The Use and Abuse of Literature (31 page)

Which comes first, the life or the “life story,” the craft of life writing? To what extent is the shape of a life conditioned by our literary expectations about crises, turning points, growth, and change? “We assume that life
produces
the autobiography as an act produces its consequences,” wrote Paul de Man, “but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer
does
is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?”
²³

This is true for “high” or “literary” versions of autobiography (de Man is thinking about Rousseau, St. Augustine, and Wordsworth), but it is equally relevant to popular and celebrity accounts. How did the great man or great woman—or these days the representative, proudly “ordinary” man or woman—become him- or herself? The dramatic or literary arc is already in place: early life, setbacks, signs of genius, promise, or unusual attainment, sundering from fellows or family, the first professional break or breakthrough, a triumph, a tragedy, reflections, recriminations, late style, etc.

The modern autobiography is occasionally written by the subject but
more often with (or, functionally,
by
) a writing partner or amanuensis. These partners are sometimes called ghostwriters, but there is a distinction to be made between the invisible ghostwriter and the credited collaborator, and down the line, these attributions of authorship have something to do with that elusive category of reality, or truth, in writing. Here are a few examples.

The New York Times
best-seller-list description for
Real Change
, “by Newt Gingrich with Vince Haley and Rick Tyler,” included Haley, Gingrich’s research director at the American Enterprise Institute, and Tyler, Gingrich’s director of media relations, as the book’s coauthors. On the Conservative Book Club website and on the book cover, however,
Real Change
is credited entirely to Gingrich, and the accompanying ad copy tells potential readers that in the book Newt Gingrich explains the role of the conservative majority. Whatever things may be real about
Real Change
, the claim of authorship is not prominent among them.
Plus ça change
.

Another book on the
Times
list that week,
I Am America (and So Can You!
), like the Gingrich book, bore on its cover a large photo of the credited author, Stephen Colbert, as well as a tagline send-up of book-promotion-speak as “From the Author of
I Am America (and So Can You!)
” The
Times
conscientiously listed Colbert’s coauthors from his television show,
The Colbert Report
, describing
I Am America
as “by Stephen Colbert, Richard Dahm, Paul Dinello, Allison Silverman et al.” But none of these names appears on the book cover. By contrast, the book jacket of another cowritten work on the list,
Send Yourself Roses
“by Kathleen Turner with Gloria Feldt,” declares straightforwardly, in reasonable-sized print, that the book, the biography-memoir of the actress, was written “in collaboration with Gloria Feldt.”

Authorship may not seem to be one of the key reality principles so much as a matter of truth in packaging. Nonetheless, for the time being, let’s note that these nonfiction books are jostling for public favor with books described as memoirs, autobiographies, meditations, or spectacularly—and unexpectedly—posthumous accounts. The attraction of these real-life narratives and their “ripped from the headlines”
appeal seems undeniable, a symptom of the times (and the
Times
). Thus, on the same best-seller list, we find:

• Manic
  by Terri Cheney. A memoir of life with bipolar disorder.
  
• Hope’s Boy
  by Andrew Bridge. A memoir of foster care by an advocate for poor children.
  
• Lone Survivor
  by Marcus Luttrell. The only survivor of a Navy Seals operation in northern Afghanistan describes the battle, his comrades, and his courageous escape.
  
• The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead
  by David Shields. A meditation on mortality, focused on the author’s ninety-seven-year-old father.
  
• Reconciliation
  by Benazir Bhutto. A posthumous look at Islam, democracy, and the West, by Pakistan’s former prime minister and assassinated opposition leader.
  ²⁴
  

Presumably, considerations of space in this last item produced the verbal compression “a posthumous look,” suggesting that Bhutto is writing after her own death—a development that would have made her the literal ghostwriter of her own book.

What might be the use of such personal accounts of the self? Let’s recall Philip Sidney’s dictum: “a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example.” We might likewise note that a bad example has as much force to teach as a good example. The good example is a model for conduct, in the mode of Plutarch’s
Lives
or the lives of the saints, where allegory displaces mimesis and acts are symbolic in the first instance, real only—or preeminently—in their power to induce imitation. In a more modern sense, this is the
Profiles in Courage
, ordinary-hero snapshot, the inspirational feature story writ large. The obverse is schadenfreude, or the bad example. Triumphs over adversity, addiction (drugs, alcohol, sex, fame, chronic lying, you name it). It doesn’t take much to see that this is itself a seductive mode. If St. Augustine—or Rousseau—had had nothing to confess, would we read their memoirs?

Under a strict definition of literature, few if any of these memoirs, real or false, would qualify. Conceivably, if any had surpassing literary
merit—however we were to determine that elusive criterion—it might somehow transcend the dialectic of truth and lie. But
faked
and
false
and
lie
and
wholesale fabrication
are damning terms when the public is deceived and not delighted.

The best-selling book
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
(Free Press, 2002) was made into a successful film entitled
21
in 2008. The book, by Ben Mezrich, was listed as a work of nonfiction, and he went on to produce other books in the same vein with similarly explanatory subtitles:
Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions
(2005),
Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees
(2005), and
Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai
(2007).
²⁵
(Are we sensing a pattern here?)

