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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, April 23, 2005

THIS WAY TO THE BUZZ,
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN



Every generation gets the literary power couples it deserves, I guess. In the ‘twenties they got Zelda and Scott. Before that there was Mary and Percy Shelley, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the ‘forties, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett reigned, and in the ‘sixties, Sylvia and Ted. The ‘seventies had Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and the ‘nineties, Donald Hall and the marvelous poet Jane Kenyon.

A serious erosion seems to have set in with the turn of the century, however, and what’s left today is the increasingly bizarre Ayelet Waldman/ Michael Chabon coupling.

If the themes among literary couples in earlier decades involved competitive and sometimes destructive aesthetic intensity, or authentic and loving creative partnership, now it’s pretty much all about self-promotion.

Garry Trudeau once wrote that contemporary America is “the only country in the world where failing to promote yourself is regarded as being arrogant,” and a corollary to this is that no conceivable mode of self-promotion is regarded as anything other than admirable around these parts.

So you have Waldman publishing her suicide note on her blog (she didn’t kill herself), and writing in Salon magazine about sex with her husband and the embarrassing little private things that her children do around the house. And you have Chabon giving talks to Jewish groups in which he conjures a holocaust survivor he knew when he was young who turns out to have been a Nazi in hiding. Chabon and his sponsors at these talks insist that it’s clear from his rhetoric that this person, who tattoed numbers on his arm to pass as a concentration camp survivor, is fictive. But one commenter to a website discussion of the controversy remarks:


If you listen to the lecture, it's clear that Chabon called it a memoir, and Maliszewski [the writer who wrote an essay charging Chabon with the fabrication] interviews a lot of people, including a fellow at Nextbook [the sponsoring organization], and all of them except Brogan [the main organizer of the talks] said they believed the Holocaust story to be true. The fellow even says if it's not true, Chabon should be stopped. … Chabon has been going around the country telling a supposedly true story that people are believing in which a real man - CB Colby - is identified as a Nazi propagandist in hiding. And, as Chabon admits, that is a lie. Colby was a children's book author who served in the Air Force Auxillary after WW II, and he's dead now, which is lucky for Chabon. Otherwise, he'd likely have a case of defamation on his hands.


“The particulars of the case,” Scott McLemee writes at Inside Higher Ed, “are not up for dispute. Maliszewski demonstrates that Chabon’s lecture is a fiction. A search of relevant databases confirms that no title called The Book of Hell by Joseph Adler exists, nor was there (as Chabon stated) an expose on the author’s true identity in The Washington Post.” (Take note of McLemee’s comments, also, on Maliszewski’s own history of hoaxing and whether this undermines his case against Chabon.)

McLemee calls Maliszewski’s essay (Maliszewski teaches in the English department at GW, but I’ve never met him) “a nuanced and searching analysis of the relationships between author and audience, between memory and fantasy, between story-telling and truth-telling. Maliszewski’s point is less that Chabon intends to trick his audience than that (for a variety of reasons) his listeners want the story to be true….Nor is the corrosive effect of that desire mitigated by dismissing Chabon’s lecture as a ‘tall tale.’ There was actually someone named C.B. Colby who published a book called Strangely Enough! He wasn’t a Holocaust survivor or a secret Nazi – just a volunteer fireman, library-board member, and author of children’s books. ‘Real life,’ writes Maliszewski, ‘apparently requires exaggerated stakes – a few teaspoons of the Holocaust, say, or some other dramatic supplement to fortify the work’s seriousness.’ ”

United in their commitment to self-promotion, this writing couple appears willing to tell any tale, reveal any secret, for the sake of publicity.


****

Update: I made Chabon David instead of Michael -- I've corrected the name. Thanks to Chris, a reader, for the correction.