Roman à clef

A roman à clef or roman à clé (French for "novel with a key") is a novel describing real-life behind a façade of fiction. The 'key' is usually a famous figure or, in some cases, the author.

The reasons an author might choose the roman à clef format include:

• Satire
• Writing about controversial topics and/or reporting inside information on scandals without giving rise to charges of libel
• The opportunity to turn the tale the way the author would like it to have gone

Since its original use in the context of writings, the roman à clef technique is also used in the theatre and in movies, such as Citizen Kane, a thinly-veiled biopic about William Randolph Hearst. Victor Hugo's banned play, Le Roi s'amuse, the basis for the opera Rigoletto, is an example from the theatre.

Notable romans à clef

• The novels of 17th century French writer Madeleine de Scudéry.
• The novels of Jack Kerouac, most famously On the Road and The Dharma Bums.
• Virtually all of the novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) presuppose a knowledge of English intellectuals and currents of thought of the time.
• Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb which chronicles her affair with Lord Byron (thinly disguised as the title character).
• The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a fictional account inspired by, but not specifically depicting, Hawthorne's experiences at the Brook Farm experiment.
• Ruth Hall by Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis) describes Fern's own struggle to become a successful newspaper columnist, and puts her family (including her brother, Nathaniel Parker Willis) and two of her early editors in a most unflattering light.
• The Fiery Angel by Valery Bryusov depicts the real-life triangle of black magic, obsession and love between himself, Andrei Bely and Nina Petrovskaya while describing a story of witchcraft in 16th Century Germany.
• The Lady of Aroostook depicts Emily Dickinson's romantic engagements with several men.
• Röda rummet (The Red Room) by August Strindberg presents thinly-disguised depictions of intellectuals of the period.
• Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925) by Aldous Huxley are all satires of contemporary events.
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is a disguised account of Hemingway's literary life in Paris and his 1925 trip to Spain with several known personalities.
• The Benson Murder Case (1926), the best-selling first entry in the series of detective novels by S. S. Van Dine featuring detective Philo Vance, is based on the unsolved murder of bridge expert Joseph Elwell, who was found shot to death in a room locked from the inside, minus his toupee, physical circumstances which are duplicated in the novel.
• The Moon and Sixpence by William Somerset Maugham follows the life of Paul Gauguin, especially his time in Tahiti.
• Power Without Glory by Frank Hardy is an unveiled and highly critical account of the life of Australian business man and political figure John Wren (referred to by Hardy as John West). Hardy, a socialist, blamed Wren for what he saw as the corruption of the Australian Labor Party during the early 20th century. Hardy was sued for criminal libel for having depicted Wren's wife having an affair.
• Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts acquaintances of Gerald and Sara Murphy in the 1920s.
• Point Counter Point (1928) by Aldous Huxley includes easily detected portraits of Huxley's friends D.H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry.
• Roman à clef is one of the many dimensions of Orlando: A Biography (1928) by Virginia Woolf.
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is based on his experiences as a soldier during World War I.
• In her novel Broderie Anglaise, Violet Trefusis represents her lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West and Vita's with Virginia Woolf in the form of a heterosexual romance. She also weaves the affairs of her mother, Alice Keppel, with Edward VII into the book.
• Mephisto by Klaus Mann. Mann's brother-in-law, the actor Gustaf Gründgens, was so offended by the main character Henrik Hoffgen (based on Gründgens himself) that the novel was banned after a libel case.
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, her semi-autobiographical novel, detailing a young girl's attempts at suicides and her mental breakdown.
• Queenie is a 1985 novel by Michael Korda, nephew of Alexander Korda and the actress Merle Oberon. Throughout her life, Oberon had gone to great lengths to disguise her mixed-race background. In the novel, Queenie Kelley (Oberon was known in early roles as Queenie O'Brien) is a girl of Indian and Irish descent, fair enough to pass for white.
• The Things They Carried (1990) by Tim O'Brien is widely considered a truthful if knowingly distorted account of the author's experiences in Vietnam and subsequent methods of coping with the war's aftermath.
• All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren is loosely based on the rise and fall of Louisiana governor Huey Long.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson, a fictionalized account of Thompson's trip to Las Vegas in a drug-induced haze.
• A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick is a semi-autobiographical novel featuring an extensive portrayal of Dick's experiences with drug culture and drug use.
