Reviews

Mark Sanderson - The Sunday Telegraph

In 2005, thanks to Oprah Winfrey's book club, James Frey's memoir of addiction, A Million Little Pieces, was outsold only by the latest Harry Potter. Its anecdotes about undergoing root-canal surgery without anaesthetic and mixing with the bad boys in prison soon turned out to be just as preposterous as any of the goings-on at Hogwarts. Telling Tales,which might just as easily have been calledAMillion Little Lies, introduces us to a rogue's gallery of writers, quite a few of whom have also sat on Oprah's sofa.

Whether pretending to be the victim of satanic sexual abuse or a child dying from Aids, brought up by a wolf-pack or a survivor of the Holocaust, each literary impostor can be described, says Melissa Katsoulis, as 'desperate, damaged or deluded'. They are desperate for recognition and revenge, physically or psychologically damaged (absent fathers loom large) and deluded about the consequences of their actions for their readers and themselves.William Lauder, for example, an angry young Scot who waged a bitter literary campaign to discredit John Milton, suffered such a septic knee after being struck by a wayward golf ball that, when his fake texts were exposed, he did not have a leg to stand on.

Katsoulis revels in highlighting the most ridiculous details of the hoaxes and is especially good at showing how they suddenly took on a life of their own and escaped their creator's clutches.William Henry Ireland, eager to impress his father,must have been off his head if he thought that Shakespeare could have written, instead of 'Unfriended, new adopted' in King Lear,'Unnefreynnededde newee adoppetedde'. He was. In 1928, Joan Lowell, who pretended to have been brought up at sea, claimed to have witnessed 'the mass consummation of a group marriage on a windswept beach' and, shipwrecked off Australia, swum'for a mile against a powerful rip-tide to shore, carrying two mewling ship's kittens on her shoulders'.However, what is astonishing is just howmany intelligent people did believe them. They did so, says Katsoulis, because they wanted the tall tales, like juicy gossip, to be true.

These book-bound hoaxes generally fall into one of three categories: the genuine hoax, the entrapment hoax (designed with a specific target in mind: for example, modernist poets) and the mock hoax (intended to question the very nature of authorship).Whatever their aim, the lengths that the hoaxers go to achieve it is truly impressive. Perhaps, now that any illiterate idiot can burble into a blog, such time-consuming scams will disappear. In the meantime, though, the absence of a bibliography in Telling Tales leaves you with a sneaking suspicion that one of them could well be a figment of the clever Katsoulis imagination.

Christopher Hart - The Sunday Times

In the 1930s, a wise and wrinkly ­American Indian called Grey Owl came to ­Britain. He was the bestselling author of an acclaimed autobiography, Grey Owl and the Beaver. A “weathered-looking Apache” in “long hair, skins and moccasins”, he was invited to address “the entire royal household in Buckingham Palace, and spoke movingly about the urgent need to protect the natural world”. Nobody doubted him, despite his blue eyes. It turned out he was really Archibald ­Belaney from Hastings.

Melissa Katsoulis’s account of some of the best literary hoaxes is hugely ­enjoyable: amusing, literate, learned and perceptive. Literary hoaxers, she points out, like con men in any other line, can only sell us what we want. We have always wanted more about Shakespeare, for instance, so no doubt “lost sonnets” will pop up from time to time. In the 18th century there was Chatterton, the “marvellous boy”, whose fakes had a genuine literary merit all of their own, and James Macpherson, who wrote misty Celtic Ossian poetry that bamboozled many, but not the redoubtable Dr Johnson. Macpher-son was evidently an unpleasant and dishonest figure who made a lot of money from his dishonesty and ended up an MP.

What we particularly want nowadays is child-abuse memoirs. But many such accounts have turned out to be not entirely accurate, such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), his harrowing memoir of drug and alcohol addiction that Oprah Winfrey made her Book of the Month. Except that it was all made up. Oprah’s Boob of the Year.

Another contemporary taste is for the mystical wisdom of indigenous peoples. Hence Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message Down Under (1995), her novelisation of her wanderings with Australian aborigines, and their miraculous healing arts. But when the aborigines themselves finally piped up, it was to say that Morgan was a fraud and her account a fantasy.

