The writer of fiction is no mere copyist
Among the many pleasures reading fiction can afford, perhaps the greatest and most lasting has to do with the people one encounters there. Ever since I first met them during my teens, I have thought of D’Artagnan and his fellow musketeers — Athos, Porthos and Aramis — as friends. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Anna Karenina and Prince Hamlet can seem more real than the people one meets in the street, perhaps because, through the exercise of our imagination, we have helped bring them to life.
But how like the people we meet in real life are they really?
Welsh writer Arthur Machen, best known for that very strange book The Hill of Dreams, thought they weren’t “lifelike” at all. In a talk he gave on BBC radio in 1937 (available in a three-CD set called The Spoken Word: British Writers), Machen said that “the supreme artists have no interest in lifelike characters and don’t depict them save in casual moments of fatigue and depression … the artist creates what neither he nor anybody else has ever seen in life or ever will see in actual life.” According to Machen, it is “the artificer, the secondary man,” who “copies and compounds from the life about him.”
The point of departure for Machen’s talk was a remark of G.K. Chesterton’s about the difference between Dickens and Thackeray: “You admired Mr. Micawber but scarcely expected to meet him … you admired Major Pendennis, but so far from not meeting him, the trouble was to avoid meeting him.” What this demonstrates, Machen said, is that “Dickens is an infinitely greater artist than Thackeray,” the reason being that “Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller went about … invisible to all eyes save those of Charles Dickens.”
What Machen had to say reminded me of something novelist Peter Straub said during a talk I heard him give a number of years ago, namely, that the writer of fiction must not be rigid about the direction in which he intends his story to go and must remain alert to possibilities on the periphery — like the character he has paid no particular attention to who, as Straub put it, “is standing on the sidelines waving his arms and yelling, ‘Forget about him, I’m the one you want to write about.'” That’s a character who is already alive. The writer hasn’t made him up so much as discovered him — or maybe it’s the character who has discovered the writer.
I recently had an email exchange with novelist Piers Paul Read concerning his latest novel, The Death of a Pope, which I reviewed for The Philadelphia Inquirer. As it happens, I imagined one of the characters, Monsignor Perez, differently from the way Read himself had. Read’s response was that “an author is always delighted if a reader takes a different view of his characters than he does himself because it suggests that he has given some sort of autonomous life to his characters. (It is the same when, in the course of writing a novel, the characters take off and do something that he had not intended.)”
That both Read and Straub see their characters as autonomous creatures and not as fabrications modeled on specific individuals leads me to think that Machen is right. This is not to suggest that the writer of fiction does not depend for his art on careful observation of actual human beings. Indeed, that shrewdest of authors, Somerset Maugham, may shed the clearest light on the process by which the creatures of an author’s imagination come to be.
In the preface to East and West, a collection of his stories, Maugham says that he thinks those authors are mistaken “who state that they never have a living model in mind when they create a character.” On the other hand, he adds, “I do not suppose any writer attempts to draw an exact portrait. Nothing, indeed, is so unwise as to put into a work of fiction a person drawn line by line from life. His values are all wrong, and, strangely enough, he does not make the other characters in the book seem false, but himself. He never convinces. … The model a writer chooses is seen through his own temperament and if he is a writer of any originality what he sees need have little relation with the facts.”
Maugham begins his preface by sharing with the reader his working notes for one of his most famous stories, “Rain.” They bear about as much relation to the finished work as a pencil sketch does to an oil painting.
One thing seems obvious: The writer of fiction is no mere copyist. It is as if he deposited certain details he has observed in the sanctuary of his imagination, from where, after a time, an altogether original creature emerges. Perhaps the best explanation of the process is what my friend David Stearns, The Inquirer‘s classical music critic, says is the best explanation for great conducting: alchemy.
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When Alexander Pushkin was finishing his novel in verse, Evgheniy Onegin, he wrote a letter to a friend, marveling at the autonomy his characters developed by the end. “You know what stunt Tatiana pulled on me?” he wrote. “She went and got herself hitched!” (Translation mine, in total contempt of the 19th-century grammar style of the original letter, but it reflects the spirit.)
Thank you, Frank, for crystallizing for me why I’ve always preferred Thackeray to Dickens. I like Maugham’s synthesis of reality and imagination in drawing a character. Faithfully basing a character on a real person does not accomplish that, but a few precise details grasped by the observant, unsentimental eye, such as Thackeray’s, does.
I like my characters to be real and alive and recognizable – even if I would avoid them in real life. I’ve had complaints about one or two of the novels I’ve published that the characters were “unlikeable,” and I would say, “I know they’re unlikeable, but they are alive. They are real. That, they have to be. Likeable, that’s optional.”
It’s nice to know I’m not the only novelist facing this problem of characters going off the reservation.
I remember studying Harold Pinter’s writing in school, and how he said it was critical, an essential paradox of good imaginative writing, that characters had to remain free of their creator’s designs for them.
No, Mark, there are two of you: you and Pushkin. (I bet Tolstoy’s characters never veered off his moral-of-the-story party line and gone rogue.)
Olga! Anna K.?
What about her? She was set up and tossed under the train as an object lesson in negative consequences of adultery.
But not, to use your terms, “real, alive and recognizable”?