100 Books I Keep Keeping... 27 The Originals
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The Originals: Who's Really Who in Fiction by William Amos (1985)
... which shows that Real People Fiction? - has a lot older and more respectable pedigree than many folk realise. And I don't just mean docudrama or semi-biography, either.
As the author himself says in the introduction "When an author denies that his characters have real-life originals, don't believe him. Dickens, and Maugham, Meredith, Wells and Waugh...all were less than honest."
And then there's Proust, oh my is there Proust...
I can't recall when and where I bought this book, but it must have been the late eighties, it's rather shabby and well worn (and that's an oh so totally 80s cover, isnt it?), but I still love it. It's just a terrific browse, a simple A-Z of fictional characters and who they were partly or wholly based on whether the author admitted it or not, several thousand of them... with the bulk, it should be said, coming from the late 19th and early 20th century, before libel laws began to bite hard and the improved and faster communication made it easier for the libelled to find out and hit back fast. In fact, the introduction has some cheery if now outdated advice for writers on how to avoid getting their inspirations [a] recognised, [b] mad and [c] siccing their lawyer on to the author :) But the range is vast, from Shakespeare and Marlowe to Kerouac, from Little Lord Fauntleroy to Jekyll and Hyde, from Josef Stalin to Norma Shearer.
Some are well known - Alice Liddell inspiring the Alice books, for instance, or Tolkein basing Luthien on his wife Edith. Many of the real people, and even the characters except in the more respected and celebrated novels, have become obscure (and honestly now, how many of us read the then-proclaimed classics of the early 20th century these days?) but there's still a fascination in seeing how many people will have their tiny (or, for people like Freida Lawrence, Zelda Fitzgerald, literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell and the wealthy editor Arthur Marwood, quite a few not so tiny) slices of immortality long after many have been near forgotten in their own right. There's also a twisted fascination in the crueller and darker portrayals like Hugh Walpole, who never really recovered from reading W Somerset's Maugham's version of him in Cakes and Ale.
There's a list at the end of all the real folk, with their fictional counterpart or counterparts so you can see who moved in the literary circles most likely to use them by the number of names after their own... or who was lucky/unlucky/interesting enough to be immortalised just once, but oh so very definitely that once.
It's dated, sure. An updated edition would be wonderful, and even if, like their predecessors, modern authors Deny All (and probably spend more conscious time and effort on the disguising than those 20th century Literary Figures that featured in my university reading lists), I'm sure their friends and family could be found in their books. But the thousands in this book are still heaps of fun for the reader, researcher and just plain nosy parker alike.
And for those of us who find basing characters on people real - if hard to explain to the nonwriter - fun, there's a joy in knowing that the Great and the Gifted Did It Too :)