The publication of Great and Unfortunate Things, a book title with sonorous undertones, is scheduled to go ahead imminently. After all, Simon and Schuster, who acquired it from the now-exited Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, have promised it is unlike any other memoir. That bit we can believe. But whether Arday’s memoir should be moved from the non-fiction to the fiction category is a question which looms awkwardly.
The tale is based on some aspects of the life of a young man from a Ghanaian background in south London which are grounded in reality: growing up on a council estate, diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay, outraged by incidences of racism – and rising through academia specialising in the sociology of education.
The problem for his publishers is that as doubts spread about Arday’s alleged plagiarism and a slew of Walter Mitty claims about university appointments, light scrutiny of his output, heroic charitable achievements which have fallen apart on simple fact-checks and tall tales of his triumph over a worryingly large series of extreme health conditions.
The publisher last year removed some of the more dramatic statements from Arday’s author page, including the Herculean claim that he has run “30 marathons in 35 days, 300 miles in three days and 600 miles in six days” and that he has raised “over £5.5m for 80 national charities”.
Another memory of volunteering in the favelas of Brazil was facilitated by the charity WaterAid, which does not send volunteers overseas. In other words – Simon and Schuster had many reasons to apply more scrutiny to this memoir than it clearly decided to apply.
The pity of this is that Arday clearly does have a story of hardship and personal drive to tell, which should act as inspiration to many young people from ethnic minorities to thrive and challenge limiting stereotypes. But he also appears to have a near-compulsive tendency to embroider truths, which suggests that he has more problems than simply combating establishment racism.
Promoted by Cambridge as a wunderkind of black success in an elite academic sector struggling to promote more ethnic minority talent, the revelations have left a great University stranded. It is caught between its initial instinct to accuse those who brought his sundry inconsistencies to public attention of “vile smears” and enduring serious damage to its reputation for rigour if it does not exit its present dozy state of avoidance.
Similarly, it would now be best for Simon and Schuster, a US-UK publisher which vaunts its diversity credentials, to suspend the publication of the memoir for a more thorough fact check and new edit. It will not do so – for the simple reason that when it comes to spicy memoirs which are talking points, publishers do not very much care if a self-reported autobiography passes a polygraph test or not.
One thing it has in common with Cambridge is that it seems highly reluctant to concede that this hot mess is more than a minor wrinkle in an otherwise brilliant career. Before his resignation, Simon and Schuster said it was still “proud” to publish the memoir and praised the professor’s “integrity and professionalism”. Words fail.
Intellectual cowardice is the common thread linking these two elite institutions.
As far as publishers are concerned, The Observer’s excellent work in unmasking the fantastical elements in the best-selling triumph-over-adversity story The Salt Path showed an uncomfortable truth about the book trade: a story deemed to be uplifting and commercially appealing was too good to be true – because it was just that. The author Raynor Winn never convincingly addressed the claims of previous damaging business practices and exaggeration of Moth Winn’s degenerative medical condition.
The death of interest or due scrutiny in what constitutes a factual basis of something explicitly called “non-fiction” as a genre matters. Publishers, like academics, have a duty. And while memoirs are by definition a self-edited view of a life and thus prone to embellishment and omission, there are limits. The memoir may serve to bring more unforgiving scrutiny on Arday’s stories, rather than set the record straight.
At a time when liberally inclined elites are often quick to point out when populist politicians they dislike are telling lies or ceding untruths, they cannot occupy their own moral high ground when alarming facts challenge their own belief system or interests.
Cambridge’s response so far keeps skirting the scale of the problem, because it fails the basic test of crisis management: namely, to get ahead of unwelcome events and form a robust and transparent plan to deal with them, rather than seek excuses and end up in a miasma of competing and contradictory messages.
The Vice Chancellor Deborah Prentice arrived from Princeton to polish up Cambridge’s international appeal (good luck with that right now) and is responsible for its administration, which looks erratic in this case. And where is the affable Lord (Chris) Smith – the Chancellor and ex-Labour minister, whose role description is “to ensure University officers duly perform their duties”? What are the two waiting for? Rightly, academics across the political spectrum are now saying that this reflects a failure of leadership and want an independent inquiry.
The response from Sonita Alleyne, the master at Jesus College (where Arday was, until his resignation, a fellow), is still bemoaning, “a very difficult time for Professor Arday and his family”, adding, “We hope that they are now afforded peace and privacy”. If you seek that, publishing a memoir is hardly the best way to go about it.
Arday is entitled to “take time to heal”, though there is little sign of self-awareness in his resignation statement beyond self-pity and an aggrieved sense that this mess is the fault of others. People make mistakes; circumstances can be muddy but mitigating.
Yet dismissing serious discrepancies because they damage a convenient set of beliefs is the opposite of honesty. It feeds the suspicions of those who really do not care about more opportunity for the under-served – and it ends, as tall stories often do, in a falling house of cards to the detriment and shame of all who looked the other way when the story didn’t suit them.
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