Phil Murphy

Is Everyone ‘Fair Game’ in the Name of Art?

As he continues his attempt to clamber back from the brink of a fall in Italy that left him tetraplegic, novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi was as rebarbative as ever in a recent interview.

In Shattered, the memoir of his accident, its consequences and subsequent reflections on his life, he describes his mother as “the most boring person I ever met”, adding “liking other people was one thing she couldn’t bear”.  Asked if he would still have published that assessment had she not died four years ago, Kureishi replied, “Yep” even though he conceded that she would have been offended.

And it wasn’t just in his latest memoir that Kureishi was accused of being harsh on his family.  His sister, Yasmin, famously wrote to The Guardian about his depiction of what she deemed to be their family in his breakthrough novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. Accusing Hanif of selling their family down the line, she said she would not let the family be “fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif’s profit”.

Pushed to say what it said about him that he felt he had to write about his mother in the way that he did, Kureishi said: “Writers have a splinter of ice in their heart, as Graham Greene says.  When I’m teaching writing, a student tells me a juicy story and I say, ‘That’s great.  Write it down,’ and they’ll say, ‘I can’t say that – if my mum read it, she’d hate me for it.’  And then you think, ‘Well, you’re not a f****** writer, are you?’”

Just three weeks after Kureishi’s interview was published, London poet James Massiah hit the news, claiming that the novelist, Coco Mellors, had used his story at the core of her novel, Blue Sisters.  More than half a dozen people had asked him if he was ‘Charlie’ in the novel.  Like the character, Massiah runs a poetry night in an east London pub where a young crowd sit cross-legged on the floor.  Phrases and concepts Massiah had used regularly – “amoral egoism” and “party poetry”, scarcely everyday constructs – are echoed by Charlie.

Massiah and Mellors had become friends in 2018, but she had never mentioned that she was writing a novel that mirrored elements of his life quite so sharply.  According to Massiah, Mellors initially claimed the character was not based on him before conceding later that she should have told him about the character.  Massiah said having details from his life appear in a bestselling novel had been confusing and unsettling.

“I want some acknowledgement or maybe an apology,” he said.

The Kureishi and Mellors examples beg the question: for the writer of fiction, is everyone they come across fair game for depiction in a novel or short story?

A typical pushback is that, whatever the resemblance between a real and a fictional character, the product is fiction, not biography.  The character depicted, however closely, should just chill out.  But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, might that character not be a duck?  And might the duck have the right to take offence at the depiction?

Ian McEwan captures the moral dilemma neatly in his excellent novel, Lessons, published in 2022.  To avoid a spoiler, I shall leave the reader to discover why central character Roland Baines agrees to meet his first wife in her home in Germany after many years of separation; but he takes the opportunity to visit her in large part due to the fact that, after years as an internationally successful novelist failing to make even the slightest literary nod in his direction whilst basing other characters on individuals that Roland recognises, in her final novel Alissa not only includes key details of their early married life but describes what was clearly their shared home in Clapham as “a shithole” and portrays her husband as a wife-beater.

As Roland says: “To the Press the implication will be clear.  You know that I never hit you.  Let me hear it from you.”

“Of course you didn’t, Jesus! ...  Have I really got to give you lessons in how to read a book?  I borrow.  I invent.  I raid my own life.  I take from all over the place, I change it, bend it to what I need,” says Alissa.

She then goes on to claim that she had in fact been ‘protecting’ him throughout her thirty-five-year career as a novelist.

“From what?” Roland asks.

“From the truth…Jesus.  From the memoir I could have written.”  She reels off an unflattering list of his failures and inadequacies, before adding, “You were a great subject, Roland.  Something about men I could have told the world.  But I didn’t.  I never forgot that you were the only man I ever loved.”

The twist at the end of that passage is sublime, but I admire too the way McEwan, in what is said to be a partly autobiographical novel, captures the tension between the real and the imagined.  Alissa clearly had that writer’s “splinter of ice” that Greene and Kureishi claimed to identify.  Yet, without landing on either side of the ethical argument, McEwan is most likely aware that the reader will feel Roland was wronged by being easily identifiable, warts and all, in Alissa’s novel, then associated unfairly with an unacceptable behavioural trait.

But if there is a Daddy of raiding his private life for ‘fictional’ material, then it has to be Saul Bellow.

To be clear, I regard him as the finest novelist of the contemporary period writing in the English language with the possible exception of Salman Rushdie, and I would take his early novel, The Adventures of Augie March, to my desert island without a second thought; but one wonders whether Bellow ever created a fictional character in all his works that was not based on someone he had known, met or been told about.

In his outstanding two-volume biography of Bellow, Zachary Leader reveals how, in his later years, Bellow would begin a novel based around a character he knew, only to re-write it from page one, after deciding to base it on another completely different acquaintance.

The ethical question-mark hovers over Bellow’s oeuvre for reasons more subtle than Kureishi’s intransigence or Alissa’s claim simply to raid, invent and bend, regardless of the cost to her ‘victim’.  He both uses the pages of his novels to settle some scores and he breaches confidences on the basis that, as a professional writer, he is free to capture whatever and whoever he comes across.

In Humboldt’s Gift, the character Leader describes as “the shrewish Denise” is clearly based on Bellow’s third wife, Susan Glassman.  One can only imagine with what kind of horror she read Denise’s words in the novel: “You couldn’t bear a serious relationship; that’s why you got rid of me and the children.  Now you’ve got this tramp with the fat figure who wears no bra and shows her big nipples to the world.  You’ve got ignorant kikes and hoodlums around you.  You’re crazy with your own brand of pride and snobbery.  There’s nobody good enough for you…  I could have helped you.  Now it’s too late!”

