Literary Hoaxes and the Ethics of Authorship

What happens when we find out writers aren’t who they said they were.

LOUIS MENAND, NEW YORKER

If a book is good, if it’s artful, entertaining, and informative, should it matter who the author is? Once upon a time, many readers would have said no. It was a long-standing protocol of book appreciation to consider things like the gender, sexuality, ethnicity, personal vices, personal virtues (if any), and prior reputation of the author irrelevant to a book’s merits. You could disapprove of a writer’s politics and prejudices if they showed up in the text; otherwise, they were customarily bracketed off.

When people had an issue with the author, it was because they felt that he or she had violated what is known in narratology as the “autobiographical pact.” This is the tacit understanding that the person whose name is on the cover is identical to the narrator, the “I,” of the text. The pact obviously governs our expectations about memoirs, but it extends in a more general way to books in which the speaker or the protagonist is presented as a fictionalized version of the author (so-called “autofiction”), and it extends even to straight-up fiction: if the name on the cover seriously misleads us about the identity of the author, we can feel we have been taken in.

There have always been writers who cheated on the pact. A case most people know is that of James Frey’s 2003 memoir of recovery from addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine, “A Million Little Pieces.” The book was hugely popular, but it turned out to be partly fabricated, something Frey was forced to admit on television under the interrogation of Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen “A Million Little Pieces” for her book club and thereby made it a best-seller.

The auto-da-fé took place in 2006, and the publicity turned Frey’s name into a synonym for memoir fraud. At the time, Frey’s exposure and humiliation struck many people as just deserts. But there have been at least three traditional lines of defense for books like “A Million Little Pieces.”

One, used for popular autobiographies whose strict veracity has been questioned, such as “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” or “I, Rigoberta Menchú,” is the surrogacy defense. This is the theory that, although a particular event recounted in the book may not have happened to the author, it happened to someone. Such a book, then, is really the life story of a group. The memoirist should be understood as representing all African-American men in the era of Jim Crow, or all indigenous people in Guatemala. Experiences common to the group are therefore legitimately represented as happening to a single, quasi-allegorical figure.

Another strategy is the higher-truth defense. This is the argument that fabrications and exaggerations in books like these are in the service of more fully conveying “what it is really like” to be Guatemalan or in recovery or whatever the theme of the life story happens to be. “A Million Little Pieces” tries to capture the experience of recovering from addiction. Readers don’t care whether these things literally happened to James Frey, because they didn’t buy the book to find out about James Frey. They bought it to learn about addiction and recovery. James Frey’s job as a writer is only to convey that experience.

And then there is what might be called the literature professor’s defense. This is the argument that the distinction between fact and fiction, although it may appear fundamental, is a fairly recent development in the history of writing, only two or three centuries old. Along with that distinction came the practice of putting the author’s name on a book, and along with both of those came the ideology of authenticity—the belief that literary expression must be genuine and original.

The literature professor’s point is that placing social value on concepts like authenticity is an invitation to manufacture them. A certain style of writing can come across as more authentic, and this can help a book gain status in the literary marketplace. Why did many readers become infatuated with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multivolume work “My Struggle”? Because the books read as authentic—so powerfully authentic that, at this point, if Knausgaard were to tell everyone he made it all up, no one would believe him.

“My Struggle” performs authenticity beautifully, and the literature professor asks why we should want anything more than that. Forget about whether the story “truly” happened to some “real” person—a philosophical rabbit hole. We are judging words on a page. Either they work for us or they don’t.

Literature professors were comfortable with this kind of argument because they thought of identity as something that was hybrid, intersubjective, performed. The idea that you could draw a straight line from the text back to some fixed and knowable entity called “the author” was naïve. So was the idea that you could draw a straight line from the text outward to some external stuff called “reality.” The fact/fiction distinction was unstable, always contested, and so on.

But that was then, and this, to put it mildly, is now. The rules have changed. The ethics of authorship are completely different. In academic discourse, hybridity is out; intersectionality is in. People are imagined as the sum of their race, gender, sexuality, ableness, and other identities. Individuals not only bear the entire history of these identities; they “own” them. A person who is not defined by them cannot tell the world what it is like to be a person who is. If you were not born it, you should not perform it.

