clear repetition in Angela’s Ashes of the details and narrative voice from A Portrait reveals McCourt’s indebtedness to Joyce’s novel, which could equally be described as representing a ‘miserable Irish-Catholic childhood’. It also establishes an implied biographical parallel, since Frank’s memoir, like Joyce’s novel, concludes with its protagonist’s exile and its author’s artistic fame. Yet McCourt’s homage blurs generic boundaries and narrative mode. The voices in Joyce’s novel are thoroughly blended, such that the apparently narratorial ‘Once upon a time’ turns out to be a free indirect rendition of the father’s address to his son. By contrast, McCourt’s declaration of self-reflexivity in his citation of

20    Textual Deceptions the ‘miserable’ Irish childhood is univocally narratorial, and dialogue between father and son is represented by the different means of free direct discourse. The third-person construction of character in Joyce’s novel – ‘His father told him that story’ – is replaced in Angela’s Ashes by the first-person address of memoir. The father’s use in A Portrait of a childlike word, ‘moocow’, becomes its close homonym ‘coo-coo’ in Angela’s Ashes, this time conveying the child’s rendition of the Irish folk hero ‘Cuchulain’, in part as a pretext to reveal the name’s pronunciation to the (perhaps American) reader. Thus what looks like literary borrowing, and the substitution of research for recall, described by Foster as ‘an eerie sense that this “memoir” has been recalled through the prism of subsequent reading’,45 masks a generic reworking. Other instances more clearly support Foster’s unease, including a version of A Portrait’s hell sermon given in Angela’s Ashes by a Redemptorist priest (340); a female moneylender against whom the young Frank rebels in an episode that appears to owe a debt to Dickens and Dostoevsky;46 and Mrs McCourt’s meeting with a tubercular old man who was once her beau, in a reprise of Gretta’s regret for her dead lover Michael Furey in Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’. There is even a moment reminiscent of an episode from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Death on Credit, in which the protagonist’s mother ‘was the first to vomit across the deck’ on board ship in the English Channel, and ‘At every wave we caught a shower with whole meals in it.’47 In Angela’s Ashes, we learn that on the ship leaving America, Mrs McCourt ‘leaned over the side and vomited and the wind from the Atlantic blew it all over us and other happy people admiring the view’ (43). Just as Joyce’s Modernist dialogism takes the form of dialogue in Angela’s Ashes, so Céline’s abject energy and horrified fascination with the maternal, in a fictional scene of sickness lasting several pages in Death on Credit, is reduced to comic bathos in its memoir version. Like other writers whose works appear in the present study, McCourt perhaps considered himself a novelist manqué. His comments on his writing practice, including the observation that, ‘In a memoir is an impression of your life, and that gives you a certain amount of leeway’, suggest that McCourt wished to see the genres of fiction and memoir as closely allied, yet that the former eluded him. Angela’s Ashes was followed by a sequel, ’Tis (1999), focusing on Frank’s life in the USA, which was itself criticised for the scant reference to the author’s decadelong second marriage.48 The likely reasons for such an omission cast light back on some of the exaggerations of Angela’s Ashes, emphasising the fact that they too arise from the author’s reasoned choices as much as inadvertent or malicious inaccuracy. McCourt’s claims in the

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    21

early 2000s to be writing a novel were followed instead by the appearance of another memoir, Teacher Man, about thirty years’ work in American high schools, while the novel he said he was working on in a 2007 interview was described in terms fitting to a memoir as ‘still about experiences I’ve had’, and was never published.49 The default position of novelising non-fiction is what both underlies the success of Angela’s Ashes, and has provoked the surrounding controversy.

Kathy O’Beirne’s Don’t Ever Tell Kathy O’Beirne’s memoir was first published in 2005 as Kathy’s Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, and released under the less specific title of Don’t Ever Tell in Britain a year later.50 O’Beirne’s memoir appears to have less of a sociological or historical basis than Angela’s Ashes in its focus on hidden individual misery. It relates the extreme childhood suffering undergone by young Kathy, first at home at the hands of her violent father, who regularly beat her, forced her and her siblings to stand up in the unheated corridor all night, denied her food and made her sleep outside in a shed. The refrain of the title is first heard in the threats of two local boys who raped the child at the age of five and swore her to secrecy (31). Because of her ‘violent’ behaviour in reaction to these events (33), Kathy was sent to a reformatory school at the age of eight, and thence to a Magadalene Laundry between the ages of twelve and fourteen. She was treated in a harsh and unloving manner by the nuns in this ‘workhouse’ (156), raped on the eve of her First Communion by a priest, who also cautioned her not to tell what had happened (225), while another incident of rape, this time perpetrated by a lay visitor to the Laundry, resulted in the birth of a child, Annie, when Kathy was fourteen. Annie was taken away from Kathy at the age of three months, and died when she was ten. When Kathy complained to the nuns about the sexual abuse, their response was to send her to a psychiatric hospital where she was used as an experimental subject. In short, as the adult Kathy puts it, her happy memories are ‘few or none’, and her childhood was ‘one long scream of suffering’ which has ‘haunted’ her whole adult life (20). However, O’Beirne has been accused of inventing this elaborate narrative of domestic and institutional abuse. The details of her story have been contested by seven of her eight siblings, journalists and the religious orders concerned. The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity51 claim that O’Beirne was never an inmate in either of the Laundries she ­mentions, and that, if she was twelve as she asserts, she would have been five years

22    Textual Deceptions too young to be admitted. In attempting to account for what they argue are her inventions about their father, O’Beirne’s family point to their sister’s history of mental illness, as well as her ability to be a ‘convincing’ storyteller,52 while the journalist Hermann Kelly ascribes to her mercenary motives. Not only does he cite the potential for the subject of a child’s mistreatment in a Magdalene Laundry to constitute a bestselling memoir,53 but he even implies that O’Beirne’s story might have been inspired by the ‘generous’ compensation offered to children who were abused in residential institutions in Ireland.54 O’Beirne’s counter-arguments include the assertion that institutional record-keeping has often been unreliable, and that her own family’s refutations are motivated by money: they only came forward to contest her story after a court case over her late parents’ house was resolved in her favour.55 However, the case subsequently dissolved on appeal, while interest in acquiring film rights, and plans to publish a sequel to Don’t Ever Tell, to be called Always Dancing, have been cancelled.56 So insistent was O’Beirne that her story was true that she agreed to undergo an fMRI-based lie-detector test, which uses neuroimaging to reveal deception ‘on the basis of brain activity’.57 An episode of the three-part 2007 Channel Four documentary Lie Lab, devoted to testing individuals’ veracity using this technique, featured O’Beirne and her siblings. Although O’Beirne did not in the end take the test, her brother Oliver’s results in relation to the brain-scan and response times were said to be consistent with his version of events.58 O’Beirne’s apparent willingness yet eventual failure to undertake the test add extra contradictory evidence to her case, not least since she is quoted elsewhere as claiming that she had been so tested.59 Although it might seem that fear of being exposed in public as telling lies prevented O’Beirne from taking the lie-detector test, the neurobiological assumptions behind it seem to be at odds with the details of her case. Neuroimaging of this kind relies upon the idea that ‘the brain must exert extra effort when telling a lie’,60 and that the extra blood required to do so causes such areas to light up in scans. Yet the possibility of self-delusion or denial is hard to screen out,61 and the long-drawn-out circumstances of writing and publishing a memoir seem to demand a conviction that would be hard to demolish on the spot in a test. Literary and memorious conviction and veracity might not be most effectively tested in this way. Thus the reader has to judge between rival kinds of circumstantial and extra-textual evidence in order to conclude whether Don’t Ever Tell is, in the phrase of Constance Briscoe’s legal counsel, ‘more likely than not’ to be true.62 Such evidence includes an absence of documentation, in relation to O’Beirne’s entrance into the Magdalene Laundry, and also to

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    23

the birth and death of her daughter. Other, more equivocal kinds of evidence, including apparently happy family photographs and an absence of scars or other bodily signs of childhood injuries, are put forward by Kelly.63 Indeed, it may appear that Kathy’s actual experiences do form the basis of what she recounts in her memoir. She did reside in various religious and state institutions as a child and young woman, although the details of timing and circumstance are different from those outlined in the memoir, and periods of residence much briefer. As an eleven-yearold, O’Beirne spent six weeks at St Anne’s Children’s Home, although her school records show no other prolonged absence;64 in later life, she was an inmate at St Loman’s Psychiatric Hospital, was incarcerated in Mountjoy Prison for petty theft and lived at Sherrard House in Dublin, a shelter for homeless women. While the period in prison is included in Don’t Ever Tell, and described by Kathy as ‘one of the happiest periods of my childhood’ (188), the other experiences are amplified and subsumed into the invented Magdalene Laundry narrative, referred to explicitly in the subtitle for the Irish and North American editions of the memoir.65 Incarceration in such a Laundry is significant for O’Beirne’s memoir since it replaces the collection of short periods of time spent in varied institutions with a single identifiable experience communally acknowledged to have been traumatic. After the last such Laundry in Ireland closed in 1996, redress was made available to those women who could establish that they had been mistreated there.66 The sources of O’Beirne’s elaborations seem to be a mixture of details of other women’s lives, particularly those she encountered in Sherrard House, and the film The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, Frances Higson, UK/Ireland 2002).67 It is thus tempting to read particular moments in Don’t Ever Tell as partially accurate elements of the narrator’s past experience, which are made to signify something even more horrible when transplanted into their new, historically ratified setting. This is the case of O’Beirne’s sixweek residence in St Anne’s Children’s Home, which has been inflated into a four-year period of abuse spent in that institution,68 and is perhaps also true of the psychiatrist’s verdict on the eight-year-old Kathy as ‘a child with a troublesome mind’ (45), one that relies on the adjective being used in the context of the memoir to mean ‘causing problems’ rather than ‘causing worry’. Although the aspirations of Don’t Ever Tell are less apparently literary than those of Angela’s Ashes, it too constructs a child’s voice as a way of conveying the pathos of young Kathy’s experiences, particularly so where her childish misunderstandings are most obvious, in relation to the hypocrisies of the ‘grand narratives’ of religion and medicine. On the death of the family’s pet dog, Kathy

24    Textual Deceptions recalls her teachers telling their pupils that ‘if we were good, we would go to heaven . . . That was where Teddy must have gone, to heaven’ (39). When taken for a psychiatric assessment, Kathy relates how ‘wires’ were attached to her head and the ‘doctor pulled a switch, and funny squiggles came out of a machine’, representing her ‘brainwaves’ (45). In both cases, the child’s circumstances of being misunderstood, and her own misunderstanding, are foregrounded, in elicitations of sympathy that make readerly suspicion even less likely. As in the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose real-life experiences of abandonment and unhappy fostering can be discerned in the invented setting of a Holocaust childhood in his Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948, Don’t Ever Tell gives the impression of a ‘troubled’69 interiority fitted into a particular historical framework. While details of dates and locations cannot be supplied in Fragments ostensibly because of the child’s extreme youth, in Don’t Ever Tell a process of legal investigation is cited as the reason for an equivalent lack of specificity (18). Like Fragments, O’Beirne’s memoir appears in part to be the record of a psychological process or treatment, as the narrator describes: ‘I had great difficulty in recalling some of the worst experiences because for most of my life I had repressed the memories’ (20), in particular the rape that took place on the day of her First Communion: ‘The memory had come back to me after years when I had hidden it away’ (227). In the wake of the accusations of invention, such comments sound like a kind of Nachträglichkeit that involves not the access of adult understanding, but a misrecognition or falsification of what took place in the past.70 Wilkomirski uses the terminology of isolated, frozen pictures in claiming that traumatised recall impedes its own narration: The first pictures surface one by one, like upbeats, flashes of light, with no discernible connection, but sharp and clear. Just pictures, almost no thoughts attached.71

Such an assertion about the difficulty of ‘telling’ memories which are nonetheless quite clear recurs in Kathy’s description: the memories of my childhood come in flashes and images that are not always connected and which often make my flesh creep and emotions spill over during the act of trying to express them. (21)

Yet, just as Fragments is less disjointed than its title suggests, and despite Kathy’s assertion of a lack of connection between episodes, Don’t Ever Tell is chronologically and coherently related. In another crossover of psychic with narrative formations, Kathy reveals an almost literal reli-

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    25

ance on the psychological notion of an ‘inner child’,72 that is, the continued existence of her youthful self. She occasionally refers to this ‘little girl inside me’ in the third person, as we see in the conclusion to the memoir’s prologue: ‘This book is that little girl’s story’ (22). As well as offering a way to approach painful memories, such a discourse appears to construct a fictional character. Paradoxically, the more the suffering child is healed, the more fictive she sounds, as this epigraph to one of the memoir’s later chapters suggests: I think of her as another person And I try to tell myself that everything happened Happened to her not me. (217)

Indeed, the similarity of Don’t Ever Tell and Fragments is furthered by an implicit likeness drawn by O’Beirne between the trauma of a Holocaust experience and that of an abusive religious institution. While the Holocaust-related references might seem particularly ironic in view of the possibly invented nature of Don’t Ever Tell, their presence conveys an attempt to establish a public discourse about the posttraumatic experience of recalling incarceration in Irish industrial schools and the Laundries.73 Some of these invocations are overt, for instance Kathy’s references to the laundry as a ‘slave-labour camp’ (68) and to a brutal ‘carer’ who resembles a ‘second Hitler’ (178). However, the most significant is Kathy’s uncredited version of an inscription allegedly found during the war in a cellar in Cologne where Jews had been hiding, one which concludes her memoir: I believe in the sun, when it doesn’t shine. I believe in love even when I can’t feel it. And I believe in God, even when he’s silent. I do BELIEVE and that’s what’s got me through. (298)74

The final line, which is Kathy’s own, adds a more practical note to this wartime response to theodicy, since the ‘belief’ to which she refers relates to her efforts at restitution on her own behalf and that of others.75 Although Don’t Ever Tell does not conclude in the same way as Briscoe’s Ugly, with its look forward to personal and professional success, or Angela’s Ashes, where emigration to the USA constitutes the book’s conclusion,76 O’Beirne’s memoir is a bleak female Bildungsroman in its focus on the specifically gendered trials of young Kathy. She emerges at the memoir’s end as someone battling for justice, so it may seem that even Kathy’s transcendence of her past actually remains wedded to it. Yet O’Beirne’s present-day activities are creations

26    Textual Deceptions of, rather than reactions to, the aftermath of her childhood experience. She resembles Wilkomirski once more in this respect and in her memoir’s embodiment of a cultural rather than a personal history.

Constance Briscoe’s Ugly Constance Briscoe’s Ugly relates the violent and neglectful behaviour of her mother, and her mother’s boyfriend Eastman, towards her until she went to university – after a year’s deferral, since her mother refused to sign her grant application. Constance’s mother Carmen treated all of her eight children badly, but Constance was singled out for particular cruelty, in part because of her habit of bed-wetting. The reliance of Ugly on the memoir’s hybrid structure of documentary and literary reconstruction is clear from the outset. It opens with one of the text’s most shocking events, its narrator’s attempted suicide by drinking bleach at the age of fourteen, and her mother’s callous response to it. Apart from this opening scene, which functions to immerse the reader in the child’s nightmarish world, it is narrated in chronological order, beginning in 1962 when Constance was five. Even this ordering, however, turns out to be impressionistic, as we learn from the accompanying material in the lawsuit to which Briscoe was subject when Carmen sued her daughter and the publisher for defamation of character. Alongside its reconstructions of such elements as chronology, the text of Ugly consists of a collection of documents. These are the memoir itself and the material it quotes, such as letters and details of names and locations, as well as its paratexts, which include a prologue, a list of charitable organisations, and, most unusually, the trial transcript, which serves both to authenticate and to reflect back on the narrative itself. We learn that Briscoe’s mother claimed that the narrative’s central moments of ‘misery’ were not just exaggerated but invented. These included incidents in which she was said to have beaten her daughter for wetting her bed, and to have cut her face by flying a toy aeroplane at her, about which we read twice: in the memoir itself, and in the trial transcript. While the book’s events do not have to be proved to be ‘true beyond reasonable doubt’ at trial, since libel is a civil and not a criminal offence, all are ultimately judged by the jury to be, in the phrase of Briscoe’s lawyer, ‘more likely than not’ according to the ‘balance of probabilities’ (319). As Bakhtin argues of the trial of Socrates, a legal verdict ‘is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses’.77 Both the notion of a truth ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, and the exercise of readerly judgement, are important factors not only for misery memoirs, but for the other

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    27

texts that will appear in this study. Incontrovertible proof of factual status may indeed be an impossible aspiration, and readers may find themselves instead adjudicating between different critical ‘voices’. While judgements that conclude that, for instance, Misha Defonseca’s testimony Surviving with Wolves is imaginary may be wholly persuasive, ‘judgement is suspended’ over other examples, such as Kathy O’Beirne’s Don’t Ever Tell, and Mark Kurzem’s The Mascot, the account of his father Alex’s rediscovery of his Jewish roots and his survival in wartime Belarus as the eponymous ‘mascot’ of a German battalion.78 At Briscoe’s trial, what emerges in the jury’s conclusion is not an instance of monologic determinism, but a verdict of likelihood derived from the dialogic interaction of varied examples of documentary and witness evidence, particularly moments where unreliable testifiers betrayed their own untruths. Briscoe’s sister Patsy, testifying in support of her mother’s legal action, insists that the young Constance shared a bedroom with her sisters, in order to claim that they were on the spot to observe that no abuse by their mother took place. Yet not only did Patsy argue in a newspaper interview, in a different effort to deny the abuse, that Constance having her own room was evidence of her mother’s care for the child’s ‘privacy’, but during the trial she accidentally let slip references to her sister sleeping in a room by herself (417–18). While Briscoe’s own evidence-in-chief at trial repeats and reformulates the events of which we have already read in her memoir, her mother’s depositions rely upon negation and denial, contradicting our reading and constituting their own unlikelihoods. These include Carmen’s insistence that social services’ records of her children’s suffering must have been forged, probably by Constance, and that a photograph of the child’s face, scarred by her mother’s actions, is not of her daughter (349, 267). As Briscoe’s lawyer Andrew Caldecott puts it, the jury, and implicitly also the reader, must reach a verdict by a combination of ‘common sense’, an assessment of the reliability of the witnesses, and documentary evidence (416). Not only does this reproduce elements of the reading experience, but it follows more general descriptions of how individuals come to trust the testimony that they are offered. The demeanour of someone giving information, as well as the characteristics of their testimony such as its coherence and lack of contradiction, are said to be more reliable as a guide to its ‘credibility’ than any doubts raised by the situation itself.79 As in the case of the ‘Ugly trial’, it is not the individual details’ accuracy that is at stake in such instances, but a more ‘fundamental premise’: that of Briscoe’s ‘basic truthfulness’ and her memoir’s believability.80 During Briscoe’s trial, Caldecott argues, invoking a paradox that we will encounter throughout this study, that any errors on Constance’s part

28    Textual Deceptions in relation to chronology or other precise recall serve not to undermine but rather to support the account’s veracity. Perfect recall is described as ‘highly suspicious’ (415). The memoir is structured by means of annual vignettes of cruelty, each titled ironically, such as ‘Christmas Cheer – 1965’, and ‘New Shoes – 1967–8’. The narrator’s caveat about her uncertainty over ‘the order of things’ (5, and quoted by the defence lawyer 319) is made the subject of a legal as well as a narratorial debate. The prosecution case implies that Constance was too young for her recall to be reliable (310), and that since there are instances where the specific years of which she writes are inaccurate and would be better described in terms of likely decades, her credibility is undermined (313–14). However, Caldecott claims that uncertain memory constitutes psychic accuracy, in order to argue for the priority of the events’ emotional significance for the rememberer over the accurate recall of their timing (319). In relation to the representation of direct speech in Ugly, the terms of testimonial convention overlap with those of the trial. Although, as Briscoe puts it, her mother’s insults about her daughter’s appearance are ‘burnt into my memory’ (334), reconstructed speech is a convention that is deployed throughout Ugly. Thus the book’s dialogue need not be subject to ‘a trial of accuracy of every word’ since it is ‘obviously not’, in Caldecott’s phrasing, ‘verbatim accurate’. Rather, the presence of dialogue represents the narrator’s attempts ‘to re-create what she remembers, how she remembers the exchanges’ (318), using a different technique from the free direct discourse of Angela’s Ashes. Thus the hybridity of Ugly is starkly apparent, such that its factual basis is represented by means of literary devices. Although its narrator is not a stylising raconteur like that in Angela’s Ashes, the construction of a child’s perspective exists, like the one in Don’t Ever Tell, to make the reader complicit in deciphering the meaning of events and reducing the distance between the unhappy child and ‘the lawyer [Constance] is now’.81 For example, the decision of Constance’s mother Carmen to adopt a second baby while in hospital being delivered of her own, and pretending to have given birth to twins, is related from the child Constance’s perspective: ‘In the crib were two babies. One was very black in complexion and the other I recognised from the day before. She had a button nose. It was my sister, but now I had two’ (19). The child’s artless view of these events highlights the extremity of Carmen’s behaviour, not least in introducing yet more children into what the adult narrator ironically calls ‘our happy family’ (21). A child’s viewpoint is used on another occasion to defamiliarise the unpleasant conditions of Constance’s life, when she describes her attic bedroom and the elaborate electronic alarm system designed to waken her when she wet the bed:

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    29

‘In really bad weather the rain would pour in; sometimes it would set my alarm off and it would wake me up. So it was not just me who wet the bed – the rain did as well’ (23). The trace here of a child’s effort to comfort herself – ‘it was not just me who wet the bed’ – and the lack of overt comment on the situation themselves emphasise the circumstances of her stress-induced bed-wetting and the extreme measures, including the ‘alarm’ but also her mother’s cruel punishments, meant to prevent it.

Conclusion As these three examples show, the misery memoir is a hybrid genre, its authenticity as well as its emotional effects existing by means of profoundly literary techniques, alongside, or in the service of, a mixture of documentary material and personal recall. Such literariness does not of itself imply invention, but might constitute another facet of the author’s adult life, for instance in McCourt’s case, where we see the effects of the reading he undertook when enlisted in the American army long after he had left the Ireland represented in his memoir. The use of such techniques might equally constitute a means of ordering inchoate childhood memory, or represent either a deliberate selectivity or an ‘appropriation’ of the lives of others. Each of the memoirists mentioned in this chapter has been accused of both remembering too little, to the point of being misleading, and remembering too much, in terms of the reproduction of dialogue, dates and the detail of everyday life. While the meaning for her memoir’s accuracy of Briscoe’s impressionistic chronology was the subject of legal contestation at trial, Hannan accuses McCourt of a similar kind of ‘year confusion’ for what he calls ‘sinister’ reasons (242) and O’Beirne’s timeline of events has been described as a ‘jigsaw’ in which nothing fits together.82 Unease about the content of such memoirs can equally be seen as a flight from hybridity. While Frank Furedi argues that such works speciously imply that ‘the horrendous degradation of children is a normal everyday occurrence’, and thus represent ‘family life as potentially violent and disgusting’,83 it could equally be argued that it is the exceptionalism of the events that these works narrate which makes them both appealing and troubling to read. They represent a wish for the abstract familial ideal implied by its absence, and call upon its recognition and endorsement by the reader, rather than its subversion. The three examples analysed here demonstrate the fact that there is no obvious means of determining whether, or to what extent, a memoir is factual, reconstructed, fictionalised or invented. While a lie-detector

30    Textual Deceptions test undertaken by the author might seem a conclusive method for the determination of a text’s truth-value, the test’s own limitations would in fact make it just one piece of evidence among many. Lawsuits for libel or defamation brought by those who feature in such memoirs equally might seem to offer the possibility of determining textual authenticity, yet court cases may lead to such different conclusions as that in Constance Briscoe’s, where the verdict suggested it was ‘as likely as not’ that her version of the truth, including the reconstruction of dialogue and chronology, was correct; or that in the case of Augusten Burroughs, which more equivocally acknowledged the existence of a variety of versions of the events of the past without discrediting his. Perhaps surprisingly, it is a comparison of texts, as in the case of Frank McCourt’s memoir, or the more obvious borrowing from a variety of fictional sources in the case of Judith Kelly’s Rock Me Gently, about a childhood spent in a convent orphanage that was anything but gentle,84 which yields the most convincing results. As we will see throughout the present study, the clear presence of intertextuality in memoirs and other literary works may itself lead to different deductions, ranging from detecting the presence of literary aspiration, signalled by recall through the prism of later reading, to the deceptive substitution of research, and the adoption of others’ memories, for experience. While it may not be possible to determine definitively which of these kinds of intertextual borrowing applies in a particular case, the use of a comparative textual method can yield a ‘likely’ verdict that is based on documentary evidence, of a literary rather than a biographical or historical kind.

Notes  1. Frank Furedi, ‘An Emotional Striptease’, Spiked 7 May 2007, http:// www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/3353#.UuupwPYvFLc, accessed 31 January 2014.   2. Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes, London: Harper Perennial, 2005 [1996]; Kathy O’Beirne, with Michael Sheridan, Don’t Ever Tell, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2006 [2005]; Constance Briscoe, Ugly, London: Hodder and Stoughton, rev. edn including details of the trial, 2009 [2006]. All page references in the text.  3. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, ed. Louis A. Wagner, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009 [1928], pp. 29–31.  4. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Abacus, 2003 [1988], p.  88; Gerard Hannan, From Bards to Blackguards: Limerick and the Art of Storytelling, Limerick: Treaty Stone, 2001, p. 218.

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    31  5. Sam Leith, ‘Misery Memoirs Like Ugly by Constance Briscoe Make Pornography of Personal Pain’, Daily Telegraph, 19 November 2008.  6. Ibid.  7. See for instance Susanna Egan’s discussion of the former slave Olaudah Equiano’s invention of an African past for himself, and thus experience of the Middle Passage, in his 1789 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, Written by Himself (in Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011, p. 65).   8. Leith, ‘Misery Memoirs Like Constance Briscoe’s Ugly’.   9. Stevi Jackson, ‘Straight Talking’, in Deborah Cameron and Joan Scanlon, eds, The Trouble and Strife Reader, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, p. 119. 10. See Dominick LaCapra on the impossibility of representing trauma by conventional narrative means, in relation to Holocaust-related experience, in his History and Memory After Auschwitz, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 20. 11. Philippe Lejeune, ‘The Autobiographical Contract’, in Tzvetan Todorov, ed., French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, trans. R. Carter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 202. 12. Furedi, ‘Emotional Striptease’; Ben Yagoda, quoted in Jennifer Schuesser, ‘Frank McCourt and the American Memoir’, New York Times, 25 July 2009, on Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989; others argue that Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called ‘It’, London: Orion, 2004 [1995], is the first such memoir. 13. Claire Lynch, Irish Autobiography, Bern: Peter Lang, 2011, p. 26. 14. Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History, New York: Riverhead Books, 2009, p. 17. 15. Tim Allen, ‘Feel the Pain’, Observer, 29 January 2006. 16. Pelzer, A Child Called ‘It’; Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors: A Memoir, New York: St Martin’s Press, 2002. 17. Buzz Bissinger, ‘Ruthless with Scissors’, Vanity Fair, January 2007. 18. Ian Sansom, ‘She is Walking Through the Kitchen . . .’, Guardian, 14 February 2003. 19. For instance, the website ‘Writer’s Digest’ includes a ‘Writer’s Guide to Defamation and Invasion of Privacy’, citing Burroughs’ author’s note as the kind of practice to adopt in order to pre-empt a lawsuit that might result from entering into such ‘disputed territory’: http://www.writersdigest.com/ writing-articles/by-writing-goal/get-published-sell-my-work/defamationand-invasion, accessed 2 January 2014. 20. ‘Augusten Burroughs and the Art of Memoir’, reported on CBS News, 27 January 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/augusten-burroughs-andthe-art-of-memoir, accessed 31 January 2014. 21. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 17; Alyson Miller, ‘The Pornography of Trauma: Faking Identity in “Misery Memoirs” ’, Literature in North Queensland, 39, 2013, http:// www.linq.org.au/past-issues/volume-39–life-writing-performing-lives/thepornography-of-trauma-faking-identity-in-misery-memoirs, accessed 31 January 2014.

32    Textual Deceptions 22. ‘Frank McCourt’, obituary, Daily Telegraph, 20 July 2009; Robert Schmuhl, ‘Angela’s Ashes Smouldering Still in Limerick’, Boston Globe, 5 March 2000. 23. George O’Brien, ‘The Last Word: Reflections on Angela’s Ashes’, in Charles Fanning, ed., New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. But see a letter from Cressida Leyshon, New Yorker, 19 July 2009, who edited extracts of the memoir for publication in a journal and recalls the efforts of fact-checkers to track down ‘the Limerick dead’. 24. Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others, London: Verso, 2003, p.  231; Roy Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 169; ‘Frank McCourt’, obituary. 25. Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, ‘I Knew Angela, Did Frank McCourt?’, Commonweal, 124 (19) 1997, pp. 7–8; Hannan, From Bards to Blackguards, p. 268. 26. Richard Harris, who initially supported financially the New York staging of Malachy and Frank McCourt’s show Two Blaguards, is quoted as saying, ‘He made up his childhood’, in John McEntee, ‘Bitter Feud Between Fellow Limerick Men Over the Destiny of Angela’s Ashes’, Irish Independent, 25 December 2011. 27. ‘Frank McCourt’, obituary. 28. See Hannan, From Bards to Blackguards, on Limerick, p. 7; transgressions, p. 202; the church, p. 177; St Vincent de Paul, pp. 247–8. 29. Quoted in Tom Socca, ‘Coattail Lit: How Familiarity Breeds Nonfiction’, Boston Phoenix, 1 October 1998. 30. Gerard Hannan, ’Tis in Me Ass, Limerick: Treaty Stone, 1999, and Kevin Myers, ‘Cyril’s Cinders’, in From the Irish Times Column ‘An Irishman’s Diary’, Dublin: Fourcourts, 2000, pp. 18–19. 31. Hannan, From Bards to Blackguards, p. 229. 32. Foster, The Irish Story, p. 167. 33. O’Brien, ‘The Last Word’, p. 249. 34. See Nuala O’Faolain, quoted in O’Brien, ‘The Last Word’, p. 242. 35. McCourt, ‘About the Author’, appendix to Angela’s Ashes, p. 13. 36. Foster, The Irish Story, p. 164. 37. As McCourt describes, the works of Joyce on which he draws to represent his Irish schooldays were not available in such a ‘Victorian’ ambience, and he only encountered them as an adult in the US army library when serving in the Korean War (‘About the Author’, pp. 11–12). 38. Andrew Gibson, James Joyce, London: Reaktion, 2006, p. 97. 39. An example of the kind of free indirect rendering of a social utterance that is implicitly held up for a more compassionate censure is the following, from Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘The Garden Party’, where the dwellings of the working-class neighbours of the well-to-do Sheridans are described: ‘the little cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house. A broad road ran between. True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all’ (Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. John Middleton Murry, London: Constable, 1948, p. 254).

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    33 40. O’Brien, ‘The Last Word’, p. 237. 41. Ibid., p. 240. 42. McCourt told stories about his Irish childhood in the New York schools where he taught for thirty years, in order to entertain his pupils (‘About the Author’, postscript to Angela’s Ashes, p. 2). In the 1980s he joined his brother Malachy for a stand-up version of their childhood experiences in the former’s two-man show, now the play A Couple of Blaguards, and on Irish radio in New York (‘Frank McCourt’, obituary). 43. See for instance Susan Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 161. Thanks to Najah Al Harby for discussions related to this point. 44. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [1916], p. 3. 45. Foster, The Irish Story, p. 169. 46. Ibid., p. 170. 47. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on Credit, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: John Calder, 1989 [1936], p. 124. 48. Frank McCourt, ’Tis: A Memoir, London: Harper Perennial 1999; ‘Frank McCourt’, obituary; see also Eric Lomax, The Railway Man, London: Jonathan Cape, 1995, a memoir of the author’s experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp which omitted almost any mention of his long first marriage and his daughter: see Joanna Moorhead, ‘The Railway Man’s Forgotten Family’, Guardian, 28 December 2013. 49. Frank McCourt, Teacher Man, London: Harper Perennial, 2005; and Stephanie Merritt, ‘A Heartwarming Tale Rises from the Ashes’, Observer, 11 November 2007. The year after its publication, Angela’s Ashes was awarded the South African ‘Exclusive Books Boeke Prize’, which has otherwise been awarded for novels. 50. Kathy O’Beirne, Kathy’s Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries, with Michael Sheridan, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2005. 51. Although the order and institutions, at High Park and Sean McDermott St, in Dublin, are not named in Don’t Ever Tell, O’Beirne identified them in an interview (see Natalie Clarke, ‘Fiction Writer? Kathy O’Beirne’, Daily Mail, 23 September 2006). 52. Quoted in Clarke, ‘Fiction Writer?’ 53. Over 350,000 copies were sold, making O’Beirne’s memoir the bestselling non-fiction book by an Irish author of all time: see Hermann Kelly, Kathy’s Real Story: A Culture of False Allegations Exposed, Dunleer: Prefect Press, 2007, p. 10. 54. Kelly, Kathy’s Real Story, p. 209. 55. Esther Addley, ‘Author Accused of Literary Fraud Says: “I Am Not a Liar. And I Am Not Running Any More”  ’, Guardian, 23 September 2006. 56. Dearbhail Macdonald, ‘Final Chapter as Father’s Will Honoured’, Irish Independent, 20 February 2008; Clarke, ‘Fiction Writer?’; Colin Coyle, ‘Publisher Dumps Sequel to Magdalene Story: Bestselling Author Kathy O’Beirne Forced to Shelve Plans for Second Book’, Sunday Times, 26 July 2009. 57. Sean A. Spence and Catherine J. Kaylor-Hughes, ‘Looking for Truth and

34    Textual Deceptions Finding Lies: The Prospects for a Nascent Neuroimaging of Deception’, Neurocase, 14 (1) 2008, pp. 68–81: 79. 58. Broadcast 16 June 2007. See Sean Spence, quoted in Kelly, Kathy’s Real Story, p. 90. 59. See Coyle, ‘Publisher Dumps Sequel’; Petrina Vousden, ‘Lie Detector Test Raises Suspicions of O’Beirne’s Story of Paternal Abuse’, Daily Mail, 19 June 2007; Kelly, Kathy’s Real Story, pp. 90–1. 60. Gary Stix, ‘Can fMRI Really Tell If You’re Lying?’, Scientific American, 28 July 2007. See also Malcolm Gladwell’s account of Kim Philby giving away the truth of his acts of spying in fleeting facial movements, while denying it aloud: a forensic methodology that seems equally unlikely to determine definitively the truth of a complex memoir (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, London: Penguin, 2005, pp. 211–13). 61. Sean A. Spence, Catherine J. Kaylor-Hughes, Martin L. Brook, Sudheer T. Lankappa and Iain D. Wilkinson, ‘ “Munchausen’s by Proxy” or a “Miscarriage of Justice”? An Initial Application of Functional Neuroimaging to the Question of Guilt versus Innocence’, European Psychiatry, 23 (4) 2008, pp. 309–14: 313. 62. Briscoe, Ugly, p. 319. 63. Kelly, Kathy’s Real Story, pp.  40, 45. The Irish edition of O’Beirne’s memoir, Kathy’s Story, includes a series of family and historical photographs, such as those of unidentified Laundries, which support O’Beirne’s story by virtue of the narrative implied by, respectively, their captions and their very presence. For instance, a photograph of a (smiling) young Kathy with short hair is described thus: ‘Aged ten. I was home from the children’s psychiatric unit for the weekend. The nurses had recently cut all my hair off.’ As in the case of Monique Defonseca’s childhood photographs in Chapter 6, contingency is turned into the necessity of historical calamity. 64. Kelly, Kathy’s Real Story, p. 35. 65. The American edition is titled Kathy’s Story: The True Story of a Childhood Hell Inside Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, Vancouver: Greystone, 2006. 66. See James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007; and campaigns such as that of the ‘Justice for Magdalenes’, http:// www.magdalenelaundries.com, accessed 6 January 2014. 67. Kelly also cites The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, an invented account of life in a convent from 1836; Kathy’s Real Story, p. 20. 68. The school is anonymous in O’Beirne’s memoir but named in an interview, quoted in ‘Hunger Strike for Kath’, News of the World, 10 July 2005. 69. The adjective is used about O’Beirne’s childhood by her sister Mary; she is quoted thus for instance in Coyle, ‘Publisher Dumps Sequel’. 70. For Sigmund Freud’s use of the term, see his ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis [The Wolf-Man]’, in vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth, 1953 [1918], pp. 1–124. 71. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, London: Picador, 1996, p. 5. 72. See for instance John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, New York: Bantam, 1992.

Fiction and Memory in Misery Memoirs    35 73. The necessarily traumatic nature of such a discourse is, however, contested by Florence Horsman Hogan’s campaign, which, like Kelly’s Kathy’s True Story, alleges that false accusations against the clergy are widespread; see Rachel Andrews, ‘Formation of “Let Our Voices Emerge” (L.O.V.E.)’, Sunday Tribune, 28 September 2003. 74. The original is itself likely to be fictive, since it is quoted in Zvi Kolitz’s novella Yosl Rakover Talks to God, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, London: Jonathan Cape, 1999 [1946], a fiction in the form of a testimony found in the Warsaw Ghetto. The novella was first published in translation without any statement of Kolitz’s authorship, to readers’ generic confusion. Fascinatingly, Marjo Korpel and Johannes de Moor argue that the phrase’s roots might lie in an Irish saying (The Silent God, Leiden: Brill, 2011, p.  279), suggesting that Kathy has, perhaps accidentally, followed an already established instance of ‘multidirectional memory’ (the phrase is Michael Rothberg’s, from his Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 75. O’Beirne’s critic Hermann Kelly adopts a discourse of religious hatred to opposite effect, implying that the victims of allegedly false allegations, which he describes as ‘blood libels’ (Kathy’s Real Story, p. 175), have been subject to an ‘anti-Catholic’ discrimination analogous to antisemitism (ibid., p. 240). 76. Schmuhl claims that ‘McCourt’s memoir justifies emigration’, but other critics argue that the text concludes ambivalently about its narrator’s return to the USA: see James S. Rogers,  ‘ “’Tis”, Meaning Maybe: The Uncertain Last Words of Angela’s Ashes’, Études irlandaises, 36 (2) 2011, pp. 129–40. 77. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 81. 78. Alex Kurzem’s claim to keep receiving German reparations payments was upheld, in the face of suspicions raised by such historians as Efraim Zuroff that he was not a Jewish Holocaust survivor, after his status was investigated by ‘an independent ombudsman’: see Keith Moor, ‘Compensation Claim Upheld as Holocaust Story Believed’, Herald-Sun, 25 July 2013. The account appears in Mark Kurzem, The Mascot: Unravelling the Mystery of my Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood, London: Viking, 2007. 79. Paul Faulkner, ‘On the Rationality of our Response to Testimony’, Synthese, 131 (3) 2002, pp. 353–70: 358. 80. ‘Ugly Author Constance Briscoe Says She Will Never Forgive Her Mother for Trying To Destroy Her’, Scotsman, 4 December 2012. 81. Camilla Culshaw, ‘Review of the Misery Memoir Genre with Specific Reference to Ugly by Constance Briscoe’, http://camillajodie.wordpress. com / 2012 / 05 / 18 / review - of - the - misery - memoir - genre - with - specific - referen ce-to-ugly-by-constance-briscoe, accessed 2 January 2014. 82. Hannan, From Bards to Blackguards, p.  242; Kelly, Kathy’s Real Story, p. 28. 83. Furedi, ‘Emotional Striptease’. 84. Judith Kelly, Rock Me Gently: A Memoir of a Convent Childhood, London: Bloomsbury, 2005, which includes material from Hilary Mantel’s novel

36    Textual Deceptions Fludd, London: Viking, 1989, and Antonia White’s Frost in May, London: Virago, 1978 [1933]. See Sam Leith, ‘Sounds Familiar? When “Memories” Seem to Spring from Other Literary Sources’, Daily Telegraph, 5 August 2005.

Chapter 2

Gender Hoaxing: Rahila Khan, Anthony Godby Johnson and J. T. LeRoy

The three works in this chapter all represent acts of cross-gender identification, or at least inscription, on the part of the author. Anthony Godby Johnson’s memoir A Rock and a Hard Place was published in 1993 as the work of a teenage boy whose parents had allowed the abuse that resulted in his developing AIDS; however, it was, rather, written by an entirely healthy middle-aged woman. The other two examples were published as fiction. Rahila Khan’s short stories about the lives of workingclass Asian girls and white boys were published in 1987 as Down the Road, Worlds Away, ostensibly by a woman born in Coventry whose name suggested that she was of Pakistani Muslim origin; Toby Forward, a white vicar, eventually admitted to being the real author. J. T. LeRoy’s fiction, particularly her 2000 novel Sarah, purported to be based on the life of its author, a gender dysmorphic former male prostitute, but was in fact written by Laura Albert, a musician living in San Francisco with her husband and son. These examples are embodiments of what Michel Foucault has called the ‘author-function’, since in each case the text did indeed point to a ‘figure’ that ‘is outside it and antecedes it’, in his description of the typical authorial function, only to reveal the misleading nature of such an attribution.1 This embodiment took varied forms: although Khan existed only as a name that was abandoned before any proof of her identity was required, Tony Godby Johnson was represented by a photograph and a voice on the telephone, while in the case of LeRoy the authorial persona was literally acted out. Gender deception is integral to the author-function constructed in each of the three cases analysed here, but it invariably acts for another purpose. In Rahila Khan’s case, the implication of an autobiographical basis for those of her stories about Muslim girls was crucial as legitimising the apparently extreme contrast such a viewpoint offered with those about white boys, as part of a plea for cultural tolerance; while the fate of Tony Johnson and J. T. LeRoy,

38    Textual Deceptions as male victims of sexual abuse and, in the latter’s case, as a former sex worker, made their stories unusual and appealing. Yet although it was gender imposture that enabled these effects, it did not provoke the consternation that accompanied the revelation that the other elements of the author’s persona, such as ethnicity and suffering, were invented. This is not only because cross-gender pseudonyms have a longstanding literary history, but also because their deployment to substitute for social advantage is widely accepted. However, in the three cases to be discussed here, such a particular and instrumental use of a cross-gender pseudonym was exceeded, and the distinction between persona and implied author, preserved in such cases as George Eliot’s, was blurred as part of a wholesale biographical falsification. It was to this wider falsification, rather than the gender imposture itself, that readers and critics responded negatively.

Rahila Khan, Down the Road, Worlds Away The first public appearance of Rahila Khan’s fiction was the story ‘Pictures’, which aired on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Morning Story’ in 1986, and was followed by the broadcast of several others. The producer Barbara Crowther welcomed Khan’s stories as a way to include in the programme material from someone with ‘a genuine “ethnic” background’, and encouraged her to submit the stories for publication.2 The collection Down the Road, Worlds Away was published in 1987 by Virago, in their ‘Upstarts’ list of teenage fiction.3 Like Tony Godby Johnson, Rahila Khan was subject to pressure to furnish evidence of her authorial being, in the form of photographs, meetings with her publisher, radio readings and interviews, but, unlike Johnson, Khan had only the plea of shyness to explain her refusals. Eventually the real author of Rahila Khan’s work, the white Anglican vicar Toby Forward, decided to identify himself by arranging to meet his literary agent in person. Forward’s subsequent revelation of his authorship to the publisher led to the withdrawal of his book from publication, and a widespread debate about the ethics of his impersonation. While some claimed that Forward had simply drawn on a recognised literary tradition in writing under a pseudonym, as he claimed was his common practice, others argued that, because of the nature of this particular alias, such usage was an appropriation.4 The use of such a pseudonym was said to silence genuine Asian women’s writing by providing a false origin and a misleading template for them, revealing the ‘commodification’ of ethnicity implicit in the eagerness with which Khan’s work was received.5

Gender Hoaxing    39

Down the Road, Worlds Away is a collection of eleven stories, of which seven are about young Asian women, all but one written in the third person, and five about white teenage boys, all in the first person. The alternation of narrative mode, and critics’ responses to it, became another occasion for the imbrication of the literary with the extradiegetic that characterised the text’s reception, both before and after its true authorship was revealed. Before Forward’s admission, the autobiographical nature of Khan’s writing was taken for granted to the extent that it was thought to be compromised by the choice of third- rather than first-person narrative in the stories about Asian girls. For instance, the Women’s Press asked Khan to rewrite ‘Winter Wind’, a story about the schoolgirl Fatima’s unplanned pregnancy, in the first person for publication in an anthology.6 However, the opposite effect took place in relation to the paratext of the author biography included in the book, in which all the details are those of Forward’s life but presented in the third person as Khan’s. The biography’s transformation by the publisher7 from first- to third-person description in this instance identifies the author as Khan, in contrast to a first-person utterance which would have left its source unidentified, as we see in the final version: Rahila Khan was born in Coventry in 1950. She has also lived in Birmingham, Derby, Oxford, London, Peterborough and Brighton. In 1971 she married and now has two daughters. It was not until 1986 that she began writing. (i)

Barbara Schaff points out the overdetermined nature of Forward’s choice of pseudonym, which generated ‘assumptions grounded in nothing more than the name Rahila Khan’ about the stories’ autobiographical content,8 and the same effect can be seen in relation to the author biography. Marriage at a young age, the birth of daughters, living in many different places and starting to write relatively late in life are likely to have quite different meanings when seen by readers as the biographical details of a vicar on the one hand, or of an Asian woman, particularly in the context of the stories themselves, on the other.9 Such effects draw attention to the fact that first-person narrative is both intimate and indeterminate, confessional yet literary, as the Virago editor’s question to Khan about the use of third-person narration suggests: ‘I wondered whether this represented your feelings about the place of Asian women particularly in Britain, that the sense of “otherness” is still so great that it feels still an impossibility to write in the first person as opposed to the third.’10 Although put to Khan, such a question is pertinent either for her or for Forward. Khan’s Down the Road, Worlds Away is a continuous narrative with

40    Textual Deceptions an episodic structure, since most of the stories are connected through recurrent characters. This form acts for a didactic effect. Theodore Dalrymple sees the parabolic nature of Khan’s stories in a generalised way, as his rhetorical question suggests, ‘Was [Forward] not implying the traditional view of literature, that it expresses the universal in the particular?’11 However, the stories’ significance more specifically concerns social and domestic pressures which might seem to be different for the two categories of character, Asian and white, but which imply a commonality of experience that neither can acknowledge. Such pressures take an external form for the female Asian characters, whose circumstances impel them to run away, or rebel in various ways against familial authority, but are internalised for the white male ones in the form of ironised dramatic monologues which reveal the speakers’ selfdestructive and unacknowledged motivations. This distinction itself gives a rationale for the different narratorial modes. The alternation of the two kinds of story implies a society consisting of parallel universes, as the title suggests: the white boys are just ‘down the road’ from the Asian girls, but, with the exception of the teenage lovers Fatima and Colin in ‘Winter Wind’, might as well be ‘worlds away’.12 Bringing the two spheres together is the stated goal of Forward’s project, which he claims was inspired by his dismay at witnessing racism when teaching a course on world religions at a Church of England school.13 By contrast to the significance derived from narrative voice before Forward’s revelation of his authorship, the reliance of some of the stories on third-person discourse was seen after his admission to be a failure or refusal to imagine the interiority of an Asian woman, by contrast to the first-person discourse used to represent the apparently accessible world of the white boys. Yet both modes are literary devices that are used in Forward’s collection to ironic effect, in each kind of story. For instance, the conclusion of the story ‘Mum’, narrated by a boy nicknamed ‘Carrot Top’, is ostensibly about teenage boys’ ‘nihilism’, in Dalrymple’s term,14 and antisocial aggression. The boy spits onto a bald man from a bus window and refuses to apologise when the man confronts him: ‘I think he knew that I was angry too. Serve them right. In our family the men don’t lose their hair’ (14). However, the reader sees more than the narrator, and understands such behaviour to be the acting out of an ‘angry’ defence against death and mourning, since the boy’s mother has lost her hair as a result of chemotherapy. It is in this sense that bald men are ‘served right’ by the boy’s violence for constituting a reminder of loss, and his male relatives are hirsute and therefore healthy. In this instance, the story’s conclusion is one of pathos; later in the collection, the same narrator’s masculine bravado is made into more of a

Gender Hoaxing    41

challenge to the reader’s sympathy, in instances where he claims to ‘hate’ a friend suffering from acne (‘Party Time’) and to envy the certainty of a friend in prison for manslaughter (‘Patch’s Joyride’). Yet the reader is still able to understand more than the boy himself, for instance in his repeating a teacher’s reproach: ‘An intelligent boy like you, and all you do is sit making fun and wasting your time’ (‘Furnace’, p. 26). The waste of the boy’s potential, due in part to being failed by such institutions as his school, is made clear in ‘Carrot Top’ becoming, in the same teacher’s words, a ‘ “red-haired lout” ’ (27). In those stories presented in the third person about Asian girls, the equivalent of Carrot Top’s inadvertent self-revelation is accomplished by means of free indirect discourse. This generates an overt clash between the two voices of narrator and character, to such effect as, for instance, Mrs Iqbal’s reflections on marriage in ‘The Angel’: ‘She had not chosen him as her husband, older and wiser minds had done that, but she gave thanks that she had spent her life with him’ (16). This utterance is double-voicedly ambiguous. The sense that those arranging marriages are ‘older and wiser’, and the ‘thanks’ Mrs Iqbal gives for their services, imply a positive view of a convention that is the source of unhappiness in stories elsewhere in the collection, including ‘Bleeding Hearts’ and ‘Taking Care’. Yet such a positive estimate is Mrs Iqbal’s, not that of the narrator or author, whose view cannot be identified. Thus in this small instance, and in relation to the collection as a whole, the reader’s literary and ethical responses and preconceptions are tested in relation to the stories’ construction and their implied author. Although this might not be one of Forward’s stated motives for the stories’ composition, it is one of the most significant effects of their narrative voice as well as the revelation of his masquerade. If the use of the name Rahila Khan is seen simply as Forward’s adoption of a pseudonym, the gap between the two figures appears to be small. Indeed, Forward argued that his various pen-names enabled him to ‘write as I really am’, as if greater authenticity could best be achieved by means of dissimulation.15 Forward does not invoke the kind of sociological legitimacy that Dalrymple asserts in his favour, by pointing to the vicar’s lowly origins and experience of the ‘inner city’ Midlands environments represented in the stories,16 but, rather, calls on a specifically aesthetic kind of legitimacy, even if such writerly concerns are enlisted for didactic purposes. As he claims in the apologia published in the London Review of Books after he had admitted his authorship, Forward was ‘accused of pretending to occupy a position I didn’t hold, to speak with a voice that wasn’t mine. I had thought that that was the purpose of art.’17 Such recourse to the aesthetic is clear in his claim that ‘Rahila Khan was me’,

42    Textual Deceptions an assertion both of a literary abolition of difference, in its rewording of Gustave Flaubert’s declaration about his character, ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’,18 and of an actual abolition of this kind that could be construed as a wish for cultural harmony. However, if Forward’s authorship is viewed differently, as an illicit ‘double appropriation’ of gender and racial identity,19 the two figures cannot be easily reconciled. As Kenneth Ruthven argues, while Khan could be seen in Barthesian terms simply as the ‘text’s immediate scriptor’, that is, an implied author-figure conjured up during the process of reading, whoever the actual author might be, the outraged reaction of the publisher and some readers showed the effect of a ‘nostalgia for the auctor as authenticating presence’.20 Yet this is not just ‘nostalgia’ as a gentle regret for the past, but a reliance on an ‘imaginary’ era of plenitude in which text and writer were one.21 Given that our view of these stories now is so inflected by knowledge of their real authorship, it is hard to answer the question, which is one raised by all the texts in this study, about whether our reading alters according to who we imagine is their author or the ‘scriptor’, to use Barthes’ term. After Forward’s confession of authorship, and focusing on content as well as narrative mode, the novelist Ravinder Randhawa drew attention to the reliance of half of the collection on the stereotype of ‘ “culturally conflicted” Asian girls’,22 and it is indeed striking that these stories represent a pessimistic view of the pressures of assimilation and resistance to them, as well as white condescension and racism. In ‘Pictures’, the schoolgirl Amina Iqbal paints the Virgin Mary to resemble herself, with a ‘brown face’ (3), and her work is judged unsuitable by her teacher, who pretends it is too good to be displayed on the classroom wall and that the child should take it home. Amina’s picture has no place there either, and her mother tears it up. Although Mrs Iqbal’s explanations are described as ‘gentle’ and the ‘bosom’ on which she cradles her daughter ‘experienced’, Amina is shown to wish for a different kind of maternal figure, and chooses Mary: she paints another ‘dusky Madonna’ (6) on a Christmas card, ‘looking at it sometimes and asking the face on it what she should do’ (7). Although such a plot device may seem to reveal the hand of Forward, in imagining that a Muslim child would seek Christian comfort, both Amina’s family and the state religion are shown to fail her. In ‘Bleeding Hearts’, she flees from an arranged marriage and shelters in a church, where she believes ‘Mary is respected and listened to’ (56). A priest’s revelation that, despite this, there are no female incumbents of his role causes Amina to run away again, to ‘ “find a god for women” ’ (59). Neither Islam nor Christianity is able to help the young woman in her conviction that she has been ‘bullied by men’ (54). The story’s conclusion is unresolved.

Gender Hoaxing    43

Over thirty years later, critics returned to Forward’s case in relation to a twenty-first-century masquerade, in the form of the online blog ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’, purportedly written by a Syrian woman, Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, who was persecuted by reason of her lesbianism. The blog was eventually revealed to be the work of Tom McMaster, an American man living in Edinburgh. After the exposure of McMaster’s authorship, Boyd Tonkin argued that ‘literary transvestism’ is acceptable when it performs what Foucault calls the ‘classificatory function’ of distinguishing between a writer’s literary voices, but not if, as in the case of McMaster and Forward, the author ‘shelters’ under a pseudonym in order to avoid ‘a real or imagined prohibition on what they wish to say, because of who they are’.23 It seems that clearly marked pseudonyms, or publicly acknowledged usages, are acceptable, while deliberate concealment is not. Thus the fact that some of Philip Larkin’s unpublished juvenilia took the form of schoolgirl romances written under the jazz aficionado’s self-advertisingly pseudonymous name ‘Brunette Coleman’, and the construction of thriller-writer ‘Nicci French’ as the name for an authorship shared between husband and wife, Sean French and Nicci Gerrard, remain in the realm of the literary, while such impostures as David Dwyer’s, who presented his writing as that of an older female poet, Ariana Olisvos, might be judged to have strayed too far into the territory of deception.24 This is a difference of genre in a very wide sense, and one that overlooks matters of literary value. Tonkin judged that, for McMaster, al Omari’s ‘battles with Syrian homophobia clearly answered a personal need probably stronger than any concern for human rights under dictatorship’.25 Thus, according to such a view, the revelation of imposture does not disrupt, but rather reinstates, a biographical link between author and text, even in cases like Rahila Khan’s in which her work was published as fiction. As Foucault puts it, ‘notions that are intended to replace the privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning of his [sic] disappearance’.26 At the simplest level, the stories of Down the Road, Worlds Away are about the plight of young working-class people in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain as these are inflected by race, gender and class. It was the exposure of Forward’s masquerade that revealed the extent of the interaction they represent between matters of literary construction and what Vincent Cheng refers to as ‘real-world effects’.27 These effects did not relate to better multicultural understanding, as Forward seems to have wished, but reinforced a polarised ideological positioning among critics and readers. The stories’ being aimed at a teenage market was clearly judged to be fitting for Forward’s literary plea for tolerance, and the

44    Textual Deceptions stark presentation of their messages. He has since become a full-time children’s writer, and although a sequel to the stories about Carrot Top in Down the Road, Worlds Away has been published in the form of the novel Dead Young under Forward’s own name, there has been no such sequel for Amina Iqbal.