The holy grail of publishing would surely be child abuse plus exotic natives: a young Eskimo girl of visionary ecological inclination, perhaps, horribly abused by her wicked, drunken white stepfather. And then in 2000 — bingo. The venerable American publisher Houghton Mifflin brought out Blood Flows Like a River Through My Dreams, a memoir by a ­Navajo called Nasdijj, recounting the agonising last months of his dying son. Subsequent volumes covered Aids, alcoholism and sexual abuse. It couldn’t get any better. Unfortunately, Nasdijj was later outed as Tim, a writer of gay porn from Michigan.

There are also some frivolous hoaxes in Telling Tales. In the 1950s, a mischievous American radio DJ called Jean Shepherd started encouraging his listeners to go into bookshops and ask for a nonexistent volume called I, Libertine, a brilliant historical novel by one Frederick Ewing. Soon, bookshops were promising that it was “on order”, a review was published, Ewing himself was mentioned in a gossip column, and le tout New York was gushing about what a wonderful read it was.

One of the finest recent hoaxes was executed by the physicist Alan Sokal, who, in 1996, published a paper called Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Theory, in a scholarly journal called Social Text. He quoted the right names (Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray), included entire sentences that meant literally ­nothing and inserted numerous basic ­scientific and mathematical errors.

The article’s appearance made a serious point, immensely pleasing for those of us who think that the parlance of postmodernism is merely a way for pretentious ­academics to try and appear impenetrably clever. Sokal proved that they are, in fact, quite dim, not to mention humourless, never once smelling a rat in his analyses of “gender encoding in fluid mechanics”, or “de[con]structive quantum field theory”. As a pin-sharp parody of academic jargon, it has never been equalled. Better still, when the hoax was revealed, the editors of the journal were unconcerned, arguing that it was still a “symptomatic document”.

Katsoulis is a wonderfully wise and witty cicerone through the luxuriant ­jungles of literary fraudulence. Telling Tales is a delight from start to finish, right down to the cheeky cover, a barefaced rip-off of the old Penguin paperback design, stamped Cuckoo Books, and then, in tiny print on the back, offering “­apologies to Sir Allen Lane”.

John Sutherland - The Times

Melissa Katsoulis’s history of literary hoaxes is packaged in a witty hoax of its own. Its cover looks, to the casual eye, like the old-fashioned Penguin on your shelf. Look more closely, and it’s a “Cuckoo Book” and, alongside the faux ornithological insignia, there’s the strapline “complete fakery”. The publishers apologise, humbly, to Sir Allen Lane (inventor of the famous paperback line) in tiny print on the back jacket. Fooled you, though.

She offers an entertaining historical riff through forgeries from the “wonderful boy” Chatterton (who took arsenic when his medieval poems were exposed as fake) to James Frey (who, almost as bad, had to confess all on Oprah).

Katsoulis stretches her category somewhat— are the Hitler Diaries or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion literary hoaxes? But her crisp summaries are thought-provoking. Principally: why is it if Bernie Madoff forges stock-market returns (and makes himself a billionaire) it’s a “crime”, but if James Frey concocts lies about his addictions (and makes himself a millionaire) it’s a “hoax”?

As interesting as the motives of a hoaxer is the suckerdom of those being hoaxed. When, in 1969, George MacDonald Fraser published the first of his Flashman books a quarter of the American reviewers thought the great cad was an historical character. One went so far as to claim that the Flashman archive was “the most important discovery since the Boswell Papers”. Fraser confessed himself “appalled ... I’d never supposed that it would fool anybody.” But, as the proverb says, there’s one born every minute and a goodly number buy books.

Emmanuelle Smith - Financial Times

Katsoulis’s compelling compendium of con artists opens with 18th-century trickster William Lauder, a bitter, failed writer who set out to ruin the reputation of John Milton by fabricating evidence that he was a plagiarist.

Some deceptions inTelling Tales are less straightforward. Binjamin Wilkomirski provoked fury with his false Holocaust memoir, Fragments, in 1995. In fact, he (real name Bruno Grosjean; not Jewish) did have an abusive childhood – although not in concentration camps. What seems to be a despicable deception is explained as the workings of an “emotionally fragile man”.

Other purveyors of the literary hoax include James Frey, whose graphic account of addiction and rehab even fooled Oprah Winfrey; JT Leroy, the teenage boy prostitute who was actually a middle-aged woman; and Tom Carew, the SAS reject who reinvented himself as an SAS expert.

Colin Waters - The Herald

What happens? The variety of literary hoaxes fascinates, from righteous hoaxers to the sad cases after fame, such as JT Leroy, “the cross-dressing teenage rent boy and junkie” who was actually “a struggling musician in her forties”. And let’s not forget the money grubbers, like the fakers of Hitler’s diaries.

