Capote, Fitzgerald, and the Ethics of Using Real People in Fiction
For centuries, authors have written people they love into their novels. Sometimes, it's gotten them in a lot of trouble. And sometimes it's gotten them into the canon.
In the fall of 1975, one of the most famous writers in America was having a complete and total mental breakdown.
Truman Capote had just published the first installment of Answered Prayers – the long-awaited follow up to his genre-creating “non-fictional novel” In Cold Blood, which chronicled the gory murder of a Kansas family. Answered Prayers purported to be a novel-novel, but in truth, it was every bit as reported as In Cold Blood. The difference was subject matter. Whereas In Cold Blood grappled with violence, mortality, and trauma, Answered Prayers aired the most humiliating secrets of high society’s most boldfaced names - who also happened to be Capote’s closest friends.
When the Answered Prayers excerpt dropped in Esquire’s November 1975 issue, the fallout was swift and nuclear. The excerpt takes place at a French restaurant in Manhattan where Capote and his famous friends would often have lunch. Capote’s doppelganger, P.B. Jones, sits with his friend Lady Ina Coolbirth (based on the real Slim Keith) who spends hours getting hammered on Cristal with him and eviscerating their mutual friends in guttural detail.
Among said details? For starters, the husband of Capote’s best friend Babe Paley cheating on her with a frumpy governor’s wife who wore orthopedic shoes and left menstrual blood on the sheets. Or the real Ann Woodward - an ex-showgirl who shot and killed her millionaire husband after mistaking him for an intruder - morphing into an assassin whose decision to kill her husband was “made by her genes, the inescapable white-trash slut inside her.” Gore Vidal gets so drunk at a party that he falls down and rolls in a puddle. Gloria Vanderbilt is so dumb that she doesn’t recognize her first husband when he stops by her dinner table to say hello. An octogenarian Joe Kennedy is fucking teenagers.
When Esquire hit the newsstands, Capote’s decades-long friends did something the rich typically do better than normal people. They never spoke to him again. Capote had no real family to speak of, and had broken up with his long-term partner by 1975. His friends were all he had, and for years they had treated him as a part of their families, hosting him on their yachts, giving him rooms in their homes for as long as he needed them, and telling him the kind of highly personal stories (orthopedia, blood) you might tell a best friend late at night. Now they wouldn’t answer his many pleading phone calls.
And so began Capote’s precipitous decline. He called the Paleys repeatedly, until Babe’s husband answered and told him to get permanently lost. Slim said she would never speak again to anyone who still spoke to Capote. Backs turned at Studio 54, which was a place that had once given the orphaned Capote an elusive sense of home. A vibrant life of friendship, travel, and company he had cultivated over the course of twenty years dried up overnight. Alone and bereft, Capote turned to alcohol, cocaine, and tranquilizers, which escalated to the point of seizures, collapses, drunkenness on live television, and ultimately an early death at the age of 59 from drug-related complications. Writing about his friends literally killed him.
This drama surrounding Capote, his friends, and their cannibalized lives is the subject of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, directed by Gus van Sant, starring Naomi Watts and Chloe Sevingy, and streaming now on Hulu. Feud has been the subject of much attention for its cast, its costumes, and in a particularly meta twist, the real-world saga upon which it is based. But the dramatic heart of Feud - and centuries of similar fights that have broken out between artists and their loved ones – is a question of ethics in art, and if the two can ever more than incidentally coexist. At stake are two precious things: first, art that moves us because it feels visceral and true; and second, the right to privacy in our most intimate moments.
For most of us, this drama never comes to a head, simply because most of us are not close with published writers who might depict us in their work. But questions of betrayal in art still fascinate even people who have never been on either fraught side of the artist-muse coin.
The Bad Art Friend
This was on most recent display when a New York Times piece - “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” - went viral, thanks to a story that while wildly different in its particulars from Capote’s hewed to the same central premise of life-theft in art. For those who missed it, the alleged “Bad Art Friend” was a (successful and Asian-American) writer named Sonya Larson, who was in a private Facebook group with a (less successful and white) writer named Dawn Dorland. Dorland also happened to be a kidney donor, and shared a letter she wrote to the recipient in the Facebook group. Larson filched the letter and put it almost verbatim in a short story called “The Kindest,” in which the titular kidney donor is not, in fact, the kindest, but instead a self-aggrandizing white savior.
