Waiting for the Barbarians (42 page)

What the slave narratives, the émigré accounts, and the Holocaust and genocide memoirs have in common is that, in them, the stakes of redemption are much higher than ever before. Now the “soul’s
eye” that Augustine spoke of was turned outward as well as inward, documenting the suffering self but also, necessarily, recording the tormenting other. The implicit and conditional universality in Augustine’s suffering-and-redemption narrative—“This happened to me, and could happen to you, if you did what I did”—became explicit and indicative in the memoir of political suffering: “What happened to me happened to many others.” Each of these witness memoirs had to bear an awful burden, standing in for the thousands of memoirs that would never be written. As the “I” became “we,” the personal journey that had begun in the fourth century was transformed, by the end of the eighteenth, into a highly political one. The conversation between one’s self and God had become a conversation with, and about, the whole world.

As the implications of the memoir have grown in importance, so have the seriousness, and the consequences, of another complaint made about it: what Freud called “mendacity.” The need for certain kinds of memoir to be true goes back to Augustine’s
Confessions
: if the anguish and the suffering aren’t real, there’s nothing to redeem, and the whole exercise becomes pointless. It is precisely the redemption memoir’s status as a witness to real life that makes the outrage so loud when a memoir is falsified; the outrage tends to be exacerbated when the book in question claims to bear witness to social and political injustice. (By contrast, if Errol Flynn bedded ten more or ten fewer starlets than he claims, you don’t feel cheated.) Yagoda, who is at his energetic best when indicting phony memoirs, gleefully recounts how a book called
The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams
—one of three memoirs by a Native American writer called Nasdijj, in which the author rehearses the catalog of sufferings that fueled his resentful rejection of Western ways (fetal alcohol syndrome, migrant life, homelessness, HIV infection)—turned out to
have been written by a twice-married white midwesterner whose other literary output includes gay S&M erotica.

The 1999
Esquire
essay on which
The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams
was based was nominated for a National Magazine Award; the book itself was ecstatically reviewed in the Native American literary press. (“Raw, poignant, poetic, and painful.”) The effusiveness of the reception explains, to some extent, the violence of the reactions when such memoirs are revealed as phonies. Beneath it lies, all too clearly, a kind of shame—shame at the ease with which we have been seduced, and at how naked our desire is for certain kinds of narrative, however improbable or tendentious or convenient, to be true.

Indeed, the reactions to phony memoirs often tell us more about the tangled issues of veracity, mendacity, history, and politics than the books themselves do. This was already true of the nineteenth-century slave narrative and the way it was sometimes exploited. One of the most interestingly convoluted cases concerns the publication, in 1836, of a book called
The Slave
,
or Memoirs of Archy Moore
—a startling account of maltreatment, incest, and revenge told by a light-skinned African-American slave. The fact that it soon became clear that the book was a novel—by a Harvard graduate named Richard Hildreth, a New Englander who, during a stay in the South, had been deeply shocked by the treatment of black slaves—didn’t bother some abolitionist reviewers; for them, what mattered was the “terrible truths” from which Moore’s fiction had been constructed. In a letter to the Boston
Liberator
, the abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child went as far as to claim that Hildreth’s novel was more powerful than an authentic narrative written by a slave called Charles Ball. “The extracts I have seen from Charles Ball are certainly highly interesting,” she wrote, “and they have a peculiar interest, because an actual living man tells us what he has seen and experienced; while Archy Moore is a
skillful grouping of incidents which, we all know, are constantly happening in the lives of slaves. But it cannot be equal to Archy Moore!”

The story of “Archy Moore” anticipates the present-day willingness to accept, as valid works of social or political witness, autobiographical narratives that turn out to be works of fiction. In the preface that Frey was obliged to add after the extent of his fictionalization in
A Million Little Pieces
created an outcry, he writes, “I hope these revelations will not alter [readers’] faith in the book’s central message—that drug addiction and alcoholism can be overcome, and there is always a path to redemption if you fight to find one.” After the publication, in 1983, of Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir describing government atrocities against indigenous Guatemalans, investigations by a Middlebury College professor and by a reporter for
The New York Times
revealed that some of the incidents in the book hadn’t happened the way she described. (Among other things, a brother who Menchú said had died of starvation didn’t exist.) Menchú, who won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, retorted that her book expressed a “larger truth” about the sufferings of her people. Yagoda reports that one sympathetic Wellesley College professor of Spanish—a modern-day Lydia Maria Child—declared, in
The Chronicle of Higher Education
, that “whether her book is true or not, I don’t care.”

One of the most interesting defenses of memoirs that turn out to be “enhanced” or downright invented is that they accurately reflect a reality present not in the world itself (as in the cases of “Archy Moore” and Rigoberta Menchú) but in the author’s mind. This line of argument raises a question that goes to the heart of our assumptions about literature, about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and about truth, fiction, and reality itself.

At the beginning of 2008, critical and public irritation with memoirs reached a new peak, during a bewildering onslaught of phony-memoir
revelations that were made within weeks of one another. There was
Love and Consequences
, a memoir of inner-city gang life by a mixed-race girl living with black gang members, which had been written by a white woman who had gone to a fancy prep school. And there was
Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years
, by Misha Defonseca, a Belgian woman who wrote about having survived the Holocaust by wandering around Europe with a pack of friendly wolves, but who turned out (a) not to have left Belgium and (b) not to be Jewish. In a statement published after the scandal broke, Defonseca declared, “The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality—it was my reality, my way of surviving.” (She added, “The truth is that I have always felt Jewish.”)

