"Can You Ever Forgive me ?"--Lee Israel
banned for life from libraries
(hat tip)1
Lee Israel hand-copied letters from William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Kurt Weill, and Eugene O’Neill, typed up a fake version at home, and then returned to do a substitution when no one was looking from libraries of Yale, Princeton and Harvard. She also forged additions to letters and created new ones.
Manual typewriters were her instruments of crime, when she started to forge letters from film stars and other celebrities, for which there is an apparently inexhaustible market.2
In a series of clever fakes bashed out on vintage Remingtons and Adlers sourced from local junk shops, Israel ventriloquised funny one-pagers from the likes of Noël Coward, the actor Fanny Brice and, her particular favourite, the satirist Dorothy Parker.
Lee Israel also forged new paragraphs and postscripts to make letters more interesting. The final sum of her subterfuge was about 400 "bogus billets," as she called them, totaling nearly 100,000 words.3 These were fenced for cash by Israel in independent bookshops of Manhattan that did a bit of literary memorabilia-dealing on the side. As long as the signature looked OK – and Israel practised those to perfection – no one bothered to ask searching questions about provenance.4
In the end, Israel didn’t see the inside of a cell, Following an investigation by the FBI she received six months’ house arrest and five years’ probation.5 She was also banned for life from using libraries.
In 2008, a safe 15 years since she had been up in court and nearly 25 years since her last legitimate publication, Israel published Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger— a bold, braggy account. 6
A film starring Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, based on Lee Israel’s memoir was released in 2018.
Thanks to Robert M. Sarwark for the tip on this one.
Mars-Jones, Adam. "Blaspheming against her own gods: The contradictory impulses behind Lee Israel's literary forgeries." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6046, 15 Feb. 2019, p. 22.
Paterniti M. “Literary Theft. N Y Times Mag. 2015: 60-61,63.
Hughes, Kathryn (2019) “Fakes and fortunes: has the time come to forgive literary forger Lee Israel ? ” The Guardian. (January 14).
Ibid. Mars-Jones, Adam.
Hughes, Kathryn (2019) “Fakes and fortunes: has the time come to forgive literary forger Lee Israel?” The Guardian. (January 14). Fox, Margalit (January 7, 2015). "Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75". The New York Times. p. B10.
I went to high school a few miles from Princeton University's Firestone Library. Back then I was able to use the library for research (although I could not check books out of the system) as an ordinary member of the public with no affiliation to the University.
The public is no longer welcome at Firestone. Open access is now a thing of the past. It was buried, in part, by a tiny set of opportunists who made it difficult or impossible for large academic libraries to make their collections available even to the qualified public.
I found the 2019 Kathryn Hughes Guardian profile offensive in its indifference to the harm Lee Israel did. In the sixth paragraph of the article Hughes informs us that "No one was getting hurt" by Lee's forgeries, an assertion that requires a rather cribbed construal of the word "hurt." The article barely (paragraph 12) acknowledges the theft and sale for profit of actual (non-forged) letters.
It's certainly possible, as Hughes hints, that Israel's "mid-life plunge into criminality was less a dramatic moral decline than a symptom of decaying mental health." Even the simplest people are complicated. And serious brain pathologies compound that complexity. We don't need to judge. But we also don't need to glamourize and romanticize destructive criminal behavior to soothe the vanity of its practitioners. Hughes writes that Lee Israel "[o]n many occasions [believed] she was offering something [forgeries] better than the original. 'It was better Coward than Coward.'" A person who can say and believe such a thing deserves our pity, not our admiration.
All of that said, what I found sort of wonderful was the sentence Lee Israel received: "banned for life from libraries." It's very Code of Hammurabi, with a punishment that, while obscure, genuinely fits the crime. It speaks to the accused in a language that she uniquely can understand. Like the 1919 Chicago White Sox, who were acquitted in criminal court but still banned for life from baseball, there's something fitting and symbolically right about the punishment.
What an extremely repulsive person... Why would she ever do something like that?