But we don’t need to imagine how Susan Glassman felt because Leader laid his hands upon an unpublished essay penned by her – presumably given to him by the third Mrs Bellow herself.  In Mugging the Muse, she wrote: “Not one of the outrageous questions (asked of me) over the years… asked about the dark heart of the matter.  How does the prize winner’s young and vulnerable son feel, when asked in school if his mother is really so awful?  Or when told by a buddy, who had the word from his mother, ‘Don’t read it.  Your father did a number on your mom.’”

Not being a writer, Susan had no means of evening the score, if that were to have been what she wanted; she also had no platform from which to itemise which were fair and which were distorted details of the persona Bellow gave her as Denise.

Susan Glassman was one of hundreds of people that Bellow copied or exaggerated in his fiction; but others were used in different ways, not least a good friend of Bellow’s called Dave Peltz.

In a hilarious episode in Humboldt’s Gift, the central character, Charlie Citrine, is kidnapped by a hoodlum who believes he has been humiliated publicly by Citrine.  Citrine is then taken on a terrifying trip round Chicago to the top of a building site.

The story was taken from Peltz’s own inadvisable slurs and his own subsequent ‘kidnapping’.  He told Bellow the story but made him promise not to use it in his fiction because he was planning to use it himself.

In a letter to Peltz the year after publication of Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow acknowledged that he had been forbidden from using the episode.  “What matters is that good things get written…  We’ve known each other for forty-five years and told each other thousands and thousands of anecdotes.  And now, on two bars suggested by one of your anecdotes, I blew a riff…  What harm is there in that?  Your facts are unharmed by my version…  The name of the game is Give All.  You are welcome to all my facts.  You know them, I give them to you.  If you have the strength to pick them up, I give you my blessing.”

Although Peltz later suggested that Bellow’s analysis was right, one suspects that he never really overcame that hurt – not least because, when he attempted to include the episode in his own novel, it lacked the vivid dynamism of Bellow’s version and was never published.

Looking back to Bellow’s letter to Peltz, it contains a neat twist.  Bellow appears to offer Peltz a gift; yet we now know that it was a gift that Peltz was incapable of picking up.  It is not strength he lacks to pick up the offer, but skill.  Between the lines, Bellow is saying that, because his friend is free to raid their shared anecdotes and experiences, he, Bellow, is free to raid them too.  He does not articulate that he, Bellow, had the skill to raid them effectively where Peltz did not.  Heads, I win; tails, you lose.

So, are there any rules we can usefully adopt as writers?  Do we evaporate too much of the story-pool, if we say we cannot recount events that have damaged or destroyed the lives or reputations of those we love?  Or do we swerve stories that will damage people we care about because it might be the ‘right thing’ to do and because there are many great stories out there and in our imagination?

When I ask myself the question, one outstanding novel outline will remain unwritten because, though recounting actual, powerful, domestic events, its publication would be likely to re-open wounds that have taken many years – and significant counselling – to come close to healing.  And I’m not sure it is my role, as an outsider looking in, to risk the likely damage.

“Why don’t you ask these people if you can write their story?” asks another writer in the family, excited by the outline of the story.  I doubt that I will ask because I am sure I know the answer.

Having said that, a character who I had the misfortune to have enter my environment would get the Bellow treatment, were I to find the right story to drop him into.  And maybe it is time I wrote about a narcissist and sociopath wreaking havoc in a sleepy town in the South-East of England.  But then, much as I would like to nail the bastard, I reflect upon the waste of a creative year in writing about so trivial an individual – and the concept has gone.

Overall, I am fortunate that my preferred genre is contemporary historical fiction.  As Robert Harris told me at a book launch for Act of Oblivion, he finds a fascinating period of history and looks for a gap into which he can drop the fictional character or characters who will help tell the tale.   It is what I have done in my two novels, Goran’s Dilemma and The Pavelić Trap (philmurphyauthor.com) and I suspect that that will continue to be one of my favoured formulae.  I’m not saying I will never base my characters on people I know but, my friends, only the narcissist and sociopath need fear my pen.

But these are merely my parameters, the intuitive boundaries I set around my writing.  And were they to be applied across the board, they would have catastrophic consequences for literature.  Had they been applied in the past, whole swathes of Bellow would never have been sent to the publishers.  Some of Tolstoy’s passages would never have seen the light of day because of the harmful effect they had on some of those close to him.  And how much worse off would we readers have been for that?

So, to answer the initial question, is everyone and everything fair game in the name of art?  For some writers, thankfully – ‘yes’!

#HanifKureishi #IanMcEwan #SaulBellow #HumboldtsGift #EthicsOfFiction #HistoricalFiction #Yugoslavia #Mladić #Milošević #Bosnia #Serbia #Croatia

References

• Hanif Kureishi interview with Simon Hattenstone – The Guardian, Saturday 12/10/24
• Shattered, by Hanif Kureishi, Random House, 2024
• ‘This is Me!’ Poet says literary sensation based book character on him – The Guardian, 4/11/24
• An example of a James Massiah poem: Watch here
• Blue Sisters, Coco Mellors, Harper Collins Publishers, 2024
• Lessons, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, 2022
• The Life of Saul Bellow – two volumes, To Fame and Fortune 1915-64 (Jonathan Cape, 2015) and Love and Strife 1965-2005, (Vintage, 2018) by Zachary Leader
• Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow, Penguin Books, 1973