By Tim Marchman

Until a couple of weeks ago, I knew James Frey only as the worst writer in the entire world, and this not because I’d read so much as a word he’d ever written, but because of a profile that ran several years ago in the Observer. My wife and I marveled reading about this enormous douchebag who ran around town with a tattoo reminding him, “Fuck the bullshit, it’s time to throw down,” and wondered whether the mysterious source of his income was a trust fund or a gigolo lifestyle. It never occurred to me to connect Frey to the best-selling fake junky memoir, written by an illiterate, that cronies kept telling me to read for its high comic value.

The sad tale of Frey and his exposure as a fraud is supposed, I suppose, to resonate with Significance, of which there is none. Frey is a pornographer, his publishers are fools, and his admiring readers are raincoat-wearers. Anyone shocked to find that a tenth-rate Norman Mailer manqué (one without the balls to stab any defenseless women or write explicitly racist essays, even) invented his own life in a bid for acceptance and money is invited to play cards with the Press editorial board any time. Anyone who finds evidence here of great truths about American Culture is invited to contract a chronic but non-fatal condition. SARS, perhaps.

While there may be no great truths about Our Culture here, though, there are some worth noting about writing. The upsetting thing about all this, after all, is not that gullible saps were defrauded, but that no one credible has risen up in favor of fiction-as-fact, one of the noblest literary forms.

As anyone who stayed awake and sober through Freshman English can vouch, the line between modern fiction and what we’d now recognize as journalism was, in the forms’ respective infancy and adolescence, nearly non-existent. Had you, the 17th-century reader, taken the Journal of a Plague Year as sober reportage of fact, DeFoe would have congratulated himself on a job properly done, and set off to craft more lively and salacious detail for his next work; had you, the 19th century reader, taken American Notes as sober reportage of fact, Dickens would have snickered and counted his bankroll. Both men (and their non-fool readers) recognized that the difference between fiction and reportage is often nil, and that to achieve certain effects each form must assume the other’s traits or even guise.

I’m not at all suggesting that the difference between fact and fancy is a matter of perspective, or that there is no way to discern between one and the other. Frey claimed he did things he did not do, and he is thus a liar. (So are many of his memoirizing peers, something that will doubtless come out sooner rather than later.) What I am suggesting is that there’s a real place for fiction that masquerades straight-facedly as fact, and defies the reader to claim it is not. Emile Zola, Ernest Hemingway, James Agee and jackanape Mailer (among many, many others), all worked within this tradition; the difference between the former three and the latter, aside from matters of talent and inspiration, is that Mailer and his peers like Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe did their work leering and winking and mugging all the while, calling attention to their own cleverness and bravado. Their generation conned people into thinking that using fictional techniques and conceits to describe largely imagined events was an acceptable thing to do, so long as the end-product was labeled a non-fiction novel or some such. The only thing wrong here was the implication that erecting a billboard reading, “THIS IS NOT TO BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE” was the only acceptable way to go about writing something fake that was meant to be taken as real.

Ambiguity is a fine thing, in fiction and journalism as elsewhere in life, and it’s one thing that’s been lost as reporting has become a white-collar trade with the concern for pedigree and Apollonian ethics therein implied. A.J. Liebling’s brilliant essay on the Jollity Building, to which our David S. Hirschman ran a lovely homage in last week’s paper, was a work of pastiche and imagination as well as straight reportage; were he to publish it today in the New Yorker, he’d be drummed out of his job within weeks. In the essence of its form—lies, truths and half-truths, meant to be taken as the description of real events—Liebling’s piece was no different than Frey’s fraudulent, Oprah-friendly memoirs. And any criticism of what Frey did that doesn’t allow a place for A.J. Liebling is wrong.

So while I offer no defense of Frey, who seems at best a conniving carny and at worst a plagiarist (see John Dolan’s witty, ahead-of-the-curve dispatches at eXile.ru for details), it seems to me that our assembled deep thinkers are missing the simple point. Frey ought to be pilloried, not for his deceptions, but for not having had the talent or ambition to make anything worthwhile out of them. Had he told lies every bit as bold in writing anything with a hundredth the accuracy and verve of A Movable Feast or Kafka Was the Rage, there would be nothing here worth discussing. 

The problem here isn’t that Frey’s a liar. It’s that he’s a talentless cunt.

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