It’s 10 a.m. on Manhattan’s West Side, and Sebastian Junger already looks beat. Dressed in an undertaker’s suit and wraparound shades, the muscular 44-year-old author of “The Perfect Storm” and other books enters the empty front room of his bar, The Half King, and sits down heavily. A waitress brings him a coffee and keeps it coming, refilling his cup four times as he talks.
“I remember when I was waiting tables,” Junger says. “I used to wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘I forgot to bring the check to table D2! They’re locked in the restaurant, still waiting for their check.’ … I do the same thing with journalism.”
Junger’s got a lot on his mind because “A Death in Belmont,” his latest book, has just landed across the United States, unleashing a swarm of truth seekers. If publication day is a restaurant, then he’s waiting on an entire football stadium. This doesn’t have to do with the size of his audience – which is blockbuster, thanks to his 1997 best seller, “The Perfect Storm.”
Seeds of doubt
It has to do with James Frey’s memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” which earlier this year was revealed to contain certain falsifications. The resulting brouhaha has planted the seed of doubt about anyone who writes about factual events. This is a problem for Junger because “A Death in Belmont” reads quite a bit like a certain “nonfiction novel” that had people in an uproar 40 years ago: Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”
The similarities begin with the crime – or rather the crime’s unfathomable quality. Between June 1962 and January 1964, 13 single women were murdered in Boston, all by a suspect who came to be called the Boston Strangler. Each woman was attacked in her apartment and then strangled with her own clothing. Many were raped. The first six victims ranged in an age from 55 all the way up to 85, leading investigators to think there was a mother complex at work. Then came victim seven, 20-year-old Sophie Clark.
No one was ever tried for the Boston Strangler case, because in 1965, while he was on trial for robbery and other sexual offences, Albert DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler. Only he got certain details of the murders wrong – sometimes the same details that were misreported in the newspaper. Other times he simply drew a blank. In the end, DeSalvo worked out a deal for immunity and went to prison for life. He died in 1973 after being stabbed through his heart in his jail cell.
Family connection
Junger was born in the Boston suburb of Belmont in 1961, so this case has always been close to him. But it comes closer than that. In the fall of 1962, his mother began building a painting studio in the backyard of their home. Among the laborers was DeSalvo himself, who once tried to lure Mrs. Junger into her own basement. Luckily, she knew he had no business in her house. “My mother told him that she was busy,” Junger writes, “and then she closed the basement door and shot the bolt.”
This move may have saved her life, for not only did DeSalvo confess to being the Boston Strangler, in March of 1963, 68-year-old Bessie Goldberg was strangled in the living room of her Belmont home and then raped. Her cleaning man, Roy Smith, was ultimately convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of lung cancer in 1976.
Junger had always wondered if Smith was really Goldsmith’s murderer. But he wanted to go further than that. “The thing that ultimately really intrigued me about the case,” he says, “was whether I could write a book without being able to find out the absolute truth. If you can prove the black guy didn’t do the murder 40 years ago, that’s a very obvious book to write.”
In this sense, “A Death in Belmont” might be too subtle a book, as it presents all the facts of the case and places the reader in the jury box. “So here’s everything I could find out,” Junger says, “everything of significance about this case. What do you guys think? This is exactly what the legal system does. After all, every person brings an inherent bias. But when you have 12 people, educated, uneducated, mechanics, lawyers, the average consensus is actually quite accurate. And that’s how I hope my book works.”
Already there are some voices of dissent. In the The New York Times, Harvard University professor Alan Dershowitz admired the book’s momentum, but raised questions about its “methodology.” “Although he acknowledges that ‘often the truth simply isn’t knowable,”‘ Dershowitz wrote, “he still tries too hard to fit the messy facts into his payoff narrative.”
And then there is one stronger dissention, coming from Leah Goldberg, the daughter of victim Bessie Goldberg, who claims that Junger has several things wrong – including placing her in the courtroom when the verdict was read for Smith, rather than at home watching coverage of the Kennedy assassination, where she claims to have been. Moreover, she said, “I would like my parents to rest in peace.”
A delicate situation
Junger understands the delicacy of this situation – not just the importance of accuracy, but what it means to talk to someone who has suffered a deep loss. He learned this interviewing widows of the fishing crew lost during the perfect storm. He also has reported on war refugees in Sierra Leone.
“The first thing you have to do is say, Listen, I have inherent unshakable respect for you. And even if I don’t entirely understand what you’ve gone through, it’s invaluable to me, I need to know more about it, and that’s why I’m here. And you also have to, sort of, feel yourself that you know nothing. That you can’t possibly know what it’s like to have your mother murdered.”
Whether that interest is valid or not depends. Erik Larson, author of “The Devil in the White City,” a blockbuster best seller in the U.S. about a serial killer at work during the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, says this is shaky territory, for it forces the writer to make a judgment call. “In the absence of concrete proof or convincing circumstantial evidence, there does arise that trickiest of questions: Why bother, especially when the act of reopening a past case can bring back a lot of pain for survivors and friends?”
Knowing such questions would come up, Junger went out of his way to try to seal his story off from quibbles about facts. “I had to hire my own fact-checker,” says Junger. “I also gave it to the defense attorney and the prosecuting attorney from the trial,” he says.
In a way, it seems Junger is being criticized for doing what he set out to do – only in a rather hostile climate. “A Death in Belmont” doesn’t come to any conclusions; it simply lays out the case from two different perspectives and asks the reader to decide which is truthful.
Tom Bissell, a freelance journalist and fiction writer, thinks similar discussions will go on for some time. “I think it’s a fad that will be rediscovered every five or six years, as some poor schmuck gets nailed for making things up in nonfiction. I hate this ‘truthiness’ label. I hate the way people talk about truth. There’s no such thing as any one real truth. I think there are truths. I think there are facts and there is truth, and I think people confuse them greatly.”
Junger agrees. “There are three kinds of falsehood in journalism. There is insignificant error. You spell a name wrong; the error has no impact on either your premise or your conclusion. It’s utterly incidental. Then there’s significant error, which is also unintentional – but it does change the substance of what you are writing. So the New York Times reporters did a wonderful long piece about the man under the hood at Abu Ghraib. Great piece, but they had the wrong guy. That’s significant error. It changes the substance of their piece, but they didn’t do that intentionally. It’s a complex, confusing world in Iraq; no one has identity cards.
“And then there is intentional distortion, and that is the mortal sin of journalism. What the public need to know, and what people who report on error need to know, is that one is not the other is not the other. And you’ve got to make those distinctions or you can effectively hang someone in the literary world or in the journalism world for the kind of error every newspaper makes every day. And it’s not fair, it’s not accurate.”
What’s really scary, then, about “A Death in Belmont” is that it reveals these very same distinctions cloud the criminal justice system, where, at the end of the day, the stakes are so very much higher.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
Book signing
Sebastian Junger will sign “A Death in Belmont” at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Boulder Book Store, 1107 S. Pearl St. and read from and sign “A Death in Belmont” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Tattered Cover LoDo, 1628 16th St. Free tickets for a place in line will be handed out at 6:30 p.m.
