Open Letter to Charles Pellegrino of The Last Train from Hiroshima
Oh no!!! Mr. Pellegrino, please tell us “they’re” wrong. I don’t care about your Ph.D, but I do care about the authenticity of your story. Did the victims truly experience what you described in detail? Those victims could have been any of my own ancestors who were killed during the bomb. Or did you use this human tragedy to advance your own writing?
One of the main victims’ tanka poem is published in Outcry From the Inferno, a book I helped edit. It meant so much to read of these poets in your book but now, “they’re” saying it’s all a scam? You couldn’t have done this to your readers and to the victims. So tell us, “they’re” wrong. Inform James Cameron that the names may be incorrect but the story is true so he can go with the film.
You owe us, Mr. Pellegrino. Look at all the excellent book reviews we posted and the book sales.
So tell us.
At the very least, regardless of the ultimate outcome, he has provided some discourse on the horrors of nuclear warfare. True, the arguments would be stronger if veracity is proven, but better to have the idea raised above the grave than to continue decomposing until it’s completely gone.
But I do agree with you: Mr. Pellegrino owes us all an explanation for these things. All we can do is hope “they;re” wrong.
Kent Johnston’s Araki Yasusada hoax (‘hyper-authorship’) has interesting relation to Pellegrino’s book – in part that the pseudo-author (Yasusada) laid claim to being a Hiroshima survivor and part in that it raised the whole debate about what ‘authenticity’ really is and what harm or benefit it actually does to the transfer or knowledge and ideas (entertainment value aside). It was the Yasusada appearance, that renewed modern debate on “authenticity” in writing. The structuralists (Derrida, et al.) had also done substantial work on the question long before, but their focus was chiefly on semiotics and conferring power and authority to a work (‘official openings’, seals, epigraphs, citations, formal presentation, typography etc.).
In any case, there has been considerable defense of Yasusada’s poems both in terms of its quality as poetry and with regards to ‘authenticity’ as an arguable concept in the evaluation of literature. Both items, it would appear, are present in evaluating the “Pellegrino Hoax”.
In any case the matter is not as clear-cut as some Pellegrino reader reactions might suggest. My own first thought is that rather than ‘vetting’ our literature for authenticity and destroying the careers of otherwise good authors, we might bolster the career opportunities of historians who might append their comments on history and authenticity at the end of such works to clarify their place as reliable accounts of history. That way we would get the best of both worlds; good and gripping works and a reality check on how much we should believe. – just another perspective. We might also open up new career opportunities for unemployed historians.
There is no hoax in in my book with regard to anything involving the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. I did not make anything up. One of the men who claimed to have been aboard the photographic escort plane during the Hiroshima mission made something up (backed by such documentation as a letter from President Truman, flight logs, photographs of himself on Tinian Island under the nose art of one of the contested planes [Bad penny], etc., etc.) – and I, not believing that a veteran and a firefighter would make something like this up, believed him. I did not invent a hoax. I was given one (and it’s my fault that I did not catch this before it went to press).
Everything else in the book happened as reported in the memoirs of survivors and by actual meetings with many of them (including the brother of Sadako Sasaki, and Mr. Yamaguchi – the double survivor whose poem appears in my book). Fr. Mattias was an actual person I met in 1974. As a Catholic who ended by alcoholism and suicide about 1986, I had changed his name when I wrote of the incident in a previous work. The other priest (Fr. MacQuitty) has also appeared in previous works (including “Return to Sodom and Gomorrah”), where I noted in the acknowledgements section that his name had been changed. As a pure oversight, in this case I neglected to add the parenthetical statement in the Acknoledgements section pointing out that these two priest’s names had been changed. Fr. MacQuitty’s name appeared in only one sentence in the book – but it was a critical sentence because of his unusual compassion for the families and friends of people who ended as Fr. Mattias had ended. It was against church rules to participate in burial of suicides on consecrated ground. I had a long standing promise with Fr. MacQuitty to quote him accurately but never to use his real name. He is still alive and elderly and in ill health, and he was horrified and felt betrayed when I asked permission to reveal his name to my publisher – who was now demanding of me, the identity of the priest who was still living. I kept my promise to the priest and this became a major problem with my publisher.
When my agent and I parted ways with the publisher, the publisher lashed out with a statement to the associated press, implying that I had made up people and events. This was picked up by the rest of the media as if it were fact and as if it applied to anyone who appeared in my book. The publisher also dredged up and became the first people to legitimize an illegal self-named “ad hoc” tribunal that revoked and down-graded the degrees of students in New Zealand a quarter century ago – mostly people who went on, as I did, to write papers and books in the area of evolutionary biology (which is what got us targeted). I had already sat my Ph.D. Dissertation and defended it and completed all degree requirements – all of which the ad hoc tribunal acknowledged as true but “irrelevant” – when they invented rules for the retroactive revokation of credentials. Colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory helped me to document all of this as it was happening, essentially re-verifying the successful completion of a Ph.D. and its revokation by an illegal tribunal. The Dissertation, by the way, involved the invention of a method that for the first time allowed measurement of the surface areas of irregularly shaped and complex objects, and is still used around the world today.
It is the smear campaign itself that has become the hoax in this story.
- – Charles Pellegrino
[...] response to my March 2, 2010, post “Open Letter to Charles Pellegrino,” he writes: There is no hoax in in my book with regard to anything involving the Hiroshima and [...]