From there, things got messy. Hearing rumors about the story, Dorland wrote blind items in the Facebook group about what she considered “another writer’s” theft and appropriation, reached out to Larson repeatedly, largely to no avail. When Larson’s story began winning prizes, Dorland finally read it, and saw her own letter. At that point, she began contacting every fellowship, residency, and writing-related organization Larson was affiliated with, crying plagiarism. Legal suits and counter-suits followed, and “The Kindest” was eventually pulled from publication to avoid the spiraling costs of litigation.
Dorland would be a pathetic figure if she hadn’t gotten so destructive. Throughout the saga with Larson, Dorland repeatedly called herself a writer, and yet she failed to write her own story based on either her kidney donation or her fight with Larson. When you Google her now, all that pops up are the Times story and a few social media profiles where she identifies herself (almost too on the nose) as an organ donor. Her rampage also ironically proves the story’s point, which is about white people insisting that other people’s lives be about them. Simply, Dorland became a Karen because she couldn’t be a writer.
On Being Written, and the Ax Murderer Behind the Curtains
But the ethics of using the lives of those we know glancingly, as Larson did Dorland, are perhaps more clear than using the lives of those with whom we are close. After all, our obligations are surely not the same to Facebook friends as they are to those with whom we’ve shared a bed. Most of us expect our most private moments will stay private, and this is a fair and reasonable expectation. Some philosophers even consider it a prerequisite for a moral society, as violating the privacies of those who trust you can become a slippery slope towards nothing meaning anything at all.
Consider a marriage that over the course of a lifetime includes money trouble and illness and infidelity. The social contract between most partners is that these painful topics are discussed in a kind of inner sanctum; the couple can discuss things freely with each other they would never dream of sharing with outsiders. When the walls of the sanctum are breached by one party, they are typically done so tenuously: late at night, over drinks, accompanied by a flurry of pleas to never repeat what I’m about to tell you. Certainly, the expectation is not that you get up close and personal with the guts and gore that go along with being another person in the world and then go relay the most visceral bits to everyone.
But that’s exactly what F. Scott Fitzgerald did in 1934, when he published Tender is the Night, which is now widely considered to be his darkest, most autobiographical, and best novel. Tender is the Night chronicles the dissolution of a marriage between Dick and Nicole Diver, who are obvious stand-ins for Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. All four are American expats living flashy lives on the Riviera with dwindling cash. Dick is an alcoholic like Fitzgerald. And Nicole is schizophrenic and frequently hospitalized, just like Zelda. How could a marriage that entailed such human depths survive their exposure? After all, when a woman is slipping into a psychotic break in a bathroom stall like “Nicole” - hallucinating and tearing at the wallpaper - she expects her husband’s full attention to be on alleviating her suffering.
But instead, he was also secretly recording. And I suspect it’s this sense of being observed that bothers real fictionalized people more than theoretical ethical violations of their privacy. For it is startling to realize that instead of the friend or lover you thought was the only other person in the room, an artist was always present too. Writing, then, is not the problem’s heart. The problem’s heart is a power imbalance of which the muse was unaware. It’s like learning an ax murderer has been living behind your curtains for the past few months, watching as you made coffee and lit the fireplace. How much of your own reality do you really understand? How much of your shared life with the writer was ever sincere?
That this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the creative process (and also the soul of a writer, which often feels relationships incredibly deeply, rather than parasitically) can feel like scant comfort to the writer or the writee. And I should know, having both written about and been written.
When I was twenty-two, I wrote an 1,100 page novel while ostensibly at work. The novel was a bildungsroman drawn from my life. In the novel, a stand-in for one of my closest friends has an affair, as this friend had. When I finished all 1,100 pages, I emailed it to her in a fit of disbelief. I wrote a book! was all I meant to say. I didn’t expect her to actually read it. Several weeks later, she wrote me a sixteen point email, complimenting the book and offering suggestions until the last point. “I had no idea there was someone else there the entire time,” she said. “Watching me.” The very empathy that makes me a writer put its hands around my throat and squeezed. How would I feel if someone had taken a complicated relationship in my life and used it to make hay for their art? I would feel less important to them than their novel, possibly mistaking this for not being important to them at all.
