Ishy Beah, child-soldier memoirist: “Don’t hurt me Oprah.”
“None of it happened, and yet every word of it is true.” —fiction writer Grace Paley
Get out your pitchforks and torches. Another memoirist might have fibbed. First we had James Frey and his A Million Little Pieces. Remember that high point in American literary history? Frey, a recovering alcoholic and crack addict, penned the “true story” of his harrowing, but ultimately triumphant trip through the seven circles of substance abuse hell. After the doyenne of redemption herself, Oprah Winfrey, had Frey on for several book club confessionals, the book sold like … well … like crack. People couldn’t get enough of it. Everyone read it, everyone cried, and everyone believed in the healing power of the human spirit. Then everyone found out Frey made some stuff up. And man, were they pissed. In one of the most excruciating examples of nationally televised sadomasochism, Winfrey publicly reamed Frey a new one for deceiving her and her viewers. Frey cried. Oprah cried. The book sold another million copies or so. Talk about redemption.
Now, the literary truth police are at it again. It seems Ishmael Beah, author of the bestseller A Long Way Gone, might have fudged a few facts in his memoir about being a child soldier during Sierra Leone’s civil war. A couple of Australian reporters started unpeeling the onion of Beah’s story and they say it smells. It all started when a man claimed to have found Beah’s father, which would have been a miracle since Beah writes that his parents were both killed. The person turned out to be Beah’s cousin. But that didn’t stop the investigation. One enterprising scribe ventured to Sierra Leone itself for some due diligence and, lo and behold, a lot of people there told him Beah couldn’t have spent two years as a soldier, as his book claims. At most, it was probably a few months. Beah vehemently defends the veracity of his work. He even asserts a kind of memoirist infallibility: a photographic memory. “Sad to say,” he wrote in a statement quoted by Slate, “my story is all true.”
His old writing teacher at Oberlin, quoted in the same Slate piece, hedges a bit and speaks vaguely of “poetic license.” It turns out that Beah originally planned to write about his life in Sierra Leone in a fictionalized account, a good old fashioned roman-a-clef. Frey started out with the same vision for Million Little Pieces. In fact, he shopped it to numerous publishers as a novel and got nowhere. Then he started claiming that every word of it was true and suddenly, he had a nice, fat contract. That’s where the real story lies in both of these cases. If you want to blame someone, America, blame the publishing industry.
The reason both these authors originally wanted to write novels was so they could tweak details of the narrative, magnify certain elements and yes, even LIE to get at the most important part of any work of art: a deeper, more crucial emotional truth. But novels just don’t make much money. And novelists themselves are often cantankerous or at least cagey when it comes to discussing their work. When people pestered William Faulkner to explain what a certain passage or chapter meant, he would simply tell them to “read it again.” DH Lawrence explicitly warned people not to trust what writers say. “Never trust the teller,” he said. “Trust the tale.” That kind of evasiveness makes for bland marketing and really dull talk shows. You can’t sell a novelist as well as you can sell an in-the-flesh success story, a living, breathing – and writing! – Horatio Alger character.
But profit-hungry publishers aren’t the only reason for these truth scandals. They’re also about misplaced social aggression. We live in a world of endless bullshit. An age where the President of the United States can stand up and utter blatant canards like, “We don’t torture” and get away with it. So it’s not surprising to see Puritanical witch-hunts over truth and veracity flare up in other sectors of the culture. It’s the basic law of fetishism. You invest an object or condition with irrational significance because something else is out of your reach or beyond your powers. We can’t change the President or the mass media pond scum that aid and abet his slippery distortions. But we can flog a few prevaricating writers. And it feels so good to do it!
The Oprah book club hordes swoon and gnash their teeth because they’ve been deceived somehow. That seething rage at being lied to by the powerful is fast becoming a very American condition. A sort of socio-cultural rabies that causes many of us to foam at the mouth and bite the closest liar we can find. But consider this: if the allegations against him are true and Beah only spent a couple months as a child soldier instead of two years, does that really affect the emotional underpinnings of the story? Does it somehow make the war in Sierra Leone any less brutal or his portrayal of it any less heartbreaking? Or, in Frey’s case, do his embellishments diminish or negate the horror of addiction? Of course not. But these scandals aren’t really about accuracy in literature (whatever the hell that even means). They’re about payback. Someone has to give a pound of flesh for our wider civic and political impotence. And, as usual, artists make easy targets.
Watch out, Mr. Beah. That sound you hear? It’s the villagers banging on the castle door. You might want to call Oprah. It’ll hurt when she brings the cat o’ nine tails down. But in the end, you’ll be cleansed. And you’ll probably sell more books. After all, we’re all suckers for a good story of redemption: the hero errs, the hero repents and we all live happily ever after.
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JB Powell is a contributing writer and the author of The Republic: A Novel.
