Telling Tales (12 page)

It would be another two years before the author’s true identity was revealed, but all this time, while Nasdijj was basking in the recognition and respect of literary America, there was a very scared, very white, writer of gay porn from Michigan wondering where on earth this was all going to end. Should he confess? Should he apologize? Should he simply say that after a series of rejections from mainstream publishers and a spell on an Indian reservation, the character of Nasdijj just came to him, fully formed and ready to write?

Tim Barrus was ill in hospital when that first letter of acceptance came from the editor of
Esquire
in the late nineties. He never thought his work would be taken on, he later admitted, but with a wife and daughter to care for and only the money from his pornographic writings and occasional work as a carer, he wasn’t going to turn down the chance of a career which could pay his medical bills and set him up in his old age.

Besides, this wasn’t only about money. Although it is hard to know much about the real Barrus because interviewers and friends all agree he has an unusual relationship with reality and identity at the best of times, it is clear that his emotional needs were as pressing as any financial ones. Perhaps the most revealing insight into this strange, many-faced man comes from an extended interview he agreed to give to
Esquire
seven years after that magazine broke him as a new talent.

In it, he apologizes for deceiving people, and claims his years as Nasdijj were ‘Awful. It’s hard to have to lie to people. It’s creepy.’ But he also says: ‘When you create a character, create someone with an emotional life, you see the stories through his eyes. So to me, he was very real.’ He also reveals a trauma that could well have been at the heart of the whole hoax: just like the protagonist of
Blood Flows Like a River Through My Dreams
, he had indeed adopted a sick child, back in the seventies. He and his wife had loved the child to distraction but his behavioural problems – which Barrus claims were a result of undiagnosed foetal alcohol syndrome, like the boy in the story – were so severe that the couple ended up giving him back to the state. The child’s name was Tommy, just like the one in the book. The terrible guilt over this act would not only break up Barrus’ marriage but propel him on into a lifelong habit of assuming various extreme personae as an alternative to simply living the decidedly un-playful life of a failed writer grieving for his lost son.

Such details of his life that are known support this. There was the article he submitted to a fishing magazine: an invented autobiographical story in which he claimed that as a boy he sailed to Cuba with his father and fished with Hemingway. Jack Fritscher, the founder of one of the adult magazines Barrus wrote for, who claims to know him well, told
Esquire
that Barrus has, in the past, greeted him in the character of a strange Indian man or a naked leather-bound bondage-freak. He had even suspected that the author’s second wife, Tina, was merely a figment of the imagination until he saw proof that she was indeed a real woman: ‘It’s not a question of whether he’s lying or not. He’s exploring the territory of identity.’

The game was up for Nasdijj when the periodical
LA Weekly
published a story entitled ‘Navahoax’ in 2006. This was in January, the same month as the big-news revelations about fellow misery memoirist James Frey hit the headlines, and the coincidence of another hoax being revealed at the same time ensured the Nasdijj story would not go away. Critics from the Indian and non-Indian writing communities both weighed in with their censure. Although Barrus must have been relieved, in a way, not to have to keep up the pretence any longer, he must also have been hurt when such Native American literary lions as the great novelist and commentator Sherman Alexie rounded on him for hijacking the real-life pain and cultural identity of his people.

There was a rumour of Barrus writing a tell-all about his years as Nasdijj, but so far this haunted, shadowy figure has turned to blogging and film-making (the rather uncomfortable results of which can be seen on YouTube – if you’re not too squeamish about voyeuristic footage of very young men washing themselves). In the period immediately following his exposure he answered back to critics, with the hackneyed but no less true statement: ‘What you want to believe you want to believe.’ But for the time being the case has been closed on Nasdijj, the heroic Indian survivor who never was. And the origins of that strange name of his? It means ‘to become again’ in Navajo.

T
HE CULT OF
celebrity is nothing new, but the desire to see all the worst and smallest parts of a big star is emphatically a post-war invention. Seemingly overnight, we went from being a culture devoted to keeping our idols on their pedestals at all costs to bringing them down with a crash. And because the unearthing of sordid details about well-known figures is such a big-money game, it is no surprise that literary hoaxers with dollar signs in their eyes have sprung up in all corners of the media to capitalize on it. The most famous of these hoaxes is surely the Hitler Diaries: those expensive embarrassments which promised readers of the
Sunday Times
intimate details of the Führer’s digestive complaints and household pets. The Howard Hughes autobiography comes a close second for an audacious assault on the credulity of a gossip-loving public, but for sheer silliness and cheek it is the phoney love-letters of Abraham Lincoln which take first prize.

A
BRAHAM LINCOLN IS
famous for many things, but being a great and passionate lover is not one of them. The man who quipped that people shouldn’t call him two-faced because if he were, he’d hardly choose to be wearing this one, has never exactly been matinée idol material. For a few months in the late 1920s, however, all that was set to change, thanks to a plucky young Californian woman called Wilma and one of the cheekiest hoaxes ever played on literary America.

The
Atlantic
has always been America’s most highly respected journal of new writing, famous since its inception in 1857 for publishing Twain, Longfellow and just about every significant US writer since. Its staff has always been knowledgeable, educated and erudite and not at all the sort to be taken in by a beautiful, doe-eyed chick from San Diego with famously irresistible curves and a sparky wit. But when Wilma Frances Minor approached the magazine with a newly unearthed collection of love-letters between the sixteenth president and his first love, Miss Ann Rutledge, the editor, Ellery Sedgwick, was blissfully fooled.