I thought of her email years later when I first started seeing myself in novels. To my knowledge, I appear in four works of fiction. Three of the four portrayals are intended to be kind. (Even in the mean one, I’m a sophisticated yet romantically dramatic degenerate, which was honestly written by someone who should know.) But there is a particular kind of breath you hold when you realize you’re reading yourself, even if fake you tends to be pretty and smart and occasionally killing herself with bottles of Chateauneuf du Pape. Smart, pretty, and expensively unwell - was there nothing deeper or darker or more interesting anyone could say? Part of a writer’s job is to be perceptive. And it’s has been impossible not to read my fictional self in contrast with my actual self. To use another writer’s perception of me as a barometer by which to judge how well I’m living my insides as my outsides. We are scared to be interpreted because it reminds us how illusory our trust is that those we love will see us as we know ourselves to actually be. This lack of control is a fact of consciousness that typically lives around the edges of our lives. Seeing ourselves in fiction brings it to the fore.
None of which is related to ethics at all. In each book in which I appear, my character serves the novel’s purpose and not my own, which is exactly how it should be. Others’ fears of appearing on the page may be different than mine. They may fear coming across badly, like Ann Woodward shooting her husband, or having a painful truths revealed, like Zelda hallucinating at the walls. But these are personal pains that should be dealt with personally, and for which it is dishonest to blame the writer for anything other than calling from inside the house. Other people’s art isn’t meant to do you justice. Art lives separately. It has to.
Stealing from Anybody and Resurrecting the Dead
Because if concern for others superseded an artist’s regard for their own work, a significant portion of canonical literature wouldn’t exist. An incomplete list of at least works that have been inspired by real people and events include: A Farewell to Arms, The Bell Jar, Anna Karenina, This Side of Paradise, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Pnin, Death of a Salesman, Moby Dick, The Sun Also Rises, Brideshead Revisited, Infinite Jest, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, The Marriage Plot, Fear of Flying, and pretty much all Philip Roth, Alice Walker, and John Updike. Mary McCarthy’s college friends felt slandered after reading her seminal campus novel The Group. Tolstoy wrote first drafts using real names.
Why have so many talented novelists found it essential to write from their lives? It’s a difficult question for non-writers to ask, as it is essentially a tradesperson’s question that most of the tradespeople can’t answer themselves. Embedded within the question is also another: shouldn’t there be some kind of legislation surrounding how artists create, the same way we regulate how pilots fly planes or dentists fill cavities?
If there was, art would cease to be. Because art is not like aviation or dentistry. It is a wild space, and it always will be. “An artist is a creature driven by demons,” William Faulkner once told The Paris Review. “He doesn’t know why they chose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”
But despite the demons and the amorality, the creative space is also a beautiful space, teeming with all that is most human. And I suspect this is why so much of literature must be populated by real people. Not because the writer doesn’t care about them, but because she cares about them a lot. The course of a life is a filled with emotions that exist beyond the edges of our descriptive powers. The high of I love you, and the grief of bad medical news; the incandescence of sex, and jealousy’s cold obsessive squeeze. There is watching your wife claw at the wallpaper as she descends into a psychotic break, and the manic, Icarian high of Madame Bovary (based on Flaubert himself) believing for a few breathless moments that she might actually be able to outrun her origins. These moments flood our cells as they are happening and possess us in their aftermath. We babble about them, and ruminate, and bargain with our gods. If only there was some way to make them permanent! Or if they are bad, to make meaning from them, make sense, make beauty.
Writing is that way. When most people go through an extreme event of any kind – love, grief, illness, rapture – there is nothing to do with it. We are all helpless in the face of so much. But when artists finds themselves living in these extremes, they have the unique ability to actually respond. To take life’s most uncontrollable marrow and subjugate it into art with meaning and form. What’s more, fiction is not memoir, in which the protagonist must be helpless as perhaps the author was. In fiction, dead love can live. Dead people can live. Who with the capacity to conjure this could ever resist it?
