The fine line between Oh and Crap
Get it while it's not.
In a Bark discussion about perceived success in writing, several people wrote that “making it” involved being published by a “reputable” house, be it big or little. I figure Henry Holt & Co. falls under this category, big division: It’s been publishing famous literary writers since 1866. It published the people who won last year’s Nobel Prize and Man Booker Prize, for a couple of instances.
Holt has found itself cleaning up after committing what I’d think would be a reputation-besmirching major error in past weeks, as it stopped printing Charles Pellegrino’s nonfiction book The Last Train From Hiroshima, about the atomic bombing of Japan. It had come to light that many of Pellegrino’s facts were shaky and some – especially those obtained from a source who apparently fabricated his own presence on the bomb-dropping mission – were complete fraud.
Pellegrino’s editor at Holt, John Macrae, told a New York Times reporter that “the difference between fact and fiction is a very fine line.”
Um, no. Whether someone was on the mission is not a very fine line. He was or he wasn’t. In this case, he wasn’t, and Pellegrino now humbly acknowledges that he was taken for a ride by the source, who is now dead. The old man had been a firefighter, see, and those guys are usually so trustworthy.
So Pellegrino is a little less reputable than he was a few weeks ago, when he was enjoying the fact that James Cameron had bought the rights to make The Last Train a movie. (And before people starting noticing that Pellegrino’s Ph.D was maybe not so real; these guys start to unravel fast, don’t they, once someone bothers to ask one question?) But what about Holt? What makes a publishing house reputable, beyond its backlist? What responsibility does it bear regarding the content of its books?
Among former firefighter Joseph Fuoco’s claims, according to Pellegrino: The Hiroshima bomb was a dud. There was an accident on Tinian Island before the bombing that diminished the weapon’s power. This claim should have been perceived as a pretty big scoop, running so counter to decades of history as it did. The Times reporter says Holt did ask a number of questions about the book’s content, but its questions centered mostly on the human drama – the stories of the Japanese victims who’d survived both atomic bombings – and not so much the “breaking news” part that ended up being false. When a newspaper or magazine journalist screws something up, readers rightly ask whether her editors were asleep at the switch. This size of the dud-bomb oversight suggests to me that it didn’t even occur to Holt’s editor that the breaking news was such, that he was not so much asleep at the switch as not qualified to be there for this particular book. He should have at least had some backup with a better grasp of history.
I remember James Frey’s and Margaret Seltzer’s names, but not their publishers’. Yet writers hinge the measure of their working lives’ success or failure on whether such “reputable” publishers choose them to rank among their chosen. I think it is Holt’s responsibility and ethical duty, if it’s purporting to put forth facts into the world, to take at least the obvious steps to ensure their accuracy. While do-it-yourself publishing changes the landscape, reputable publishers still have a lot of power, not only over writers’ lives, but over the quality of the marketplace.
What I find also especially irksome: This “the difference between fact and fiction is a very fine line” line that Pellegrino’s editor has co-opted for a completely inappropriate situation, rendering something that is true into bullshit. The fine line can be part of the art, something to be explored and put to use by nonfiction writers who can meanwhile acknowledge what they’re doing. It’s not an excuse for laziness or for straight-up lying, which book-buying regular people who are less concerned about dancing on the fine line will identify and take offense at. Pellegrino’s errors were reported to Holt by readers. Who are, at least to Holt, the point.
Phew. I think I’m done now.
Good post. I hadn’t heard about the “Hiroshima bomb was a dud line.”
Did it actually make it into the book? If so, that’s insane. Had the editor not read John Hershey’s Hiroshima? Seen the goddamn pictures? This makes me mad too, and I’m a poet, so I’m supposed to be frolicking in flowers and petting a lamb while dying of consumption.
I did not know about the lambs. I will now become a poet.
Yes, the “dud” parts appeared in the book. The claim was that the bomb worked, just not nearly as “well” as it should have because of an accident before the big blast.
Stay away from the lambs. Contrary to popular belief they are not cute and cuddly (especially if you have a steel wool lamb, like I do.)
And they swear more than old drunks. And they keep you up all night, counting each other. In fact, I think my lambs are autistic; they sound like Rainman.
Despite all this, everyone loves them. That’s probably because they have really good PR people–goats.
Anyway.
Note to self: Don’t dash off wanna-be witty comments or you too can sound insensitive to those with autism. I’m a jerk. Sorry, world.
Who should really be offended are the goats.
I’m always struck by the defensive posture of the publishing industry on these cases — basically arguing that they can’t be liable for the truth of what they publish on even a very minimal level, and taking an extreme, illogical line about the impossibility of identifying “truth” — like an undergrad who’s landed on a radical notion: what is truth, anyway, man?
I mean, OK — people see things through their own prisms and memory is faulty. But the fundamental difference between fact and fiction — despite all the efforts to over-complicate it — is not all that fine. It may be hard to recognize whether someone’s recollection is fudged or spruced up or outright falsified. Our own memories may partake of a little fiction and a little fact. And i like a lot of art that explores this line — a line of inquiry that is old and venerable, by the way, and yet seemingly always introduced as daring and experimental.
But the DIFFERENCE between fact and fiction — between the invented and the actual — is not a fine line at all. It’s a big-ass fucking line, especially when it comes to historical events with many witnesses, and every time these discussions go traipsing down the path that Henry Holt is trying to take, I want to hurl.
A publishing house ought to have at least the editing chops of, say, a magazine. Or even a smallish newspaper. Or at least the decency to apologize correctly.
Anyway, right on, Adrian. I’ve just restated your entire post, fueled with my own irritation….
That — the notion that the blurring of this line has just recently been invented, or is, as you say, “daring and experimental” — is what makes me mad about David Shields, if I recall correctly the time I had to read that whole manuscript because of Sam. Even though I really don’t ever want to talk about David Shield again, because I think he adds nothing about nonfiction vs. fiction that writers haven’t already known for a very long time and manage to pull off without being liars or lazy …
Maybe that Holt editor had just read Shields’ book and figured this was as good a time as any to haul out the blurry line. Really, you could apply it to many situations. “Honey, did you put gas in the car?” “Well, I might remember doing that.”
Adrian, I enjoyed this post very much. You are asking us to examine some important ethical questions–about how much responsibility editors and publishers have, what their obligations are and should be.
This poignantly addresses one of the main issues of the growing phenomenon of self-publishing as well, because a self-published book making this claim would be regarded by even the least attentive reader as extremely suspect, likely classified as having as much merit as books that deny the holocaust. I feel Henry Holt is more to blame than the author, as they most certainly have the resources and a serious professional obligation to check this shit out.
Well, I’d say the author has at least an equal professional obligation. He’s basically doing a big piece of literary journalism, and checking stuff out is a big part of that. He’s also more immersed in the details of the work, from start to finish, so he’d be more attuned to discrepancies and inaccuracies he finds along the way. But every journalist needs a line of defense, and this one was inadequate, to say the least, considering the size of the error.