Illustration by Jillian Tamaki
Earlier this week, news broke of two literary fakeries. On Sunday, an exhaustive exposé on the Smoking Gun website alleged that bad-boy writer James Frey exaggerated and fabricated details in his best-selling addiction-and-redemption memoir — and current Oprah Book Club pick – A Million Little Pieces. It seems Frey’s violent and drug-addled youth — which the book at once embraces with a macho swagger and denounces with pious contrition — might not have been as harrowing or eventful as written.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that HIV-positive, androgynous author JT Leroy was himself a fictional creation. It appears 25-year-old Leroy’s “autobiographical” fiction about his life as a truck-stop hustler and homeless drug addict is actually the work of Laura Albert, the 40-year-old woman Leroy claims rescued him from the street. Meanwhile, Albert’s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, has been exposed as the mysterious figure in wigs and sunglasses that makes public appearances as Leroy, who along the way has befriended celebrities like Courtney Love, Billy Corgan and writer Mary Gaitskill.
Writers with a hard-luck memoir in the works may want to wait until the dust settles before approaching a publisher. With both of these swindles, industry insiders have spent the week alternately claiming they “suspected all along” that something was up and nervously defending their fact-checking processes. As for the rest of us, we can sit back and relish the juicy details of the latest incidents in the long, illustrious history of literary hoaxes. Here are 10 of the best.
Thomas Chatterton, from an engraving by W. Ridgway. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
The poetry of Thomas Chatterton
In 1769, a Bristol apprentice and teenage literary
prodigy named Thomas Chatterton exploited the
era’s passion for Medieval literature by penning
a collection of poems he claimed to be the work
of a 15 th-century monk named Thomas Rowley.
Although the work was greatly praised, when some
experts raised questions about its legitimacy,
Chatterton panicked and took his own life. When
the truth was revealed, Chatterton was posthumously
hailed as a major talent and became a beloved
hero of Romantic poets.
Scotland’s Homer
While Chatterton was fooling the Brits, a Scottish
schoolmaster named James Macpherson produced
“translations” of the Gaelic verse of third-century
epic poet Ossian, whose stories of heroism and
love wowed primitivists like
Napoleon and Goethe. Though there
were some early skeptics — Samuel Johnson
among them — it took
almost another century before the translations
were proven to be fake.
Ern Malley’s The Darkening Ecliptic
In 1944, an Australian poetry editor
published a collection of poems by
a raw young talent named Ern Malley,
a Melbourne mechanic who had died
the previous year. The editor lauded
Malley as one of the most “important
poetic figures of this century.” Alas,
the verses had been written
as a joke by a pair of poetry purists:
James McAuley and Harold Stewart penned
Malley’s entire body of work in one
afternoon, pulling phrases randomly
from books and making it purposely
obscure. Their mission was to reveal
what they felt was the “gradual decay”
and absurdity of avant-garde poetry.
The hoax became national news and
was the inspiration for Peter Carey’s 2003 novel My
Life As a Fake.
Clifford Irving. Photo Fred Mott/Evening Standard/Getty Images.
The Howard Hughes biography
In 1970, U.S. novelist Clifford Irving cooked
up a scheme with fellow writer Richard Suskind
to write a fake biography of reclusive aviation
and film mogul Howard
Hughes. Irving landed a $750,000 advance
from publisher McGraw-Hill, and with
Suskind’s help, made up interviews and fabricated
documents with Hughes’s forged signature. They
were eventually discovered — Hughes even came out of his self-imposed
exile to condemn them, claiming never to have
met Irving. Both Irving and Suskind served time
in jail.
Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree
One of the stranger hoaxes. Published in 1977,
Forrest Carter’s celebrated memoir about a Cherokee
orphan who fights racism and struggles to connect
with his heritage was later revealed to
have been written by a white Ku Klux Klan member
named Asa Carter. (In more recent reprints, The
Education of Little Tree was labeled “fiction.”)