This justification of a literary fraud on the ground that it is true to the writer’s interior world—a world that helps the author “cope” or “survive”—strikingly echoes the self-defense offered by Frey. “People cope with adversity in many different ways,” he wrote in his published mea culpa, adding that his mistake had been “writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.” Behind such tortured psychological self-justification lies an aesthetic consideration familiar to anyone who has ever gone fishing: the experience Frey actually went through wasn’t nearly as compelling as the one he wrote down. “I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require,” he explained.

Such claims add up to a quite valid defense of a certain literary genre, but the genre in question isn’t memoir—it’s the novel. The novelist, after all, is a writer who has a vivid internal reality that wants expressing; who invents stories with dramatic arcs and tensions that point the reader toward a message; and who imagines himself or herself into the experiences of others in order to populate those stories with psychologically real characters.

The seemingly pervasive inability on the part of both authors and readers to distinguish “their” truth from the objective truth is nothing new in the history of modern literature; it goes right back to issues that were simmering away as both the memoir and the novel were emerging in their contemporary forms, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Yagoda points out the curious fact that Daniel Defoe, the earliest major novelist in the English-language tradition, cast many of his novels as memoirs, thereby complicating a relationship that has remained vexed right up until the present. In 1719, a well-known author called Charles Gildon published a tract demonstrating that a popular book that claimed to be “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures” of an English mariner, and that came complete with an editor’s note (“neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it”), was a pack of lies. The mariner in question was Robinson Crusoe, and Gildon was, of course, right; like all novels, it was, in one sense, a pack of lies. And yet like all great novels it expresses something we know to be true.

But the truth we seek from novels is different from the truth we seek from memoirs. Novels, you might say, represent “a truth” about life, whereas memoirs and nonfiction accounts represent “the truth” about specific things that have happened. A generation after Defoe and a generation before Rousseau, the philosopher David Hume was pondering the difference between memoir and fiction—a difference that, ultimately, may have as much to do with readers as it does with writers. Yagoda cites a passage from
A Treatise of Human Nature
(1740) in which Hume compared the experience of a reader of what he called “romance” to that of a reader of “true history”:

By “entertainment,” Hume meant intellectual stimulation and illumination—what we have been seeking from memoirs, in one way or another, since Saint Augustine. In this reading, memoir is a genre in which truth value is necessarily of greater importance than are aesthetic values.

Two and a half centuries later, in a reaction to the revelation that Binjamin Wilkomirski’s
Fragments
, the 1995 account of the author’s experiences as a Latvian Jewish child experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust, was a fiction (the author was a Swiss Gentile whose real name was Bruno Grosjean), a Holocaust survivor named Ruth Klüger suggested that, precisely because it lacks truth value, a fraudulent memoir—particularly a fraudulent account of extreme trauma—could never amount to much more than a kind of perverse aesthetic experience, a trashy entertainment (in the more familiar sense of that word):

When readers defended Frey on the ground that his book, however falsified its “memories” were, had nonetheless (as he had hoped)
provided them with the genuine uplift they were looking for, they were really defending fiction: an uplifting entertainment that can tell truths but cannot tell the truth.

A question that Yagoda never really explores is why, now in particular, there seems to be so much blurring between reality and fiction. (He doesn’t mention, for instance, the scandals involving fraudulent journalism—Stephen Glass at
The New Republic
and Jayson Blair at
The New York Times
—that erupted in the very period when similar scandals were staining the reputations of memoirists.) The answer to this question suggests why there is something distinctive about the current cycle of memoir proliferation and anti-memoir backlash.

For one thing, reality itself is a term that is rapidly being devalued. Take reality TV: on these shows, “real” people (that is, people who aren’t professional actors) are placed in artificial situations—they go on elaborately arranged dates, are abandoned on desert islands, have their ugly apartments redecorated, or are dumped into tanks of worms or scorpions—in order to provoke the “real” emotions that the audience tunes in to witness (disappointment, desire, joy, gratitude, terror, whatever). This craving on the part of audiences for real-life displays of increasingly extreme emotion (over, say, the carefully rehearsed displays of synthetic emotion that are provided to us when we go to the theater or to the movies) surely stems from the rise, in the 1970s, of talk shows whose hosts put ordinary people and their problems in the spotlight: first, Phil Donahue and, later, Sally Jessy Raphael and Montel Williams. Those TV shows helped create and promulgate the wider culture of self-discussion and self-exposure without which the recent flurry of memoir-writing and reading would be unthinkable. More important for the history of the memoir, they created a context for the huge popularity of Oprah Winfrey, who has used her show as a platform for people to tell—or, in the case of authors, to sell—their
remarkable life stories; and who has, not coincidentally, fallen prey to more than one fraud. (In addition to Frey, Winfrey promoted what may be the strangest phony-memoir case of all: that of Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor who embellished his true story of survival in the camps with an invented, sentimental twist—his “angel,” a little girl who, he claimed, threw apples to him over the camp’s fence.) Winfrey’s susceptibility suggests how an immoderate yearning for stories that end satisfyingly—what William Dean Howells once described to Edith Wharton as the American taste for “a tragedy with a happy ending”—makes us vulnerable to frauds and con men peddling pat uplift. As Frey’s preface reminds us, the grander the dramatic arc, the likelier the tale is to be a tall one.