Anthony Godby Johnson, A Rock and a Hard Place Johnson’s memoir, A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story,28 has elements in common with those discussed in the previous chapter, since its premise is indeed one of extreme misery. Tony’s wellto-do parents neglected their son by rationing his food and making him sleep on the floor, as well as beating him, abusing him sexually and ‘trading’ him with their friends. In this way Tony suffered over fifty broken bones and contracted not only syphilis but AIDS, as well as undergoing a stroke and the eventual amputation of one of his legs. Just as in the other misery memoirs, Tony’s plight is, as the subtitle’s gloss on the apparently pessimistic title shows, redeemed by later contentment. As Tony recounts, the counsellor, Ernie, who answered his telephone call to a suicide hotline put him in touch with a social worker, Vicki, whom Ernie then met and married. Tony began an idyllic life with Ernie, whom he called ‘Pop’ and whose surname he took, and his new wife ‘Mom’. While living with the threat of premature death, Tony established relationships by telephone and mail with others who shared elements of his experience. His initial correspondence with Paul Monette, whose Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir was published in 1988, led to a book contract, while other interlocutors included the writers Keith Olbermann, who planned to write a novel about baseball with Tony, Tom Robbins and Armistead Maupin, who read the proofs of the boy’s memoir and wrote an admiring blurb for it, as well as Jermaine Jackson and Jack Godby, an HIV counsellor whose surname the boy added to that of his adoptive parents. While Monette wrote a foreword to A Rock and a Hard Place, less than two years before his own AIDS-related death in 1995, Maupin came to question the existence of his correspondent, and his novel The Night Listener is about a writer’s telephonic relationship with an HIV-positive boy whose existence he starts to doubt but continues to value.29 A Rock and a Hard Place differs most notably from the memoirs by McCourt, O’Beirne and Briscoe in Chapter 1 in its withholding descriptions of the hardship experienced by its narrator. This absence is reflected in the memoir’s construction, since it is narrated from a point

Gender Hoaxing    45

in the present when Tony is fourteen, and is thus a work of memory rather than re-enactment. The boy’s abusive parents exist only in analepses, not in reconstructed real-time action. As Tony puts it, he has ‘no desire to go into vivid details’ about his experiences (32), including the text’s central episode, that of the rape that led to his developing AIDS, which is for the most part ‘a blank for me now’ (40). In the place of any such description is Tony’s almost saintly predisposition to view even the worst events, including the death of his best friend David, in terms of a ‘celebration of life’ (45), making the text resemble a collection of parables and implying a wisdom, not to mention literary facility, that the memoir’s critics claimed were beyond that of a fourteen-year-old boy. Michele Ingrassia argues that Tony’s ‘language [is] too adult, his cultural references too ancient, his stories too perfectly constructed’,30 while the death or disappearance of most of his friends is not only a personal tragedy but necessary for the maintenance of the imposture. As Ingrassia’s remark implies, Johnson’s memoir has hybrid aspirations in relation to both memory and literature. However, its textual references and forebears are not those of high Modernism, as in McCourt’s case, but of such homiletic fiction as Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, both of which Tony praises. In both cases, the protagonist has a role similar to that of Tony in the memoir in terms of both moralistic effect and ontological status: in Bach’s novel, an anthropomorphised creature has a didactic function, while in the children’s book the toy rabbit’s wish to become real is eventually granted.31 Such unwitting selfreflexivity is also present in other examples of Tony’s literary choices, which include Stephen King’s Misery (56), a novel about the extreme over-investment of a reader in the heroine of romances written by Paul Sheldon, her favourite author. A Rock and a Hard Place differs from misery memoirs most strikingly in effecting a complete separation of writer and text, arising not from literary techniques, reconstruction or exaggeration, but from invention. Although the true authorship of A Rock and a Hard Place has not been definitively established, it seems likely that it was written by Vicki Johnson, a former primary schoolteacher with an interest in creative writing who claimed to be Tony’s adoptive mother.32 The need to represent an embodied version of the boy in support of the textual invention took the form of telephone conversations between Tony and his interlocutors, and a photograph that was sent to his agent, publishers, correspondents and others. Vicki claimed that her adopted son’s illness, as well as the need to protect him from his former abusers, meant that his privacy had to be strictly maintained. Ernie Johnson, Tony’s ­adoptive

46    Textual Deceptions father, never spoke to any of Tony’s contacts and was said to be overseas on military duty in the Gulf War; he is assumed never to have existed.33 However, a vocal expert judged the voice on the telephone purporting to be Tony’s to be the same as that of his mother, while the photograph of the boy was identified as that of another child.34 Vicki’s cancellation of a contract with the American television network HBO for a film of Tony’s book, and the boy’s unavailability for even the briefest meeting with trusted associates, aroused suspicions among many, although not all, of his ‘friends’.35 Despite the airing of questions after the appearance of Tony’s memoir, his writing continued to be published online in a website called ‘Tony’s World’, while a television documentary about children who had prospered despite hardship, hosted by Oprah Winfrey, purported to use Tony’s voice although he was represented by an actor.36 After the publication of Maupin’s The Night Listener in 2000 the matter of Tony’s ‘invisibility’ was raised again in a New Yorker article,37 after which his website became inactive. A final flurry of interest followed the release of the film version of The Night Listener (2006), in the wake of which the photograph supposedly of Tony was identified as that of Vicki’s former pupil Steve Tarabokija.38 As in the case of such memoirs as O’Beirne’s Don’t Ever Tell, on which final judgement remains suspended, the reader is called upon to decide between different kinds of evidence in relation to A Rock and a Hard Place. While Tad Friend argues that the boy is the equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat, since ‘by eluding definitive observation, Tony remained perpetually real and perpetually imaginary’, it is useful to consider that, even in the absence of a definitive verdict or an authorial confession, the accumulation of items of evidence that suggest Tony’s existence is unlikely will point to a particular verdict, as Joseph Major argues: ‘If the convergence is on improbabilities, each unlikely, and their combination even more so, the conclusion is as obvious.’39 This is a methodology similar to that urged on the jury by Constance Briscoe’s counsel, although in this case the verdict tends the other way, towards one of Tony’s story being ‘as unlikely as not’. The narrative of Tony’s memoir itself contributes to such an accumulation of ‘items of evidence’. Its narrator’s contracting AIDS can be viewed as the result of a twofold fictional imperative: the pathos of the child’s plight is certainly increased, while the possibility of his final disappearance is allowed for, however implausibly delayed that might have seemed over the decade of his activity. Tony’s illness worsened in parallel to the growth of his fame, rendering him increasingly unavailable even to talk to his contacts, let alone meet them. Paul Monette writes in his introduction that, ‘It still amazes me that I’ve never met him’ (15), as a way of affirming

Gender Hoaxing    47

the profundity of a connection with Tony that unwittingly also points to the boy’s non-existence. The substitution of positive thought for traumatic memory in Tony’s memoir, in which childhood suffering leaves its victim apparently unscathed, gives it a distinctive episodic form. In the afterword, Tony refers to A Rock and a Hard Place as a collection of self-contained ‘essays’ (296), while Monette revealingly describes its chapters as ‘linked stories’ (17), rather than a continuous narrative. These ‘essays’ constitute a ‘celebration of life’ arising from their narrator’s habit of taking ‘good things from wherever I could get them’ (43) and refusing ‘to think badly of people’ (80). Each of the memoir’s chapters is a vignette about Tony’s life and his acquaintances, constructing a similar pattern every time: apparently hostile or troubled characters have hearts of gold (the gruff doctor ‘Uncle Frank’, the prostitutes in Times Square); injustice, for instance that undergone by gay men and African-Americans, is lamented; the horrors that lurk behind ‘ordinary’ façades are exposed and thus redeemed. The narrator claims the text’s didacticism as a trait of his voice and recall – ‘I know that I am advocating now’, as he says about an insistence on tolerance for the victims of AIDS (65) – but, as with Rahila Khan’s parables for tolerance, it seems rather that such advocacy is a sign of constructedness. The memoir’s lack of straightforward chronology or any narrative of the abuse itself is accompanied by its almost self-conscious derivation of plot elements from metaphorical discourse, and their transformation back into metaphors. For instance, the bad weather from which Tony’s adoptive family shelter together at home quickly turns into a pretext for abstract sentiment: ‘But AIDS was in our lives now, and it didn’t seem as if we would ever be able to take comfort from a storm again’ (227). The description of the feral cat from which Tony gains companionship likewise slides from an account of feline independence – ‘she didn’t consider whether or not she had hurt my feelings’ when she left abruptly – to her fading into another moralistic abstraction: ‘She was staying true to herself. It was the first time I truly understood such a concept . . . She didn’t understand hypocrisy or “have to”s. There had to be something to that’ (102–3). The same kind of rhetorical transformation takes place most revealingly in relation to the memoir’s title, signalling that all these small instances of the dissolution of reality convey the memoir’s fundamental basis in metaphor and fiction. Tony claims that, among the various ‘titles’ that could be given to his schoolmate David, ‘the words that would remain etched in stone for me were “best friend” ’ (262, emphasis added). This sentiment relies upon an image that slides metonymically into the boys’ plight as conveyed by the memoir’s titular

48    Textual Deceptions ‘rock’ and ‘hard place’. Yet the reader learns in the next paragraph that the eponymous rock is not simply figurative, but has a real location in Central Park, and is one on which the boys have written their names; near to this ‘rock’ there is also a real ‘hard place’, ‘a spot where we buried notes to each other that we planned to unearth in years ahead’ (262). Such a ritual was valuable, according to Tony, in giving ‘a semblance of normalcy’ to the boys’ lives, since ‘even between a rock and a hard place we were able to thrive and grow and know the value that the love of a friend could bring’ (263). Signifier and signified are thoroughly confused in this phrasing. Although it might seem that the memoir’s title was conjured up by the boys’ ritual, it is in fact the other way round: metaphor always precedes reality in this memoir. Such a condensation, by means of which the phrase about the non-choice of a ‘rock and a hard place’ and the text itself are thoroughly blended, is clearest in Tony’s final remark in his epilogue: ‘Yes, sometimes life leaves you between A Rock and a Hard Place’ (303). The narrative and the phrase are now indistinguishable. Although various kinds of text are referred to in the memoir which highlight its true genre and its inspiration, it is a misreading of Anne Frank’s Diary that is its most revealing forebear. Anne Frank’s diary might appear to be an example of the voice of one of the ‘drowned’, in Primo Levi’s phrase, since hers is not a retrospective or post-war text from a survivor’s point of view, unlike his If This is a Man. Yet even Frank’s diary is written at a remove from the atrocity that engulfed her, since the world of the camps to which she was deported, and the last days of her life, lie outside the text itself. As Tim Cole puts it, ‘the Holocaust is essentially the context within which the diary is written, rather than the central focus’.40 Although Tony does not directly cite Anne Frank, his memoir takes a form that might appear analogous to her diary, since his suffering is just the ‘context’ for his present-day reflections. Monette describes reassuring Tony of the value of his writing since ‘the greatest human testament we have from the Second World War was written by a fourteen-year-old girl’ (17), and argues that the boy ‘shares with the girl from Amsterdam a deep certainty about the essential goodness of people’ (18). While Monette’s view of Tony’s ‘deep certainty’ is accurate, his characterisation of Anne Frank in terms that make her sound like a universalised ‘secular saint’41 is based not on the diary itself, but on the stage version by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which notoriously concludes with Anne’s statement, qualified in her diary, that ‘I still believe that people are really good at heart’.42 A generic blurring can be discerned in A Rock and a Hard Place. It purports to be a memoir, while resembling more closely an example of fabular fiction following a pattern similar to that of ‘positive thinking’,

Gender Hoaxing    49

also associated with Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. Such positivity’s adherence to the source and conquest of illness by means of mental power does not make a formal appearance in Johnson’s memoir, although it concludes with the sixteen-year-old Tony’s epilogue and the implication of continued life in the ‘beautiful’ flowers that grow between the rock and the hard place (303). Thus the memoir’s discourse of beauty, ‘hope and trust’ exists in the service of what Maupin describes as a ‘pathological’ fraudulence on the part of Vicki Johnson,43 one which places such emphasis on transcending misfortune through individual self-help that Tony has been described as a ‘Republican’s dream-child’.44 On the other hand, it is from Maupin’s novel The Night Listener that the reader gains their fullest sense of Vicki’s remarkable performance of the ‘spirited’ boy who gained the affection and commitment of so many people over the course of a decade.

J. T. LeRoy, Sarah Like Tony Godby Johnson, J. T. LeRoy conducted intense relationships with devoted readers, many of whom were themselves well-known writers and artists, over the telephone or in writing, although, unlike Tony, LeRoy did eventually contrive to appear in public. Like Rahila Khan’s, LeRoy’s work was published as fiction, but, since his short stories and novel are themselves about various kinds of masquerade, his writing shows a greater integration of intra- and extra-diegetic elements, giving an almost metafictional element to this construction of an invented authorial persona. Just as the first-person narrator of LeRoy’s fiction was a man aspiring to femininity, so Laura Albert, who eventually admitted to its authorship, was a woman writing as a man. J. T. LeRoy’s first publication was the autobiographical piece ‘Baby Doll’, credited simply to ‘Terminator’; later, his first names were said to be ‘Jeremiah Terminator’. The piece appeared in a 1997 anthology of autobiographical writing,45 and describes a young boy dressing as a girl and seducing his mother’s boyfriend. ‘Baby Doll’ was singled out for praise in reviews of the anthology, and was followed in 2000 by Sarah, described as an autobiographical novel about a twelve-year-old boy and his eponymous mother, a truck-stop prostitute in West Virginia. LeRoy’s short story collection The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things was published a year later, although the events represented precede those of Sarah, since it is about the implied author’s early childhood.46 It is an episodic gothic tale of what the blurb describes euphemistically as the ‘abusive love’ shown to a young boy by his mother and her family.

50    Textual Deceptions One of the stories, also called ‘Baby Doll’, includes almost verbatim the allegedly autobiographical piece from 1996, now recast as fiction. The collection’s publication history, and the ‘autobiographical’ vignette embedded among them, imply its documentary status. LeRoy’s works became successful as examples of ‘transgressive literature’, due in part to the connections the author established with writers such as Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill and Sharon Olds, with whose works LeRoy’s shared plot elements of drug-taking, sado-masochism, prostitution and, in Olds’ case, a personal background in fundamentalist Christianity.47 A film version of The Heart was released in 2004 (Asia Argento), and a contract signed for the film rights to Sarah, but the revelation of Albert’s real authorship meant that the film was never made. LeRoy was represented by means of the photograph of a young man on early editions of Sarah, its paratextual position acting to authenticate the novel on which it appeared. This image, which turned out to be one of Dennis Cooper’s ‘great friend and muse’ George Miles as a teenager,48 was replaced by an embodied enactment. Although LeRoy’s pathological shyness was blamed for his restricting literary relationships to telephonic or email form, from 2001 he started to appear in public as a withdrawn, androgynous figure dressed in blonde wig and sunglasses, one who was always accompanied by his talkative former social worker, Emily Frasier. In October 2005, an article by Stephen Beachy in New York Magazine was the first to suggest that LeRoy did not exist and that his works had instead been written by Laura Albert, a New York musician.49 Yet even this article, which another newspaper had refused to publish, was not seen as conclusive, and such figures as LeRoy’s literary agent allowed themselves to be persuaded that Beachy had impugned the other writer through professional jealousy. However, a pair of articles published in the New York Times in early 2006 confirmed the non-existence of LeRoy and Laura Albert’s authorship of his work.50 The apparent distance between Albert’s biography and that of the invented writer, an Appalachian transvestite man born on Hallowe’en 1980 who had been forced into prostitution by his mother, was signalled by Beachy’s account of her as ‘a 39–yearold mother named Laura Albert, originally from Brooklyn’. Indeed, the fact that such a description should resound with comic bathos, by contrast with LeRoy’s exotic background, suggests why Albert might have chosen a persona to ensure the publication of her work. It was Albert who had conducted telephone relationships with the writers and film stars of LeRoy’s coterie, and had accompanied the writer’s ‘body double’, her partner’s half-sister Savannah Knoop, on book tours and social occasions in the guise of the social worker Emily Frasier. Such a

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division of labour, between voice and body, led to confusing, although not suspicion-arousing, occasions on which great telephonic intimacy was followed by apparent lack of recognition.51 Despite the extremity of the case of J. T. LeRoy’s fiction, in terms of his ability not just to represent but to redeem an itinerant life of lawlessness and addiction in ‘magical’ prose, as the blurb to Sarah has it, the features of this instance of imposture are not so different from the other examples in the present study. LeRoy’s oeuvre is akin to the invention of individual, rather than historical or communal, suffering also evident in James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, while a longstanding habit of self-romanticising links his work to that of Margaret B. Jones’ Love and Consequences, a memoir that was, like Albert’s assumption of LeRoy’s mantle, the final instance of its real-life author’s adoption of various personae. Yet LeRoy wrote fiction, not memoir, profiting from its greater leeway and, particularly in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, constructing a fictive child’s viewpoint akin to that in Binjamin Wilkomirski’s false Holocaust memoir Fragments. LeRoy’s novel Sarah is a magic-realist road narrative about the fortunes of an apprentice twelve-year-old prostitute nicknamed Cherry Vanilla. In an effort to outdo his mother, Sarah, Cherry leaves the familial truck-stop brothel where she works, and is imprisoned, or, as he puts it, ‘indentured’, to the violent and unpredictable Le Loup. Following Sarah’s training, Cherry keeps his masculinity secret at Le Loup’s establishment, where he is known by his mother’s name in what appears to be a transgendered oedipal effort to supplant her. The novel’s title has an uncertain referent, signalling equally a homage to the mother Cherry hopelessly loves, and the triumphant self-naming of a Bildungsroman. The overlapping of these two meanings is encapsulated in Cherry’s friend Pooh’s unexpectedly addressing her as ‘Sarah’ while acting maternally: ‘Hearing my mother’s name spoken out loud combined with a gentle touch unsteadies me’ (127). Elsewhere in Sarah the novel’s Biblical eponym is invoked in claiming that Cherry too could give birth without menstruating (54), and their shared name is the reason for the boy’s elevation into a ‘holy lizard’ worshipped by truckers. In his role as an icon, Cherry’s ability to walk on water conjures up another model of unconventional motherhood and birth to add to his persona, although this time he is identified with the miraculous son rather than the virginal mother. These Biblical tropes constitute comically exaggerated identifications alongside trickery – not only does ‘sphagnum moss’ account for Cherry’s ability to walk on water, but he is neither female nor called Sarah – that uncannily prefigure the book’s extra-textual fate. It is not only the novel’s narrator but its author who turns out to be, as Pooh

52    Textual Deceptions puts it of Cherry, ‘ “just a whore, just like all of you. Ain’t nothin’ holy about her” ’ (57). The novel’s combination of disjunctive discourses in representing its West Virginian world of underage hustling and addiction is embodied in the description given by Sundae, one of his working girls, of the benevolent overseer Glad: ‘ “he aspires to be a world-class pimp and reach the truckers’ handbooks, but he also wants to be Santa Claus too. It is a hard combination for him. It makes him suffer terribly” ’ (24). Such a combination of real-world hardship with fantasy constitutes the novel’s approach to its subject, and allows for an approach similar to (the mother) Sarah’s when she covers up the effects of domestic abuse: ‘The trick is to use an oil-based, yellow-tone foundation’, Sarah would say, wincing while tentatively sponging on tan goop. ‘I swear it should say so on the bottle: “Do not under any circumstance use matte to cover your man’s fist kisses”.’ (27)

The willing covering up and prettifying of violence take place on the level of both énoncé and énonciation in Sarah, on the part of character and reader alike. It underlies the novel’s cult status, as its reviewer Catherine Texier claimed, since its narrator’s ‘sweet and pure vision makes even the nastiest scenes bearable’,52 while also preparing for the effect of such transformation when its autobiographical basis was shown to be false. Reality itself is sufficiently altered, by means of a ‘language [that] turns the tawdriness of hustling into a world of lyrical and grotesque beauty’,53 for LeRoy’s status as a pseudonym or alter ego to seem to be part of this enterprise of transformative fictionality. As a review of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things puts it, LeRoy has ‘already lived many remarkable lives, but none as unlikely as his current guise of the acclaimed author’.54 Although Albert testified under oath to having undergone experiences that make LeRoy’s life seem less divergent from her own,55 in particular having experienced years of therapy during which she spoke through the persona of a teenage boy called Jeremiah,56 the magicrealist elements of Sarah and extremity of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things make it hard to read either work as autobiography, except as fictional accounts of their own genesis. Albert has referred to LeRoy as a literary pseudonym, one that acted as a ‘respirator’ for her writing, and was, in Alan Feuer’s words, ‘an imaginary, though necessary, survival apparatus that permitted her to breathe’.57 The representation of gender masquerade, as well as anxiety about false or absent parents, does double duty as the fiction’s psychic and metafictional subject.

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Sarah is about gender and family relations at the same time as it is about the necessary constructedness of a literary voice. Cherry’s wish to be a woman is also a wish to impress and then to supersede his mother. The latter demands that her son dress as a girl to facilitate his shoplifting: ‘ “Girls have more cubbyholes to hide things in” ’ (10), as she tells Cherry, making it no surprise that the next stage in Cherry’s masquerade is as a female prostitute. From dressing up to enact the feminine role of ‘defective shopper’ by shoplifting, Cherry becomes the commodity herself.58 Like a parody of any girl acceding to adult femininity, Cherry takes notes on how to conduct herself in the bedroom (16), and imitates a mother who often pretends to be her child’s sibling: not just in order to seem younger, but because the presence of another man might alienate her clients. In a revealing conversation, Cherry admits to Pooh that his hair is dyed: ‘I’m always jealous of girls that have albino hair’ . . . [I] tell her, ‘I’m not albino. At least I don’t think I am.’ It doesn’t occur to me to mention that I’m not a girl. (31)

Cherry responds to Pooh’s remark as if she is making an imputation about his physical condition (‘ “I’m not albino” ’), yet his not admitting to the truth of his maleness de-essentialises gender by making it even less of an inborn characteristic than a blonde look. It is possible to view the often grotesque gender confusion in Sarah as transgressive – and popular – fantasy, as well as an allegory of the travails of an author who had followed the longstanding literary device of assuming a male pen-name. Just as prostitution is made literary in LeRoy’s fiction, so the hustling in Sarah is a metaphor for literary persuasiveness and consumption, as well as acknowledging an element of the eschewing of reality that both might share. Albert evaded construction as a female author by means of the persona of LeRoy, while LeRoy’s claim not to know his own gender identity apparently inspired him to insist that he might well not have written the novels either. In an interview about The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, LeRoy gave a statement that must have sounded at the time like the gender polymorphousness that had appealed to both male and female readers, but in hindsight resembles more the preparation for the exposure of Albert’s authorship that was to follow: When I wrote Sarah, I was male-identified, and now I’m not. I don’t know what I am. So it’s easier if people decide it is not me, then I won’t be held down. So many people have claimed me as their own, so I guess the best thing is to confuse them all.59

54    Textual Deceptions As Warren St John argued in his article in the New York Times, transgenderism was invoked by LeRoy in part ‘to explain confusion over his identity’ as an author,60 although it had certainly been prepared for in fictional terms. Yet, like Boyd Tonkin’s insistence that Tom McMaster’s online masquerade as a Syrian lesbian was all about him, so Albert claimed that her writing had an autobiographical basis, and that, ‘I just told a story that fit the pain I was in.’61 Legal verdicts of various kinds play an unexpected role in offering deterministic verdicts on literary hoaxes, as we have seen in relation to Constance Briscoe’s trial for defamation, and as we will see in relation to James Frey and Misha Defonseca. In the case of J. T. LeRoy, it was the signature, one of the signifiers of official selfhood as well as of authorship, that was central to a court case brought against Laura Albert. In 2007, Albert was found guilty of engaging in fraud ‘by signing her nom de plume to a movie contract for her acclaimed first novel, Sarah’, since her defence, that ‘the fictional persona – an Appalachian misfit with a titillating past – was no financial ploy or literary trick but the sole aesthetic method that permitted her to write’, was not accepted by the jury.62

Conclusion Although each of the three cases of cross-gender authorship in this chapter provoked scandalised reactions when they were explored or exposed, in none was gender itself the only, or even the central, element of the masquerade. In the instance of Rahila Khan, as we will see in relation to Wanda Koolmatrie, the native Australian creation of two white men, ethnic impersonation seemed to trump that of gender in the hoax’s unmasking. Indeed, femininity serves the function in those of Khan’s stories with Asian protagonists of emphasising cultural conflict, and it seems to have been chosen by the author too for that reason. The gender masquerade in A Rock and a Hard Place arises in part from its homage to gay men’s AIDS memoirs, the genre that developed in its era of publication in the early 1990s, and it was the invention as such that prompted readers’ concern, not simply Vicki Johnson’s creation of a specifically male author and subject. Yet the text’s true priority is not the creation of a suffering boy, but a kind of kitsch positivity: evil is alluded to only so that goodness is thrown into relief. Tony is a personification of this concern, rather than its arising as an element of his imagined life-history. Like Tony’s advocacy of liberal causes, positivity is thus a hint at constructedness, not at the child’s psychology. For J. T. LeRoy, a male persona seems to have functioned as a distancing device

Gender Hoaxing    55

to enable Albert’s process of composition, but the novel’s success rested in part on its representation of elements of what is more usually a female experience, including prostitution, from a male perspective. While these examples might suggest that literary gender masquerade is unexceptional, particularly so where a female author takes on a male guise, they also show that gender identity itself, including its impersonation, cannot easily be separated from such other elements as sexuality, ethnicity and even the history and health of the body, each of which assumes a greater importance than gender when it is faked. Gender deception is unexpectedly the least controversial of those analysed in this study.

Notes  1. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 124.  2. Toby Forward, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 4 February 1988, pp. 21–2.   3. Rahila Khan, Down the Road, Worlds Away, London: Virago, 1987. All page references in the text.   4. Theodore Dalrymple (itself the pseudonym of the writer and psychiatrist Anthony Daniels) defended Forward in ‘An Imaginary “Scandal” ’, New Criterion 23 (May) 2005, p.  90, while Dympna Callaghan explored the charge of appropriation in ‘The Vicar and Virago: Feminism and the Problem of Identity’, in Judith Roof and Robin Weigel, eds, Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Forward has also written fiction under the name Tom Dale, poetry as Judy Delaghty (‘Diary’, p. 21), and, with fellow clergyman David Johnson, letters by the invented vicar Francis Wagstaffe (The Spiritual Quest of Francis Wagstaffe, Leominster: Gracewing, 1994).   5. Callaghan, ‘The Vicar and Virago’, p. 197.   6. Rahila Khan, ‘Winter Wind’, in Christina Dunhill, ed., A Girl’s Best Friend, London: Women’s Press, 1987. The story was omitted from later editions of the anthology.   7. Forward, ‘Diary’.   8. Barbara Schaff, ‘Duplicitous Games: Faked Authorship from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, in Peter Knight and Jonathan Long, eds, Fakes and Forgeries, Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004, p. 59.  9. A comparison with the longer author biography included in Forward’s novel Dead Young, published a year after Down the Road, Worlds Away under his own name, fills in those details omitted from Khan’s biography that identify the author as a clergyman: we learn, for instance, in relation to the varied locations, that Forward ‘worked as a teacher of English and Religious Education’ in Derby, ‘trained as a priest’ in Oxford and was a chaplain at London University (Toby Forward, Dead Young, London: Simon and Schuster, 1988, p. i).

56    Textual Deceptions 10. Forward, ‘Diary’, p. 22. 11. Dalrymple, ‘An Imaginary “Scandal” ’. 12. Ruthven interprets the title to refer only to the Asian girls, whose schools are ‘just down the road’ from where they live but in other respects ‘worlds away’ from the domestic ethos provided by their Muslim parents (K. K. Ruthven, Faking Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 24). The structure of Khan’s stories resembles the apportioning of stanzas to the voices of young people from different cultural backgrounds in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Comprehensive’, in Standing Female Nude, Oxford: Anvil, 1985. Thanks to Neil Roberts for this reference. 13. Quoted in Terry Trucco, ‘The Vicar’s Tale Irks Bookish Feminists’, Wall Street Journal, 17 June 1988. 14. Dalrymple, ‘An Imaginary “Scandal” ’. 15. Forward, ‘Diary’, p. 21. 16. Dalrymple, ‘An Imaginary “Scandal” ’. 17. Forward, ‘Diary’, p. 22. 18. Quoted by Harry Levin in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Lowell Blair, ed. Leo Bersani, New York: Bantam, 2005 [1857], p. 401. 19. Schaff, ‘Duplicitous Games’, p. 59. 20. Ruthven, Faking Literature, p. 112. 21. The phrase is Svetlana Boym’s, from The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. xvi. 22. Quoted in Ranu Samantrai, AlterNatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 18. 23. Boyd Tonkin, ‘Travesties and Titillations’, Independent, 17 June 2011; Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, p. 126. 24. Philip Larkin, Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions, ed. James Booth, London: Faber 2002. The novels of Nicci French are described as giving readers the opportunity to ‘enter the minds of not one but two exceptional writers – Nicci Gerrard and Sean French’, http://www.niccifrench.co.uk, accessed 28 January 2014. David Dwyer published his poetry in Aphra in 1974 as Olisvos’ without revealing his authorship, but won the Juniper Prize in 1980 for the collection published under his own name (Ruthven, Faking Literature, pp. 191–2). 25. Tonkin, ‘Travesties and Titillations’. 26. Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, p. 127. 27. Vincent J. Cheng, Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004, p. 18. 28. Anthony Godby Johnson, A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story, New York: Signet, 1994. All page references in the text. 29. Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener, New York: Bantam, 2000. 30. Michele Ingrassia, ‘Memoir or Hoax?’, letter to the editor, New York Times, 30 March 2008. 31. See Tad Friend on The Velveteen Rabbit, and other apparently daringly self-reflexive references to belief in the impossible or imaginary in Tony’s memoir, in relation to both Charlotte’s Web and Santa Claus; ‘Virtual Love’, New Yorker, 26 November 2001, pp. 88–99: 91, 99. 32. Friend names her as Joanne Victoria Fraginals, ‘Virtual Love’, p. 96. 33. Friend, ‘Virtual Love’, p. 90.

Gender Hoaxing    57 34. Elizabeth Vargas, ‘Believing in Tony’s Existence’, 21 July 2006, http:// abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2221860&page=2, accessed 21 January 2014, on the voice expert Tom Owen. 35. Richard Miller, ‘Anthony Godby Johnson, the Invisible Boy’, http:// armisteadmaupin.com/blog/?p=341, accessed 21 January 2014. Michele Ingrassia, ‘The Author Nobody’s Met’, Newsweek, 31 May 1993, implied that Monette might be the real author of Tony’s memoir. 36. ‘About Us: The Dignity of Children’, March 1997; Tony was played by Steven Parenago. 37. Friend, ‘Virtual Love’. 38. The photograph was identified in an ABC television news programme about hoaxes including the case of Tony, 20/20, 7 July 2006. 39. Friend, ‘Virtual Love’, p. 98; Joseph Major, ‘The Life of Tony’, Challenger 24 (Summer 2006). 40. Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust, from Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold, London: Duckworth, 1999, p. 23. 41. C. Jan Colijn, ‘Toward a Proper Legacy’, in Carol Rittner, ed., Anne Frank in the World: Essays and Reflections, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998, p. 100. 42. See also Edna Nashon, ‘Anne Frank from Page to Stage’, in Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, eds, Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 43. Maupin, interviewed in NBC’s television series Countdown with Keith Olbermann, 26 August 2006. 44. Miller, ‘Anthony Godby Johnson’. 45. Terminator, ‘Baby Doll’, in Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire, ed. Laurie Stone, New York: Grove Press, 1997. 46. J. T. LeRoy, Sarah, London: Bloomsbury, 2000; J. T. LeRoy, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, London: Bloomsbury, 2001. All further page references are in the text. 47. See Elizabeth Young’s review of Sarah, ‘Novel of the Week’, New Statesman, 28 August 2000; and Stephen Beachy, ‘Who is the Real JT LeRoy?’, New York Magazine, 17 October 2005. 48. Quoted in Beachy, ‘Who is the Real JT LeRoy?’ The photograph also featured in Cooper’s 2000 novel Period. 49. Beachy, ‘Who is the Real JT LeRoy?’ 50. Warren St John, ‘The Unmasking of J. T. LeRoy: In Public, He’s a She’, New York Times, 9 January 2006, p. B1; Warren St John, ‘Figure in J. T. LeRoy Case Says Partner is Culprit’, New York Times, 7 February 2006, p. B6. 51. See Savannah Knoop, Girl Boy Girl: How I Became J. T. LeRoy, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 52. Catherine Texier, ‘Lot Lizards’, New York Times, 7 May 2000. 53. Ibid. 54. Alex Gibbons, review of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, New Statesman, 9 March 2001. 55. See for instance Kira Cochrane, ‘A Literary Fraud Who is Not a Fake’, New Statesman, 28 June 2007.

58    Textual Deceptions 56. Alan Feuer, ‘Judge Orders Author to Pay Film Company $350,000 in Legal Fees’, New York Times, 1 August 2007. 57. Ibid. 58. Zygmunt Bauman, quoted in Anne Campbell, Delinquent Girls, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, p. 32. 59. Quoted in Jannah Loontjens, ‘Resisting the Author: J. T. LeRoy’s Fictional Authorship’, Image and Narrative, 22, 2008. 60. St John, ‘The Unmasking of J. T. LeRoy’. 61. Nathaniel Rich, ‘Being J. T. LeRoy’, interview, Paris Review 178 (Fall) 2006, pp. 145–68: 159. 62. Feuer, ‘Judge Orders Author’.

Chapter 3

Indigenous Envy: Wanda Koolmatrie and Nasdijj

Wanda Koolmatrie, My Own Sweet Time Leon Carmen’s deception in publishing a novel, My Own Sweet Time, about a young Australian Aboriginal woman under the name ‘Wanda Koolmatrie’ has elements in common with the other examples discussed in this study. Like James Frey and the authors of Jiri Kajanë’s Winter in Tiranë, Carmen presented himself, in the wake of his fraud’s exposure, as a literary artist manqué whose writing only gained a positive reception when published under an assumed identity. Unlike Frey, Carmen published his work as a novel rather than non-fiction, although the context of his imposture had meant that My Own Sweet Time was described as an ‘autobiography’ or instance of ‘life-writing’.1 As in the case of the Yasusada poet’s imitation Hiroshima survivor, the particular identity Carmen took on led to ideological contestation, although in this instance it did not take place alongside acknowledgement of the novel’s literary identity, but tended to submerge it. Wanda Koolmatrie’s novel My Own Sweet Time was published in Australia in 1994 by Magabala Books, a government-funded publisher that describes itself as ‘a not-for-profit organisation to preserve, develop and promote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures’.2 The following year, the novel won the Nita May Dobbie Award for a first book by a woman writer and was placed on the shortlist of the 1996 New South Wales Premier’s Award for Literature. In her author biography, Koolmatrie was said to have been born ‘in the far north of South Australia’ in 1949, taken from her Pitjantjara mother in 1950 and ‘raised by foster parents in the western suburbs of Adelaide’. ‘Koolmatrie’ was the surname of Wanda’s late husband Frank, so that her own family heritage was not disclosed. It is partly the overlap between what turned out to be two fictions – that of the novel itself, and that of its author’s biography – that led

60    Textual Deceptions to descriptions of My Own Sweet Time as autobiography rather than fiction, even though no claim about the link between the two was asserted in the book itself. Philip Morrissey identifies this tendency to assume the presence of autobiography as an example of the ‘repressive authenticity’ to which Aboriginal writing is subject,3 but such a slippage in generic labelling was made with even greater frequency after its actual author came forward, as if to emphasise the enormity of Carmen’s masquerade. In 1997, when a sequel to My Own Sweet Time was offered to them, editors at Magabala requested a commitment from Koolmatrie to take part in publicising the book before agreeing to publication, whereupon in March 1997 Leon Carmen admitted his authorship and the role of his friend and ad hoc literary agent, John Bayley, in writing the book. The nature of the deception and the timing of its revelation in relation to the sequel meant that Carmen’s confession was followed by the withdrawal of the book from sale, the opposite of the desired effect that the novels could at last be published under his own name; self-publication was the only option.4 Australian hoaxes Carmen’s admission took place in a setting of late-1990s hyper-­ awareness of deception in Australia, since it followed a week after the confession by Elizabeth Durack, descendant of early Irish settlers, that she was the artist of paintings by the invented Aboriginal artist Eddie Burrup, and less than a year after the exposure of Helen Demidenko, a woman of British descent and author of the Vogel Award-winning novel The Hand that Signed the Paper, who had masqueraded as a second-­ generation Ukrainian. In March 1996, the same year that Demidenko was unmasked, Paul Radley, an earlier recipient of the Vogel Award, admitted on national television that the prize-winning novel Jack Rivers and Me was written by his uncle Jack Radley, who was too old to be eligible for the prize and had published under his nephew’s name; while in June, the writer Mudrooroo, Australia’s ‘first Indigenous novelist’, was said to be of African-American and Irish but not Aboriginal descent.5 Critics have noted that distinctions between these literary ‘identity crises’ are overlooked by grouping them together as instances of Australian ‘contemporary literary hoax’; indeed, it seems that an inflexible generic classification, sometimes following an equally inflexible ethnic ‘taxonomy’, is shared by these different cases.6 Some commentators expressed scepticism about the reliability of Carmen’s post-hoc statements justifying his Aboriginal pretence on the grounds that otherwise his work would not have been published .7 Yet these statements were frequently

Indigenous Envy    61

and vociferously repeated: in his preface to Bayley’s account of the deception, Carmen quotes an unnamed theatre producer to the effect that ‘scripts received from Caucasian males wouldn’t be considered’, and Bayley makes the same point on at least four occasions.8 Thus the author’s own explanation has come to constitute the basis of a rigidly binary approach to his novel: the ‘reactionary populism’ of his ‘discourse about Anglo decline’9 was either self-pitying and unjust, or regrettable but true. By extension, Carmen’s successful impersonation was taken by different constituents to reveal the presence of conflicting extremes: both excessive anti- and pro-Aboriginal sentiment in Australian politics and public life. A criticism of the former view is evident in Morrissey’s claim that Carmen’s revelation of authorship was ‘opportunistically timed to ride on the current wave of anti-Aboriginal feeling’ in the mid-1990s under John Howard’s conservative government, while K. K. Ruthven argues the opposite, that the revelation showed the extent to which the Australian literary awards system ‘wilfully misrecognises white mediocrity as black excellence’.10 Official sanctions against Carmen and Bayley were levelled in relation to the ‘gender-specific’ Dobbie award. They had to return the prize of AU$5,000 and Bayley, in his role as literary agent, was taken to court for fraud on the grounds of ‘making a false and misleading statement’, although all charges were eventually dismissed. Yet in the cultural arena, Carmen was not taken to task for the pretence of being female, even though the narrator’s persona in My Own Sweet Time was constructed in revealingly minimalist terms in relation to gender as well as race. Wanda appears at times boyish – as a character who takes revenge on the racist schoolboy Trevor with a tripwire, envies the life of a truckdriver and favours wearing overalls – or gender-free, as the sudden and perfunctory introduction of a romance plot shows. Wanda declares of an unreliable acquaintance: ‘[Steve] appeared to be a taster, a variety fiend. He was no Gibraltar. I’d better keep that in mind if I planned to get entangled in his life. Which I did . . . ’ (103). Rather, the novel was criticised on the grounds of imposture in its representation of not only an Aborigine but specifically a member of the ‘stolen generations’, one of those children, often of mixed race, who were forcibly taken from their parents and fostered by white families as part of an assimilation policy that lasted until the late 1960s.11 Indeed, Carmen’s use of such a context has led to his novel itself being likened to other kinds of ‘stealing’, including that of Aboriginal land in the colonial era, as Alexis Wright asks rhetorically of falsely attributed Aboriginal paintings: ‘Is then our art the last piece of Aboriginality left to be plundered?’12 It may be going too far to read My Own Sweet Time’s invocation

62    Textual Deceptions of the ‘stolen generations’ as a knowing version of the ironically apt reference to theft that appears in the title of Bernard Holstein’s false Holocaust memoir Stolen Soul. Nonetheless, making Wanda a mixedrace Aborigine and thus a victim of the ‘stolen generations’ policy is useful in narrative terms, allowing her to follow a non-traditional path in a predominantly white, urban world. The representation of antiVietnam War activism, rather than contemporary events such as the Aboriginal land claims and equal pay strikes, was lamented by critics as a sign of inauthenticity that should have been detected.13 As Wanda pronounces in rather unlikely vein on her arrival in Melbourne, ‘Skin colour was nothing. “Us and Them” referred to anti-war stance, long hair, narcotic experience et cetera’ (17). The text itself is, like Kajanë’s Winter in Tiranë, characterised by representations of dissemblance and trickery that cannot help but appear metafictional with hindsight. The most obvious example is that of the character Bartos McQueenie, a former drama student turned confidence trickster who can ‘ “portray anyone he liked” ’ (68), including the Australian folk hero Ned Kelly. Bartos defrauds Wanda’s friend Simon Mordecai, who, perhaps like a reader whose disbelief is too readily suspended, ‘ “lives in storyland” ’ and is unable to ‘ “resist a stereotype” ’ (72). Wanda herself is a flâneuse who takes pleasure during her wanderings in ‘guessing [the] stories’ (61) of people in the street or being ‘someone else for a couple of hours’ (83), and whose Aboriginality crosses over into invisibility when a white friend rents a house for which Wanda also pays rent: ‘Officially, I didn’t exist’ (85). However, it is Simon’s account of his confectioner father’s move into ersatz chocolate that is My Own Sweet Time’s most striking instance of mise-en-abîme, as he describes it to Wanda: ‘Do you know what carob is? A tree. You can forge a bogus chocolate from its pods. Guilt-free gluttony. Father predicts an illustrious future for it . . . He’s calling it the Natural Selection.’ (186)

This pseudo-chocolate is ‘forged’, both created and counterfeited, and Simon’s description of its properties is shot through with textual selfconsciousness: Carmen’s novel itself offers the equivalent of ‘guilt-free gluttony’, that is, a counterfeit experience that may nonetheless be satisfying, although its future was ‘illustrious’ in a different way from the one its author might have predicted. Even the borrowing of a Darwinian term as an advertising slogan satirises the naturalist’s forecast of the disappearance of the Australian Aborigines on his 1836 visit to the continent.14 But the carob refers most meta-deceptively to Wanda herself. Simon’s father Gene Mordecai offers Wanda the chance to be the adver-

Indigenous Envy    63

tising face of Bliss Bars as a ‘Chocolate Girl’: ‘ “You’d be a symbol of Australia, that’s all. It’s about time this country stopped cringing” ’ (35). Although this incident, in common with the novel as a whole, resounds with what Morrissey aptly calls ‘a message of respect and agency’,15 it also overdeterminedly signals both the tendentious nature of the ‘chocolate girl’ imagery – Wanda wonders whether such a commission would ‘degrade my race even further’ (35) – and its own inauthenticity. Post-hoax reading The fact that My Own Sweet Time has appeared in two different editions published nearly a decade apart, one concealing and the other revealing Carmen’s authorship, demonstrates the potential for varied readings of the same text when published under a variety of names. As in Jorge Luis Borges’ story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, in which Menard plans to create a new text by transcribing Don Quixote word for word, the simple fact of ‘erroneous attribution’ can have ‘astounding’ effects.16 The reissue of My Own Sweet Time in a self-published format in 2004 under Wanda Koolmatrie’s name is apparently a response to reader demand, and features on the cover a drawing of a young woman walking up a staircase with her back to the viewer – a posture that, like the photograph on the jacket of Margaret B. Jones’ Love and Consequences, withholds ethnic, although not gender, identification. The use of Koolmatrie’s name here has the status of a literary pseudonym, since Carmen’s authorship is not disguised, yet neither is it foregrounded. The appearance of the new edition of My Own Sweet Time allows for a third variety of reading experience, acknowledging its status as a novel: the first, when it was believed to be the work of Wanda Koolmatrie, overlooked the text’s fictive nature for the sake of its Aboriginal author and protagonist, while the second, post-revelation but before the novel was reissued, also overlooked its fictionality in viewing negatively that representation and its origin. In the two polarised approaches, the same features took on opposite meanings. The fictional Wanda’s ‘relentless positivity’ and ‘enviably well adjusted’ outlook were later seen as the denial of ‘stolen generation suffering’.17 Her ‘distinctive’ perspective was at first enjoyed by such reviewers as Dorothy Hewett, who celebrated the novel as the tale of ‘an urban aboriginal girl making it in the tough city counterculture of the mid-60s’.18 Yet this urban setting came to seem undistinctive in its substitution of modern city life for anything specifically Aboriginal: as well as the fact that My Own Sweet Time is not by an Aboriginal person, it is, as Linda Westphalen puts it, ‘not even a story about’ one.19 My Own Sweet Time had been praised for its strikingly direct

64    Textual Deceptions opening in which racial difference is defamiliarised, and this first chapter appeared in Australia’s English Higher Certificate examination for 1996 accompanied by questions about narrator ‘viewpoint’.20 Later in the novel’s history, this moment was lamented as one of the text’s few instances of engagement with its protagonist’s blackness, an absence seen variously as a failure of authorial imagination or a textual version of the ‘triumph of assimilation’.21 The novel’s lack of detail has been interpreted with hindsight not only as a buried clue to its deceptive nature but also as a hint at the implied author’s attitude towards the Aboriginality he had created. In contrast to Wilkomirski’s ‘Holocaust envy’, or emphasis on ‘pathos’ and the wish for a ‘sense of community, spirituality and belonging’ shown by those who aspire to Aboriginal identity,22 neither Carmen nor his text exhibits such traits. Yet Wanda’s Aboriginal self-consciousness does not vanish from the text after the first chapter, although such consciousness never takes the form of a communal awareness or familial curiosity and at times draws instead on the discourse of black American experience. For instance, Wanda is grateful for the anonymity of stereotype, claiming that an acquaintance of Simon’s ‘ “probably assumes I’m your maid” ’ (39); suspects that she is being typecast as ‘Aunty Tom’ when offered the chance to advertise confectionery as Australia’s ‘Chocolate Girl’ (35); and neatly records the unuttered word in a telephone conversation: ‘Who are you?’ ‘Wanda.’ ‘Oh, you’re the –’ (43)

With the distance of reissue – one not often available to literary hoaxes – My Own Sweet Time has settled back into what Ross Chambers calls the ‘readability of the figural’,23 and can be approached simply as pseudonymous fiction. The first chapter of the novel establishes the narrative voice that Carmen claims was the origin of his literary project: one that would ‘speak directly and intimately to the reader’.24 The subject of this ‘intimate’ address is that of a black child in a white environment, related in a stylised version of a child’s voice mulling over her identity in the home of her foster-parents: One thing puzzled me though. Mum and Dad and the few people who came to the house were all white. I knew no other children. I was certainly growing, but I stayed black. Would I fade, or what? (1)

The facts of ethnic difference and adoption are defamiliarised here in a confusion of developmental with ethnic characteristics. Wanda’s

Indigenous Envy    65

youthful notions occur not just in the form of a literalised viewpoint, as in her description of the schoolteacher’s face looming over her: ‘And here was the teacher. Huge and wrinkled’ (2), but also as a matter of vocabulary. Her ‘stolen generations’ background means that she knows less about Aboriginal history than the implied reader does, and uncovers it, although not her own place in it, when looking at a picture of early settlers arriving in Sydney: [The Aborigines] did have sticks, as I’d heard, and their garments weren’t sharp. But no one had thought to mention their majesty. They stood like they owned the joint. Tough, athletic, proud. But pensive too, and perhaps a bit sad. In brief, heroes. (9)

The use of hipster vocabulary – ‘sharp’, ‘joint’ – to describe this scene turned out not to be a sign of the ‘new genre’ of urban-Aboriginal writing that Dorothy Hewett had hoped for, but something more abstractly literary: that is, Carmen’s interest in what he calls ‘bookish’ matters,25 such as the clashing registers and the distinctive skaz – the written reproduction of oral utterance – of Wanda’s narration that are evident here. Descriptions of Carmen in the wake of the scandal that emphasised his status as ‘either unemployed or a taxi driver’ are not simply instances of class-based condescension but, as Nolan argues, acknowledgement of his status as one of the very people who might claim ‘a loss of privilege in the post White Australia policy era’.26 Such descriptions might ignore the literary aspiration and achievement of Carmen’s fiction, but succeed in highlighting its duplicity and indebtedness to a backlash against both feminism and multiculturalism. White rage It may be difficult in the case of My Own Sweet Time to separate the impetus to write from the reasons for writing as an invented Aborigine, and to distinguish between those reasons and what Ghassan Hage calls the ‘white fantasy’ of those who appear to experience ‘multiculturalism as a loss of national reality’.27 Even Bayley’s term for Wanda as a member of the category of the ‘existentially challenged’28 reads as a satirical borrowing from the discourse of what he calls ‘political correctness’. Bayley’s denial of the existence of any ‘malice’ in the project and insistence that he and Carmen were at the ‘very forefront in the battle against discrimination of any kind’ simply restates the problem, since ‘discrimination’ here seems to mean campaigns for equal rights for women and minorities, described by Bayley as, respectively, the ‘feminization of culture’ and ‘affirmative action’ to the disadvantage

66    Textual Deceptions of ‘mainstream blokes’.29 Bayley offers such comments as if they were a straightforward explanation for his and Carmen’s actions, of equal status with the fact that their hoax was also meant to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Ern Malley’s appearance. In various contexts, including an episode of Australia’s ‘Jennifer Byrne Presents’ television show devoted to literary hoaxes, Bayley repeated his claim that My Own Sweet Time constituted ‘a swipe at political correctness’;30 clearly, such ‘explanations’ act to compound the impression that the deception was an instance of ‘white backlash’ directed specifically against multiculturalism and feminism. Paradoxically, Wanda was chosen as a protagonist and her ­background constructed because of what Carmen describes as his own experience of ‘ostracism’ and ‘sense of isolation’ as an ‘outcast’ that found embodiment in hers,31 to the extent that character and author share a year of birth. While Nolan argues that it was envy of institutional reparation for just this Aboriginal ‘ostracism’ that lay behind Carmen’s ‘own feelings of loss’,32 his description of this shared state seems at least equally rooted in anomie and artistic failure. Such an unexpected identification in the fiction, emerging as tendentious attack in the public sphere, seems to be at the root of Bayley’s noting without apparent irony that the Aboriginal characters in My Own Sweet Time are ‘clearly portrayed as being the existential and spiritual superiors of their European counterparts’.33 Carmen’s author biography as it appears in the reprint of the novel reads, ‘Wearied by a string of menial jobs, such as cabbie, musician, et cetera, he turned to story telling’ (191): the emphasis here is on ‘story telling’, rather than impersonation or satire, as an escape route from ‘menial’ work. Wanda’s experience of being an ‘outcast’, in Carmen’s phrase, was designed to give her a ‘unique perspective on the world’: it is as if his existential alienation was given what turned out to be controversial, and, according to critics, inappropriately self-pitying,34 expression in another. It seems that the initial successes of My Own Sweet Time were due to the value placed upon its innovative content at the expense of its literariness, as much as to any ‘special privilege’ of being Aboriginal. In 1980 Paul Radley had been eligible to win the Vogel Award for fiction by writers under thirty-five for the novel Jack Rivers and Me when his uncle Jack Radley was not; however, his confession that it, and two subsequent novels, were actually written by his uncle was not followed by a debate about the existence of a ‘special privilege’ for the youthful. In Radley’s case, like Carmen’s, it seems that critics’ and award panels’ interest in innovative content, presented from a viewpoint that in itself defamiliarises – in his case, that of a five-year-old boy with an invisible

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best friend – has at least equalled the importance of literariness. Yet, as Viktor Shklovsky argues in his essay ‘Art as Technique’, such defamiliarisation in itself may be taken to constitute literariness, so that the award panels for Koolmatrie’s Dobbie and Radley’s Vogel prize were responding fittingly to this quality. As Shklovsky puts it, ‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.’35 This statement could be read as a defence of the practice of imposture itself, which relies on perception and representation rather than knowledge and experience. In an extension of the argument that wilful critical blindness led to the success of My Own Sweet Time, Westphalen claims that the novel’s discourse is too metaphorical to resemble Aboriginal writing, which draws on such literary figures only in the case of ‘images of land, and the Dreaming ancestors who created it’.36 Even if this has any basis in truth, with hindsight, the novel’s title My Own Sweet Time itself sounds like a contemporary, individualised version of the Aborigines’ mythological era of the Dreamtime, an adaptation of a traditional form for its Bildungsroman plot, akin to James Joyce’s invocation of painting in the title of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The goal of Wanda’s Bildungsroman is not one of ancestral recovery, but that of becoming a writer: it is this journey of which we read, rather than the Aboriginal life-history whose presence was first assumed and later lamented. The notions of Bildungsroman and ancestral story are not entirely separate, since, despite Wanda’s interest in writers such as Proust, Joyce and Saul Bellow, her literary career begins as part of an Aboriginal theatre company, the ethos of whose founder Bill Jacob supports the very meritocracy that his author Leon Carmen elsewhere questioned: ‘ “Only the best are admitted to our circle. No one is invited just for being black, and no one is turned away for reasons of whiteness” ’ (175). Aboriginal fictions The contradictory responses to My Own Sweet Time after its real status became known include the novel’s implication in political debates about Aboriginal identity, despite its turning out to have little to do with such a subject. Westphalen argues that Magabala Books should have questioned the text on the grounds of its lacking the usual means of identification, since the character Wanda – treated as a metonymic substitute for the author Wanda Koolmatrie – is ‘not recognized by any Aboriginal community and identifies as Aboriginal only by virtue of her black skin.’37 In this statement, we see a customary conflation of levels of critique: that the novel disappointingly represents an ‘assimilated’

68    Textual Deceptions Aboriginal woman, and that this woman is not really Aboriginal at all. Although Westphalen attempts to anchor her argument in the language of the text, it is not clear whether her objections relate to its quality or the fact of the imposture. Other critics argue that the notion of ‘authenticity’ in this context is itself a suspect one, and that asking who is a true Aboriginal can be as punitive and restrictive as it may be ethical and empowering.38 In this way Carmen’s novel, for all its falseness, became genuinely symptomatic in its role within pre-existing debates as an instance of literary and representational politics. Westphalen’s remark that Wanda identifies as Aboriginal ‘only by virtue of her black skin’ is an effort to separate the absence of specific historical detail in the novel from its simple assertion of racial difference. However, it also echoes arguments made against the prolific novelist and poet Mudrooroo, whose ancestry has turned out to be most likely that of a mixed-race settler rather than an indigene, arguments satirised by the writer, who has described himself as, ‘ “some kind of blackfella masquerading as a blackfella” ’.39 The case of My Own Sweet Time is often cited in post-1996 studies of Mudrooroo,40 which, ironically, has the effect of re-Aboriginalising Carmen’s novel. Mirroring the binarism of the notion of authenticity itself, responses to questions about Mudrooroo’s ancestry have been polarised between those who appeal to the ‘truth of blood’ in ascribing an individual’s identity, and, by association, their writing; and those who acknowledge that, whatever his origins, Mudrooroo has ‘lived the life of a Blackfella’, and that the validity and quality of his writing remain unaffected.41 Although Mudrooroo has been subject to the same slide from imputations of extra-textual to those of textual inauthenticity, as if his ‘genealogy determined those published works’,42 his case does not fall into the same pattern as Carmen’s: that of a knowing deception followed by a definitive revelation. Yet the relationship between the imposture of My Own Sweet Time and Mudrooroo’s work is not simply associative. Carmen’s novel was hailed as the first indigenous novel by a woman writer, a counterpart to Mudrooroo’s 1965 novel Wild Cat Falling, about a nameless part-­ Aboriginal man. Like the basis of Yasusada’s fictive biography in that of the real writer Ogiwara Seisensui, Wanda Koolmatrie’s novel is a homage of sorts to Mudrooroo’s, her fictional life an upbeat riposte to his nameless protagonist’s alienated descent. The protagonists of both novels have a white father and Aboriginal mother. In contrast to Wanda’s assessment of herself as simply ‘black’, with a father who was ‘a white bloke, a shearer’ (4), Mudrooroo’s protagonist describes himself as a ‘half-breed delinquent’, an ‘odd species of native fauna cross-bred with the migrant flotsam of a goldfield’.43 As a child, he fears being

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taken away from his mother, although as an adult he cuts his ties with her and her Aboriginal history; in a reverse formation, Wanda has no memory of her Aboriginal mother but maintains happy relations with her adoptive parents. Like Wanda, the narrator of Wild Cat Falling has an itinerant existence in 1960s Melbourne, and uses a hipster discourse as Wanda does, but, as the pun in the novel’s title suggests, does so in order to convey disaffection rather than a comic collision of registers. While it was traditional Aboriginal costume that failed to be sufficiently ‘sharp’, in Wanda’s view, the narrator of Wild Cat Falling claims that the white world will ‘look down on you if you don’t look sharp’.44 Both are self-taught intellectuals, but while the interests of Mudrooroo’s protagonist are bleakly existential, Wanda’s have an upward teleology. The former adopts Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as the script for his own conviction of life’s meaninglessness. By contrast, Wanda puts aside her copy of Joyce’s Dubliners on the journey from Adelaide to Melbourne in a gesture that conveys the success of her flight from suburbia (15); her interest in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past shows her optimistic engagement with memory, in contrast to the sour flashbacks of Wild Cat Falling, and inspires one of her first pieces of writing, the lyrics to a song called ‘Madeleine Cake’ (74). Even Mudrooroo’s narrator’s recourse to self-justifying stereotype has a favourable counterpart in My Own Sweet Time. When he hears someone stir as he burgles their shop, the narrator of Wild Cat Falling thinks it is ‘probably some lousy Jew who counts his money every night’;45 by contrast, in My Own Sweet Time, the Jewish Gene Mordecai’s confectionery business makes him philanthropic as well as comically entrepreneurial. Indeed, it is tempting to see the Jewish characters of My Own Sweet Time as figures for the unreliability of ‘racial’ identification and for acknowledgement that the possibility exists of ‘conversion’ or elective belonging, of the kind that Mudrooroo describes in his realisation of the ‘ “absurdity of seeking a racial identity away from what I believe I am” ’.46 Such a possibility is represented mischievously in the context of Carmen’s masquerade, which was not one amenable to such conversion. Yet textual slippage emulates such transformation. While the myopic Simon in My Own Sweet Time compares himself to the AfricanAmerican Ray Charles (18), Wanda picks up Gene’s habit of addressing his son in a phrase that issues from one who ‘could only be Jewish’.47 Gene’s disapproving, ‘ “My son the schicker” ’ (17) is echoed in her own versions of the phrase as narrative commentary: ‘ “My son the jailbird” was unthinkable’ (49), and ‘ “My son the dupe” persisted in the abstract’ (79). This refrain culminates in Gene’s ambiguous lament for the absent Simon: ‘ “My son, the Invisible Man” ’ (124) is a reference not only to

70    Textual Deceptions H.  G. Wells’ eponymous character, but also to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel about the fate of an African-American man in the pre-Civil Rights USA. These utterances posit the priority of heteroglot discourse from various sources, literary and everyday, in place of the truths of ‘racial’ identity.