Carter had previously worked for Alabama Governor
George Wallace, penning his infamous inauguration
speech, in which Wallace vowed: “In the name
of the greatest people that have ever trod this
earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the
gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say:
segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation
forever.”
Go Ask Alice
This 1971 “actual diary” of a teenaged girl
who died of a drug overdose was meant to be a
cautionary tale for adolescents in the post-hippie
era. In the late 1970s, however, its “editor,”
Beatrice Sparks, a psychologist and Mormon youth
counsellor, admitted to writing it based on the
stories of some of her students. Sparks has gone
on to produce many other “actual diaries” about
troubled adolescents, including Treacherous
Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager and Annie's
Baby: The Diary of an Anonymous Pregnant Teenager.
The so-called authentication for the Hitler diaries. Photo Michael Urban/AFP/Getty Images.
The Hitler Diaries
In 1983, the German magazine Stern announced
that journalist Gerd
Heidemann made the greatest Nazi memorabilia
find of all time: Adolf Hitler’s diary, a whopping
62-volume set covering the crucial years of 1932
to 1945. Despite containing cornball entries
like “must not forget to get tickets for the
Olympic Games for Eva Braun” (or maybe because
of that), the diaries were authenticated by several
respected historians. Within days of the story
breaking, however, a forensic study of the actual
paper stock confirmed that the diaries could
not have been penned in the ’30s and ’40s, and
were thus fake. They had been written by a Stuttgart
forger named Konrad
Kujau; both he and Heidemann served time
in prison.
Crad Kilodney. Photo courtesy Syd Allan.
Crad Kilodney’s CanLit
submissions
For years, this abrasive, eccentric
writer had a reputation for selling his books (sample
titles: Excrement, Mental Cases and Putrid
Scum) on the streets of Toronto. In 1988,
he perpetrated what he called the
“biggest literary hoax in Canadian history.”
Disguised as original work by unknown amateurs,
Kilodney submitted poetry and short stories by
famous CanLit figures to various publishers and
literary contests. All the work was rejected.
An editor at Montreal’s Vehicule Press, which
received a collection of Irving Layton poems
written under the name Herman Mlunga Mbongo,
did send a nice rejection letter, noting, “Irving
Layton, to whom I showed your manuscript, was
as delighted as I was to see how useful his poems
still are.”
Anthony Godby Johnson’s Rock and
A Hard Place
This grim 1993 “memoir,” by a 14-year-old HIV-positive
survivor who endured ritual sexual abuse, dazzled
several writers, including Paul Monette and Armistead
Maupin, who championed the young author. But
suspicions quickly arose when Johnson refused
to appear in public (he would only speak to people
on the phone). Reporters began to notice a similarity
between Johnson’s voice and that of his “foster
mother” Vicki Fraginals; a New Yorker story by
Tad Friend stopped just short of proving Fraginals
and Johnson were one and the same. Maupin wrote
about the betrayal in his 2000 novel The
Night Listener.
Andreas Karavis (aka David Solway's dentist). Courtesy Vehicule Press.
Andreas Karavis
In a 1999 feature in Books in Canada, Montreal
poet David Solway celebrated the work of a newly
discovered Greek poet named Andreas Karavis,
complete with an interview and a photograph.
Solway claimed that he had hunted the reclusive
fisherman-poet for years until he finally met
him in 1991; he claimed he had begun to translate
the Greek’s poems in 1993. Karavis’s fame soon
spread. There were parties for the launch of
his books, including one at Montreal’s Greek
embassy in 2000, where Karavis appeared in person,
wearing a navy blue fisherman’s cap. Soon after,
Montreal journalist Matthew Hays (a contributor
to CBC.ca) wrote a column in
the Globe and Mail raising questions about Karavis’s
real identity. Solway admitted that he had invented
the man, written his poems and had charmed his
dentist into playing Karavis at the party.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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