In the culture industries, the identity and the personal history of artists have become unbracketed. Critics worry about whether it’s still ethical to admire Woody Allen’s movies or Louis C.K.’s standup routines. And the view that certain characters are out of bounds for novelists who don’t share their identities, although it seems to contradict a basic premise of fiction writing, has penetrated the world of publishing.

As for the public discourse, it is almost completely corrupted by mendacity. The political lie has achieved a kind of unholy immunity, such that when liars are caught they no longer complain that they have been misunderstood. They “double down” on the lie as shamelessly as possible. An accepted way to respond to someone who accuses you of lying is to accuse that person of lying, an invitation for people to choose the falsehoods that suit them, since it’s all fake anyway. In these circumstances, it would be nice to put some bones back into the old fact/fiction distinction.

This is where Christopher L. Miller’s smart and engaging study, “Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity” (Chicago), enters the conversation. Miller is a literature professor at Yale, so he has been around the “death of the author”/“there is no ‘outside the text’ ” block a few times. He says that he was drawn to the subject of hoaxes because he was interested in the games they play with readers’ expectations—that is, for old-fashioned literature-professor reasons.

But as he was working on the book the world turned, and he realized that fakery is no longer just a classroom sport. “It is harder to see the fun in deception when the fate of the world seems to depend on resisting lies, ‘alternative facts,’ and ‘fake news,’ ” as he puts it. It seems to have taken the election of a man who is the personification of perspectivalism to reset the ethical calibrations of literary criticism.

There is a whole taxonomy of authorial falsification, from ghostwriters and noms de plume to plagiarism and forgery, and within each species there are moral boundaries. No one feels betrayed by the revelation that the mystery writer Ellery Queen was really two people, neither of whom was named Queen, or that Franklin W. Dixon, whose name is on the cover of the Hardy Boys detective stories, did not exist, and that the books were written by a series of contract writers. (Well, as an early devotee and binge reader of the Hardy Boys books, I was a little crushed when I learned this.) Pen names are accepted in genre fiction: Saki, O. Henry, Amanda Cross. They are understood to belong to the package, to be part of the entertainment. Readers are not being tricked.

Mary Anne Evans was trying to trick readers by pretending to be a male author named George Eliot. But many women writers have adopted male names, and some still do, or use initials to go gender-neutral. It’s an accepted convention. J. K. Rowling’s publishers thought that she would sell more books to boys if they did not know her name was Joanne. On the other hand, people were upset when, in 2015, a writer named Michael Derrick Hudson got poems accepted for inclusion in “The Best American Poetry” under the name Yi-Fen Chou.

Hoaxes have played a role in literary history. Probably the most famous hoax in English literature is an epic cycle about a warrior named Fingal, published in the seventeen-sixties. This was advertised as translations of poems written by a third-century Gaelic bard named Ossian. In fact, the poems were fakes, cooked up by a Scottish writer named James Macpherson. Although a few people—Samuel Johnson was one—had suspicions, Ossian’s work was read and admired in Europe and America and translated into many languages, and his fake poems are considered a major influence on Romanticism—a literary movement that made authenticity a supreme value. If you were editing an anthology of English literature, would it be right or wrong to include something by “Ossian”?

A hoax with consequences closer to home is “Go Ask Alice.” The book was published in 1971, and purported to be the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl who starts taking LSD, gets sucked into the drug underworld, and ends up dead. Miller says it may have sold five million copies. The real author has not been conclusively established, but the copyright belonged to a Mormon therapist who claimed that she had merely edited a real Alice’s diary, which was under lock and key at the publisher’s. Which is a strange alibi. “Why did someone not ask for it to be ‘unlocked’?” as Miller inquires. He suggests that the scare story in “Go Ask Alice” contributed to the launching of the war on drugs, which led to the crackdown on recreational-drug sales and produced a wave of incarcerations.