Nasdijj, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams Nasdijj’s essay ‘The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams’ was published in Esquire in June 1999. A contract for a book of the same title followed on the strength of the essay, for a collection of ‘personal essays’48 with the subtitle A Memoir. The blurb to the book, rather than the author biography, describes Nasdijj as having been ‘born to a storytelling Native mother and a roughneck, song-singing cowboy father’, while the biography both takes for granted and elides these details by substituting ‘lived among’ for ‘born to’: Nasdijj was born in the American South-west in 1950. His family were migrant workers, traveling between farms and ranches around the country. He has lived among the Tewa, the Chippewa, the Navajo, and the Mescalero Apache people.

The author biography concludes with the information that the name ‘Nasdijj’ is ‘Athabaskan for “to become again” ’.49 The book is prefaced with an apparently cautionary caveat, which both asserts its author’s truth-telling – ‘This work is a memoir and represents, to the best of my ability and my memory, an accurate reporting of facts and events as I know them and as they have been told to me’ – and makes allowance for alteration, referring to ‘the editorial decision to frequently change names, appearances, and locations’ in order to ‘protect the privacy of people’ (iv). Although the absence of such a disclaimer has been lamented in other cases, as it was after the exposure of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, its presence, as in Margaret B. Jones’ Love and Consequences, simply shores up the text’s appearance of authenticity. The memoir consists of a series of essays on the struggles of Nasdijj, a Navajo former migrant worker who tries to live as a writer in the wake of his son Tommy’s death, and those of friends and associates living on Native American reservations and suffering variously from alcoholism, foetal alcohol syndrome, AIDS and the effects of extreme poverty. The essays are self-consciously about the act of writing and the practical and physical difficulties of accomplishing it, as well as diatribes against the publishing industry which appear to offer an insight into the fraud’s origins.

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Esquire’s editor-in-chief David Granger described the original essay as ‘one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’d ever read’: the adjective seems to refer both to the subject matter, that of Nasdijj’s anguish at the death of his adopted son Tommy, and the poetic-prose style in which the relationship of father and son is described. In a review, MariJo Moore praised the memoir as ‘raw, poignant, poetic and painful’,50 in terms that similarly combine appreciation of style and content. Indeed, it is the very fact of this combination of ‘poetic’ expression with ‘raw’ experience that underlies Nasdijj’s success. The essay was a finalist in the National Magazine Award, while The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1999, a contender for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and winner of the Salon Book Award; one of its two sequels, The Boy and the Dog are Sleeping, won a 2004 PEN/Beyond Margins Award and ‘helped solidify Nasdijj’s place as one of the most celebrated multicultural writers in American literature’.51 ‘Navahoax’ In contrast to David Granger’s laudatory approach, Ted Conover’s New York Times review of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams described it in terms that focus on its unusual content rather than style, as ‘fascinating . . . unlike anything you are likely to have read . . . [Nasdijj’s] book reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society.’ Conover added that although ‘comparisons will be made to Lars Eighner’s Travels With Lizbeth and to The Broken Cord, by Michael Dorris . . . Nasdijj is sui generis’.52 Continuing such a focus on substance, the review posed innocent but, particularly with hindsight, unanswerable questions about Nasdijj’s habit of withholding ‘self-revelation’, including not supplying the details of his birthname or extant family members, and ‘choos[ing] his words carefully’ when describing his mother’s origins. Nasdijj’s defensive response to the review raised exactly the suspicions he was trying to allay. Conover began investigating the memoir’s factual basis, including the accuracy of its depiction of foetal alcohol syndrome. On 23 January 2006, coincidentally just three days before James Frey appeared on Oprah’s television show to apologise for his inventions in A Million Little Pieces, an article in LA Weekly by Conover’s student Matthew Fleischer revealed that Nasdijj was in fact Tim Barrus, who has no Navajo heritage, who had not been a child migrant worker, and whose assumed name is not a recognisable word in Athabaskan. The ­pseudonym’s putative meaning, ‘to become again’, thus takes on an ironic double meaning, suggesting

72    Textual Deceptions not only reclamation but imitation. Barrus’ parents were of Dutch and Scandinavian descent and he was brought up in comfortable circumstances in Lansing, Michigan. The brother on whom Nasdijj’s third memoir, Geronimo’s Bones, centres does not exist (he has a sister), and although Barrus and his wife had adopted a little boy called Tom in the 1970s, he did not die but was returned to the protection of the state two years later.53 As soon as Fleischer’s article appeared, Random House, the publisher of the two later memoirs, withdrew all remaining copies from sale. Commentators made demands for publishers to confirm the eligibility of their nominated authors for awards such as the PEN/ Beyond Margins award, which is ‘for books by authors of color’. Nasdijj’s case follows a familiar pattern in which assuming a false identity is said to be the precondition for literary success, and his Native American persona brought the acclaim that the gay fiction he published in the 1980s had not.54 The tropes of mixed-race identity and cross-cultural adoption that characterised Wanda Koolmatrie’s novel and Margaret B. Jones’ memoir are also present in Nasdijj’s writing, and they allow for, yet also distance, a sense of racial belonging. If the literary representation of adoption, as Marianne Novy argues, ensures that the ‘passing on’ of traits and culture takes place at the ‘intersection between heredity and nurture’,55 in Nasdijj’s memoir it also destabilises the notion of ethnic lineage. Adoption here is a matter not of a lost or acquired identity, as it is for Koolmatrie’s and Jones’ narrators respectively, but a way of attributing ethnicity by association. The narrator of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams observes with varying emphases that ‘Tommy Nothing Fancy was my Navajo son’ (2) and ‘My son was a Navajo’ (85), and concludes the chapter ‘A Movie Lives Inside My Head’ with a vision of his son, returned from the dead and grown into a young man about to leave for college: I force myself to look in the rearview mirror. He was standing there. A Navajo Indian. I could never ask more from him than that. (160)

Here, both the backward glance and the act of ‘asking’ emphasise the fact that it is an adoptive father who gains ethnic credibility from his son, rather than the other way round. In the title essay of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, Tommy dies of foetal alcohol syndrome, a condition from which the narrator also claims to suffer. The trope of adoption allows for Native American descent and foetal alcohol syndrome to be shared by father and son without demonstrating the ‘blood quantum’ of Native ancestry that literal lineage would entail. The representation of foetal alcohol syndrome in Nasdijj’s memoir con-

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denses several narrative necessities, as well as signalling the presence of intertextuality. It is an acquired rather than a genetic sign that nonetheless serves to establish Native origins, at least in certain circumstances – as Michael Dorris puts it, the syndrome knows ‘no ethnic boundaries’56 – and provides a tragic arc for a story of devoted fatherhood. Indeed, it was in response to Nasdijj’s unusual focus on ‘the caring father persona’ that Film4 began work on a feature-length film adaptation of The Boy and the Dog are Sleeping. Questions about the text’s authenticity led to the film’s cancellation, since, as its producer James Dowaliby put it, ‘admitting it was fiction would have ruined the emotional truth – the core of the book’.57 Mixed-race poetics Nasdijj’s contradictory and inconclusive descriptions of his ethnic origin appear throughout The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, drawing attention to the very source of imposture, although apparently honestly musing on an elective allegiance. In a scene at his son’s grave in the first essay, ‘I Hate Mary Potato’, Nasdijj uses the first-person plural to refer to himself and Mary, and, by extension the Navajo nation: ‘We do not say much. Certainly nothing meaningful. The Navajo abhor speaking of the dead’ (14), while elsewhere he claims that ‘white culture isn’t a culture at all. It’s an unculture.’ The fact of ‘looking white’ is incorporated into the narrative rather than appearing extra-textually, in contrast to the case of My Own Sweet Time. Nasdijj’s Navajo allegiance is one chosen from the ‘mixed mongrelism’ (200) available, since his descriptions of ‘being part Indian’ are qualified with a phrase repeated on several occasions: ‘or so my mama claimed’ (25, 59, 79). Yet this uncertainty is counterpointed by definite assertions of mixed-race heritage: Nasdijj says of himself, ‘You never questioned the fact you were a mongrel’ (33), using the image of a crossbred dog that is also repeated elsewhere (82, 83, 200). Nasdijj’s dog is herself a figure for racial difference, as a ‘blue heeler’, a variant of Australian Cattle Dog whose origins lie in the pedigree dogs brought to Australia with British settlers and bred with native dingoes. Nasdijj claims inconsistently that either he or his son named their dog ‘Navajo’ (25, 89). This act of naming both is the location of intertextual influence – in The Broken Cord, the Dorris family husky has the Sioux name ‘Skahota’ (14), after the ‘white-grey’ of its coat – and acts as a synecdoche for the memoir itself. It is as if naming something can make it so. Nasdijj’s comment, ‘There is no such thing as a pure-bred Navajo dog. Navajo dogs are mongrels. Mine is’ (82), implies that ‘a Navajo dog’ is simply the companion of a Navajo:

74    Textual Deceptions since all the dogs are mongrels, it cannot be the name of a breed. Like his adopted son, Nasdijj’s dog serves to cast authenticating light on him, but this time it is hybridity, not ‘full-blood’ or pedigree purity, that is shown to be genuinely Native American. In the chapter ‘Half-and-Half’, such an identity is likened, with deliberate bathos, to the ‘milky swirls’ at ‘McDonald’s in a cup of coffee’ (84). Such ambivalence is evident even in the memoir’s title with its foregrounding of ‘blood’, which conjures up notions of both ‘racial’ ancestry and bodily suffering. The act of writing itself is represented as riven by racial distinctions. Nasdijj describes the hybrid origins of his own practice as the construction of an Indian style to convey the details of white realism: ‘My mother gave me Navajo sings. My dad gave me a particular way of seeing things’ (83). In a review of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, Maria Russo responds to the memoir’s hybrid literary construction in terms of its ‘singular language [that] blends Native American mythological rhythms and imagery [with] stirring Whitman-esque catalogs’.58 As Russo’s reference to Whitman suggests, it is Nadijj’s use of poetic forms that is one of the most striking rhetorical properties of his writing. In ‘I Hate Mary Potato’, the narrator takes the opportunity of Mary’s migrant worker status to present an anaphoric catalogue: I knew Chippewa who picked cherries. I knew Muckleshoot Indians who picked apples. I knew Ute Indians who baled hay during baling season. I knew Alabama-Coushatta who picked Texas cotton. I knew Cherokee who worked tobacco. (4)

The narrator’s literary and historical expertise are on show together here, in his yoking of Indian tribal names to the commodities of white American life using a rhythmic repetition that reproduces the drudgery of the work described. Yet this literary effect seems indebted to Walt Whitman to the exclusion of native sources. Although Whitman never wrote his planned ‘poem of the aborigines’,59 his interest in Indian culture is evident in his own use of anaphora and catalogues of names in Leaves of Grass. In the section ‘Starting from Paumanok’, the poem’s speaker claims that the Indian legacy is ‘syllabled to us for names’: ‘Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla’.60 However, the speaker of Whitman’s poem consigns the ‘red aborigines’ to ‘the past’ and not the ‘future of the States’, while Nasdijj’s conclusion is to undercut his lyrical list with the observation that ‘the fields I knew Mary Potato worked were mainly plowed in bars and saloons in Gallup, New Mexico, watering holes of gin and sin’ (4). It seems that, for different reasons, the ‘catalogues’ of Leaves of Grass and The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams rely solely on the non-Indian perspective

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of viewing Native Americans as ‘noble but doomed’. In the final chapter of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, ‘My New Wife is a Teacher’, Nasdijj prepares to leave the reservation, along with the ‘part Navajo, part Mexican’ boy Mosika he is teaching, for ‘the world of white people’ (215, 213). His last view of the reservation as he drives away is of Mosika: ‘I look in the rearview mirror and he’s there, of course. Riding his bike around and around what used to be a BIA school for the Navajo’ (216). This second backward glance echoes the visionary one that Nasdijj cast at his revenant son Tommy, implying that Mosika too is dead, consigned to the past along with the abandoned school. The Indian persona On several occasions, Nasdijj claims with apparent contradiction of his statement about its hybridity that writing is regrettably monocultural, ‘a white people thing’ (83), emphasising his own ‘perversity’ (195) in persisting in the face of uneven odds, as he tells his former schoolfriends: ‘Writing and publishing is perhaps more of a white people game than even we gave it credit for way back when . . . I look white to you, but the people I write about aren’t white and so what I do gets assigned to that niche where we’re all familiar with the edges. The literary world is very, very white.’ (206–7)

Rather than addressing the artistic difficulties of writing, this statement conveys a version of the familiar lament that ‘looking white’ will hamper an author’s publication chances. This is despite the fact that the lament itself appears in published form and its author is self-avowedly a ‘racial slur of mixed mongrelism’ (200). When Nasdijj claims that writing is a ‘form of revenge’ on the white people he ‘hates’ (199), it is as if this hatred is really directed towards the publishing industry. An apparently racial binary stands in for a different opposition, that between talented writers and authoritarian publishers. Indeed, Nasdijj identifies himself oppositionally throughout the memoir: it is rejection by the white world (that is, by publishers) that makes clear his Indian allegiance. The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams seems at first sight to have little in common with the purported autobiography of Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree, other than the fact that both are award-winning texts resting on the invention of a Native American persona. By contrast to Nasdijj’s essays about disadvantaged adults caring for sick children, Carter’s utopian text relates the ‘wonderfully funny and deeply poignant’61 childhood story of its eponymous fi ­ rst-person narrator, an orphan who is adopted by his Cherokee

76    Textual Deceptions g­ randparents and learns to share their simple life and love nature. Forrest Carter’s earlier life is equally different from Tim Barrus’. He abandoned his original name, Asa Carter, as part of his reinvention as a Native American writer, having been in earlier life a violent white supremacist who had worked for the segregationist Governor George Wallace in the 1950s. Despite the claims made in his autobiography, Carter was in fact of British descent and had no Cherokee ancestry.62 Since he was the successful author of such fiction as The Outlaw Josey Wales, later made into the 1976 film (Clint Eastwood/Robert Daley, USA), Carter had no ostensible need to share Barrus’ preoccupation with unwarranted literary failure. The projection onto Barrus’ Indian persona of his conviction that his writing deserved better is evident in the letter that accompanied the unsolicited manuscript of ‘The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams’: ‘In the entire history of Esquire magazine, you have never once published an American Indian writer. This oversight is profound. I am a Navajo writer.’63 However, it is the representation of such a conviction on Barrus’ part, in its guise as that of a troubled and overlooked Navajo, that suggests the Native American imposture had a similar function in both these false autobiographies. Barrus’ apparently bruised sense of entitlement and resentment of authority found its symbolic expression in the memoirs of a Native American, while Carter’s extreme libertarianism and antigovernment beliefs took the form of a fictive return to the world of a pre-modern America and its inhabitants, ‘the one experienced by noble savages before the corrupting influence of civilization’.64 Dana Rubin claims that part of Carter’s libertarian – and, he argues, antisemitic – prejudice took the form of his entertaining ‘no respect for the agents, the editors . . . who ran the New York publishing world’.65 Nasdijj’s equivalent rejection of the authority of publishers and reviewers is evident in his return, post-exposure, to writing as Tim Barrus and advocating digital self-publishing: Getting published has to do with who you are, and who you know . . . I set out to prove it and I did prove it way beyond any reasonable doubt . . . I was so marginal, I was invisible. Until I became Nasdijj.66

In the case of both Asa Carter and Tim Barrus, a Native American masquerade functions to register discontent with particular elements of modernity67 and institutional power in the form of fake autobiography. ‘Marginality’ is interpreted to mean white masculinity.

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Intertextuality As in the case of James Frey, the most experiential-seeming detail in The Blood has its roots in the literature Tim Barrus read. Conover cites the work of Lars Eighner and Michael Dorris in terms of generic similarity to Nasdijj’s, but their work, and that of the Native American writer Sherman Alexie, is even more closely interwoven with Nasdijj’s writing than this suggests. Eighner was a correspondent of Barrus’ in the 1980s when both were engaged in writing gay fiction.68 His Travels with Lizbeth is an autobiographical account of time spent on the road with his eponymous dog, and Nasdijj’s debt to Eighner is that of a narrative of homelessness. Nasdijj too spends a winter in his pick-up truck Old Wanda with only his dog Navajo for company. While Eighner emphasises the realism of his text in relation to Lizbeth – ‘I do not write clever things she is supposed to have thought’69 – Nasdijj reverses and expands upon this convention, in recording not only his dog Navajo’s thoughts but also her utterances. In ‘Oñate’s Foot’, Nasdijj recounts the removal of a foot from the eponymous conquistador’s statue: The authorities are looking for whoever did this. ‘I told you they would’, my dog informs me. (151)

Authentication is blended with literariness here. The dog Navajo not only takes on the role of a stereotypically psychic Native Indian in her soothsaying, but responds as if psychically to an unspoken observation in the narration. Of another instance of reasonable canine discourse, in which Navajo recommends going by car instead of walking to an Indian burial ground, Nasdijj concludes, ‘She is a modern-day sort of dog’ (52). Not only does this – for once comically – comment on the content rather than the fact of the dog speaking, it also echoes the description Nasdijj gives of his wife: she is a ‘modern Indian’, who would rather Tommy Nothing Fancy die in a hospital than at home or in the open air (94). It is not only the dog’s name but the text’s associative patterns that make her a Native American, albeit one whose unwelcome modernity contrasts with the narrator’s authenticity. Nasdijj’s reliance on Michael Dorris’ The Broken Cord is even more evident than that on Travels with Lizbeth, given that it is an account of Dorris’ gradual discovery that his ‘full-blood Sioux’ adopted son Adam suffers from foetal alcohol syndrome.70 Since it was written a decade later than The Broken Cord, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams has to substitute simple misinformation – ‘Had the Indian social worker said the words “fetal alcohol syndrome”, I don’t know if I

78    Textual Deceptions would have done any of it differently’ (86) – for the painful process that Dorris recounts of identifying the syndrome itself. Yet elsewhere Nasdijj is able to transform his borrowings from Dorris to increase their pathos. Dorris’s prefatory caveat to The Broken Cord sounds much like Nasdijj’s: Much of this book is memory and as such is subjective . . . The names of some people, including Adam’s, have been changed or omitted to protect their privacy, but otherwise the events recounted are true, to the best of my knowledge and recollection. (vii)

Dorris claims to have been the first single man to adopt a child in the USA, and Nasdijj attempts to emulate this historically striking bachelorparent status in giving only minimal detail about ‘the woman I was married to’ at the time of Tommy’s adoption – another omission regretted in Conover’s review – although she is, as if in homage to Dorris’ partner Louise Erdrich, described as an ‘Indian wife’ (2). Nasdijj’s claim to be Athabaskan-speaking echoes Dorris’ description of living in an Athabaskan community before adopting his son (2). The nun who facilitates Adam’s adoption writes on a ‘yellow legal pad’ (4), just as Nasdijj’s narrator does (109); one of Adam Dorris’ few heirlooms from his birth family is a ‘child’s cowboy boot’ (78), and Nasdijj adapts the image for pathos’ sake: ‘I can still hold both his cowboy boots with one hand’ (2). He similarly amplifies a detail from Erdrich’s note, in the preface to The Broken Cord, that ‘I have watched my husband spend months of his life teaching Adam to tie his shoes’ (xi), which is transformed in The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams into Nasdijj’s memories of ‘teaching [Tommy] how to tie his shoes when I can barely tie my own’ (19). Yet it is the structure of the central relationship between father and son as it appears in Blood, as much as these individual details, that reveals Nasdijj’s debt to Dorris. Like his literary heir, Dorris is ‘of mixed-blood ancestry’ (22) but the adopted Adam, like Tommy Nothing Fancy, is ‘a fullblood’, ‘4/4th quantum’ (22, 47), who casts ethnic legitimacy back onto his father. Just as Nasdijj reports that sceptics such as the Navajo Mary Potato say to him, ‘ “You’re white” ’ (3), so Dorris’ narrator is told by one of the nurses at the hospital where Adam is being treated, ‘ “You don’t look like an Indian” ’, and is only recognised as such in relation to his son. Dorris describes how ‘no matter how frequently I was blamed by strangers for not resembling their image of some Hollywood Sitting Bull, I was still defensive and vulnerable’ (22), just as Nasdijj notes, ‘I loathed explaining it’ (3). The novelist Sherman Alexie claims that his warnings about the inauthenticity of Nasdijj’s work, based on his reading the galley proofs of

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The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, went unheeded. Alexie’s suspicions were aroused by the similarity between Nasdijj’s writing and his own, in particular his story ‘This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona’, which was, like Nasdijj’s essay, published in Esquire, and became a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 1993. Alexie claims of Nasdijj’s essay that ‘The whole time I was reading I was thinking, this doesn’t just sound like me, this is me.’ Alexie’s story, as he puts it, features ‘an autobiographical character named Thomas Buildsthe-Fire who suffers a brain injury at birth and experiences visionary seizures into his adulthood’, while Nasdijj’s memoir ‘features a child named Tommy Nothing Fancy who suffers from and dies of a seizure disorder’. ‘Quite the coincidence’, he drily concludes.71 In all these cases, and in contrast to Frey’s homage to Céline, Nasdijj has drawn on the structures of narrative and plot rather than the detail of language. As with the reprise of Wild Cat Falling offered by My Own Sweet Time, the changes to the material Nasdijj has drawn upon are as revealing as the similarities. For instance, the comic bathos of Alexie’s story is turned around in the uninflected poignancy and seriousness of Nasdijj’s, starting with their respective titles. In ‘This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona’, the protagonist Victor asks how his friend Thomas-Builds-the-Fire knows about the death of his father, to which Thomas replies, ‘ “I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. Also, your mother was just in here crying.” ’72 This is to parody readers’ expectations of Native American mystical knowledge, but also to replace it with a more everyday perceptiveness. The same is true later in Alexie’s story when Thomas describes walking to Spokane Falls in search of a vision. Victor’s father found him, warned that, ‘All you’re going to get here is mugged’, and drove him home. Rather than forestalling his vision, as Thomas says, ‘ “Your dad was my vision” ’, in his offer of practical rather than spiritual assistance.73 Thomas subverts the high seriousness of detailing Native Indian genealogy; he follows Victor’s description of himself as ‘ “Full blood” ’, with, ‘ “Not me . . . I’m half magician on my mother’s side and half clown on my father’s.” ’74 This is to parody, and also obscure, racial quantification by replacing it with a carnivalesque equivalent. Such a pattern, of meaning constructed precisely by the undercutting of sententiousness in Alexie’s fiction, is reversed in Nasdijj’s work. For instance, the essay ‘Runaway Horses’ transforms the narrator’s sighting of a wild horse near his home on the Navajo Nation reservation into a figure for himself: ‘I have been homeless like a runaway horse’, ultimately extending this simile into pure identification at the essay’s end: ‘We are all runaway horses. We are all draped across the backs of horses, d ­ esperately hanging on’ (22, 27).

80    Textual Deceptions Such a transformation may shed light on the identificatory process by which Barrus became Nasdijj, and it is also revealing about the nature of his work as a whole: this chapter is simply a long meditation on an image. Following the view that Indian identity is a matter of legal citizenship rather than existential preference, Barrus’ imposture was seen by commentators as one that should be treated as legal fraud. However, although it is ‘a federal crime for anyone not enrolled in or associated with a federally recognised tribe to sell their art as “Indian” ’, this law does not apply to literature.75 As in the case of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces being exonerated of fraud under the First Amendment on the grounds of its entertainment value, so the literariness of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams allows it to evade the strictures of prosecution, if not literary genre, since the only grounds on which legal action could be taken against a publication in the USA are those of copyright infringement.76 This is the case even though Barrus’ faux memoir may seem a greater affront than Carmen’s falsely attributed novel, which it is easier to detach from its purported author and consider on its own account. Although Tim Barrus’ assumption of Nasdijj as a literary and public persona was prompted by a wish for acclaim, he has not followed Leon Carmen and John Bayley in identifying and denouncing others who succeed. Instead, he has held fast to his polemic against the publishing industry and its alleged impediment to his freedom. While Carmen and Bayley took on what they judged to be an unfairly privileged identity in order to expose that privilege, Barrus used his chosen mask to reach a different target. Yet the wishes figured in the impostures of both My Own Sweet Time and The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams are not those of desire or empathy, but of a conservative libertarianism that imagines disadvantage and marginality to be the lot of white male writers.

Notes   1. See references to My Own Sweet Time as autobiography in Maggie Nolan, ‘In His Own Sweet Time: Leon Carmen’s Coming Out’, in Maggie Nolan and Carrie Dawson, eds, Who’s Who: Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crises in Australian Literature, special issue of Australian Literary Studies, 21 (4) 2004, p.  134; Adam Shoemaker, ‘Mudrooroo and the Curse of Authenticity’, in Annalisa Oboe, ed., Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003, p. 12. An extract from My Own Sweet Time was published in an anthol-

Indigenous Envy    81 ogy of autobiographies (Gillian Whitlock, ed., Autographs: An Anthology of Australian Autobiography, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996).  2. http://www.magabala.com, accessed 11 April 2012.  3. Philip Morrissey, ‘Stalking Aboriginal Culture: The Wanda Koolmatrie Affair’, Australian Feminist Studies, 18 (42) 2003, pp. 299–307: 300.   4. Wanda Koolmatrie (Leon Carmen), My Own Sweet Time, Victoria, BC, and Crewe: Trafford, 2004 [1994] – all page references in the text; Leon Carmen, Door to Door, Maroubra: Despot, 1997.  5. On Radley, see Robert Milliken, ‘The Teenage Literary Hero Who Could Not Live a Lie’, Independent, 15 March 1996; on Mudrooroo, Victoria Laurie, ‘Identity Crisis’, Australian Magazine, 20–21 July 1996; on Durack, Marguerite Nolan, ‘Elizabeth Durack, Eddie Burrup and the Art of Identification’, in Peter Knight and Jonathan Long, eds, Fakes and Forgeries, Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004; on Demidenko, Sue Vice, ‘Helen Darville, The Hand that Signed the Paper: Who is “Helen Demidenko”?’, in Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins, eds, Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.   6. Shoemaker, ‘Mudrooroo and the Curse of Authenticity’, pp. 12–13, 15.   7. Bruce Simms’ riposte to being confronted with Carmen’s claim to authorship was to observe that, ‘ “They’ve been lying for three years – now everybody suddenly thinks they’re telling the truth” ’; quoted in Morrissey, ‘Stalking Aboriginal Culture’, p. 301.  8. Carmen, ‘Preface’, in John Bayley, Daylight Corroboree: A First-Hand Account of the ‘Wanda Koolmatrie’ Hoax, Campbelltown, SA: Eidolon Books, 2004, p. x; the sentiment is repeated by Bayley in ibid., pp. 10, 13, 17, 39.   9. See Nolan, ‘In His Own Sweet Time’, p. 135, and quoting Ghassan Hage, p. 136. 10. Morrissey, ‘Stalking Aboriginal Culture’, p.  300; K. K. Ruthven, Faking Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.  191. Ruthven’s comment is at odds here with his earlier argument, that even when masquerading as an Aborigine Carmen found it hard to get his work published; ibid., p. 31. 11. See Peter Read’s report for the New South Wales Government’s Aboriginal Affairs Department, The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales 1883–1969, updated edition 2006 [1981]. 12. Alexis Wright, ‘The Politics of Art and Authenticity’, in Kaltja Now, Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2001, p. 129. 13. See Linda Westphalen, ‘Betraying History for Pleasure or Profit’, Overland 150 (Autumn) 1998, pp. 75–8: 76. 14. See F. W. Nicholas and J. M. Nicholas, Charles Darwin in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 137. 15. Morrissey, ‘Stalking Aboriginal Culture’, p. 299. 16. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, trans. Anthony Bonner, Ficciones, New York: Grove Press, 1962, pp. 45–56. 17. Nolan, ‘In His Own Sweet Time’, p.  142; Suzanne Donisthorpe, review

82    Textual Deceptions of My Own Sweet Time, Australian Book Review, 169 (April) 1995; Westphalen, ‘Betraying History for Pleasure or Profit’, p. 77. 18. Dorothy Hewett, review of My Own Sweet Time, quoted in Morrissey, ‘Stalking Aboriginal Culture’, p. 300. 19. Westphalen, ‘Betraying History for Pleasure or Profit’, p. 78. 20. See https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:mYcCJC1DpwQJ:www. boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au, accessed 10 April 2012. This is also the section extracted in Whitlock, Autographs, for its representation of racial difference from a child’s perspective. 21. Nolan, ‘In His Own Sweet Time’, p. 142. 22. Geoffrey Hartman uses the phrase ‘memory envy’ in ‘Tele-Suffering and Testimony’, in Daniel T. O’Hara, ed., The Geoffrey Hartman Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p.  441; Morrissey, ‘Stalking Aboriginal Culture’, p. 304; Maureen Clark, Mudrooroo: A Likely Story, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007, p. 102. 23. Ross Chambers, ‘Orphaned Memories, Foster Writing, Phantom Pain: The Fragments Affair’, in Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, eds, Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002, p. 109. 24. Bayley, Daylight Corroboree, p. ix. 25. Ibid., p. xii. 26. Nolan, ‘In His Own Sweet Time’, p. 136. 27. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 23. 28. Bayley, Daylight Corroboree, p. xiv. 29. Ibid., pp. 33, 82, 10. 30. ‘Jennifer Byrne Presents: Hoaxes’, ABC-TV, broadcast 10 March 2009. 31. Bayley, Daylight Corroboree, p. x. See also Rick Viede on his play Hoax, partly inspired by the scandal over My Own Sweet Time, who claims that Carmen ‘clearly related to’ and ‘felt for’ the character Wanda that he had created (quoted in Bridget Cormack, ‘The Outsiders Who Seduce To Win’, Australian, 26 April 2012). 32. Nolan, ‘In His Own Sweet Time’, p. 145. 33. Bayley, Daylight Corroboree, p. 33. 34. Carmen, ‘Preface’, p.  x; Nolan, ‘In His Own Sweet Time’, p.  146: ‘the purpose of the hoax was to prove that Carmen is, in fact, worse off than Wanda Koolmatrie’. 35. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds and trans., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, p. 12. 36. Westphalen, ‘Betraying History for Pleasure or Profit’, p. 78. 37. Ibid., p. 77. 38. See Wright, ‘The Politics of Art and Authenticity’, pp. 134, 137; Shoemaker, ‘Mudrooroo and the Curse of Authenticity’, p. 19. 39. Quoted in Shoemaker, ‘Mudrooroo and the Curse of Authenticity’, p. 19. 40. See for instance Clark, Mudrooroo, pp. 38–9. 41. Maggie Nolan, ‘Identity Crises and Orphaned Writings’, in Oboe, Mongrel Signatures, p. 109; Ruby Langford Ginibi, ‘Sharing Stories with Mudrooroo’, in ibid., p. 226.

Indigenous Envy    83 42. Shoemaker, ‘Mudrooroo and the Curse of Authenticity’, p. 5. 43. Colin Johnson [later Mudrooroo], Wild Cat Falling, London and Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965, pp. 31, 69. 44. Ibid., p. 102. 45. Ibid., p. 83. 46. Quoted in Eva Rask Knudsen, ‘Mudrooroo’s Encounters with the Missionaries’, in Oboe, Mongrel Signatures, p. 182. 47. Mariam K. Slater, ‘My Son the Doctor: Aspects of Mobility Among American Jews’, American Sociological Review, 34 (3) 1969, pp. 359–73: 359. 48. Nasdijj, ‘The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams’, Esquire, 1 June 1999. The phrase ‘personal essay’ is used in Esquire’s online note describing their good faith in publishing what they had believed to be ‘an astonishing personal essay’, http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0699– JUN_NASDIJJ_rev_1?click=main_sr, accessed 31 January 2014. 49. Nasdijj, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams: A Memoir, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000; all further page references in the text. 50. David Granger quoted in Matthew Fleischer, ‘Navahoax’, LA Weekly, 26 February 2006; MariJo Moore, review of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 12 (4) 2000, pp. 100–2: 102. 51. Fleischer, ‘Navahoax’. 52. Ted Conover, ‘A Soul That Won’t Heal’, New York Times, 15 October 2000. 53. Andrew Chaikivsky, ‘Nasdijj: Seven Years Ago, He Was Born in This Magazine. The Story of a Fraud’, Esquire, 30 April 2006. 54. Tim Barrus published five novels between 1985 and 1992, including My Brother, My Lover, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1985. Eighner (http://larseighner.com/homeblog/index.php/2006/01/nasdijj-is-timbarrus/#more-85, accessed 4 February 2014) both questions the experiential nature of these works and sees repetitions of their detail in the abusive scenarios of Geronimo’s Bones, while Fleischer, ‘Navahoax’, detects a covert narrative of desire for vulnerable young men in Nasdijj’s first two memoirs. 55. Marianne Novy, Reading Adoption: Family Difference in Fiction and Drama, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, pp. 197, 223, 220. 56. Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord, New York: Warner, 1989, p. 226. All further page references in the text. 57. Quoted in Fleischer, ‘Navahoax’. 58. Maria Russo, review of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, Salon, 26 October 2000. 59. See Ed Folsom, ‘Native Americans’, in J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds, Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, New York: Garland, 1998. 60. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman, ed. Stephen Matterson, Ware: Wordsworth, 1995, p. 22. 61. Rennard Strickland, ‘Foreword’, in Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986 [1976], p. v. 62. See Laura Browder, ‘The Curious Case of Asa Carter and The Education

84    Textual Deceptions of Little Tree’, in Elizabeth Hoffman, ed., American Indians and Popular Culture, Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012; and the documentary film The Reconstruction of Asa Carter (Mario Ricci, ITVS/Square 2 Entertainment, USA, 2012). 63. Quoted in Chaikivsky, ‘Nasdijj’. 64. Allen Barra, ‘The Education of Little Fraud’, Salon, 20 December 2001. 65. Dana Rubin, ‘The Real Education of Little Tree’, Texas Monthly, 20 (2) 1992, pp. 78–96: 95. 66. Tim Barrus’ blog, http://redroom.com/member/tim-barrus/bio, accessed 4 February 2014. 67. Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 8. 68. http://larseighner.com/homeblog/index.php/2006/01/nasdijj-is-timbarrus/#more-85, accessed 4 February 2014. 69. Lars Eighner, Travels with Lizbeth, London: Bloomsbury, 1994, p. xii. 70. Since Dorris’ death in 1997, there has been debate about the factual nature of some details of his account; see for instance Colin Covert, ‘The Anguished Life of Michael Dorris’, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 3 August 1997. 71. Sherman Alexie, ‘When the Story Stolen is Your Own’, Time, 29 January 2006. 72. Sherman Alexie, ‘This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona’, Esquire, 1993, reprinted in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993, p. 61. 73. Ibid., p. 69. 74. Ibid., p. 66. 75. See Suzan Shown Harjo, ‘Fakes and Phonies and Frauds, Egad: There Ought To Be a Law’, Indian Country, 15 February 2006. 76. Steve Russell, personal communication, 24 May 2012.

Chapter 4

‘Falsifying Downward’: Margaret B. Jones and James Frey

The memoirs of James Frey and Margaret B. Jones (née Margaret Seltzer) were both high-profile cases of belated revelation. While Frey’s memoir of addiction and rehabilitation turned out to be embellished in crucial respects, Jones’, about gangland life, was ‘entirely fabricated’, in the words of the New York Times.1 Both memoirs are characterised by an imitative stylisation: that is, the reproduction of another’s language. This is not ‘an artistic image of another’s language’2 in the sense of imitation of an individual voice or literary work, as in parody or plagiarism, but the ‘image’ of a genre: the literary addiction memoir in Frey’s case, a gangland Bildungsroman in Jones’. These works are performances, in a sense that extends beyond the language of the memoirs to the acting out of an artificial author’s biography, in interviews and publicity events; but they are concealed rather than openly acknowledged performances.3 Unlike parody, these imitations do not register mockery or dissent from an original voice, but are acts of literary aspiration and incorporation. As Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson claim, works of plagiarism or forgery are presented to fit with the way that the ‘intended victims’, that is, its implied readers, perceive the original. This marks a difference from Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of stylisation, in which ‘the stylizer and his audience’ are united in their recognition and appreciation of the difference between the ‘contemporaneous’ and stylised language in a text .4 Thus, as Morson and Emerson argue, the ‘success of Ossian may be indicative of how Macpherson’s contemporaries read Homer’,5 rather than offering either Macpherson’s own view of Homer or a faithful appraisal of him. However, although ‘parody’ will not do as a label, since it relies on the reader’s instant recognition of its judgemental imitation, neither do ‘plagiarism’ or ‘forgery’ exactly describe the literary activity of Macpherson, nor that of the two authors under discussion here, and elsewhere in this study. Although in more usual examples of stylisation the ‘interaction of two

86    Textual Deceptions speech acts is designed to be heard and interpreted by a third person’,6 in the case of Frey and Jones ‘interpretation’ is meant to corroborate the impression instead of the presence of a single, authentic intention. The existence of an ‘original’ utterance, that is, the inventions and sources on which each writer drew, is denied or disavowed by the second, the styliser’s. The stylised language in these cases is not meant to be ‘unmasked’ as part of the reading process, as Bakhtin argues is so in, for instance, Dickens’ fiction.7 In fact, the rather different kind of unmasking that took place in the case of Frey’s and Jones’ memoirs restored their ­double-voiced, ‘hybrid’ construction, although not in sufficient measure to save 19,000 copies of Love and Consequences from being recalled by the publisher, or to prevent Frey from undergoing a class-action lawsuit. These memoirs are unusual in that their history meant there was a temporal gap between the act of stylisation and its reception as such. For this reason, the usual ‘hallmark’ qualities of stylisation, such as its playfulness and studied artificiality,8 are necessarily absent. Stylisation does not take place in the kind of context described by Nikolas Coupland, in which members of a community deploy particular speech forms at a remove, both to question and to enact ‘the norms of tradition and cultural continuity’.9 In the case of Frey’s and Jones’ memoirs, stylisation is, rather, the product of a wish to be part of a particular tradition, or even an envy of the very right to stylise as a member of a community. This is a particularly fraught aspiration since both memoirs enact what William Ian Miller calls ‘falsifying downward’. He questions whether ‘a person who pretends to vices he does not have [is] a hypocrite’, or whether ‘culpable false-seeming’ runs only ‘in the direction of falsifying upward – ­pretending to virtue’.10 Whether or not these authors were ‘hypocrites’, both cases demonstrate the apparent paradox of the modern faux memoir’s habit of ‘pretending to vice’: drug addiction in Frey’s case and drug dealing in Jones’, along with a repudiation of middle-class origins in both instances. It is only with hindsight that the difference between the ‘two semantic intentions’, the implied and actual discourse, of Frey’s and Jones’ memoirs becomes apparent. The actual situation of the authors outside the traditions they have imitated might lead to accusations of an unsympathetic and condescending attitude more usually associated with parody. Binjamin Wilkomirski’s false Holocaust testimony Fragments also falsifies downward, in his case into extreme victimhood rather than vice. His masquerade as a Holocaust survivor appears to be dependent on a screen memory paradoxically more horrible than the reality it masked. In this sense it has its origin in a ‘desperate defence’, in Slavoj Žižek’s

‘Falsifying Downward’    87

phrase, against a privileged and sheltered life, in the conviction that it is, rather, suffering that constitutes ‘the ultimate guarantee that there is somewhere full, unconstrained enjoyment’.11 A version of such a defensive measure is also apparent in the cases under discussion here. Emma, the Margaret Seltzer character in Cusi Cram’s play A Lifetime Burning based on the scandal, utters such a perception in the form of dramatic dialogue: EMMA: I just couldn’t bear to write about my stupid real life. But then I began to think what if I had led said stupid life, but had overcome great odds to have it? What if I were me but better?12

Emma’s remark reveals an unlikely honesty about her motivation – by contrast, both Frey and Jones continued their deception even in their acts of confession – and a shortfall in the kind of psychic pleasure, an ‘excessive surplus-enjoyment’,13 that Žižek thinks she could expect, rather than simply a return to the status quo. In this chapter, I argue that the combination of the fictive and fantasied roots of imposture is fully readable in both Love and Consequences and A Million Little Pieces. While the former is a record of wishing for estrangement as the prelude to acceptance, Frey’s testifies to its own literary aspirations.

Margaret B. Jones, Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival The reality-effect sought by Jones’ memoir is clear in its declarative title, in contrast to Frey’s allusive one. Love and Consequences was published in 2008 and tells the story of five-year-old Maggie, a part-white, part-Native American child removed from her birth family when social workers suspected that she was the victim of sexual abuse. After three years of being shuttled between foster-families, Maggie ends up in Los Angeles’ South Central district in the poor but loving household of ‘Big Mom’, a black grandmother caring for her drug-addict daughter’s four children. Maggie, now known as Bree, becomes a surrogate mother to two young girls and adopted little sister of two older boys. She is drawn into the boys’ gang life, receives a Smith and Wesson .38 for her thirteenth birthday, and at sixteen learns to process crack cocaine in order to pay the family’s water bill and buy herself a pair of the latest Nikes. A scholarship to the University of Oregon propels Bree out of the ghetto and into work with International Brother/SisterHood, a rehabilitation programme. The very success of Seltzer’s public performance as Margaret B. Jones

88    Textual Deceptions led to its unmasking. An interview with Jones published in the New York Times’ ‘House and Home’ section in February 2008 represents her domestic interior as if typical of that of a reformed gang member whose circumstances have taken an upward turn. The interviewer, Mimi Read, notes that Jones ‘keeps up with gangland style, slang and people from her old life’, and describes what appeared to be the confirmatory elements of this lifestyle. It was such a focus that caused these details to be exposed as ‘mere signifiers’, in Roland Barthes’ phrase:14 when she read the article, Jones’ older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, contacted the publishers, Riverhead Books, to reveal that the memoir was entirely fabricated.15 In Read’s article, we encounter features that appear to signify class (a sofa ‘jacketed in a brown elasticised cover from Target’); gang life (Jones allegedly sports a tattoo of a ‘large, weeping pit bull across her back’ to commemorate a friend on death row); and ethnicity, albeit someone else’s (Jones has inherited Big Mama’s ‘shoebox’ of recipes, such as the ‘black-eyed peas, which were stewing with pork neck bones’ during the interview, while ‘Masai’, a South Central foster-nephew, is said to visit frequently). As Barthes argues in his analysis of second-order signs, such a myth is ‘neither a lie nor a confession’;16 its signifying system functions regardless of its veracity, as it does in Read’s article. While this might mean that we do not have to discard automatically such memoirs as Jones’, the revelation laid bare the necessarily superficial nature of the myth, that of a reformed gang member, by showing its construction to be stereotypical or even parodic. Hoffman’s telephone call to the New York Times prompted a confession by her sister. The author of Love and Consequences, Margaret Seltzer, has no Native American heritage, grew up with her biological parents in San Fernando Valley’s middle-class Sherman Oaks neighbourhood, attended Campbell Hall, a private Episcopalian school in North Hollywood, and then took credits in ethnic studies at the University of Oregon. She was not fostered, did not live in South Central LA and has never taken part in any kind of gang-related activity. There is no evidence even that the anti-gang-violence programme whose website Jones cites pre-existed its establishment by her agent, Faye Bender, on the author’s behalf.17 The construction of a memoir While the literariness of James Frey’s memoir both conceals and advertises its artificiality, in Jones’ case it is the presence of sociological detail – evidence of her research rather than her experience – that underpins the memoir’s masquerade. Love and Consequences opens with a

‘Falsifying Downward’    89

prefatory statement, entitled ‘Author’s Note on Language, Dialect, and Kontent’, of a kind absent from A Million Little Pieces and emphasising its aspiration to non-fiction.18 The following statement in particular from Jones’ memoir seems to follow the psychological double bluff described in Joan Riviere’s classic essay on the structure of masquerade: ‘I have combined characters and changed names, dates, and places . . . The experiences and sentiments, though blurred, are real. This is how we live’ (3). In its ‘mask’ of innocence, this disclaimer draws attention away from the greater imposture of the memoir itself that would attract ‘retribution’ if uncovered.19 The memoir’s Author’s Note also refers to its language, enhancing its masquerade as fact by including linguistic explanation alongside the admission of alteration: Please do not confuse the use of slang and my replacing c’s with k’s as ignorance or stupidity. I choose to write as we chose to speak in the world of my childhood. A world where Bloods and Crips have such a deep-seated hatred for each other that Bloods smoke bigarettes and Crips celebrate C-days rather than B-days (birthdays). I do it in order to offer up the whole story. (2)

Once more, such pre-emptive honesty is in fact a way of covering up ‘the whole story’. Rather than aiming for representational authenticity, certainly where it makes no difference in such spoken discourse as ‘ “Kall nine-one-one!” people yelled’ (11), it seems that Bree is signalling her own authenticity by her choice of spelling. This does not function as skaz but as concealed support for the representation of gang warfare. The missing C is a sign of the memoir’s constructed nature rather than its factual status. The literary nature of the verbal practices of Bloods and Crips in the memoir was apparent even to reviewers who otherwise took for granted Love and Consequences’ non-fictional status. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani noted that ‘some of the scenes [Jones] has recreated from her youth (which are told in colorful, streetwise argot) can feel self-consciously novelistic at times’, while Vanessa Juarez observed that ‘Readers of Love and Consequences may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue – much of which she remembers from childhood.’20 Given its artifice, it is tempting to view Jones’ imitation of gang argot as double-voiced or performative in the sense that dialect is not a straightforward ‘marker of regional belonging’, but signifies the presence of strategic selection in order to construct a social persona.21 However, in the case of Love and Consequences, the features of strategic selectivity and the construction of a persona through dialect were fulfilled in a literal way that was neither playful nor reflexive. Its artificiality22 rather than its hybridity makes it seem to be ‘the artistic image of another’s

90    Textual Deceptions language’.23 Such an effect is also clear in the memoir’s striking use of topical detail and brand names. In retrospect, the description of gang members’ cars and clothing appears ‘fake but accurate’, signalling literary inventiveness and research where originally it conveyed authenticity: Maggie’s friend Marcus drives a ‘silver-pearl Monte Carlo’ (140), her mentor Kraziak ‘a candy-red 1969 Chevy Chevelle Malibu Super Sport with two black racing stripes up the middle and a red flag (bandana) neatly folded and tied around the rearview mirror’ (6); Bree uses her drug-runner money to buy shoes: ‘I lined the bottom of my closet with new kicks: Nike Cortez; low and high-top red, white, and black Chuck Taylor all Stars; and Adidas’ (229). In her retraction, Jones claimed that she had based her memoir on the stories of friends and their families, so that what she wrote was anchored in fact; however, others have expressed the view that she was more likely to have been influenced by films and such high-profile gangland television series as the Los Angeles-set The Shield, or the Baltimore series The Wire.24 Adding to this impression of drawing on the texts of popular culture, as well as the implicit influences of her ethnic studies degree programme,25 when speaking in character, Jones mentioned the NBC sitcom Diff’rent Strokes (1978–86), about a situation that was the reverse of her own and one that was equally fictive: two black children are adopted by an affluent white family. Love and Consequences offers not only an ‘artistic image’ of a gangland memoir, or an American-dream story of success despite inauspicious origins, but also a self-advertised allegiance to narratives of ‘passing’ and cultural mixing.26 Jones’ persona was a longstanding one, recalled by university tutors.27 Her enrolment in the ethnic studies degree at the University of Oregon – from which she never graduated – turns out not to be the remarkable outcome of a life in the ghetto, but the underpinning of that life’s imagining. Yet it is only with hindsight that the academic research for Jones’ memoir appears suspicious. The journalist Dyan Foley records Jones’ comments from an interview about Big Mom’s physical punishment of her grandchildren: ‘ “When I got to college, I read all the theories about these beatings being handed down from slavery.” ’28 The reverse was clearly the case, since Big Mom was not better understood but created as the result of such reading. Foregrounding her research appeared to buttress the authenticity of Jones’ memoir until the revelation that the memoir itself was inauthentic. Gordon Sayre, one of Jones’ university tutors, argued for the value of both the research and the writing that arose from it, although this view was disparaged after the March 2008 revelations as the dangerous relativisation of ‘a postmodern perspec-

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tive’.29 Sayre had included an acknowledgement to his former student ‘Peggy Seltzer, of the Quinault nation’ in his book The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero. After Jones’ unmasking Sayre declared that he was ‘neither angry nor disappointed’ to discover the Native American imposture, and his verdict on a student essay in which Jones/Peggy Seltzer claimed to have spent her childhood on a reservation was that it was at least ‘backed up by enough research to be convincing’.30 The same was true of Sayre’s former student’s memoir. The Native American invention exists alongside an unspoken and less literal masquerade in the memoir, which expresses what Jones seems really to have wished for: not just being adopted by an African-American family, but adopting their identity in turn. The memoir’s jacket appears to ‘transliterate’31 this wish, in its image of a grey-haired black woman with her arm around a small, lighter-skinned black child, both photographed from behind. This does not directly convey an untruth about the memoir’s narrator, particularly since the author’s photograph appears on the jacket’s back flap, but allows for the inference that the protagonist may be the young girl whose face we cannot see. Narrative viewpoint The publishers’ high expectations of Jones’ memoir were made clear in the publicity material accompanying advance copies of the book, which addresses the recipient as ‘Dear Reviewer/Producer’, offers interview opportunities, and advertises her forthcoming book tour. In the House and Home interview, Jones mentions that interest in her story was expressed by a film agent.32 It is clear from the early reception of Love and Consequences that its success rested on a combination of the detail of gang life with an unusual narrative viewpoint, that of a young and ‘nurturing’ woman.33 Despite Jones’ reliance on them in terms of detail and structure, this contrasts with previous memoirs, including Colton Simpson’s Inside the Crips as well as Sanyika Shakur’s Monster,34 by men who had been active participants in gang warfare. Although Bree gives an account of initiation into the Bloods, and in interviews Jones described her gang membership as lifelong, her perspective is that of a bystander. In contrast to Shakur, who shot rivals and spent time incarcerated in ‘Juvenile Hall’, Bree’s bystander status takes on a literal form when the closest to prison she gets is a visitors’ room, looking in on her brother Taye’s life in California Youth Authority detention, and when she views events from a bedroom window, on one occasion instructing her adoptive sisters to lie on the floor to avoid the bullets that might fly in from other people’s battles.

