Sideways Review: How To Fool Ourselves
Kristopher Jansma
on
David Samuels’s
The Runner
.
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For a fiction writer, I’ve always been a terrible liar. What I can do on the page I can never do off-the-cuff. In high school, desperate to go to a party at a friend’s house, I lied to my mother about having finished A Separate Peace. I’d looked up enough details online to fake a verbal summary, but she was not fooled. I missed the party, was grounded, and didn’t read the novel until college.
My best friends, however, have always been fantastic liars. In middle school one friend told me how he’d invented a girlfriend who lived in Maine, and he showed me a Word document he’d filled with every detail he’d ever told anyone about her—down to her favorite chess piece (Queen) and brand of facial tissue (Kleenex) so he’d never get trapped in a lie. I went to college to study creative writing, but sometimes I think I learned more about the nature of fiction from the roommates I lived with in an off-campus house we called “The Doug.” When freshmen asked us why, we’d tell them that Doug was our former suitemate who’d been killed in a battery factory accident. And people believed this—at least whenever I didn’t try to tell it.
Around this time I began to wonder if I was drawn to liars. How better to learn the craft of fiction than to hang around those who found deception effortless? It was this curiosity about the fine art of lying that drew me to The Runner by David Samuels. His biography of American con artist James Hogue contains volumes of advice for those of us who wish to spend our lifetimes spinning yarns, embellishing what’s true, and forever reinventing ourselves.
Hogue applied to Princeton University’s Class of 1992 with a personal essay describing his idyllic life as a Mexican-American sheepherder in California. He spoke of reading Whitman, Plato, and Kerouac in a moonlit canyon known as Little Purgatory. He said his mother was an artist residing in Switzerland and that his father was deceased. When Fred Hargadon, then head of Princeton Admissions, was asked to describe his ideal candidate for Princeton, he replied simply, “Huckleberry Finn.” Hargadon wanted a fictional character, and Hogue made sure he got one. Hogue was admitted and granted a $12,730 track scholarship. Only everything he’d written was pure fiction, including his nom de application—Alexi Indris-Santana.
Hogue had to defer his admission for a year after he was arrested for stealing bicycles. From jail he sent a letter to Princeton claiming his mother was dying. “Ad astra per aspera,” he wrote, “To the stars through difficulties.” Hogue only knew this line because it was the state motto of Kansas, where he was actually from. He used the only four Latin words he knew in precisely the same way that I find myself brandishing a few things I’ve read on Wikipedia about the inner workings of a watch to fool readers into believing one of my own characters is an expert horologist.
Some might think Hogue’s behavior bordered on sociopathic, and they might be right. But I can’t help admiring Hogue’s expert deployment of characterizing detail. He knew that every moment in a story either reinforces or undermines the persona created in a reader’s mind—in this case, his “readers” just happened to be a pair of hapless admissions officers.
It was three years before Hogue’s lies were discovered. He was recognized at a track meet by a girl from a Palo Alto high school that Hogue had previously attended under the alias of Jay Huntsman. Hogue broke the cardinal rule of all con artists and writers—never run the same scam twice.
When the truth came out, Hogue’s classmates were not upset that he’d deceived them. In fact, many were angry that he’d been expelled. His SAT scores hadn’t been faked. He’d received A’s in nearly all his classes at Princeton—clearly he’d been smart enough to belong. Those he’d been close to admitted they’d had some suspicions—there were things in his stories that never quite added up. But they’d wanted to believe Hogue, just as, in the face of skillful fictions, we all must suspend our disbelief, or the story will abruptly end.
David Samuels, author of The Runner, feels Hogue’s life constitutes “a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress in reverse,” which appeals to those of us, who, like so many Walter Mittys, live secret lives in our imaginations.
The disease that took over Jim Hogue’s life might be diagnosed as a low-grade fever in tens of millions more. There is no shortage of people like James Hogue who walk among us disguised as people like ourselves, having made themselves up from scratch and then acquired credit cards and mortgages and spouses.
He’s absolutely right, and I’d go one step further and claim that these disguised people are the characters that inhabit the very best of our stories, both on the page and off.
Samuels recalls the thrills he felt when making up stories in his own youth.
On long bus trips, talking with strangers, I made up a past for myself as a kid who’d grown up on U.S. Army bases…. Perhaps there was something I was trying to express about myself that could be best expressed in a lie.
Surely we have all felt this way at one point or another. That perhaps our true origins do not fully explain ourselves. That we can make up some truer truth, if we only do it artfully enough.
Societies nearly all think of lying as sinful and immoral. Samuels examines holy texts and ancient myths and concludes this belief stems from thinking of language as a tool that can be used to spread truth, share love, and foster communication—the very root of the mutual trust that allows us to form societies in the first place. By contrast, “a lie is a perversion of language that splits a person in half.” We liars risk alienating ourselves, sowing seeds of distrust, and ultimately destroying whole societies.
We must admit that lying is also a perfectly normal and necessary survival tool. As Samuels observes, most of us “would be hard-pressed to get through the day without telling at least one lie.” We tell a friend that her hair looks great. We tell a tall tale that makes our dinner guests laugh. We tell each other everything is going to be all right when we don’t know if it will be. The truth is that often we lie out of kindness, humor, and optimism.
But while we all stretch the truth on job interviews and first dates, there is something that stops most of us from lying to the extent that Hogue did. Perhaps morality, perhaps lack of imagination, perhaps shame. The principle lies that Hogue told were ones I tell in my fiction all the time. He changed his name and the circumstances of his birth; he made his parents unrecognizable.
Like the best novels, Hogue’s story offers us a glimpse at fresh possibilities. When the Princeton police asked Hogue why he perpetrated this fraud, he offered the simplest of all explanations. “I wanted to start all over again, without the burdens of my past.”
Was this just another lie? Even if it was, it is a truth—the truth behind our dreams and the reason we read and write.
In his fictional application essay, Hogue wrote that he idolized physicist Richard Feynman, whose writings had taught him that science was “essentially a long history of learning how not to fool ourselves.” If this is true, then perhaps writing, and all the arts, are but a long history of learning how to fool ourselves ever better.
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Kristopher Jansma teaches at Manhattanville College and SUNY Purchase. His novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, will be published by Viking Press in 2013. He also writes a monthly column “Literary Artifacts” on Electric Literature’s blog, The Outlet. He tweets as @KristopherJans, and you can find him on Facebook. Maybe this bio is true and maybe it isn’t.
The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Imposter James Hogue
David Samuels
New Press
2008