Miller’s particular subject is literary hoaxes—that is, books that are deliberate, flat-out violations of the pact. The name on the cover is not that of the person who wrote the contents—the name on the cover is deliberately misleading—and the reader has no way of knowing it.

 Miller examines several types of hoaxes. There are literary impersonations, in which the author assumes the racial or ethnic identity of someone else. These are usually memoirs, autofictions, or books that pretend to speak for the group to which the fake author is assumed to belong. Miller calls these intercultural hoaxes. There are hoaxes designed to insinuate a subversive message through a benign-seeming work, a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing text. Miller calls these Trojan Horses. And there are hoaxes aimed at exposing the poor judgment of editors, critics, or readers. He calls these time bombs.

Why do people go to the trouble of creating intercultural hoaxes? Miller thinks that one answer is the book business: “Demand exceeds supply, creating a market for fakes.” The key here is the power differential between the hoaxer and the fake persona. The hoaxer has cultural capital. He or she is already a writer, someone who understands how the publishing world works. The marginalized or exotic subjects they pretend to be have cultural capital, too, in the sense that people want to buy their books and read their stories. But they have fewer means with which to cash out that capital. So the hoaxer steps in.

In an intercultural hoax, therefore, the hoaxer is often white and the fake persona is often a person of color. The white writer is appropriating the experience of a nonwhite person—“performing” a self. A good example is the novel “Famous All Over Town,” which came out in 1983. The author was Danny Santiago, and the book’s narrator was a young Chicano, named Chato, who tells the story of his coming of age in East Los Angeles. The novel was critically acclaimed, and the hoax survived for about seventeen months. Then, in an article by John Gregory Dunne in The New York Review of Books, Danny Santiago was revealed to be a seventy something white writer named Daniel James, who was from a well-to-do Midwestern family and had attended Andover and Yale. Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, knew James, and were in on the hoax.

James got started by sending some stories, using the name Danny Santiago, to Dunne’s literary agent, who was able to place them in magazines like Redbook and Playboy. The agent never met or spoke to the author. It was understood that he did not have a telephone, and his return address was a post-office box. One Danny Santiago story appeared in “The Best American Short Stories.” The stories eventually became the novel “Famous All Over Town,” which, after getting turned down by several houses, was published by Simon & Schuster. No one there had met or talked to Danny Santiago, either. “We figured he was probably in prison and didn’t want anybody to know,” the book’s editor later said.

“Famous All Over Town” was received enthusiastically by the Times, whose reviewer confessed that “I am totally ignorant of the Chicano urban experience but I have to believe this book is, on that subject, a minor classic.” The book received a five-thousand-dollar prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, but Danny Santiago, for obvious reasons, did not turn up to claim it, and James had to forfeit the money. A few months later, Dunne (with James’s acquiescence) published his exposé.

Challenged about adopting a Hispanic pseudonym, James invoked the literature professor’s defense: the identity of the writer is irrelevant. What matters is the contents. “Nobody’s going to be hurt if the book’s any good,” he said. It was true that he was not a Chicano, but neither was he a stranger to the barrio. James was politically progressive—he had been a Communist and had been blacklisted in Hollywood, where he once worked as a screenwriter—and he and his wife had been volunteers for twenty years in the Los Angeles neighborhood where “Famous All Over Town” is set.

Was James’s appropriation of a Chicano identity illegitimate? At the time, Latino writers were divided. (None had suspected that the novel was by an Anglo writer.) The author’s bio on the book jacket said that Danny Santiago grew up in Los Angeles, and Daniel James did not. Dunne says he had tried to persuade James not to use the pseudonym, but concluded that James was blocked as a writer (he was a playwright who had been notably unsuccessful getting his work produced), and that assuming a new identity was liberating for him.

Miller thinks that “Famous All Over Town” is a Trojan Horse. Chato, the narrator, wants to escape from the barrio. He laments the eventual destruction of his neighborhood (displaced by a Southern Pacific rail yard), but he also makes fun of his relatives for their adherence to premodern Mexican ways. It’s a book about getting out of your ethnic cul-de-sac so you can write a book about it. That “Famous All Over Town” can be read as promoting assimilation was probably not James’s intention, but this does not mean that it was not part of the book’s effect.

