Gatsby’s Bar: The New Mermaids
The barkers are calling all along the midway, "Come one, come all, to our strange and wonderful show! Come see our amazing collection of human oddities! Step right up, the freaks are waiting inside!" Welcome to the carnival, the circus, and the sideshow. Come inside The Museum of Oddities. Welcome to the House of Freaks. Pull aside the canvas flap and enter this ragged tent of American Literature.
Here in this overcrowded corner you’ll find the disturbing shadow-forms of the emotional cripple, the abused, and the socially forsaken. Witness safely from afar the ruination wrought of drug abuse, disease, gambling addiction, incest, and political misadventure. It’s all here, the degradation, the depredation; every sad, sorry and unholy folly people have visited upon themselves and others.
One glance at any current bestsellers list will confirm we’ve bought our tickets and eagerly stepped inside the tent to gawk, to witness a breathing morality tale, to seek solace from our own lives in the pain and tragedy of others, to draw strength from their tales of survival and triumph.
Memoirs rule our current literary landscape. As a genre the memoir lords over the imagination of the largest section of the reading public outselling practically everything else. And this particular corner of the tent of literature holds such compelling, superbly relaized attractions – Frank Conroy’s "Stop Time", John Edgar Wideman’s "Brothers & Keepers", Alice Sebold’s "lucky" to name but a few. Lately, however, a truly Barnum-esque quality has overtaken this artfully solipsistic corner of the litscape; a new Feejee Mermaid is on display and it’s pulling coin from the readers’ pockets faster than you can say "humbug".
The original Feejee Mermaid was one of P.T. Barnum’s most inspired, and lucrative, hoaxes. After manipulating the press into a frenzy of discussion over the imminent arrival to the shores of America the body of a real mermaid discovered by the Englishman Dr. J. Griffin, Barnum displayed the scientific marvel in his American Museum where crowds and cash poured with equal measure through his open door.
Of course there was no Dr. Griffin. He was a plant working for Barnum. And naturally there was no mermaid either, just the contorted torso of a monkey sewn to the desiccated tail of a fish.
A gullible public lured in by the advertising broadsides depicting beautiful fairytale mermaids dancing gleefully upon the waves was confronted with what Barnum himself described as "an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen… its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony."
And here we are off the midway in the tent of literature where there is a certain expectation of something like a funhouse mirror approximated by the sentences and paragraphs committed to the page by our authors and poets; a desire to see our own weaknesses and insecurities pulled this way and that, forming a new but comfortingly familiar shape; and not at all surprisingly there’s a new mermaid, every bit as fraudulent as Barnum’s, making a mockery of it all.
James Frey, Nasdijj, and JT Leroy are mermaids all. While there may be a certain retrospective charm, even a nostalgic, rib-tickling delight, to be found in Barnum’s wool-pulling there’s little but contempt and a mercenary grab at the quick cash to be witnessed in the disgraceful bid by these writers to fabricate out of whole cloth a self they claim as real. Frey’s bout with addiction and prison cell degradation, Nasdijj’s harrowing and bitter revelations from the rez, and Leroy’s horror show of homelessness, prostitution and HIV-tragedy are all fakes. Their promise of truth, the very selling point of their work, has turned out to be no more than a misbegotten fish-monkey.
Or perhaps I protest too much. There’s a certain American-ness to the idea of a fluid identity, a self based more on a personal declaration of "I am what I say I am" than on any actual fact. We all know that Fitzgerald’s now clichéd dictum that there are no second acts in American life is patently untrue. There are as many acts as we can manage; as many new masks to wear as we can carry. Like the emperor of America, Joshua A. Norton, that deluded San Francisco reprobate handing out currency to his own personal empire, there’s a quality of Huck Finn impishness to these authors’ acts of self creation, an "alright then I’ll go to hell" pronouncement of self that could be construed as admirable.
It’s a slippery slope we climb when castigating them for exploiting an already exploitative marketplace. Casting stones willy-nilly we’re liable to put our own eyes out. Watching Oprah Winfrey and The New York Times maul James Frey for having suckered them one couldn’t help feeling queasy. After all, Oprah’s millions were made by exploiting just the sort of person that the James Frey of "A Million Little Pieces" claims to be. And the indignity expressed by the Times was downright laughable considering that once august institution’s failures regarding truth-checking where Judith Miller and Jayson Blair were concerned. Rather than appearing triumphant upon shining steeds of superior ethics their irony-free hypocrisy rides a broken-down nag.
