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Real People, Made-Up Stories

Do you have an opinion of authors who use real people in their fiction? I'm thinking about "Loving Frank" by Nancy Horan, about Frank Lloyd Wright's affair with Mamah Cheney.

—E.K., Stony Brook, N.Y.

Michael Cunningham's 'reanimation' of Virginia Woolf in his book "The Hours," was the focus of some criticism. ENLARGE

There are two conflicting schools of thought about novelists using real people as characters; I agree with both of them.

On the one hand, novelists who appropriate genuine historical (or even modern) figures to populate their fictional worlds would seem to lack imagination. Novelists are inventors, not borrowers; if readers want real stories about real people, there's no shortage of superb biographies.

Jonathan Dee, a novelist and critic, made the case against "literary grave robbing" in a 1999 essay in Harper's magazine. His lead example was Michael Cunningham's "reanimation" of Virginia Woolf in "The Hours," but he also mentioned Don DeLillo's "Libra" and E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," among others. Mr. Dee attributed part of this trend to a diminution of respect for privacy: About Mr. Cunningham, he wrote, "there is no corner of Woolf's extraordinary consciousness that, for reasons of modesty, he might shy away from attempting to recreate." Partly, too, Mr. Dee believes people today can't tolerate the unknown, excoriating Jane Mendelsohn's novel, "I Was Amelia Earhart," which has the aviatrix and her navigator enjoying a torrid romance on the desert island where the writer pictured them landing.

But this is what I found most persuasive in Mr. Dee's polemic: "Creating a character out of words and making him or her as vivid and memorable as a real person might be the hardest of the fundamental tricks a novelist has to perform. Simply adopting or impersonating an already interesting real-life character—Lee Harvey Oswald, J.P. Morgan, Amelia Earhart—cannot be considered as substantial an achievement as creating a character who enters the reader's consciousness as a total unknown." Agreed. Raskolnikov, Sherlock Holmes, Alexander Portnoy and Jane Eyre may have been endowed by their creators with some traits of real people, but they were imagined into being, composed on blank pages.

Yet I have loved so many novels in which a modern writer has brought new life to a historical figure. For me, Gore Vidal's "Lincoln" transformed a stick-figure textbook hero into a real man. Lincoln wasn't a juiceless amalgam of dates and places, speeches and proclamations, as he came across in my history books; he was a wily politician, a folksy teller of yarns, an insomniac, a teetotaler, a self-doubter.

Similarly, in Russell Banks's "Cloudsplitter," the two-dimensional antislavery zealot John Brown comes to life as an incompetent businessman, a depressive, a wrathful but merciful father, a complex man who inspired and infuriated those who knew him. And what did I know of Thomas Cromwell before I read Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall"? Nothing. Nor was I much interested in him. Ms. Mantel changed all that, and if her portrayal wasn't scrupulously faithful to the historical record, I forgive her.

But in general, novelists who write about real people should stick to what Gore Vidal calls "agreed upon facts." As Ron Hansen, who has written several novels embroidering the lives of real historical figures ("The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"; "Hitler's Niece"), has said, "In America today we commonly have such an ignorance of history that it seems to me a kind of malfeasance, a violation of the public trust, to distort the record still further."

More troubling to me is the borrowing of a living person for fiction, as Curtis Sittenfeld did with Laura Bush in her novel "American Wife" and Joe Klein did with the Clintons in "Primary Colors." Although I thought both books were enlightening and engaging, I couldn't help wondering how it would feel to have your life story told by a writer whose only responsibility was to the marketplace. But to be inconsistent, again, that didn't bother me about Alan Bennett confiscating Queen Elizabeth for his novel "The Uncommon Reader," perhaps because his portrayal was so amiable.

A few other novels based on real characters that I thought were gracefully executed are "Arthur and George" by Julian Barnes (Arthur Conan Doyle); "Winnie and Wolf" by A.N. Wilson (Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler); and "The Untouchable" by John Banville (Anthony Blunt).

In "Aspects of the Novel," E. M. Forster explained why fictional characters can be so much more vivid and powerful than real people. Although he doesn't address this question specifically, you can see why the combination of real people and fiction is irresistible to writers and readers. "People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes," he wrote, "their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do, and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe."

Write to Cynthia Crossen at

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