http://www.telegraph.co.
uk/culture/books/booknews/10172292/The- Also in France, the actress Scarlett Johansson is currently suing the
murky-world-of-literary-libel.html
The murky world of literary libel
Lawsuits, pulped books, family rifts: when novelists base their
characters on real people, trouble tends to follow. John Preston
investigates literary libel.
By John Preston
7:00AM BST 14 Jul 2013
"It never occurred to me that it might cause problems, says the
Norwegian novelist, Karl Ove Knausgaard, of his 3,500 page epic
about his family, catchily if provocatively titled Min Kamp. In
retrospect, this might have been a bit naive. Aged 40 and with an
undistinguished literary career behind him, Knausgaard decided to
write unsparingly about himself and his family. No punches would
be pulled, he vowed, no confidences left unbroached.
Here at least he was as good as his word. Knausgaard wrote about
his grandmother being an incontinent alcoholic, his father being a
sadistic brute and his second wife being a depressive. While he was
writing, his mother begged him to stop. Its too much, she said.
Think of your family. But Knausgaard ploughed on regardless.
When he had finished, he showed what hed written to his relatives.
Not surprisingly, they didnt like it in fact they hated it so much
that they tried to get publication halted.
Although they failed, they did persuade Knausgaard to change
everyones name apart from his fathers. This, however, did nothing
to lessen the fallout when the first volume of Min Kamp (Mein
Kampf in Norwegian) came out in 2009. Knausgaards fathers
family have refused to have anything to do with him since, and so
has his brother. His former wife made a radio documentary about
how traumatic she found the whole business, while his second wife,
Linda, called him up after reading it to say that their life together
could never be romantic again. Subsequently, their relationship was
said to be in deep crisis.
While some critics have described Min Kamp as narcissism gone
mad, Knausgaard must be doing something right the book has sold
450,000 copies in Norway alone. Even so, Knausgaard himself is
ambivalent about whether its all been worth it. I get the rewards,
he admits, while the people I wrote about get the hurt.
While Knausgaard was busy trying to dodge his familys flak in
Norway, something similar was going on in France. Earlier this
year, Christine Angot, a 54-year-old novelist who basks in the title
of Frances Queen of Shock Fiction, was found guilty of pillaging
the private life of her boyfriends ex-lover in her novel, Les Petits
(The Little Ones). Elise Bidoit insisted that the novel had ruined her
life this despite the fact that her name had been changed in the
book. She was so upset that she had tried to commit suicide, she
claimed. A French court sympathised and ordered Angot and her
publishers to pay her 40,000 (34,500) in damages.
It turns out that Angot is no stranger to this sort of thing. In previous
novels, shes written about her incestuous relationship with her
father, and about the athletically adventurous sex life she enjoyed
with an earlier boyfriend. Remarkably, she had also written about
Bidoit before in a 2008 novel called The Lover Market in which
Angot didnt even bother to change her name. Angot ended up
paying her 10,000 (8,600) in an out-of-court settlement.
author of a bestselling novel featuring a fictional character who
resembles her. The author, Grgoire Delacourt, insists that his
portrayal of Johansson is intended as a tribute to her beauty. But
Johansson or at least her lawyers dont see it that way and are
demanding damages for breach and fraudulent use of personal
rights. All these cases have focused attention on a perennially grey
area in fiction: how far can you go morally as well as legally
when writing about real people?
Whats not in doubt is that legally it can prove very costly indeed
as Francis King found when he wrote about a neighbour of his, a
former Labour MP called Tom Skeffington-Lodge in his 1970
novel, A Domestic Animal. Skeffington-Lodge read a proof copy of
the book and recognised a lightly veiled, far-from-flattering, portrait
of himself.
The case was lent a peculiar piquancy by the fact that Skeffington-
Lodges character in the book went by the name of Dame Winifred
Harcourt it transpired that King thought hed be safe if he gave
him a sex change. However, King then made the big mistake of
writing to Skeffington-Lodge to apologise for what hed done.
Skeffington-Lodge took this admission of guilt straight around to his
barrister, the novel was pulped days before publication and King
was forced to sell his house in Brighton in order to pay his legal
costs.
But what about morally? Should writers be free to base characters
on real people? Of course they should, says the novelist Philip
Hensher. As a novelist, your imagination has got to be free you
cant spend your time worrying about what someone is going to
think. As far as Im concerned you can make a real person anything
you like, just as long as people understand that this is not necessarily
an accurate version of anything. If you were a historian, it would be
different but youre not.
None the less, Hensher believes theres a big difference writing
about people who are alive, and those who are dead. For instance, I
dont think anyone would worry about putting a real-life Victorian
into a novel. But it does get trickier if someone is alive, or has only
just died. When I was younger and much naughtier, I wrote the
libretto for an opera [by Thomas Ads] about Margaret, Duchess of
Argyll, who had only died three years earlier. People did think that
was a little bit dubious. I must say Im not sure if Id do it now. As
you get older, you do become a bit more sensitive to causing people
pain.
Ah yes, causing pain Here we come to one of the trickiest areas of
all when writing about real people. I once wrote a novel in which a
real-life man appeared an archaeologist who had been married to
my aunt. I did my research, read his journals and generally felt
rather pleased with the accuracy of my portrayal.
Then I happened to meet an old friend of his. He was so angry he
could hardly speak. Apparently the man wasnt remotely how Id
depicted him, and Id done his memory a grave disservice. My
immediate response was to say that he should write his own novel if
he felt that strongly. The trouble is the sense of guilt has never quite
gone away the sense that if I was a portrait painter I wouldnt have
done a very good job of capturing a likeness.
Getting it wrong when writing about real-life people can take many
forms. In 1976, Piers Paul Read wrote a novel called Polonaise
which included a particularly nasty character called Lord Derwent
who had incestuous relations with his daughter.
Read had chosen the name because he happened to be staying near
the River Derwent in Yorkshire while writing the book. To his
horror, he then found out that there was a real-life Lord Derwent
and that he was out for blood.
At Derwents insistence, the whole edition was pulped and the name
of the character changed in subsequent editions. However, the
American edition went ahead as planned albeit with an erratum
slip, guaranteed to leave readers in a state of puzzlement: It should
be noted that the Lord Derwent in this novel bears no resemblance
to the real Lord Derwent.
Much the same thing happened to DJ Taylor when he published his
second novel, Real Life, in 1991. For reasons Taylor is still at a loss
to explain, he used the name of someone hed met fleetingly five
years earlier for one of his main characters a man who happened
to be a Soho porn baron, a former associate of the Kray Twins and
the maker of films such as Nazi Death Camp and Spank Academy.
Taylor had inadvertently given his character the same number of
children as the real Mr X, and had him living in the same area of
London. Nor did it help that hed misspelled the mans name this
was taken by his lawyers to be a ham-fisted attempt to cover his
tracks. In the end Taylor and his publishers settled out of court for a
sum in the lower end of five figures. Contractually bound to
indemnify his publishers, Taylor ended up paying half of it himself.
And judging by a recent proposal made by Hachette, the French
publisher which controls Little Brown and Hodder & Stoughton, the
fear of ending up in court is greater than ever. Hachette now want
offer letters to authors to include the clause: This offer is made
on the understanding that the novel would be purely fictional with
no basis on real people or events.
When I asked David Miller, a literary agent at Rogers Coleridge &
White, how this would affect him, he said hed ignore it. How do
you apply that to anyone who uses their own life to write a realistic
novel? Its bonkers.
Some people, of course, seem only too happy to appear in novels.
Several years ago, the crime novelist James Ellroy was at a book
signing in Hollywood when he was asked to sign a book by Don
Crutchfield, an LA private investigator. The two men got talking
and Crutchfield told Ellroy how he often felt like a character from
one of his novels.
Not long afterwards, Ellroy asked Crutchfield if he really would like
to be a character in a book. Crutchfield was thrilled especially
when Ellroy offered him money into the bargain. Hes remained
thrilled ever since, despite the fact that his character is none-too-
bright and goes by the name of Dips--- Don Crutchfield.

