No, I can not ever forgive you....

So Lee Isreal's book, Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger is out. No link, it is not worthy. I am have a soft-spot for literary crime [when it does not involve...er...me]. There are some great stories of brilliant forgeries, elegant frauds and clever manipulations. Of course the punch line is that, in order for the stories to be "known", the evil-doers have been caught and the work/inscription/letter has been relegated to the "forgery files" (mind you, a collectible area in and of itself).

For every "great" forger, there are doubtless a dozen or so marginal ones, passing off Dickens' signed in ballpoint pen...a random search on ebay at any given time will doubtless offer up a wide selection of "inscribed" of dubious veracity. Somewhere between the two poles rests the likes of Ms. Isreal. She is/was, in brief, a book thief and a forger. I did not know her personally, though there are many in the book world that did/do. I have read a galley of her book and will not bother getting a copy. I was planning to review it, as I have been reading a great deal about literary forgeries of late, preparing for a presentation, but then I read Kevin MacDonnell's review on one of the ABAA listserv groups. It is better than any I would have written and he was kind enough to allow me to post it here:

It's 125pp of over-written chatty arrogance, heavily padded with facsimiles of what she considers her best forgeries, of which she is brazenly proud. She describes her forging career as "fun" and drops celebrity names faster than a flasher can drop his trousers, a simile that comes to mind because by the end of the book you feel like you've been assaulted by a forger-flasher.

Although she churned out some celebrity biographies years ago, she happily calls her forgeries "her best work." The closest she comes to explaining why she did it is that she fell on tough times, needed money, and besides, she was alive and the people whose letters she was stealing and/or forging were dead. No further reasons given. At one point she uses the phrase "screw with history" but never gets around to confronting her immorality, and many of her behaviors that she describes at length with glee are appallingly sleazy.

With the exception of Catherine Barnes she describes most dealers as greedy and stupid. The closest she comes to admitting guilt over the thefts is when she says that guilt is mitigated by her help in recovering the stolen letters of "drunken American writers." But she makes very clear that she has little or no guilt over her forgeries. She has contempt for the court system, and readily admits that she never attended AA meetings that were a requirement of her probation and calls community service "bullshit."

Her account of Alan Weiner is that he extorted her for $5,000 in return for not testifying against her, but Alan's conversations with me at the time made clear that he pressed harder than any of her victims to get her convicted, was disgusted by her, and wanted her to spend a long time in jail. I mentioned previously in this list that she left a vile message on his answering machine after his death for the sole purpose of bringing more pain to his grieving family.

Much of her account also relies heavily on what she claims Jack, her accomplice, did or did not do. Both Alan Weiner and Jack are dead, so the reader can draw his own conclusions on whether to trust this account by a convicted thief and forger. By the end of the book it's clear she doesn't want to be forgiven; she wants to be admired. But the reader will find it impossible to find anything to forgive or admire in this vulgar display of narcissism.

This sums her and the book up as well as any could... It would be interesting to find out if she is still under the terms of her probation...as she explicitly states that she has violated the terms and actually having to serve out her sentence would probably be a good thing.

If you want a good read about better forgers, read Charles Hamilton's Great Forgers and Famous Fakes (1980 or the 1996 2nd Revised). A fair number of them I can forgive...for the art of their work, the chutzpa of the attempt and/or the humor of it...but I really find no reason to forgive Ms. Isreal. While it makes a cute title, I don't think she actually wants or cares about forgiveness, nor do I think she deserves it. [Again, thanks to Kevin for his permission to reprint his review.]