92    Textual Deceptions The initial success of representing gang life from what the publishers’ material calls this ‘personal, emotional’ viewpoint is shown by early reviews of Love and Consequences. In the New York Times, Kakutani wrote a glowing account of Jones’ ‘remarkable book’ and noted, ‘Ms. Jones’s portraits of her family and friends are so sympathetic and unsentimental, so raw and tender and tough-minded that it’s clear to the reader that whatever detachment she learned as a child did not impair her capacity for caring.’35 As such praise for this unusual viewpoint suggests, the representation of South Central in Love and Consequences is contradictory. It relies for its cachet on portraits of gang loyalty and ghetto savoir faire, as descriptions of gang members as ‘soldiers’ and ‘warriors’ reveals, yet represents that ghetto’s citizens as constantly wishing to flee (to the bourgeois world of the implied reader, perhaps); it both laments and profits from the pathos of a constant danger of death, without including the detail of violence or crime. The deaths of Kraziak, Marcus and Bree’s brother Terrell – the last of these shot outside the house as he waited to collect his son for a weekend visit – are related at a remove and without context. In the terms of Žižek’s argument, the deaths of others assure this narrating subject of her own narrow escape from the danger that may offer ultimate enjoyment. The world represented in Love and Consequences is a utopian one in which a young white woman in black inner-city Los Angeles is regarded unproblematically and almost without remark as, variously, a family member, friend and girlfriend. During Bree’s early days in the South Central household, she takes on the role of braiding the two younger girls’ hair, and in turn Big Mom rather unexpectedly tries to do hers: ‘It always came out in embarrassingly crooked, loose cornrows, made even worse by the fact that . . . my hair didn’t really have the texture to hold it’ (8). Hair becomes an overdetermined site of the memoir’s ambivalence over whether to lament or deny racial difference. Bree’s adoptive brother Terrell laughs at her, a ‘ “white gurl” ’, for trying to use his afro pick on her hair, at which she is distraught: ‘It was the first time I had heard myself called white. I heard it as a powerful insult. Living here, white seemed to mean rich people who didn’t understand or care’ (46). Jones establishes here the attitude that is crucial to her narrative, in implying that Bree was blind to the usual structures of racial difference, and that class and local or family solidarity superseded any literal conception of it. Such an attitude to racial difference disguises Jones’ own whiteness. What looks like colour-blindness is, rather, an acutely attuned representation of race in America from the viewpoint of one who repudiates her own identity. The memoir’s only explicit reference to ‘racial tensions’ (264) in Los

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Angeles sets the scene for an account of the real-life assault by police officers on Rodney King in 1991, which appears as if narrated by a historicising voice distinct from Bree’s usual subjective one. This didactic voice tells the reader, at different moments in the text, about such facts as the history of the American Methodist Episcopal Church (69), Ronald Reagan’s drug policy (130), and the California Youth Authority juvenile detention system (147). It is as if the fictive and factual strands of Love and Consequences, the family story and its South Central backdrop, are insufficiently blended at these moments, an impression increased by the presence in the memoir of a fictive Rodney Smith, also brutally arrested by the police, alongside the historical Rodney King. In this instance, although King’s beating at the hands of white LAPD officers is acknowledged, Bree’s use of the phrase ‘racial tensions’ is tellingly imprecise and actually refers to friction between Koreans and African-Americans. In an effort to insert herself into this narrative, Jones reimagines Bree as a historical figure, that of Latasha Harlins. The death of Harlins, shot in South Central LA in 1991 by the Korean shopkeeper Soon Ja Du who thought the young black woman was stealing a bottle of fruit juice, is invoked here as ‘the real turning-point’ in the descent towards the Los Angeles riots the following year (264, my italics). Mention of Harlins also serves as a ‘turning-point’ in the memoir itself, by implying that it is the Koreans of South Central who are the black inhabitants’ racial antagonists and that Bree too is one of their victims. She relates an incident in which a ‘Korean storeowner’, as if seeing Bree as a latter-day Latasha, demands to see her money before she picks anything up: ‘I felt humiliated, but I did what she said’ (89). In narrative terms, attention is deflected from Bree’s – and the author’s – white identity, as well as from the notion of ‘racial tensions’ between white and black Americans. When the memoir’s fabricated nature is considered, such features stop being attributable solely to viewpoint and appear to be those of the implied author’s pathology. As is often the case with fraudulent memoirs, the travails recounted may appear with hindsight to be allegorical expressions of the text’s origins. I have argued elsewhere that in Wilkomirski’s Fragments, the habit of the adopted child Binjamin in post-war Switzerland of mistaking innocent structures, such as the household stove or a ski lift, for the apparatus of genocide represents fictively the author’s deluded state of mind. He too saw signifiers of the Holocaust in unlikely locations, including within his own biography.36 A similar textual phenomenon characterises Love and Consequences. After Terrell’s reminder to Bree that she is white, albeit ‘ “white an Indian mixed” ’, she goes to Big Mom for comfort to ask, ‘ “What if I don’t wanna be white?” ’ It is as if Seltzer’s motivation is spelled

94    Textual Deceptions out here. The wish of a fictional adopted child stands for the implied author’s fantasy. Big Mom’s reply seems directed at the memoir’s implied white reader: ‘ “Well . . . that’s white folk for ya. They thinking everyone wanna be white so they finna consider you white anyway. Like it or not” ’ (46). The gaze of such an implied reader,37 who may have consulted the author’s photograph displayed on the book jacket, reappears when Bree and Marcus drive to a suburban area populated by white people. Marcus is worried that the latter are ‘ “lookin at us” ’ and may ‘ “report a kidnappin” ’ since Bree is ‘ “too white-looking” ’. She denies this, as if also addressing the reader: ‘ “Naw . . . only black people think I look white. White people always think I’m Mexican” ’ (141). This remark suggests that it was not what the Korean-American novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee, in an article on Love and Consequences, refers to as the ‘Native American writer mystique’38 that led Jones to assume a Native American heritage. Slippage in the memoir between various ethnic labels – Native American, Mexican – that were suited to her ‘light-skinned’ look, without commitment to them or curiosity about their history, shows that they were only ever substitutes for the AfricanAmerican identification of Jones’ wish. Such a ploy is also apparent in the House and Home interview, where Jones observes of her (real-life) daughter Rya that ‘she was the first white baby I ever saw. I said, she looks sickly, is there something wrong with her?’39 This is an extension of Love and Consequences’ discourse, revealing an allegiance to black culture that works to disavow the speaker’s whiteness. The memoir offers a representation of the neediness of a child torn from her biological family which matches that of the ‘narcissistic’40 implied author. It is possible to discern a political agenda in Love and Consequences, and its narrator has been described as a ‘passionate advocate’41 for giving space to the voices of South Central. In her admission of invention, Jones said in her own defence that I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to . . . I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it . . . I thought I had an opportunity to make people understand the conditions that people live in and the reasons people make the choices from the choices they don’t have.42

However, Love and Consequences not only features an author who, in Ruben Martinez’ phrase, ‘wrote herself “authentically” in an unintentional parody of liberal sympathy’,43 although Jones’ words here attest to such a reading. It is also a parodic fulfilment of the reader’s capacity for emotional sympathy. The memoir may appear to be the confused affirmation of a political stance, but it is also, as the history of a delu-

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sion, the record of a search for a purely personal acceptance and ‘psychological gratification’.44 Love and Consequences accomplished this by taking on the details of contemporary American social history. In this sense, the memoir is an apolitical account of a psychically impoverished, orphaned ego attempting to find love from others who are similarly rejected and misunderstood. The disavowal of whiteness that Bree enacts in Love and Consequences is not the only instance of a diegetic representation of the text’s own meta-deception. Its first-person narrator is uncertain about her own origins and struggles to create a persona for herself, an impression increased by the proliferation of pseudonyms and alter egos both within and outside the text. Seltzer’s real-life nickname is neither Maggie nor Bree but Peggy, while ‘Margaret B. Jones’ is a constructed version of the notion of the implied author.45 The memoir’s detailed descriptions of the need to fit into gang life in terms of dress and speech also thematise imitation. The ersatz reproduction of the Bloods’ gang-speak accidentally generates a phrase that is fitting for a memoir whose protagonist turned out to be someone other than who she claimed: ‘ “Daymn, it’s good to bee you” ’ (153). With equally unwitting aptness, the words of warning issued to Bree by a drug dealer sound prescient about the high cost of failing to follow the rules of either the ’hood or the genre of memoir: ‘ “Never speak or act on anything you aren’t 100 percent sure of, or someone will expose your mistake and take you down for it.” ’46

James Frey, A Million Little Pieces While Margaret Seltzer relied on a mixture of popular and academic inspiration in order to construct her memoir, James Frey’s forebears are all literary. Seltzer narrated the psychic history of an ego craving love, disguised as a fantasy of adoption, while Frey’s memoir is a record not so much of his past addictions as of his reading. His repeatedly likening A Million Little Pieces to fiction by Charles Bukowski, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Henry Miller47 is one of the most revealing comments on the subject of this contested memoir. A Million Little Pieces was published in 2003 as the tale of recovery from drug and alcohol addiction by an author who claimed to have fallen foul of the law on several occasions and to have spent many months in jail.48 The memoir became a bestseller after its selection in 2006 for Oprah’s Book Club and its author’s appearance on her television show. In the wake of this publicity, the investigatory website Smoking Gun revealed that A Million Little Pieces included significant

96    Textual Deceptions passages of exaggeration and outright invention.49 Eventually Frey admitted that he had indeed fabricated his criminal record and the detail of what befell him in a rehabilitation centre. A publishers’ and author’s addendum was included in all subsequent editions of the book, which was subject to a class-action lawsuit by disgruntled readers. Although the invented episodes in A Million Little Pieces were not central to the memoir’s representation of addiction and recovery, which was based on Frey’s real-life experience in the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota, they constitute extremes of literariness as well as of reportage. The incidents that had appeared most authentic on the memoir’s publication, due to their very extremity and ‘bleak nature’,50 were precisely those that were shown to be most fictional. Such episodes include James undergoing root-canal work without anaesthetic at the dentist’s, a tragic train accident that resulted in the death of a schoolfriend, criminal behaviour which meant James was ‘wanted in three states’, his multiple arrests, a cocaine-fuelled confrontation with police, and a sexual assault committed against him by a priest. Other examples also partake of this contradictory representation, as allegedly truthful yet unlikely, including the resetting of James’s broken nose without anaesthetic; the stitching of his cheek and his later pulling out the stitches himself in his room, where, on another occasion, he tears off a toenail; and the suicide of his girlfriend Lilly on the day of his release from prison. At first, as Timothy Aubry argues, ‘These exaggerations served to reinforce, rather than undermine, [the] book’s plausibility’,51 at least partly because of a readerly sense of double bluff: it would be too audacious to pass them off as true if they were not. In this way implausibility becomes a guarantor of truth, since ‘its depiction of extreme suffering functions . . . as a reality-effect’.52 The particular embellishments that Frey added to A Million Little Pieces arose from his indebtedness to literary forebears. The exaggerated machismo and rebelliousness of James in the memoir are thus partly an expression of the anxiety of influence, as are the multiplication of addictions and criminal convictions and exaggerated bodily disintegration and excess. The decision to publish Frey’s book as a memoir meant the literary tropes that he borrowed from Bukowski, Miller and Céline had to become autobiographical facts. Frey claims that these writers’ use of the details of unconventional autobiography in their novels is similar to his own blending of fact and fiction, and argues that if his chosen trio ‘were writing now they’d be publish[ing] . . . memoirs’.53 However, the reverse seems to be the case: it is not these writers who are memoirists manqués, but Frey who regards his memoir as literary fiction. Bukowski, after all, opens Post Office with the statement, ‘This is presented as a

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work of fiction’,54 in an assertion of novelistic freedom, and rewrites the autobiographically based vignettes collected in Notes of a Dirty Old Man in fictionalised form for his novel Ham on Rye.55 It appears that following the style and genre of these writers’ works led Frey also to emulate the autobiographical content – theirs as well as his own – in his embellished memoir. Frey has consistently claimed that his book is primarily a work of literature, that he wanted it to be issued as fiction but was persuaded otherwise by his publishers, and that he is, tout court, a writer.56 It is as if Frey always viewed A Million Little Pieces as a novel, judging fiction to be a higher art than memoir, despite the fact that, during the three years before its deceptions were revealed, he also continued to make claims for its truth. This contradiction seems to arise from the tension between his literary ambition and the economic imperative of his masquerade. Frey observed that publication as part of Nan Talese’s list at Doubleday established his book’s literariness: ‘ “That imprint lends a lot of credibility to what otherwise might be considered a recovery memoir” ’,57 but it was as a memoir that it became a bestseller. Given the memoir’s transformation into fiction, with no textual alteration other than author’s and publishers’ notes, it may seem that the furore surrounding A Million Little Pieces is best described as a case of misattributed or overly prescriptive genre. Yet Frey’s statements are not confessions of fraudulence but assertions of literary aspiration. The fact that he spoke freely about his memoir as a literary work rather than a memoir before the revelations of 2006 suggests that firmly locating it on one side of the binary of fact and fiction was not always as important in the reception of this memoir as it later seemed. Rather, the distinction was one between kinds of prose: the aesthetic and the declarative. This is clear in Sean O’Hagan’s pre-publication interview with Frey, in which the interviewer describes the author as ‘delivering . . . an autobiographical tale in an essentially novelistic style’, and does not insist on an answer to his own speculation: ‘how much he has exaggerated or embroidered in the telling is anyone’s guess’. For O’Hagan, the opposing terms of fact versus fiction dissolve in the face of the text itself. His verdict, ‘Were it fiction’, James Frey’s ‘tale of personal decline and against-all-odds redemption would be scarcely believable. As a memoir, it is almost mythic’,58 implies that while fiction paradoxically requires more credibility than fact, the extremes of nonfiction may turn into the fictions of myth. The novelist John Burnside concluded similarly, writing after the exposure of Frey’s untruths: ‘To write good non-fiction requires more than just facts – it takes a degree of well-disciplined artifice.’59 In other words, the truth resides in the

98    Textual Deceptions authentic artistry of language. Frey’s distinctive style, and the narrative voice that he claims took years to refine, can be seen as tending towards the aesthetic and away from the authentic. Literary innovation Allan Borst observes that Oprah Winfrey, who chose A Million Little Pieces for her book club in September 2005, is not a close reader of the books she endorses.60 This is a trait shared by almost all of Frey’s critics, who have, rather, seen his book and its accompanying scandal in terms of its relation to truth-claims or its status as an addict’s confession, or as an instance of new technologies of communication.61 However, Winfrey did comment on the memoir’s narrative voice: ‘ “It’s like you were talking to us.” ’ This aptly describes A Million Little Pieces’ reliance on the literary device of ‘mak[ing] writing oral’, in Julia Kristeva’s phrase about Céline.62 Winfrey made this observation not in order to acknowledge the memoir’s literariness, but for an opposed effect: her reception of A Million Little Pieces as a work of self-help ‘made it a valuable true story of drug addiction’.63 In this sense it was not simply the book’s high profile in the wake of Frey’s appearance on Oprah’s show that inspired its unmasking as an embellishment, but its constitution in that context as just what its author had feared, a true-life ‘memoir of recovery’. Frey’s style, developed in A Million Little Pieces and also present in his later work, may be influenced by the ‘dirty realism’ of his precursors, but is also the site of the text’s most genuine literariness. The narrative voice of A Million Little Pieces emulates a spoken utterance in its ­present-time, reportage mode of short, descriptive sentences, rather than, as is the case of Margaret B. Jones’ memoir, reserving such discourse for the dialogue. Its idiosyncratic use of capitalisation, in examples such as those below, adds to the impression given by the memoir that it is making writing oral: Me and my Brother and my Mother and my Father. My entire Family. Going to the Clinic. (7) The Lecture ends and the Patients clap. (397)

Such capitalisation has various effects. Noting its resemblance to eighteenth-century habits of capitalising nouns subjectively, accord­ ing to their importance and for the purposes of reading aloud,64 is not entirely far-fetched, given A Million Little Pieces’ generic invocation of such ‘addict-subject confessions’ as Thomas de Quincey’s.65 The memoir also relies on the Coleridgean trope of the drug-induced vision, for

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instance in a section that starts with an apparent narrative of relapse – ‘I have an empty bottle in one hand. I have an empty pipe in the other’ – that is then revealed to be a vision: ‘I know I was dreaming, but it doesn’t matter. The liquor was real. The crack was real’ (259). A hierarchy of affective significance is evident in phrases where the capitalisation of nouns is erratic, such as, ‘it’s cold and it’s winter and the World has gone to sleep’ (41), and ‘He lost his House, his Wife, his Family, his mind’ (42). Such a practice also gives the narrative a fabular aspect, as in the example above where an unnamed ‘Brother’ takes his place alongside James’ ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, and constitutes an orthographic equivalent to the text’s declarative sentences through its emphasis on concrete nouns. Other stylistic effects in A Million Little Pieces, in the manner of Margaret B. Jones’ representation of street argot, concern the disruption of literary convention rather than a clear representation of spoken utterance. Like the lack of indentation for new paragraphs, avoidance of inverted commas has the effect, appropriate to a memoir about drugand alcohol-induced states and withdrawal from them, of making indistinct the origin and status of characters’ voices. James retells Leonard’s story about the shooting of his friend Michelangelo in a manner almost fitting to W. G. Sebald’s novels in confusing the narrating and narrated voices. It is Leonard describing holding Michelangelo of whom we read: ‘Leonard’s voice cracks and tears start running down his face. I held him as he bled. Just held him and told him how much I loved him’ (229). Such a narrative style also has the effect of blurring temporality. It is at first hard to decide here whether Leonard is speaking in this scene, or the narrator is describing his own actions. However, as with the mediated narration of a speaking voice in Sebald’s novels, such confusion is only a temporarily disorienting effect. Here, the use of tense clarifies what the absence of inverted commas concealed: that this is a past historic moment, not one taking place in the clinic. In James’ report of his father’s remark about Lilly, narratorial description and reported speech appear to overlap: Next time you see her will you tell her we said hello. I smile. I will. (343)

It is not clear at first whether this is spoken or internal speech, making ambiguous the expression of intent, ‘I will’, and thus James’ attitude towards his parents’ request.

100    Textual Deceptions Literary homage A Million Little Pieces opens with its protagonist waking up on an aeroplane with no memory of how he got there, experiencing ‘the feeling of something warm dripping down my chin’. We later learn that James sustained terrible injuries in a fall from a fire escape while resisting arrest under the influence of crack cocaine, and is on his way to a Midwest rehabilitation centre. This opening offers a paratactically described inventory of injury, related without emotion or comment as James passes his hand over his face: My front four teeth are gone. I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut. I open them . . . I look at my clothes and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood. (1)

It is tempting to read this opening as erring on the ‘creation’ side of what Patricia Waugh has described as fiction’s ‘creation/description’ paradox.66 The portrayal of James’ physical state as a discovery he is undertaking in present time while he feels his injuries makes it sound as if a persona is being invented as we read: this opening moment thus acts as an embodiment of the text’s fictional nature. Some of Frey’s stylistic ‘tics’67 are evident here, most notably the use of repetition. In this instance it takes the form of the rhetorical figure of anadiplosis, that is, repeating the last words of a clause at the beginning of the next one: ‘I look at my clothes and my clothes are covered . . . ‘. This conveys not just emphasis, but what Kristeva calls ‘written affect’:68 in this case, the gradual, numbed realisation of horrifying injury and illness. Yet it also conveys the memoir’s literary aspiration. Aubry sees ‘the simple declarative sentences’ of Frey’s style as the impersonation of ‘an unflinching confrontation with the facts’, in such passages as the following, describing James on his way to the rehab medical centre: ‘I have a hole in my cheek that has been closed with forty-one stitches. I have a broken nose and I have black swollen eyes. I have an Escort because I am a Patient at a Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center.’69 However, they are, rather, confrontations with and homages to other writers. The opening description of the state in which James finds himself in A Million Little Pieces echoes a trope that appears frequently in Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, when its narrator Henry Chinaski glances at himself or his reflection and describes or discovers his appearance as a record of his recent exploits. In one such instance, Chinaski, who has just beaten up a colleague of his friend Jimmy, undergoes a moment of self-consciousness about his appearance, a parallel to James’ on the

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plane: ‘My white t-shirt was stained with wine, burned, with many cigarette and cigar holes, spotted with blood and vomit.’70 As a schoolboy, Chinaski is dragged away from a fight because his injuries result in the spilling of not only blood, a bodily fluid acceptable in a conflict, but also his own pus: ‘I looked down. The front of my shirt was dark and there were splotches of pus. The punches had broken open three or four boils’ (173). While James’ catalogue of his appearance in A Million Little Pieces signals the secretly fictive nature of his memoir, Chinaski’s points to the autobiographical basis of the novel in which he appears: the signs of his drunken, brawling life are directly inscribed on the ‘white’, paper-like surface of his shirt. As if to signal the overlap of ‘tough guy’ with artist, Chinaski flees his rented room after knocking out someone with a typewriter.71 He presents himself at another rooming-house, taking care to describe his beaten-up state: ‘I had one black eye from the fight, another cut eye, a swollen nose, and my lips were puffed. My left ear was bright red and every time I touched it, an electric shock ran through my body.’ Thus the reader knows why the landlord questions Chinaski’s description of his vocation: ‘ “You don’t look like a writer.” ’ Chinaski’s riposte, which gains him rental of the room – ‘ “What do they look like?” ’ (294) – encourages us, as it may have done for Frey, to think that this is indeed how a writer should appear. The notorious episode in Frey’s memoir in which James undergoes root-canal dentistry, without the anaesthetic that is denied to rehab patients, is an emulation of Chinaski’s account of his experience in hospital in Ham on Rye. Chinaski’s treatment is for a case of ‘acne vulgaris’ so extreme that the doctor describes it as ‘ “The worst case I’ve seen in all my years of practice!” ’, an expression of heartless professional glee echoed by his colleagues: ‘ “Fantastic! . . . Look at the face! . . . The neck!” ’ (142). James receives a similarly expressed verdict, but one resounding with paradoxical admiration, when a doctor declares of his addicted state, ‘I have never seen so much and such extensive damage in someone so young’ (109). The difficulty of representing physical pain during Chinaski’s treatment for acne is registered in Ham on Rye through its customary minimalism. An introduction – ‘[The doctor] pushed the electric needle into my back. I was being drilled. The pain was immense. It filled the room. I felt the blood run down my back’ (145) – is followed by a laconic description of the rest of the process: ‘The needle got very hot but he went on and on’ (145, emphasis added), relying on its own version of repetition: ‘He jammed the needle into me. Then he pulled it out and jammed it into a third boil.’ The absence of any description of

102    Textual Deceptions Chinaski’s own reactions registers not just the difficulty of representing a bodily extreme but also the patient’s demeanour, since the watching doctors remark on his stoicism too: ‘He gives no sign at all’, until they provoke an unwelcome response from their patient: ‘ “Why don’t you guys go out and pinch some nurse’s ass?” ’ Frey reproduces a version of Bukowski’s hospital scene in A Million Little Pieces, in which the electric drill from Ham on Rye becomes, more conventionally, a dental one. The equivalent to Chinaski’s stunned observation of the outrage of machinery violating flesh, ‘I was being drilled’, is James’ ‘There’s a fucking drill in my mouth’ (78). In the place of Chinaski’s stylistically and psychologically minimalist response to pain, James narrates a stream-of-suffering at the drill’s first contact that relies on an inflated version of the former’s repetitions: The drill comes and the drill hits and I squeeze the [tennis] balls so hard that I think my fingers are fucking breaking. I moan in a steady tone that fills my ears so that I don’t have to hear the drill but I still hear it and I concentrate on the sound of the moan so that I don’t have to hear the drill but I still hear it . . . Bayonet bayonet bayonet. The hole gets larger and larger. Bayonet bayonet bayonet. (78)

As well as the analogy with weaponry that we see here, this sequence relies on an accumulation of other comparisons in its twelve-page extent, for instance with an electric shock at a ‘trillion volts’, a ‘razor’, and ultimately registers the impossibility of description: ‘A current shoots through my body that is not pain, or even close to pain, but something infinitely greater’ (81). James’ reactions to the procedure are both signalled and calmed, in the absence of anaesthetic, by squeezing the tennis balls provided by his mentor Hank. Even these details signify the presence of intertextual influence. In Ham on Rye, it is Chinaski’s friend Robert Becker who ‘ “had a childhood disease and . . . lay in bed one time for a year squeezing two tennis balls, one in each hand” ’ (253), an activity that produced a set of fearsome biceps, and it is Chinaski who is known to his friends as ‘Hank’.72 In both cases the tennis balls are the means of creating a macho persona out of apparent weakness, in literal and literary terms. Chinaski’s apparent stoicism – ‘ “Just go ahead and drill”, I told [my doctor]’ (145) – in the face of great suffering arises not from ‘resignation’ (162) but from what he calls ‘disgust’. By contrast, James is simply brave: he responds, ‘Let’s go, Doc. Bring it’ (75), when the doctor describes the ‘incredibly painful’ treatment to come. Chinaski suspects his acne treatment at the LA County General Hospital is ‘useless’ and that the doctors do not know how to treat him: ‘They were hesitant,

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uneasy, yet also somehow disinterested and bored’ (148). His condition and his experience in the public hospital constitute an outward manifestation of what he calls his ‘sheer alienation’ (262) in both personal and political terms, as he concludes: They experimented on the poor and if that worked they used the treatment on the rich. And if it didn’t work, there would still be more poor left over to experiment on. (148)

James, by contrast, receives nothing but compassion and respect from the doctors and staff during his private treatment. The dentist Dr Stevens hugs him at the end of the root-canal treatment, in contrast to Chinaski’s unnamed doctor who rebukes his patient for answering back: ‘ “Look, son, you can’t talk to us like that!” ’ (145). Both accounts end with the protagonist’s look at himself in a mirror. Chinaski describes the act of wondering how ugly a person could get. I would look at my face in disbelief, then turn to examine all the boils on my back. I was horrified. No wonder people stared . . . I felt singled out, as if I had been selected to be this way. (149)

He echoes Dostoevsky’s Underground Man’s equally mortified and defiant glance in the mirror: ‘I am a sick man . . . I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.’73 By contrast, James’ appearance is the result of medical procedures: My face is hideously swollen. The area around my mouth is splattered with flakes of dried blood. There are stitches protruding from my lower lip and my eyes are black . . . I look like a fucking monster. (85)

The ‘monster’ James invokes here is Frankenstein’s. This is a likeness that, as in the case of the invented poet Ern Malley,74 appropriately implies a literary avatar set free from its creator, even if James’ invocation of undergoing an electric charge and being strapped to the operating table, and his reminder to the reader of his visible stitches, suggests likeness to the filmic rather than the literary monster, as portrayed by Boris Karloff the 1931 film (James Whale/Carl Laemmle, USA). Once more James seems to be approvingly creating a reflection in the act of describing it, by contrast to Chinaski’s mortified discovery of his ugliness. While Ham on Rye represents the profound disaffection and solipsism of its narrator, A Million Little Pieces cannot help but cast its protagonist as ‘heroic’75 in his individualist quest to shake off addiction by sheer willpower. For James, the priorities of the middle-class world he has

104    Textual Deceptions apparently shunned remain intact. Only personal, ‘affective’ pain76 can replace the Depression-era, poverty-stricken family life that Chinaski fled, and his ‘lowlife’, heavy-drinking existence thereafter. The same inability to live up to its precursor is true of the representation of bodily disintegration that characterises A Million Little Pieces. Aubry argues that James’ ‘scatological descriptions’, particularly of ‘the copious amounts of vomit’ that feature in the text, function as an ‘honesty-effect’.77 James vomits every morning in the recovery centre, for instance: ‘It is a foul endeavor. I vomit twice and I have to clean my own vomit as well as the spit and the piss and the bloody tissue and the shit’ (78). Chinaski vomits frequently but incidentally, after drinking and fighting. On one occasion, he vomits into a car left unlocked on the street: ‘Then I started to puke. It really came. It came and it came, it covered the rear floorboard’ (260). This incident seems to be relived, and even amplified, in its antisocial detail as well as its parataxis, when James feels nauseous after dental surgery: ‘I can feel it coming and there’s nothing I can do to stop it and it comes . . . It comes and comes and comes. Red red red. All over the blanket, all over the chair, all over the floor, all over myself’ (83). In A Million Little Pieces such incidents may indeed act as ‘a form of de-concealment’, implying that since James is ‘refusing to shield any feature of himself, however disgusting or despicable, from the reader’s scrutiny’, everything in the text must be true, despite the impossible use of the present tense. The unstoppable outpouring of bodily fluid acts to suggest that the text we read is its verbal equivalent, alike in pure expressiveness. Kristeva characterises Céline’s prose in similar terms as fluid and oral,78 while one of Frey’s interviewers describes the process of writing A Million Little Pieces in an equally projectile way: ‘It came pouring out.’79 Such incidents signal both the memoir’s literary influences, and its failure to live up to them. While ‘disgusting and despicable’ might be a just description of some of Chinaski’s exploits, particularly in relation to women and those weaker than himself, James’s behaviour is decorous and conventional, even when he is drawn into arguments or fights with other inmates. These conflicts are pale versions of Chinaski’s bare-fist fights and drunken brawls, just as James’ romance with Lilly is – in this case, mercifully – a sentimentalised and monogamous version of Chinaski’s encounters with women. In Ham on Rye, Chinaski’s vomiting and descriptions of other bodily functions are, like the car incident, a mixture of ‘apocalypse and carnival’,80 and act as physical expressions of his verdict on the ‘disgusting’ nature of life. As he puts it, ‘The thought of being something didn’t only appall me, it sickened me’ (213). These moments have the opposite effect to those in A Million Little

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Pieces, and do not act as real-life moments of ‘de-concealment’. Rather, they indicate fictiveness; as Howard Sounes argues, Bukowski did not live ‘on the road’ for the ten years that his writing suggests, but for a far briefer period, interrupted by time spent living with his parents.81 This alteration of history may sound reminiscent of the embellishments in A Million Little Pieces, but constitutes, rather, the pattern-making of a fiction. The bouts of vomiting in both texts are unexpected signs of literary influence as well as records of addiction’s consequences. In Bukowski’s case, the mixture of realism and abjection in Ham on Rye arises from a fascinated horror with mid-century American life akin to that characteristic of Céline’s novels about Europe just before the Second World War. Kristeva aptly describes an episode of seasickness on board a boat in the English Channel from Céline’s Death on Credit as ‘one of literature’s most abominable scenes of abjection or nausea’, made readable only by virtue of its ‘humor and style’:82 ‘Mama collapses against a rail, she vomits herself up again, all she’s got . . . A carrot comes up . . . a piece of fat . . . and the whole tail of a mullet.’83 The protagonist Ferdinand continues this theme of a nauseatingly inverse menu in his description of his own sickness: ‘With a little more effort I think I could bring up French fries . . . if I emptied all my guts out on deck . . . I try . . . I struggle . . . a complete hank of noodles . . . with tomato juice . . . a drink of cider three days old.’84 Neither Frey nor Bukowski attains the precise mixture of ‘disgust and laughter’85 present in this scene, although in the former’s description of a particular bout in A Million Little Pieces – ‘The sickness is worse than usual. Thicker, bloodier, more chunks of stomach, more painful’ (48, my italics) – Frey comes close for once to Kristeva’s characterisation of the seasickness episode in Death on Credit by making it seem as if James’ own body is being vomited up like a rejected foodstuff, as she puts it: The body is turned inside out, sent back from deep within the guts, the bowels turned over in the mouth, food mingled with excretions, fainting spells, horrors, and resentments.86

The generic pact I suggested at the beginning of this discussion that A Million Little Pieces could be said to suffer from a misattribution of genre, as much as constituting a fake memoir. The text’s fictionality is signalled by its clear indebtedness to other novelists, as well as its inventiveness in terms of narrative voice and plot detail. However, the genre-transforming effects of both indebtedness and invention are somewhat qualified. The

106    Textual Deceptions alteration of genre in the case of A Million Little Pieces turns what might have been the story of a writer’s genesis into one with a teleology of recovery from addiction. Ham on Rye, on the other hand, as the wry pun on whisky in the title suggests, is a novel about the development of a writer, however much of a ‘ham’ he may be, who does not give up drinking. Although it implicitly records its own genesis, the novel’s only progression is through time in its chronological account. While his stylistic innovations may be all too imitable,87 Frey’s debt to Bukowski rests partly on a confusion of persona with fictional character, and to the indistinguishability, as he perceived it, of that novelist’s work and his life. Frey performed an opposite action to that of Bukowski and Céline: rather than allow fiction to arise from life, he fabricated the life itself and presented it as fact. Publishing A Million Little Pieces as a memoir rather than fiction seems attributable not only to what some commentators have described as the contemporary ‘decline of the novel’88 and the popularity of factual writing, but also to Frey’s work being not quite literary enough. The actual rootedness of some of A Million Little Pieces’ contested episodes in Frey’s biography suggests not a truth after all, but a failure to invent. Discovering that Frey did board a plane with minor injuries in the aftermath of suffering a blackout, that the train accident of 1986 did take place although he was not involved, and that he did spend time in police custody that amounted to a matter of hours rather than months89 does not make the reader more inclined to accept as fact the embellished version in A Million Little Pieces, but, rather, inclined to question why the details of plot needed a factual basis of this kind at all. The text does not fall satisfactorily into either genre, as Burnside laments of its failure to accede to memoir proper: ‘[Frey] gave up a golden opportunity to add to the vital work of verification that the memoir affords’;90 while, of A Million Little Pieces’ failure as fiction, Ted Frank claims that the memoir in general has come generically to be the ‘modern-day equivalent of a Philip Roth novel’, featuring as a character an author-surrogate who may even share that author’s name, but which could not ‘be successfully marketed as fiction’.91 As Linda, the literary agent for Emma, the Margaret Seltzer figure in Cram’s play, damningly puts it, ‘Emma, darling, fiction is for writers.’92 In the Note to the Reader added to all copies of A Million Little Pieces after 2006, Frey’s words register a retreat from the literary to the psychic, by explaining the fact that the memoir’s narrator James is someone ‘tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am’, because he was ‘the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience’.93 Where

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Roth’s fiction flaunts the metafictional potential of an author-surrogate character, and, as Kristeva puts it, Céline’s writing ‘bursts’ the ‘shell’ of apparent autobiography in favour of polyphony,94 Frey closed down the difference between author and narrator. The lawsuit to which A Million Little Pieces was subject is helpful in suggesting that, for legal purposes, there is no distinction between a false and a true memoir. Both have the function of diverting the reader. Margaret B. Jones’ Love and Consequences escaped the elaborate legal fate of Frey’s memoir, since its imposture was discovered so soon after publication that 19,000 of a print run of 24,000 copies could be recalled and destroyed, while readers who had already purchased it were offered a refund. By contrast, A Million Little Pieces had been in the public realm for three years before its deceptions were made public, by which time it had sold 3.5 million copies. The outcome of the court case brought against Frey and his publishers established two principles that are significant for a literary analysis of false or embellished testimony. First, Frey was not found to be in breach of contract, since he had been ‘bound only to write a book that was completely original and his own’, that is, was not plagiarised, rather than one that had to be true.95 The ‘originality’ of Frey’s book could even be seen as greater because of his inventions. Second, the judgement established that memoirs set out to ‘tell a story’, and are bought and read in order to ‘entertain’,96 rather than for any other purpose such as to sell or promote a product, whether or not they are factual. For this reason the charge of ‘consumer fraud’ against A Million Little Pieces was unsuccessful, nor were plaintiffs granted compensation for time spent reading the book under false pretences. The book was judged to have lost none of its entertainment value through the revelation of its invented nature. Yet such legal discourse does not fully address the literary question of a partially fictional memoir and its reception by readers. If the notion of a ‘generic pact’ exists, established along lines similar to Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’97 and signalling to the reader through intra- and paratextual codes whether a text is fact or fiction, it lies outside the realm of legal judgement.

Notes   1. Motoko Rich, ‘Gang Memoir, Turning Page, is Pure Fiction’, New York Times, 4 March 2008.  2. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 362.   3. Frey appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s television show in October 2005 and

108    Textual Deceptions January 2006, once before and then once after he admitted to his memoir’s embellishments (and again in 2011), and on Larry King Live in January 2006. In Jones’ case, performances took place in written, radio and film interviews. The recorded interviews include an EPK (electronic press kit) for reviewers, and two public radio interviews. A book tour that would have continued Jones’ performance was cancelled on 3 March 2008, the day it was due to begin.   4. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 362.   5. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 66.   6. Ibid., p. 65.   7. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 304.   8. Nikolas Coupland, ‘Dialect Stylization in Radio Talk’, Language in Society, 30 (July) 2001, pp. 345–75: 366–7.   9. Ibid., p. 372. 10. William Ian Miller, Faking It, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 242 n. 3. 11. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Camp Comedy’, Sight and Sound, 10 (April) 2000, p. 23. 12. Cusi Cram, A Lifetime Burning, New York and London: Samuel French, 2011, p. 45. 13. Žižek, ‘Camp Comedy’, p. 23. 14. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London: Paladin, 1973, p. 113. 15. See Motoko Rich, ‘Author Admits Acclaimed Memoir is Fantasy’, New York Times, 4 March 2008. Cram’s play A Lifetime Burning centres on the relationship between the two sisters in the wake of this act of ‘outing’ (the phrase is used on p. 58). 16. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 8. 17. Motoko Rich, ‘Foundation is Questioned After Memoir is Exposed’, New York Times, 6 March 2008. 18. Margaret B. Jones, Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, New York: Riverhead Books, 2008, p. 1. All further page references are in the text. Sinéad Moynihan points out that this Note recalls ‘the conventions of slave narratives’, as if even paratextually Jones’ memoir exhibits ethnic envy (Passing into the Present, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, p. 157). 19. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, in Herman Ruitenbeek, ed., Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1966, p. 210. 20. Michiko Kakutani, ‘However Mean the Streets, Have an Exit Strategy’, New York Times, 26 February 2008; Vanessa Juarez, review of Love and Consequences, Entertainment Weekly, 29 February 2008. 21. See Jannis Androutsopolous, ‘The Study of Language and Space in Media Discourse’, in Peter Auer and Jürgen Erich Schmidt, eds, Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation, New York and Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2010, p. 752. 22. The journalist La Shawn Barber asked, ‘Homies? Do people still use that word?’, in ‘La Shawn Barber’s Corner’, http://lashawnbarber.com/ archives/2008/03/04/crips-bloods-and-rats, accessed 25 October 2011.

‘Falsifying Downward’    109 23. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 362. 24. Constance L. Rice, quoted in Rich, ‘Foundation Questioned’. 25. The syllabus for ‘African American Politics and Culture’, an ethnic studies course at the University of Oregon in 2003, included material on ‘national affiliation’, hip-hop and strategies of resistance among African-American citizens, traces of which are apparent in Jones’ memoir. 26. Moynihan describes Love and Consequences’ imposture in such terms, as ‘the passing of a middle-class white woman’ as the ‘working-class “mixedblood” ’ author of a ‘ghetto memoir’; Passing into the Present, p. 147. 27. Jayna Brown, personal correspondence, 18 October 2011. 28. Dyan Foley, ‘Writing What You Know’, Newark Star-Ledger, March 2008. 29. Ron Hogan, ‘Margaret Jones Punditry Devolves into Farce’, Galleycat, 10 March 2008. 30. Gordon Sayre, ‘Fine Line Separates Memoir, Novel’, Register-Guard, 9 March 2008; Gordon Sayre, The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 31. The term is Moynihan’s, Passing into the Present, p. 146. 32. Mimi Read, ‘A Refugee from Gangland’, New York Times, 28 February 2008. This is contradicted by the agent representing film rights for Love and Consequences, who said no interest had been expressed by the time the fraud was uncovered, although she estimates that offers were likely to have followed (Tatiana Siegel and Michael Fleming, ‘Hollywood Goes On with the Faux’, Variety, 7 March 2008). 33. Read, ‘A Refugee’. 34. Colton Simpson, with Ann Pearlman, Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.’s Most Notorious Gang, New York: St Martin’s Press, 2005; Sanyika Shakur, Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member, New York: Grove, 1993. Both accounts, like Jones’, are prefaced with author’s notes about conflating names and characters; they too open on a traumatic childhood scene; like Jones, Shakur focuses on the Rodney King beating; as a child, Simpson is allowed to shoot with a .38, and he describes his footwear in loving detail. 35. Kakutani, ‘However Mean the Streets’. 36. Sue Vice, ‘Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments and Holocaust Envy: “Why Wasn’t I There Too?” ’, in Sue Vice, ed., Representing the Holocaust: Essays in Honour of Bryan Burns, London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003. 37. See Moynihan’s analysis of the popularity of ‘misery memoirs’ and their fictional equivalents among the ‘mainstream reading public’, whose lives are not depicted in what they read (Passing into the Present, p. 153). 38. Marie Myung-Ok Lee, ‘Fake Memoirs and the New Racial “Passing” ’, http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_04_012649.php, accessed 4 February 2014. 39. Read, ‘A Refugee’. 40. This is the psychiatrist Gail Saltz’s term, as quoted in Tim Jordan and Vanessa Juarez, ‘Joining the Liars’ Club’, Entertainment Weekly, 14 March 2008.

110    Textual Deceptions 41. Anonymous review, Kirkus Reviews, 2008. 42. Margaret Seltzer, quoted in Rich, ‘Gang Memoir, Turning Page, is Pure Fiction’. 43. Ruben Martinez, ‘Reality Bites Back’, Los Angeles Times, 9 March 2008. 44. Daniel Mendelson, ‘Stolen Suffering’, New York Times, 9 March 2008. 45. The publishers were criticised for not acknowledging the fact that they knowingly published Love and Consequences under its author’s pseudonym of Jones, claimed by Seltzer to be her gang name and also necessary due to renewing relations with her birth parents; see Motoko Rich, ‘Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud’, New York Times, 5 March 2008. Once more, the very act of deception enhanced the impression of authenticity. 46. See Clark Hoyt, ‘Fooled Again’, New York Times, 16 March 2008. 47. See for instance Laura Barton, ‘The Man Who Rewrote His Life’, interview with James Frey, Guardian, 15 September 2006. 48. James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, New York: Doubleday, 2003; all page references from this edition given in the text. Some reviewers expressed doubts about both the reliability and quality of the memoir on its publication, including Janet Maslin, who found the story fictively stereotypical (‘Cry and You Cry Alone? Not if You Write About It’, New York Times, 21 April 2003); Deborah Caulfield Ryback, who was not convinced of the likeliness of central incidents (‘Taking Liberties’, Star Tribune, 8 July 2003); and John Dugdale, who described the detail of reported dialogue as a sign of ‘phoneyness’ (‘Art and Toast’, Guardian 8 May 2004). 49. See the Smoking Gun account of Frey’s inventions, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/million-little-lies, accessed 4 February 2014. 50. Timothy Aubry, ‘The Pain of Reading A Million Little Pieces: The James Frey Controversy and the Dismal Truth’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 22 (2) 2007, pp. 155–80: 157. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., p. 167. 53. Sean O’Hagan, ‘Junk Male’, Observer, 18 May 2003. 54. Charles Bukowski, Post Office, London: Virgin, 1980 [1971], p. iv. 55. Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000 [1982]; Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, San Francisco: City Lights, 1973 [1969]. Even in Notes, however, Bukowski distances himself from the first-person of the newspaper columns collected in that volume by renaming this protagonist ‘Radowski’, revealing that they are short stories and not pieces of non-fiction. This is the opposite of Frey’s action: Bukowski confounds the generic expectations of journalistic non-fiction and tends instead to the novelistic. 56. See for instance Frey’s interview with Joe Hagan, ‘Meet the Staggering Genius’, New York Observer, 3 February 2003. 57. Ibid. 58. O’Hagan, ‘Junk Male’. 59. John Burnside, ‘A Different Kind of Truth’, Guardian, 28 September 2006. 60. Allan G. Borst, ‘Managing the Crisis: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces

‘Falsifying Downward’    111 and the Addict-Subject Confession’, Cultural Critique 75 (Spring) 2010, pp. 148–76: 155. 61. See, respectively, Aubry, ‘The Pain of Reading’; Borst, ‘Managing the Crisis’; and Mark Nunes, ‘A Million Little Blogs: Community, Narrative, and the James Frey Controversy’, Journal of Popular Culture, 44 (2) 2011, pp. 347–66. 62. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 137. 63. Borst, ‘Managing the Crisis’, p. 165. 64. On capitalisation, see N. E. Osselton, ‘Spelling-Book Rules and the Capitalization of Nouns in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes with Hans Jansen, eds, Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English, Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985. Others have suggested a likeness to Emily Dickinson’s poetry in its use of capitalisation as a means of crucial emphasis. 65. See for instance Borst, ‘Managing the Crisis’. 66. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London: Routledge, 1988, p. 101. 67. Anonymous review, Kirkus Reviews, 2003. 68. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 203. 69. Aubry, ‘The Pain of Reading’, p. 158. 70. Bukowski, Ham on Rye, p. 283; all further page references in the text. 71. Chinaski’s fear that the man is dead is echoed by James’ fear that he may have killed the Parisian priest whom he fended off viciously after a sexual assault. 72. The names of Chinaski’s grandfather Leonard and schoolmate Lilly also reappear in A Million Little Pieces as those of James’ friend and girlfriend. 73. Despite its autobiographical basis, Chinaski’s affliction takes on the look of a literary homage. Ernest Fontana likens Bukowski’s protagonist to Gregor Samsa’s insect incarnation in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ (‘Bukowski’s Ham on Rye and the Los Angeles Novel’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (3) 1985, pp. 4–8: 6); Howard Sounes points out a resemblance between Chinaski’s face, bandaged in an attempt to cure his acne, and Boris Karloff’s title role in Karl Freund’s 1932 film The Mummy (Bukowski in Pictures, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000, p. 2). 74. See Peter Carey’s fictionalised version of the Malley affair, in which the invented poet is presented as another version of Frankenstein’s monster, in Carey’s My Life as a Fake, London: Faber, 2003. 75. Aubry, ‘The Pain of Reading’, p. 165. 76. Ibid., p. 166. 77. Ibid., p. 158. 78. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 198. 79. Evgenia Peretz, ‘James Frey’s Morning After’, Vanity Fair, June 2008. 80. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 138. 81. Sounes, Bukowski in Pictures, p. 4. 82. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 146–7. 83. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on Credit, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: John Calder, 1989 [1936], p. 124.

112    Textual Deceptions 84. Ibid., pp. 124–5. 85. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 138. 86. Ibid., p. 146. 87. See the parody of the memoir’s self-stylised telegraphese and orthography, not to mention derivative plot, in Maslin’s review: ‘Maybe you have heard this Story before. Maybe it sounds like Movies. [Frey] ingested Substances for a long time and was very soused. But somehow he ingested those Movies too’ (‘Cry and You Cry Alone’); and in James Pinocchio’s (Pablo F. Fenjves’) parody A Million Little Lies, which opens, ‘I am crying. I am crying. Cry cry crying. Like. A. Little. Girl’ (New York: Harper, 2006, p. 1): Maslin too satirises the memoir’s habit of representing the healing power of tears. 88. See for instance Philip Roth’s forecast that the novel will become a ‘cultic’ form, in Alison Flood, ‘Philip Roth Predicts Novel will be Minority Cult within 25 Years’, Guardian, 26 October 2009; and Lee Siegel, ‘Where Have All the Mailers Gone?’, New York Observer, 22 October 2010 (thanks to Sadek Kessous for these references). 89. See Frey’s second interview with Oprah Winfrey, http://www.oprah. com/oprahshow/Oprahs-Questions-for-James, and that with Larry King, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/11/lkl.01.html, accessed 4 February 2014; and the Note to the Reader placed in all editions of A Million Little Pieces after 2006. 90. John Burnside, ‘Fact, Fiction, History, Myth – and Lies’, Telegraph, 12 March 2006. 91. Ted Frank, ‘A Million Little Plaintiffs’, Overlawyered, 12 January 2006. 92. Cram, A Lifetime Burning, p. 40. 93. James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, New York: Doubleday, 2006, p. iii. 94. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 137. 95. Peretz, ‘James Frey’s Morning After’. 96. Samantha J. Katze, ‘A Million Little Maybes: The James Frey Scandal and Statements on a Book Cover or Jacket as Commercial Speech’, Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal, 17 (1) 2006, pp. 207–34: 230. 97. Philippe Lejeune, ‘The Autobiographical Contract’, in Tzvetan Todorov, ed., French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, trans. R. Carter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Chapter 5

Self-Advertising Hoaxes: Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajanë

Both these fabrications, of Araki Yasusada, a Japanese poet who survived Hiroshima, and Jiri Kajanë, an Albanian short-story writer from the immediate post-communist era, are of an unusual kind. In some respects they resemble the ‘entrapment hoaxes’, in Brian McHale’s phrase, of Ern Malley and Alan Sokal, since the texts signal, if in muted fashion, their own deceptive status, and both depend on the knowledge of that deception for full effect. Yet there are definitional differences between the present cases and those of Malley and Sokal. Any definitive revelation of authorial identity has been withheld in relation to Yasusada even in the wake of the fraud’s exposure; while Kajanë’s stories have responded to their own publication history in becoming increasingly self-conscious about their deceptive status. Thus both cases have transformed themselves from examples of entrapment, a kind of hoax whose delayed exposure is meant for ‘didactic’ ends, into aesthetically motivated ‘mock hoaxes’ that signal their own inauthenticity.1 The very fact of such a transformation is what makes these examples into ‘stunts’2 rather than hoaxes, and demonstrates the difficulties of classification using intention-based categories. Describing these hoaxes as stunts suggests that knowledge of their particular kind of inauthenticity emerges during the course of reading, to be shared by publisher, reader and critic alike, and that this forms the background for enjoyment of the text itself. While the poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart made clear their responsibility for the creation of Malley and the fact that they considered his poetry to be a collection of ‘nonsensical sentences’, Sokal’s article did not necessitate a change of identity – it was published under his own name – except in the sense that his argument, which he likewise later described as an example of ‘fashionable nonsense’, implied a writer with an allegiance to a particular theoretical system.3 The hoaxes in Yasusada’s and Kajanë’s cases are not meant to expose the intellectual

114    Textual Deceptions imposture of those who accept meretricious writing at face value, but the opposite: they serve to imply that writing of merit may not be acceptable unless its author has the right kind of biography,4 even though both may consist of fictive texts.

Araki Yasusada The first appearance of Yasusada’s work was in the form of the published transcript of a discussion or ‘tape-essay’ on ‘Renga and the New Sentence’ said to have been held in Madison, Wisconsin, in December 1989, by three non-existent critics, Tosa Motokiyu, Ojiu Norinaga and Okura Kyojin.5 It included an example of a traditionally collaborative renga poem by three Hiroshima poets, all of whom turned out to be invented: Araki Yasusada, Ozaki Kusatao and Akutagawa Fusei. The translators are named as Kendrick Johansen – a Nordic incarnation of Yasusada’s probable author, Kent Johnson – and Tosa Motokiyu. It is tempting to see the sets of multiple and ‘unstable’6 authorship here, presented as if by reason of the imperatives of co-translation and of collaborative poetry, as figures for the palimpsest of voices and nest of personae that characterise the Yasusada saga. For the same reasons, the critic Mikhail Epstein describes the Yasusada phenomenon as a paradigmatic example of ‘hyperauthorship’, in the sense of a ‘variety of authors working within the confines of one (allegedly one) human entity’.7 During the 1990s, the poetry – or portfolios, since they were usually accompanied by or ‘embedded’8 in his letters and other material – of Araki Yasusada appeared in several literary journals in the USA and Britain, including Grand Street, Conjunctions and Stand. The publication of poems and other material as an appendix to American Poetry Review in 1996, entitled ‘Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada’, was the fullest and most high-profile appearance of Yasusada’s work, and eventually precipitated its exposure.9 A lengthy biographical note included in the journal alongside the poems claimed that Yasusada’s notebooks were discovered by his son eight years after his death. The notebooks’ pages were described as being filled with poems, drafts, English class assignments, diary entries, recordings of Zen dokusan encounters and other matter. In addition, the notebooks are interleaved with hundreds of insertions, including drawings, received correspondence, and carbon copies of the poet’s letters.

Yasusada was said to have been born in Kyoto in 1907 and moved to Hiroshima in 1921, where he ‘attended Hiroshima University sporadi-

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cally between 1925 and 1928, with the intent of receiving a degree in Western Literature’. Due to his father’s illness, Yasusada had to withdraw from the university to take up work ‘with the postal service’. The biography continues, In 1930 he married his only wife Nomura, with whom he had two daughters and a son. In 1936, Yasusada was conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army and worked as a clerk in the Hiroshima division of the Military Postal Service. His wife and youngest daughter Chieko, died instantly in the atomic blast on August 6. His daughter Akiko survived, yet perished less than four years later from radiation sickness. His son, Yasunari, an infant at the time, was with relatives outside the city. Yasusada died in 1972 after a long struggle with cancer.10

The biographical note describes Yasusada’s artistic background; although ‘virtually unknown’, he was no Malley-esque autodidact working in isolation, but was, rather, ‘active in important avant-garde groups such as Ogiwara Seisensui’s Soun [Layered Clouds] and the experimental renga circle Kai [Oars]’. However, it emerged that none of this was true and that no such person as the poet Araki Yasusada had ever existed. Most critics take for granted the authorship of Kent Johnson, a poet, translator and Spanish instructor at Highland Community College in Illinois, who has been variously copyright holder, ‘middleman’ and recipient of fees. Johnson, however, denies his authorship; rather, he claims that he and his co-editor Javier Alvarez, the Mexican composer, are the caretakers of the estate of the late Tosa Motokiyu, named as primary translator but actually the pseudonymous author of Yasusada’s poetry, whose true identity they have sworn not to divulge. The revelation of Yasusada’s non-existence was followed by the appearance of an editorial retraction in American Poetry Review,11 and the cancelling of contracts to publish poems in journals and in book form. As Marjorie Perloff points out, the biography itself contains hints at its subject’s invented status, including errors in Japanese nomenclature, the anachronistic citing of influences and words, impossible biographical details,12 and, through Yasusada’s work in the postal service, a nod to the similarly postal-clerk-cum-‘outsider’-artists Jean-Jacques Rousseau13 and Charles Bukowski. These constitute ambiguous clues in the literary journals where Yasusada’s work was published, but are clearly marked as fictive details in the book-length collection of his work published in the wake of the hoax’s exposure in 1997, complete with blurb advertising its deceptive status and such unusual endorsements as the verdict by the American Poetry Review editor Arthur Vogelsang that ‘This is

116    Textual Deceptions essentially a criminal act’, as well as one by Hosea Hirata of Princeton University that acknowledges both the poetry’s ‘fictitious nature’ and its eerie beauty.14 This unusual development, that the exposed hoax itself is used to advertise the work, is shared only, on a smaller scale, by Wanda Koolmatrie’s My Own Sweet Time,15 although there is not a genuine suspension of authorship in relation to the latter: Leon Carmen is identified in the ‘About the Author’ section at the book’s end, despite the persistence of Koolmatrie’s name on its cover, preliminary pages and copyright line. Yasusada’s biography bears a resemblance to that of the real-life Japanese poet Ogiwara Seisensui, whose literary journal Layered Clouds was founded in 1911. Letters and homages to Seisensui are included in Doubled Flowering. Such borrowed details include the fact that Ogiwara wrote under a pen-name (his real first name was To¯kichi) and advocated a new mode of verse in the form of ‘free style haiku’.16 His ‘revisions’ of other poets’ more traditional haiku, to give an enhanced impression of perception in the moment as well as immersion in nature, have some links with the practice of both Johnson and ‘Yasusada’, although theirs offers a dark version of haiku’s concerns and they usually favour longer kinds of verse. Ogiwara’s oeuvre is diverse, including literary criticism and travelogues as well as poetry, and his biography tragic. Like the fictive Yasusada, Ogiwara suffered the loss of his wife and daughter, who were killed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, a natural disaster characterised by terrible firestorms that might appear to prefigure those of the atomic bomb; during the war, his house was destroyed.17 In 1987, a decade before he borrowed the details of Ogiwara’s biography for Yasusada’s, Johnson had published as his own work four poems entitled ‘From the Daybook of Ogiwara Miyamora’.18 This echo of Ogiwara Seisensui’s name in that of a poetic character hints at the process of Johnson’s artistic practice and shows an early stage in its experimental trajectory. In the ‘Daybook’ poems, a fragment of historical reality is incorporated into fiction through Ogiwara’s surname, but the distinction between poet and mask is clearly maintained. In Yasusada’s case, fiction takes over and masquerades as historical reality. Yet it could still be argued that the markers of Yasusada’s fictionality are as clearly present as those in the ‘Daybook’ case, simply represented differently by being dispersed throughout the poems, biography and paratexts. These markers take the form not only of the anachronisms and solecisms identified by Perloff and other critics, but also of the very basis of ‘Yasusada’ in the biography of a significant Japanese literary figure. Remarkably, the very same four poems that made up the ‘Daybook’ by Kent Johnson are included among the poems of Doubled Flowering

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as the work of Yasusada. They are reproduced almost verbatim, except that the name of the speaker’s wife in ‘Convalescence’ has been changed from ‘Yosano’ to ‘Nomura’.19 Such a knowing act of repetition produces two entirely different works, transformed by their framing and making clear the radical nature of an apparently small shift in ascription. Indeed, David Wojahn argues that, post-revelation, ‘Yasusada is a better poet than Johnson’,20 even when the same poems, published under two different names, are at stake. Wojahn’s remark echoes that of the narrator in Jorge Luis Borges’ story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, an editor who declares of Menard’s project of rewriting Don Quixote word for word three centuries later that when he ‘read the Quixote – all of it – as if Menard had conceived it’, it was ‘infinitely richer’ than Cervantes’ version. Johnson has not reproduced an earlier canonical text, but his construction of an iconic witness utterance read in the knowledge of its inauthenticity shares the ‘new technique’ Borges’ narrator identifies, ‘that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution’, with equally ‘astounding’ effects. The detail of authorship transforms the experience of reading, as Menard’s editor argues, giving the example of an imagined ‘renovation’ of the ‘tenuous spiritual counsels’ of The Imitation of Christ if it were attributed to Louis-Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce.21 In contrast to such ‘confessions’ of duplicity as Monique De Wahl’s, which in effect turned her memoir Surviving with Wolves into fiction, or Helen Darville’s, which made her novel The Hand that Signed the Paper into one of imagination and not autobiography, the lack of any admission of authorship in Yasusada’s case is its crucial feature. Equally unlike Bruno Doessekker in his declaration that Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memories as related in Fragments are real and his own, Kent Johnson insists that he is not Yasusada and that the poetry is a construction by another poet. Thus the work remains suspended, still published under the name of the non-existent Araki Yasusada, and its literary merits still debated. Such a state of suspension is this work’s distinctive contribution to hoax poetics. Even those sympathetic to Yasusada’s work have produced in response their own (usually clearly marked) hoaxes, or have published letters and critical pieces under a variety of pseudonyms.22 A range of ways of referring to the poems’ creator has been adopted. Marjorie Perloff takes Johnson, ‘as a matter of convenience’, to be the poems’ author, a decision I will follow in this chapter, while others use the terms ‘Yasusada author’, ‘Yasusada poet’, ‘Yasusada project or the Yasusada’.23

118    Textual Deceptions Versions of personae The poems ‘Trilobytes’ and ‘High Altitude Photo of Hiroshima’ have appeared in three different contexts: in the ‘Daybook of Ogiwara Miyamora’ collection by Kent Johnson; some years later, under Johnson’s own name and without the Ogiwara persona, in John Bradley’s poetry anthology Atomic Ghost;24 and in a state of suspended authorship in Doubled Flowering, as the work of a ‘Yasusada’ who was, by the time of the book’s publication, known not to exist. While a New Critical reading would suggest that the poems should not change in these different contexts, it is clear that the relations between speaker and implied reader do in fact shift subtly and significantly. ‘High Altitude Photo of Hiroshima (circa 1944)’ is dated 7 March 1957 and dedicated to ‘the great artist, Piet Mondrian’; in a footnote – added by an unidentified source in Ogiwara’s case, by the ‘translators’ in Yasusada’s – the artist’s work is described as being ‘distinguished by its geometric austerity’, as if in parallel to the pattern of the title’s photograph. In its first appearance in the ‘Daybook of Ogiwara Miyamora’, the poem is a dramatic monologue whose speaker, constructed implicitly as a hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivor,25 is contemplating or imagining an aerial photograph of Hiroshima city taken a year before the bombing. Indeed, this is a poem overwhelmed for both speaker and reader by foreshadowing, the attack conjured up by the ominous phrase of the title as well as by the date of composition, however archaic and imprecise ‘circa 1944’ may sound. Not only does the title’s ‘high altitude’ suggest the impersonality of military planning, but it adopts the contemporary phraseology used to describe the attack. The three planes that made up the atomic bombing mission were said to have entered Japanese airspace at a ‘very high altitude’, one of the reasons that local radar control considered them to be simply on a reconnaissance mission, and were accompanied by a plane dedicated to ‘strike observation and photography’.26 Thus the poem implies that reconnaissance and attack, an act of devastation and its record in photography, are as hard to separate as the forward and backward look of the poem’s speaker. Its sense of a grim ‘anticipation’27 that has since been fulfilled is evident in the poem’s opening: There must be a schoolgirl deep inside there, stuttering, almost weeping, to remember the main cities of our ally, Germany.

