Since there’s never a shortage of fakery, the title of “the modern era’s most successful literary hoax” would surely be hotly contested. The Feb. 23 Village Voice claims it isn’t.
Writer Philip Nobile bestows it on the late Alex Haley and “Roots,” the best-seller that inspired the mini-series and gained a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.
Doubts about the work’s authenticity surfaced after its 1976 publication. Haley settled one plagiarism lawsuit for $650,000 just before a trial was to climax with a judge’s verdict. Here, the judge discloses he would have ruled against Haley.
Haley’s public image, especially among blacks, is an honorable one. But Nobile, relying in part on many previously unreleased Haley papers and audiotapes donated to the University of Tennessee, as well as interviews with participants in Haley’s research, portrays him as an adroit scam artist.
He makes a strong case that Haley fabricated key moments in the book, including his 1967 encounter with a Gambian villager who, a tape indicates, did not recite the lineage of the Kunta Kinte clan as portrayed in the book.
The article offers other examples and concludes with word of a 1990 interview with Haley by Charles Galbraith, a New York genealogist, who had gone from admirer to skeptic of Haley’s work. Haley defended himself vigorously, but then perhaps lifted a curtain as he conceded possible “carelessness” and being “caught up in a sweep.”
“The quest for a symbolic history of a people, just swept me like a twig atop a rushing water. It was sort of like riding a tiger. . . . You always remember, you ride this tiger and the crowd’s cheering, always remember if you fall off the tiger, you’s eaten.”
Quickly: Two wonderful profiles can be found in the March 1 New Yorker, where David Remnick captures the essential Murray Kempton, 75, a wise and idiosyncratic (he rides around town on a bike) master of irony who writes for Newsday and is New York’s best columnist, and in the Feb. 22 Sports Illustrated, where Gary Smith shows the glory, patriotism and “cold, patient fury” of Mexico’s Julio Cesar Chavez, the undefeated super-lightweight champ who is the world’s finest fighter. . . . March Country Living may inspire envy among fans of the arts-and-crafts period of design (roughly 1903-1916), which includes framelike use of oak trim to highlight spaces, as the monthly shows the Asheville, N.C., home of Bruce Johnson, an authority on the period. . . . March House Beautiful offers this tip on fending off air pollution and the sick building syndrome in one’s home, from Bill Wolverton, formerly NASA’s top environmental scientist: install common house plants, including dieffenbachia, English ivy and chrysanthemum. They absorb carbon dixoide and dangerous gases such as formaldehyde. . . . The winter literary quarterly Raritan includes writer Linda Dowling’s “Esthetes and Effeminati,” an overview on the “new language of moral legitimacy” for male love that she traces to the late Victorian period in England and writers including Oscar Wilde ($6, 31 Mine St., New Brunswick, N.J. 08903). Meanwhile March Atlantic has writer Chandler Burr’s look at growing research that suggests, but doesn’t prove, a link between biology and sexual orientation. Elsewhere, just when you thought it was safe to go out and not be bothered by debate over Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” writer Edward Jay Epstein claims even greater distortions than noted before. . . . In January-February Tikkun, the Jewish critique of politics and culture, Svi Shapiro, an education professor at the University of North Carolina and man of the left, concedes that “the Right’s campaign to `return to basics’ contains, at its heart, critical insights into the psychological, moral and social context in which parents face their own future and that of their children” ($7, 5100 Leona St., Oakland, Calif. 94619-3002). . . . Moral standardbearer or “club crank?” January-February Harvard profiles the university’s best-known conservative, government professor Harvey Mansfield Jr. ($4.50, 7 Ware St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4001). . . . The Winter Public Interest presents Heywood Sanders, an urban-administration specialist at Trinity University, arguing that we don’t really have an infrastructure crisis and that our problem is not lack of funds but priorities which result in stadiums being built rather than potholes fixed ($6.50, 1112 16th St. N.W., Suite 530, Washington, D.C. 20036).
