1 week Ago By Louisa Saunders
The novelist Coco Mellors has scored a second bestseller with Blue Sisters , her follow-up to Cleopatra and Frankenstein . But one reader is not happy: the British poet James Massiah, an acquaintance of Mellors, has accused her in a lengthy Instagram post of basing a character in the novel on him. The similarity he sees between him and this flawed character has given him a “mini identity crisis”.
The news has raised a wry smile here. Way back in 1996, I faced a similar accusation when a long-ago ex-boyfriend, literary critic David Sexton, believed himself to be unflatteringly depicted in my novel A Vicious Circle . He threatened to sue and as a result the book’s publication was cancelled by Hamish Hamilton (an imprint of Penguin).
The scandal has lingered in many memories, and at least once a year I get contacted by other writers anxious for advice about how to avoid legal trouble. The conviction among non-writers remains that novelists “put” a real-life person into a work of fiction, sometimes out of vengefulness or spite. But a novel is what it says on the tin – a work with made-up characters and situations.
I may sometimes use a line I’ve heard uttered by a real-life person in dialogue, because it strikes me as funny or revealing, but I would hate for any of my family or friends to believe themselves skewered in my work. And while I can understand why Massiah might feel unsettled, the characteristics he shares with the fictional character in Blue Sisters – a black poet living with his parents and interested in drugs and philosophy – surely apply to more people than himself. A certain kind of reader, however, loves to deny the creative imagination.
As well as projecting themselves into novels, many insist on reading almost all fiction as a “roman a clef”. It’s enraging because the truths a novel tells can only be psychological and archetypal. If it were as easy to write as a gossip sheet, why bother with the ill-paid ardours of making stuff up ? Nevertheless, even those family and friends leading lives of irreproachable dullness often tiptoe round my tribe because of this misapprehension.
Reader, even if you claim Lizzie Bennett or James Bond as your own avatar, it’s not all about you. No, really. I’ve had one or two readers accuse me (I am not making this up) of reading their emails/ tapping their mobile/ being a witch.
I know firm friends who have fallen out over their supposed fictional selves. (“But why did she have to put in my bunions?” said one). Sometimes, as in Jilly Cooper’s Rivals , an author has to change a character’s name for being too close to that of a real-life person they’ve never met but subconsciously registered.
Very occasionally, someone like Melvyn Bragg has embarrassed themselves in a novel by writing a minor character who is not Lynn Barber, the interviewer who wounded his ego, doing something like sitting on the loo. But most writers would go through agonies, trying to make a character who might just possibly have their roots in reality as remote as possible from the original. A writer’s own upbringing may sometimes be another matter.
“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,” wrote the Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, coining a phrase that has been taken as a badge of honour by authors from Philip Roth to Andrew O’Hagan. I once heard a story about rich relations who bought up every copy of a writer’s debut to prevent it from being read by anyone else – a tactic which, ironically, could lead to the offending work becoming a best-seller. Alas, some good novels have been suppressed, especially those featuring journalists.
As long ago as 1933, Malcom Muggeridge’s Picture Palace , loosely based on his time at the Manchester Guardian, was stalled by his publishers at the last moment over fear of libel claims. Murray Sayle’s Fleet Street novel The Crooked Sixpence ran into similar problems. Francis King lost his home after a Labour MP, Tom Skeffington-Lodge, picked up the proofs of his 1970 novel A Domestic Animal , which, although the matter never reached court, landed him with substantial costs.
(More recently, Jake Arnott accidentally gave his pervert of a 70s bandleader in Johnny Come Home the same name as a former bandleader of spotless character who was understandably distressed. The book was pulped and the character renamed). Read Next 'Readers loved the fisting': Why novels need good sex scenes I myself was once sent a pornographic novel featuring a red-headed nymphomaniac called Amanda Craig.
I laughed and binned it. This is what James Massiah should do. Thanks to his complaints, thousands more readers have now heard not just of his poetry but of Mellors’s novel Blue Sisters .
It is bound to reach a far wider audience as a result. When my own scandal erupted, it looked as if I would be left with no publisher and no home. I was saved by a libel lawyer who read my manuscript and saw how a few tweaks could make A Vicious Circle publishable.
Because of the media frenzy, Fourth Estate put in a pre-emptive bid for five times my original advance – which Penguin did not then dare ask to be repaid. Far from losing our home, we were able to move into a bigger one. Strangely, the common feature about all the libel cases I know about is that they are brought by men, not women.
So whenever I am asked for libel advice I say the same thing to each anxious author. “Just give your character an enormous penis.” They are never sued.
Amanda Craig’s latest novel is The Three Graces (Abacus £9.99).
