Portraits and disguises
Allan Massie
THE ORIGINALS by William Amos
Jonathan Cape, £12.95
William Amos's The Originals carries the sub-title `Who's Really Who in Fic- tion'. It represents a wide-ranging attempt to identify the models or prototypes for some 3000 fictional characters. It is obviously a labour of love and it is highly entertaining. Mr Amos is well aware of the temerity of his enterprise, but he doesn't take it or himself too seriously, quoting for instance Auden on the dark lady of the Sonnets: 'anyone who wastes his time trying to identify the dark lady seems to me to be a fool', and himself adding that 'the enigma of Mr W. H. has done valuable public service in keeping generations of academics off the streets . . .'
He knows too that, except in the case of a few authors, and except for minor `flat' characters with walk-on parts, identifica- tion is rarely a simple matter of x=y. Authors may find a character suggested by an acquaintance, but good authors usually add something of their own. The character develops in their imagination and writing away from the original. Where there are several originals, as with Proust's charac- ters, their qualities may come to seem so attenuated, so sliced salami-style, that we are justified in regarding Charlus and Albertine, Saint-Loup and the Duchess of Guermantes, as being purely imaginative creations, the fruit of Proust's experience of life.
Here perhaps I should, parliamentary- style, declare an interest. Three years ago I was commissioned to write a book for The Bodley Head with the working title: Liter- ary Identities. My intention was less ambi- tious than Mr Amos's, for after a wide- ranging opening chapter, I was to confine myself to Waugh, Powell and Nancy Mit- ford. The book struggles on, but its emph- asis has changed, as I became increasingly suspicious of my notion that identifications could be happily made. Certainly, this was possible in the case of Mitford; far less so with Waugh and Powell.
It may be fear of libel that restrains Mr Amos, but he would seem to agree with me. Of course he offers some originals for these writers, but they are often peripheral figures or cases where the author has already himself obliged. So, in Powell for instance, we get Hugh Moreland (Constant Lambert), Pennistone (Alick Dru), Dicky Umfraville (Lt-Col Basil Hambrough, who also appears in What's Become of Waring as Eustace Bromwich) and various minor figures (foreign military attaches, for ex- ample) carried more or less straight from life to the page: but we get no Widmer- pool, no Stringham, neither Peter Templer nor his sister Jean, no Deakin, no Jeavons, and no Pamela Flitton. Julian Maclaren- Ross is of course identified as the original of X. Trapnel (also as Dorian Scott- Crichton in Rayner Heppenstall's The Les- ser Infortune), but some of the identifica- tions seem to me hazardous. I don't believe that Quiggin owes anything to Cyril Con- nolly, though Connolly was used by Waugh (Everard Spruce), Mitford (Ed Spain in The Blessing though Waugh detected Lord Stanley of Alderley in that character too and said that he `and Boots don't mix'); also by Olivia Manning, Harold Acton and John Davenport and Dylan Thomas in The Killing of the King's Canary.
The Waugh identifications shed no new light and repeat some rather weary and uncritical statements. `John Beaver is Sir John Heygate, Bt. (1903-76) for whom Waugh's first wife Evelyn Gardner, left him in 1930.' Not so: only the situation is similar. The characters bear no resembl- ance, as a reading of Anthony Powell's memoirs should have told Mr Amos. Beav- er was a wimp; Heygate a man of striking energy and eccentricity. Ambrose Silk is as usual identified with Brian Howard; yet Waugh emphasises in Put Out More Flags that Silk was a fine artist of the utmost integrity, which could never be said of Howard. No doubt Howard contributed something, but he would never have been fooled by Basil Seal as Silk innocently was. I have always been suspicious too of the easy identification of Rex Mottram with Brendan Bracken (Mr Amos calls it 'an unflattering caricature'). Mottram seems to me far more a type, drawn from the Churchill-F. E. Smith-Beaverbrook circle (to which Bracken of course belonged) than a portrait of Bracken himself.
Some novelists of course do draw direct- ly from life — Snow and Lawrence are good examples — and this is perhaps why their characters are rarely more than skin- deep. Mr Amos seeks them out assiduous- ly, but Snow's originals pose him with a problem; few of us have heard of them. Mr Amos knows this very well: `those with a high boredom threshold,' he observes, `might like to know that Despard-Smith' (in The Masters) is in part Sir Franklin Sibly (1883-1948), Vice-Chancellor of Reading University from 1929 to 1946.' Quite. Identifications are interesting when we already have an interest in the originals. Kingsley Amis made this point to Mr Amos: ` "The only time I have based charac- ters on real people was in I Like It Here . . . Harry Banyon and adopted son are based on Harold Tyrrell and his wife Lucia and their adopted son. Nothing since." Harold who? Was this, I asked, a leg-pull? "No," Amis replied. "As you will now be
finding out, the truth is very often trivial and dull." ' This seems to me to apply equally to Mr Amos's industrious investigation of the originals in 19th-century Russian fiction. All very well, of course; nice to see it can he done; good to know the Russians work in the same way and all that; it doesn't however alter the fact that Anna Karenina for instance has a real existence denied to `Maria Alexandrova Hartnung (1832- 1919), daughter of Alexander Pushkin (see Khlestakov). Some will find it interesting to know that in the first draft of the novel the Karenins were named Pushkins'. (In- cidentally Khlestakov is Gogol's Govern- ment Inspector whose prototype is Push- kin, though he bears no resemblance to Pushkin and the only connection (apparently) is that Pushkin was mistaken for a Government Inspector 'during a visit to the military and civil governor of Nizhni (sic) Novgorod in 1833'.
Mr Amos tries to distinguish three levels of identification. Sometimes he says a character is so-and-so Minch in Oliver St John Gogarty's Tumbling in the Hay (1939) is James Joyce'). Sometimes he says x is based on y — or on, y,z,a,b,c and round the alphabet; Proust's painter Elstir is credited with eight originals, surely exces- sive. At other times, chiefly 1 think when the author has not met the supposed original, he calls the latter a prototype. Fair enough, though obviously the categor- ies blur. Historical characters can cause a deal of trouble, though Mr Amos has made good use of S. R. Crockett's The Scott Originals. It's also strange when the origin- al's name has not been changed; so Miss Joan Hunter Dunn turns out to be Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. Should she be in the book? (I'm glad she is; the note on her is charming and informative.) He is inclined too to discount the part the author plays in his own creations. Colonel Cantwell, in Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees is given two sources of inspiration: General Buck Lanham and Colonel Charles Sweeney; yet the principal ingredient of the character is Hemingway himself; rarely can there have been a case where a novelist identified more intensely with his hero.
Mr Amos ranges widely. There is a great deal of interesting 19th-century stuff. His notes are always modest, mannerly, yet also lively and often funny. Naturally he makes some mistakes; unavoidable in such a work. Equally naturally he makes some dud guesses, and is occasionally lured by a red herring laid across his path by the author (Hugo Pierce in Emma Tennant's Woman Beware Woman, for example). There are some odd omissions; he doesn't seem to have investigated the works of Sir Angus Wilson. In short, every reader will find something to quarrel with; but every reader will also find much to entertain, much to inform, much that will give rise to speculation and argument. This book is a form of gossip, and all of us who delight in gossip will find it a delight, and be grateful.
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