Any good? Telling Tales is a brisk, amusing run-through of the many famous, sometimes obscure, cases of literary counterfeiters.

In her own words “Regardless of Beatrice Sparks outing herself as the ‘editor’ and considerable flesher-outer of Go Ask Alice, the book continues to this day to be read as pure fact. There is everything about the look of it and the words ‘diary’ and ‘Anonymous’ on the cover to suggest to a thrill-seeking teenager it is real, and nothing to suggest that it is the weird propaganda of a smart old lady you might think would be more at home flower arranging than writing about drug-fuelled sex sessions.”

Brandon Robshaw - Independent on Sunday

Melissa Katsoulis's entertaining account of literary hoaxes from the ancient world to the present day covers all three main kinds of hoax: the "genuine" hoax, that is to say the hoax that was never intended to be discovered (the Hitler diaries, the Ossian poems); the mock hoax, where a writer adopts a persona to create a new literary voice, such as James Norman Hall's invention of the 10-year-old poet Fern Gravel; and, most deliciously of all, the entrapment hoax, perpetrated to make a fool of a specific target.

Among the latter are the Ern Malley poems, which took the Australian literary world by storm in the 1930s; Alan Sokal's placing of an essay full of scientific-sounding gibberish with the postmodern cultural-studies journal Social Text to expose the intellectual pretensions of the "pomo" crowd; and Bevis Hiller's stupendous hoax on his rival, Betjeman biographer AN Wilson, inveigling him into publishing a spurious love letter which acrostically spelt out "AN Wilson is a shit."

The book could have been better proof-read (neither Katsoulis nor her editor knows what "enervated" means) but apart from that, it's a joy to read.

Ian Thomson - The Spectator

In this diverting, well-written history of deceitful and counterfeit literature through the ages, Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis chronicles a variety of fraudsters and fibsters, and their motives for hoodwinking the public. The earliest known literary hoaxer was the philosopher Dionysus the Renegade, who inserted a number of unflattering acrostics — ‘HERACLES IS IGNORANT OF LETTERS AND IS NOT ASHAMED OF HIS IGNORANCE’ — into his trumpery Sophocles play, Parthenopaeus.

Dionysus had acted in a spirit of mischief. Recent spoofers have been motivated more by the promise of celebrity. In 2001, Michael Gambino published his bestselling memoir, The Honoured Society, which purported to reveal the ‘innermost workings’ of the American Cosa Nostra. In ghost-written journalese the author described a 12-year apprenticeship in pornography, strip clubs and cocaine-dealing, and claimed descent from the feared Gambino family of New York.

Unfortunately Mr Gambino was a fraud. Michael Budaj — his real name — was a Chicago factory-hand of German immigrant origin. All his life he had idolised Cosa Nostra wiseguys, and coveted their camel- hair overcoats and custom-made shoes. Long after Budaj/Gambino’s unmasking, interestingly, ‘insider crime memoirs’ by self-proclaimed Mafia hustlers, hoods and other gangland cuties continued to flood American bookshops. There will always be another dissembler to fill Gambino’s shoes, Katsoulis suggests; and the publishers will make him an offer he can’t refuse.

Elsewhere, Katsoulis considers revenge as a motive for hoaxing. In 2006, John Betjeman’s official biographer, Bevis Hillier, concealed the insult ‘A. N. WILSON IS A SHIT’ in a cod Betjeman love-letter which he submitted to his rival biographer under the name ‘Eve de Harbden’ (Ever Been Had); the letter was unthinkingly included by Wilson in the first edition of his life of the poet.

Who has not tried a leg-pull at some time? Twenty years ago I invented a Mediterranean island for a guidebook on Italy I had been commissioned to write. Palinura (population 150) had been named after the captain of Aeneas’s ship, who apparently drowned at sea somewhere off the coast of Sicily. To my astonishment, the Palinura hoax was later reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, in other guidebooks on Italy, among them the Rough Guide, who said the island was accessible by hydrofoil. I owe an apology to those who tried to get to the island.

The Hitler Diaries rank as an egregious hoax (‘Must get tickets for the Olympic games for Eva’), as do the Ossian poems and William Ireland’s Shakespeare papers. Katsoulis might have mentioned Graham Greene, who in 1953 co-founded the spoof Anglo-Texan society — a prank which got out of control when enthusiastic Texans queued up to sign as members. Other of the fraudsters here ended their lives tragically. Earlier this year, in January 2009, the phoney SAS memoirist Tom Carew was found dead in an Antwerp garage lock-up, a couple of years after Newsnight had exposed his blockbuster Jihad! as a fake. Carew was a Walter Mitty-type fantasist, suggests Katsoulis, for whom suicide offered an alternative to ignominy.

