Real People Appearing in Fiction

A work of fiction is not necessarily a lie, but most of them begin with one. “Any resemblance found between characters in this book and any living persons is coincidental and unintentional.” This traditional gesture aims to inhibit lawsuits; it is frail, and not particularly effective.

And it is often set down not in the expectation that readers will believe it but in the hope that they won’t; like the notice on cigarette ads that warns you of poison but hopes you will smoke anyway. It is for this reason, I suppose, that biographies and preemptive memoirs such as David Stockman’s do not carry the inscription: “This book is true, and any resemblance found between its characters and real people will be highly appreciated.” Readers might conclude the opposite.

Whatever the expectations, a number of so-called fictional entertainments are dispensing with the disguises and using real names. It was something of a novelty when George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman began to blackguard and brag among real-life Lord Raglans and Lord Elgins. But these days, William Buckley gets his Blackford Oakes to romance the Queen of England.

And John Ehrlichman’s new novel, “The China Card,” has a fictional hero batted about among the schemes of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Robert Haldeman (Ehrlichman never shows up, for some reason), and Chou En-Lai.

The reprehensible things these people do and say, the author warns us, are to be taken as true when they are a matter of record, and as fictional otherwise. This is a publishing equivalent of Heavenly Hash ice cream; having it, not just both ways, but about seven.

Traditionally, though, our literature has its references more or less concealed. Sometimes, it has been as a tease; so that those in the know will guess, and others won’t. Sometimes, it has been for genuine discretion. Mostly, it has been part of the process of writing. A real person, or some attribute of a real person, suggests the germ of a character; the author goes on to elaborate or simplify, to mix in bits of other real people, and to invent.

William Amos, an English literary journalist, has now undertaken to produce a kind of skeleton key for these various locks or half-locks. His “The Originals, An A-Z of Fiction’s Real-Life Characters” (Little, Brown: $19.95) identifies or suggests models for about 3,000 fictional characters across the (largely recent) ages.

There is a lot of Noel Coward, H. G. Wells, Somerset Maugham and Charles Dickens. There are fewer Americans, though the main ones are there; and a smattering of Continental authors. The selection seems to have been made very much to Amos’ own taste and reading, which is as it should be. Though he clearly has worked for a wide range of references, excessive academic rigor doesn’t spoil his enjoyment nor, as a result, our own.

Certainly, many of the references are fairly well known or unstartling. As a rule, the revelation that a character is based on an author’s mother, father, uncle or best friend is less than startling. We also get, at least in an American frame of reference, quite a few low-watt illuminations. It is pleasant to learn but easy to forget that the character of Davie Gellatley in Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley” is based on “Daft” Jock Gray, a peddler’s son. The news that Nathaniel Filson in a novel by Norman Douglas is really Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law will leave many of us unmoved.

It’s not surprising to read that Hesione Hushabye in “Heartbreak House” was modeled on Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Shaw used her a lot. He made love to his women in order to put them into his plays; not, as is more common, vice versa.

It is much more intriguing to think that Virginia Woolf was the inspiration for Lady Utterword. I’m not sure I believe it, in fact. Amos cites a respected Shaw scholar, but he doesn’t vouch for it. For such an elusive question as where characters come from, suggestion is probably more fruitful, and closer to the truth, than certainty.

It is satisfying to know that Evelyn Waugh, sacked as a Commando officer by Lord Lovat, is said to have made him into the unlikable Trimmer in “Officers and Gentlemen.” This is the kind of thing Alexander Pope used to do, except that he tended to use real names.

Amos digs up a whole underground tangle of references involving, appropriately, John le Carre. In “The Naive and Sentimental Lover,” le Carre based Shamus and Helen on his friends, James and Susan Kennaway. In real life, Mrs. Kennaway and David Cornwell--le Carre--were lovers, as well. Kennaway, also a novelist, then wrote “Some Gorgeous Accident” and made Cornwell, as Dr. Fiddes, part of a marital triangle. Finally, rounding things off and serving as the source for Amos’ account, Susan Kennaway wrote about this romantic and literary morass in “The Kennaway Papers.” Since her husband had died by that time, perhaps of geometrical fatigue, she used extracts of his diary.

Sometimes, as Amos points out in his introduction, the real-life originals for fictional characters grew incensed, even if the names were altered. When Jane Seymour Hill objected to her portrait as Miss Mowcher in early installments of “David Copperfield,” Dickens was able to make amends by polishing her up later on.

Others, on the other hand, were delighted. Gerard Fairlie was so pleased to be the model for Sapper’s “Bull Dog Drummond” series that, when Sapper died, he carried on for an additional seven books. Here, truly, was a character who insisted on outliving his maker.

And then there were the lawsuits; and still are. None of them is likely to match the suit brought against George Moore’s “Lewis Seymour and Some Women.” A reader changed his name to Lewis Seymour so as to be able to claim he was injured. Happily for Moore, he lost. Happily for literature, too; except, perhaps, for the literature of literary representation.