A writer will use any tool at her disposal to take her shot. To give life’s transient and gorgeous chaos form. To articulate for the first time something of which people believed they could never make sense or peace. To capture forever the blazingly beautiful or the precious dead. The only thing the writer knows of these things is what she saw and felt, derived from her life, and the task ahead of her is formidable. Real people are conduits then, not pawns, in her quest to do something that probably cannot be done.
“You Can Always Write About Us”
Can pristine and blameless ethics co-exist with this quest? Probably not, or if so only incidentally. But almost no worthwhile quest ever remains blameless or pristine. The only useful guidepost a writer has in tending to her conscience along with her art is that the moment a writer’s work becomes bad is when it loses its heart. Which is what happened with Answered Prayers. The novel eviscerates Capote’s friends as cartoon caricatures while serving no higher purpose. It is beautifully written because Capote wrote it, but despite all of its crinoline and sex and champagne and murder, it falls flat because it ultimately means nothing. Capote mistook the banal for the extraordinary, and left out everything that could have made it more. He should have let the foibles of the rich serve as background noise, and asked himself why he spent his whole life so enamored of them. There are interesting and deeply human answers to that question that have to do with security and belonging and trauma’s need for beauty to serve as a counterweight.
Which are themes Fitzgerald returned to time and again, and this is why his work endures while Answered Prayers does not. The difference between Fitzgerald’s using Zelda and Capote throwing Babe and Slim and Ann under the bus is vast. Tender Is the Night is meant to illuminate important truths about marriage, ambition, and illness. It was written in the kind of grief that is borne of love. Because when his wife was descending into homicidal schizophrenia on the last of their money, what else was Fitzgerald supposed to do? There was no recompense in the real world. And so he took to the page.
Zelda never got better, and Fitzgerald died young without her, broke and alone. But Tender Is The Night is now considered a great American novel. Would it have been more ethical for Fitzgerald to force himself to write a campus yarn, or a brief encounter with aliens, or a marriage plot with a Zelda doppelganger who had no problems, and so whose story consoled or illuminated no one? Perhaps within the narrow context of his marriage. But an artist’s personal life is not the only realm to which they are responsible. If a novel can gift a theoretically infinite number of people peace or understanding they would otherwise lack, is that not equally or perhaps more important than the sanctity of one relationship?
This is Utilitarian ethics at what some might call its most heartless; the same architecture of thought that advocates for ending one life to save a thousand or dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima to end a war. But it would be a mistake to understand the artist as a thief, prowling around their own lives for material while hoodwinking their loved ones into believing the relationship is both sincere and sacred. For most writers who use their loved ones in fiction, the living comes first, and the need to translate it into art comes second. Sincerity and artistic use cannot be disentangled. To love someone as a writer is to carry the capacity to write about them; there is no one without the other.
Years ago, I was sitting by the water in Red Hook ending a relationship. The sun was setting and men were fishing and the night was coming in and in. When we left, this man and I would not see each other again, and so we sat there entwined for a long time, emptying ourselves of things to say. “You can always write about me,” he said as the sun dipped below the horizon. “You can always write about us.” A part of me has always worried that love and writing were vital things between which I would have to pick. But here, now, as he kissed my head, and a velvet dark spread over the sky, a door that had felt locked swung open. For the next little while, I would be gutted by this breakup. But so too would I have the sense of being given a gift. Maybe I wouldn’t have to choose between the only two parts of myself I care about at all. So here I am now, doing just what this man said. Because it moved me. I cannot help but write it down.
The creative impulse is powerful, and this essay captures the price authors sometimes pay when they write about friends or others they know. The fact that the need to create often supersedes the bonds connecting friends certainly made sense to Faulkner - the kind of "demons" he noted in the quotation can be more real than the people in front of you. I appreciated the fact that both sides of this situation were addressed. What a thoughtful essay this is.
Elizabeth, this is wonderful, thoughtful, lyrical, and well argued as is all of your writing. Often, as I write for substack now, I think about what a relief it is to turn to fiction. Proud to know you. Xx