Questions about the truth value of
Bringing Down the House
resurfaced with the opening of the movie and the concurrent revelation of several less than fully truthful memoirs. The public was now on the alert for falsification and in a mood to equate it with deception rather than with the art of fiction. Mezrich had conflated some characters, fabricated others, and invented some significant details in the story. “Every word on the page isn’t supposed to be fact-checkable,” he told an interviewer. “The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.”
²⁶
But Mezrich’s book was published with a disclaimer explaining that the names, locations, and other details had been changed and that some characters were composites. As the
Boston Globe
reporter noted, though, the disclaimer was “in fine print, on the copyright page” and might readily have been missed by readers. Other editors and nonfiction authors, when consulted, expressed skepticism about Mezrich’s techniques: “It’s lying,” said Sebastian Junger, author of
The Perfect Storm
. “Nonfiction is reporting the world as it is, and when
you combine characters and change chronology, that’s not the world as it is.”
²⁷
Gay Talese, often regarded as one of the inventors of the modern nonfiction genre, was similarly emphatic: taking liberties of this kind is “unacceptable” and “dishonest.”
²⁸
Mezrich, when asked, invoked the word
literary
to describe the choices he made: “I took literary license to make it readable.”
²⁹

What does
literary
mean in this connection? Is it a version of the more familiar phrase
poetic license
? License in such a context has more to do with giving, or taking, permission than with legal sanction.

A few years later, Mezrich was back with a new book,
The Accidental Billionaires
, subtitled
The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
, in which the boundaries of fact and fiction were unapologetically, indeed triumphantly, blurred. As with James Frey, who transformed himself from faux memoirist to fiction writer (and profited by the exchange), so Ben Mezrich declared that he would capitalize on what had been perceived as a transgression of the rules: “I see myself as attempting to break ground. I definitely am trying to create my own genre here,” he told an interviewer. “I’m attempting to tell stories in a very new and entertaining way. I see myself as an entertainer.”
³⁰
A bookstore owner noted that copies originally piled on a table for new nonfiction, would later be relocated to the business section. Mezrich’s book included imagined and re-created scenes, some in the “he might have” mode that has become popular in certain kinds of biography. One review, dryly adopting the book’s style of unabashed psychological guesswork, began, “Though we cannot know exactly what went through Ben Mezrich’s mind as he wrote
The Accidental Billionaires
, his nonfictionish book about the creation of Facebook, we can perhaps speculate hypothetically about what it possibly might have been like.”
³¹
The film version, called
The Social Network
, told the story of Facebook’s founding through the accounts of several characters, never indicating which of them was “true.”

If memoirs often tend to veer in the direction of self-fictionalizing, the venerable practice of biography, literally “life writing,” would seem to depend to a certain extent on telling the truth. Thus, biography is often poised somewhere between the categories of literature and history. While in many ways this would seem to increase the prestige of biography as a genre, since these days history is a less suspect, more rational and evidence-based category than literature, it has made for a slightly anomalous role for the modern practitioner of this ancient craft.

Biography, it seems, has been suffering from an inferiority complex of sorts even as its practitioners triumph in the bookstores. The founding of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York was described by its faculty director, David Nasaw, himself a distinguished biographer (
Andrew Carnegie; William Randolph Hearst
), as a way of changing the perception of biography as “the stepchild of the academy.”
³²
The editor of
The American Historical Review
commented that “increasingly historians are turning to biography,” even though in the past they “haven’t considered it a kind of legitimate scholarship in some respects.”
³³
The new center supports biographers working in a wide range of modes, including film, television, and graphic novels, and the executive director, Nancy Milford, author of biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay, told a reporter that she “insisted that at least half the fellows come from outside the academy.”
³⁴
So on the one hand, biographers are seeking credibility and standing within the academy (as non-academicians call the world of universities and colleges). On the other hand, they stand proudly outside it. Where does the readership come from? According to the head of the Leon Levy Foundation, Levy’s widow Shelby White, her enthusiasm for the project came from “a love of biography and history and reading about other people’s lives. I guess I’m a snoop.”
³⁵

The gratification of snooping, or even of a more seemly curiosity, was not the stated goal for biographers from ancient times through the
Victorian period. Once upon a time, biography was supposed to model character and the conduct of life. Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans
placed, side by side, biographies of famous men from these two periods. Plutarch announced in the opening sentences of his
Life of Alexander
that his objective was to depict the character of his subjects rather than every detail of their daily existence. “It must be borne in mind,” he wrote (in the celebrated translation by John Dryden), “that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges …” Plutarch compared his art to that of the portrait painter, who focuses attention on the lines and features of the face, rather than on other parts of the body, as the most indicative signs of character.
³⁶
This comparison between the biographer and the portrait painter or sculptor would become a favorite in later biographies, and calls attention, tacitly but importantly, to the degree of artifice involved in making something “true to life.”
³⁷

The historian Jill Lepore cites a story told by David Hume in his 1741 essay “Of the Study of History.” Having been asked by a “young beauty, for whom I had some passion,” to send her some novels and romances to read while she was in the country, Hume sent her, instead, Plutarch’s
Lives
, “assuring her, at the same time, that there was not a word of truth in them.” She read them with pleasure, apparently, until she came to the lives of Alexander and Caesar, “whose names she had heard of by accident,” then indignantly sent the book back to Hume “with many reproaches for deceiving her.”
³⁸