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Coming from Ogiwara, these lines may provoke in the reader an uneasily divided response. While the invocation of the ‘schoolgirl’, invisibly present ‘deep inside’ both the photograph and the soon-to-be bombed city, cannot help but flash forward to the loss of children’s lives in the atomic bombing, her ‘stuttering’ and ‘weeping’ suggest incoherent pity for, and also fear of, the precision bombings that had destroyed most German industrial cities by late 1944, but had proved harder to undertake in Japan. Hiroshima in particular had been spared the conventional bombing of air raids. The schoolgirl’s having to ‘remember’ those cities conveys economically the fact that they no longer exist. The melancholy tone and stark reminder by Ogiwara that Germany was ‘our’ ally sounds like contrition. Uttered by ‘Yasusada’, all of this alters. ‘Germany, our ally’ sounds like a fictively bold reminder of the speaker’s knowledge of ill-doing; its own slightly ‘stuttering’ or posturing phrasing may remind us that, like the poem’s footnote, it is not only the speaker but the implied poet who is faux-Japanese. The ambivalence of the Ogiwara version, in which the victims’ fear and the inevitability of their fate are placed morally and temporally side by side, goes missing here. We may take for granted the fact that both versions of ‘High Altitude Photo of Hiroshima’ were originally written in English, despite the list of three translators included in Doubled Flowering, and while this is a part of the Ogiwara creation that is easy to accept, its embedding of both an English-speaking author and reader in the Yasusada poem acts to different effect. Indeed, in the Yasusada version of the poem in Doubled Flowering, the use of the pseudonym affects everything, starting with its title. In the Ogiwara version, the coalescence of the ‘altitude’ and twelve years’ temporal distance in the title and its date gives the poem a sense of both foreboding and nostalgia that reappears later in the poem; while in the Yasusada version, because of the reader’s knowledge of the details of the artificiality of Japanese speaker and poet, there appears a division between the – almost literal – viewpoint of the implied American reader, ‘guilty’28 by association for the poem’s foreshadowed calamity, and the fictional Japanese speaker, who looks for himself in the photograph: And I . . . where am I? For being here is confusing, makes my position less clear. Somewhere in the upper left, I suppose, hurrying ambitiously to get somewhere . . .

Read in the knowledge of Yasusada’s fictional nature, the lines above possess their own slant. While the phrase ‘being here’ issuing from a persona allows us, in the suspension of disbelief, to read it as referring to Ogiwara’s sense of Hiroshima survivor-guilt from the vantage point of 1957, or the ‘shame of living’, as Robert Jay Lifton terms it,29 when it

120    Textual Deceptions is attributed to a fictive Yasusada, the line between poet and persona is no longer clear. The effect is that this phrase and those that follow take on a metafictional nuance. It is as if the first-person speaker is the selfconscious dissembler, whose ‘position’ is unclear and who exists only as the signature of a poem in, perhaps, its ‘upper left’ corner.30 ‘Hurrying ambitiously to get somewhere’ has a poignancy in Ogiwara’s voice, as if he can now see how trivial were the concerns of his former self and how that ‘somewhere’ could have been anywhere, while in Yasusada’s voice, the phrase resounds with an uneasy admission of the ‘ambition’ of the hoax itself, ‘somewhere’ its poetic goal. In the poem’s last stanza, the conflict between the different speakers is resolved rather differently: Outside of me the photograph is beautiful and clear: A long, single pulse of geometry under dreams. Pure hieroglyph into which I also will vanish.

Once more, the first line’s ambiguous phrasing – ‘outside of me’ – sounds like Ogiwara’s poetic, or Yasusada’s fictive, ‘stuttering’. In both cases, the phrase’s awkwardness allows it to refer to the beauty of abstraction in the absence of feelings; and to the fact that, like Mondrian’s paintings, the photograph has an existence separate from the speaker and his knowledge of history. These lines echo Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’, a poem that was itself inspired by an unidentified painting of Paul Klee’s.31 Echoes of Plath’s poetry in Yasusada’s constitute further clues to its falsity, for reasons of anachronism as well as a glance at the controversy surrounding the ‘appropriation’ of historical experience in Plath’s work. Even though ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’ was not composed until 1958, the year after the alleged composition of ‘High Altitude Photo’, such anachronistic influence is fitting for a poem so concerned with retrospective anticipation.32 Like Plath’s poem, this one presents an oneiric view of a world ‘under dreams’, a view that may seem more acceptable from Ogiwara’s post-memorial than from Yasusada’s witness perspective. The speaker’s observation ‘I shut my eyes, try to recall those days . . . ’ suggests a vision or dream of the past in Ogiwara’s case, while in Yasusada’s it can only point to what we know to be the replacement of recall by invention. In Plath’s ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’, it is the ‘chair and bureau’ in the sleeper’s room that are the ‘hieroglyphs’ of ‘some godly utterance wakened heads ignore’, ordinary objects made to over-signify. In ‘High Altitude Photo of Hiroshima’ the opposite is the case and the hieroglyph is ‘pure’, implying that the photograph could seem, like a Mondrian painting or a character from the Japanese alphabet,33 simply a signi-

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fier. The appearance of the word ‘pure’ here differs from that in Plath’s poetry, where its almost invariably ironic meaning ranges from adjective to adverb, from ‘sinless’ or ‘bodiless’ to ‘simply’ (in ‘Fever 103’); in ‘Tulips’ it suggests ‘stripped of life’, while in ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ it means ‘immaculate’ but also ‘racially uncontaminated’. Rather than suggesting that the possibility exists of ‘merely waking up’, as Plath’s poem does, Ogiwara’s/Yasusada’s ends with a ‘vanishing’ that indicates death. In Ogiwara’s case, it sounds as if this will result from something like a belated atomic ‘pulse’, or the relentless flattening-out of historical time that erases the very meaning of moral patterns. In Yasusada’s case, knowledge of his biography intrudes into this prediction of dying, and the reader may wonder if the poem’s mention of 1957 marks the beginning of the ‘long struggle with cancer’ that concluded with his death fifteen years later. Yet again these final lines have a metafictional resonance, that, like Plath’s ‘overreaching’34 metaphors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, may disturb for being too little about the atom bomb they invoke: it is ‘Yasusada’ himself who is the uninterpretable hieroglyph and who does indeed ‘vanish’ into his own poetry. In 1996, before the imposture’s exposure, a series by Yasusada called ‘Poems from Hiroshima’ was published in Stand magazine in the UK, where it was advertised on the issue’s front cover. This foray into a British publication, albeit one with a significant international following, suggests both that it was important to establish the hoax outside its native American context, and that Stand was chosen as a host that might be particularly receptive but also knowledgeably searching. Its editor Jon Silkin had spent the three years up to 1994 in Japan, where he taught at the University of Tsukuba; his Japanese-speaking wife Toshiko Silkin was the journal’s editorial assistant and named as such in the issue where Yasusada’s work appeared. One of Silkin’s best-known poems is his ‘Death of a Son’, an apparent counterpart to Yasusada’s elegy for a daughter, ‘Mad Daughter and Big-Bang’, included in ‘Hiroshima Poems’. Yet it was not until two issues after his poems’ appearance that doubts surrounding Yasusada’s authenticity were revealed in Stand’s letters page, by reproducing the editorial from American Poetry Review alongside an exchange of faxes between Stand’s editors and Kent Johnson.35 The poems that appeared in Stand were later reprinted, after the fraud’s exposure, in Doubled Flowering. The two contexts in which these ‘Hiroshima Poems’, and in particular ‘Mad Daughter and BigBang’, which I will discuss here, have appeared are different from those of ‘High Altitude Photo of Hiroshima’ and ‘Trilobytes’, since the poetry published in Stand has never appeared under Kent Johnson’s

122    Textual Deceptions name or with the distance of a conventional poetic persona. In Stand, ‘Mad Daughter’ is presented simply as the work of a Japanese poet named Yasusada, whose biography, letters and notes are included;36 in Doubled Flowering, where ‘Mad Daughter’ appears as the volume’s first poem, it has taken its place as part of the ‘Yasusada’ project of unidentified but certainly not autobiographical or Japanese authorship. Once more, the two different contexts produce different reading experiences. ‘Mad Daughter’ is a troubling poem in its own right, in which the speaker imagines that he sees the severed head of his unnamed daughter in the garden and has a conversation with her. It is dated 25 December 1945, and includes a footnote explaining that ‘Yasusada and his daughter’, presumably the surviving Akiko, moved to the ‘foothills of the Chugoku mountains surrounding Hiroshima’ in the aftermath of the atomic bomb. ‘Trolley Fare and Blossom’, a posthumous poem dedicated to Akiko and dated for her death on 18 May 1949, also appears in both Stand and Doubled Flowering. Given the prominence of Yasusada’s biography as part of the apparatus of his poetry, it is difficult in Stand not to read ‘Mad Daughter’ in relation to the details of his life, although the footnote is enigmatic rather than helpful. The daughter in the poem seems to be a composite of the two, dead Chieko and dying Akiko, one who is, perhaps, ‘mad’ with radiation poisoning and historical suffering.37 The freedom from historical biography and ability to treat it as fiction alongside the poetry is certainly a gain in Doubled Flowering. Like ‘High Altitude Photo of Hiroshima’, the speaker in ‘Mad Daughter’ is subject to nightmarish visions that are introduced as straightforward reports on reality: Walking in the vegetable patch late at night, I was startled to find the severed head of my mad daughter lying on the ground.

The only hint in the gruesomely fantastic world of the poem that all is not what it seems occurs in parentheses, and simply offers another misrecognition: (From a distance it had appeared to be a stone, haloed with light, as if cast there by the Big-Bang.)

Critics have pointed out that the notion of the originary ‘big bang’ is anachronistic, since it was not current when Yasusada was writing, however well it may fit with his interest in cosmological imagery and

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contrasting human history with that of the universe. The ‘Big-Bang’, idiosyncratically hyphenated, could instead be seen as a translator’s rendering of the atomic bomb, while the enjambment of ‘it had appeared / to be a stone’ gives away the apparitional nature of the whole poem. The conversation between father and daughter that follows combines uncannily the registers of a family tiff and a voice from beyond the grave: What on earth are you doing, I said, you look ridiculous. Some boys buried me here, she said sullenly.

The father’s phrase seems to possess a horrible literality, as if he is really asking his daughter why she is on earth, or what she is doing ‘buried’ in the earth, and she responds to this accurately, as Perloff points out: American ‘boys’ could indeed be said to be responsible for her fate.38 The poem’s uncomfortable juxtapositions continue to the poem’s conclusion: Her dark hair, comet-like, trailed behind . . . Squatting, I pulled the turnip up by the root.

The vision of the daughter’s head takes on a celestial cast in its ‘cometlike’ form, and although she is ‘buried’, it is as if the daughter flies away here, since the gap between these two stanzas, signified by the ellipses as if they are a space of awakening from a dream, is as great a gulf as those noted by Hugh Kenner in a 1966 review of Plath’s collection Ariel, ‘like cracks in the sidewalk’, as well as following Ogiwara Seisensui’s ‘high regard for caesura’.39 The presence of such a technique reveals the overlapping of the two principal influences on ‘Yasusada’: twentieth-century American poetry and reformed Japanese haiku. In the poem’s stanzaic gap, the vision of the dismembered daughter abruptly disappears and the speaker returns to the harvesting, on account of which he must have walked into the vegetable patch. Yet the uncanny nature of the encounter persists in the last two lines. The use of the definite article to describe the turnip makes it sound as if this vegetable body is the one the father has been addressing all along; it was not that the daughter’s head resembled a stone, but that a turnip resembled a human body. In this way the ‘mad daughter’ is the opposite of the baby addressed in Plath’s poem ‘You’re’, who is said to be ‘Mute as a turnip’: Yasusada’s child is disturbingly all too vocal, and she is not likened to a turnip but is one.

124    Textual Deceptions When read in the context of Doubled Flowering, ‘Mad Daughter and Big-Bang’ takes on the metapoetic nature of a poem about figuration, in which traumatic grief is the scene and the pretext for a resurrection that occurs by means of a metonym that is never explicitly identified as such. In its original context in Stand, ‘Mad Daughter and Big-Bang’ was followed by a poem titled ‘Hiroshima’ by Peter Meister, with whose clearly non-witness poem an implicit contrast is established. In Meister’s ‘Hiroshima’, the perspective is not that of a ‘high altitude’ that then zooms in on particular individuals, but one of philosophical meditation: ‘But in 1945 / Our kind became a kind / Of natural disaster.’40 In the original setting, the difference between the expressionism of Yasusada’s survivor poem and the contemplative nature of Meister’s post-memorial one must have seemed appropriate to their respective distance from the event; with hindsight, both styles are revealed simply as literary devices, although Yasusada’s may now seem provocatively surreal and manipulative. The same is true of the date of composition for ‘Mad Daughter’: since Christmas Day is not a national holiday in Japan, in Stand it points to Yasusada’s various identifications with western culture, while in Doubled Flowering fictive irony is more prominent, and the poem’s slant towards its implied western reader incontrovertible.41 Mock signatures As John Mullan argues, much contemporary pseudonymous publication takes place in the form of a ‘mock disguise’ that simply advertises ‘the adaptability of the author’ rather than concealing his or her identity.42 However, in a notorious exception to this, Doris Lessing submitted two novels pseudonymously to her usual publishers, which were, as she expected them to be, rejected, although eventually published elsewhere.43 Such an occurrence supports the notion that a text’s context, in this case the signature under which it appears, may profoundly affect or indeed wholly determine publishers’ and readers’ reception of a literary work.44 It seems to be at least partly the case that it was another way of enacting and thus subverting this truism that prompted the ‘Yasusada saga’ (as Stand magazine has it), and that Kent Johnson, or the ‘Yasusada author’, audaciously chose the identity of a hibakusha as an authorial limit-case. It may be, as I. A. Richards’ ‘experiment’ in practical criticism shows, that the opposed notion of presenting entirely neutral, contextless literary texts only ever takes place in rarefied conditions far from the social contexts of reading. Richards famously distributed poems by a variety of writers to his students, ‘the authorship’ of which ‘was not revealed’ and ‘with rare exceptions . . . was not recognised’.45 Richards

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notes that the responses or ‘protocols’ that he gathered ‘constitute the record of a piece of fieldwork in comparative ideology’,46 one that showed readers resorting to ‘stock responses’ when the author’s name was withheld. Such a variety of ‘fieldwork’ aptly describes the reception of Yasusada, although in the latter’s case it was the category of author that was concealed rather than his name. When it appeared as the work of Kent Johnson in Ironwood and the Atomic Ghost anthology, the poetry met with a muted response. However, reverential publication in mainstream literary journals accompanied the poems’ reinvention as the work of the unknown Japanese poet Yasusada, while the third stage in this history of reception was a post-revelation flurry of analysis and counter-analysis, ranging from accusations of appropriation to approbations about empathy, and declarations that the imposture constituted a stand against the vogue for ‘ultra-empirical’ witness poetry or the ‘fashionable [“multicultural”] quotas’ of editors and publishers.47 The hoax and readers’ awareness of it make the poetry significatory on several levels, and this is the force of Eliot Weinberger’s assertion that it is ‘far more interesting, full of brilliant details’ when known to be invented.48 For instance, the biographical features that appeared to be extra-diegetic errors turn into fictive tropes, standing on a par with the notebooks’ rendering of a parodic ‘translationese’ that reads as if it were a precursor to Alex’s letters in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated. In particular, Alex’s habit of signing off with the comically unidiomatic and misleading ‘Guilelessly’ is echoed by Yasusada’s to his American pen-pal Richard: ‘I am sincere.’49 The pedantic editorial interventions of the translators in Doubled Flowering are laid bare when we come upon such apparently authenticating details as the ‘dampness’ that ‘heavily blotche[s]’ the manuscript of a letter to Akutagawa Fusei from 1946, in which Yasusada relates how ‘the grief welled up in me again’ as he watched his daughter Akiko’s uncomfortable sleep.50 This is a detail that, like the etching of the poet’s face that appeared in American Poetry Review, the voices on the ‘tape-essay’ and mention of a ‘filmed recording’ of Yasusada and his renga collaborators reading aloud,51 seems to offer an irresistibly authentic bodily imprint. Yet, as Kent Johnson himself quotes Derrida arguing,52 the very presence of a signature (and one of these appears, too, in the carbon manuscript of Yasusada’s letter to Ogiwara Seisensui reproduced in Doubled Flowering),53 stands in for the author who is necessarily absent. Yasusada’s editors note a ‘stain covering the first half’ of a poem addressed to Nomura, ‘Loon and Dome’, reference to which its author incorporates into one of his typically crucial but parenthetical stanzas:

126    Textual Deceptions (It was your sentimental heart that always made me laugh and this stain on the page is spilt tea.)

It is as if we can follow the progress of the poem’s composition here, apostrophe as it is to Yasusada’s dead wife, in judging the stain to be surely that of tears, not tea, provoked by her memory. After the revelation, the artifice of the poem, including the tea(r)-stain, functions differently. The speaker’s invocation of Nomura’s heart follows by association from his memory of a ‘stroll’ they took together through the ‘plaster chambers / of the giant Model of the Heart’ in Hiroshima’s Industrial Promotion Hall, where she told him she was pregnant with their daughter Akiko. Just as the giant heart turns metonymically into a figure for Nomura’s sentimentality,54 so, at an even more embedded level of the fictive, the stain turns out not to be a para- or extra-textual mark but a metaphor for imaginary grief. Doubled Flowering is thus not simply a collection of falsely attributed poems but one of fictive paratexts and editorial practices. This too may prompt us to think that questions of authorship are the motivation for this elaborate, novelistic hoax, as the translators’ preface has it: ‘the writing is fascinating for its . . . biographical disclosure, formal diversity and linguistic elan’,55 such ‘disclosure’ being structurally rather than literally biographical. Kent Johnson Johnson has continued to publish his own poetry, featuring such Yasusada-esque techniques as homages to and imitations of Japanese verse-forms and other writers including Sappho and Emily Dickinson, while addressing such subjects as contemporary American foreign policy.56 The representation of the latter differs from the ‘Yasusada project’ in that the atrocities are the more recent ones of Abu Ghraib, and the ‘identifications’57 are multiple. In Johnson’s poem ‘Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, or: “Get the Hood Back On” ’ the speakers are a collection of ‘ordinary’ American perpetrators, rather than an individual victim. Instead of adopting the voice of another and effacing his authorship,58 Johnson incorporates the implied author into the poem’s last, uncomfortable stanza, in which the speaker describes himself as ‘an American poet’ who apologises to his Iraqi victim Madid: I voted for Clinton and Gore, even though I know they bombed you a lot, too, sorry about that, and I know I live quite nicely off the fruits of a dying imperium, which include anti-war poetry readings at the Lincoln Center and the Poetry Project, with appetizers and wine and New World Music.59

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Such prose poetry offers ironic confirmation of Adorno’s insistence on the impossibility of the lyric after Auschwitz, while making in its last line ‘this self-righteous poem’ the very means of assaulting the Iraqi addressee by literally shoving it down his throat. This is another, less elaborately constructed way of confronting American responsibility for atrocity while questioning whether poetry is indeed up to the task of so doing. Such a comparison of Yasusada’s works with those published as Johnson’s own is useful in analysing the effects of the hoax, rather than as an attempt at ‘attributional research’,60 particularly since the questioning of authorship is part of the meaning of Doubled Flowering. Yet the Yasusada project’s formal superstructure makes it hard to keep considering its content as an ‘American elegy’61 for the dead of Hiroshima. Yasusada’s non-existence makes him into a ghostly revenant, a figure whose survival of the atom bomb turns out to be an untruth, and in this sense the gradual and inconclusive process of revelation can be seen as part of his poetry: but the logic of this reading is that the nature of his writing is less important than the simple fact of its existence, as an ‘archive’ with its ‘conventions of attribution’ that appeared to have survived Hiroshima when it had not.62 To want Doubled Flowering to act as both enoncé and an énonciation is to ask a great deal of it, and makes death in wartime an uncomfortable equivalent for Barthes’ conceptual death of the author.

Jiri Kajanë, Winter in Tiranë From the mid-1990s onwards, stories by Kajanë appeared in North American literary journals including the Minnesota Review, Chicago Review and Michigan Quarterly, while the story ‘The Same, Only Different’ appeared in the collection The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Assassins,63 alongside stories by Charles Bukowski, Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith. According to the biographical details given in the Chicago Review in 2001, Kajanë grew up in Krujë, Albania, and trained as an engineer at Tiranë University in the 1960s. His work is said to consist of a collection of stories entitled Sa Kushtón (What Is the Cost) and a number of one-act plays. The biography concludes, Due to Kajanë’s precarious standing before the revolution and the country’s industrial paralysis that followed, his work has never been formally published in the original language. English translations have appeared in Glimmer Train, Cutbank, and the Minnesota Review.64

Several tropes familiar from Yasusada’s life-history reappear here. Kajanë too is said to be a marginalised and little-known artist whose

128    Textual Deceptions background seems unsuited to a literary career, making his writing all the more remarkable. Like Yasusada, Kajanë is a victim of history, and, to his implied anglophone readership, of exotic provenance, his circumstances constituting both the frame within which he is read and the content of his stories. Those named as translators, in this case Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren, are in fact the authors, whose writing was less successful when published under their own names.65 A collection of Kajanë’s stories, Winter in Tiranë, was published in 2010, and the author’s biography amended, in part to emphasise his marginal and oppressed status: His satirical drama, Neser Perdite (Tomorrow, Every Day), received great acclaim in a singular 1981 performance before being banned by the Albanian Ministry of Culture . . . Kajanë has never been photographed.66

Such a description also hints at Kajanë’s fictional status. The irony of the Ministry of Culture banning a play is a foreshadowing of just the kind of obstacle faced by the nameless fictional protagonist in Kajanë’s stories, although his are of a bureaucratic kind, blurring the distinction between paratext and text. The fact that Kajanë has ‘never been photographed’ represents both an instance of the ‘parodies of totalitarian life’ that Winter in Tiranë has been accused of offering,67 and a hint at the author’s non-existence. Kajanë’s fictional status was not formally revealed until 2011, but such double reference in his biography and the stories themselves, which are frequently concerned with deception and lying, leads to a condition of suspended admission similar to that in the case of Doubled Flowering. However, such confession was simply delayed in Kajanë’s case rather than deferred, as in Yasusada’s. Kajanë’s fictionality was made publicly known by Ian Jack, the former editor of Granta, in an article that followed soon after the publication of Winter in Tiranë. It seems that the appearance of this collection prompted Jack to recall his idea of publishing a collection of Kajanë’s stories in 1998, after several were submitted to Granta by Phelan in his role as Kajanë’s translator. Jack’s insistence on meeting the author led to an encounter with Phelan, who admitted that Kajanë did not exist, although Jack then ‘did nothing’ with the information for nearly fifteen years.68 Other critics have argued that Jack’s article was no revelation and that he was not, despite his claim, Kajanë’s ‘assassin’, given widespread hints elsewhere at the author’s fictionality.69 Such an argument reveals that the revelation of a hoax can itself be strategically deceptive. The publisher’s blurb for the book does indeed present a description that makes metafiction out of the overlap between extra-textual and diegetic concerns:

Self-Advertising Hoaxes    129 Set against the final days of the Albanian empire . . . Winter in Tiranë is an exploration of the meaning of identity, the power of suggestion, and the complex relationship between a story and its creator.70

In the terms of this description, those categories that appear in the stories – ‘identity’, ‘power of suggestion’, ‘creator’ – refer at once to the pressures of life in a totalitarian regime, where even subjectivity and agency are at stake, and the relation between implied author and implied reader. A reader’s knowledge of the hoax, however, is necessary in order to allow for a third, confessional meaning of these words. Jack’s description of his high regard for the Kajanë stories which were submitted to Granta in terms of their ‘laconic strangeness’ neatly acknowledges the overlap of form and content in its combination of geographical distance with literary ‘estrangement’, while his description of the ‘new and mysterious’ nature of the story’s ‘voice’ conflates the mystery of ‘remote’ Albania with that of the work’s construction. Such conflations are a distinctive feature of the stories themselves, particularly in the three final stories of Winter in Tiranë that have not been published elsewhere. It may be taking hindsight too far to liken the subtext of a contract murder in ‘The Same, Only Different!’, to which the narrator is oblivious, to the concealed truth about its non-existent author.71 These late stories allow themselves a high degree of metafictional and metadeceptive leeway; as a corollary, they are the most surreal and impish of the collection, showing that not having to maintain a convincing façade released the stories from the constraint of a certain kind of realism. In the wake of Jack’s encounter with Phelan, it is in these three previously unpublished stories, and the publicity for the anthology, that clues to Kajanë’s fictional nature appear most clearly. Neither the editors of Glimmer Train, in which three stories were published in the 1990s, nor Jack saw any reason to question the existence of Kajanë from the evidence of the stories themselves, as Jack notes: We were quite sceptical readers at Granta. It was only the difficulty of getting in touch with the author that raised any suspicion about who had written them.72

Indeed, as late as 2005, Michelle Richmond, the editor of the journal and publishing imprint Fiction Attic, took the opportunity of a story by Ismail Kadare appearing in the New Yorker to advertise what she described as the work of one unsung yet magnificent Jiri Kajanë, whose work I’ve had the pleasure of publishing, in translation, of course, in Fiction Attic. In fact,

130    Textual Deceptions Kajanë’s story, ‘Okay, A Cake Then!’ was the first one I ever published . . . It was translated by Kevin Phelan (disclaimer: he’s my husband!) and Bill U’Ren.73

Richmond’s ‘disclaimer’ follows the logic of technical or partial confession that acts to cover up continued dissembling, since it does not make clear knowledge of her husband’s authorship. In the first eight of the eleven stories of Winter in Tiranë, the confidence trickery and ‘elaborate pranks’ on the part of the unnamed narrator and his friend Leni arise from petty subversions of the post-Hoxha regime. In this respect they follow Kadare’s representation, in ‘The Albanian Writers’ Union as Mirrored by a Woman’, of such Cold War subterfuges as the narrator’s ‘little trick’ in spinning yarns to a young communist poet as a form of muted protest, and the narrator’s cousin confessing to the creation of myths at the Ministry of Information. In the case of Kajanë, the stories of tricks and deceptions also arise from the protagonists’ personal status as gullible fools – in contrast to the supine fatalism of Kadare’s narrator – meaning that the stories are to be read under the sign of their plots’ representation of inauthenticity. In McHale’s phrase, ‘deliberate inauthenticity’ has been ‘absorbed into the very poetics of the work’.74 For instance, the narrator is the most successful fake mourner hired to attend a funeral covering up an industrial accident (‘Wake Up, It’s Time to Go to Sleep’); he attends a government lie-detection course (‘The Usual Trickery!’); inspects ‘triplicate’ forms appointing him as Assistant Deputy to the Acting Ambassador in Italy for signs of being ‘a Leni forgery’, precisely because he wants the appointment to be real (74); is involved in a fake car accident as part of an elaborate scam (‘Some Pleasant Daydream’); and fills in hotel comment forms as if they were by other guests in order to help a friend (‘The Perfect Slogan’). In the first of the three previously unpublished stories in Winter in Tiranë, ‘The Pawnbroker’s Appraisal’, the representation of trickery takes on an almost fabular guise. Leni poses as an ‘agony uncle’, Signore Amore, for a local newspaper and receives an anonymous letter: ‘Sir Amore: Is there a time limit for lies? Once a lie has been told, and once enough time has passed for everyone to become comfortable with it – when everyone has accepted the lie as truth – is it wrong then for the liar to come forth and reveal his deceit?’ ‘Yes. Yes, it is!’ Leni announced, his quickest response of the evening . . . ‘Really?’, I said, my own agenda in mind. (199)

Although the narrator’s ‘agenda’ is ostensibly his idea that the letter might be from his long-lost brother Janos, the letter reads as if it ema-

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nates from an implied reader who is becoming aware of the text’s deception, its narrator’s ‘agenda’ that of revealing his own fictionality. This is a postal version of reader-response theory. Deception is also motivated by romance; in ‘Okay, A Cake Then!’, Leni considers disguising himself as an Italian businessman in order to win over the reluctant Kosi, but the narrator has a failure of imagination at the idea: ‘this vision is too difficult to conjure, and in the end all I can see is Leni looking like himself, only slightly darker’ (3). The same might be said of Phelan’s and U’Ren’s adoption of an Albanian narrator. Jack notes the failure of the ‘playful’ material of their own writing in a climate where ‘trailer-park realism’ was in vogue, and indeed the short stories published under Phelan and U’Ren’s own names are notable for their similarity to Kajanë’s, which differ most obviously by taking place within a ‘slightly darker’ Albanian setting. The authors’ two co-written stories ‘Brief Vacation’ and ‘Free Fruit Salad and an Occasional Pizza’, as well as Phelan’s ‘Turn-Down Service’, feature the Kajanë-esque device of a nameless and hapless narrator who offers a deadpan view of everyday American life.75 Yet without the Albanian setting, inconsequentiality – in the eponymous story, the narrator’s wife favours hotels that offer a ‘turn-down service’ for the bed – lacks the resonance of Leni’s escapades at the Hotel Dajti, while extreme events, including the car fatality and suicide of ‘Brief Vacation’, offer a reverse pattern to the stories of Winter in Tiranë where enormities, such as the old farmer’s death in a car accident in ‘Some Pleasant Daydream’, become incidental. In ‘Free Fruit Salad’, the familiar is made strange – the narrator is a naïve member of a church-league softball team – in contrast to its opposite in Winter in Tiranë, in which the strange is made familiar. In Phelan and U’Ren’s work, foreign destinations are seen from the limited viewpoint of tourists, rather than from within, for instance when the narrator of ‘Turn-Down Service’ travels to an unnamed country in the throes of civil unrest and journeys by bus to the sniper-beset ‘Boulevard of Heroes’, perhaps an equivalent to Tiranë’s Boulevard of National Martyrs. He views the nameless country from the bus window and does not reach his destination within the story. In ‘Brief Vacation’, the narrator describes the unusual bosses, unfulfilling jobs and moneymaking schemes taken up by the indigent of Los Angeles, all of which lack the meaning and distinctiveness of the communist-legacy hustling undertaken in Winter in Tiranë. As Jack puts it, for its authors, ‘Albania changed everything.’76 The version of the American dirty-realist ‘trailerpark’ aesthetic in Kajanë’s stories is that of the ‘dingy’ apartments and ‘faded concrete buildings’ (31) of a country in the former eastern

132    Textual Deceptions bloc, complete with travel restrictions, nepotistic appointments, poor television reception and inhospitable weather. The text’s background of Albanian life and history exists, paradoxically, to domesticate its narrator: he is constructed as different so that he can be shown to be surprisingly familiar, undergoing marital regret, social embarrassment and ‘daily dread’ (177) of the office. In ‘Some Pleasant Daydream’, Faldo, a victim of one of Leni’s confidence tricks, asks plaintively when all is revealed, ‘ “But why the elaborate trick?” ’ (122). With hindsight, the extra-diegetic answer to his question is that Kajanë’s stories present a world in which ‘grey’ uniformity and constraint hinder free expression and require inventiveness and artifice, as if Albania itself, in its shadowy portrayal, might represent the literary world, viewed as a totalitarian state. The stories’ success is evidence of their own species of resistance to such a regime. Such allegorical use of Albanian history for a satirical portrayal of contemporary publishing priorities collides with its opposite in Kadare’s story ‘The Albanian Writers’ Union as Mirrored by a Woman’. Here it is the literary world in Tiranë of the 1960s that fails the city’s citizens, as the narrator observes of the prostitute Marguerite, who is exiled along with ‘decadent’ writers and commits suicide while they make no protest: It is difficult to imagine that, in her moments of quiet solitude, Marguerite ever took any comfort from Albanian literature . . . Any other house that stood opposite a building inhabited by poets and artists would have derived its light and soul from the latter. But in the case of the Writers’ Union it was Marguerite’s abandoned home that was the cathedral.77

Throughout Winter in Tiranë, the narrator’s graduation from his job as Deputy Minister of Symbols to that of Slogans, although a promised promotion to Information never takes place, has a clearly symbolic element that turns not just metafictional but meta-deceptive in the wake of Kajanë’s exposure. In ‘The Perfect Slogan’, the narrator wishes to charm Katinka, a woman from the north, with ‘a single crafty slogan that might make me seem just a little more desirable’, observing that, due to his job, ‘anything of me the world has known – all of those slogans and party aphorisms – is built upon language’ (184). The wish for a suitable slogan at an intimate moment does not have the political implication that the narrator, like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel 1984, has internalised the party’s doublethink, but, rather, has the literary one that he is indeed ‘built’ from the slogans of an unseen author. Such an implication goes beyond self-conscious metafiction or existential mise-en-abîme to refer to an extra-diegetic imposture – at least, for the knowing implied reader.

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The most extreme example of such fictional meta-deception occurs in the story ‘Weights and Measures’, in which reference to its own fraudulence provides rich grounds for a fictional narrative of Ian Jack’s encounter with Kevin Phelan. In this overdetermined, surreal version, the British publisher Ian James visits Tiranë in order to meet the nonexistent Bhanuprasad Armritraj, professor of Indian literature at the University of Tiranë and editor of a bestselling anthology of Indian writing, as well as to collect Albanian stories for another anthology. James is the editor of the ‘intellectual quarterly’ Der Trüben Fluss, the ‘foggy river’, a version of the equally fluvially named Granta. While the narrator pretends to be Armritraj, succeeding in his role ‘ “because [James] wants to be fooled” ’, according to Leni (152), James is being impersonated by his younger brother Roderick Newton James, to whom Leni presents a collection of Albanian stories allegedly by various hands but all composed by him. Leni’s first attempt at creating this collection meets with James’ disapproval: ‘they’re not very Albanian, if you know what I mean. Love and relationships and family concerns, these are all fine, but where is the political strife, the tales of the zealous underground resistance, the humanity in the face of the oppressive dictatorship?’ (159)

Leni rewrites all the stories, and weighs the result on the scales that the narrator is repairing on his behalf: ‘I have assembled nearly three hundred grams of Albanian fiction!’ he shouts towards the kitchen. ‘That’s quite impressive’, I say. ‘You have nearly doubled the entire canon!’ (161)

As part of its strategy of including verdicts on the text as part of the fiction, this exchange presents both a literal literary commodification – the stories are weighed rather than weighed up – and the narrator’s apparent awareness of the fictional form in which he appears: his claim that Leni has ‘doubled’ the Albanian canon paraphrases a widely quoted Time Out review of Kajanë’s contribution to The Killing Spirit that described the author as ‘Albania’s second greatest living writer’ – that is, after Ismail Kadare.78 The narrator’s remark also casts a sideways glance at negative comments on the Kajanë fraud in relation to ‘AngloAmerican literary provincialism’, lack of genuine translations from Albanian, and ignorance of Albania’s ‘ancient [literary] tradition’.79 Like his and the narrator’s impersonation of respondents to hotel customer questionnaires, Leni’s rewritten stories attempt to pre-empt their reception, as he explains:

134    Textual Deceptions ‘I merely took the information that Ian had given me, and I mixed it up and gave it back to him. I asked him to describe Albania, and these stories are what he said.’ (164)

‘Weights and Measures’ is a fantasy based on the detail of Kajanë’s unmasking, since what we read in Winter in Tiranë resembles not the rewritten but the original version of Leni’s stories. The stories’ setting is a backdrop consisting of occasional Albanian phrases, references to foodstuffs, locations and historical figures, and a sense of political change. In the early story ‘Wake Up, It’s Time To Go To Sleep’, which is set in the late 1980s, the narrator becomes involved in covering up a mining accident and saves his payment for the foreign travel that is becoming a possibility in ‘the changing political climate’ (41). The narrator’s remark that he ‘wanted to go somewhere else, even if it turned out to be only slightly different’ sums up the stories’ ethos: their success is based precisely on representing a world ‘only slightly different’ from that of their English-speaking readership. Translation is not needed in any sense. The final story of Winter in Tiranë, ‘Weights and Measures’, is set soon after the popular uprising of 1997, since the narrator’s ex-wife Ana describes being stranded in the city of Vlorë, after the collapse of pyramid schemes led to riots and her job in quality-control inspections ‘ “obviously became superfluous” ’ (200). Yet such historical detail is subordinated to the story’s focus on the personal, in Ana’s mistaken claim to have seen the narrator’s brother Janos in Vlorë. The story’s title is one shared with the Austrian Joseph Roth’s 1937 novel Weights and Measures, in which the scales are multiply significant not only as the embodiment of the protagonist’s ‘incomparable honesty’80 but also as a moral burden under which he gradually sinks. In Kajanë’s story, the narrator repairs a set of scales that showed ‘everything weighed eight grams less than its actual weight’, by shaving off a portion of each of its internal counterweights, as he tells Leni: ‘So now, essentially, each measurement the scale gives will be technically wrong, but nonetheless, it will appear to be right.’ A long silence arises as Leni considers this tactic . . . ‘So what you are saying’, he says, ‘is that the scale is still broken, but now, only the scale knows it.’ (162)

The scales are both a plot device and a symbol. They are an example of Winter in Tiranë’s focus on the tall stories spun by two Albanians in a country of economic extremes, in this case Leni’s invention of a cousin Leke, ‘the scalemaker from Peshkopia’ (147), who will mend

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those belonging to Fiskin, owner of a ‘lucrative mining operation near Rehove’ (146). The scales also symbolise the collection’s own tall stories, equally dependent on the details of named individuals and precise locations that may look convincing but only ‘appear to be right’. The narrator’s deceptive ‘repair’ echoes the deathbed vision Roth’s Inspector of Weights and Measures has of the ‘Great Inspector’, who acknowledges the dying man’s fallibility as well as his humanity: ‘ “All your weights are false, and yet they are all correct.” ’81 As the original German title of Roth’s novel, Die falsche Gewicht, ‘the false weights’, has it, nothing is what it seems. Ian Jack argues that ‘much of the attraction of writing from eastern Europe vanished with the Berlin Wall. The stimulant of oppression was no longer there’, but Albania remained sufficiently different and distant to take over the literary interest that Czechoslovakia had once inspired.82 Winter in Tiranë both satirises and draws upon such a sentiment, one that provoked disgust in Jack’s critics for its suggestion that only the ‘stimulant’ of ‘other people’s oppression’ can make native literatures interesting to an English-speaking readership’.83 In ‘Weights and Measures’, Ian James recalls the final collapse of Albania’s ruling communist regime when he looks out at Skanderbeg Square from the steps of the Palace of Culture, and pronounces, ‘It is all so familiar: the statue, the palace, the mosque. I recognize it all. Positively CNN, 1991 . . . Of course I could be wrong. Perhaps I am thinking of Prague and the Velvet Rebellion. Another city, another square.’ (156)

The reaction of the narrator, in his guise as Professor Amritraj, is to ‘nod and stroke my false beard for effect’. Such comic undercutting has a complex effect as part of the stories’ response to their own gradual revelation as deceptions, implying that post-Cold War confusions on the part of critics and readers, in which different cities’ ‘signifiers fade into one another’,84 may blind them to such obvious falsity as that of the narrator’s glued-on beard. James’ elision of the difference between medium and message – ‘Positively CNN, 1991’ – is a detail that resounds with the discourse of Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, his analysis of the western consumption of atrocity and war, itself first published as an article in 1991. Baudrillard’s comment that ‘we are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual’ describes modes of knowing about war, which include CNN’s televisual ‘invention’ of the event by placing ‘information’ and ‘artificial commentary’ above it,85 leading to the kind of substitution of one event for another that Ian James’ remark betrays. Baudrillard’s argument also offers a way of

136    Textual Deceptions viewing the construction of Winter in Tiranë itself. The collection is a ‘virtual’ work offering a linguistic simulacrum of an Albanian translation, conceived to benefit from its readership’s receptiveness to such a mediated representation. There is no Albanian original in relation to the text or its author, or in terms of research conducted by those responsible. While Phelan had visited Albania twice in the 1980s, U’Ren had never been there; the narrator in ‘Weights and Measures’ is reassured to think that Ian James ‘didn’t have a tourist-oriented guidebook that would contradict’ his and Leni’s construction of the invented Albanian stories, ‘because none exist’ (153). Thus we learn from the invented text that invention is likely to go undetected. Like Yasusada’s, Kajanë’s invented, exotic biography constitutes not just the creation of an imaginary writer but the necessary context in which his writing is received. In this respect, both cases differ from that of Alan Sokal, whose biography was not invented but whose writing was: his article has little independent value except as an exhibit in the history of his hoax. The case of Yasusada has generated more critical debate and polarised positions than Kajanë’s. This is partly because Yasusada’s poetry was a project designed both to hoodwink the poetry establishment and to be uncovered by it; the stakes were higher both critically and in literary terms than in relation to Kajanë’s stories, written in a prose fiction genre that is ‘licensed to impersonate’86 and where the revelation has not been of such great concern either to the authors, who have readily admitted their deceit, or to publishers and critics.87 Although Winter in Tiranë seems to be more of a recontextualising of its actual authors’ ‘playful’ aesthetic than the exploration of identity, nationality or ethical witness that characterises Doubled Flowering, both texts are concerned with the apprehension of other cultures and the contemporary reception of historical events such as the fall of communism in Albania and the bombing of Hiroshima.

Notes  1. Brian McHale, ‘  “A Poet May Not Exist”: Mock-Hoaxes and the Construction of National Identity’, in Robert J. Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 236–7.   2. This is Bill U’Ren’s term; personal correspondence, 14 April 2012.  3. James McAuley and Harold Stewart, quoted in Max Harris and Joanna Murray-Smith, Ern Malley, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987, p. viii; Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’

Self-Advertising Hoaxes    137 Abuse of Science, New York: Picador, 1999 (the UK edition is titled Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science, London: Profile Books, 1998).   4. See Charles Bernstein, ‘Fraud’s Phantoms’, Textual Practice, 22 (2) 2008, pp.  207–27, on Yasusada; Ian Jack, ‘Albania’s “Second-Greatest Living Writer” Was a Hoax, But Does it Really Matter?’, Guardian, 17 June 2011, on Kajanë.   5. Tosa Motokiyu, Ojiu Norinaga and Okura Kyojin, ‘Renga and the New Sentence’, Aerial, 6/7, 1991, pp.  52–9. See Marjorie Perloff, ‘In Search of the Authentic Other: The Poetry of Araki Yasusada’, in Bill Freind, ed., Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums: Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada, Exeter: Shearsman, 2012 [1997], p.  39. Invented biographies for Ozaki Kusatao, Okura Kyojin and Oiju Norinaga appear in Aerial, in Conjunctions, 23, 1994, p. 325, and in Stand, 37, 1996, pp. 4, 11.   6. Critics have argued that the only point of stability in Yasusada’s oeuvre is the copyright holder, Kent Johnson, although even this is disrupted by the appearance of Yasusada’s letters, where the copyright, assigned to ‘Kent Johnson, for the Estate of Tosa Motokiyu’, makes the hoax extend into deep paratext (Tosa Motokiyu, Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords, New York: Combo Books, 2005, p. iv). It was the name ‘Ozaki Kusatao’ that caused the Japanese scholar Leith Morton to write about his doubts to Stand, as it was ‘a combination of names from 2 of the great haiku poets of this century’, and Johnson was then asked to return a payment that the magazine had made to the translators, since ‘there aren’t any’ (Stand, 38 (1) 1996, pp.  37–8): Johnson is always present in some guise.  7. Mikhail Epstein, ‘Hyper-Authorship: The Case of Araki Yasusada’, Rhizomes, 01 (Fall) 2000, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue1/misha.html, accessed 3 January 2014.   8. Perloff, ‘In Search of the Authentic Other’, p. 43.  9. Araki Yasusada, ‘Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada’, American Poetry Review, 25 (4) 1996, pp. 23–6. 10. Ibid., p. 23. 11. Weinberger’s article ‘Can I Get a Witness?’ (originally published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, July, 1996) was ‘the first public declaration of the pseudonymity of Araki Yasusada’, according to the addendum to its reprinted version in Freind, Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums, p. 18. 12. For instance, the influence of writings by Roland Barthes is asserted in correspondence written before Barthes’ work was published, and words such as ‘scubadiver’ appear in poems composed before the word was coined. Yasusada’s alma mater, Hiroshima University, which he was said to have attended in the 1920s, was not founded until 1949 and Perloff considers it unlikely it would ever have offered a discipline named ‘western literature’ (‘In Search of the Authentic Other’, p. 26). 13. David Wojahn, ‘Illegible Due to Blotching: Poetic Authenticity and Its Discontents’, in Freind, Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums, p. 300. 14. Araki Yasusada, Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, ed. and trans. Tosa Motokiyu, Ojiu Norinaga and Okura Kyojin, New York: Roof, 1997.

138    Textual Deceptions 15. Wanda Koolmatrie’s My Own Sweet Time (Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 1994), by Leon Carmen, was reissued with an afterword (Victoria, BC, and Crewe: Trafford, 2004). 16. Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1983, p.  284; Ueda’s earlier book, Literary and Art Theories in Japan, Cleveland: Case Westner Reserve University Press, 1967, is quoted in Motokiyu et al.’s ‘Renga and the New Sentence’, p. 53. 17. Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets, p. 54. 18. The poems are ‘High Altitude Photo of Hiroshima (circa 1944)’, ‘Convalescence’, ‘Trilobytes’ and ‘Because I Live’, Ironwood, 10, 1987, pp.  187–91. In an interview, Johnson claims that Motokiyu liked the poems so much that he incorporated them into Yasusada’s oeuvre. 19. Both names are surnames; Ogiwara’s wife’s name echoes the nom de plume of the early twentieth-century poet Yosano Akiko, whose colloquial verse is akin to Yasusada’s in tone. Yasusada’s elder daughter’s name, Akiko, is a remnant of the earlier borrowing. 20. Wojahn, ‘Illegible Due to Blotching’, p. 306. 21. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, trans. Anthony Bonner, Ficciones, New York: Grove Press, 1962, pp. 45–56. 22. See for instance Wojahn’s description of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath as the creation of a collaboration between MI5 and the CIA (‘Illegible Due to Blotching’); Charles Bernstein’s presentation of an MLA address that he never gave (‘Fraud’s Phantoms’), and a series of letters dated March 1997 purporting to be written by Arthur Vogelsang to the Boston Review, suggesting that Marjorie Perloff is the creator of A Doubled Flowering, and, in a meta-hoax, complaining that others have been writing in his name (http:// www.bostonreview.net/BR22.3/Vogelsang.html, accessed 15 March 2012). 23. Eliot Weinberger, ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, in Freind, Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums, p.  19; Paisley Rekdal, ‘Doubled Flowering: Charles Yu, Araki Yasusada and the Politics of Faking Race’, in ibid., p.  113; Farid Matuk, ‘ “A Displacement of the Main Reed into the Other” ’, in ibid., p. 239. 24. ‘High Altitude Photo of Hiroshima (circa 1944)’, in John Bradley, ed., Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1995, p. 10. 25. The term is used of Yasusada, Kusatao and Fusei in Motokiyu et al., ‘Renga and the New Sentence’, p. 56. 26. See for instance Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991, p. 18. 27. Ibid., p. 15. Thanks to Gwyneth Bodger for this reference. 28. Several critics ascribe the interest in Yasusada’s poetry, particularly before its exposure, to ‘guilt’ for Hiroshima, including Perloff (‘In Search of the Authentic Other’, p. 39) and Rekdal (‘Doubled Flowering’, p. 107). 29. Lifton, Death in Life, p. 488. 30. One of the few changes between the earlier Ogiwara and later Yasusada versions of the poem is the placing of the poem’s date in the top left in the latter case; otherwise, only a comma distinguishes the two in any literal way.

Self-Advertising Hoaxes    139 31. Editor’s Note, Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes, London: Faber, 1981, p. 287. 32. See Paul Saint-Amour on the ‘nuclear uncanny’, the ‘pretraumatic’ state of anticipating attack (‘Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny’, Diacritics, 30 (4) 2000, pp.  59–82). Such a state depends on such an attack having already taken place elsewhere, an apt description of many of Yasusada’s poems. 33. Yasusada’s poem suggests that it is western art such as Mondrian’s paintings, rather than Chinese or Japanese characters, that are the concrete embodiments of (in this case, malign) meaning, in a reversal of the ‘ideogrammatic’ poetics associated with Ezra Pound; see for instance Sylvan Esh, Empiricism, Metaphor and the Ideogrammatic Method of Ezra Pound, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison Press, 1993, and Alex Verdolini, ‘Desert Music, Hiroshima: The Poetics and Politics of Heteronymity’, in Freind, Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums, p. 168. 34. Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 157. 35. Jon Silkin, ‘The Yasusada Saga’, Stand, 38 (1) 1996, pp. 37–8. 36. The poem, along with eight others, was also published as the work of Yasusada in First Intensity, 5, 1995, pp. 7–17. 37. Perloff assumes that the poem is about Chieko, who died in August 1945, although this makes the footnote appear irrelevant. In keeping with the construction of Yasusada’s life as a portmanteau of details from elsewhere, ‘Chieko’ is the name of the literally ‘mad’, because schizophrenic, wife of Takamura Kotaro, the early twentieth-century sculptor and poet whose ambivalent attitude to western culture in his work is not dissimilar to Yasusada’s (see Hiroaki Sato, A Brief History of Imbecility: The Poetry and Prose of Takamura Kotaro, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992). 38. Perloff, ‘In Search of the Authentic Other’, p. 39. 39. Quoted in Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath, p. 157; Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets, p. 321. 40. Peter Meister, ‘Hiroshima’, Stand, 37 (3) 1996, p.  12. The details of Meister’s biography accompanying his poem match those of Yasusada in appearing to account for its genesis: ‘Peter Meister is a Quaker’ (ibid.). 41. A similar argument might be made about the date of 14 February 1960 given for ‘Telescope and Urn’, a poem centred on the conception, childhood and death of Akiko. Valentine’s Day was not celebrated in Japan until the 1960s, the date’s black irony suggesting either (or both) Yasusada’s precocious western knowledge or his artificial construction. 42. John Mullan, Anonymity, London: Faber, 2007, p. 288. 43. Jane Somers, The Diary of a Good Neighbour, London: Michael Joseph, 1983, and If the Old Could, London: Michael Joseph, 1984, later published under Doris Lessing’s name as The Diaries of Jane Somers (London: Michael Joseph, 1984). 44. See also John Mullan’s question prompted by the notion of ‘preconceptions attached’ to a particular author such as Lessing: ‘To what extent do we need that author’s name in order to read?’ (Anonymity, p. 290). 45. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, London: Mariner Books, 1956, p. 3. 46. Ibid., p. 6.

140    Textual Deceptions 47. Weinberger, ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, p. 15; Charles Simic, ‘Our Scandal’, Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/BR22.3/Simic.html, accessed 15 March 2012. 48. Weinberger, ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, p.  22. See also Bernstein, ‘Fraud’s Phantoms’, p. 218. 49. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002; Motokiyu, Also, With My Throat. 50. Yasusada, Doubled Flowering, p. 13. 51. In the biographical note for Yasusada given in Conjunctions, 23, p. 327, and in Stand, 37, p. 11, such a recording is said to have been ‘found at the house of one of his relatives’. 52. Interview between Thomas Swan and Kent Johnson, in Martin CorlessSmith, ‘Three Dialogues Between Real and Imaginary Poets’, in Freind, Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums, pp. 226–7. 53. Yasusada, Doubled Flowering, p. 50. 54. Wojahn identifies the giant ‘plaster’ heart as that in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (‘Illegible Due to Blotching’, p. 303), a further transformation of documentary into poetry. 55. ‘Introducing Araki Yasusada’, in Yasusada, Doubled Flowering, p. 10. 56. Kent Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, Exeter: Shearsman, 2008. 57. See John Beer’s review, http://www.bigbridge.org/fictjbeer.htm, accessed 4 February 2014. 58. In interview, Johnson has described himself as inadequate to the task of writing poetry such as Yasusada’s. 59. Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, p. 122. 60. Don Foster, Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous, New York and London: Macmillan, 2001, p. 5. 61. Rekdal, ‘Doubled Flowering’, p. 113. 62. Saint-Amour, ‘Bombing and the Symptom’, p. 67 n. 5. 63. Jay Hopler, ed., The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Assassins, Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996; New York: Overlook Press, 1998. The story had previously appeared in the Minnesota Review, 44/45, 1995. 64. Michigan Quarterly Review, 40 (3) 2001, p. 145. 65. Jack, ‘Albania’s “Second-Greatest Living Writer” Was a Hoax’. 66. Jiri Kajanë, Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren, Winter in Tiranë: The Stories of Jiri Kajanë, Fiction Attic Press 2010, online publication, unnumbered pages (ii). All further page references in the text, following my numbering. 67. Literalab, ‘The Non-Assassination of Jiri Kajanë’, Central European Literary Life, http://literalab.com/2011/06/21/6758394115, accessed 28 March 2012. 68. Jack, ‘Albania’s “Second-Greatest Living Writer” Was a Hoax’. 69. Literalab, ‘The Non-Assassination of Jiri Kajanë’; Bill U’Ren, personal communication, 14 April 2012. As well as Michelle Richmond at Fiction Attic, it is likely that Jay Hopler, editor of Killing Spirit, was aware of Kajanë’s fictionality, as an alumnus of the same Johns Hopkins creative writing MA as Phelan and U’Ren. 70. Fiction Attic Press, http://fictionattic.com/our-titles, accessed 4 February 2014. 71. In Winter in Tiranë, this story is entitled ‘Believe Me!’; some clear hints to

Self-Advertising Hoaxes    141 the reader about the scenario that the narrator is failing to understand have been removed from the later version. 72. Linda Swanson-Davies, co-editor of Glimmer Train, personal communication, 31 March 2012; Ian Jack, personal communication, 30 March 2012. 73. Michelle Richmond, ‘Sans Serif’, http://michellerichmond.com/sanserif/ 2005/12/20/91, accessed 2 April 2012; Ismail Kadare, ‘The Albanian Writers’ Union as Mirrored by a Woman’, New Yorker, 26 December 2005, trans. Robert Elsie, pp. 112–27. 74. McHale, ‘ “A Poet May Not Exist” ’, pp. 236–7. 75. Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren, ‘Brief Vacation’, Coe Review, 21, 1991, pp. 72–81, and ‘Free Fruit Salad and an Occasional Pizza’, Aethlon, 14 (1) 1996, pp. 145–51; Kevin Phelan, ‘Turn-Down Service’, Fiction Attic Press, 8 (May) 2005. 76. Jack, ‘Albania’s “Second Greatest Living Writer” Was a Hoax’. 77. Kadare, ‘The Albanian Writers’ Union as Mirrored by a Woman’, p. 127. 78. Jack, ‘Albania’s “Second Greatest Living Writer” Was A Hoax’. 79. Literalab, ‘The Non-Assassination of Jiri Kajanë’. 80. Joseph Roth, Weights and Measures, trans. David Le Vay, London: Peter Owen, 1982 [1937], p. 25. 81. Ibid., p. 149. 82. Jack, ‘Albania’s “Second Greatest Living Writer” Was a Hoax’. 83. Literalab, ‘The Non-Assassination of Jiri Kajanë’. See also an interview with Kadare in which he rejects the legitimacy of likening the Czech to the Albanian communist regime: Shusha Guppy, ‘The Art of Fiction no. 153’, Paris Review, 147 (Summer) 1998. 84. Paul Patton, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995 [1991], p. 2. 85. Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, pp. 27, 48. 86. McHale, ‘ “A Poet May Not Exist” ’, p. 235. 87. Although he declined to publish Kajanë’s stories on learning of the author’s fictionality, Jack’s article is meaningfully subtitled, ‘But Does it Really Matter?’; while Linda Swanson-Davies of Glimmer Train claims that ‘It was a surprise – though somehow not a shock – to find out, years later, that there was no such person’ as Kajanë, and adds that, ‘We didn’t regret the publication’ (personal communication).

