Unknown - FAKE IT: Fictions of Forgery

The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

I still consider the letters to be my best work (126). So writes literary forger Lee Israel in her memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which recounts how she fabricated dozens of letters she attributed to Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Louise Brooks, and Noel Coward. Although Israel professes to regret betray[ing]... my community of scholars, a citadel of culture (122), she feels no guilt about the Parker forgeries, which were larky and fun and totally cool.... I was a better writer as a forger than I had ever been as a writer (126).

Israels words capture three important truths about the peculiar form of fraud that is literary forgery. First, she declares explicitly what many forgers come to realize: that faking enables them to fashion a fresh authorial identity. Ron Fortune and Amy Robillard write that forging gave Israel an opportunity to be truer to who she was as a person and as a writer (286). More accurately, Israels forgeries empowered her to discover her writerly self. Often forgeries are the forgers best work because the spurious name liberates them from constraining habits and oppressive expectations. In forging texts, they reforge themselves. These writers, like critics and actors, use another artist to ignite their creative fires. The forger attaches herself or himself to that other artist like a flowering epiphyte on a tree. The forged work and persona not only permit the forger to bloom; they may also resurrect or revivify the artist(s) imitated.

Second, Israels description of the Parker forgeries as larky and fun could have been written by any forger or hoaxer, because these activities partake of the spirit of play: forgery is a contest, a performance, often a practical joke. Clifford Irving, for one, admitted that he contrived his scheme to write a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes as a titanic prank; although he certainly desired the money he earned, he also wanted to test himself and his powers of deceptionto win a game against himself and his victims. Third, although Israels title suggests penitence, the memoir is only part mea culpa: like all forgers, she craves recognition for her scholarship, skill, and savvy. As we will see repeatedly in the real-life and fictional forgeries and hoaxes discussed in this book, fakers are motivated by a paradoxical longing to receive positive attention for the cleverness with which they make themselves invisible. This dialectic between erasure and exposure characterizes all literary and fine-art forgeries and hoaxes. Thus, Israel reproduces several celebrities letters within the book and then divulges that they are all her work (11): See how foxy I am! Even her title is a line she invented and inserted into one of her Parker forgeries (65); that is, the very words with which she asks forgiveness for forging are themselves forged! As she wrote the line, Israel recalls, she imagined the waiflike Dorothy Parker apologizing for any one of countless improprieties, omissions, and/or cutting bon mots... apologizing with no intention whatsoever of mending her wayward ways (66). The same is doubtless true of Israel.

Before she turned to fraud, Israels career was foundering: her biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen had been successful, but her hasty profile of Este Lauder flopped, and she rapidly plummeted from best-sellerdom to welfare (19). While doing research on Elaine Carrington, she came across a cache of letters from Fanny Brice and stole them; she then supplied postscripts mentioning a gangster (thereby increasing the value of each by twenty or thirty dollars), invented a cousin named Sidney who had found them, and fabricated a deathbed promise that she would not sell other (nonexistent) letters (3942). During calls to vendors she renamed herself Leonore Carthage and employed her Smith college alumna voice to clinch the sales. (She actually attended Brooklyn College [43].) Her motivespoverty, resentment over her lack of success, adulation of famous artiststypify those of the forgers and hoaxers discussed herein. Although Israel avers that the letters content was the prime selling point, what truly convinced the buyers were the stories she told them. Her background as a biographer had honed her skills as a narrator and gossip, and characters like Uncle Sidney and details like deathbed promises created relationships with her victims: like all good con artists, she took her marks into her confidence. Indeed, as will become clear in the course of this book, any forgery or hoax is only as good as the stories used to verify its provenance. But not only is a forgery always a narrative; forgeries also function as the seeds of further fictions, which also include the usually mendacious explanations offered by fakers after the fact. Forgeries are kernels from which fictions bloom.