Fact and fiction

 

  

Cheryl's comment on yesterday's post is a very interesting one as it raises the question of how and where, in a work of fiction in which a character is based on a real person, the writer draws the line between fact and invention, and how the reader spots that line.
    Taking both Deborah Lawrenson's Songs of Blue and Gold and Justine Picardie's Daphne as examples, I was struck by how rigorous both writers' research must have been and thus how intimately they knew their 'subjects'. All my reading about or by Lawrence Durrell and Daphne du Maurier suggested that both Deborah and Justine had got their characters exactly right. Yes, they are putting words in mouths, but they have gone to great pains to choose those words carefully and pitch the voice accurately. As to plot, again, everything they have had their characters do is entirely plausible, though Deborah makes it very clear that one major incident in her novel is entirely imagined - it does still fit her character, though.
     One difference between the two books is that Justine is writing about Daphne du Maurier as Daphne du Maurier, while Deborah has used Lawrence Durrell as the inspiration for Julian Adie so she would have had greater latitude. That said, neither writer strikes a single false note and each has used her raw material with the utmost respect for the person or facts on which it was based. These are impeccable books.
     Someone who has adopted an alternative approach and taken what we might call affectionate liberties with a real person is the marvellous Alan Bennett. He uses the Queen, no less, in his excellent The Uncommon Reader (having previously featured her along with Anthony Blunt in his play "A Question of Attribution") and he invites us to see what might happen were Her Majesty to develop a passion for books (she is patron of The London Library, after all...). This is pure invention as pure fun and it is easy for the reader to separate fact from fiction.
     With Justine's and Deborah's respective books, it is clear they are novels and not biographies, and yet their grasp of their characters and their use of them has been as sure as a biographical work would have required, though as I mentioned yesterday, even a factual treatment of a person cannot be fully definitive as we are all of us open to many interpretations.
    

Comments

[Deborah Lawrenson]

First of all, thank you so much for the lovely review yesterday!

There's also Colm Toibin's novel-portrait of Henry James, The Master, which evokes the inner life of the writer in a way that would be difficult to achieve in a straightforward biography.

What struck me forcibly about Justine Picardie's Daphne was how superbly it works on several levels. The modern-day strand of the (nearly) nameless PhD student researching Daphne's own mystery while her own life resonates with bleak echoes of Rebecca both illustrates the point about reading and writing being subjective activities, and shows vividly the intense psychological draw of Du Maurier's stories. It's an exploration of the reader's reaction too.

As for Lawrence Durrell, what fascinated me was how his non-fiction (especially the island-resident books) is so evocative of place, lyrical yet absolutely accurate in the descriptions of landscape, but not quite as true as it purports to be of the writer himself. Yet his novels are almost always about writers who were by his own admission "variations of myself". Rather like authors who write sequels of other authors' books, what I set out to write was another "variation" - as I saw him, with all the preconceptions and personal interpretations I brought to the task.

[Simon T]

It is such an interesting question, the use of someone real in a book. I find it a little disappointing when it's someone not famous, and not overtly done - like when I discovered du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel was simply based on a person she knew. When an author is open about it... I don't know. Virginia Woolf in The Hours is a very different creature from Virginia Woolf as I 'know' her through diaries and letters and novels... but still interesting. Can any person be crystallised in language? Ooo... discuss (!)