Talking of books
Thanks, pal
Benny Green
When a famous novelist puts a famous person Into a famous book, the whole world, that is to say, the daft enclave of London's metropolitan limits, soon knows all about it. Anybody well up in his trivia will tell you, quite rightly, that Dicken's Harold Skimpole is Leigh Hunt, that H. G. Wells's Altiora Bailey is Beatrice Webb, that Maugham's Alroy Kear is Hugh Walpole, and so on. The world finds these identifications a source of some fascination not because the chemistry of metamorphosis from fact to fiction interests them, but because at heart we are all a bunch of quidnuncs who like nothing more than to eavesdrop from time to time on the doings of what are sometimes derisively called our betters.
But is Skimpole really Hunt or only the tip of his fibia; is Kear really Walpole or merely the protruding end of his ego? Even if an author desired to render a man whole, would it be possible, when God himself has so much trouble in that regard? It is the same with women of course. It is always being said that Tolstoy used his mother as the model for Natasha; if that is so, he certainly made a comical mess of one or two of Freud's most famous theories, although that is a point which is too unfashionable to mention these days. The unanimity with which we all look at Natasha and deduce Mrs Tolstoy, regard Skimpole and see Hunt, give Altiora the once-over and sniff doctrinal dry-rot, is due more to the fame of the subjects than to the skill in portraiture of the writers. The real test comes when the models are unknown to the reader, at which point perhaps I might be allowed to drift coyly from the sublime to the ridiculous and modulate from Tolstoy and Dickens to myself.
In 1967 I published a novel called Blame It On My Youth, whose backgrounds, like all backgrounds in all novels, were based closely on the topography of personal experience. Recently I came across the following assertion by Compton Mackenzie:
As far as my knowledge of literature goes, all the genuine novelists have started off with a story in which no trace of autobiography is perceptible . . . If a young writer's first novel depends on his personal experience, I say firmly he is not a genuine novelist.
Tactfully overlooking the knotty problem of Scott 'Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, considerately passing over Arnold Bennett's A Man From the North, deftly turning a blind eye to Maugham's Liza of Lambeth, I come to
the sworn statement that if the backgrounds of my novel were actual (you can see the very streets from the back windows of The Spectator), my plot and characters were pure moonshine. However.
A few months after publication I received a telephone call from a man 1 had not seen for nineteen years. He insisted on talking to me about something urgent, which always means it is urgent to them and not to you, and that it was too intimate to discuss over the wire. So we met in one of those Health-Food cafes and sipped some foul honey-and-loganberry juice concoction on the site of the house where William Blake first realised that the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and there, in that depressing setting, my old friend accused me of libelling him in my book. He had decided that he was in chapter thirteen and that in accusing him of living in a three-bedroom house, I had stained his reputation as a materialist, for he had been living for some years now in a four-bedroom house. The charge was so witless that I had no idea how to refute it, except to keep laughing and reassuring him with all the tact I could muster that he was far too dreary a chap to be put into a book.
Two or three months went by when I received another telephone call from another friend I had not spoken to for nineteen years. He too wanted to talk to me about something urgent which he too considered too intimate to thrash out over the phone. So we met, this time in one of those 61d-fashioned fry-up institutions whose atmosphere is pervaded by the ghosts of a million chuckling pork sausages. This old friend had read my book and considered that I had libelled him in chapter thirteen by putting him into a threebedroom house, when the truth of it was he had been astute enough to acquire a fourbedroom house.
Naturally I denied the whole thing, but I could see from his trembling fingers and his white face that he didn't believe me. To lose one friend through inadvertent libel is unfortunate, but to lose two by the same inadvertent libel sounds very much to me like rank injustice. The logical thing for me to do was -of course to have brought my two accusers together and let them fight it out for the privilege of having been traduced in chapter thirteen. Unfortunately the two of them had had some difference of opinion nineteen years ago and had refused to have anything to do with each other since. The thing • that really upsets me is the time-lag between publication by me and identification of a grievance by them, an interlude explained by the fact that your old friends, those tried and true comrades from the good old days, never think of buying your book, but put their names down for it at the library instead. Thanks, pal.
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