A more spectacular intercultural hoax, which Miller devotes a third of his book to, is the case of Paul Smaïl. The hoaxer was a white Frenchman named Jack-Alain Léger, whom Miller calls “without doubt one of the greatest hoaxers and impersonators in the history of French literature.” Léger was born Daniel-Louis Théron, in 1947, and published books under a variety of names, including Melmoth (once a pseudonym of Oscar Wilde’s), Dashiell Hedayat, and Eve Saint-Roch. Paul Smaïl was his most scandalous invention.

Smaïl was purportedly the nom de plume of a well-educated French-born Arab, or Beur. (The name Paul Smaïl is supposed to echo the first line of “Moby-Dick.”) The first Smaïl novel, “Vivre Me Tue” (“Living Kills Me”), was published in 1997, and its author was received as a genuine voice of the Beur community. North Africa specialists were as fooled as anyone else. Sales were strong; a successful movie adaptation was produced; subsequent Smaïl novels were published; and people wrote dissertations on the work of Paul Smaïl. Léger had to fend off attempts by the press to locate and interview his fake author.

This is a danger often confronted by successful hoaxers. At some point, there is a demand to produce a body. In 2003, as pressure and suspicion began to mount, the Smaïl hoax was revealed by Léger himself. Miller thinks that although Léger may have wanted to play out the string a little longer, the revelation was his plan. That is because, he thinks, “Vivre Me Tue” was a Trojan Horse. Léger was an enemy of cultural pluralism and religious identity, Miller says. The protagonist in “Vivre Me Tue” is a sympathetic ethnic who has suffered from discrimination, but, like Chato, he wants to escape the prison of identitarianism and become, simply, French. It is an anti-multicultural book.

When the hoax was revealed, it turned out to be a time bomb, too. People were outraged that Léger had appropriated an ethnic identity to which he had no claim. Léger was delighted to point out that until he emerged as the real author the books had seemed Beur enough to everybody. The reception of the books allowed Léger to argue that maybe the real fiction was the concept of “Beur identity.”

There are many examples of Miller’s thesis that ethnic difference inspires hoaxers. “The Third Eye,” the autobiography of a Tibetan monk named Lobsang Rampa, published in 1956, turned out to have been written by Cyril Henry Hoskin, a British plumber. “The Education of Little Tree,” by Forrest Carter, a memoir of a young Cherokee orphan raised by his grandparents, came out in 1976, a few years before “Famous All Over Town,” and became a Times best-seller. The book was praised by critics who knew something about Native American culture, sold at gift shops on Indian reservations, and taught in high schools and colleges. The author went on “Today,” where he was interviewed by Barbara Walters. Then, in 1991, a historian named Dan Carter (unrelated) revealed that the man who presented himself as Forrest Carter was really Asa Carter, a former Ku Klux Klan member and George Wallace speechwriter. By then, Asa Carter was dead, but his book had sold more than half a million copies. It seems that before Asa became Forrest Carter his career had fallen apart and he had developed a drinking problem. So he had decided to turn himself into a Cherokee. He performed a new identity.

A more complicated case is “The Radiance of the King,” a novel published in French in 1954 and in English two years later. The author was a Guinean writer named Camara Laye, and the story is set in Africa. It was received as a leading work in African literature. In 2001, Toni Morrison published a piece in The New York Review of Books in which she called “The Radiance of the King” “an Africa answering back.” It gave us, she said, “Africa’s Africa”—that is, it passed the authenticity test. But there had been rumors right from the start that Laye had not written the book, and Miller, reviewing the scholarship, concludes that “The Radiance of the King” was likely written by a former Nazi collaborator from Belgium named Francis Soulié. Laye evidently agreed to go along, and put his name to it.

Intercultural hoaxes are aimed at readers who are curious about worlds they have little contact with, and who are therefore easily duped. Some nineteenth-century American slave narratives, for example, were written by whites. They were published in order to meet a demand for stories about life in the South which there were not enough ex-slaves around to satisfy. But they were good enough for readers whose conception of the evils of slavery they seemed to confirm.

