Cockawhooping Frey into A Million Little Pieces

Richard Watson Gilder's response to the publication of the infamous little magazine Yellow Book:

The amount of attention that this periodical has attracted is proof, if any were needed, that the mountebank in his motley can call the crowd; but is that all the editors of this quarterly and are aiming at? Have they yet to learn that notoriety is not fame?  They claim that the Yellow Book is the embodiment of the modern spirit.  If this is true, then give us the old-fashioned spirit . . . whose aim is to please intelligent people and not to attract attention by "tripping the cockawhoop" in public.

Indeed!  We shall not brook the tripping of such cockawhooping mountebanks as late-period Henry James in our manly American culture!  (With typical restraint, the OED defines "cock-a-hoop" as "drinking without stint" and the various behaviors associated therewith.)  But even though Gilder impresses upon his readers that it is the drunken revelry which offends "us [of] the old-fashioned spirit," the Yellow Book folded in 1897 because of its association with a man whose work it never printed (Oscar Wilde) but with whom it shared an illustrator (Aubrey Beardsley). 

The Yellow Book's unwarranted demise comes to mind today for a very particular reason: the furor over the exaggerated cockawhooping of Oprah darling James Frey.  Look how far we've evolved as a culture.  Once upon a time back when people (even Americans!) were Victorians, thinly veiled autobiographical fictions about ambiguously gendered but patently homosexual aristocrats could put a little magazine out of business. 

In our more evolved culture, you'll be pilloried for lying about a brutal root-canal surgery accomplished sans anesthesia or an airplane trip during which you're bleeding through a hole in cheek while wearing cloths covered "with a colorful  mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood" or kicking a homosexual Catholic priest in the balls fifteen times. 

See what improvements time has wrought?

Before Frey would have been imprisoned for writing about doing what he'd done.  Now some suggest he should go to prison for not having done what he wrote about doing.   (All those people, I should add, skulk around message boards formerly devoted to singing Frey's praises.  Now they want blood . . . but not spit, snot, urine or vomit.  They'll let him keep that.  And his infamy.  He can keep that too.)  There's an interesting marital dilemma at the heart of this concerning Gay Talese, to whom the NY Times turned to for quotations about the ethics of fabrication in books stamped non-fiction, and Nan Talese, whose vanity imprint published Frey's book.  I'll touch upon it later.  Right now I have some self-imposed deadline dissertating to do.

Comments

[Thomas Elrod]

Yeah, many memorists (and I'm thinking mainly about David Eggers here) seem to be writing literary fiction anyway. This isn't a problem, in my opinion, so I don't know what people are fretting about. If the 9/11 Commission Report or a David McCollough book had blatantly forged facts, there would be a problem. But seriously. James Frey? People need to get over themselves. (Partly, I think the problem is that for some reason people perceive a sacred line between memoir and fiction that should not be crossed. I dunno.)