No less a fantasist, Thomas Chatterton committed suicide in 1770 by taking arsenic, apparently reduced to despair by poverty and his own exposure as a forger. (A decade earlier, Chatterton had ‘discovered’ the work of the non-existent 15th-century Bristol poet Thomas Rowley, and even had it published.) Happily, he was resuscitated posthumously by the Romantics, for whom he was ‘the marvellous Boy’. Others have been less indulgent of literary forgers. One of the most famous of all 20th-century hoaxes — the fabricated life and works of the Australian modernist poet Ern Malley — left its intended hoaxee outraged and embittered. Still the world would have been a worse off place without Malley (or Palinura, for that matter): long live fibbers and their fibs.

Olivia Lang - The Observer

...Thank heavens, then, for Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis's genial history of forgeries, hoaxes and general skulduggery in the world of books. Katsoulis has made valiant attempts to apply a scholarly framework to her collection of tall tales and their tellers, but what really comes across is her pleasure at their wayward, wicked schemes. Many of the hoaxers are tragic figures, too broke or lowly to win literary renown by ordinary methods; too talented or dogged to give up. Some are more malicious, like the money-grabbing Holocaust hoaxers whose false witness has distressing consequences for real survivors. A surprising number are Australian or have absent fathers. Among the latter category is that most famous of forgers, William Ireland, who created a seemingly endless supply of Shakespeariana, starting with a mortgage deed and culminating in a self-penned and apparently dreadful play, solely, Katsoulis claims, to woo his critical father.

Often it seems astonishing that the stories were ever believed. Take Grey Owl, a tanned, moccasin-wearing middle-class Englishman who passed for decades as a Native American, even lecturing to the Queen on the perils of industrialisation. Then there's Marlo Morgan, a greedy new ager whose Mutant Message Down Under cashed in on her claims to have been kidnapped and initiated by a mysterious band of Aboriginals. The book made her a millionaire, despite being denounced by real Aboriginal elders, not to mention being "based, seemingly, on a smattering knowledge about Native Americans and a thorough grounding in Crocodile Dundee".

While Katsoulis has little patience with such exploits, she delights in tricks designed to puncture pomposity or expose the self-regard of a particular artistic or literary scene. These include the acclaimed modernist poet whose entire oeuvre turned out to have been tossed off over a few stray afternoons and the Greek literary hero who became renowned across Canada, later revealed to have been played by a "dentist in a funny hat". As for the stooges, it turns out that Oprah is a serial victim and James Frey wasn't the first false misery memoirist to win her over with his crocodile tears.

The most delicious story here is also one of the most recent. In 2004, Bevis Hillier, the venerable biographer of John Betjeman, was horrified to discover his arch rival, AN Wilson, was also planning a biography of the poet. Spotting an opportunity to pay Wilson back for a series of insults and slights over the years, he decided to forge a love letter from Betjeman to a (real) woman by the name of Honor Tracy.

This sexy missive, which included the immortal line "Tinkerty-tonk, my darling", was in fact a cunning acrostic, the first letter of each sentence spelling out a hidden message to his enemy. To Hillier's "jig-dancing, air-punching" glee, the letter duly appeared in Wilson's biography. And the message encoded within it? AN WILSON IS A SHIT. I expect to see it anthologised in Fake Love Letters of Great Men before the year is out.

The Oldie

There have been hoaxes in literature since Sophocles was faked in 400 BC. They have included fake poets, fake Shakespeare plays, fakes lives among Aborigines, Red Indians and even wolves. A fake Canadian Apache called Grey Owl was even welcomed at Buckingham Palace. And most famously Hitler was faked as a most unconvincing diarist. This neat little book, got up to resemble a second-hand vintage Penguin, is an anthology of hoaxes, both historical and present day.

By now enough ‘misery memoirs’ have been outed as spurious to give the genre a bad name. Mostly American in this collection, they include James Frey, whose lurid account of life as a crack addict ‘kept Oprah awake at night’. Having been featured and later denounced on her show you would think she would be wary of any others. But, pointed out Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday, ‘the Patron Saint of America has an unerring instinct for plugging misery memoirs that turn out to be fakes.’ He lists six, ending with the smiling elderly couple who had fallen in love as children at Buchenwald concentration camp – though on opposite sides of the perimeter fence.