The multi-layered false selves of Nasdijj and JT Leroy are actually quite fascinating in their ersatz baroqueness. Each an onion of fallaciousness where, with every exfoliation of pulpy outer skin is revealed a fresh, new layer of deceit. Nasdijj authored a critically lauded memoir, while Leroy was a wunderkind author of fiction. Neither author actually exists, both are wholly fictional creations manufactured to secure publishing deals and inspire sympathetic jacket copy.
Nasdijj’s life was actually cribbed from the work of real-life author Sherman Alexie who was the first to blow the whistle. L.A. Weekly then investigated the author and found that in reality Nasdijj is gay erotica author Timothy Patrick Barrus who never grew up as a Navajo.
Leroy was the conspiratorial creation of Laura Albert who did the writing and her partner of many years Geoffrey Knoop who handled the PR and business side of being Leroy. Ingeniously, the couple even enlisted Knoop’s half-sister to attend readings and events in a JT Leroy costume to further the illusion. Again the sordid details of Leroy’s life were cribbed from another author’s fiction. This time it was the work of Dennis Cooper that was mined.
Is this merely a case of the author creating an alter-ego, another instance of Robert Zimmerman creating Bob Dylan; a non-person complete with a biography that grants authority to the artist and his chosen artform. Zimmerman was a middleclass kid who knew next to nothing of deprivation and poverty, nor did he come up in the itinerant folk music tradtion. Dylan however had a thousand page curriculum vitae of wandering dusty American backroads, jobbing endlessly from strip clubs to circuses and everything in between, and playing with established blues musicians in all ports of call.
Does the lie of the artist diminish the art? Does the art supersede the false identity? Is the false identity an integral part of the artwork itself? As Laura Barton wrote in The Guardian,
It is all a matter of authenticity. Is it because if JT LeRoy is not a drug-addled hobo hooker made good, we feel embarrassed because we've been conned, as if we paid full price for a Louis Vuitton purse only to find it was a fake? But nothing has been taken from us. The books remain: as startling and disturbingly beaeautiful as they ever were. There is nothing that has sullied the New York Times's assertion that "his language is always fresh, his soul never corrupt". And what strikes me more than anything is that in this age of overblown celebrity, where people such as Paris Hilton can be famous purely for being Paris Hilton, mightn't JT LeRoy represent the precise inversion of this? The work is all. The identity is irrelevant.
The creation of a marketable self in the person of the fictional author of a writer’s work appears to be the hot trend right now. Sure, it’s crass and despicable but keep in mind that James Frey originally submitted "A Million Little Pieces" to publishers as a work of fiction. And not one of them showed the slightest interest. Without changing a single word he re-submitted the book as a memoir and it was quickly snatched up and went on to bestseller stardom. The authors mentioned above, if nothing else of a positive nature can be said of them, were certainly canny observers of our current literary marketplace. Although it wreaks havoc upon one’s purer notions they have shown a keen understanding that the Tent of Literature is just one more sideshow competing for dollars in the entertainment industry.
Recently a mass-market sized paperback has hit the shelves of certain bookshops, records stores, and other purveyors of the odd and the artsy. It’s a novel entitled "Manifesto" accredited to no author or publisher. The book jacket is a blank white. No art, no copy, no selling points, or actually even a title. That I know the title to be "Manifesto" is due to a small leaflet folded into my copy, provided by what one assumes to be the publisher. The title "Manifesto" appears in large blocky letters printed sideways on the edge of the leaflet with the rest of the page given over to Situationist-style phrases such as "give to bands on tour", "participate in all things", "ennui is the enemy" and the like.
The book plays against typical narrative construction in much the same way that it evades issues of prefab identity. A series of short paragraphs gracefully slide into line much like building blocks. Each paragraph making some culturally acute/naïve pronouncement/observation and/or recounting a moment from the invisible narrator’s recent past. This is not so much a novel as it is a collection of barbed koans meant to work on the reader’s understanding of him-/herself.
As a work of literature in our current cultural climate, with the literary marketplace clogged by shifty quick change artists like those described above, "Manifesto" is actually quite remarkable. Rather than providing a marketable face with a marketable set of problems/disorders/addictions, "Manifesto" resists any easy categorization of Self. This book and its author are a blank slate, a true tabula rasa wherein the reader must experience the work purely on its own terms. And its terms are language, not media-ready image.
Kristofer Collins is an editor at The New Yinzer and owner of Desolation Row CDs. A book of his poems entitled “King Everything – Selected Poems” will be published later this year by Six Gallery Press.