[Mb-civic] Fashions in Falsehood - Anne Applebaum - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Fashions in Falsehood

By Anne Applebaum
Thursday, February 2, 2006; A21

The memoir was a bestseller, a literary sensation, a compelling read. 
Unfortunately, its most sensational and compelling material was invented 
-- a fact that many of its readers learned from a controversial and 
much-quoted television show.

No, I'm not talking about James Frey's drug-, blood- and alcohol-soaked 
"memoir," "A Million Little Pieces," which led to an unprecedented 
apology from Oprah Winfrey last week. I'm talking about Lillian 
Hellman's "memoir," "Pentimento," published in 1973 and denounced on 
"The Dick Cavett Show" by the writer Mary McCarthy in language 
significantly more withering than what we have become accustomed to 
hearing on daytime television: "Every word she writes is a lie, 
including 'and' and 'the' " is how McCarthy put it on the air -- a line 
far more memorable than Winfrey's "I feel duped."

But what's interesting about a comparison of the two works is not what 
they tell us about the evolution of talk shows from Dick Cavett to Oprah 
-- I'll leave that analysis to the professors of media studies -- but 
what they tell us about the evolution of literary fabrications. 
Hellman's most famous invention was a character named Julia, a female 
friend who supposedly persuaded Hellman to smuggle money into Germany to 
help the anti-Nazi resistance. In "Pentimento," Hellman's descriptions 
of that mythical 1937 train ride into Germany are powerful. There is a 
girl in the train compartment who asks too many questions, an emotional 
meeting with Julia in a station and various other emotionally convincing 
scenes that never took place. Julia's character was actually derived 
from the life story of a woman named Muriel Gardiner, whom Hellman knew 
of but had never met.

What is most striking about a rereading of "Pentimento" (which I don't 
necessarily recommend) is the quaint, outdated heroism of it. Hellman 
reinvents herself and her nonexistent friend as brave and principled, 
willing to fight for the right cause even in the face of great danger. 
In that sense, Hellman's work belongs to a long line of fantasists, 
stretching back to Baron von Munchausen and beyond -- liars who 
reinvented themselves as better, braver or more blue-blooded than they 
really were.

Frey, by contrast, belongs to a tradition that emerged more recently and 
that has been best described by the British writer and psychologist 
Anthony Daniels as the "literary assumption of victimhood." These 
fabricators reinvent themselves not as heroes but as victims, a status 
they sometimes attain by changing their ethnicity. Among them are Bruno 
Grosjean, aka Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose touching, prize-winning, 
"autobiographical" tale of a childhood spent in the Majdanek 
concentration camp turned out to be the fantasy of the adopted son of a 
wealthy Swiss couple. Another was Helen Darville, aka Helen Demidenko, 
whose touching, prize-winning "autobiographical" tale of a Ukrainian 
girl whose father was a former SS officer turned out to be the fantasy 
of a middle-class British girl living in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia.

And the trend continues: In the past few days, yet another prize-winning 
author, who calls himself "Nasdijj" and claims to be the son of a 
violent cowboy and an alcoholic Native American woman (and who, as a 
child was "hungry, raped, beaten, whipped and forced at every 
opportunity to work in the fields," he told an interviewer) -- has also 
been "outed" as a white writer of erotica named Timothy Barrus. As 
Daniels wrote in the New Criterion several years ago, "where fantasists 
would once have invented privileged aristocratic backgrounds for 
themselves, they now invent childhoods filled with misery. It is lack of 
privilege, not privilege, that now confers prestige upon a person's 
biography."

As for Frey, he gave himself not just a juvenile delinquent's childhood 
but a flamboyantly bad character -- "I was a bad guy," he originally 
told Oprah. He had spent most of his life, he wrote, as a drug-addicted, 
alcoholic criminal. Although his violence and excess were in truth 
limited to his vulgar prose, Frey was clever enough to know that moral 
degradation is, nowadays, what wins you admiration, fans and money.

I'm not writing here in praise of Lillian Hellman (whose other fantasies 
included a deeply held belief in the goodness of Stalinism) but rather 
to point out how much the world has changed in 30 years. We used to 
admire people who claimed to fight the Nazis. Now we admire people who 
claim to have fought their own drug addiction -- and we really, really 
admire them if they beat up priests, fight with cops, frequently find 
themselves covered in vomit and spend lots of time in jail while doing so.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020101837.html
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