Poor Peg Seltzer

By Mischa Henry

Poor Peg Seltzer. She is the victim of having committed no crime. And now Harvard historian Jill Lepore has used poor Peg as the peg for a New Yorker piece. Lepore’s main agenda is to push back against Brown historian Gordon Wood for his review of her book on King Philips’s War. Wood was mainly gentle with her, particularly given the crashing difference between them as historians. In her piece, Lepore returns the professional courtesy. Instead, it’s poor Peg Seltzer who she singles out for a lashing. “Jones,” Lepore sputters, “also known as Margaret Seltzer, tried to pass off a gangland bildungsroman as the story of her life. Pulped days after it was published, the book, titled Love and Consequences, is a fraud; [Henry Fielding’s] Tom Jones is not. Fielding was playing; Seltzer was just lying.”

Lepore argues, essentially, that novels can be useful to historians. Because Fielding is useful to her, he is “playing.” Because Seltzer is the competition, she’s a scoundrel. Lepore’s glee at Seltzer’s “pulping,” is particularly odd. Lepore believes that fiction “can do what history doesn’t but should…it is the history of obscure men. Who are these obscure men? Well, a lot of them are women.” Just not Peg Seltzer. So what if Seltzer had reasons for obscuring her identity? So what if her supposedly privileged and white upbringing wasn’t so happy? So what if Seltzer’s own sister ratted her out? Who cares? Whatever her obscure story is, it’s not the kind of obscure story that matters to Harvard historian Jill Lepore.

Besides missing the point about Peg Seltzer, Lepore is completely wrong, of course, about Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe. She’s quick to Defoe’s rescue for charges of the same sort as Seltzer’s. Defoe claimed Robinson Crusoe to have been “Written by Himself.” Defoe’s name appeared nowhere on the first edition. “This was a lie,” Lepore writes, “but not a hoax.” A different “lie,” it appears, than Seltzer’s. Defoe had multiplex reasons for not wanting his name to appear. One of them, though not the only one, was to make money selling the book. The fact that Seltzer did precisely the same, and did it for a complicated set of personal reasons, doesn’t impress a mind like Lepore’s. Her agenda is to advance her own career by way of burnishing her name in the New Yorker. She is a historian who, as Wood puts it, does “not recount events and tell stories.” She is also a budding novelist. She has an upcoming book called Blindspot, written with Jane Kamensky. “Peopled not only with the celebrated Sons of Liberty but also with revolutionary Boston’s unsung inhabitants—women and servants, hawkers and rogues and pickpockets,” the pre-pub states, “Blindspot is both prodigiously learned and lush with the bawdy sensibility of the eighteenth century. It restores the humanity, the humor, and the sex to the story of the American Revolution.” Gangland memoirists need not apply.

While Lepore was dispatching Peg Seltzer as a writer of “fake memoirs” (whatever a “real” example of the form might be) another famous hoax, though one with a distinctly different profit outcome, was visiting Baltimore. Pumping his own brand of malarkey (at a ticket price of $40-$60 a head) Frank McCourt told a reverent crowd that he was writing a novel. Why? So that his greedy ex-wives couldn’t sue him for telling “the truth.”