Friday Column: The Art is Deceitful Above All Things

(a guest post by Barrett Hathcock)

Back in June, when the fraud trial of JT LeRoy/Laura Albert was unfolding in Manhattan, I had two recurring thoughts:

1) This is absolutely fascinating.
2) This is the novel of the future.

First, let’s recap. Here’s the lead paragraph from the most recent New York Times story (6/23/07):

JT LeRoy, the authorial "other" whom the writer Laura Albert employed as her alter ego and self-protective proxy in the world, was found yesterday by a jury in Manhattan to be not just a fictional creation, but a fraud.

Albert was sued by a film production company that had bought the film rights for LeRoy’s first novel, Sarah. The production company contended that when it came to light that LeRoy didn’t actually exist and that the persona was a ruse created by Albert and supported by a few close associates, the company had been defrauded since it bought not just the rights to the movie but the LeRoy backstory, the autobiographical engine that drove so much interest in the novel.

First, I had the by-now prosaic thought: Man, the life of the fiction really is dependent on the life of the creator. This is not just some Ettlinger photo on the back of a hardback; this is the author’s life.

And what a life—for a while, everyone believed that a middle-aged mother originally from Brooklyn Heights was in fact a 20-ish transgendered, HIV-positive former prostitute from West Virginia forging an oeuvre out of hardship. In bald summary form, the life just sounds like a bad movie, and the fact that the bad movie played convincingly for people for a few years strikes me as wondrous. It’s amazing what people will believe and what energy they get from belief.

But then comes the honestly cynical disposition of the movie production company, specifically stating that they weren’t just buying the movie. They were buying the author behind it. And when that story turned out to be false—and when they were denied the true story behind the true story, the story of Albert’s creation of JT—that’s when they sued.

In the handful of articles devoted to the subject—scandal?—the director slated for the project talks about doing some sort of meta-movie that incorporates this fiction and faux reality and further supposedly real reality. He was tentatively calling the project “Sarah Plus.” (One hopes this title is a mere placeholder.)

So, reading each new day’s Times article as the trial was underway, I thought, Of course someone should do a meta-movie. But by the time the verdict came down, and the various “real-life”—I think at this point we’re allowed to put quotations around everything Albert says—travails that Albert went through on her way to creating LeRoy as an alter ego (a respirator that allowed her to speak and live and free herself from the psychological imprisonment created from a childhood of trauma and abuse), by the time all of this came to light in late June, I thought that no movie could do it justice. Because no movie could outdo the multimedia, low-boil spectacle of the whole Albert/LeRoy media event.

You read online about the Internet and the blessed god of interactivity and how, soon, TV will be different, and how, so soon, fiction will be different, and our entertainment will be unbound and on-demand and so much like Web 2.0, etc. and so forth. (A pox on that phrase forever more.) And I skim such utopist postings and I think, No novel of the future will be able to do something like this, this marshalling of so many media and tastes and constituencies. But here in this Albert/LeRoy scandal, perhaps we have our first multimedia novel. I realize I’m stretching the definition of “novel” almost to the point of meaninglessness; perhaps, for the convenience of this column, let’s temporarily define a novel as a study of human consciousness that can take place via a variety of media. Perhaps it would be best to call it simply a multimedia experience. Here, oh so interestingly, the actual novel itself acts like a booster rocket to levitate all of the other JT LeRoy infected bits of entertainment—the music, the press coverage, the movies.

But this was simply the first act, the first portion of the story. Then came the uncovering, the revelation that JT LeRoy was just a mask. Fine, fine. We’ve had hoaxes before. But through this trial, we’ve gotten a glimpse of the “real” Albert with all her lurid background of abuse and psychiatric treatment. If it weren’t for the fact that she’s on the witness stand, bound by the constraints of a court of law, and if it weren’t for a native sympathy for anyone who’s gone through such hardship and who’s about to be drug through the media mud, a cynical reader might say that she’s making this second, seriously truly true story up as well. It certainly sounds made up—taken to her first psyche ward on her 14th birthday, running away and hanging out with the punks in Tompkins Square Park, approached by a trucker in Virginia trading candy for kisses, talking on the phone to a therapist in an “embryonic” version of JT LeRoy. There was even a childhood picture of Albert introduced as evidence in the trial where she’s wearing a T-shirt that says, “I want to be me.” I remember thinking: this is simply too good to be true. If it is true, American reality truly does outrun American fiction, and if it’s not true, then it sounds like LeRoy’s biography sounds: a lurid pastiche assembled for the prototypical magazine profile, where clichés about the artist rising through adversity and turning misery into beauty are uplifted with total solemnity, as if these words had not been uttered a thousand times before.

So, here we have, as I’ve come to call it, a novel of identity in triplicate, a full-scale engagement not just with literature, but with pop music, the worlds of press and promotion and celebrity, the world of film, the world of crime. Through its multiplicity of media, the LeRoy event is almost interactive in the way it feeds back on the volume of our outrage as tricked believers. Belief and the shattering of belief almost become a call and response.