• Dominick Dunne's novels depict various upheavals in high society, with many thinly-veiled prominent persons among the casts of characters. Among the novels and respective cases alluded to are The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (the shooting of Belair Stud owner William Woodward, Jr. by his wife, Ann Arden Woodward); People Like Us (the downfall of a socially-ambitious junk bond trader, thought to be a conflation of John Gutfreund, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky); A Season in Purgatory (the Michael Skakel/Martha Moxley murder case) and An Inconvenient Woman (the Alfred S. Bloomingdale/Vicki Morgan affair and ensuing scandal).
• Primary Colors (1996) about Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, published anonymously but later confirmed to have been written by Joe Klein.
• The Devil Wears Prada (2003) about a woman constantly bullied by her boss while working as an intern at a fashion magazine. Although author Lauren Weisberger worked as an intern at Vogue magazine, she denies that the book's antagonist, Miranda Priestly, is modeled after the magazine's editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
• The Washingtonienne (2005) based on the author Jessica Cutler's sexual affairs as a congressional intern with various men in Washington, D.C.
• The Body Politic (2000) by Lynne Cheney in which a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while making love to his mistress. [1] [2] [3]
• Primary Coloured (2007) by Brent Meersman covers an election campaign in South Africa. Real life public figures appear as themselves interacting with fictional characters and thinly disguised fictional depictions of politicians.[4]
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad mirrors his own journey up the Congo. The character of Kurtz is most likely a compilation of several different colonial officials.
• The protagonists of both Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice are representations of Thomas Mann.
• Animal Farm by George Orwell is an example of roman à clef used as satire.
• The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, a book that criticized American foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War; the book uses the fictional country of Sarkhan (a fictionalized Vietnam) as the setting and includes several real people, most of whose names have been changed.
• Ravelstein by Saul Bellow is a thinly disguised memoir of friendship between Allan Bloom and Bellow. Also from Bellow is Humboldt's Gift, about his friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz.
• In Mexican literature, Martin Luis Guzman's La Sombra del Caudillo was inspired by accounts of the abuses of the Revolutionary Party during the 1920s when ex-president Álvaro Obregón was Mexico's most powerful personality.
• This All Happened (2000) by Michael Winter was inspired by his time with the Burning Rock Writers Collective in St. John's, Newfoundland.
• Lunar Park (2005) by Bret Easton Ellis is partly a fiction ghost story and an autobiographical novel describing Ellis' early years of fame and his difficult relationship with his father.
• The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, inspired by a story recounted by his friend involving stolen hair.
• Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher which outlines the often-strained relationship between Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds and Carrie's substance abuse.
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, a lesbian Bildungsroman.
• East Is East (novel) (1990) by T. Coraghessan Boyle, set in a writers' colony, includes thinly-veiled depictions of many well-known writers of the late 1980s.
• Second Crossing by N. A. Diaman a semi-autobiographical coming-out novel set in San Francisco at the end of the Beat Era.
• Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
• Stephen Fry's The Liar
• The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy, supposedly about the integration of the first black cadets into The Citadel. The events depicted within are vehemently denied as being accurate by other alumni who attended at the time.
• The Idle Warriors, Kerry Thornley's novel based on his old acquaintance from the Marine Corps, Lee Harvey Oswald.
• Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
• Q (1999) by Luther Blissett is a multiple roman à clef in the form of a matrushka doll, describing 1990s situationist political activism, the uses of new media, and the power of textual fragments to form social and personal myths - in the guise of a historical roman policier revolving around those elements, and inspired by an extant 16th century apparent confession of religious activism in similar terms within the post-reformation realignments of power.
• The Writing on the Wall (2007) is a political novel by Hannes Artens whose fictitious American president, Jim Whitman, is modeled on Republican presidential nominee, John McCain.
• In the X-Files episode "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", the CSM gets a short story published based on his life in a magazine titled, "Roman A Clef"

References

• William Amos, The Originals: Who's Really Who in Fiction, (London: Cape, 1985) - ISBN 0722110693
• Brian Busby, Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2003) - ISBN 0676975798

See also

• Allegory
• Autobiographical novel
• Literary technique