Seventy-four million people voted for Donald Trump in November, 2020. This astonishing fact was in my mind as I read Bunk, by Kevin Young, and as I write this post.
Bunk (full title: Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News) was not the salacious romp I was expecting. Author Kevin Young has written 12 books of poetry, and his writing has the allusive, associative indirectness of poetry. Bunk is entertaining, witty, provocative, brilliant, but I do not think it was intended primarily as an entertainment. Rather, it is a book about how unreality stalks our lives and our nation.
Young isn’t equally interested in all kinds of fraudsters: he is particularly interested in people who deploy a false reality, usually by pretending to be someone they are not. So he is less interested in the Bernie Madoffs of the world than he is in the Clifford Irvings and JT LeRoys. (I realize the distinction is not absolute: Madoff was pretending to be a legitimate financial professional, but his biography was more or less as he claimed.)
Clifford Irving, for anyone under the age of 60, wrote an “as-told-to” biography of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes in the early 1970s. Except that he and a collaborator fabricated the book from information in the public record and their own imaginations. Knowing that Hughes at the time hadn’t appeared in public or given an interview in decades, they counted on the likelihood that Hughes would not step forward to refute their claims. Until he did—but only after Irving had been paid a huge advance and the book had been widely publicized.
JT LeRoy, a name previously unknown to me, published a series of books in the late 1990s and early 2000s describing a young man’s triumph over an “almost unspeakable childhood, including abuse and neglect and prostitution.” The real author, a woman named Laura Albert, employed various associates and street kids to meet with the numerous writers and admirers who flocked to her/his cause, or to actually appear on television as LeRoy.
The amazing thing about the two or three heads who made up JT LeRoy may be how well the tricks in his name worked, and for how long. The list of those caught up in the act, or by it, reads like a who’s who of a certain brand of American royalty: one writer calls LeRoy “the darling of a certain demimonde of the damned: Gus Van Sant, Courtney Love, Madonna, Winona Ryder, Marianne Faithfull, Tatum O’Neal and Garbage’s Shirley Manson were all whooping high hosannas about this damaged, cross-dressing naïf.” Writers like Mary Karr and Mary Gaitskill all appeared with LeRoy; Madonna, Faithfull, and other rock stars reached out to or wrote for him; fiction writer Dennis Cooper helped encourage LeRoy very early on, and O’Neal and Lou Reed would perform in his stead, JT being too shy to read. I too want only celebrities to read my work. Either aloud or to themselves—I’m not picky.
The last two sentence are Young being snarky. For him, there are two essential points. The first is that with a hoax there is always a discrepancy between what is real and what some portion of the population believes to be real. The second is that by taking the measure of these discrepancies we can make a kind of moral diagnosis of what afflicts our country. Young rejects moral relativism: most authors would admit to some admiration for the cleverness and ingenuity of an Irving or a LeRoy. But not Young. It’s hard not to fall under the spell of ingenious fraudsters: The actual author of the LeRoy books would sometimes accompany whoever happened to be playing LeRoy (most often an androgynous-looking woman named Savannah Knoop) as an assistant or hanger-on named Speedie. “Later on, newfound friends like Carrie Fisher would warn Savannah-as-JT in person—or unwittingly, Albert-as-JT over the phone—about the creepy hanger-on Speedie.” Young may delight in relaying such details, but he never lets you forgets what side he’s on.
Hoaxers and fraudsters succeed by telling you what your already knew—or strongly suspected. One thing that a majority of Americans believed without question through much of the 20th century was that the white race was the acme of creation, superior to all others. If you’d had any doubts about the matter, you could point to the work of distinguished scientists affiliated with prestigious institutions.
As detailed in volumes such as Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man, prominent nineteenth-century and even twentieth-century scientists … regularly falsified results and faked data to preserve notions of race and white superiority; to a man they may be said to have “[begun] with conclusions, peered through their facts, and came back in a circle to the same conclusions.”
2020 has been the year when many Americans have tried as hard or harder than ever before to disabuse themselves of racist notions. This is a kind of progress: we recognize injustices we were previously blind to and make an effort to see the world differently. But as always when a society updates its moral standards, there is an intense and determined reaction.
The effort to understand history and reality—or the history of what is understood to be reality—is ongoing, and it isn’t always enough to proclaim, as per numerous yard signs in my neighborhood, that “Science is real,” because science is created by humans and humans are imperfect. It will always be possible to unearth a scientist or two who will claim that global warming is not real, or that the white race is the pinnacle of creation. Never mind that membership in the white or any other race is a fluid concept: eugenicists a hundred years ago were almost as contemptuous of Italians and Jews as they were of blacks.
As an African-American, Young is highly attuned to the role that race has played in the history of American humbug:
I’ve come to realize the hoax regularly steps in where race rears its head—exactly because it too is a fake thing pretending to be real.
From 19th century side shows that exhibited people from Africa and Asia as “missing links” between apes and humans, to 20th century eugenicists, hoaxers have flattered the white masses by demonstrating, with elaborate scientific mumbo jumbo, that they are better than all the rest. The list of prominent public men who subscribed to eugenicist notions included Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. They may not have been the last to accept eugenicist notions, but they were the last to not see any reason to keep such beliefs to themselves.