What’s remarkable is how deft LeRoy/Albert was with the art of publicity. Watching the latest MTV Movie Awards (don’t ask), it was easy to nod grimly and think, Yes, it’s all publicity now, as tired celebrities trotted to the podium to highlight the fact that their new movie was coming out. But LeRoy takes this a step further. Yes, it’s all publicity, but where art can decay into publicity—into a constant shouting match to gain some sort of audience—Albert pushed publicity into a form of art itself. In short, she had it both ways. I began to think of another fictional/authorial doppelganger that has been deeply concerned with fame and its costs and the provisions of privacy—Philip Roth and his fictional, “alter brain” Nathan Zuckerman, both of them living alone in the New England woods. In his latest (non-Zuckerman) book, Everyman, Roth put his face on the back cover, he said, to assure his friends that it was merely his fictional narrator who was sick and dying and not himself. This—aside from a few author interviews accompanying each book; even Zeus must do promo, apparently—has been the extent of Roth’s acquiescence to the public eye. His graven, unsmiling face says, Keep Out.

So two models then, the elder American master of prose who does not share his private life yet puts it through an intense fictifying scrutiny, and the young American upstart who creates a false biography in order to create the attention to focus on the art, a fiction for the fiction, and this false biography turns out to be similar to the “real” story, squeezed out in a court of law.

In the end, being found guilty of being a fraud is actually an inverted compliment. Albert, that damaged Prospero, has succeeded wildly in making things up.

Let’s end with a quotation from Roth’s The Counterlife, via Nathan Zuckerman—who, let’s remember, in his first appearance in My Life as a Man is a fictional creation of Peter Tarnopol, himself a fictional author created by Philip Roth.

And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.

—Barrett Hathcock

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Comments

[Michael Brown]

Excellent overview and assessment of this whole convoluted process. I have lately been researching hoaxes (such as Arn Malley) and the assumption of heteronyms (as in the case of Fernando Pessoa), and like you, find this business absolutely fascinating. Doesn't it seem as if the less access "critics" have to being able to assess an author's personality, the more willing they are to praise the work? Look at how many publishers turned down John Kennedy Toole while he was alive, and after his posthumous book came out, so many bemoaned the loss of "brilliance."
Are those authors who create separate personae too thin-skinned to bear being critically lambasted, or have they cleverly sidestepped being the front person (until/unless the work is evaluated on its own merits)?
And why is it only now, after his death, that Roberto Bolaño, with such obvious talent, is reaching his widest audience?
It might sound as if I'm running on two different tracks here, but I simply wonder why we praise the inaccessible and damn the identifiable.

[Cal Godot]

Look at the results of this decision and you see the true motivation: greed.

The movie producer was in no way damaged by the revelation of the pseudonym. The deal was in no way voided by the "false" signature on the contract. (Had the contract been signed "Laura Albert," there would have been no case.)

Indeed: the movie producer realized, once the pseudonym had been revealed, that he could generate publicity for his project by bringing suit. If he prevailed, he would get back his money; if he did not prevail, he likely lost nothing (he would have retained his option in any case), and gained free publicity.

His cynical calculation to create a movie based on the incident goes to this point. Now he has no need to obtain rights to the material he previously purchased: he is part of the story, and can therefore tell the story himself, without remuneration to other parties.

So basically this scumbag producer gained a million-dollar property for free. The actual creator of all this (the original author) suffers and gains nothing. The author, the artists, is once again raped by a corporate entity.

And thus we have a fine example of the true effect of our recent changes in US intellectual property laws: the law is stacked against individual creators and favors corporate entities like production companies, studios, networks, etc.

Someday there will be no art or artists in Corporate America. There will be properties and slaves instead, as well as those who own them.

[Brady Walker]

I'm reading this article a good bit after its original posting, but another interesting instance like this popped into my mind as I was reading. Are you familiar with the Wanda Tinasky Letters to the Editor at the Anderson Valley Advertiser that were supposedly from Thomas Pynchon?

In the mid-80's, a small SoCal rag started receiving these incredibly interesting letters from a mysterious (that is to say non-existent) woman named Wanda Tinasky. The letters were from Mendocino county in Northern CA, where Pynchon was supposedly staying while he was working on Vineland. (Actually, he was living in Humboldt county. I had a professor who lived next door to him in Trinidad, CA). Anyway, the writing style, various literary and intellectual references and scholarly whatnots reminded a lot of people of Pynchon, and they just so happened to be from around the area he was then residing.

I've always thought of this funny little happening as Pynchon's real life "paranoid pet project", if you will. The king of writing paranoid characters dons a persona that gets scholars and casual fans alike sniffing wildly in all directions for a glimpse of the man behind the curtain. I've got a manuscript for the unpublished collection of letters with essays about the Tinasky/Pynchon conspiracy theory, and it's hilarious to think that Pynchon tossed the seeds that grew into scholarly paranoid findings. The fact that Vineland came out shortly after the letters stopped only served to reinforce everyone's suspicions, since it is based in Northern CA.

I think the Albert case went a good bit further and is amusing for anyone, while the "Tinasky/Pynchon Theory" only gets a chuckle out of the Pynchon-obsessed

[soshin]

Hey,I just wanted to ask you a question about the literature, if literature is a "more likely" way to lead to truth than other art or other areas of knowledge, i have a hard time answering this question, do u think that the authors could through art give us the "truth", a reality?...:D..
i would appreciate an answer ..thank u