Here’s the thirty ninth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly
LiteratEye #39: What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? Somebody Else.
By W.J. Elvin III
November 13, 2009
“My walk will be different, my talk and my name,
Nothing about me is going to be the same”¦”
-From the song lyric, There’ll Be Some Changes Made
There are different kinds of imposters in the field of literary deception. There’s the trickster, such as the false-memoirist in it for the bucks. And then there’s the true believer, the re-invented person who is really into a role.
Nasdijj is a trickster. He made claims but actually had no direct experience of the Navajo life he wrote about.
Grey Owl, on the other hand, surely had a trickster streak but he was far more the true believer. He was an English boy, Archie Belaney, who wanted to be an Indian. And eventually, in outward appearance and lifestyle, he became one.
If the imposter Nasdijj has any Indian defenders, I haven’t run across them. But certainly Grey Owl does. One of them is Armand Garnet Ruffo, author of Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney. The book is a prose poem that includes tales from Ruffo’s Ojibway relations.
Having read half a dozen accounts of Belany/Grey Owl’s life, I find the “facts” vary from one biographer to the next. Then there’s his own autobiography and other writings, which have to be taken with a pillar of salt. Continue reading “LiteratEye #39: What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? Somebody Else.”