Sting in the tale a breach of trust

Simon Caterson writing in The Australian, 2 February, 2008

THE truth, at least in the publishing world, has never been easier to fabricate or harder to conceal.

If nothing else, the Ishmael Beah affair (Inquirer, January 19) illustrates just how high a premium we are inclined to place on the facts when the book is being sold to us as the truth and nothing but. That absolute claim is the strongest selling point for any work of nonfiction, yet it may prove an achilles heel.

Like Norma Khouri's Forbidden Love - a book that really is a fake - Beah's A Long Way Gone is an atrocity story from a part of the world that very few of its readers in the West would ever contemplate seeing for themselves.

Readers must therefore rely on the author knowing from first-hand experience real-life horrors such as the so-called honour killings in Jordan that Khouri wrote about and the conscription of child soldiers in Sierra Leone described in intimate detail by Beah. We have no one else to tell us what it is to be in the midst of the most appalling acts of inhumanity that occur in the world and to guide us to a better understanding of the best, as well as the worst, in human nature.

Fake atrocity stories do not always come from beyond the West. They may originate in our own backyard. Two of the most recent literary hoaxes involved James Frey and J.T. LeRoy, each a bestselling international celebrity author who claimed to have been an inhabitant of the dangerous and sleazy US underworld but somehow had lived to tell the tale.

In the well-known case of LeRoy, even the identity of the author was a lie. LeRoy, readers were told, had been a child prostitute working the mean streets of San Francisco dressed as a girl and was now an ex-drug addict living with HIV. In fact, the books were written by Geoffrey Knoop and Laura Albert, a middle-aged, middle-class, suburban couple. In public appearances LeRoy was impersonated by Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey's half-sister.

Frey, meanwhile, said he had survived a traumatic childhood and crime-addled youth, served a prison sentence for assault and had overcome his life-threatening addictions to drugs and alcohol. It was a gross exaggeration that was only revealed publicly after Frey had been taken under the wing of Oprah Winfrey as the embodiment of her brand of hope and inspiration. Hoaxers are so often brought down by the sheer scale of their success.
Like Khouri, Beah is an author who has charmed audiences at literary events and given countless interviews, thus adding to the sense that here is someone we can trust as the teller of a tale that might otherwise seem stranger than fiction. Beah, like Khouri, has become a powerful activist in the West against the evil of which he was a victim.

Any suggestion that such a sincere, wronged person could have made up the whole thing is difficult to accept. Humans, after all, are the most deceptive species and we are also the most trusting. In our popular art and literature, we prize authenticity above all else. Hollywood came up with the phrase "based on a true story" in order to have the best of both worlds, simultaneously inviting us to believe in what we see on the cinema screen while taking no responsibility when we do.

In his own defence, Beah has strenuously denied uttering any falsehood. No one has accused him of being an imposter or suggested he was not a child soldier. The unchallenged facts of his story are so compelling that there seems no reason why he, or indeed his publishers, should want to invent or distort anything. Publishers are in the high-risk business of entertainment, but the truth does not always get in the way of a good story, or commercial advantage.
More equivocal than Beah, and perhaps less convincing, are some of his supporters. Beah's cause may not have been assisted by Dan Chaon, his former creative writing professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, who suggested that even if there were factual flaws, A Long Way Gone is true in a special literary sense.

The average book buyer, who might not be used to academic sophistry, would be entitled to assume that the books containing poetic truth are shelved in the section marked poetry and not in the one labelled nonfiction.

Beah's alleged errors are clearly not of the same order of magnitude as Khouri's turned out to be, though the doubts that have been raised similarly originate in discrepancies in the dates at which key events in the book were said to occur. Khouri's claim that the events described in her book did actually happen was found to be completely false in 2004 after an investigation by Malcolm Knox and Caroline Overington, then of The Sydney Morning Herald.
The trail led from Australia, where Khouri had settled as a refugee and where her greatest sales were achieved, to Jordan and eventually to Chicago, where her murky past as a con artist and fraudster was uncovered. The recent superb documentary film on Khouri, Forbidden Lie$, confirmed that she was a compulsive liar who at one point is shown revelling in her inexhaustible capacity for deceit.

Once a serious doubt has been raised about a bestselling memoir, it is possible to check even the most mundane facts anywhere in the world. In the 19th century, Mark Twain, one of the most renowned and prolific American literary hoaxers, wrote that "a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on".
That assertion could not be made with the same confidence now, thanks to modern communications technology and the ease of travel. There is no shortage of literary hoaxers, who will continue to exist as long as humans feel they can get away with telling lies, but the mechanics of the deception have changed and perhaps the margin for fabrication has been reduced.

No one believes there are giants or monsters living on the other side of the world, as many did for centuries before the great voyages of discovery, but they can still be fooled by cunning imposters and plausible rogues. In a world where there is nowhere to hide, the wheels of hoaxing, and of hoax-busting, grind small.

The increasing globalisation of culture, together with everything else in our daily lives, means a hoax can arise at any point on the globe and also be detected anywhere else. The Beah and Khouri controversies, which like the books themselves, have travelled around the world, are not the only occasions when Australians have queried supposedly true stories that the rest of the world may have taken at face value.
Not long after the Khouri hoax story broke, doubts were raised about Burned Alive, the memoir by "Souad", a Palestinian girl who fled to Europe having survived an attempted honour killing by members of her family, who doused her in petrol and set her alight. Therese Taylor, a lecturer in history at Charles Sturt University, investigated the case and discovered that the book had gained publication in the West without the normal process of verification, a dispensation attributed by Souad's supporters to the sensitive nature of the material.
In a 2005 article published in The Diplomat magazine, Taylor raised the possibility that Souad's recovered memory, an aspect of the story not averred to by sympathetic reviewers of Burned Alive, is a fiction. The book, in Taylor's view, contained "too many improbabilities" to be given unquestioning acceptance.

Australia had another world-class hoax buster in Derek Freeman, who in the 1980s painstakingly exposed the hoaxing by a group of young Samoan girls of the immensely influential US anthropologist Margaret Mead. The claim by Freeman that Mead was the victim of a hoax was momentous and highly controversial in the academic world, and was later dramatised on stage by David Williamson in Heretic.

A key question throughout the course of intellectual history is whether, or to what extent, humans are formed by nature or nurture. In the late 1920s Mead claimed to have found in traditional Samoan society a place where the normal rules of sexual conduct did not apply, thus proving that the otherwise universal taboos that restrict the ways males and females interact with one another physically were artificial and not an expression of our true biology.
In making what at the time was a very radical assertion, Mead relied on the evidence she gathered from conversations with adolescent Samoan girls who spoke to her of a paradise of unfettered, guilt-free sex. Mead's claim had a huge impact in the postwar age of sexual liberation in the West, a legacy of permissiveness embraced by an entire generation of baby boomers and their children. However, Freeman travelled to Samoa and uncovered evidence suggesting Mead had been told only what her interviewees had thought she wanted to hear.

To avoid the mistake that Freeman alleged was made by Mead, we should strive to maintain a reasonable scepticism about what others tell us and be aware of our innate credulity. We also have to accept that there will be no end to the things we feel we must take on trust.
Simon Caterson is a Melbourne writer.