Chapter 6

False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony

False Holocaust testimony occupies a singular place in any exploration of textual deception, since what is seen as the effrontery of those who create or embellish accounts of survival in such circumstances is judged to have special ethical and political dangers, alongside the aesthetic and intellectual ones that we have already encountered. Such risks are seen to include the disparagement of genuine survivor accounts and thus the encouragement of Holocaust denial.1 The public controversy that has accompanied the exposure of the testimonies to be analysed here has also raised anew the question of fiction’s role in representing the Holocaust years, as if registering a pan-generic backlash against all varieties of non-documentary discourse. In this chapter, I will consider such issues in relation to three testimonies that are known to be genuine but exaggerated, and contrast them with three that are entirely fabricated. The embellished testimonies are Martin Gray’s For Those I Loved, originally published in French in 1971, Deli Strummer’s A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust from 1988, and Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, of 2009; the fabrications are Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948, translated into English from the German original in 1996, Misha Defonseca’s 1997 testimony, reissued in 2005 as Surviving with Wolves: The Most Extraordinary Story of World War II, and Bernard Holstein’s 2004 Stolen Soul. In particular, I will ask what kinds of generic and ethical differences exist between the two categories, and how their inauthenticity is expressed in textual terms.

Embellished testimony Embellished testimonies, that is, accounts by Holocaust survivors in which significant amounts of invented material have been included, are

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extreme examples of any testimony’s being subject to what Primo Levi calls the unreliable ‘drift’ of memory, as well as such a work’s inevitable reliance on existing testimonial and literary conventions.2 Changes over time in repeatedly delivered testimony, particularly when this takes an oral form, may not necessarily be a sign of unreliability or forgetting on the survivor’s part. Inconsistency may convey how the experience appeared to the testifier in the moment of speaking or writing, and how the narration of memory may change over time.3 In his account of writing the biography of Marianne Ellenbogen, who survived the war by living in hiding and on the run in Germany, Mark Roseman describes the ‘complex layers of memory’ that characterise Ellenbogen’s story and the strategies she adopted in order to ‘cope with an unbearable past’, the most striking of which included altering the detail of some of the most traumatic elements of her experience.4 Embellished testimonies such as those to be analysed in the present chapter could be seen as a large-scale version of this process of modification, expanded into the form of a narrative. This is in apparent support of arguments by the psychologist Dori Laub that it is precisely individuals’ mistakes that are valuable in testimony. Inaccuracies such as the one famously analysed by Laub, in which a woman describing the Sonderkommando rebellion at Auschwitz claimed that four rather than one of the crematoria chimneys had been blown up, offer a different kind of ‘historical truth’ to that of the documentary record in testifying to something ‘unimaginable’, such that ‘the number [of chimneys] mattered less than the fact of the occurrence’.5 However, the changes made in these examples are not the small details of Ellenbogen’s case, in which, for instance, she described her adored aunt Lore dying at the war’s end on a death march rather than, as was the case, in a hospital, in order, Roseman judges, to emphasise the senseless waste of Lore’s life.6 In the three extreme cases explored here, the reasons for survivors’ inclusion of extra and invented material, as well as the particular nature of those additions, reveal significant and sometimes uncomfortable truths about readers’ and publishers’ expectations of such accounts, as well as contemporary attitudes to the survivors themselves. In the case of Gray’s For Those I Loved and Strummer’s A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust, added material takes the form of episodes set in labour and extermination camps. While Gray invented a period of incarceration in Treblinka, where he claims to have taken part in the camp revolt, Strummer exaggerated the length of time she spent in Auschwitz. Such additions seem to be motivated by survivor guilt – indeed, Gray presents his ‘shame at still being alive’ as redeemable only by the act of rebellion that, it emerges, he did not undertake – and a wish

144    Textual Deceptions to appear heroic in withstanding extreme victimisation.7 The implication is that the true story of Strummer’s experience in Theresienstadt, and Gray’s living on false papers in Aryan Warsaw, would not in itself be sufficient to engage readers’ interest. Rosenblat’s embellished memoir is more recent, and his additions imply a different set of expectations. He accurately relates being sent to Buchenwald as a young boy, but includes a fictionalised episode about the ‘angel’ of his book’s title, his future wife Roma, saving his life at the camp. Whereas the wish for a heroic intervention in history is evident in Gray’s case, and one for adulation and pity in Strummer’s, Rosenblat’s represents an opposite kind of interpolation, one that romanticises his experience in order to make it palatable and appealing to a late twentieth-century reader. It is as if Angel at the Fence registers a wish for the mitigation and resolution of horror. The fate of these three hybrid texts in the wake of their exposure has varied according to their cultural significance and the moment of the embellishment’s discovery. Gray’s testimony still retains a central place in Holocaust literature, particularly in France, in its multiple forms;8 Strummer’s was self-published and thus its distribution was unaffected, although the endorsement of the Baltimore Jewish Council that was crucial for her talks was withdrawn;9 and Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, publication of which was cancelled at the last moment, has its own afterlife in the form of a novelisation, Penelope Holt’s The Apple, and the online presence of the original text.10 Martin Gray, For Those I Loved Martin Gray’s 1971 For Those I Loved is the earliest of the three embellished texts to be discussed here. Gray was born Mieczyslaw Grajewski in Warsaw in 1922, and recounts in his testimony the details of his life in the Warsaw Ghetto, followed by deportation to the nearby extermination camp of Treblinka along with other members of his family. After his escape from Treblinka, Gray describes how he joined the Red Army, left Europe for the USA, then for many years made his home in France. An article by the Sunday Times Insight team that included Gitta Sereny, the historian and biographer with a particular interest in Treblinka,11 was published in 1973 to suggest that, although Gray had indeed lived in the Warsaw Ghetto and members of his family were deported to Treblinka where they were killed, Gray himself had not been taken there.12 It seems that Gray had, rather, left the Ghetto and lived on false papers in Aryan Warsaw. This contention was prompted by anomalies in Gray’s description of the camp: for instance, he claimed to have been imprisoned in September 1942 for three weeks and to have seen the

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camp’s infamous false railway station, although it was not constructed until December of that year. He confuses the upper and lower camps at Treblinka, which were respectively for extermination and reception, as a result of which he contradictorily congratulates himself on escape from the lower camp, ‘that bit of the Himmelstrasse [‘Heaven Street’, the walkway between the two camps] from which no one returned’ (147). The declaration of Gray’s ghostwriter, Max Gallo, that he had combined the roles of historian and novelist in his task,13 sounds, at least in hindsight, like a justification as much as an admission. However, like Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, as we will see, a slippage seems to take place between the use of storytelling conventions, characteristic even of testimony, and the invention of stories. Gray’s account of his struggle for survival in the Warsaw Ghetto includes details that it seems impossible he should have noticed or recalled, including descriptions of the seasons, the ‘ripples on the Vistula’ (18), and the appearance and facial expressions of individual SS officers (24). Such details signify the transformation of a survivor’s story into literary form, and serve as a means of introducing authenticating characters and locales. These details have a role similar to descriptions of Gray’s encounters with such historical figures as Janusz Korczak, whom he sees on his way to deportation with his school of orphans (108), and his ‘friend’ Mordechai Anielewicz, a leader of the Ghetto Uprising (210). It is not only Holocaust heroes with whom Gray has personal encounters, but prominent Nazis too: on a visit to the Ghetto, Himmler passes sufficiently close to the young Martin for him to overhear the Reichsminister’s words (36), and in Treblinka he is overseen by ‘Ivan, a huge Ukrainian with a tiny, squashed-looking head’ (138), presumably the infamous guard nicknamed ‘Ivan the Terrible’ by inmates. Alongside these overly frequent encounters with historical personages there occur apparently verbatim representations of conversations, and Martin’s father is credited with a prescience that seems more likely to be the result of hindsight on the author’s part, such as his repeated conviction that the construction of the Ghetto bodes ill for the Jews and that the Nazis aim to ‘exterminate the lot of us’ (51). Such deployment of what might be called ‘testimonial licence’ in instances such as these shades imperceptibly into the invented descriptions of Treblinka. Max Gallo, Gray’s ghostwriter, is a bestselling author of books about French historical figures, including Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle, and a description of him in the New York Times as ‘seeking a sense of France’s identity’14 is also relevant to Gray’s testimony, which Gallo has cast as a thriller in part to emphasise active resistance against the Nazis. In Sereny’s account of confronting both ghostwriter and survivor about

146    Textual Deceptions her suspicions of the testimony’s Treblinka sections, while Gallo claimed that the story ‘needed’ a section on Treblinka for ‘pulling in’ readers, ‘Gray finally retorted, despairingly, “But does it matter?” ’ Sereny glosses Gray’s remark thus: ‘Wasn’t the only thing that Treblinka did happen, that it should be written about, and that some Jews should be shown to have been heroic?’15 These admissions on the part of both ghostwriter and eyewitness testify not only to Gray’s wartime experience, but also to the contemporary imperatives of publishers’ and readers’ demands. Sereny argues that Gray’s memoir is an example of ‘commercially motivated’ frivolity.16 Yet it is not clear that Gray’s motivation was one of monetary gain, since his testimony is a memorial to his familial losses, both during the war and afterwards. The memoir’s title in both French, as Tous les miens, ‘All my people’, and English, For Those I Loved, has a dual reference: Gray lost his parents and siblings as well as 110 members of his extended family in the Holocaust,17 while after the war his wife Dina and all four of their children died in a forest fire in France. Gray emphasises the double tragedy by comparing the burning of the Ghetto to the flames of the devastating fire in 1970 (5). For Those I Loved also bears traces of the moment of its publication, in the aftermath of the socalled ‘Treblinka affair’. This controversy erupted in France in 1966 in the wake of the publication of Jean-François Steiner’s novel Treblinka, and concerned the passivity versus the resistance of Jews during the Holocaust.18 The Martin Gray represented in For Those I Loved is certainly no passive victim. Deli Strummer, A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust In A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust, Deli Strummer recounts her deportation from Vienna followed by incarceration in several camps, including Theresienstadt, Mauthausen and Auschwitz. Although parts of Strummer’s account are based on fact verifiable by means of camp and other records, other details of her Holocaust experience have altered significantly over the years of her telling the story, in the form of her published testimony, a documentary film,19 interviews recorded for the Steven Spielberg and Fortunoff archives, and talks delivered over several decades to schools in Baltimore. Such details as the year of Strummer’s deportation from Austria, and the locations and number  of camps she was sent to, are subject to change in the different versions of her story. In response to concerns about these discrepancies, the Baltimore Jewish Council, with whose support Strummer had undertaken speaking engagements, enlisted the services of Lawrence Langer, as an expert in testimony, and the historian Raul Hilberg to explore the story’s details.

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Rather than authenticating her claims, as the Council had expected, it emerged from Langer and Hilberg’s report that Strummer was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943, rather than 1941 as she describes,20 making the period she was in the camps closer to two than the four-and-a-half years she originally claimed; most of her time was spent in Theresienstadt, although that part of her testimony is very brief, while a period of imprisonment in Auschwitz lasted for, at most, weeks rather than months, yet this is the text’s focus. Strummer’s husband Ben did not die in Dachau, as she describes (32), but survived the war, and the couple later got divorced.21 Given the number and extent of these changes, Langer describes the discrepancies in Strummer’s various v­ ersions of her story, in spoken, written and filmed testimony, as constituting an ‘invented reality’ rather than a ‘lapse’ or retreat from memory.22 While Strummer’s alterations might suggest a wish for ‘self-­ aggrandizement’,23 in emphasising miraculous escape from gassing at Auschwitz and Mauthausen rather than life in Theresienstadt, her selfpublished memoir, edited by the writer Nancy Heneson, seems, rather, to feature examples, albeit extreme ones, of the distortion of memory and knowledge that she cites in her own defence. In this way, A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust supports Tony Kushner’s argument that the ‘contradictions and mythologies’ of even embellished Holocaust testimony can be seen to convey the ‘chaos and rupture’ of individuals’ experience at least as effectively as more seamless and factually accurate narratives.24 The testimony’s genesis in Strummer’s success as a public speaker, to which she alludes (xi), is preserved not only stylistically in the form of such devices as its rhetorical questions – ‘Can you imagine 32 people sleeping in a three-bedroom apartment?’ (5), as Strummer asks of the reader – but also in relation to impressionistic and emotive description. All the camps mentioned, including Dachau, as well as Mauthausen, in the prefatory ‘An Acknowledgement’ by one of the camp’s liberators, Edmund F. Murtha (v), are inaccurately described as ‘death camps’, while Strummer conflates gas chambers with crematoria in her reference to Mauthausen’s ‘gas ovens’ (44). These terminological errors testify to Strummer’s and Murtha’s awareness of her narrow escape from death, as well as the unexpected presence at Mauthausen, despite its location in the west, of a gas chamber, rather than to the detail of her daily experience. Strummer’s published account constitutes, at least in part, a smallscale version of the phenomenon described by Laub, in which feeling supplants fact, although some of her other solecisms take on an extended narrative form that is a sign of sustained amplification. In A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust, many of the exaggerations centre on the

148    Textual Deceptions gas chambers. On her arrival at Auschwitz, Strummer claims that she was part of a group of people sent into a ‘chamber with nozzles on the wall that looked like shower heads’ and that it was the ‘captors’ choice’ whether the nozzles would ‘spray water, or the deadly gas’. She adds that she ‘went through this experience five times’ (12). Critics describe this as a historical impossibility in terms of the number and detail of these narrow escapes. The ‘showers and gas chambers at Auschwitz were separate facilities’,25 in contrast to the gas chamber at Mauthausen, as the Memorial Museum at that site describes it: ‘The tiled gas chamber [was] disguised to look like a shower . . . On the ceiling was a working shower system with 16 nozzles’,26 and it seems that Strummer has transposed details of the latter camp to Auschwitz. Her narrative of narrow escape thus seems to be a conflation of locations alongside a wish to claim her own extreme proximity to the sites of death. The problem in Strummer’s account seems to be one of expression at least as much as the inaccuracy of her chronology and factual detail. Her phrase about the ‘captors’ choice’ refers not to the guards’ decision about whether to turn on gas or water in a particular room at Auschwitz, but to their ability to determine whether an individual was sent to the gas chambers or a shower room. Strummer’s emphasis on the threat of mechanised death is signalled by this unclarity, a focus that is equally evident in her claim that on the day of Mauthausen’s liberation, she was among the ‘next ones [due] to enter the gas chamber’ when the SS suddenly fled, and at that moment, ‘the door to the gas chamber flew open, sending odor of death into the air. Naked people stumbled out gasping for breath’ (21). This description represents an impossible telescoping of time. The last gassing at Mauthausen took place on 28 April 1945 at around the same time Strummer arrived there from the nearby camp of Flossenbürg, making it unlikely that she was either destined for or reprieved from a gassing; the SS abandoned the camp on 3 May, and it was liberated two days later by US troops.27 No incident of the kind Strummer describes, in which people are saved from a gassing during its process, is known to have taken place. Strummer’s description of her close shave with death and the flinging open of the gas chamber door thus possesses emotional rather than historical truth, as suggested by the transformation of the notion of ‘[the] odor of death’ into the more literal, and equally exaggerated, subsequent claim that she recalled having ‘smelled the gas chamber’ (24). When challenged about her description of being reprieved from death at the last minute although it was no longer threatened, Strummer claimed that, ‘at the time she thought the gas chamber was in operation’.28 Such a claim, like the expressive but unlikely detail of the ‘human bones [that] lay on the floor’

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of one of the gas chambers Strummer entered (12), is a mixture of what the author calls “innocent errors, inconsistencies’ with expressive invention, yet she defends the integrity of her experience as a whole, arguing that in the camps ‘I didn’t think about timing.’29 It seems that the act of relating her story in public, first orally as one of a group of survivors, and then, more significantly, in published form, impelled Strummer to embroider it in order to justify and retain her audience’s attention. Herman Rosenblat, Angel at the Fence In 1996 Rosenblat won a competition run by Oprah Winfrey for ‘the most touching love story’, in which he described how he was imprisoned in Buchenwald during the war along with his older brothers, and his life was saved by the food thrown to him over the camp fence by a little girl; later in life, he met a young woman, Roma, on a blind date in New York, who turned out to be the ‘angel’ at the camp fence from Herman’s past, and the two fell in love and married. While the detail of the teenage Rosenblat’s time in Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, was accurate, the meeting with the girl at the fence was an invention. Rosenblat’s real-life spouse Roma was, like her husband, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, but she had spent the war in hiding on a farm with her family near Breslau, over 200 miles from Buchenwald, whose titular fence was in any case not approachable either by the camp inmates or from the outside in the way Rosenblat describes. The only public road near the camp was closed to civilians in 1943.30 Herman and Rosa met for the first time in New York in the late 1950s. Once more, a story that needed no embellishment was altered from one of luck and fraternal protection into one of romantic determinism. For the most part, Angel at the Fence relies on Holocaust testimony’s standard narrative tropes, including those which draw attention to an acceptable margin of uncertainty between memory and reconstruction. These include providing the detail of reported speech, such as dialogue that took place before Herman was born (8), and the interpolation into the present of knowledge that seems likely to have been acquired later, such as the teenage boy’s ability to distinguish between the two ghettos at Piotrkow (65), and, as in Gray’s case, an apparent foreknowledge of genocide in his father’s certainty that the Nazis’ aim was to ‘destroy all the Jews in the world’ (53). Alongside these features are some that are particular to Rosenblat’s narration and its embellished status. From its outset, Rosenblat brings into his testimony a discourse of supernatural maternal protection that prepares the reader for the introduction of his ‘angel’ narrative: ‘It was my mother who ensured that I would survive,

150    Textual Deceptions who showed me how to keep on living, who promised that an angel would save me and bring light into my life’ (5). Such a statement represents a slippage from reference to Rose Rosenblat’s act of ensuring Herman’s survival, by refusing to let him stay with her on a transport to Treblinka, into a less concrete, posthumous wish to ‘save’ her son, one that takes on the embodied form of the little girl. The familiar elements of a camp testimony themselves are made to register the anticipation of such a figure, as shown by Rosenblat’s emphasis on his hunger and weakness in the days before the girl’s appearance (132). Rosenblat’s text as a whole is characterised by the oneiric and visionary, in a way that serves, in hindsight, as an alibi for its author’s invention. At his brother Isydor’s wedding after the war, Herman claims, in a way that sounds factual but is clearly wishful, ‘I knew my mother was present at the wedding, looking down on her children reunited’ (198). These moments not only blur history and imagination, but imply that there is a continuum between the two realms. In support of this implication, metaphorical discourse alongside protestations at the event’s unlikelihood accompany the narration of the first sight of the young girl at the fence in Schlieben. Her presence is described by Herman as a ‘miracle’ (137), and as an occurrence that ‘fed my will to live on’ and ‘nourish[ed] my body and soul’ (138, 147). Such metaphors suggest that the ‘angel’ provided figurative food, and thus a hesitancy about the reality of what is being described. On the other hand, the metaphorical discourse of nourishment might suggest that not only did the girl provide Herman with food, but her presence sustained him in less literal ways, by embodying his mother’s values of generosity and humanity. The narration of Rosenblat’s realisation, at their date in Coney Island over a decade after the war’s end, that Roma was the ‘girl at the fence’ is equally characterised by a double-voiced and metaphorical discourse that acknowledges unbelievability even as it repudiates it. Herman declares the coincidence of their reunion ‘impossible’, and enlists the clichés of romantic discourse to literal effect in describing the ‘shock of recognition’ the pair underwent on being introduced, the fact that they were ‘fated for one another’, and that although it seemed as if they had only just met, ‘both knew that wasn’t true’ (223–8). As a counterpart to the figurative language of wartime sustenance and post-war romance with which the story of the angel is conveyed, the circumstances of Rosenblat’s creation of the narrative in the mid-1990s appear in Angel at the Fence with apparent accuracy, since they are represented in terms of actual rather than emotional reality. In the testimony, Rosenblat describes the armed robbery at his television repair shop that resulted in his own injury and the permanent disabling of his son, a real-life

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calamity that seems to have provoked both the financial and other kinds of psychic need for the fable of the angel. As Elizabeth Day argues of the invention, in a way that makes Rosenblat’s alterations seem, like Strummer’s and even Gray’s, more akin to those of Ellenbogen than to the fabrications of Wilkomirski: ‘Perhaps, for the first time, Rosenblat felt in control of a life that had previously been buffeted by a series of external tragedies.’31 Although the Holocaust context is crucial for the significance of Herman and Roma’s later meeting, in Angel at the Fence and its reception the Holocaust itself is implicitly subsumed by the romance of the testimony’s title. It is the post-war encounter leading to Herman and Roma’s marriage that casts significance back onto the camp setting: necessarily so in the context of the ‘love story’ competition, and Oprah’s description of the Rosenblats’ tale as ‘ “the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air” ’.32 The Holocaust meaning is thus evacuated from the narrative; as implied by the planned subtitle to the withdrawn publication, ‘The True Story of a Love that Survived’, it is not an individual’s survival of genocide but the persistence of a personal relationship in such circumstances that is of importance. Among Herman’s earliest words about his parents in Angel at the Fence is his conviction that they would be proud their son is ‘celebrated as a symbol of the power of love’ (5); and he describes his response during the war to Isydor’s determination that the brothers should survive Buchenwald by helping each other in observing that ‘That thought helped me survive. Work helped me survive. And one more thing helped me survive: love’ (78). Such statements do double duty as endorsement for the importance of the testimony’s romantic invention and, as if aware of the notion’s bathos, as implying that other kinds of love are also significant: the testimony portrays parental and particularly fraternal love as crucial to Herman’s survival. Indeed, Herman’s real story is one of brothers keeping their younger sibling alive, a narrative made subsidiary to the romantic embellishment. At times, a struggle between the actual and invented stories is perceptible in the text, for instance where a sentence about Herman’s memory of his mother has literally to be embellished with an extra clause, where he writes of, ‘the benevolent image of my mother as she appeared in my dreams – and of course, my memory of the angel she had sent to me in Schlieben’. This remark is swiftly followed by Herman’s acknowledgement that ‘For all its horrors, my survival had taught me what the bond of brotherhood really means’, a statement of the real import of his testimony (178). However, the text’s likening of different kinds of love also serves its imposture, by making the ‘angel at the fence’ appear to be an incarnation of the devotion shown to Herman

152    Textual Deceptions by his mother and older brothers. While on a transport from Schlieben to Theresienstadt, Herman takes comfort from recalling the angel at the fence – and my mother coming to me so vividly in my dreams, promising she was watching over me. Surely, this was real. The little girl had appeared, as if out of nowhere, at the fence. She had fed me when I was starving . . . Was this a sign that God worked through my dead mother to keep me alive? (154)

Here, as elsewhere, the angel is described in factual terms, but the phrasing also seems simply to signify the existence of motherly love, as if it were that and not the little girl which is ‘real’. On other occasions in Angel at the Fence, episodes concerning the appearance of the angelic girl at Schlieben, and Herman’s encounter with her after the war, are narrated without ambiguity. On the first occasion of their encounter, Herman describes how, after half-an-hour’s walk in the camp, he reached one of the ‘blind spots’ in the guards’ surveillance of the perimeter fence and states simply, ‘that is how I first happened to see the little girl’ (136). The girl not only speaks Polish and is able to throw Herman an apple over the fence, but wears a ‘red sweater’ that offers relief from the ‘monochromatic’ world of the camp, in what appears to be an intertextual reprise of the child in the red coat from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List. Conveniently, the young Herman never told anyone about the little girl, and destroyed the notes she wrote to him (141). Indeed, a failure to search for other kinds of evidence on the part of those who heard and read Rosenblat’s story supports the historian Kenneth Waltzer’s criticism of those he describes as ‘the culture-makers’, including the publishers Berkley Books, the ghostwriter and Harris Salomon, the film director who optioned the novel, as well as many others who encountered the ‘angel’ story during the decade of its existence.33 Their unquestioning belief in Rosenblat’s story points to a Holocaust ‘illiteracy’, in Waltzer’s term,34 whether genuine or willed, which we will see writ large in the following examples: those of completely fabricated Holocaust memoirs.

Fabricated testimony In the three cases of complete fabrication by Wilkomirski, Defonseca and Holstein that I analyse in this section, the author necessarily masquerades as a Jew and a child survivor, in support of which all have altered their birth-dates in order to appear older and thus more plausible. As Robert Eaglestone has shown, Holocaust testimonies adhere

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to a surprisingly consistent format, often buttressed paratextually by the authenticating presence of such documents as maps, photographs and glossaries.35 This development of a template has had the effect of making such testimony not only iterable but also imitable,36 leading to the existence of ‘Holocaust testimonial novels’,37 as well as the effect that I discuss below, that of false testimony, which in structural terms may appear to resemble the real thing. However, the success of these impostures has also depended on a readership willing or eager to suspend its disbelief. Such suspension requires not only the acceptance of impossible or unlikely events but also the overlooking of overt or unassimilated textual borrowings. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948 Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments is not only the earliest and bestknown of the three false Holocaust testimonies that I will discuss. It is also an important text in the history and canon of Holocaust literature, in the three phases of its reception that I outline below. Fragments purported to be the account of the eponymous barely recalled ‘fragments’ of memory possessed by Binjamin Wilkomirski. Wilkomirski claimed to be a Latvian Holocaust orphan, but had in fact suffered the fate of an illegitimate Swiss child whose early years were spent in unsettled circumstances with unsuitable foster-parents. According to Wilkomirski’s prize-winning testimony,38 the young boy fled Riga and was subsequently imprisoned in both Majdanek and Auschwitz, then, after the war, was smuggled into Switzerland and given the papers of a Swiss boy. None of these details was true, except that Wilkomirski’s birth-name was that of the purportedly vanished Swiss child, Bruno Grosjean. At all times in its history, Fragments’ status as a literary artefact has coexisted with its representation of a traumatised subjectivity. It is this combination of extreme literariness with an apparent psychic realism that distinguishes Wilkomirski’s testimony, and on which I focus here. The reception and significance of Fragments have altered over time, and take place in three main phases. First, on its initial publication, it was hailed as the testimony of one of the Holocaust’s very youngest survivors, written in a strikingly unusual style in order to represent a child’s experience. Even during this early phase, however, doubts about the testimony’s reliability were voiced, to the publisher by the Swiss journalist Hanno Helbling and publicly by the historian Raul Hilberg, on the grounds that Wilkomirski’s story was at best unlikely, at worst impossible.39 Second, during the protracted process of its exposure

154    Textual Deceptions as fraudulent, one initiated by an article by the Swiss writer Daniel Ganzfried, Fragments was approached both as a ‘fictional testimony’ and as a case-study of the constitution of a real testimony in the public realm, including analysis of the expectations of readers and obligations of publishers.40 This exploration took place in what became foundational essays by Philip Gourevitch and Elena Lappin.41 Third, after it was established beyond doubt to be false, the text was reassessed in literary terms as a species of novel.42 With hindsight, the fact that Fragments’ representation of a child’s viewpoint could only be a stylisation, given the necessary presence of an adult narrator, was taken to be a literary clue to its dissimulation: its very narrative structure betrayed the truth. Such analysis was accompanied by critical speculation on the significance of such fraudulence for Holocaust studies and testimony, about what the text’s actual autobiographical origins might be, and on whether these feature in the text in what has been described as ‘encoded’ form.43 Alongside this cultural and literary consideration of the text have arisen questions about the author’s psychology and motives, in relation to whether its impetus was tragic or cynical: that is, if the author was knowingly fraudulent or genuinely deluded.44 The nature of these three different phases is reflected in the intertextual influence of Wilkomirski’s testimony as well as in its critical reception. As we will see, Misha Defonseca’s and Bernard Holstein’s testimonies responded to Fragments’ first incarnation by drawing on it for authentication in constructing their own false testimonies. However, such reliance has had the opposite effect, one of compounding the falsity of the two later works, in a parallel to Wilkomirski’s story being backed up in public by that of his ‘fellow-Auschwitz inmate’ Laura Grabowski, who herself turned out to be masquerading.45 Holstein’s Stolen Soul includes surprisingly direct transcriptions not only from Fragments but also from Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves, and his borrowings from the latter consist of the very incidents that were the occasion for its exposure. During the second phase of its reception, as Andrew Gross and Michael Hoffman argue, Fragments was still viewed in relation to Holocaust literature but as part of a different genre in this canon: ‘Those who began by comparing Fragments to Elie Wiesel’s Night now invoked Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird.’ Gross and Hoffman describe Kosinski’s novel as another ‘discredited survivor’s tale told from a child’s point of view’,46 and such a description of The Painted Bird is itself revealing of the effects of ‘the Wilkomirski affair’. These are notable not in the sense that Fragments’ exposure made readers suspicious of other testimonies and thus fuelled Holocaust denial, as some had predicted, but because it cast associative generic doubt on Holocaust fiction. It is

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as if the boundaries of testimony have to adhere so strictly to historical reality that, following the terms of a longstanding debate,47 even novels about the Holocaust, particularly those written by survivors, must do so too. Such an attitude implies that Holocaust fiction of this kind is not recognised as representation, but criticised as if it had made a reality claim similar to that of testimony. For instance, Norman Finkelstein ignores the fictional genre and figural discourse of The Painted Bird in arguing that it, like the phenomenon of Fragments, is the outcome of over-valuing Holocaust testimony, and describes Kosinski’s novel as a ‘purported . . . autobiographical account’ and thus a ‘hoax’.48 A similar application of testimonial standards to fiction is evident in the case of other examples of ‘fraudulent’ novels, such as Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper and, more recently, Deborah Rey’s Rachel Sarai’s Vineyard.49 In these examples, not only did the text itself blend fiction with history, but the author’s extra-textual statements and, particularly in Demidenko’s case, authorial performances were ‘discredited’.50 However, the texts by Kosinski, Darville and Rey were published as fiction, and, in the case of The Painted Bird, events are narrated in a dark magic-realist mode that advertises its literariness. The novels by these three writers have undergone different fates since it came to light that the links between author and text they constructed were themselves fictive, a variation dependent in part on how long the book had been in the public realm. An Afterword was included with later editions of Kosinski’s novel, Darville’s was reissued under her real name and with an added author’s note, while Rey’s has been withdrawn by the publisher. In relation to the third phase of Fragments’ reception, both Sara Paretsky’s Total Recall and Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas offer novelistic versions of Wilkomirski from the period in which his memoir’s fraudulence was no longer in doubt. Paretsky’s novel, published shortly after Wilkomirski’s exposure, uses the figure of a troubled individual convinced that he was sent to Terezin at the age of twelve months as a symbol for the impossibility of the full retrieval of memory implied by the novel’s title. The self-created survivor Paul Radbuka has retrieved ‘fragments’ of memory under hypnosis, in what turns out to be a way of ‘glamorizing’ his unhappy childhood with a violent father.51 Stein’s novel, published nearly fifteen years after the Fragments controversy, uses the figure of an individual convinced that he is someone else to more postmodern effect, transforming Wilkomirski into the occasion for a metafictional meditation on identity.52 Such varied novelistic responses to the case suggest that Fragments’ legacy may lie in its literary influence. Some of the commentary that appeared in the wake of the revelation

156    Textual Deceptions of Fragments’ falsity, that is, in the third phase of its reception, when it was viewed as a kind of novel, tried to predict its future status. Although Andrea Reiter was convinced that ‘the literariness of [Wilkomirski’s] book ensures that it will last’, Anne Whitehead wondered by contrast whether it ‘deserves’ to fall into oblivion.53 More recently, and in what might be called a fourth phase of Fragments’ afterlife, in which its likely longer-term standing is overtly assessed, Eli Park Sorensen argues that Fragments has turned out not to ‘haunt’ the canon of Holocaust literature after all, but has been ‘forgotten’.54 The nature of the scandal surrounding Fragments, as well as its author’s continued failure to admit to his invented survivor status, mean that it has not been reintegrated into any literary canon in a fictional genre. If Fragments has a representational value, it lies in its offering a child’s viewpoint which cannot analyse the Holocaust world intellectually or morally, disrupting the clear distinction between the normal and abnormal, civilised and barbaric, that usually characterises Holocaust literature. The child responds instead by internalising what Kushner calls the Holocaust’s ‘chaos and rupture’.55 This unusual perspective is not represented in Fragments by the retrospective view of an adult, as is the case, for instance, in Simon Srebnik’s description in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (Les Films Aleph, France, 1985) of the inner world of his thirteen-year-old self in the Łódz´ Ghetto: All I’d ever seen until then were dead bodies. Maybe I didn’t understand. Maybe if I’d been older I’d have understood, but the fact is I didn’t. I’d never seen anything else . . . I thought that’s the way things had to be, that it was normal.

Srebnik’s narration of his teenage self’s experience and existential confusion takes place in the present moment of his adult utterance, thus signifying the loss of the child’s viewpoint. By contrast, it is precisely the recreation of a child’s perspective in Fragments that is its most significant and most literary feature, one that suppresses temporal difference. A child’s viewpoint can only be achieved aesthetically, as we see in Jona Oberski’s short-story collection A Childhood. Oberski’s stories take a fictional rather than documentary form in representing the author’s youthful experience in Bergen-Belsen by means of a child focaliser, a device that foregrounds the psychological impossibility of any such return to the past. In Fragments, the counterpart to Srebnik’s look back at his younger self – ‘Maybe if I’d been older . . . ’ – is Wilkomirski’s recreation of the childhood perception that his world was not the real world: ‘They’ve all tricked me. Maybe I didn’t need to live behind the fence at all . . . Was it all about nothing?’ (116). Indeed, just before we

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read of Wilkomirski’s suspicion that, in Srebnik’s phrase, this was not ‘the way things had to be’, the distinction in Fragments between the atrocious past and the present moment of writing is elided: ‘Oh God – I had brothers too once, I did – I remember now. Where are they?’ (116, emphasis added). Yet in Fragments’ case such recreation is not only literary, but constitutes the trace of its imposture; such temporal elision signifies factual elision. In the wake of the revelation of its inauthenticity, Fragments could be described as a ‘deluded’ memoir rather than a work of fiction.56 Viewed in such a way, Fragments is not an imaginative recreation of a child’s view of the Holocaust world, but a non-fictional case history akin to Daniel Paul Schreber’s subjective account of his hallucinatory convictions in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness of 1903, which formed the basis of one of Freud’s case histories. However, while Schreber’s Memoirs includes a translators’ preface, an introduction and contemporary psychiatric reports on his progress,57 Fragments was presented without any such introduction or framing, unless its present appearance as an appendix to Stefan Maechler’s exploration of its true background counts as such.58 Indeed, such hesitation between different descriptions of Fragments on the part of its critics reveals the strength of the generic strictures at work in determining readers’ responses to works of Holocaust literature. What later emerged as hints at its falsity include the absence of any relationship between Fragments’ account of individual, uncomprehending suffering and the bureaucratic, state-sponsored killing that makes the Holocaust horribly distinctive. Rather, as Philip Gourevitch notes, ‘the supremacy of one individual’s woe seemed to be what gave Fragments its authority’, despite Rebecca Wittmann’s reminder that the value of survivor testimony ‘far exceeds mere evocation of a visceral reaction’.59 Although the factors that Gourevitch mentions may be the reason for the value rather than the false promise of testimony, most readers’ experience of encountering Fragments on its publication bore out his statement while confounding Wittmann’s. It is the adult perspective of a witness like Chaim Kaplan, in his diary of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, set against the background of threatened deportation to extermination at Treblinka,60 which is needed for the acknowledgement of such a relationship between the suffering individual and the machinery of a genocidal state, yet texts of Kaplan’s kind, which chronicle what Richard Brody calls ‘finely tuned administrative torture’,61 have never attracted the wide readership and acclaim that greeted Fragments. Wilkomirski’s testimony is easier to read and comprehend, since the reader’s response is centred on an individual’s decontextualised suffering, and indeed the testimony is constructed to such an end.

158    Textual Deceptions It is perhaps the frequent occurrence of episodes in Fragments in which the reader knows more than the child, whose trust is betrayed by an adult, that prompted Ganzfried to combine aesthetic with moral judgement in his claim that Wilkomirski makes ‘pity replace thought’.62 The most symptomatic examples in Wilkomirski’s testimony are those in which an adult does not simply act cruelly but transforms friendliness into violence, so that the child is not just assaulted but betrayed. For instance, Binjamin enters into what he believes to be a game with a ‘big gray man’ but is thrown against a wall (17), while a different ‘bull-necked man’ kills a child during what appears to be a game of football and then subjects Binjamin too to dreadful violence (78–9). On other occasions, adults act with more straightforward cruelty and malice. Some male gardeners punish the child for stepping on newly turned earth by locking him up in a kennel (40), while women are no better: a farmer’s wife imprisons him in a cellar, a female guard tricks him into going quietly to Majdanek, and a woman schoolteacher in Switzerland reacts with hostility to his fear of the image of William Tell. This phenomenon of narratorial self-pity offers evidence for Slavoj Žižek’s assertion that such substitution of a Holocaust life-story for one that took place in neutral Switzerland constitutes an apparently perverse instance of Freud’s notion of screen memory, since, instead of conjuring up a reassuring fantasy, here it is the ‘very ultimate traumatic experience’ of the Holocaust that is used as a ‘shield’ against real recall.63 Yet such a psychic flight from reality may possess a historical pragmatism. The contemporary reception of Holocaust survivors and their stories does possess such compensatory and ‘shielding’ qualities, offering the opportunity for Misha Defonseca to transform the shameful death of her collaborator father in Sonnenburg concentration camp into that of a blameless ‘racial’ victim; and, in Wilkomirski’s case, soliciting communal acceptance for a story of childhood suffering whose actual origins, in the post-war Swiss fostering service, would not have been received with equal acclaim. As Langer revealingly puts it, Wilkomirski proffered a ‘more sympathetic image of his orphaned self’64 in making his background a Holocaust-related one. The strongest impression Fragments gives is that of an interiority to which the factual details of location and identity – no dates are given, while the names of such locations as Basel and Lemberg are treated as magical signifiers – seem almost irrelevant. It is indeed as if external signifiers have been enlisted, where they do appear, to anchor the amorphous bleakness of a childhood suffering and betrayal that was not understood as such at the time. In this sense, Fragments represents a fantasised instance of Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit, in which the

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backward glance of adult understanding has not accurately recognised those elements that were incomprehensible to the child, but furnished an illusory explanation for them.65 The adult Wilkomirski alludes to such a process in his description of trying to ‘subject’ his ‘earliest memories to intelligent reason, and arrange them in a pattern that made sense’ (147). This description, like that in the ‘Afterword’, reveals that a process of invention may not sound very different from one of the reconstruction of genuine memory, since for Wilkomirski both involve the attempt to ‘clarify many previously inexplicable shreds of memory, to identify places and people . . . to make a possible, more or less logical chronology out of it’ (155). During what I have called phase three of Fragments’ reception after its fraudulence had been established, and it was regarded as a literary artefact rather than a testimony, Mary Jacobus argued that such incidents as the child’s encounter with his mother in a barrack in Majdanek represent scenarios whose psychic nature means that they sidestep the binary of truth and untruth in representing regret for a mother-figure ‘who can never be properly missed because her meaning has been lost too early’.66 Such an argument raises one of the central questions that remain about Fragments, which is whether its representation of childhood trauma has a value independent of its imposture. In this way, Fragments could be seen as a true eyewitness account, testifying to a ‘primitive psychic disaster’ (135), or, in Michael Bernard-Donals’ argument, as offering a glimpse of trauma even though it is fictional.67 We might therefore ask whether the experience of Fragments’ child focaliser can be analysed separately from the imagery of the invented Holocaust setting, in effect undoing the text’s elaborate act of contextualisation. Sorensen describes such a division between traumatic imagery and its ostensible Holocaust backdrop in terms of a reprise of Tzvetan Todorov’s description of the detective story’s paradigmatic dual structure.68 All fictions construct a particular relationship between the fabula, or series of events in chronological order, and the sjuzhet, the order in which these events are narrated. In the detective novel, the originary crime constitutes the fabula, while the investigation of the mystery is the text’s sjuzhet, the solution of a mystery through an act of detection that is also one of narration.69 The events of the Holocaust in Fragments are not, as in a testimony such as Primo Levi’s or a diary such as Dawid Sierakowiak’s,70 the fabula but its sjuzhet. In other words, the Holocaust is needed to give meaning to the fragments of memory, rather than the fragments being best explained by the Holocaust. In attempting to explore the representation of trauma in Fragments, I will focus on two particular areas of the text’s production: the imagery of the eponymous ‘fragments’, and the child’s Jewish identity.

160    Textual Deceptions Despite the title of Wilkomirski’s testimony and frequent assertions of the incoherence of its structure as well as the narrator’s memory, it is, paradoxically, meticulously constructed in order to give such an impression. Far from there being ‘no discernible connection’, as the narrator claims (5), between the details as they are presented, the child’s memories from different periods are often closely matched. For instance, the blurred account of a failed attempt to reach Lemberg by train in the early days of the war is followed by a temporal jump but thematic congruity in the description of a post-war train journey to Switzerland (10–11). The two are most decisively linked by the adult narrator’s describing the later reconstruction of what this travel by train might have meant by using the same term for the remembered event and the process by which it was retrieved: ‘this [journey to Lemberg] was the beginning of years that I only slowly came to understand, when someone tried to talk hope into me again, and took me on another long journey’ (10). The metaphor of travel for therapeutic understanding affects the text’s other journeys, one undertaken in the company of a nameless woman, the other with the mysterious Frau Grosz in post-war Switzerland, making these ‘threads’ (68) between episodes sound similarly imaginary. The notion of fragments, or, in a more literal version of the German title Bruchstücke, broken pieces, equally appears in the text in terms of intersecting literal, psychological and narratorial senses. In particular, fragmentation characterises the child’s perception of the bodies of others as well as his own. Binjamin’s focus on the hands and legs of adults represents both a child’s-eye view, one literally from below, and an acknowledgement of the power and agency of others, as conveyed by their ‘strong arms and legs and terrible big hands’ (115). For instance, in Auschwitz when hiding under a ‘mountain of rags’, the child recalls a raid in terms of the ‘boots and bare feet’ (101) that he saw, and which represent the murderous guards and protective women prisoners respectively. The use of metonymy to convey distinctions in the child’s sense of power hierarchies is a technique that is apparently authenticating and also distinctively literary.71 The child’s sizing up of individuals’ status in relation to their uniforms – a female guard’s spotless ‘jacket with beautiful shiny buttons’ (35) shows that she ‘must be someone special’ (35), while a lowly ‘big block warden’ who guards the latrines has a dirty uniform ‘without any shiny buttons’ (61) – leads to his referring to them simply as ‘uniforms’. However, the device of metonymy, in which a part stands for the whole, mutates into the imagery of dismemberment, in which we see the whole threatened by its disintegration into parts, a transformation that also has a literary significance.72 The signifier of the buttons of those with power has a counterpart in

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Fragments for those without power in the image of the bundle, an amorphous collection of possessions that comes to stand in for its owner. Sometimes such a bundle is present as a literal object. While waiting to be processed on his arrival in Switzerland after the war, Binjamin notes that ‘bundles of paper’ are ‘passed round’ but he is ignored (18); on the same occasion, the ‘bundle and the teddy bear’ (21) that constitute all of the child’s possessions get lost: thus, on the same occasion, the ‘bundle’ embodies both unfeeling bureaucracy and the child’s affective past. At other times the ‘bundle’ becomes a synecdoche for the human bodies whose form it resembles. The image’s associations with hasty flight, stolen clothing and objectified bodies are gathered together and given a Holocaust-related meaning. People hanging onto the steps of a train are ‘like bundles’ (9), suggesting an inertia and powerlessness that come to horrible fruition when the ‘big gray man’ throws Binjamin into the air and the child ‘[flies] forward like a loose bundle’ into a stone wall. In a particularly gothic episode, the two ‘bundles’ who are put into the children’s barrack at Majdanek turn out to be ‘tiny babies’ who die of starvation soon after their arrival, although not before having eaten their own fingers (69–71). The imagery of the two episodes is combined in another scene, in which Binjamin hides from a raid at Auschwitz in the room full of discarded clothing, but other children are not so lucky. It is they and not the rags who are thrown out: ‘Two small, wriggling bundles were pulled out by large hands . . . then a big swing and the bundles flew clear across the room . . . through the window, and out’ (101–2). This description suggests both the danger and the allure of a category error, in which animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, are abjectly confused. Such imagery seems to present a return to a pre-oedipal region, befitting the child’s lack of a ‘mother tongue’ (3), and under the constant threat that his uncertain selfhood will disintegrate and revert to the ‘body-in-pieces’ of the pre-Mirror Stage era. Binjamin has not only lost the ability to hold at a distance what Jacques Lacan describes as the ‘images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body’,73 but offers a catalogue of such events that he either underwent or witnessed. Bodily and psychic disintegration share the same language. During an assault, the child’s face feels ‘torn in two’ (41), while the outcome of believing that he sees women giving birth to rats, confusing stomach and womb in the process, is that ‘everything inside me comes loose and seems to flow away’ (86–7). By contrast to this imagery of disintegration, the textual body of Fragments itself constitutes an almost seamless mixture of its author’s misrecognised childhood suffering with his Holocaust-related

162    Textual Deceptions reading. Even if an intertext is identifiable, as in the case of Oberski’s A Childhood, its specific influence is local and limited. Narration by means of a child focaliser as well as the representation of maternal loss in Fragments are indebted to Oberski’s fiction, although some of the most shockingly violent scenes originate elsewhere.74 The influence of A Childhood is evident in the fact that while the English translation of Fragments simply gives numbers to the text’s episodes, in the German original these are individually named, often in explanatory style, for instance ‘Die Hundehütte’ (The Kennel), ‘Das Brot’ (The Bread). Wilkomirski’s testimony seems almost to advertise its resemblance to Oberski’s stories in this respect, since the latter uses similarly childlike titles, such as ‘Jumping Jack’, ‘Kitchen’ and ‘Cake’.75 In both A Childhood and Fragments, the chapter titles are innocent-sounding signifiers for what turn out to be mysteries or horrors. Wilkomirski goes a step further in some instances by reversing this priority, so that what seem to be atrocities are everyday events, thus ‘derealizing the Swiss here-and-now’, in Ross Chambers’ phrase:76 ‘Der Henker’ (The Executioner) is the title of a ‘fragment’ about a skiing instructor, while ‘Der Verdacht’ (Suspicion) concerns Binjamin misrecognising his fosterparents’ house as another camp. Although Jacobus argues that Bruno Doessekker’s actual maternal loss is perceptible through its Holocaust guise, its means of expression, if not its very presence, has an intertextual origin. For instance, after the war’s end the boy in Oberski’s A Childhood visits his mother in hospital, where she is ill in bed: Someone was lying there with the covers pulled up over her head. All you could see was a bunch of hair. Red hair . . . Like my mother’s hair.77

This is echoed in Wilkomirski’s vision of his mother: I made out the shape of a body under a gray cover. The cover moved. A woman’s head became visible, then two arms laying themselves slowly on top of the cover. (49)

Oberski’s child protagonist’s temporary inability to recognise his mother in hospital is resolved when he sees her face, in contrast to Binjamin’s complete lack of familiarity with his mother; the mother in A Childhood deliriously throws food at her son from her hospital bed, while in Fragments the mother gives Binjamin a piece of bread she has hidden under the bed-covers, thus metaphorically ‘offering’, in Jacobus’ phrase, ‘the gift of survival’.78 The death of the child’s mother in A Childhood is indirectly conveyed to him by Trude, a family friend, who says that they cannot visit the hospital again: ‘I said the last time she

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had simply opened the gate. She said: “That’s not possible any more”.’79 Trude’s oblique breaking of the news is turned in Fragments into a hint that is more nebulous but, in the setting of Majdanek, also more definite. After Binjamin and ‘the lady in the grey uniform’ visit his mother, the boy sees this Trude-substitute on another occasion and she addresses him thus: ‘ “Oh, it’s you . . . you can’t see your mother again . . . it’s not possible anymore” ’ (51). Wilkomirski thus transforms the drily laconic representation of childlike misunderstanding from A Childhood into an occasion for overt pathos. Such a transformation in Fragments of emotional equivocality into certainty, in this case pity for the son and admiration for the mother, also occurs in Wilkomirski’s version of the child’s misplaced assertions of loyalty to his mother as they appear in A Childhood. In the latter, the boy’s post-war foster-mother Mrs G. kisses him on the lips, conjuring up his mother’s warning against deathly infection in Belsen and causing him to vomit. Mrs G., in the book’s last line, declares, ‘Now look what you’ve done. Just clean it up. You’re not a baby anymore.’ She gave me a cloth. I started wiping it up.80

In Fragments, the equivalent of this ambivalent moment becomes one of unmistakable cruelty. In the wake of the ‘big gray’ man’s attack on Binjamin, a female guard spots the ‘trail of blood’ that marked the child’s way back into the barracks: ‘She threw a big, heavy cloth at me. She ordered me to clean the floor. I bent down and tried to wipe up the blood’ (17). The incident in A Childhood is framed by the book’s paratexts, in particular the wry dedication to Oberski’s carers that appears at its end: ‘For my foster parents, who had quite a time with me’.81 Such acknowledgement of retrospection, since the dedication is dated ‘19 November 1977, 7pm’, as if recording the very moment of the book’s completion, colours the child’s errors with an adult perspective that is absent from Fragments. It gives a double meaning to Mrs G.’s insistence that the boy is no longer a ‘baby’ and to the act of ‘wiping up’, implying a process of growth and restitution that takes place outside the text. No such implication is made in Fragments, in which the act of wiping up his blood appears both limitless and deadly to Binjamin, and is another instance of indistinguishable bodily and psychic disintegration: Every time I bent over to wipe, more blood fell down from my forehead . . . and I thought, This is how it’s going to be, forever and ever, until everything’s dripped out of me, and then I’ll be dead. I don’t remember how it actually ended. (18)

164    Textual Deceptions Jacobus interprets the image of Binjamin’s mother’s body ‘under a gray cover’ in the Majdanek bunk as ‘a representation of death in the unconscious’, and such images as the child’s endless wiping of his own blood as examples of traumatic ‘frozen memory, arrested in time and space’.82 Although Jacobus argues in the postscript to her chapter, added after Fragments’ exposure, that, ‘Holocaust memory risks losing its historicity when it becomes a metaphor for object loss’,83 it seems that Fragments is after all a record of its author’s reading rather than a historicised narrative of his own traumatic losses. The English translation of Wilkomirski’s testimony follows the German original closely in relation to such linguistic effects as passive grammatical constructions, the child’s use of rhetorical questions and the deployment of metaphorical language, such that the word ‘Bündel’ is used wherever I have cited the ‘bundle’ imagery. However, the two versions differ in relation to the representation of Binjamin’s Jewishness. In the English version of Fragments, the absence of any Jewish selfawareness might appear on first reading to be simply another part of the child’s tragedy. Since he describes himself as having no grasp of a native language, without parents, siblings or homeland, lacking any knowledge of a Jewish heritage is yet another element in this deracination. In retrospect, such an absence appears to be less a tragedy than a pretext. Although Wilkomirski seems to have entered enthusiastically into an enactment of Jewish practice in his own life, its absence from his testimony conveniently doubles up as a source of pathos and as a way of avoiding potential errors. Yet such a lack of acknowledging a Jewish past is as much a function of the text’s publishing and translation history as it is an authenticating detail. Binjamin establishes himself more distinctly in the original German text as Jewish, although in non-specific ways that depend on a Yiddish-inflected language which would have been hard to render in English. This more clearly identified Jewish experience is evident first in terms of Bruchstücke’s publication by Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin’s venerable Jewish publishing house, but also in the detail of the text itself. The word ‘Jew’ does not appear until page 29 of the English version, and even then it is in the Biblical tale of Jonah that Motti relates to his brother Binjamin. In the German original, by contrast, at the end of the text’s very first paragraph about the narrator’s lack of a mother tongue we learn that he spent his childhood in ‘verschiedenen Kinderbaracken in den polnischen Lagern der Nazis für Juden’.84 In English, we read simply that Binjamin was incarcerated in ‘an assortment of children’s barracks in the Nazis’ death camps in Poland’ (3), and the final clause of the German original – ‘in the Nazis’ Polish camps for Jews’ – is absent. Such alteration in English can be partly ascribed to convention and

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phraseology rather than a project to de-identify Binjamin. Yet a version of the ‘mother tongue’ that Binjamin laments, and which Langer, going by its absence in the English translation, argues that Binjamin appears to have ‘forgotten . . . soon after his painful adventure begins’,85 does appear in the German text. A woman who hides Binjamin under a pile of rags in Auschwitz speaks Yiddish, and a ‘fragment’ of her speech is reported directly and without comment. In German, we read: ‘ “Hob nischt kein Moire – jetzt – schnell!” flüsterte es drängend hinter mir.’86 The English version omits any suggestion of this Yiddish vocabulary: ‘ “Don’t worry – quick – now!” said an urgent whisper behind me’ (103). The woman’s warning in the German original echoes a phrase from the Yiddish song ‘Dus Appele, Dus Appele’, about an oedipal relationship between mother and daughter as the latter asserts her independence: ‘Nain, ich hob ka Moire nischt, ich bin nischt mehr ka Kind’ (I don’t worry, I’m no longer a child), implying at once Binjamin’s recognition of the woman’s cultural fluency, and the pathos of the little boy’s lost childhood. Similarly, an apostrophe that Binjamin voices to his absent mother appears in English as, ‘ “Mama, Motti, Jankl, what do I do?” ’ (126); but in the German original he uses a Yiddish term: ‘ “Mamele, Motti, Jankl! Wass soll ich nur tun?” ’87 Once more, the challenge to translation has been such that the nuance is simply left out in English. Such sidestepping of the German text’s linguistic representation of Binjamin’s Jewishness entails losing the implication that it, like his knowledge of Yiddish, was never wholly lost or, as Langer puts it, ‘forgotten’, even if the narrative logic of the testimony suggests that this reported speech must be the responsibility of the adult narrator. In the place of Binjamin’s recall of the sound of Yiddish in the German text, the English translation offers the reader instead the addition of a word without an original. On a school visit to a Swiss funfair after the war, Binjamin starts begging, and is teased by his classmates, who sing: Beggar kid, beggar kid, There’s never enough for the yid Beggar kid, beggar kid. (138)

In German, the chant is different: Der Bettelbub, der Bettelbub, er hat noch immer nicht genug . . . der Bettelbub, der Bettelbub . . .88

There is no equivalent to the word ‘yid’ here. Ross Chambers notes the ‘haunting quality’ of this chant in German, appropriate to a text

166    Textual Deceptions that ‘bears witness to a haunted culture’; yet this is drowned out by the verse’s ‘transformation’ into ‘antisemitic doggerel’.89 In the English translation, the effect of these various choices is to obscure traces of Yiddish but introduce an antisemitic term, as if Jewishness can only be represented in terms of antipathy: an effect that could be said to reproduce Wilkomirski’s extra-diegetic attraction to a religion simply by reason of its association with suffering. In the text, Binjamin describes the rabbi he meets after the war as ‘one of the barracks people too’,90 as if the Holocaust has produced a new definition of Judaism that relies solely on the locations of oppression. Misha Defonseca, Surviving with Wolves As we have seen in relation to Fragments, it is not easy to read the traces of an inner reality that might have motivated, and which constitute, the subtext of a false Holocaust testimony. In the case of Misha Defonseca’s invented account Surviving with Wolves, it is not so much the psychic as the historical traces of wartime parental loss that are apparent, blended once more with Defonseca’s Holocaust-related reading. The knowing nature of Defonseca’s imposture, in contrast to Wilkomirski’s, is evident both in the alteration of details between the different editions of her testimony, and in her ability to confess to duplicity when confronted with the evidence, as she put it in a statement released to the press in 2008: ‘This book, this story is mine. It is not actual reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.’91 While Fragments is the account of a confused interiority which has been historicised in relation to the Holocaust, Surviving with Wolves adapts the elements of fairytale and mythology in its project of transforming a wartime into a Holocaust narrative. Defonseca’s testimony was first published in the USA in 1997, under the title Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, issued by a small, independent imprint, Mount Ivy Press.92 The appearance of Misha’s life-story in textual form was the result of the publisher’s interest in Defonseca’s claim that animals had saved her life, and the jacket of this first edition features a drawing of a young girl surrounded by wolves. However, the focus of the story was not explicitly on its lupine aspect in this edition. Such an emphasis was more evident in the testimony’s second edition, on its republication in 2005 as Surviving with Wolves: The Most Extraordinary Story of World War II, and it is by this title that the text is best known.93 Just as the story of a child’s rescue by wolves during the war was what distinguished Defonseca’s testimony and made it a bestseller in its reissued format, so it was the feature that aroused most suspicion about its authenticity. Surviving with Wolves

