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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Michael Jackman, ULA
Leroy, Frey and the Affinity Con:
or, A Class Version of Blackface
Most of the writers in the literary world are what I’d call “pros.” Pros
go to school and study writing. They take special courses, they get
degrees, they go to workshops. They write books and get tenure so they
can teach other aspiring pros.
But, the thing is, you can’t do all that unless you’re a person with
plenty of money. Devoting your life to school and workshopping takes
means. People of means are people whose lives are mostly free of the
great crushing tragedies that money can prevent -- with the reliable
exception of death. Mortality is the great tragedy of the comfortable.
That’s why so many “memoirs” written by this class of “pros” have
funerals in them before page 50.
But, just when you think that the entire literary world is populated
with “pros,” there come some amateurs into the literary scene who’ve
had a rough life. People who’ve gotten into writing as a way to grapple
with the tremendous pain of their lives. In other words, such writers as
JT Leroy and James Frey. What a breath of fresh air to hear from a
former child prostitute and a former drug addict and prisoner. What a
vindication for the lit elite who the ULA has long described as
“hothouse flowers” and residents of a “literary Versailles.” See? Here
are some authors who have real tragedy in their lives.
Then come the revelations of this month. Oops.
It turns out that these people haven’t lived the lives they’ve claimed
they did. In the case of Leroy, he isn’t even a real person.
Of course, we in the ULA always knew there was something fishy
about these two. When Karl Wenclas first read Leroy’s book Sarah, he
was baffled to find these stories of being a child prostitute delivered
with a shrug and a smirk. When we first heard of Frey’s tales of being
a druggie and a criminal, we were puzzled that he lived in a vast
Tribeca loft. The indifference of Leroy to his own tragedy and the
evident means of Frey didn’t square with our experiences with
desperation, poverty, addiction and ending up on the wrong side of the
law. Wenclas observed that nowhere in Leroy’s work did one get the
sense of a Dickens, a person who had lived through a degrading
personal experience and came out wiser and more serious. Rather it
seemed to collaborate with the clueless upper-class reader’s erotic
fantasies. And nowhere in Frey’s act did we see any anger about the
degradation of addiction and crime. What’s more, somebody who can
occupy a massive loft in downtown New York is a tourist of the
American underbelly, not somebody who’s going to have the kind of
anger at the corrupt rich, at how the game is fixed in America,
something most addicts and criminals know all too well.
So, if we couldn’t be completely fooled, how could the literary
establishment be hoodwinked?
The answer has to do with the art of the con. The con artist knows that
his victims must want to believe the con, because it will benefit them,
and often because it will ennoble them. Not only did these frauds’
publishers want to believe the story for their own self-interest, because
it was worth good money to them, but it made them feel good to help
somebody who’s had a hard go of it.
But there’s something more to the psychology of these cons. There’s
something about them that indicts the publishers who fell for them.
It’s because this kind of con has elements of the “affinity” con.
Normally, you see this kind of con in young, upbeat religious
entrepreneurs who prey on the pious elderly. They aim to look like a
member of the “affinity group.” They earn the victim’s trust because
they look, talk, and act like them. The people in the publishing
industry aren’t total idiots, but they are very rigidly socialized. To
them, frauds, liars, and hopelessly untalented writers are those people
who don’t look and behave the same way they do.
That’s very important to remember. These same people in the
publishing industry take a pass on the work of people who’ve been
socialized differently from them. People who have been hungry or
homeless or burned out of their apartment -- struggling, unschooled
writers who need a break. But, you know what? Those people are
often angry and resentful, disagreeable and aggressive. They laugh
bitterly at the promises of affluent America because they’ve heard it all
before. They know better. Therefore, these nice, smart but rigidly
socialized people in the publishing world just don’t trust their motives.
Too resentful. Too angry. Too aggressive. They must just be jealous
and untalented.
But bring in a con artist who acts like they do and they react
differently.
When a couple of well-fed musicians start claiming to be an exploited
child prostitute with gender issues, but have none of the class anger
and resentment that would go along with that, we in the ULA
recognize that all is not right. Somebody is putting us on. But Mary
Gaitskill fell for it hook line and sinker, as did many New York editors.
When the son of an executive, a liberal arts school student, a fraternity
brother, a khaki-wearing rich kid claims to have been a ruthless
criminal and opponent of authority, we figure that, at best, he’s a
poseur. He’s telling the elite what they want to hear, that people who
fall into a criminal culture of drug addiction and despair are actually
dipshit egomaniacs who had no conceivable reason to rebel against
authority in the first place.
Again, it’s not that the editors and publishers are stupid, they just
consider themselves to be so “rational” that they dismiss the anger of
the poor and oppressed. They see it as bad form. But when a person
appears to them to be “rational,” they then let down their guard and
listen credulously. This is the “affinity group con” at its most effective.
The decision-maker says, “This person isn’t angry or resentful. This
person talks and acts just like me. Therefore, they’re reasonable and
rational and telling the truth.” It’s a short-cut that has always worked
for them in the past, so, why not now?
The saddest lesson to take away from this story is that the
panjandrums of publishing are so out of touch with the lower classes,
so distant from the culture of the losers of our economic system, they
would never know how to read a real down-and-outer, let alone trust
them to tell their story. And so they’re easy prey for these frauds, these
people who do a class version of blackface. That’s an act that, sadly,
they can believe.
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Michael Jackman is the ULA's Detroit Bureau Chief and a founding member.
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