Writing Real Lives
Writing fictional accounts of the lives of real people is a haunting experience. I don’t mean this in the sense that I believe I’m reliving their lives, but rather, I feel at every moment I’m not doing them justice. I feel my spiritual debts amassing with every line of dialogue I put into their mouths. I guess the difficulty I’m having with this script is that the characters feel very present to me, yet at the same time, I know that they are figments of my imagination as much as any character I might choose to create from nothing. The simple fact is that I cannot hope to capture an authentic moment. Everything written as ‘non-fiction’ is still in some senses ‘fiction’ because every moment is remembered less perfectly than it was lived.
Yet this gets me no further with my drama. I tried to get ahandle on this by watching Alan Bennett’s version of Anthony Blunt’s life, A Question of Attributation. He must have faced the same problems. If you aren’t consulting the real people, then you are interpreting their lives. The only way to remain loyal to the reality is to transform it in a way that does them some justice.
For Bennett, whatever actual history he recreates eventually slips into the grand design of the double-layered narrative, between the uncovering of the fifth man in the spy ring and the fifth man in the Titian painting. It matters little if his Blunt is anything like the real Blunt. In a way, his becomes more authentic because it is the one that people will remember. I don’t know who, in the end, should be the more grateful. The writer’s debt to his source material is perhaps outweighed by the honour the subject might feel to see his life reinterpreted.