For those of us to make their livings with the written word, stories such as the J. T. Leroy drama pose a dilemma. On one hand, we understand the creative needs of an artist and how “the system” can prevent them from being met; on the other, citizens in a free society must be held accountable for their actions. It’s a conflict that’s played a role in the Casey Serin saga, and shows up whenever someone crosses the line and scrambles to rationalize themselves.
Personally, I don’t feel ambiguous at all about Leroy, aka Laura Albert:
A Manhattan jury decided Friday that Albert had defrauded a production company that bought the movie rights to an autobiographical novel marketed as being based on LeRoy’s life.
The federal jury, after a short deliberation, awarded $116,500 to Antidote International Films Inc.
The San Francisco author, who went to strange lengths to hide her identity behind the nonexistent LeRoy, condemned the jury’s decision, saying it had ominous implications for artists.
“This goes beyond me,” Albert said. “Say an artist wants to use a pseudonym for political reasons, for performance art. This is a new, dangerous brave new world we are in.”
Then legally change your name, Laura. It’s one thing to perform art under a psuedonym; that’s been an honored tradition in art since time eternal. You signed contracts and filed for copyrights under a fictitious name. That’s fraud. There’s a not-so-subtle difference.
On my office wall, above my desk, I have the following quotation framed. It’s from Salman Rushdie - a guy who went to the wall and suffered to protect the integrity of his art, without for a moment sacrificing truth in the process. I have it there to remind me why I’m in this business.
“Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.”
Whenever someone like Laura Albert or James Frey attempts to pass off flat-out lies for art, and then to tell the rest of us that THIS is art, I think of Salman Rushdie. And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And the estimated 1,000 writers killed, threatened or imprisoned every year around the world, in defense of that unimportant-looking room.
People like Laura Albert is an insult to their sacrifices, and a threat to what they sacrifice for.
That’s a great point. It’s amazing how so many people are being conned again by another story and confused that this is an issue around a pseudonym. Somehow it is mental illness and performance art at the same time as well.
Left by michelle on July 13th, 2007