Greatest literary hoaxes
Gal Beckerman and Tina Jordan offer their pick of some of the best book frauds from the last 100 years
SOMETIMES, it turns out, writers aren’t who you thought they were — at all.
Clifford irving, The AuTobiogrAphy of howArd hughes
Irving perpetrated one of the greatest literary frauds of the 20th century, though now largely forgotten: He fabricated, seemingly out of whole cloth, an authorised autobiography for the reclusive and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.
Irving managed to fool his publisher and curious journalists, producing fake letters and calling editors from exotic places (where he was supposedly interviewing Hughes). As publication neared, he was finally caught when Hughes himself said he had no idea who Irving was. The episode landed Irving in jail after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy.
In 2012, the autobiography was published for the first time as an e-book. Later in life, Irving expressed befuddlement for why it had all gotten so out of hand. “I had never realised I was committing a crime,” he said. “I had thought of it as a hoax.”
JAmes frey, A million liTTle pieCes
For fictionalising his memoir — including making up a three-month stint in prison and a harrowing anaesthesia-free root canal — Frey landed on Oprah’s couch in early 2006.
She had picked A Million Little Pieces for her popular book club and wanted some answers after the Smoking Gun website, in prosecutorial fashion, had revealed just how much of Frey’s addiction story had been made up.
Frey appeared contrite and hangdog, admitting that he had embellished his own story. “It is difficult for me to talk to you because I feel really duped,” Oprah said. “But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.”
Though he is forever attached to the memory of this comeuppance, Frey went on to write more books. Even Oprah eventually apologised for being so hard on him.
Glass might win the chutzpah prize when it comes to trying to turn disgrace into reward.
After being fired by The
New Republic in 1998 for fabricating details in 27 articles — including some truly fantastical flourishes like a Church of George Bush — he turned around and published a book about his deceits.
It is a first-person account of an ambitious young journalist who fakes interview notes and voice mail messages to trick his editors. Except The Fabulist was a novel.
Rather then ‘fessing up directly and honestly, Glass fictionalised what happened to him. The only saving grace may have been his author’s note: “This book is a work of fiction, a fabrication, and this time, an admitted one.”
romAin gAry, hoCus bogus
Gary’s story is a tale of a very tangled web. The celebrated French author, past his prime and a winner of the Prix Goncourt (which authors can only win once), decided in 1973 to liven things up for his 20th novel by writing under a pseudonym, …mile Ajar.
To sustain the lie once his second Ajar book, The Life Before Us, became one of the biggest commercial and literary blockbusters of his career (and won him the Goncourt again), Gary had his cousin play the flesh-and-blood Ajar to receive the award.
When this ruse was discovered, Gary then had to writea faux-memoir, Pseudo, claiming schizophrenia and confusing things still further.
The truth of Gary’s elaborate literary deceptions emerged only after his death by suicide, in a confession he left behind, titled The Life and Death of …mile Ajar.
dAnny sAnTiAgo, fAmous All overTown
This 1983 book about Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles was judged by the Times Book Review to be an “honest, steady novel that presents some hard cultural realities”. The name on the book jacket, Danny Santiago, lent it authenticity, even though there was no accompanying author photo. It turns out there was a reason for this: The author was actually Daniel Lewis James, the son of a wealthy Kansas businessman who attended Andover and Yale, where he majored in classical Greek. He based the novel on his experiences as a volunteer workinginpoorneighbourhoods in Los Angeles.
The revelation of his pseudonym after the book was published caused a backlash, to his bewilderment. Friends had warned him about using a Latino name. “But I said the pen name is pretty well established, with Mark Twain, Rabelais and so many others,” Lewis said. “I said nobody’s going to be hurt if the book’s any good.’’
mArgAreT b. Jones, love And ConsequenCes
This one was bad. Love and Consequences was rapturously received as the memoir of a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in Los Angeles as a foster child among gangbangers. Much of the book was about running drugs for the Bloods.
But the author of the memoir, Margaret B. Jones, did not exist. She was the invention of Margaret Seltzer, who is white and from the San Fernando Valley, a private school graduate who had never lived with a foster family.
When confronted about her lies, Seltzer said she had based the book on friends she had met while working on the problem of gang violence.
Her publisher recalled all copies of the book. “Maybe it’s an ego thing,” Seltzer said about her decision to invent a story and claim it as truth. “I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”
Cleone Knox, The diAry of A young lAdy of fAshion in The yeAr 1764-1765
“A little Irish girl, the 19-year-old daughter of a British naval officer, has accomplished the greatest literary hoax of the century,” The Times exclaimed in a front-page story on June 4, 1926.
Magdalen King-Hall, wielding what the paper called “a saucily descriptive pen”, dashed out the fake (and racy!) diary of a late-18th-century woman in a few weeks.
Published in 1925, it was a best-seller in Britain and the United States. It’s unclear how King-Hall was unmasked, although she admitted to factual errors in The Times’s report: “I made Cleone read in October Walpole’s Castle of Otranto .It was not until my book had been issued that I discovered that that particular work had not been published until December of that year.”