Young Herman Rosenblat strolled along it every day to meet a little girl waiting for him with an apple to sustain him. Later they met again by chance on a New York street, married and now posed as twinkling pensioners for Oprah. Their book, Angel of the Fence, was about to be published, until real camp survivors pointed out that strolling along the perimeter at Buchenwald earned you not an apple but a bullet.

Why do people invent a spurious past as a Holocaust victim? Money, obviously, given the eager market. But some, (including Herman) were real survivors who felt unfairly ignored since their stories of suffering were too ordinary. Why do people want to believe such stories, however unlikely? The author, writing in the Independent, thinks them ‘akin to pornography... something edgy they have never seen but want to identify with (safely) for a while.’

Aimee Shalan – The Guardian

This compilation of literary deceptions explores the amazing lengths people will go to wilfully misconstruct the printed word, from Hitler’s Diaries, bogus Shakespeare documents and an “autobiography” of Howard Hughes to other less famous or long-forgotten literary frauds.

The cheekiest trick has to be that of a New York DJ who in 1956 got his late-night listeners to create an imaginary masterpiece by asking bookshops for an author they knew didn’t exist. In no time people were claiming to have read it, with one college student actually bagging a B+ for an essay on the author.

Ultimately the book is dulled by its formulaic structure, and barely skims the surface of the psychology of hoaxing and the sheer audacity of the works that fooled publishers, readers and critics alike. But it also touches on the sadness surrounding the majority of hoaxes, which are often connected with rejection, bitterness and a sorry lack of self-respect. It also reveals, bizarrely, that Australia turns out to be the biggest producer of hoaxes.

Emily Firetog - The Irish Times

Most bibliophiles can recount some modern literary hoaxes – New York sensation JT LeRoy, the counterfeit Shakespeare papers, the forged Hitler diaries, and the recent Oprah-tricking James Frey debacle. Telling Tales recounts the tantalising details of literary hoaxes, entrapments, and fakeries from the 18th century to the present.

Katsoulis describes the origin, success, and eventual downfall of each hoax – there is just enough detail to be shocked and amazed at the lengths to which some authors have gone for literary celebrity. Though there isn’t much psycho-cultural examination of these hoaxers, Katsoulis’s brief, quippy insights into the circumstances that allow these ruses to mature allow for due reflection: whether it is Australian white-men proffering themselves as authors of Aboriginal narratives or the Holocaust narratives written by fantasists, the industry of reading, writing, and publishing has become a route to financial gain and fame. It’s a worthwhile read for literary trivia too.

Katherine Wilson - The Age

"What is it about Australia?" asks British journalist Melissa Katsoulis in her witty, elegant page-turner, Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes. "A country whose ratio of literary hoaxes to genuine literary successes is so high must surely be guarding a fascinating secret." Her flair for a good yarn, coupled with scholarly insight, makes this book a relentlessly entertaining romp through literary hoaxes since the 18th century. Of Australia, Katsoulis speculates that race issues, coupled with a perception of Australia as a backwater, influence our hoax culture. That Norma Khouri and Mario Morgan's hoaxes were exposed by Australians "proves that the country is nothing like the intellectual black hole they narrowmindedly assumed it would be; but it does suggest that the Antipodean creative scene allows things to happen that other countries may not".

All this country's great literary hoaxes, she contends, have a race element. While this rings true in her intriguing accounts of the Kulmatrie, Khouri, Culotta, Morgan and Demidenko hoaxes, the view that Ern Malley was created "by a pair of Anglo-Saxon fogies who wanted to poke fun at a trendy Jewish poetaster" is less convincing, though Katsoulis gives sharp insights into the credulous cultures enabling hoaxes.

"Not all hoaxes are equal," explains Katsoulis. Like US academic Brian McHale, she classes them in three categories. First are "genuine hoaxes", a delightful oxymoron used to describe "dishonest literary creations which are never intended to be exposed", and written by those desperate for recognition. Second are "entrapment hoaxes", whose "intention is to lure a particular academic, publisher or literary community with a prank text" and then to reveal it. These (the kind promoted in McIntyre's book) remind its "of the value of play and theatre in the often selfimportant business of publishing and academia".

The third group consists of "mock hoaxes" in which a writer pretends to be another, or anonymous. Whichever way, "the world would be a much duller place without them".