This has been a bad week for bestselling authors. JT Leroy was unmasked as a 40 year old frustrated she-rocker rather than a 20 something male former child prostitute turned low key literary sensation, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces turned out to be a million little pieces of crap, Augusten Burroughs’ integrity continues to be challenged. It’s not a new phenomena- it’s generally believed by biographers that the Marquis de Sade was a pasty half-impotent pornographer rather than adventurer, that Casanova and John Smith both grossly exaggerated their adventures, etc…
Here at the Dope, however, we have incredible contacts and investigative skills, and I think we should devote our time to even more literary unmaskings. Here’s a few I uncovered with some googling and phone calls and “people who know people” interviews just today:
Les Miserables- heartwarming story of a man who spends 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to save his dying nephew, then turns his life around as an industrialist and foster father. Or is it?
According to my sources, the real Jean Valjean didn’t steal a loaf of bread but was arrested for rolling, egging and doing “biological stuff” on the front yard of his high school girlfriend when she left the prom with his Junior Justice Team rival Archie Javert. It turns out it wasn’t nineteen years at hard labor but one afternoon at a Scared Straight talk, where in fact he wet himself and passed out when told his prison name would be “Madamoiselle Thang”. It wasn’t a glass factory but an online discount porn site, and as for the little waif he adopted, she wasn’t 8 but 16 and he said she was his foster daughter when he got pulled over for pot possession and had to explain why he had a minor in his car. Makes a difference, doesn’t it?
The Red Badge of Courage- turns out Private Henry Fleming never went anywhere near the Battle of Chancellorsville. He spent the entire war as a correspondent for High Times stationed in Dupont Circle and bought the story off of a legless vet for a $.50 greenback and half a lid of Piedmont Peace Pipe filler, then started saying “Yeah, me too!” whenever a group of vets were gathered exchanging experiences.
Moby Dick- Ishmael finally admitted on his deathbed that the closest he ever came to a whaling vessel was the time he fought William Howard Taft for the last can of tuna fish at the A&P. He concocted the whole story as an excuse to sue the Pequod’s insurance company when it was reported there were no survivors. Point of fact: the Pequod’s captain was not a one-legged obsessed man named Ahab but was Caleb “Jo-jack” Buckaloo, a cross-dressing Shriner with a fondness for Mai Tais that ultimately led to the ship’s sinking when he got drunk and tried to harpoon a Cunard senior’s cruise vessel. Father Mapple really did say he remembered Ishmael at the whaler’s chapel that day, but the fact that he swore he saw him sitting between Joan of Arc and a ladder full of leprechauns cast aspersions on his testimony.
Great Expectations- there were so many problems here, but the fact that there’s no record of a Miss Havisham ever having been jilted or burned to death, no convict named Magwitch ever having escaped and that “Philip” was born Abner Pirrip and by all accounts chose the name “Pip” because he loved to dance to Gladys Knight albums all pale when compared to the fact that high school records, birth certificates and tax records show he wasn’t an English orphan but was in fact born in an affluent suburb of Cleveland, Ohio with parents who disowned him for an incident involving a stolen Suburban and a naked male dance instructor.
So does anybody else have literary sources who can set the records straight?
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