The whole thing was incredibly traumatic, he says now. I
realised just how serious it was when I got a call from my solicitor
advising me to put any property I had into my wifes name. What
made it worse was that it was plainly an innocent mistake. But
looking back, I think I was an idiot and deserved everything I got.
At the same time its unquestionably true that the libel laws are
stacked against the writer.
Traditionally, courts in the United States have come down much
harder on novelists who libel real people than British ones. In 1971,
Gwen Davis wrote a novel called Touching, in which one of her
characters was a sadistic quack who ran nude encounter sessions for
neurotic Californians.
Its probably best to tread carefully when putting real-life characters
into your novel. Equally, though, theres something to be said for
going the other way portraying them in the most outrageous light
possible.
In 1982, a former Miss Wyoming sued Penthouse over a short story
in which a fictional Miss Wyoming went in for exaggerated
sexual practices. The jury agreed this was a grave libel and
awarded her $28 million. However, an appeal court reversed the
ruling. They did so, they said, because the sexual exploits in
question were so fantastic that no one would believe a person could
ever have performed them.

Paul Bindrim, a real-life psychologist who staged his own nudie

encounter sessions, claimed the character was based on him and
sued. In court, Davis admitted that she had once attended one of
Bindrims nude marathons but denied her character was based
on him.

The jury disagreed and awarded Bindrim $100,000. There was,

however, a silver lining of sorts for Davis. Her book, which had
been a flop when it first appeared, rapidly became a collectors item.

But 20 years on, the climate had changed a good deal. When the
novelist Terry McMillans former boyfriend, Leonard Welch, read
her 1989 novel, Disappearing Acts, he promptly blew a gasket.
Launching a $4.75 million lawsuit, Welch claimed he was the model
for the books central character, a drunken racist and homophobe
called Franklin Swift. He wore the same clothes as Swift, he
maintained, had the same pet, the same dodgy knee and even ate the
same breakfast cereal.

Yet the judge decided that no one who knew Welch could confuse
him with the fictional Swift. In essence, the differences between
them outweighed the similarities. It seemed the balance had shifted
from the plaintiff to the writer.

Over here, though, we still do things very differently. In 1999, when

an anonymous British author wrote a satire about Tony and Cherie
Blair called Holly Lester, its publishers, Pan, pulled it just before
publication over fears that the Blairs would sue for libel.