What may seem harder to account for is that the hoaxes are rarely detected by people who are from those communities or know something about them. But these readers, too, have a stake in the believability of the book’s authorship. They want quality works coming out of their cultures. And successful efforts at what Miller calls “forensic reading”—guessing the real identity of the writer from internal evidence—are exceedingly rare. Charles Dickens guessed that George Eliot was a woman, but no one else seems to have. Our cheater detectors don’t work very well on written documents.

After you know, of course, the deception can seem blatant. But, as Miller says, you can’t unring the bell: you can’t ever read the text again in its pre-exposed state. “Famous All Over Town” no longer seems especially Chicano. It seems, in fact, like what it is: a fictional re-creation of life in East L.A. by a sympathetic writer with a mainstream education. But Daniel James surely knew that such a book would not have received an excited review in the Times.

“Famous All Over Town” was not a time bomb. James would have been happy to go on writing as Danny Santiago forever (and, in fact, he tried to). One time bomb that Miller, oddly, doesn’t mention is the Ern Malley hoax, which the critic Robert Hughes called “the literary hoax of the twentieth century.” It’s been dissected a number of times, most thoroughly by Michael Heyward, in “The Ern Malley Affair,” in 1993.

Ernest Lalor Malley was a fictional Australian poet created in the early nineteen-forties by two young writers named Harold Stewart and James McAuley. Stewart and McAuley had a target in mind: Max Harris, the editor of the Australian literary magazine Angry Penguins. 

Their own tastes in poetry were somewhat traditional, and they considered the modernist poetry Harris was publishing to be facile and pretentious. So they composed sixteen poems, plus an incomplete deathbed poem, which they attributed to “Ern Malley,” and sent a few to Harris with a cover letter purportedly from Malley’s sister Ethel.

Harris took the bait. He was knocked out by the poems and eager to publish them, not least because the author was an unknown. He wrote back asking for more. Barely able to believe their good fortune, Stewart and McAuley concocted a long letter from Ethel Malley explaining that her brother had lived an unfulfilled life, of which she plainly disapproved, and had died of Graves’ disease, in Sydney, at the age of twenty-five. She sent along a book manuscript, titled “The Darkening Ecliptic,” containing all the poems that Stewart and McAuley had written for the occasion. These were duly published in Angry Penguins in 1944.

As with the Smaïl case, the hoaxers had hoped to prolong the deceit in order to land even bigger fish in the poetry world than Max Harris. But their hoax began to fray. One writer suggested that Ern Malley was really Harris himself, prompting Harris to hire a detective to make inquiries at the address on the letter from Ethel Malley. No one there had ever heard of her. Stewart and McAuley decided that this was the moment to blow it all up, and they gave their story to a mass-circulation Australian paper that could be counted on not to paint an embarrassment to the avant-garde in shades of gray. The world press took up the line: Ern Malley had exposed the fraudulence of literary modernism.

Adding injury to insult, Harris was visited by policemen and charged with publishing obscene, immoral, and indecent matter. Absurdly, Harris had to argue in court for the literary merit of the Malley poems—to explain to the magistrate the meaning of phrases that were intended as nonsense—and he was convicted of indecency. Angry Penguins could no longer be published in South Australia, and the magazine folded soon afterward. Harris was a good sport about the affair, but his career never recovered. The Malley hoax is said to have set back the modernist movement in Australia several decades.

To the end, Harris insisted that the Ern Malley poems really were good poems, and that his editorial judgment was correct. And, over the years, there have been writers who agreed. “I liked the poems very much,” John Ashbery once said. “They reminded me a little of my own early tortured experiments in surrealism, but they were much better.”

Are hoaxes unethical? Of course they are. At a minimum, a book is being marketed under false pretenses. And some hoaxes, like the Ern Malley hoax, are intended to damage the reputations of other people. 