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is a translation back into English of the second French edition, which was itself entitled Survivre avec les loups. While the first French edition was simply a translation of Misha,94 the second consists of a retelling and remarketing of Misha’s story, in concert with a second, French ghostwriter.95 The later French edition differs in small but crucial ways from the original version, and constitutes what Defonseca described as a ‘fuller and more accurate’ account of her experiences.96 The complex and confusing nature of the testimony’s publication and translation history is inseparable from the fact that it is invented, and the detail of the alterations between the editions became crucial to the exposure of Defonseca’s fraud. These details are for the most part those of individuals’ names and photographs. However, small differences between the second French edition and its English translation appear, at least in hindsight, to offer their own linguistic hints at the text’s artificial nature. For instance, we read in French that Misha’s post-war fosterers refused to believe her experiences and declared, ‘ “C’est un tissu de mensonges! Un torchon!” ’,97 that is, a rag or dishcloth, a term used dismissively in a way similar to the Yiddish word ‘schmatte’. In English we read instead: ‘ “This is a web of lies! A dog’s dinner!” ’ (212). It seems fitting here that the uncaring carer utters the disparaging phrase ‘dog’s dinner’ in a way that relies on a domesticated version of the text’s most surprising element, that of ‘surviving with wolves’, as an image for its own unlikeliness. The central events of the two different versions of Misha’s story, each the responsibility of a different ghostwriter, do not differ substantially. Both relate the early years of a little girl, born in Belgium in 1934 to Jewish parents: the Russian-born Gerusha, and Robert or, as he was also known, in the ‘Hebrew version’ of his name, Reuven, originally from Germany. The little girl was called ‘Mischke’ by her parents, although she changed this to ‘Misha’ during the war, and never knew her real surname. In September 1941, both parents were rounded up in the street during a Nazi raid and Misha never saw them again. She was taken in by Marguerite and Maurice De Wael and their son Leopold, who gave her the name ‘Monique De Wael’ in order to protect her identity. Thus Misha accounts within the text, as part of its invented Holocaust narrative, for what was her real name. Yet this ironic expression of the truth in Misha is altered in Surviving with Wolves, where, following the French editions, the child’s surname has been turned into ‘Valle’ for the sake of preventing discovery, most particularly in the author’s native Belgium. According to Defonseca’s testimony, the De Waels insisted that Misha must pretend to be a younger child, born on 12 May 1937 (9): this is of course the author’s actual date of birth. Misha felt unloved

168    Textual Deceptions in this family, who looked after her solely on account of the money her parents had left for them, and her only solace was time spent at the farm of Maurice De Wael’s uncle Ernest, known as Grandfather, and his wife Marthe, among their animals. Once again, the adopted name of a central character is in fact a real designation, since the real-life Ernest De Wael was indeed Defonseca’s grandfather. Eventually, as Defonseca relates it, the child was told that it was too dangerous for her to keep visiting the farm, and she decided to set out on foot to find her parents, who Grandfather told her were ‘in the east’. Thus began, according to her testimony, Misha’s four-year odyssey of some 3,000 miles, from Belgium to Ukraine via Germany and Poland, and back again to Belgium through Romania, Yugoslavia and Italy, guided only by a compass given to her by Grandfather. This section of the text makes a generic departure from the earlier and later sections set in Belgium, diverging from disguised autobiography into a splicing together of historical detail with wolf-related mythology, both elements based on a mixture of research and invention. During this trek, the seven-year-old Misha survived by stealing provisions and eating what she found in the forest, including wild plants and carrion; she trimmed her toenails with her teeth (87) and drank her own urine (172). To protect herself, on one occasion she attacked a Polish peasant with an iron bar and, on another, stabbed a Nazi to death. She entered the Warsaw Ghetto and managed to get out again, witnessed a deportation and the massacre of a group of children at Otwock in Poland, was sheltered by Russian partisans, among whom she encountered her male namesake Misha, travelled by clinging to the underside of a train, and was cared for by two different packs of wolves. At the war’s end when she had returned to Belgium, although Grandfather was still alive, Misha was once more taken in by unloving foster-parents, this time a pair of schoolteachers. These women never explicitly told her about her parents’ fate, and she was unable to find out about the circumstances of their death. Summarising the events of Surviving with Wolves makes it seem hard to imagine that Misha’s wartime story could ever have been taken for the truth. Indeed, the ease with which the child manages to witness infamous Holocaust atrocities and remain unharmed transforms her into a narrative principle rather than a character. For instance, she claims that in order to see the round-up of a group of what she calls ‘living corpses’, ‘I flattened myself on the ground in the undergrowth to examine this unexpected procession’ (116). Later, Misha comes upon another puzzling scene: ‘I was lying flat on the ground, behind a tree, my face pressed into the grass, waiting to see what those children of varying ages and

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sizes might be doing there’ (153), then witnesses the children being shot. In both of these instances, the description of a secluded vantage point gives way to an apparent engagement that is in fact no closer to reality. Although Misha’s explanation is that being a child made her ‘invisible’, the conceit of a roving observer is both crucial to her imposture and a sign of her reliance on anterior sources, in particular Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State.98 Indeed, one of the few moments of Surviving with Wolves’ clear indebtedness to another text draws on just this notion of the onlooker. Having managed to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, Misha is almost magically shielded from the consequences of what she sees: she witnesses murder from her ‘vantage-point’ in a stairwell, and on the way to the cemetery claims that ‘no one took any notice of me’ (122–5). Her verdict on the Ghetto is that ‘I had arrived in something that was not life, this was not a town, and these were not real people’ (122). Both this vantage point and such a conclusion draw on Karski’s words: in his interview with Claude Lanzmann in Shoah, Karski says of the Warsaw Ghetto, ‘It was not a world. It was not a part of humanity.’ However, Misha does not repeat Karski’s recognition, following from these observations, that ‘I did not belong there’, since the point of her story is to insist that she does. Karski, the wartime courier for the Polish government-in-exile, was twice smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto by Jewish leaders so that he could report on the destruction of Polish Jewry to the Allies. On another occasion, Karski was taken secretly into a death camp that he believed to be Bełzec, but which has since been identified as Izbica Lubelska, a smaller death and transit camp nearby.99 Karski’s remarkable experiences in witnessing and reporting on Holocaust atrocity, enabled by his own and the Polish underground’s bravery and meticulous planning, are transformed by Defonseca into the chance encounters of a child. In the place of his anguished recall of the misidentified Izbica, we read in Surviving with Wolves of Misha’s arrival at the barbed wire fence of an unidentified camp: ‘I’d come within inches of what was probably a prison camp, although I’ll never know which one, since I didn’t even know where I was’ (89). Karski’s account of being told to blend in with the guards in order to witness what happened in the camp – ‘I was to join them, mingling with the mob of mixed attendants’100 – also has its invented counterpart. When she approaches the Warsaw Ghetto, Misha decides to join a column of Jews in case they can lead her to her parents, and the description of her experience mimics Karski’s: ‘All I had to do was slip in among the other children’ (117). Even Misha’s description of children playing a game of ‘counting deaths with pebbles’ in the Ghetto, thus ‘mirroring [their] everyday experiences’ (125), is an amplification

170    Textual Deceptions of Karski’s recall in his interview with Lanzmann of children ‘playing something with some rags’. Misha is only able to reproduce his horrified conclusion that, ‘They are simulating playing. They don’t play’, by claiming that the children’s game simply reflects their ‘daily life’ (125). The representation of the Ghetto in Surviving with Wolves constitutes an echo of Karski’s outsider perspective from someone who is able to enter and leave at will. This presents a divided allegiance at this moment in Surviving with Wolves, since Misha’s kinship is supposed to be with the imprisoned Ghetto inhabitants, rather than with the non-Jewish perspective of Karski; like the gentile courier, she wears no star. However, the transformation of the rags in Karski’s account of the game to the pebbles in Misha’s gives a clue to her primary identification, which is with suffering children in general, since we have already been told that pebbles are Misha’s playthings. Indeed, the incidents of the text as a whole could be considered in the same way that Misha describes the Ghetto children’s game, as a ‘mirror’ for her actual ‘everyday experiences’, both intra- and extra-diegetically. In all these instances related from a bystander’s perspective, the child’s onlooker status gives ­narrative form to the story’s origins in an imaginary identification. A retrospective judgement of the impossible-seeming nature of what Misha describes appears to place blame on the various different publishers who marketed her story, for not investigating its factual basis. It seems that they must have suppressed their suspicions for the sake of the sales that such a remarkable tale of childhood survival against historical odds would bring. While Misha sold well in the USA, it was in the many European-language versions of Surviving with Wolves that the testimony became a bestseller,101 and it was made into a film in France (Véra Belmont, 2007). However, the two English-language and two French publishers did not shun a process of verification but, rather, saw no need for it. Jane Daniel, the original American commissioning editor and publisher of Misha, weighed up the evidence of divided expert opinion on Misha’s story alongside lack of definitive proof and decided on publication, as did Charles Ronsac, the editor at Robert Laffont, the first French publisher, who was himself a Holocaust survivor. Neither Bernard Fixot of the second French publisher, XO Editions, nor the British publisher of the English translation had any such suspicions.102 Although the publishers of the testimony did not consider its narrative implausible, early detractors, such as Lawrence Langer and Debórah Dwork, did comment on the unlikely nature of the story’s historical detail, which they took to cast doubt on the story as a whole.103 Others, including the psychologist Marcel Frydman, assumed some of its elements to be psychic reconstructions. Although he described it, in a study

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of hidden Jewish children in wartime France, as an ‘unbelievable’ and ‘hallucinatory’ account, Frydman ascribed its ‘errors’ and ‘transformations’, including the ‘anthropomorphism’ with which the wolves are described, to interpretations ‘elaborated by the adult author’.104 The fact that the author had not lived in Belgium for over a decade by the time of Misha’s publication enabled the long-lasting nature of the imposture.105 Eventually Misha’s confession that she had invented her wartime story was provoked by a journalist’s threat to ‘find her parents’ for her if she did not do so.106 In the press statement published in Le Soir in February 2008, Defonseca declared that, ‘This book, this story [was] my way of surviving’, as ‘a small girl of four years old who has lost everything and who has to survive’.107 Her adding that ‘It’s true that I’ve always felt Jewish’ suggests that, as in the cases of Binjamin Wilkomirski and Bernard Holstein, Jewishness was taken by her to be synonymous with a suffering that is childlike in its innocence. While such a statement on Defonseca’s part points to the blurred boundaries of ‘projective or incorporative identification’ with a Holocaust experience, in Dominick LaCapra’s phrasing, rather than the respectful distance of ‘empathic unsettlement’,108 other commentators suggest different motives. Daniel Mendelson argues that confusing subjective with historical reality is more typical of psychosis than simple invention, while the publisher Jane Daniel sees a mercenary rather than psychic motivation for Defonseca’s imposture.109 Misha’s story exhibits a surprising accuracy in relation to what might be called a series of shadow events in her own life.110 As in Wilkomirski’s case, childhood suffering of another kind has been transposed into a Holocaust setting. The real history to which Misha Defonseca’s confession of invention alludes includes the fact that Monique was born on 12 May 1937 to a French-speaking couple in Etterbeek, Belgium. Her parents were Robert and Josephine De Wael, the invented ‘Gerusha’ arising from the fact that the latter was known by her middle name of Germaine. While her mother came from a devout Catholic family, Monique’s Grandfather Ernest De Wael was an outspoken anti-cleric and her father an atheist who underwent adult baptism only in order to please his parents-in-law. Robert was a member of the Grenadiers, the Belgian regiment who were mobilised when the Germans invaded on 10 May 1940, and after Belgium’s surrender less than three weeks later became a member of the underground resistance. On 23 September 1941 Robert was arrested, and Germaine, misunderstanding his instructions to collect Monique from school, was herself taken into custody while trying to remove a gun from the family apartment. In her parents’ absence, Monique was brought up by her paternal grandparents, since

172    Textual Deceptions her mother’s parents lost touch with their grandchild. After the deaths of Ernest and Marthe De Wael, the child lived with two schoolmistress sisters and then with the family of her cousin Maurice De Wael, his wife Marguerite and son Leopold. Robert and Germaine De Wael both died in German custody during the war. Robert became an informer and a Gestapo agent, apparently in an effort to have himself and his wife freed from prison; however, he was never released but died of ill-health in May 1944 in Sonnenburg concentration camp in Poland, where political prisoners were incarcerated. Germaine was interned in the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück at the end of the war, and became so ill that during the spring of 1945 she was sent to her death in the gas chambers there.111 Monique was never definitively informed by her grandparents of her parents’ deaths, but was simply told that they were still in captivity ‘in the east’. Robert De Wael’s conduct was brought home to his parents and daughter when the post-war Belgian government refused to pay the orphan’s pension due to families of political prisoners; by contrast, Germaine was posthumously awarded a ‘medal of the Resistance’, although she had not formally been involved in the underground and was arrested because of a mistake. Later in life, Misha sued her original American publisher for failing to pay royalties or to market Misha effectively, with initial success; this provocation to Daniel to investigate her former author’s authenticity coincided with inquiries undertaken in Belgium on the release of the film Survivre avec les loups in 2007.112 While Defonseca’s motivation may remain uncertain, and her statement that she ‘found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination’ may constitute a justification as much as an explanation,113 it seems clear that the childhood experiences of Monique De Wael, or a fantasy about them, are the basis for the Holocaust experience of Misha in Surviving with Wolves. The text itself appears to acknowledge the construction of this alibi, in such observations on the part of its adult narrator as ‘it’s hard to gauge distance in my memory’ (2), and ‘I had lost track of time since my parents were arrested’ (44). Despite Langer’s argument that it is essential to observe a ‘distinction’ between the ‘child consciousness that experiences events’ and the ‘adult narrator who retrieves them for the reader’, in order that a text like Fragments or Surviving with Wolves should appear ‘convincing’,114 in the case of Defonseca’s testimony, such a gap becomes crucial, rather, to the simulation. The impression of candour that it gives about uncertain memory masks quite the opposite: an apparently extraordinary capacity for recalling the most precise details of an incredible story. In the testimony, the details of proper names and dates are cited

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and thus admitted, only to be repudiated, or, as the author later put it, ‘jumbled up’.115 As we have seen, the grandparents Ernest and Marthe and the unsympathetic Maurice De Wael and his family appear in Surviving with Wolves under their own names, but their blood relation to Misha is erased. Maurice’s family did not foster Misha until after the war, rather than in 1941 as the text claims – a time at which the real-life Monique was living with her grandparents. In the testimony, the child’s parents are given Hebrew names alongside their real ones, while Misha’s actual name ‘Monique’ is represented as one imposed by her guardians. Her real date of birth is acknowledged, but said to be part of her false identity; likewise, the date of her parents’ arrest by the Gestapo is preserved, but turned into the date of their being rounded up as Jews. Such transformations, and efforts to make authentic and mythologised histories overlap, sometimes result in the opposite effect: a revelation of their incompatibility. For instance, one of the inconsistencies identified by the testimony’s critics was the fact that Misha would not have needed to go into hiding in 1941, as she claims, and that the Jews of Belgium were not deported until August 1942, a year after the arrest of her parents.116 Misha’s first husband, with whom she had a child, was Morris Lévy, the son of a Turkish-Jewish immigrant to Belgium. Such a connection, albeit indirect, to a Jewish past supported Misha’s reinvention as a ‘Shoah orphan’, in preference to being a ‘traitor’s daughter’, as she was known in Belgium.117 Misha claims to have created a new biography in this way, as she put it to a relative: ‘ “now I am called Lévy, and my parents died like Jews in the camps’”.118 In Surviving with Wolves, it is as if the crucial preposition ‘like’ has been omitted. Throughout her adult life, Misha’s conviction that humans are violent and cruel predators, animals innocent and loving protectors, has persisted. With hindsight, it is possible to view this not as the result of her experience of rescue by wolves, but as the origin of such a fantasy. The differences between the two English-language editions of Defonseca’s autobiography all centre on ways of achieving a balance between what looks like a historical account of events, and one that depends of necessity on a child’s memory. In terms of their paratexts, both Misha and Surviving with Wolves include maps, in order to represent the child’s journey, and a mixture of personal and generic photographs. In this respect, as well as in others including encounters with varyingly sympathetic partisan groups, Defonseca’s texts resemble Martin Gray’s For Those I Loved. Gray’s testimony similarly incorporates a map showing his odyssey through Poland after his escape from Treblinka and later after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (155), as well as sections which place Gray’s family photographs alongside such generic

174    Textual Deceptions documentary images as photographs of the construction of the Ghetto wall. Misha, the testimony’s first edition, includes italicised passages after each episode summarising Misha’s present-day historical knowledge of the events she witnessed, while Surviving with Wolves’ index supports its claim to non-fictional status. The factual chapter-headings of Misha are replaced by more allusive ones in Surviving with Wolves; for instance, in the place of the first chapter’s ‘1941, Spring, Brussels’ the later edition has ‘A Woman in Black’, in a change that prioritises memory – in this case, one about the child’s foster-mother – over chronology. In terms of its plot, Surviving with Wolves’ focus on the animalnurturers plot is put in parallel with a greater emphasis on Holocaust history. It opens with the narration of a young woman, returning to her Belgian home town ten years on, who identifies herself simultaneously as a wolf and as a Jew: Passers-by ignore me. They don’t notice that I’m a stray wolf wandering through town . . . I was a little girl when I ran away from their world. My name was Mischke, I was Jewish and I was seven years old. (1)

This combination of the mythical with the historical contrasts with the opening of Misha, where the first scene is narrated from the viewpoint of a child playing with pebbles while she waits to be collected from school by her father, on the very day, it turns out, that her parents were arrested. She does not refer to her Jewish identity until she is served bacon by the De Waels, which in later life she realised was an affront.119 This contrast sums up the difference between the two versions of Misha’s story: in the first edition, the pathos of the little girl’s abandonment and inability to understand is paramount, while in the second, it is the ‘extraordinary’ nature of her encounters with wolves that is emphasised. The frequent invocation of Misha’s Jewishness in Surviving with Wolves, by contrast with Misha, coexists with other examples of the stark drawing of identity boundaries. Gilles, a friend of Misha’s mother Gerusha, appeared in Misha as an individual of mysterious, perhaps sexual motives;120 in the 2005 edition, it is more clearly implied that he is a member of the resistance alongside Misha’s father. Misha wonders rhetorically, ‘Did Papa belong to a resistance network with Gilles?’ (16). In this sharpening of moral borders, not only between victims and perpetrators but between resisters and betrayers, Gilles and Misha’s father Robert both appear in a better moral light. By contrast, the boy who helps Misha to crawl under the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto is shown more clearly to be reprehensible. In Misha, she asks the boy how to enter the Ghetto and claims of his response, ‘a slashing gesture like a knife across his throat’, that ‘there was no misunderstanding that!’121

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However, the gesture is ambiguous here, as it is in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, to which this detail seems to be a homage, since it signifies a warning as much as malevolence. In Surviving with Wolves, on the other hand, Misha not only claims that ‘there was no missing the contempt’ in the boy’s gesture, but wonders if he was stationed beside the wall specifically in order to ‘denounce people’ (121). The moral clarity of the child’s encounters increases in Surviving with Wolves, not just to contrast with the wolf narrative and the animals’ generosity, but in synchrony with it, to offset its fantastic nature. The two encounters with wolves in Surviving with Wolves represent an often explicit fusion of personal myth with history.122 The first wolf that Misha meets is initially described as ‘a big dog’ (91), allowing for the description to be recuperated as the error of a child. Indeed, Misha calls this wolf, which becomes her protector, ‘Maman Rita’, knowingly creating a substitute for the loss of her mother and registering not just her fondness for her grandparents’ spaniels, Rita and Ita, but a confusion between domestic and wild animals. It is only after her death that ‘Maman Rita’ is once more described not by name but as an animal: ‘I saw my she-wolf slung over a man’s back’ (103). The same blurring of domestic and wild applies to the child herself. Misha describes her efforts to pacify the wolves by emulating their behaviour through yelping and howling (96) and submissively rolling on her back (135). It was just such detail that drew the scepticism of the writer Serge Aroles on the release of the film version of Survivre avec les loups in 2007, and his declaration that Misha’s account ‘reproduces all the usual surreal clichés’ of narratives about children succoured by wolves, such as Misha’s lapping water with her tongue and skinning dead animals with her teeth, but includes some new ‘fables’, such as her claim to have ‘baby-sat’ the baby wolves when the adults were away hunting, and to have urinated in a lupine manner.123 However, these details have a significance other than the literal. They emphasise the ‘close proximity to the creaturely’ of a child,124 a closeness to which Misha is eager to draw attention, as she thinks of a lone wolf: ‘ “This must be a stray creature, which has been harmed by humans, like me” ’ (96). Despite the wolf’s strength, and the child’s assumption of a lowly position in the wolf pack, both are subject to the same threat of violence. After Maman Rita’s death, Misha observes that ‘the men in this area were hunters, and I hadn’t been careful enough’ (103): their prey is equally child and wolf. As such, the wolf is a figure for the ‘ambivalence of the monstrous as pertaining to both victim and perpetrator’,125 one with a particularly significant symbolic effect in times of war. The child herself is ‘monstrous’ in the sense that she is an outcast who prefers not to accept help

176    Textual Deceptions from humans and identifies herself as an animal. We might wonder what role such ambivalence has in the authentic, ‘shadow’ story of Misha Defonseca’s life. While Lionel Duroy argues that the wolves are simply exaggerated versions of the spaniels by which the parentless child felt comforted during the war,126 in the text itself an insistent identification is made between the wolf and Misha’s lost mother Gerusha. It is Gerusha’s hair of which the wolf’s pelt reminds the child (94), and after the first wolf’s death she declares that the hunters ‘had murdered my mother’ (106). Such an introjection of a wolf-mother is emphasised in the English translation in relation to the ingestion of food. When soldiers hand out chocolate at the war’s end, the adult Misha observes: ‘I’m still a chocoholic, capable of wolfing down a whole bar of chocolate in a matter of seconds’ (198, my emphasis). The French original, however, includes no such pun, but concludes descriptively: ‘Je suis encore aujourd’hui une fanatique de chocolat, capable de dévorer une tablette en une minute’ (I am still a fan of chocolate, able to devour a whole bar in a minute).127 Despite the English translator’s Freudian word-play, the wolf’s ambivalent status, as both hunter and hunted, seems more akin to that of Misha’s father Robert, as a prisoner whose role as informer led to the deaths of others. Yet this is a likeness that goes unspoken and the male wolves remain distant from the child. Both Misha and Surviving with Wolves include generic and personal photographs that appear to support the testimony’s factual status. However, it is those very images from Misha’s early life which provided ‘clues on her real age and her real relationships to family members’ for the forensic genealogists who took part in the exposure of the author’s real background.128 The photographs’ role in relation to constructed truth-claims might seem, revealingly, to be more typical of their customary appearance in novels, where playing with notions of photographic authenticity or indexicality129 can form a part of the fiction. It is the potential of just such an assumption of indexicality that informs the incorporation of photographic imagery into, for instance, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,130 where photographs self-consciously masquerade as confirmation of the narrative, rather than admitting to being its inspiration.131 In Surviving with Wolves, the suppression of the reader’s knowledge of this kind is not an intra-diegetic or metafictional conceit but crucial to its extra-textual claim to testimonial authenticity. This is so much the case that all the photographs were omitted from both French editions in case readers in Belgium recognised Misha or her relations.132 As Susan Sontag argues, ‘only that which narrates can make us understand’ the reality implied by photographs,133 since they are not reliably intelligible on their own. In Surviving with Wolves, the potential for photographs

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to be placed within varying narratives is exploited in order to produce a particular kind of ‘understanding’ on the reader’s part. For instance, an indistinct photograph of a foot that features in Misha but not in Surviving with Wolves is described thus, ‘1983. I had surgery on my feet to correct deformities caused by years of walking and bad shoes’, in a way that appears to refer at once to the child’s remarkable four ‘years of walking’ and also to something far more mundane. The childhood photographs of Misha on her own and with Ernest and Marthe in both English editions call even more directly upon the reader’s assumptions about what seems to be a natural indexicality to which they have in fact been directed. Like the photograph of ‘the author at about age 10’ reproduced as the frontispiece to Fragments, the very presence of the photographs misleadingly implies the truth of the narrative of which they are a part. A series of three photographs of the child dressed in a smock and with a large ribbon in her hair appears in both Misha and Surviving with Wolves, with almost identical captions to the effect that these are ‘The earliest pictures I have of myself as a child, aged seven. They were taken in the “Polyphoto” shop in Brussels when I was given my new identity.’ Despite the fact that these images seem to be of a much younger child, for which reason Defonseca is careful to emphasise her youthful appearance throughout her testimony, the photographs do not offer a plausible false narrative, in Sontag’s sense. We do not learn why the imposition of a new identity necessitated the photographs, and the visit to the photographer’s shop described in Defonseca’s testimony is more easily explained in relation to the suppressed plot of her actual experience. The reality-effect of the childhood photographs in Surviving with Wolves is constructed retrospectively, as well as by the caption, in a scene that takes place soon after Misha’s arrival at her foster-family. Marguerite De Wael insists, ‘I’m taking you to have some photos done. From now on, your name is . . . Monique Valle and you’re four years old. Try and get that into your head’. . . . After tying a ridiculous bow on my head, she dragged me by the hand into a photographer’s studio. (34)

Just as Sebald transforms the contingent details of the photographs included in Austerlitz into ones that appear necessary within a fictional narrative, so Defonseca does so here in order to construct an impression of historical authenticity. Contingency is turned into necessity, as we see in relation to the bow in Misha’s hair in the childhood photographs, which, simply by virtue of its prominence, is pressed into service as part of a narrative about being made to invent a new identity. It seems that, far from being part of a ‘ridiculous’ effort to hide the child’s Jewish

178    Textual Deceptions i­dentity, the photographs are those that Ernest De Wael sent to his imprisoned son and daughter-in-law via a lawyer in May 1942 in order to reassure them of her well-being.134 The photographs are thus full of narrative meaning, but of a different kind from the one described in the testimony. The absence of photographs of Misha’s parents is a necessity for the success of the imposture rather than that offered in the text, namely that Reuven and Gerusha had been too poor to have any photographs of themselves taken. In Surviving with Wolves, the teenage Misha is offered photographs by the present owner of her parents’ pre-war apartment, and accepts two of them although ‘they aren’t my parents, but . . . because they are of a blond man and a woman with dark hair . . . just as you might draw ghosts out of the shadows into the light’ (6). This is an uncanny and partial acknowledgement by Misha of her parents in both their guises, as ‘ghosts’ who died tragically in the Holocaust and can barely be recalled, or as wartime casualties viewed less honourably and repudiated by their daughter. Like Wilkomirski’s Fragments, Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves deploys an invented Holocaust narrative because it seemed preferable to her own history. It does so by means of what Blake Eskin sees as ‘the lurid specificity’ of violence set alongside ‘the vagueness of basic information’ that all three fabricated testimonies have in common.135 Defonseca was able to turn herself from a ‘shameful’ into an ‘exemplary’ victim by means of adopting the persona of a Holocaust orphan.136 Lionel Duroy describes her real story as ‘much sadder’ than the assumed Holocaust narrative, and Misha herself says that she was able to make her parents’ death more ‘beautiful’ by means of her invention.137 This paradox, that adopting a Holocaust autobiography may have an aesthetic and validating effect, lies at the heart of all three false testimonies considered here. Bernard Holstein, Stolen Soul Bernard Holstein’s Stolen Soul: A True Story of Courage and Survival138 was published in Australia in 2004. His memoir recounts the experiences of young Bernard, whose idyllic childhood with his Jewish vintner family in north Germany was interrupted by their deportation to Auschwitz in 1943. The nine-year-old boy was chosen to work on arrival in the camp, but all other members of his family were killed immediately. During his time in Auschwitz, Bernard and his two companions, the young German boys Mikhail and Erhardt, were put to work in Monowitz alongside British prisoners of war and subjected to medical experiments including forced sterilisation. The three boys took part in the underground resist-

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ance movement at Auschwitz and, during a period when they managed to flee the camp, were nurtured by a family of wolves. On being recaptured, the three were imprisoned in concrete bunkers and emerged barely alive. Although Mikhail and Erhardt died towards the war’s end, Bernard survived and was cared for by Chuck, a soldier from the liberating US army, at which point the memoir ends. After the war, Holstein claims that he was sent to a ‘holding camp’ in Cyprus.139 He describes arriving as an orphan in Australia in late 1948, where he was fostered by a family ‘on the north coast of NSW’, near Sydney, and educated in a Catholic boarding school.140 Like Wilkomirski and Defonseca, Holstein presents the detail of his actual biography as one falsely and unfeelingly imposed. In this section, I will explore in detail Holstein’s intertextual reliance on both of the other false testimonies, but also on two earlier, factual accounts of incarceration in Auschwitz. So extensive and overt are Holstein’s borrowings that Waltzer’s notion of ‘Holocaust illiteracy’, and its role in this constructed testimony’s existence in the public realm, take on an almost literal significance. The genesis of Stolen Soul’s composition was almost as complex as Defonseca’s. Judy Shorrock, the editor of the Perth Jewish newspaper The Maccabean, was introduced to Bernard Brougham, as he was known, in 2000 in case she was interested in his story. Since she wanted ‘to raise awareness of the Holocaust’, Shorrock encouraged Brougham to publish his memoirs, which he did under what he claimed to be his real name, that of Bernard Holstein. A first draft, based on taped interviews, was ghostwritten by Jilly Hayes, a professional editor, but Holstein claims that as it was not suitable he ‘tore it up’ and a second ghostwriter was engaged.141 Despite such mediation, in what is now a familiar pattern, the detail and provenance of Holstein’s reading which forms the substance of his testimony remain perceptible. On the strength of his memoir, which sold out its first print run of 500 copies, Holstein was invited to speak to local schoolchildren about his experiences and began work on a sequel to Stolen Soul, about his experiences after the liberation of Auschwitz and journey to Australia. After Bernard’s biological, Australian-born brother contacted Shorrock in 2004, a private investigator was hired to explore Holstein’s background, to the effect that his testimony was withdrawn from sale by its distributor, University of Western Australia Press. The Brougham family’s counter-narrative to Bernard’s Holocaust story is that he was never a prisoner in Auschwitz nor adopted, but was born in Australia into a Catholic family. His sterility is due to childhood mumps and not, as he claims, Nazi experimentation.142 The investigator corroborated the Broughams’ claims that Bernard was born in Australia in 1942, rather

180    Textual Deceptions than 1934 as he asserts in his testimony; his Catholic confirmation took place in 1952 and he later trained in a seminary to become a priest. It is tempting to see such religious education as the origin of a discourse of sacrifice, purification by fire and angelic salvation that characterises Stolen Soul. For instance, in the testimony Bernard views his companion Mikhail in a Christ-like guise – ‘I saw in his deep blue eyes unimaginable pain and sadness, but also irresistible love and compassion’ (140) – and, at the camp’s liberation, the American soldier Chuck appears to recognise the same formation in the boys: ‘he dropped to his knees in front of us, tears streaming down his face, and said, “What have they done to you?” ’ (149). In a televised interview with Mick O’Donnell broadcast in late 2004, Holstein was urged by both the interviewer and his wife Dee to take a DNA test to settle the matter of his relationship to the Broughams, but he claimed that it was ‘not necessary’.143 Although questions put to him on air and by newsprint journalists were not conclusively answered, about his apparent inability to speak German or Yiddish, his lack of immigration papers or record of any claim for reparations, and absence of witnesses to his arrival in Australia from the camp in Cyprus, Holstein continues to assert the truth of his story while also admitting its unverifiability. Holstein’s Stolen Soul most strikingly testifies not to its author’s experiences in a death camp, but, as with Wilkomirski and Defonseca before him, to his reading about it. Such an effect is not itself an indicator of dissembling; for instance, Charles Reznikoff’s long poem Holocaust transforms witness accounts made at war crimes trials into the poetic testimony of the present-day reader of this material, the poem’s speaker,144 but the aesthetic shaping of the poem is foregrounded and unmistakable in its paratexts as well as within the poem. Stolen Soul itself opens with a profusion of paratextual assurances of its factual status, including a biographical summary, dedication, acknowledgements, poem, dedicatory epigraph to Mikhail and Erhardt, and a ‘Prelude’ asserting both the truth of Holstein’s account and the mutability of memory (iii–xi). Since Fragments and Surviving with Wolves were published more than two years before Shorrock encountered Holstein, and neither was exposed as a fake until after the publication of Stolen Soul in 2004, Holstein drew on them as authenticating intertexts. Defonseca’s account is one of an odyssey rather than incarceration in a camp, and therefore its use to Holstein’s Auschwitz-focused work is less than that of Wilkomirski’s. However, it is beyond coincidence that encounters with wolves appear in both works, and Holstein’s version, despite its brevity, follows Defonseca’s even in terms of small detail. As in Defonseca’s account, it is in a cave that Bernard and his companions encounter a pack of wolves. The boys take shelter

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after escaping from Auschwitz, and come upon some newly born wolfcubs. Erhardt’s declaration that the boys should stay in the cave because ‘ “If it’s a choice between wolves or Nazis I will take my chances with the wolves” ’ (131) registers an awareness of the animal’s duality, as foe and nurturer. Like Misha, who claims that she ‘missed the smell of wolf’ (133) when it was absent, Bernard describes the scent of the wolves’ lair as ‘deliciously cloying’ (130). The transformation of a ‘sovereign’ predator into a persecuted victim, and of animal into human,145 takes place in the form of Bernard’s hallucination. Although this vision is ostensibly caused by the boy’s fever, its description – ‘I was on fire, radiating heat, burning’ (131) – is also the occasion for an instance of the text’s recurrent representation of a masochistic fantasy of being killed and burnt: Then I was alone, alone in the cave with wolves swarming all around, baring their teeth, screaming, telling me that I had burnt their babies . . . I tried to tell them that I hadn’t done anything, that it wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t meant to burn their babies, but they didn’t hear me because my tongue could not form the words. (131)

Holstein interprets his inability to speak as an expression of ‘guilt’, and indeed this moment is characterised not just by reversal, since the boy is accused by the wolves of murder, but by an oscillation between victim and perpetrator subject-positions. The trio consisting of Bernard and his two companions is reflected in the three wolf-cubs; it is perhaps their vulnerability that prompts the boy’s fantasy about the extreme, Holocaust-inspired scenario of being killed and cremated, but also a desire for parental protection. In Surviving with Wolves, Misha wishes she were one of the wolf pups, ‘protected and cherished in their forest lair’ (134), while in Stolen Soul the same sentiment is expressed as Erhardt’s warning: “Don’t go near them . . . Remember they probably have a mother nearby’ (130). The appearance in Holstein’s account of the cubs’ parents registers the last stage in the process of the wolves’ transformation from predator to nurturer, and it is the ‘very large, very menacing’ male wolf who bares his teeth at the boys, yet later his mate offers them her own vomit as food (132–3), just as the female wolf in Surviving with Wolves regurgitates food for Misha (136–8). Human horror intrudes for Misha when she is left alone by the wolves so that she ‘didn’t see the danger coming’: in this case, a Nazi whose assault on a young Russian girl provokes Misha to stab him to death (141–3). In Stolen Soul, leaving the ‘safety’ of the wolves’ cave leads the boys ‘straight into a German patrol’ (134), signalling again the reversal of roles: in this unlikely scenario, it is not the wolves who are to be feared, but other humans.

182    Textual Deceptions Holstein’s debt to Wilkomirski’s Fragments is more extensive than that to Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves. Stolen Soul does not reproduce Fragments’ stylistic innovation of giving priority to the child focaliser over the adult narrator. By contrast, the very gap between adult and child comprehension of the Holocaust world in Stolen Soul is related solely in terms appropriate to an adult, as shown in Holstein’s description of a state that Wilkomirski presents subjectively – ‘We didn’t understand [the Auschwitz reality] but we accepted it anyway’ (50) – as well as his use of rhetorical questions: ‘how does [a] child deal with the trauma of a premature immersion into the world of adulthood, moreover into a world dominated by sadism, cruelty and deceit?’ (20). In Fragments, by contrast, such ‘immersion’ is a quality of the narrative itself. This is clear in the use Holstein makes of an episode from Fragments. Bernard simply describes the fact that, as the Holstein family is being taken to the cattletrucks, ‘We had never seen weapons before and were frightened by the sight of them’ (10), while in contrast Binjamin’s failure to recognise a particular weapon is enacted as it is represented. Binjamin addresses a ‘soldier’ when he arrives at the Majdanek camp: ‘What’s that funny weapon you’ve got?’ I asked him . . . Quick as a flash he turned around, just as quickly his arm shot up in the air with the strange thing in his fist, and something whizzed across my face with such burning heat that I thought I’d been cut in two. That’s how I learned what a whip is. (37)

This scene from Fragments of youthful trust betrayed is represented in a stylisation of a childlike discourse, with its simple syntax and reduced vocabulary, yet by this means conveys the complex, ‘adult’ notion of psychic splitting that is the outcome of such violence: ‘I thought I’d been cut in two.’ This episode emphasises Fragments’ distinctive deployment of aesthetic construction to psychic effect, and its striking absence from Stolen Soul. Holstein’s moments of reliance on Fragments paradoxically constitute those of the greatest narrative differences between the testimonies. This is evident, for instance, in Bernard’s recall of the loss of his parents in the camp: ‘Why did they leave me, why aren’t they looking out for me? How could my father let this happen? Didn’t he love me enough?’ (34). In the scene from Fragments to which this pays homage, Binjamin witnesses the violent death of a man he believes to have been his father: I’m sad and very afraid because he turned away from me, but I feel he didn’t do it because he doesn’t love me any more . . . All at once I realize: From now on I have to manage without you, I’m alone. (7)

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Here, the child’s viewpoint conveys with the economy of a child’s perspective two levels of meaning, literal and psychic, such that the father’s bodily ‘turning away’ from Binjamin just before his death is understood not to be an emotional abandonment. Holstein seems also to have based Bernard’s companions Mikhail and Erhardt on Binjamin’s fraternal protector Jankl, and there are simplified versions in Stolen Soul of such other tropes from Fragments as Binjamin’s preoccupation with rats, his witnessing acts of extreme cruelty meted out to other boys, a moment in which the source of an external voice turns out to be the boy’s own utterance, and coming to experience the barracks rather than the outside world as ‘familiar’ and safe. However, Holstein’s text is most significantly indebted to two real testimonies, both by Hungarians deported near the war’s end who survived by working as what Robert Jay Lifton calls ‘prisoner-doctors’.146 These are Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account and Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys,147 both originally published in 1946. While Wilkomirski’s reliance on Jona Oberski’s A Childhood is motivated by that text’s viewpoint which he wished to emulate, Holstein has drawn on early, widely read accounts by adults, the details of which he has therefore had to amend. Nyiszli’s Auschwitz recounts his deportation from Hungary in May 1944, and his experience as a pathologist in Auschwitz, working for Dr Mengele in conducting dissections and autopsies. By this means Nyiszli survived the camp and was reunited with his wife and daughter after the war’s end. Nyiszli’s role has been criticised by some, including the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who argues in his foreword to the first edition of Auschwitz that although the author refers to himself as a doctor throughout the testimony, he was, rather, ‘the assistant of a vicious criminal’.148 Nyiszli counts himself, by contrast, as a member of the Sonderkommando, with whom he shares living quarters, and both have been described as inhabiting what Primo Levi calls the ‘grey zone’; indeed, Nyiszli’s testimony is the basis for Tim Blake Nelson’s play,149 later adapted into a film (Avi Lerner, USA, 2001), of that name. Lengyel’s Five Chimneys recounts her experience as the gentile wife of a Jewish Hungarian doctor, whom she decided to accompany when he was summoned for deportation from their home in Cluj, taking with them their two sons and her elderly parents. On arrival at Auschwitz, Lengyel and her husband were chosen to live, while her parents and sons were sent immediately to their deaths; only she survived the war. Lengyel was put to work in the Auschwitz infirmary where she helped other prisoners more directly than Nyiszli was able to, and became a member of the camp resistance movement. Holstein has adapted particular elements of these testimonies to suit

184    Textual Deceptions his purpose. The fact of deportation late in the war offers a time-frame that fits the notion of Bernard’s youth and his survival, as does the fact that he is said to be a native German-speaker, thus outdoing Nyiszli’s original, in which the doctor’s fluent command of the language is the result of having worked in Germany for two years. Although these two testimonies from the viewpoint of adult prisoner-doctors may not seem immediately useful for the construction of Holstein’s child protagonist, they furnish the detail necessary to support his account of extreme childhood suffering in undergoing medical experiments. As a child, Bernard inhabits a simplified moral universe: rather than the accusations that Lengyel directs against herself for the death of her parents and sons, or those Nyiszli records in relation to suffering patients whose deaths he was not able to hasten, Bernard constitutes a principle of pure victimhood. Like Wilkomirski and Defonseca, he views the Judaism of which he claims to be an adherent in such a light, as is implied by Bernard’s regret that his parents were ‘unable to escape their heritage’ (11), and his own assumed ‘Jewish heritage’ consists of being ‘familiar’ with ‘great suffering’ (93). The term ‘heritage’ here refers to an occasion for self-pity rather than any kind of religious or cultural transmission. The narrative of deportation and arrival at Auschwitz in Stolen Soul is composed of details from both testimonies spliced together, as is Holstein’s account of the Sonderkommando uprising and of other events, such as the liquidation of the Gypsy camp and negative estimates of its inhabitants.150 Although Holstein’s intertextual technique is one of collage, involving the juxtaposition of details that have been removed from their original context to new effect, he draws on the two prisonerdoctors’ testimonies for different purposes. Since he was not involved in the day-to-day life of the camp but worked in a ‘laboratory’ in one of the crematoria, Nyiszli’s testimony is deployed for details of his arrival in the camp and for its paratextual prefatory material. The truth-claims implicit in the elaborate paratextual material accompanying Auschwitz must have inspired Holstein’s, since the former includes such features as a dedication to Nyiszli’s wife and daughter, both of whom survived the war, the opening foreword by Bruno Bettelheim, introduction by the publisher Richard Seaver, and Nyiszli’s own formal ‘Declaration’ of eyewitness authenticity.151 Lengyel’s experience was one of daily battle for survival, avoiding selections and bartering medical services for food, and Holstein draws upon it more extensively than Nyiszli’s, especially for the sake of Lengyel’s accounts of children imprisoned in the camp, of whom she writes, ‘Most of the condemned little boys knew what their fate would be’, yet they ‘accepted the news with more sang froid than the strongest adults ever did’. In evidence, she cites the fact

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that when children selected for death at Birkenau were taken away on trucks, they ‘cried out their names so that their parents might be notified’.152 It is just this image of ‘thoughtful’, ‘clever’153 twelve-year-old boys in the camp that Holstein sought to reproduce in Bernard, as his borrowing of Lengyel’s observation suggests: ‘Perhaps, as children, we accepted our fate far easier than the men around us’ (48). Holstein declares that if he and the other boys are selected they will ‘not beg or plead, but shout out our names proudly as we pass in the trucks heading for the ovens’ (55), in a version of Lengyel’s account that enhances its heroism. Such an emphasis on Holstein’s part suggests that his reasons for relying on Five Chimneys more than Auschwitz might have been guided by Bettelheim’s critique to a greater extent than at first appears, in a preference for Lengyel’s account of resistance over Nyiszli’s of accommodation. Bernard is subjected to such horrifying procedures as immersion in ice water and sterilisation, both of which are mentioned only in passing in Five Chimneys154 but amplified by Holstein into full narratives about a young boy facing extreme suffering with noble stoicism. In relation to his borrowing the details of medical experiments, Holstein evidently could not resist repeating a bitter irony noted by Lengyel. She comments on the forcible extraction of blood from camp inmates for transfusions to wounded German soldiers that ‘To save the lives of the Wehrmacht soldiers, the Germans forgot that Jewish blood was of “inferior quality.” ’155 Once more, Holstein amplifies this into an enactment of youthful suffering, in which Bernard’s blood is taken by a kapo without warning and other boys faint ‘on the parade ground’. The adult narrator of Stolen Soul observes, ‘Wasn’t it ironic: Hitler’s Aryan race needing the blood of the Jewish vermin to keep alive? Not only did they have our blood on their hands; now they had it in their veins’ (118). The second sentence, with its transformation of metaphorical ‘blood on their hands’ into the bodily reality of Germans having Jewish blood ‘in their veins’, inadvertently advertises the fact that transformation of this kind characterises the text as a whole. A subliminal acknowledgement of Stolen Soul’s own collated origins takes the form of such comments as this on the smuggling of explosives into the camp: ‘Years later I was to read of the women who worked in the ammunition plant’ (71), which it is impossible not to see in hindsight as a specific reference to the original version of this event in Lengyel’s Five Chimneys;156 while Bernard’s remark that ‘We heard later from Dr Nyiszli of hormone injections, castrations, and burnings with X-rays’ (89) seems to be an admission that, indeed much ‘later’, reading about this material ‘from Dr Nyiszli’ inspired Holstein’s sado-masochistically inclined invention. Nyiszli even appears in Stolen Soul as a character, not only offering

186    Textual Deceptions a clue to the origins of Holstein’s account, but literally embodying his testimony’s intertextual influence. Nyiszli shares a joke with the boys, recommends them to Dr Pasche for the camp resistance, and is said by the latter to be ‘convinced that Mengele has a heart’ (77–8). In keeping with the absence of any kind of ambivalence in his account, Holstein’s fictive version of Nyiszli constructs a contradictory representation while failing to acknowledge a moral dimension to it. His text implies that Nyiszli was crucial to the camp resistance while the prisoner-doctor also believed Mengele to possess a human side. It does not seem that in his fictional version of Nyiszli’s experience Holstein is either underestimating the nature of his overseer Mengele or implying, as does a survivor quoted by Lifton, any ‘ambiguity’ in the fact that the two were ‘very close’.157 Rather, Holstein seems to have misread Nyiszli’s account. At various times in his testimony, Nyiszli describes Mengele responding unexpectedly, in admitting to murder ‘almost apologetically’, speaking with ‘resignation’ of the necessity to continue with what Nyiszli calls the ‘destruction’ of his work, and, in terms most akin to Holstein’s, that ‘Even Dr Mengele showed from time to time that he was human.’158 The latter description, however, fully takes for granted the camp world and refers simply to Mengele occasionally forbidding ‘a healthy young woman’ to join her mother ‘in the left-hand column’ destined for immediate death.159 Holstein seems to have missed Nyiszli’s irony. It is tempting even to imagine that the utterance invented for Nyiszli by Holstein about Mengele’s ‘heart’ is the result not only of misreading but of the latter’s confusion of sources, since it is not Nyiszli but Lengyel in Five Chimneys who gives a nuanced description of a perpetrator, Dr Fritz Klein, of whom she writes, ‘he was less sadistic than his colleagues . . . Perhaps he had a conscience.’160 Lifton describes Nyiszli’s situation in relation to Mengele as an ‘excruciating . . . master–slave relationship’, and interprets the final line of his testimony about immediate post-liberation life, ‘I would begin practicing, yes . . . but I swore that as long as I lived I would never lift a scalpel again . . . ’, to mean that ‘the price of that friendliness’ with Mengele which enabled Nyiszli’s survival ‘had been his own medical integrity’.161 It is possible to read Nyiszli’s final comment in a different way, to suggest that emotional as well as moral distaste would prevent his taking on the specific role of a pathologist again. Yet despite its great potential for fictional exploration, none of this nuance is apparent in Stolen Soul. Holstein has accomplished in Stolen Soul what is a second-order, or second-generation, act of borrowing, in a way that advertises its generic links to other fictional works, not only in its reliance on two earlier false testimonies, but also because both Nyiszli’s and Lengyel’s testimonies are already well known as the sites of literary borrowing. Martin Amis’

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Time’s Arrow, about the life of a Nazi doctor told in reverse, draws on Nyiszli’s descriptions of Mengele’s experimental procedures as quoted by Lifton, while William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice recasts the loss of Lengyel’s sons in fictional format, drawing on an incident that Holstein too covets and reworks.162 Holstein’s amalgamation of different accounts emphasises the recognisable shape, described in many testimonies, of arrival in the ‘Auschwitz universe’, and thus its reproducibility. The narrative of deportation described in both testimonies and followed by Holstein includes a cattle-truck journey, first impressions of the camp on arrival, the process of selection, tattooing and showers, then introduction to the barracks. Nyiszli’s fourteen-year-old daughter was just old enough to be sent to the right-hand group of prisoners destined for labour; Lengyel herself was selected for work but her sons were both too young, although in this case she cites twelve as the cut-off age.163 Holstein’s text is an amalgamation of the two accounts of this process. Since he is twelve, Bernard is old enough to be sent ‘to the right’ for work, while his younger brother Pieter is consigned to death along with their mother Magda, called thus perhaps after Lengyel’s ‘warm-hearted’ medical comrade of the same name.164 Magda Holstein cannot follow the precedent of Nyiszli’s wife Margareta, or that of Olga Lengyel, in being sent to work, since Bernard has to be a lone survivor to avoid any question of corroboration by others. The struggle related in Stolen Soul between Magda Holstein and a guard over the destination of her elder son Bernard, whom she wants to keep with her ‘on the left’, is indebted to that in Lengyel’s account, although its outcome is necessarily different. On arrival at the camp, Lengyel insists that her son Arvad is not yet twelve and should go with his grandmother, a request that is received with unruffled ‘acquiescence’ on the part of the Nazi doctor Fritz Klein who is in charge of selections, and results in the boy’s going to his death.165 This is necessarily altered in Holstein’s version, where a ‘soldier’ demands that Bernard be assigned to the side destined for survival. The false assurance offered to the Holsteins at the moment of separation consists of a doctor’s claim that, ‘ “You will meet again inside” ’ (23), a simple untruth that contrasts with the horrible irony of a guard’s statement to Lengyel’s family: ‘ “And in several weeks you’ll all be reunited.” ’166 This is a moment that also appears in Wilkomirski’s Fragments. Binjamin is lured to Majdanek because the name is ‘so pretty’ and because a female guard tells him he will be reunited with his siblings: ‘And my brothers?’ ‘You’ll see them all again’, she said, looking down at me, and now she was smiling. (36)

188    Textual Deceptions While it is hard to say whether Holstein, in keeping with the secondorder nature of his borrowings, adapted this moment from Fragments or from its original source, Five Chimneys, it is in support of the idea of a ‘war against children’ in both false testimonies that this moment of deception is coveted. In its portrayal of his mother’s failure to keep her son with her, Holstein’s account avoids the moral confusion and survivor guilt with which Lengyel opens her testimony, for being ‘in part, responsible’ for her son’s death.167 This forms an element of Stolen Soul’s representation of a manichean world of heroic victimhood versus recognisable evil. Holstein’s reliance on the moment of selection in Five Chimneys calls upon its overdetermined history as the source of intertextual borrowing. The scene in Lengyel’s account in which one of her sons could have remained with his mother is the basis for the much-inflated dilemma in Sophie’s Choice, in which the eponymous protagonist is forced by a Nazi doctor to choose which of her two children to save. Such a subliminal acknowledgement rises to the text’s surface in Holstein’s present-day reflection on his mother’s actions: ‘If she had known the true horror, what would have been her choice for her son, right or left? Could she have made that choice? What would have been my choice?’ (24). The insistent repetition here of Styron’s term ‘choice’ may remind the reader not only of debate on the issue of agency and ‘choiceless choice’ in the Holocaust world, but also of controversy provoked by Styron’s recasting of Lengyel’s testimony in novelistic form.168 Stolen Soul thus offers implicit textual evidence for its own generic reclassification as fiction. Nyiszli’s testimony is the source for the subsequent stages in Holstein’s entry into camp existence. Gender difference is in part the reason for this movement from one account to the other: Holstein is no longer with the mother he constructed by means of Lengyel’s testimony, but is processed into camp life as a man, thus drawing on Nyiszli’s. The latter describes the process by which ‘A barber came and shaved first my head, then the rest of my body, and sent me to the showers.’169 As if in implicit response to what Nyiszli writes, Holstein emphasises his youth in noting that ‘I was grabbed and my head shaved, too young to have hair anywhere else, at least I was spared that humiliation.’ Nyiszli records of the shower, ‘They rubbed my head with a solution of calcium chloride, which burnt my eyes so badly that for several minutes I could not open them again.’170 At first, in Holstein’s version the detail of the chemical burning is implied but not explained, in keeping with his child’s viewpoint: ‘I was unprepared for the pain, how that water stung my skin, my freshly shaved head, my eyes’ (26). It may be far-fetched to detect here an allusion to, or even a buried wish for, the experience of another kind of shower, one

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in which water was replaced not just with pain but with death. It is only later that Holstein makes clear that his ‘skin and eyes were stinging’ due to ‘a chemical shower’ (26–7). The roll-call is one of the last elements of the narrative of ‘initiation’ into the camp that Holstein adopts from Nyiszli, since he cannot follow the older man’s experience in becoming Mengele’s assistant in the camp: the equivalent for Bernard is being put to work in Monowitz’s metal plate factory, where his survival is more likely and grey zone compromise not in evidence. Nyiszli observes that during the roll-call the prisoners are at first lined up with ‘the taller ones in front’, until a different guard ‘pushed the taller men back and had the short men brought up front’.171 Holstein’s version transforms the meaning of this scene into one about the mistreatment of young boys: in Stolen Soul the guard calls for ‘ “Tallest at the front, children at the back” ’, but the order is almost immediately reversed (45). Once more, Holstein’s account fills the details from Nyiszli with content that emphasises the pathos and blamelessness of his youth. Precisely because of its fabricated nature and its deviation from the originals after its representation of the process of camp initiation, Stolen Soul functions as a fascinating testimony to its author’s act of reading. It is the adoption of small details in Stolen Soul from Nyiszli’s and Lengyel’s testimonies, where they are often only fleetingly mentioned, that is its most telling technique. At one level, such a methodology simply supplies the setting for Holstein’s testimony, in terms of such details as his being provided with ‘a piece of string to hold up my pants’ by his protector Erhardt (51), just as Lengyel finds for herself some ‘fragments of twine’ as a ‘waistband to hold up my drawers’ (58); Bernard debates with Erhardt whether the experiments, however cruel, have medically useful outcomes, in a child’s version of Nyiszli’s condemnation of the ‘demented doctor’ Mengele’s ‘pseudo-science’ (127, 85). In both testimonies, the surname of Irma Grese, the infamous warden of several camps, is spelt ‘Griese’, and naturally Holstein follows suit. However, there are other instances where either the impetus or the failure to imagine is laid bare. For instance, Lengyel describes the process of gassing followed by the incineration of corpses, which were ‘sorted methodically’ such that ‘the babies went in first, as kindling’.172 It is not just this concept, of the abject transformation of human life into the means of its own obliteration, that attracted Holstein’s attention, but the word ‘kindling’ itself. In Stolen Soul we read that, ‘Small children were often referred to as kindling because their young, soft bodies were so effective in fanning the flames within the crematoria’ (38). This description consists of a morbidly imagined elaboration of the very source which ‘referred’ to the babies in this manner. The addition to

190    Textual Deceptions Holstein’s account of such details as the small bodies’ use in ‘fanning the flames’ marks another effort, one akin to those in Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, to return a metaphorical phrase to literal usage, all the while inadvertently making clear such additions’ constructed nature. Soon after, Holstein’s description of Bernard’s reaction to the murder of an old man on a hot day in the camp reveals an apparent fantasy that the boy himself is the ‘kindling’ in the crematorium oven: I felt as though I was on fire with no escape from the flames. My throat was parched, like kindling it breathed new life into the fire; my skin was burned and instinctively recoiled from the heat of the relentless summer sun. (45)

Once more, the same detail from Lengyel’s account seems to have caught not only Holstein’s but also Wilkomirski’s attention. In the house of his adoptive parents after the war, Binjamin mistakes the coal boiler for a crematorium: ‘The oven door is smaller than usual, but it’s big enough for children. I know, I’ve seen, they use children for heating too’ (125). The less obvious citation of Lengyel’s original in the case of Fragments emphasises the different intertextual methods of the two fabricators: while Wilkomirski’s sources are seamlessly blended with what seem to be his childhood memories, the intertextual lineaments of Holstein’s borrowing, including details of phraseology and proper names, are put almost on display. The equivalent phrase taken up by Holstein from Nyiszli’s account has a rather different function, and its origin lies in Bettelheim’s tendentious foreword. The psychologist, who had himself been imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald, argues that accounts of the death camps are not as important for their ‘all too familiar stories’ as they are for something ‘far more unusual and horrifying’, that is, the fact ‘that millions, like lemmings, marched themselves to their own death’ without any ‘retaliatory fight’.173 Bettelheim ascribes this behaviour to what he calls a ‘ “business as usual” ’ attitude on the part of the victims, a ‘destructive’ state of mind that, according to him, registered a failure to adjust to radical new circumstances.174 What Richard Evans describes as the ‘moral arrogance’175 of Bettelheim’s argument is clear in the latter’s use of this term to describe not only Nyiszli himself, of whom he writes that it was ‘the same business-as-usual attitude that enabled Dr Nyiszli to function as a doctor in the camp’, where he ‘volunteered’ to become an ‘accessory’ of and ‘participant’ in Mengele’s crimes, but also Otto Frank, Anne’s father, whom he takes to task for not providing his family ‘with a gun or two’.176 Bettelheim also names Lengyel but exempts her from censure, by reason of her efforts to evade selection (viii). As Evans puts it, Bettelheim’s is a thoroughly ‘retrospective’ view

False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony    191

that erroneously describes the basis of Nyiszli’s actions, and that of the Sonderkommando themselves, as ‘volunteering’ when it was rather coerced, and he points out that Nyiszli did not ‘participate’ in Mengele’s crimes, as Bettelheim insists, but ‘dealt with their outcomes’.177 In this intertextual instance, Holstein does not just incorporate the material he has read into his imagined testimony, but alters Bettelheim’s use of the phrase ‘business as usual’ by enlisting it to describe the routine of atrocity rather than the prisoners’ submission: Every day was the same, business as usual. No matter what happened, what the weather was like, how weak you felt, whether there was food or not, it was business as usual. (47)

This repetition also betrays another misreading of Bettelheim on Holstein’s part, and something of a failure of imagination. The phrase ‘business as usual’ is used here in Stolen Soul for the licence it appears to give for metonymy, allowing one instance of an atrocity that is by definition unrepeatable to stand in for its regular occurrence. This is suggested by the appearance of the phrase in a description implying that the slave labour undertaken by Bernard and his companions in Monowitz would routinely be followed by their undergoing medical experiments: The guard berated us for a while and then wandered off to give some poor soul a hard time. And so it went on, business as usual. We would be used as human guinea pigs at the lake or in the barns, we would be sent to the kitchen to peel potatoes, to the mess to clean up after the officers. (116)

Both such repetition and the long duration indicated by Holstein’s description of ‘my years at Auschwitz’ (30) are the characteristics of fiction, where ‘meanings are generated through recurrence’.178 Even in a retrospective account, the camp universe is more fittingly to be represented by means of unpredictable and violent change, leading to abrupt endings. It is partly in keeping with this that both Mikhail and Erhardt die before the narrative’s end, their surnames and origins conveniently unknown. In Stolen Soul, specificity itself comes to signify either invention or reliance on an anterior source. The testimonies upon which Holstein has drawn are characterised by expressions of uncertainty and incomprehension that underlie their truth-claims, yet even this is a technique open to imitation. The extremity of life in the camp is expressed by invoking the notion of a dream by both Nyiszli and Lengyel. Despite his claim to be writing an objective account in his role ‘as a doctor’, Nyiszli notes that, ‘When I thought of the past, it often seemed to me

192    Textual Deceptions that all this was merely a horrible dream’; while Lengyel claims that, three weeks after her arrival in Auschwitz, she still could not believe it: ‘I lived as in a dream, waiting for someone to awaken me.’179 Such discourse is amplified by Holstein into a trope that, like the frequent invocation of his unreliable memory, functions to assure the reader of the truth of his account by means of advertising its seeming unreality. For Holstein, past and present are united in his description of nightmares in adulthood: ‘Like a child I cannot separate the nightmare from reality, as a child the nightmare was my reality’ (2). While Nyiszli and Lengyel convey the horror of the camp by separating it from their former lives, Holstein’s phrasing makes the two time-periods interchangeable. This confusion of ontological levels can be ascribed to the child’s perspective and that of a fabricator in equal measure. This is also the case for Holstein’s musing on the inaccuracy of memory. As in Surviving with Wolves, such comments as, ‘I must confess that I remember very little’ (7) and ‘How do you know who you are when there is no-one to confirm your memories?’ (16) preface an account that is both a remarkable feat of memory retrieval, and a substitution of creation for ‘confirmation’. The double-voiced nature of these remarks is equally clear in Holstein’s description of his disavowals later in life: ‘For years now I have hidden the telltale numbers tattooed on my left forearm . . . I have worked in remote places, trying to suppress my past . . . I lived a lie, but I lived’ (3). Such an insistence on disguise, in terms of hiding, suppression and lying, in fact represents its opposite, acts of creation and advertisement. While Holstein’s tattoo was created in order to be hidden,180 both Nyiszli and Lengyel describe the significance of theirs: for Nyiszli, the number has an existential meaning, as the shifts between first and third person suggest: ‘So I, Dr Miklos Nyiszli, had ceased to exist: henceforth I would be, merely, KZ prisoner Number A 8450.’181 For Lengyel, the tattoo signifies the indelibility of her experience: ‘I was number “25,403”. I still have it on my right arm and shall carry it with me to the grave.’182 By contrast, Holstein’s description of the tattoo is an opportunity for an assertion of identity – ‘Jews do not mark their bodies in this manner . . . every child knew this’ – even as he echoes his own earlier refrain about lack of knowledge and a version of Nyiszli’s phrasing: ‘How do you know who you are when names no longer matter?’ (25).

