Inspirations the Originals

By Stefan Kanfer

"It began as a diary . . . little by little it began to turn itself into a story." So Katherine Anne Porter described the act of writing, and her alchemy of experience into story is as old as fiction itself. Some 3,000 instances of the process appear in The Originals, a witty and thorough compendium that traces novels, plays and tales back to their sources. No matter how extravagant the characters seem on the page, claims British Journalist William Amos, every one of them was based on an actual person.

Some of his entries are speculative: Ophelia may have been the Katharine Hamlet who drowned in the Avon river in 1579. But other cases are beyond argument. Harold Skimpole, the "damaged young man . . . who had undergone some unique process of depreciation" in Bleak House, was the poet Leigh Hunt. A boasting letter from Charles Dickens is exhibit A: "The likeness is astonishing. I don't think it could be more like (Hunt) himself." Dickens tempered his Victorian portrait with humor, but George Eliot was made of sterner stuff. Apologizing to a clergyman who had recognized an unflattering likeness in Scenes of Clerical Life, she explained that she had thought he was dead.

There are occasions, Amos admits, when the distortions of life far exceed those of art. Evelyn Waugh's scapegrace Basil Seal (Black Mischief) is based in part on an aristocrat who might have arrived from the set of early Monty Python. As a houseguest, Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, liked to borrow a pound from the butler and later tip him with it. The title character of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas is a version of the author's father, a West Indian journalist. Seepersad Naipaul publicly labeled the rite of goat sacrifice superstitious. He subsequently received a note in Hindi ordering him to perform the sacrifice or perish within the week, acquiesced, and then went mad. "He looked in the mirror one day," the novelist's mother recalled, "and couldn't see himself. And he began to scream." A siren of Britain's Roaring Twenties, Heiress Nancy Cunard appears in at least seven books under various guises. She "seems to have had lovers almost as often as the rest of us have lunch," says Amos, "and such was their variety that one wonders if she even paused to glance at the menu." If she did, among the entrees she saw were Michael Arlen, Richard Aldington, Louis Aragon, Aldous Huxley and Wyndham Lewis. Alas, at her funeral the pallbearers outnumbered the mourners. Writers, unlike painters, are not famous for acknowledging their models.

A few originals have taken the opposite position. Alexander Woollcott, twitted unmercifully by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart as The Man Who Came to Dinner, played the title role onstage. Gerard Fairlie, who inspired Sapper's stolid Bulldog Drummond, went on to write seven further novels about himself after the death of the detective's creator. Still, most of those who find themselves appearing under other names have a tendency to seethe. The reason for their umbrage frequently has less to do with egos than with wallets. The model for the romantic doctor in W. Somerset Maugham's story The Happy Man was typical. The author had profited handsomely from his tale, complained the original, but where was the fee for the man who had lived it? A Swazi warrior named M'hlopekazi was more succinct. He was the inspiration for Umslopogaas, the intrepid tribesman of King Solomon's Mines. The hunting knife that H. Rider Haggard had presented was all very well. But, M'hlopekazi protested vainly, there was something an African guide would find far more valuable in the veld: royalties.