Pants on fire. Never. Good. Thing. (Can Cameron movie option survive implosion of Pellegrino's Hiroshima book?)
Last Train From Hiroshima, out from Henry Holt in January, is Charles Pellegrino's deep dive into the personal stories behind this pivotal moment in history, including gut-wrenching stories from survivors and eyewitness accounts from those who flew the mission. From the article that appeared in the NYT Saturday:
Mr. Fuoco, who died in 2008 at age 84 and lived in Westbury, N.Y., never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer, Mr. Corliss’s family says. They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor.But that's a lot easier said than done. I can't speculate on strain to Pellegrino's relationship with Cameron (he served as sci advisor on Cameron's current smash Avatar), but they seem to go back quite a way, and frankly, Cameron must know that when you do interview-based research, you never know if that great story you're being told is platinum mine or tar pit.
Facing a national outcry and the Corliss family’s evidence, the author, Charles Pellegrino, now concedes that he was probably duped. In an interview on Friday, he said he would rewrite sections of the book for paperback and foreign editions.
“I’m stunned,” Mr. Pellegrino said. “I liked and admired the guy. He had loads and loads of papers, and photographs of everything.”
The public record has to be repaired, he added. “You can’t have wrong history going out,” he said. “It’s got to be corrected.”
As a memoir guru, I lecture my clients within an inch of their lives about the importance of telling the truth and the futility of thinking one can get away with lying. All oral history is subjective and, to a certain extent, malleable, but I think everybody's mama taught them the blatant difference between being on an airplane over Hiroshima and not being on an airplane over Hiroshima. Obviously, we have to work hard to back everything up with vigilant research, but I'm not sure what an author can do to protect him/herself from someone who'd go so far as to fake documentation.
Meanwhile, I hate the doubt cast on all oral histories every time this happens. At best, I guess it's another cautionary tale.
Comments
I'm thinking a man who collects scrapbooks' worth of documentation has spent so many years revising his own history, he'd long since convinced himself he was telling the truth. It's a slippery slope that begins with a little exaggeration, then a lie to make the story better, and before these people know if, they really do "remembers" the story they've made up.
Not that it isn't wrong....
Thanks for sharing.
The problem here is that it's a SOURCE and not the author who has done the lying, and that's problematic for anyone. It's one reason why, much as I love journalism and interviewing people, I like to stick with "fiction."
I had enough of a taste for this when researching my own novel, which is about pathological lying. In order to make it as believable and credible as possible (a book about lying--credible, ha!), I interviewed people who had brushes with the disorder I'm writing about, and found my way into a big can of worms. I ended up having to delete some people from the bibliography of my dissertation because I didn't even want the association, but it was hard.
A few months ago, I did a comparison in my magazine column of the different POVs of the individuals involved in the Prof. Henry Gates case. In a way, it's kind of scary how our egos paint a picture that's not quite, um, realistic out of a need to be right or perfect.