Accidental fibs

In the introduction to Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, there is the following statement on the bombing of Dresden by the Allies during World War Two:

The malt syrup factory was gone. Everything was gone but the cellars where a hundred and thirty-five thousand Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men.

This spectacular misquote comes from the middle of an otherwise accurate, astute, and typically poignant comment on humanity from Vonnegut, which makes it all the more frustrating. I’m writing this offline on the train, so can’t check, but I believe that there were between thirty and forty thousand deaths in Dresden during the (still appalling) firebombing of the city. I also believe that Vonnegut’s error comes from the now-shunned historian David Irving’s figures; an idea only backed up by Vonnegut’s mention of him in Slaughterhouse Five amongst other musings on the firestorm.

This brings me to the oft-discussed subject of research, and my belief that all writers should have a pedantic obsession about where we get our facts from. I’ve had long discussions with a friend on the subject, who has similar (and possibly stronger) opinions on these things. Searching for something on wikipedia isn’t good enough if you’re going to talk facts, and put it in writing as such. Society has embraced the Just Fucking Google It philosophy, of course, who wouldn’t? It’s piss easy to make yourself sound smart on a forum, or in a quick reply in an email or to a list, or in various other situations, but the underlying fact is that the likes of wikipedia are an unmoderated secondary source, rife with errors and lies. Also, other sources can be.

Vonnegut’s quotes were wrong, and he didn’t even use wikipedia. He got them from a trusted (at the time) historian, who just happened to later reveal himself as a holocaust denier and all round fuckwit. Thirty or forty years later, mind. How can you be sure you’re correct and safe? I’m not suggesting an answer here; I’m asking for one.

Obviously, you need to cross-reference your facts, and to get them from more than one reputable source where possible. You need to know what you’re saying is true, if you’re going to claim it is. And if not, well, do you need to inform your audience that you are not? And if you don’t, could you be the one writing one of the great masterpieces of a century, with the slight misfortune of a key point that depends on figures more than three-fold out of line?

I’m merely illustrating a point with this example, by the way. Vonnegut is off the hook in my books, seeing as how Dresden was largely denied and/or hushed by the US government for many years after the war, when he was writing both novels mentioned above. It is entirely possible, if not probably, that he had access only to the Irving book. Dresden was in fact largely revealed due to Slaughterhouse Five itself. Also, anyone who knows me will be entirely familiar with the fact that I adore Kurt Vonnegut’s work, and think he was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Hell, Mild Wild Mike is pretty much an homage to his tongue-in-cheek style of social commentary. I’m not writing this as a dig at him.

Skipping further into Mother Night, Vonnegut writes this:

In preparing this edition of the confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., I have had to deal with writings concerned with more than mere informing or deceiving, as the case may be. Campbell was a writer as well as a person accused of extremely serious crimes, a one-time playwrite of moderate reputation. To say that he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it. To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.

And, now that I’ve said that about lying, I will risk the opinion that lies told for the sake of artistic effect – in the theatre, for instance, and in Campbell’s confessions, perhaps can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.

… which reminds me a lot of something I can only paraphrase from William Boyd’s mind-bending short story, Long Story Short:

You write fiction, you’re telling lies, pal.

… and how much fun can you have with them? What responsibility to do you have? The Daily Mail bends the truth if it will sell papers, and the amount of control over society’s conscience that newspaper has gives me the fuckin’ fear. I’m not kidding. So, you have the gift of the gab. Do you choose the dark side or the light side? Do you have to assume an audience knows you might be writing The Big Fib? That your book’s morals may be as weak as a warthog’s mental arithmetic? I’ve not got the answer, although I’d err towards a no on the latter. I just think it’s an interesting subject!

Discuss.