Are hoaxes illegal? Not per se, but a cloud of lawsuits does hang over the phenomenon. James Frey’s publisher agreed to refund buyers who felt cheated, and set aside more than two million dollars for the purpose. (Not many wanted their money back: the total refunds came to less than thirty thousand dollars—a victory for the higher-truth defense.) On the other hand, Misha Defonseca, the author of “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” a hoax published with a blurb from Elie Wiesel, sued her publisher for withholding royalties, which, you have to admit, was pretty chutzpadik. A judge awarded her and a collaborator thirty-two million dollars. (The award was set aside after it emerged that Defonseca was a Belgian Catholic who spent the war years in school.)

Exposed hoaxes often have a lucrative zombie afterlife. If the books are popular, it is often in everyone’s interest to continue pretending they’re genuine. They just go on being published. You can go into a bookstore in Paris today and buy a novel by Paul Smaïl. The University of New Mexico Press, the publisher of “The Education of Little Tree,” advertises the book on its Web site as “a classic of its era, and an enduring book for all ages.” You can go on Amazon and order James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” described as the “acclaimed account of his six weeks in rehab.” “Go Ask Alice,” by Anonymous, is sold on Amazon as “a classic diary by an anonymous, addicted teen.”

Some hoaxers like to boast about how easy it was to pull off, and this may be the key to what is truly scandalous about them. Jack-Alain Léger claimed that his entire preparation for writing about Beur life consisted of a few afternoons hanging around cafés in the Barbès neighborhood of Paris. The Ern Malley hoaxers said that they wrote the entire Malley œuvre in a single day.

If that is so, they created a diabolically intricate deception. The Malley poems make extremely subtle allusions to a dozen poets, from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot. Malley’s first name is an allusion to Wilde’s play “The Importance of Being Earnest,” in which Ernest is also the name of a fictitious person; and his nickname echoes “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” by John Keats—who died at exactly the age Malley supposedly died, twenty-five years and four months. (The second letter from Ethel Malley, which really is a brilliant forgery, took Stewart and McAuley several weeks to compose, however.)

The idea behind the claim that it is easy to produce a hoax is that the “authentic” work, the multicultural memoir or the modernist poem, is, in some sense, faked as well, constructed from a set of easily reproduced formulae. The hoaxers are not completely wrong about this. The Ern Malley poems, like the fake “postmodernist” article that the physicist Alan Sokal got published in an academic journal, another time-bomb hoax, are remarkably similar to the real thing. There is just something a little off about them, places where the author seems to have overreached, or had a lapse of taste, or misunderstood a post-structuralist concept. To a sympathetic editor, these missteps are signs of genuineness: the writer is new to the business but is really trying. It shows, once again, the importance of being earnest.

That’s why it’s so hard to tell the difference. When Ashbery taught at Brooklyn College, he used to give an exam to his creative-writing students which printed side by side, without attribution, a poem by the modernist poet Geoffrey Hill and a poem by Ern Malley. Students were told that one of the poems was a spoof, and were asked to identify it, and to answer the question “Do you think it possible that the intellectual spoof might turn out to be more valid as poetry than the ‘serious’ poem, and if so, why?” Ashbery said half the students thought the Hill poem was the hoax.

If we pick up a novel about life in the barrio, or a book by a Tibetan monk, or an avant-garde literary magazine, we know what we expect to find. We are complicit in the attempt to get us to believe because we already want to believe. Writing is a weak medium. It has to rely on readers bringing a lot of preconceptions to the encounter, which is why it is so easily exploited.

Does this mean it’s all a game? Yes, in a sense. Literature is a game with language, and hoaxing alerts us to the fact that the rules are not written down anywhere—in the same way that someone who goes barefoot to a wedding alerts us to the fact that there are actually no regulations governing these things. Those acts draw our attention to the thinness of the social fabric by tearing a little piece of it. Literary hoaxes appeal to critics and theorists because they expose the fragility of the norms of reading.

If it is a game, then, does it really matter who wrote it? The old literature-professor response was that authorship, like identity, is a construction, and so it doesn’t. The response of what Miller calls “the new identitarians” is that we should not accept representations of experiences that the author could not have known, and so it does. Both arguments are provocations. They should get us thinking about what we mean by things like authenticity and identity. What they should not do is prevent us from reading. ♦