It seems the idea had come to the young journalist in the mid-1920s when she had interviewed an old man called Scott Greene, who told her that his father had known Abraham Lincoln in the 1830s and had often heard the future president talk longingly about Ann, the young woman he had loved and lost. Ann had died before the two could wed and although the romance was not news in itself – historians had been discussing its significance for years – the interview gave Wilma the inspiration for the hoax that would make her infamous. She hatched a plan to ‘discover’ Lincoln’s lost love-letters.

Her accomplice in this project was her mother, one Cora De Boyer, to whom she was unusually close. However, De Boyer was no ordinary supportive parent: she was a clairvoyant, and one with a state-wide reputation for invoking the spirits of the great and the good. Some time later, Wilma would claim that the content of the letters had been taken down verbatim during a séance at which her mother had contacted the spirits of Abraham and Ann, but when she first made contact with the
Atlantic
she proffered the more credible explanation that she had inherited the letters from an older family member and now wished to turn them over to the nation.

Wilma proposed that the magazine publish her discoveries – with attendant contextual articles by her – in three instalments and then bring out a complete study of them in book form. Ellery Sedgwick asked to see proof of the letters and the grainy photostats he received by return of post so impressed him that he decided to waive the magazine’s long-standing no illustrations policy to display them in their original form. He also handed over the extremely tidy sum of $6,500 for the exclusive rights.

For several weeks, the offices of the
Atlantic
were abuzz with what they were about to unleash on the world (and the glamorous young Wilma was no doubt doing some serious shopping in light of her windfall). The letters betrayed a yearning, adoring heart and a distinctly soppy turn of phrase which had been hitherto unsuspected in the venerable sixteenth president. He was, at the time of writing, a young man working at menial jobs in New Salem and convinced, as this letter from Ann shows, that semi-literacy was no bar to love:

my hart runs over with hapynes when I think yore name. I do not beleave I can find time to rite you a leter every day. stil I no as you say it wood surely improve my spelling and all that . . . I dreem of yore . . . words every nite and long for you by day. I mus git super now. all my hart is ever thine.

Not that young Abraham’s literary powers were much of a match for his obvious powers of attraction:

My Beloved Ann . . . I am borrowing Jacks horse to ride over to see you this coming Saturday. cutting my foot prevents my walking. I will be at your pleasure to accompany you to the Sand Ridge taffy-pull. I will be glad to hear your Father’s sermon on the Sabbath. I feel unusually lifted with hope of relieving your present worry at an early date and likewise doing myself the best turn of my life. with you my beloved all things are possible. now James kindly promises to deliver into your dear little hands this letter. may the good Lord speed Saturday afternoon.

affectionately A. Lincoln

As well as letters like these, which were all carefully written on old paper (Sedgwick had a chemist test it for age), there were extracts from journals and notes by people who knew the courting couple and could attest to their love. This diary entry from Ann’s cousin Matilda, supposedly written after Ann’s untimely death, is typical of their eccentric style: ‘the kin ses Abe is luny. I think he is broaken-harted. he wants me to keep his 5 leters from her coz he is perswaded he will soon foler her I expect he will too.’

The Atlantic
ran the first of the extracts in December 1928 and no sooner had the issue hit the stands than the magazine was receiving taunting notes from scholars who saw the letters were out-and-out fakes. ‘Have you gone insane or have I?’ asked W. C. Ford of the Massachusetts Historical Society. But alongside the dissent of critics as esteemed as Paul Angle, the Secretary of the Lincoln Centennial Association, who was the first officially to accuse Minor of trickery, there were enough venerable commentators who believed the letters to be genuine to encourage Sedgwick to bring out the other two instalments as planned. The second one, which appeared in January 1929, attracted even more criticism than the first, and by the time of the trilogy’s conclusion in February that year even Sedgwick was beginning to smell a rat. For Minor had made the mistake of so many excitable young hoaxers and not checked her facts properly: one letter, dated twenty years before the state of Kansas was named, had Lincoln referring to ‘some place in Kansas’. Another spoke about surveying land in Sangamon County, where Lincoln was working, and referred to ‘section 40’ of a plot that could only, under federal planning law, have ever had thirty-six sections.

The game was very nearly up for Wilma Minor, and a red-faced
Atlantic
launched an investigation into her claims, resorting to employing a private detective and a handwriting expert to examine the details of the case. But so lax was this careless mother–daughter hoaxing team at covering their tracks that when Mrs De Boyer wrote a stiff letter to the magazine asking them to stop hounding her ‘high strung and supersensitive girl who does not seem to understand how to cope with the rebuffs of this crass world’, it did not take a graphology expert to see that the handwriting was suspiciously similar to that of the love-struck young Lincoln’s.

Finally, towards the end of 1929 the two women started to tell people that the truth was that the voices transcribed in the letters had come to them via the spirit world at one of their regular séances. By this time, however, the reading public and the historical societies of the United States were heartily sick of this pair of time-wasters, and wasted little more attention worrying about their claims.

Poor Ellery Sedgwick had to admit in print that he had been had, and although the
Atlantic
was an august enough organ to reclaim its good name after the affair, Ms Minor was not. She went on to flit through a number of ill-conceived marriages and incarnations as a writer but never made such a name for herself again as she did, briefly, in the roaring twenties. And the truth about Abraham and Mary remains their secret.