Conclusion The two categories of embroidery and fabrication in Holocaust testimony explored in this chapter are more distinct from each other than

False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony    193

might at first appear. In the case of the embellished testimonies, the particular incidents that have been added to genuine accounts reveal that the Holocaust itself is central to the texts’ purpose and meaning in historical and biographical terms. Any explanation for the form and origin of such exaggeration lies in the aftermath of the genocide, its late sequelae in survivors’ psyches, as well as post-war controversies over particular events and conceptions of the nature of the Holocaust and its representations. While embellishments may themselves constitute a kind of traumatic narration, in relation to affronts not assimilable as such when they occurred and still misrecognised,183 the entirely invented testimonies rely upon a planning and forethought that reverse the temporal structure of trauma, since in these cases knowledge precedes fragmentation. Each of the simulacra produced by Wilkomirski, Defonseca and Holstein offers textual clues to its fraudulence by reason of its roots in other testimonial and historical works. Thus it was not so much the impossibility of the events narrated in each that ought to have constituted hints at their inauthenticity, but their very familiarity. In these fabrications the Holocaust itself has been subsumed by the quite other events and concerns for which it is made to stand in, related by means of what Aleida Assmann calls a ‘rhetoric of authenticity’,184 one that has the opposite effect of signalling the testimonies’ fictive nature. Despite their inclusion of borrowed and adapted historical detail, these false testimonies are about the Holocaust most clearly in the distanced sense of implying its contemporary precedence over other kinds of traumatic experience. Thus the false testimonies present a parody of the tension between an individual and a communal fate that has provoked criticism of any reliance on personal recall. Gross and Hoffman argue that, like the other examples of fraudulent testimony analysed in this chapter, Wilkomirski’s creates a problem for all those who view memory, in the form of testimony or autobiography, as a privileged or authoritative form of historical discourse, ‘because he illustrates that affect is no guarantee of accuracy’.185 Yet Fragments and the other false testimonies constitute a kind of ‘secondary witnessing’,186 testifying at least to the contemporary significance of Holocaust testimony for both subjective and historical recall. The very act of distinguishing meticulously between genuine and false accounts allows for a rebuttal of both Gross and Hoffman’s argument against testimony, and the excesses of Holocaust denial. As Jane Daniel, who commissioned the original version of Misha Defonseca’s false testimony, argues, publishing a book is part of a larger process of truth-finding that takes place both during and after the testimony’s publication.187 The process of reading and discovery of a false testimony is

194    Textual Deceptions itself ­significant and revelatory, and one that readers and critics would not wish undone.

Notes 1. See for instance Gitta Sereny, ‘The Men Who Whitewash Hitler’, New Statesman, 2 November 1979, pp.  670–3: 673. Thanks to Philip Maughan, at the University of Sussex Special Collections, for his help in locating this article. 2. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Abacus, 2003 [1988], p. 35. See also Ruth Franklin, ‘A Thousand Darknesses’, New Republic, 23 March 2006, on the literary qualities of Elie Wiesel’s testimony Night, and Lawrence Kirmayer’s argument that accounts of trauma themselves ‘draw from meta-memory’, those models that determine not only how to represent but what is recalled, in his ‘Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation’, in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 175. 3. See Jennifer Maiden on the varied accounts of by Anita Lasker-Wallfisch of her life, in ‘Ruptures in Remembrance: Trauma, Utterance and Patterns in Survivor Remembrance’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield 2008. 4. Mark Roseman, ‘Surviving Memory: Truth and Inaccuracy in Holocaust Memory’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 8 (1) 1999, pp. 1–20: 1. 5. Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, London: Routledge, 1992. 6. Roseman, ‘Surviving Memory’, p. 15. 7. Martin Gray, with Max Gallo, For Those I Loved, trans. Anthony White, Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. p.  139. All further page references in the text. See Tony Kushner, ‘Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation’, Poetics Today, 27 (2) 2006, pp. 275–95. 8. Martin Gray’s Au nom de tous les miens is still in print, the most recent edition dated 2002 (Paris: Poche). 9. See Libby Copeland, ‘Survivor’, Washington Post, 24 September 2000. 10. Penelope Holt, The Apple: Based on the Herman Rosenblat Holocaust Love Story, Rye Brook, NY: York House, 2009; Herman Rosenblat, Angel at the Fence, unpublished memoir with uncredited ghostwriter Susanna Margolis, http://pdf.edocr.com/cc90d3b0aebea2ec00843e622e0dbeaee274a732.pdf, accessed 12 October 2013; all page references in the text. 11. See Gitta Sereny’s account of interviewing Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka, in Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, London: André Deutsch, 1974. 12. Insight, ‘Survivors Challenge Martin Gray Story of Extermination Camp’, Sunday Times, 2 May 1973. Thanks to Alan Polak for this reference.

False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony    195 13. Quoted in Jean-Marc Théolleyre, ‘M. Gray, le camp de Treblinka et M. Max Gallo: Roman et brouillard’, Le Monde, 27–28 November 1983. 14. John Vinocur, ‘Max Gallo: Seeking a Sense of France’s Identity’, New York Times, 14 July 1998. 15. Insight, ‘Survivors Challenge Martin Gray Story of Extermination Camp’. Despite his apparent admission of embellishment to Sereny, Gray insists on the authenticity of his Treblinka experience in his Ma vie en partage: Entretiens avec Melanie Loisel, La Tour d’Aigues: L’Aube, 2014, pp. 38–41. 16. Sereny, ‘The Men Who Whitewash Hitler’, p. 670. 17. These numbers appear in Gray’s website: see n. 13. 18. See Samuel Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France, Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2005. 19. From Out of the Ashes: The Deli Strummer Story (Harold L. Smullian, Zarhar Remembrance Fund, USA, 2001). 20. Deli Strummer, A Reflection of the Holocaust, Baltimore: Aurich Press, 1988, p. 7. All page references in the text. 21. Alan H. Feiler and Phil Jacobs, ‘Doubts Raised about Accounts by Popular Holocaust Survivor’, Baltimore Jewish Times, 22 June 2000. 22. Quoted in Copeland, ‘Survivor’. 23. Ibid. 24. Kushner, ‘Holocaust Testimony’, p. 283. 25. Marego Athans and Jay Apperson, ‘Survivor’s Story Raises Some Doubts’, Baltimore Sun, 22 June 2000. 26. Explanatory text at the Mauthausen Memorial Museum: http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at/db/admin/de/show_article. php?carticle=375&topopup=1, accessed 1 February 2014. 27. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007731, accessed 5 February 2014. 28. Athans and Apperson, ‘Survivor’s Story Raises Some Doubts’. 29. Feiler and Jacobs, ‘Doubts Raised about Accounts by Popular Holocaust Survivor’. 30. Elizabeth Day, ‘When One Extraordinary Life Is Not Enough’, Observer, 15 February 2009. 31. Ibid. 32. Quoted in Gabriel Sherman, ‘Wartime Lies’, New Republic, 26 December 2008. 33. Quoted in Gabriel Sherman, ‘Ken Waltzer on Canceled Memoir: “Where Were the Culture-Makers?” ’, New Republic, 27 December 2008. 34. Ibid. 35. Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 36. Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 37. 37. Anna Richardson, ‘Mapping the Lines of Fact and Fiction in Holocaust Testimonial Novels’, in L. O. Vasvári and S. T. de Zepetnek, eds, Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009. 38. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939– 1948, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, London: Picador, 1996. Fragments

196    Textual Deceptions was awarded the Jewish Quarterly Prize in the UK, the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah in France, and, in the USA, the National Jewish Book Award. 39. See discussion of Helbling’s warning in Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods, New York: Schocken, 2001, p.  93; Hilberg is quoted in Harvey Peskin, ‘Holocaust Denial: A Sequel’, Nation, 19 April 1999, in which Peskin continues to assert his belief in Wilkomirski’s story. 40. Daniel Ganzfried, ‘Die Geliehene Holocaust-Biographie’ [The Purloined Holocaust Biography], Weltwoche, 27 August 1998; Richardson, ‘Mapping the Lines of Fact and Fiction in Holocaust Testimonial Novels’. 41. Philip Gourevitch, ‘The Memory Thief’, New Yorker, 14 June 1999, pp.  48–68; Elena Lappin, ‘The Man with Two Heads’, Granta, 66, 1999, pp. 7–65. 42. Richardson, ‘Mapping the Lines of Fact and Fiction in Holocaust Testimonial Novels’, p. 65. 43. Andrew Gross and Michael J. Hoffman, ‘Memory, Authority, Identity: Holocaust Studies in the Light of the Wilkomirski Debate’, Biography, 27 (1) 2004, pp. 25–47: 38. 44. Eli Park Sorensen, ‘A Pathological Core of Authenticity: Rereading the Case of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 49 (1) 2013, pp. 79–98: 84. 45. Bob Passantino, Gretchen Passantino and Jon Trott, ‘Lauren Stratford: From Satanic Ritual Abuse to Jewish Holocaust Survivor’, Cornerstone, 13 October 1999, pp. 12–16, 18. 46. Gross and Hoffman, ‘Memory, Authority, Identity’, p.  42, spelling corrected. 47. See for instance Berel Lang’s argument for the documentary over fiction in his Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 48. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, London: Verso 2000, p.  55. Timothy D. Neale mistakenly reverses generic chronology to argue similarly that Kosinski’s ‘near-iconic Holocaust memoir’ was eventually ‘shown to be fiction’ (‘ “ . . . The Credentials That Would Rescue Me”: Trauma and the Fraudulent Survivor’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 24 (3) 2010, pp. 431–48: 431). 49. Helen Demidenko [later published under the name Helen Darville], The Hand that Signed the Paper, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994; Deborah Rey, Rachel Sarai’s Vineyard, Bristol: Bluechrome, 2008. 50. On Demidenko, see for instance Andrew Riemer, The Demidenko Debate, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996. 51. Sara Paretsky, Total Recall, New York: Delacorte Press, 2001, pp.  77, 343. Thanks to Nicole Campbell for this reference. 52. Benjamin Stein, The Canvas, trans. Brian Zumhagen, Rochester, NY: Open Book Press, 2012. 53. Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, London: Continuum, 2005, p. 239; Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, p. 32. 54. Sorensen, ‘A Pathological Core of Authenticity’, p. 83. 55. Kushner, ‘Holocaust Testimony’, p. 295.

False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony    197 56. The term is Susan Suleiman’s, from Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 10. 57. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. and ed. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter, intro. Samuel M. Weber, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 [1955]. 58. Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair. 59. Gourevitch, ‘The Memory Thief’, p.  67; Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 144. 60. Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans. Abraham Katsh, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. 61. Richard Brody, ‘Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust’, New Yorker, 27 September 2013. 62. Ganzfried, ‘Die Geliehene Holocaust-Biographie’. 63. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, London: Verso, 2009, p. 74. 64. Lawrence L. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, p. 63, my emphasis. 65. Sigmund Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis [The Wolf Man]’, in vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth, 1953 [1918], pp. 1–124. 66. Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 142. 67. Ibid., p. 136; Michael Bernard-Donals, ‘ “Blot Out the Name of Amalek”: Memory and Forgetting in the Fragments Controversy’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 33 (3) 2000–1, pp.  122–36: 130–1. 68. Sorensen, ‘A Pathological Core of Authenticity’, pp. 90–1. 69. See Boris Tomashevsky, ‘Thematics’, in Lee T. Lemon and Marion Reis, trans. and eds, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, p. 66. 70. Primo Levi, If This is A Man, trans. Stuart Woolf, London: Abacus, 1988 [1958]; Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódz´ Ghetto, trans. Kamil Turowski, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 71. See for instance studies of Charles Dickens’ fiction, such as the chapter ‘The Gentleman in the White Waistcoat: Dickens and Metonymy’, in John R. Reed, Dickens’s Hyperrealism, Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2010. 72. See the debate about how to read the fragmented bodies represented in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, for instance Katherine A. Rowe, ‘Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (3) 1994, pp. 279–303. 73. Jacques Lacan, ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’, in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999 [1977], p. 85. 74. See for instance the origin of the scene in which Binjamin’s father is

198    Textual Deceptions crushed against a wall by an armoured vehicle in a dream related in Gray’s For Those I Loved (21), transformed into a memory in Fragments (6). 75. Jona Oberski, A Childhood, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983. See Maechler’s discussion of the film version of the stories, Jona che visse nella balena [Jona Who Lived in the Whale] (Roberto Faenza, RAI, Italy/France, 2003), as the influence for Binjamin’s brother Motti comforting him with just this story of Jonah, in The Wilkomirski Affair, p. 316. 76. Ross Chambers, ‘Orphaned Memories, Foster-Writing, Phantom Pain: The Fragments Affair’, in Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, eds, Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002, p. 106. 77. Oberski, A Childhood, p. 102. 78. Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, p. 141. 79. Oberski, A Childhood, p. 106. 80. Ibid., p. 123. 81. Ibid., p. 125. 82. Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, pp. 143, 147. 83. Ibid., p. 162. 84. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948, Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag, 1997 [1995], p. 7. 85. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust, p. 58. 86. Wilkomirski, Bruchstücke, p. 97, my italics. 87. Ibid., p. 118, my italics. 88. Ibid., p. 129. 89. Chambers, ‘Orphaned Memories’, p. 95. 90. Wilkomirski, Fragments, p. 113. 91. Defonseca’s lawyers issued a statement on her behalf that appeared in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, 28 February 2008, my translation. 92. Misha Defonseca, with the collaboration of Vera Lee, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, Gloucester, MA: Mount Ivy Press, 1997. 93. Misha Defonseca, with the collaboration of Vera Lee and Marie-Thérèse Cuny, trans. Sue Rose, Surviving with Wolves: The Most Extraordinary Story of World War II, London: Piatkus 2005. All page references in the text are to this edition. 94. Misha Defonseca, Survivre avec les loups, Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997. 95. Misha Defonseca, avec la collaboration de Vera Lee; avec la collaboration de Marie-Thérèse Cuny pour la nouvelle édition, Survivre avec les loups, Paris: Robert Laffont, 2005. All references are to this edition. 96. Quoted in Jane Daniel, Bestseller!, Gloucester, MA: Mount Ivy Press, 2008, p. 132. 97. Defonseca, Survivre avec les loups, p. 232. 98. Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World, trans. Krystyna Sokolowska, London: Penguin, 2012 [1944]. 99. Ibid., pp. 368–72 on Bełzec; the detail about Izbica Lubelska is clarified in an editor’s note, p. 446. 100. Ibid., p. 370. 101. Lionel Duroy estimates over 300,000 sales, in his Survivre avec les loups: La véritable histoire de Misha Defonseca, Paris: XO Editions, 2011,

False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony    199 p. 7; versus 5,000 copies sold in the USA, estimated by David Mehegan, ‘Incredible Journey’, Boston Globe, 31 October 2001. 102. Daniel, Bestseller!, pp. 286, 34; Fixot quoted in Duroy, Survivre avec les loups, p. 16; Alan Brooke, personal correspondence. 103. Langer, quoted in Mehegan, ‘Incredible Journey’; Dwork, quoted in Daniel, Bestseller!, pp. 64–5. 104. Marcel Frydman, Traumatisme de l’enfant caché, Paris: L’Hamattan, 2002, p. 35, my translation. 105. Daniel reproduces Defonseca’s baptismal and school records, revealing that she was born a Catholic and enrolled in a school in Brussels during the war, Bestseller! pp. 252, 255. 106. Marc Metdepenningen, ‘Le vrai dossier de “Misha” ’, Le Soir, 23 February 2008. See also his ‘Survivre avec son vrai passé’, Le Soir, 7 March 2008. 107. Defonseca’s statement, Le Soir. 108. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 41. 109. Daniel Mendelson, ‘Stolen Suffering’, New York Times, 9 March 2008; Daniel, Bestseller!, p. 214. 110. See Defonseca’s statement, Le Soir, for these details, and such accounts as Metdepenningen, ‘Le vrai dossier de “Misha” ’, and Duroy, Survivre avec les loups. 111. See the account of the final days of political prisoners in the camp in the introduction to Wanda Symonowicz, ed., Beyond Human Endurance: The Ravensbrück Women Tell Their Stories, trans. Doris Ronowicz, Warsaw: Interpress, 1970, pp. 11–12. 112. Daniel’s investigation relied upon the work of forensic genealogists Sharon Sergeant and Colleen Fitzpatrick; see Judith Rosen, ‘Does Publishing Need Genealogists?’, Publishers Weekly, 12 January 2009. 113. Defonseca’s statement, Le Soir. 114. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust, p. 58. 115. Quoted in Daniel, Bestseller!, p. 79. 116. Maxime Steinberg, quoted in Géraldine Kamps, ‘  “Survivre avec les loups”: une imposture!’, 4 March 2008, http://www.cclj.be/article/39/331, accessed 5 February 2014. 117. Duroy, Survivre avec les loups, pp. 174, 137. 118. Quoted in ibid., p. 228. 119. Defonseca, Misha, p. 10. This incident appears in Surviving with Wolves, p. 31. 120. Defonseca, Misha, p. 167. 121. Ibid., p. 128. 122. Peter Arnds, ‘Innocence Abducted: Youth, War, and the Wolf in Literary Adaptations of the Pied Piper Legend from Robert Browning to Michel Tournier’, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 4 (1) 2012, pp. 61–84. 123. Serge Aroles, ‘ “Survivre avec les loups”: une escroquerie!’, 8 February 2008, before Misha’s confession, http://www.loup.org/spip/Survivreavec-les-loups-Une,858.html, accessed 5 February 2014, my translation; see his L’Enigme des enfants-loups: Une certitude biologique mais un déni des archives, Paris: Editions Publibook, 2007. 124. Arnds, ‘Innocence Abducted’, p. 67.

200    Textual Deceptions 125. 126. 127. 128.

Ibid., p. 68. Duroy, Survivre avec les loups, p. 115. Defonseca, Survivre avec les loups, p. 180. ‘Identifinders’, http://www.identifinders.com/misha.html, accessed 5 February 2014. 129. C. S. Pierce, Collected Writings, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W Burks, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58, vol. 2, p. 306. 130. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001. 131. See Sue Vice, ‘  “Yellowing Snapshots”: Photography and Memory in Holocaust Literature’, Journal for Cultural Research, 8 (3) 2004, pp. 293–316. 132. Daniel, Bestseller!, p. 253. 133. Susan Sontag, On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, p. 21. 134. Duroy, Survivre avec les loups, p. 102. 135. Blake Eskin, ‘The Girl Who Cried Wolf: A Holocaust Fairytale’, Boston Magazine, September 2008. 136. Duroy, Survivre avec les loups, p. 184. 137. Ibid., pp. 19 and 229. 138. Bernard Holstein, Stolen Soul: A True Story of Courage and Survival, Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2004. All page references in the text. 139. Catherine Madden and Jim Kelly, ‘Holocaust Man’s Claims Queried’, Perth Sunday Times, 21 October 2004. 140. Holstein, in Mick O’Donnell, 7.30 Report, Australian Broadcasting Company television interview with Bernard Brougham [Holstein], his wife Dee, Judy Shorrock, Jilly Hayes and George Foster of the Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, broadcast 17 November 2004; Holstein, ‘Acknowledgements’, in Stolen Soul, vii. 141. O’Donnell, 7.30 Report. A sum of AU$85,000 is mentioned during the interview as the amount paid by Holstein to produce the two versions of Stolen Soul. 142. Madden and Kelly, ‘Holocaust Man’s Claims Queried’. 143. O’Donnell, 7.30 Report. 144. Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust, Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975. 145. Arnds, ‘Innocence Abducted’, p. 69. 146. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York: Basic Books, 1988 [1986], p. 214. 147. Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, trans. Tibere Kremer and Richard Seaver, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 [1946]; Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, Chicago: Academy, 1995 [1946]. 148. Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Foreword’, in Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p.  iii. In the most recent edition (2012), published too late for Holstein to draw upon, Bettelheim’s commentary forms an Afterword, while the Introduction is by the historian Richard J. Evans. 149. Tim Blake Nelson, The Grey Zone, New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998.

False and Embellished Holocaust Testimony    201 150. Holstein, Stolen Soul, p.  121; Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p.  31; Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 122. 151. Nyiszli, Auschwitz, pp. iv–xix. 152. Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 120. 153. Ibid., p. 121. 154. Ibid., pp. 181, 185. 155. Ibid., p. 184. 156. Ibid., p. 163. 157. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p. 370. 158. Nyiszli, Auschwitz, pp. 55, 128, 70. 159. Ibid., p. 70. 160. Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 158. 161. Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p. 160; Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p. 370. 162. Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991; William Styron, Sophie’s Choice, New York: Random House, 1979. See Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction, London: Routledge, 2000, chs 1 and 5. 163. Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p. 24; Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 27. 164. Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 142. 165. Ibid., p. 27. 166. Ibid., p. 27. 167. Ibid., p. 13. 168. See also Lynda LaPlante’s borrowing from Lengyel of an episode that appears to demonstrate Mengele’s mixture of professional with murderous behaviour, for her novel Entwinement about twins who had survived Auschwitz (London: Pan, 1993), discussed in Ian Griggs, ‘Lynda LaPlante is Prime Suspect in Memoir Row’, Independent, 7 September 2008. 169. Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p. 26. 170. Ibid., p. 26. 171. Ibid., p. 28. 172. Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 86. 173. Bettelheim, ‘Foreword’, pp. vi, x. 174. Ibid., p. vii. 175. Evans, ‘Introduction’ to the 2012 edition of Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p. xix. 176. Bettelheim, ‘Foreword’, pp. ix, xi. 177. Evans, ‘Introduction’, p. xxi. 178. J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 1. 179. Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p. 136; Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 60. 180. Holstein mentions his tattoo, with the number 111404, on air to O’Donnell in 7.30 Report. 181. Nyiszli, Auschwitz, p. 26. 182. Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 116. 183. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 3–9. 184. Aleida Assmann, ‘Authenticity: The Signature of Western Exceptionalism?’, in Julia Straub, ed., Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Critical Concept, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012, p. 46. 185. Gross and Hoffman, ‘Memory, Authority, Identity’, p. 43.

202    Textual Deceptions 186. The term is Dina Wardi’s, quoted in Neale, ‘ “. . . The Credentials That Would Rescue Me” ’, p. 440. 187. Quoted in Blake Eskin, A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski, New York: Schocken, 2002, p. 176.

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204    Textual Deceptions Browder, Laura, ‘The Curious Case of Asa Carter and The Education of Little Tree’, in Elizabeth Hoffman, ed., American Indians and Popular Culture, Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012. Bukowski, Charles, Ham on Rye, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000 [1982]. Bukowski, Charles, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, San Francisco: City Lights, 1973 [1969]. Bukowski, Charles, Post Office, London: Virgin, 1980 [1971]. Callaghan, Dympna, ‘The Vicar and Virago: Feminism and the Problem of Identity’, in Judith Roof and Robin Weigel, eds, Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Carey, Peter, My Life as a Fake, London: Faber, 2003. Carter, Forrest, The Education of Little Tree, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986 [1976]. Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, Death on Credit, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: John Calder, 1989 [1936]. Chaikivsky, Andrew, ‘Nasdijj: Seven Years Ago, He Was Born in This Magazine. The Story of a Fraud’, Esquire, 30 April 2006. Chambers, Ross, ‘Orphaned Memories, Foster-Writing, Phantom Pain: The Fragments Affair’, in Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, eds, Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Cheng, Vincent J., Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Clark, Maureen, Mudrooroo: A Likely Story, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007. Colijn, C. Jan, ‘Toward a Proper Legacy’, in Carol Rittner, ed., Anne Frank in the World: Essays and Reflections, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Cram, Cusi, A Lifetime Burning, New York and London: Samuel French, 2011. Daniel, Jane, Bestseller!, Gloucester, MA: Mount Ivy Press, 2008. Defonseca, Misha, with the collaboration of Vera Lee and Marie-Thérèse Cuny, trans. Sue Rose, Surviving with Wolves: The Most Extraordinary Story of World War II, London: Piatkus, 2005. Demidenko, Helen, The Hand that Signed the Paper, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994. Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, London: Routledge, 1992. Dorris, Michael, The Broken Cord, New York: Warner, 1989. Duroy, Lionel, Survivre avec les loups: La véritable histoire de Misha Defonseca, Paris: XO Editions, 2011. Eaglestone, Robert, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Egan, Susanna, Burdens of Proof: Faith, Doubt, and Identity in Autobiography, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011. Eighner, Lars, Travels with Lizbeth, London: Bloomsbury, 1994. Epstein, Mikhail, ‘Hyper-Authorship: The Case of Araki Yasusada’, Rhizomes, 01 (Fall) 2000. Eskin, Blake, A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski, New York: Schocken, 2002.

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206    Textual Deceptions Katze, Samantha J., ‘A Million Little Maybes: The James Frey Scandal and Statements on a Book Cover or Jacket as Commercial Speech’, Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal, 17 (1) 2006, pp. 207–34. Kelly, Hermann, Kathy’s Real Story: A Culture of False Allegations Exposed, Dunleer: Prefect Press, 2007. Khan, Rahila, Down the Road, Worlds Away, London: Virago, 1987. Knight, Peter, and Jonathan Long, eds, Fakes and Forgeries, Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004. Knoop, Savannah, Girl Boy Girl: How I Became J. T. LeRoy, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. Koolmatrie, Wanda, My Own Sweet Time, Victoria, BC, and Crewe: Trafford, 2004 [1994]. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kushner, Tony, ‘Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation’, Poetics Today, 27 (2) 2006, pp. 275–95. LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Langer, Lawrence L., Using and Abusing the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Lappin, Elena, ‘The Man with Two Heads’, Granta, 66, 1999, pp. 7–65. Lejeune, Philippe, ‘The Autobiographical Contract’, in Tzvetan Todorov, ed., French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, trans. R. Carter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Lengyel, Olga, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, Chicago: Academy, 1995 [1946]. LeRoy, J. T., The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, London: Bloomsbury, 2001. LeRoy, J. T., Sarah, London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Abacus, 2003 [1988]. Levi, Primo, If This is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf, London: Abacus, 1988 [1958]. Lifton, Robert Jay, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Lifton, Robert Jay, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York: Basic Books, 1988 [1986]. Lynch, Claire, Irish Autobiography, Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. Lynch, Jack, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Farnham: Ashgate, 2008. McCourt, Frank, Angela’s Ashes, London: Harper Perennial, 2005 [1996]. McGurl, Mark, ‘Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 18 (2) 2005, pp. 243–67. McHale, Brian, ‘ “A Poet May Not Exist”: Mock-Hoaxes and the Construction of National Identity’, in Robert J. Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Maechler, Stefan, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods, New York: Schocken, 2001.

Select Bibliography    207 Maupin, Armistead, The Night Listener, New York: Bantam, 2000. Miller, J. Hillis, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Miller, William Ian, Faking It, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Morrissey, Philip, ‘Stalking Aboriginal Culture: The Wanda Koolmatrie Affair’, Australian Feminist Studies, 18 (42) 2003, pp. 299–307. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Moynihan, Sinéad, Passing into the Present, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Mullan, John, Anonymity, London: Faber, 2007. Nasdijj, ‘The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams’, Esquire, 1 June 1999. Nasdijj, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams: A Memoir, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Neale, Timothy D., ‘ “. . . The Credentials That Would Rescue Me”: Trauma and the Fraudulent Survivor’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 24 (3) 2010, pp. 431–48. Nolan, Maggie, and Carrie Dawson, eds, Who’s Who: Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crises in Australian Literature, special issue of Australian Literary Studies, 21 (4) 2004. Novy, Marianne, Reading Adoption: Family Difference in Fiction and Drama, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Nunes, Mark, ‘A Million Little Blogs: Community, Narrative, and the James Frey Controversy’, Journal of Popular Culture, 44 (2) 2011, pp. 347–66. Nyiszli, Miklos, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, trans. Tibere Kremer and Richard Seaver, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 [1946]. O’Beirne, Kathy, with Michael Sheridan, Don’t Ever Tell, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2006 [2005]. Oberski, Jona, A Childhood, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983. Oboe, Annalisa, ed., Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003. O’Brien, George, ‘The Last Word: Reflections on Angela’s Ashes’, in Charles Fanning, ed., New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Paretsky, Sara, Total Recall, New York: Delacorte Press, 2001. Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, ed. Louis A. Wagner, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009 [1928]. Reiter, Andrea, Narrating the Holocaust, London: Continuum, 2005. Rey, Deborah, Rachel Sarai’s Vineyard, Bristol: Bluechrome, 2008. Rich, Nathaniel, ‘Being J. T. LeRoy’, interview, Paris Review, 178 (Fall) 2006, pp. 145–68. Richardson, Anna, ‘Mapping the Lines of Fact and Fiction in Holocaust Testimonial Novels’, in L. O. Vasvári and S. T. de Zepetnek, eds, Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009. Riviere, Joan, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, in Herman Ruitenbeek, ed.,

208    Textual Deceptions Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1966. Roseman, Mark, ‘Surviving Memory: Truth and Inaccuracy in Holocaust Memory’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 8 (1) 1999, pp. 1–20. Rosenblat, Herman, Angel at the Fence, unpublished memoir with uncredited ghostwriter Susanna Margolis, online publication. Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rubin, Dana, ‘The Real Education of Little Tree’, Texas Monthly, 20 (2) 1992, pp. 78–96. Ruthven, K. K., Faking Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. St John, Warren, ‘Figure in J. T. LeRoy Case Says Partner is Culprit’, New York Times, 7 February 2006, p. B6. St John, Warren, ‘The Unmasking of J. T. LeRoy: In Public, He’s a She’, New York Times, 9 January 2006, p. B1. Saunders, Max, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Schaff, Barbara, ‘Duplicitous Games: Faked Authorship from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, in Peter Knight and Jonathan Long, eds, Fakes and Forgeries, Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004. Silkin, Jon, ‘The Yasusada Saga’, Stand, 38 (1) 1996, pp. 37–8. Sokal, Alan, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Sokal, Alan, ‘A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies’, Lingua Franca, 6 (4) 1996, pp. 62–4. Sokal, Alan, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, Social Text, 46/47 (Spring/Summer) 1996, pp. 217–52. Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science, London: Profile Books, 1998. Sontag, Susan, On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Sorensen, Eli Park, ‘A Pathological Core of Authenticity: Rereading the Case of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 49 (1) 2013, pp. 79–98. Spence, Sean A., and Catherine J. Kaylor-Hughes, ‘Looking for Truth and Finding Lies: The Prospects for a Nascent Neuroimaging of Deception’, Neurocase, 14 (1) 2008, pp. 68–81. Spence, Sean A., Catherine J. Kaylor-Hughes, Martin L. Brook, Sudheer T. Lankappa and Iain D. Wilkinson, ‘ “Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy” or a “Miscarriage of Justice”? An Initial Application of Functional Neuroimaging to the Question of Guilt versus Innocence’, European Psychiatry, 23 (4) 2008, pp. 309–14. Stein, Benjamin, The Canvas, trans. Brian Zumhagen, Rochester, NY: Open Book Press, 2012. Strummer, Deli, A Reflection of the Holocaust, Baltimore: Aurich Press, 1988. Suleiman, Susan, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Select Bibliography    209 Takolander, Maria, and David McCooey, ‘Fakes, Literary Identity and Public Culture’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 3, 2004, pp. 57–65. Ueda, Makoto, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1983. Vice, Sue, ‘Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments and Holocaust Envy: “Why Wasn’t I There Too?” ’, in Sue Vice, ed., Representing the Holocaust: Essays in Honour of Bryan Burns, London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003. Vice, Sue, ‘Helen Darville, The Hand that Signed the Paper: Who is “Helen Demidenko”?’, in Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins, eds, Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Viede, Rick, A Hoax, Sydney: Currency Press, 2012. Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London: Routledge, 1988. Westphalen, Linda, ‘Betraying History for Pleasure or Profit’, Overland, 150 (Autumn) 1998, pp. 75–8. Whitehead, Anne, Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Wilkomirski, Binjamin, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, London: Picador, 1996. Yagoda, Ben, Memoir: A History, New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Yasusada, Araki, ‘Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada’, American Poetry Review, 25 (4) 1996, pp. 23–6. Yasusada, Araki, Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, ed. and trans. Tosa Motokiyu, Ojiu Norinaga and Okura Kyojin, New York: Roof, 1997. Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Camp Comedy’, Sight and Sound, 10 (April) 2000. Žižek, Slavoj, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, London: Verso, 2009.

Index

Aborigines, 6, 8, 59–70 addiction, 6, 12–13, 86, 95–107; see also alcoholism adoption, fostering, 14, 64, 71, 72–3, 78, 88, 93–4 Adorno, Theodor, 127 AIDS, 5, 37, 44, 46–7, 54, 70 Albania, 6, 113–14, 127–36 Albert, Laura, 2, 6, 37, 49–54 alcoholism, 12, 17, 70–1, 77–8 Alexie, Sherman, 77, 78–9 Alvarez, Javier, 115 Amis, Martin, Time’s Arrow, 186–7 Anielewicz, Mordechai, 145 anonymity, 3, 124 Araf al Omari, Amina Abdallah, 3, 43, 54 Araki Yasusada see Yasusada, Araki Argento, Asia, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, 50 Armstrong, Lance, It’s Not About the Bike, 4 Aroles, Serge, 175 Aronowitz, Stanley, 2 Assmann, Aleida, 193 Attridge, Derek, 8 Aubry, Timothy, 96, 104 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 12, 121, 127, 143, 146–8, 153, 165, 181, 183–94, 201n168 Monowitz, 189 Australia, 59–70; see also Aborigines authenticity, 12–13, 29–30, 41, 94, 97–8, 166, 172, 193 author, as genius, 1 author-function, 37 implied, 3

autobiography, 6, 14, 39, 50, 52, 59–60, 80n1, 122 autofiction, 4 Bach, Richard, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 45, 49 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 26, 41 carnival, 6 dialogism, 27 polyphony, 107 skaz, 89–90 stylisation, 85–7 Barrus, Tim, 6, 70–80 Barthes, Roland, 1, 42, 137n12 Baudrillard, Jean, 135–6 Bayley, John, 2, 60–70, 80 Beachy, Stephen, 50 Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, 69 Bellow, Saul, 67 Belmont, Véra, Survivre avec les loups, 172, 175 Bełz˙ec, 169 Bergen-Belsen, 156, 163 Bernard-Donals, Michael, 159 Bernstein, Charles, 138n22 Bettelheim, Bruno, 183, 185, 190–1 Bildungsroman, 13, 25, 51, 67 Blake-Nelson, Tim, The Grey Zone, 183 Borges, Jorge, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, 117 Borst, Allan, 98 Bradley, John, Atomic Ghosts, 118 Briscoe, Constance, Ugly, 5, 11, 13, 16, 22, 25, 26–30, 44, 46, 54 Brody, Richard, 157 Buchenwald, 7, 144, 149, 151, 189 Bukowski, Charles, 127 Ham on Rye, 6, 95, 97, 100–6

Index    211 Notes of a Dirty Old Man, 97, 110n55 Post Office, 96–7, 115 Burnside, John, 97–8, 106 Burroughs, Augusten, Running with Scissors, 14, 31n19 Burrup, Eddie, 60 Caldecott, Andrew, 27–8 Callaghan, Dympna, 55n4 Carey, Peter, My Life as a Fake, 3, 111n74 Carmen, Leon, 59–70, 80, 82n31 Carter, Forrest The Education of Little Tree, 7, 75–6 The Outlaw Josey Wales, 76 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, Death on Credit, 20, 95, 98, 104–5, 107, 117 Chambers, Ross, 64, 162, 165–6 Cheng, Vincent, 43 child’s perspective, 5, 13, 17, 49–54, 64–9, 93–4, 152–66 inner child, 25 see also memoir: misery memoirs Cole, Tim, 48 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 98 confessional poetry, 13 Conover, Ted, 71, 77, 78 Cooper, Dennis, 50 Coupland, Nikolas, 86 Cram, Cusi, A Lifetime Burning, 3, 87, 106 Crowther, Barbara, 38 Dachau, 4, 189 Dalrymple, Theodore, 40, 41 Daniel, Jane, 170, 171–2, 193 Darville, Helen see Helen Demidenko Day, Elizabeth, 151 De Wael, Monique see Defonseca, Misha defamiliarisation, 28, 67 Defonseca, Misha, Surviving with Wolves, 3, 7, 27, 34n63, 54, 117, 152, 154, 158, 166–78, 179–81, 192, 193 Deleuze, Gilles, 2 delusion, 7, 22 Demidenko, Helen, The Hand that Signed the Paper, 60, 117 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 2, 125 Dickens, Charles, 15, 20 Dickinson, Emily, 111n64, 126 ‘dirty realism’, 7, 98, 131

Dorris, Michael, The Broken Cord, 71, 73, 77–8, 84n70 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 20 Notes from the Underground, 103 Dowaliby, James, 72 Duffy, Carol Ann, 56n12 Durack, Elizabeth, 60 Duroy, Lionel, 3, 176 Dwork, Debórah, 170 Dwyer, David, 43, 56n24 Eaglestone, Robert, 152 Eagleton, Terry, 15 Eastwood, Clint, The Outlaw Josey Wales, 76 Egan, Susanna, 5, 31n7 Eighner, Lars, Travels with Lizbeth, 71, 77 Eliot, George, 38 Ellenbogen, Marianne, 143, 151 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, 70 embellished memoir, 7, 8, 18, 107, 144–52, 192–4 entrapment hoax, 2, 113 Epstein, Mikhail, 114 Equiano, Olaudah, 31n7 Erdrich, Louise, 78 Evans, Richard, 190 fairytale, 11–12 Feuer, Alan, 52 Finkelstein, Norman, 155 Fixot, Bernard, 170 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 42 Fleischer, Matthew, 71, 72 Flossenbürg, 148 Foer, Jonathan Safran, Everything is Illuminated, 125 Foley, Dyan, 90 folktale, 11–12 formalism, 11, 67, 159 Forward, Toby, 5, 37, 38–44, 55n4 Foster, Roy, 15, 17 Foucault, Michel, 1, 8, 37, 43 France, 8 Frank, Anne, 190 Diary of a Young Girl, 9, 48 Frank, Otto, 190 Frank, Ted, 106 Frankenstein’s monster, 103, 111n74 French, Nicci, 43, 56n24 Freud, Sigmund, 158, 176; see also Nachträglichkeit; Schreber, Daniel Paul

212    Textual Deceptions Frey, James, A Million Little Pieces, 6, 51, 54, 59, 70, 71, 77, 80, 85–7, 88 Friend, Tad, 46 Frydman, Marcel, 170–1 Furedi, Frank, 29 Gaitskill, Mary, 50 Gallo, Max, 145–6 Ganzfried, Daniel, 154, 158 gender, 5, 6, 37–58, 59–70 genre, 3, 7–8, 11–14, 19, 46, 48, 85, 97, 105–7, 110n55 Gladwell, Malcolm, 34n60 Godby, Jack, 44 Goodrich, Frances, The Diary of Anne Frank, 48 Gourevitch, Philip, 154, 157 Grabowski, Laura, 154 Granger, David, 71 Gray, Martin, 7, 8, 143–6, 173–4, 197n74 Greene, Graham, 127 Grese, Irma, 189 Groom, Nick, 6 Grosjean, Bruno see Wilkomirski, Binjamin Gross, Andrew, 154, 193 Guattari, Félix, 2 Hackett, Albert, The Diary of Anne Frank, 48 Hage, Ghassan, 65 Hannan, Gerard, 2, 16, 29 Harlins, Latasha, 93 Harris, Richard, 15 Hayes, Jilly, 179 Helbling, Hanno, 153 Heneson, Nancy, 147 Hewett, Dorothy, 65 Highsmith, Patricia, 127 Hilberg, Raul, 146, 153 Himmler, Heinrich, 145 Hiroshima, 1, 4, 59, 113–27 hoax, 1, 3, 60, 125, 129; see also entrapment hoax; mock hoax Hoffman, Cyndi, 88 Hoffman, Michael, 154, 193 Holocaust, 9, 25 Holocaust denial, 7, 154, 193–4 Holocaust testimony, 142–94 see also names of individual camps Holstein, Bernard, 7, 62, 152, 154, 171, 172–92, 193 Holt, Penelope, The Apple, 144

Homer, 85 Hopler, Jay, 140n69 Howard, John, 61 Hughes, Ted, 138n22 hybridity, generic and textual, 7, 14, 16, 26, 28–9, 74–5, 86, 89, 144 hyperauthorship, 114 Ingrassia, Michele, 45 intertextuality, 1, 4, 6, 11, 30, 77–8, 91–2, 100–5, 153, 179–94, 197n74 Iraq, 4, 126 Abu Ghraib, 126–7 Ireland, 5, 11, 14, 15–26, 29, 60 Islam, 5, 42 Izbica Lubelska, 169 Jack, Ian, 128–9, 131, 133, 135, 141n87 Jackson, Jermaine, 44 Jacobus, Mary, 159, 162, 164 Johnson, Anthony Godby, 3, 37, 38, 44–9 Johnson, Kent, 4, 5, 6, 114–27, 137n6 Johnson, Vicki, 5–6, 44–9, 54 Jones, Margaret B., Love and Consequences, 3, 51, 70, 72, 85– 95, 98, 99 Joyce, James, 15, 17, 18, 67, 117 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 19–20 Dubliners, 69 Juarez, Vanessa, 89 Judaism, Jewishness, 27, 159, 164–6, 171, 173–4, 177–9 Kadare, Ismail, 129–30, 132–3, 141n87 Kafka, Franz, ‘The Metamorphosis’, 111n73 Kajanë, Jiri, Winter in Tiranë, 6–7, 59, 62, 113–14, 127–36 Kakutani, Michiko, 89, 92 Kaplan, Chaim, Scroll of Agony, 157 Karloff, Boris, 103 Karski, Jan, 169–70 Kelly, Hermann, 2, 22–3 Kelly, Judith, Rock Me Gently, 30 Kenner, Hugh, 123 Kermode, Frank, 6 Khan, Rahila, Down the Road, Worlds, Away, 5, 37, 38–44, 47, 49, 54 King, Rodney, 93, 109n34 King, Stephen, Misery, 45 Klee, Paul, 120

Index    213 Klein, Fritz, 186 Knoop, Savannah, 2, 50 Kolitz, Zvi, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, 35n74 Koolmatrie, Wanda, 2, 3, 6, 54, 59–70, 72, 73, 82n31, 116 Korczak, Janusz, 145 Kosinski, Jerzy, The Painted Bird, 154, 155, 196n48 Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror, 98, 100, 104–5, 107 Kurzem, Alex, 27, 35n78 Kurzem, Mark, The Mascot, 27 Kushner, Tony, 147, 156 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 161 LaCapra, Dominick, 171 Laffont, Robert, 170 Langer, Lawrence, 146, 158, 165, 170, 172 Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah, 156, 169– 70, 175 LaPlante, Lynda, Entwinement, 201n168 Lappin, Elena, 154 Laub, Dori, 143, 147 law, legal cases, 7, 11, 13, 14, 22, 26– 30, 46, 54 Leavitt, David, While England Sleeps, 4 Leith, Sam, 36n84 Lejeune, Philippe, 13, 107 Lengyel, Olga, Five Chimneys, 183–94 LeRoy, J. T., 2, 6, 37 Sarah, 49–54 The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, 49, 52–3 Lessing, Doris, The Diaries of Jane Somers, 124 Levi, Primo, 9, 140, 183 If This is a Man, 12, 48, 159 libel, 14, 26, 30 lie-detector test, 14, 22, 29–30 Lifton, Robert Jay, 119, 183 McCourt, Frank, Angela’s Ashes, 3, 4, 11, 12, 14, 15–21, 23, 25, 28, 29, 44 Teacher Man, 21 ’Tis, 20 McCourt, Malachy, 15 McGurl, Mark, 7 McHale, Brian, 2, 113, 130 McMaster, Tom, 3, 33, 54 Macpherson, James, 85

Maechler, Stefan, 157 Magdalene Laundries, 5, 8, 21–6, 34n66 magic realism, 51 Maiden, Jennifer, 194n Majdanek, 153, 158–9, 161, 163–4, 182, 187 Major, Joseph, 46 Malley, Ern, 3, 66, 103, 111n74, 113, 115 Mansfield, Katherine, ‘The Garden Party’, 32n39 Mantel, Hilary, Fludd, 35n84 Martinez, Ruben, 94 Maslin, Janet, 110n48, 112n87 masquerade, 49, 89 Maupin, Armistead, The Night Listener, 44, 46, 49 Mauthausen, 146–8 Meister, Peter, ‘Hiroshima’, 124, 139n40 memoir, 1, 5 memoirs, 14 misery memoir, 4, 11–36, 44–9 Mendelson, Daniel, 171 Mengele, Josef, 183, 186, 189 metafiction, 7, 49, 51–3 Miller, Henry, 95 Miller, William Ian, 85–6 mock hoax, 113–14, 130 Modernism, 5, 17, 20, 45 Mondrian, Piet, 118, 120 Monette, Paul, 44, 46–8 Monk, Maria, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, 34n66 Moore, MariJo, 71 Morrissey, Philip, 60, 61, 63 Mortensen, Greg, Three Cups of Tea, 4 Morton, Leith, 137n6 Moynihan, Sinéad, 108, 109nn26,37 MRI scan, 11, 22 Mudrooroo, 60 Wild Cat Falling, 68–9 Mullan, John, 124 Mullan, Peter, The Magdalene Sisters, 23 multiculturalism, 5 Nachträglichkeit, 24, 158–9 narrator, 13, 19, 41, 44, 64, 169, 182 Nasdijj Geronimo’s Bones, 72, 84n70 The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, 6, 70–80

214    Textual Deceptions Nasdijj (cont.) The Boy and the Dog are Sleeping, 71, 73 Native Americans, 7, 8, 70–80, 87–95 9/11, 8 Nolan, Maggie, 65, 66 Novy, Marianne, 72 Nyiszli, Miklos, Auschwitz, 183–94 O’Beirne, Kathy, Don’t Ever Tell, 3, 5, 8, 11–13, 21–6, 27, 28, 44, 46 O’Casey, Sean, 15 O’Flynn, Chriostoir, 16 O’Hagan, Sean, 97 Oberski, Jona, A Childhood, 156, 162–3, 183 Olds, Sharon, 50 Olisvos, Ariana, 43 Orwell, George, 1984, 132 Ossian, 85 Paretsky, Sara, Total Recall, 3, 155 Parker, Alan, Angela’s Ashes, 15 Pasche, Jacques, 186 passing, 90 Pelzer, Dave, A Child Called ‘It’, 14 Perloff, Marjorie, 115–17, 123, 137n12, 138n22, 139n37 Phelan, Kevin, 6, 127–36 Philby, Kim, 34n60 photographs, photography, 6, 23, 24, 27, 34n63, 37, 38, 45, 94, 118–20, 128, 167, 173–4, 176–9 plagiarism, 4, 85, 107 Plath, Sylvia, 4, 121, 138n22 Ariel, 123 ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’, 120–1 ‘You’re’, 123–4 pornography, 13 postcolonialism, 5 postmodernism, 1–2, 90–1 Pound, Ezra, 139n33 Propp, Vladimir, 11–12 Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past, 67, 69 pseudonym, 5, 38–44, 71, 124 publishers, 3–4, 76, 86, 96, 107, 110n45, 113, 128, 136, 164, 166, 170, 172, 179, 193, 196 Quincey, Thomas de, 98 Radley, Jack, 60, 66 Radley, Paul, 60, 66, 67

Randhawa, Ravinder, 42 Ravensbrück, 172 Read, Mimi, 88 readers, 8, 13, 17, 22, 27, 38, 41, 49, 52–3, 64, 94, 113, 119, 125, 129, 131–2, 193, 196 Reagan, Ronald, 93 Reiter, Andrea, 156 Reznikoff, Charles, Holocaust, 180 Richards, I. A., 124–5 Richmond, Michelle, 129–30 Riviere, Joan, 89 Ronsac, Charles, 170 Roseman, Mark, 143 Rosenblat, Herman, An Angel at the Fence, 7, 8, 144, 145, 149–52 Roth, Joseph, Weights and Measures, 134–5 Roth, Philip, 106–7, 112n88 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 115 Rubin, Dana, 76 Russo, Maria, 74 Ruthven, K. K., 4, 42, 56n12, 61 St John, Warren, 54 Saint-Amour, Paul, 139n32 Sappho, 126 Sayre, Gordon, 90 Schaff, Barbara, 39 Schlieben, 149–50, 151–2 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 157 Sebald, W. G., 99, 176–7 Seisensui, Ogiwara, 114, 116, 123, 125 Seltzer, Margaret, 3, 51, 70, 72, 85–95, 106 Sereny, Gitta, 144–6 Shakur, Sanyika, Monster, 91, 109n34 Shield, The, 90 Shklovsky, Viktor, 67 Shorrock, Judy, 179 Sierakowiak, Dawid, 159 Silkin, Jon, 121 Silkin, Toshiko, 121 Simpson, Colton, Inside the Crips, 91, 109n34 slavery, 12, 13, 31n7 Socrates, 26 Sokal, Alan, 1–2, 113 Sonderkommando, 183–94 Sonnenburg, 158 Sontag, Susan, 176–7 Sorensen, Eli Park, 156, 159 Spender, Stephen, 4

Index    215 Spielberg, Steven, 146 Schindler’s List, 152 Srebnik, Simon, 156–7 Stein, Benjamin, The Canvas, 3, 155 Steiner, Jean-François, Treblinka, 146 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 19 Stratford, Lauren see Grabowski, Laura Strummer, Deli, 7, 8, 143, 146–9 Styron, William, Sophie’s Choice, 187–8 Syria, 3, 43, 54 Takamora, Kotaro, 139n37 Talese, Nan, 97 Texier, Catherine, 52 Thatcher, Margaret, 43 Theresienstadt, Terezín, 144, 146–7, 152, 155 Todorov, Tzvetan, 159 Tonkin, Boyd, 43, 54 trauma, 13, 193 Treblinka, 7, 143–6, 150, 157, 173 U’Ren, Bill, 6, 127–36 Viede, Rick, Hoax, 82n31 Vietnam War, 8, 62 Vogelsang, Arthur, 115, 138n22 Waltzer, Kenneth, 152, 179 Warsaw Ghetto, 144–6, 157, 168–70, 173–4

Waugh, Patricia, 100 Weinberger, Eliot, 125 Wells, H. G., The Invisible Man, 69–70 Westphalen, Linda, 63, 67–8 White, Antonia, Frost in May, 36n84 Whitehead, Anne, 156 Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass, 74 Wiesel, Elie, Night, 154 Wilkomirski, Binjamin, Fragments, 3, 7, 24, 26, 51, 64, 86, 92, 117, 151, 152–66, 171, 172, 177, 179–80, 183, 187–9, 193, 197n74 Williams, Margery, The Velveteen Rabbit, 45 Winfrey, Oprah, 45, 71, 95, 98, 149, 151 Wire, The, 90 Wittmann, Rebecca, 157 Wojahn, David, 117, 138n22 Wolff, Tobias, This Boy’s Life, 13–14 Woolf, Virginia, 17 Wright, Alexis, 61 Yasusada, Araki, 4, 6, 59, 68, 113–27, 136 Yiddish, 165–6, 167, 180 Yosano, Akiko, 138 Žižek, Slavoj, 86–7, 92, 158