Racism is a complicated and often baffling phenomenon that doesn’t always work the way you might expect. For example, what is it that makes white people want to impersonate black people—that is, what explains the strange appeal of blackface? Young cites numerous cases of white people masquerading as people of color, including Asa Carter, the Klu Klux Klan member and speechwriter for Georgia’s segregationist governor (and one-time presidential candidate) George Wallace, who wrote a faked memoir from the perspective of a half-white half-Indian child. Repackaged as a novel, The Education of Little Tree can still be found in many bookstores and school libraries. Also worthy of note is the case of Tom McMaster, a Georgia man who was behind the popular blog A Gay Girl in Damascus. What are the impulses driving such hoaxes? Self-dramatization and the desire for attention play a major part, but Young maintains that there’s also some sort of fetishization at work, the replacement of real people by effigies and masks of various types.
Bunk is a book that has to be read very carefully. It is a profound book that shows us what a weird and twisted hall of mirrors our culture is. For example, authors of fraudulent memoirs are “making stuff up,” right? So isn’t that the same thing as writing fiction? Isn’t there a creative side to a clever fake? Young will not have it:
Writing of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, scholar Ruth Franklin reminds us that there is in the memoir form—even in the Holocaust memoir—and element of artistic license and shaping. But this is not the same as untruth. “Like the translator who occasionally veers from the phrasing of an individual line for the sake of the work as a whole, the memoirist too must be at liberty to shape the raw materials into a work of art.” I couldn’t agree more—it should be clear that my concern is not with fiction but untruth. The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent too—hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art. The toxic presence of Holocaust deniers helps us realize how sophisticated those critics who write about Holocaust literature, including its fiction, must be; and how troubling an outright Holocaust hoax is. Besides the cost to truth, and to lived and lost lives, a collateral yet not insignificant cost is to the idea of fiction.
One of the authors Young indicts is Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird, the story of a Jewish boy managing to survive in the Polish countryside during World War II. The Painted Bird is a novel, but:
Kosinski let it be known to fellow Holocaust survivor and future Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel that the book was “in essence, autobiographical.”
I read The Painted Bird a while back, along with some other Kosinski novels. Young concedes that “what Kosinski stands accused of isn’t exactly hoaxing,” but in the context of Bunk it’s pretty clear that he finds the author guilty of deceit. Had I never read the novel, and had I not been reading the newspapers throughout the whole strange course of Kosinski’s fame and disgrace, which ended with his suicide, I might be willing to see him as just another rogue in Young’s gallery. But there is the fact that Kosinski certainly was a young Jewish boy, in Poland, during World War II. There is also the fact that The Painted Bird is a fine book. OK, that’s not a fact, it’s an opinion.
I recently listened to a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell titled “Free Brian Williams.” Gladwell’s claim is that news anchor Williams’ false claim to have been on a helicopter that was fired upon in Afghanistan is as likely to be a case of imperfect memory combined with wishful thinking as it is to be an outright lie. Gladwell brings in experts to testify to the fact that all our memories are imperfect, and that just because we might remember something happening in such and such a way doesn’t mean that that’s the way it really happened. No doubt, it would have been better for Brian Williams’ career if he had been on the helicopter that was fired upon. Alas, it turns out that he was in another helicopter entirely.
Young doesn’t have anything to say about Brian Williams, but if Williams’ case is not clear cut (at least in Malcolm Gladwell’s estimation), then how much more murky is Kosinski’s. If he told Elie Wiesel that The Painted Bird was in “essence autobiographical,” there are multiple levels on which that statement may be true or false. My take on Kosinski is that his entire life was like Brian Williams’ helicopter ride—that he himself wasn’t sure what in his life was real and what was imagined. It could hardly be otherwise given the circumstances of his early years. That he was able to write books like The Painted Bird, and like Being There, which is a sly and funny book that was made into a wonderful movie starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine, suggests to me that he aspired to do fine things, to make art out of the confused mess of his life.
If I am a bit of a Jerzy Kosinski fan, it seems plausible to assume that there might be some JT LeRoy fans out there in the American reading public, even now that the peculiar composite nature of that author, and the un-reality of his life, are public knowledge. Young notes how exposure is rarely the end of the road for plagiarists and fraudsters: the mea culpa phase can be just as lucrative as the initial fraud phase. There’s usually a market for memoirs describing “how and why I did it.” Frequently these books are also largely fraudulent. But the point is that un-masking isn’t likely to be the end of a fraudster’s career. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a best-selling memoir exposed as largely fabricated, was just the first of eleven books published by Frey—so far.
From Young’s descriptions of the JT LeRoy books, I’m pretty sure I would not be a fan myself, but I’m not sure if the differences between Jerzy Kosinski and JT LeRoy are absolute or just a matter of taste or an accident of experience. It’s nice to think that you or I are smarter than all those celebrities who got on the JT LeRoy bandwagon, but I can’t really believe that Tom Waits is such a dummy.
Bunk is a very sophisticated and nuanced book, and while it’s fun to take issue with it in places, that is not to suggest that Kevin Young hasn’t understood how complex human beings are. He is like a judge who has taken on the task of distinguishing truth from lies. He knows he can’t be 100% right 100% of the time, but he does his best to disrupt our complacent satisfaction with the “humbugs, plagiarists, and phonies” around us, presidential pardons notwithstanding.
