Roman à clef, not quite

2011’s controversy over ‘The Help’ makes more sense now

One way—in days gone by, when the West at least was less free—for authors to satirise the Great and the Good was for them to employ the roman à clef, or ‘novel with a key’. The actual phrase was coined by French author Madeleine de Scudéry, who used the technique to do just that: she wrote her books with fictitious, but recognisable names (and characteristics) the alert reader could link to real people in the upper reaches of French society. She was immensely popular in her day and so skilful the people she hung out to dry couldn’t do a damned thing about her, legally or otherwise.

Of course, other writers both before and especially since have employed the technique, although like Scudéry’s use of it the best examples of the genre tend to involve satirising or otherwise attacking those best able to defend themselves: the rich and the powerful. Somehow (and I am not sure why this should be so), this seems entirely legitimate. If a person writes a roman à clef about poor people, it seems inherently unfair. This isn’t to say that romans à clef about the powerless haven’t been written, just that (and this is an uncomfortable truth), the poor and the powerless are not, as a rule, people who read books.

Photo by Levi Guzman on Unsplash (the significance of this image will become clear later).

Perhaps that’s why it took so long for the rather awkward situation outlined below to percolate to the surface:

JACKSON, Miss.—A former baby sitter for the family of the author of “The Help,” a best-selling novel about Southern black domestic workers and their white employers, has filed a lawsuit claiming she was humiliated by the book.

The lawsuit claims Ablene Cooper was the basis for the book’s “Aibileen” character, and that Ms. Cooper asked author Kathryn Stockett not to portray her in the book, and the writer refused.

[…]

Ms. Stockett couldn’t be reached for comment. In interviews, she has said the plot and characters were fictitious.

“This is a beautifully written work of fiction and we don’t think there is any basis to the legal claims,” said publisher Amy Einhorn, at Amy Einhorn Books, a unit of Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group (USA).

[…]

Few books in recent years have enjoyed as much good word-of-mouth publicity as Ms. Stockett’s debut work, published in 2009.

Set in Jackson in the 1960s, it focuses on the relationships between African-American maids and affluent white families that employed them.

The novel became a staple for book groups across the country. Its depiction of the deep frustrations of black servants in the South stunned many middle-aged and older white southerners.

[…]

According to the lawsuit, the book says “Aibileen” is an African-American, middle-aged, has a gold tooth and has a deceased son—all of which match Ms. Cooper. The complaint says the portrayal of “Aibileen” reflected negatively on Ms. Cooper, because she doesn’t speak or behave in the manner of the character in the book.

Leaving aside damages for humiliation, which are apparently possible in parts of the US (and the main reason a US attorney friend shared the article with me on Facebook back in the day), this story struck me as enormously messy and complicated, for the simple reason that novelists are notorious for cannibalising the lives, attributes and even turns of phrase of people they know and then blending them into fiction.

Of course, some writers do it more than others—in the Australian literary pantheon, Christina Stead was so fond of turning persons into printed paper that friends were reluctant to go to social engagements with her on the grounds that they’d appear in fiction in deeply unflattering versions. Entire awkward dinner parties would turn up in her novels. People could remember what they’d said and identify themselves.

Few—possibly none—of the writers who use ‘plain folk’ in this way consider what they’re doing to be roman à clef, precisely because they don’t want the characters to be identifiable as real people. They want them to seem real and convincing, and thereby persuade the reader to keep reading. I have done this myself. Most writers I know do the same thing. (In fact, I’m struggling to think of one who doesn’t, and I know a lot of writers.)

One effect of the piece above (on me, at least) was that it made me want to read The Help. I found a lengthy excerpt on the UK Daily Telegraph site, and there’s no doubt that Kathryn Stockett can write. Ablene Cooper also fell prey to the Streisand Effect, which despite geeky pretensions to the contrary, has always existed in litigation about reputation, be it defamation or damages for humiliation or something else.

That said, she may just have wanted the money. Sometimes damages are an adequate remedy—it’s fine to admit this to your lawyer if it happens to be true—for the simple reason that they buy capacity if not anonymity. Successful litigants in actions like this are often happy because they are freed to do something else they couldn’t otherwise do: pay out their mortgage, move to a remote location, wall out the world in some other way (if the sum is large enough).

There are other complexities, too. In a jurisdiction like the United States—where winning a defamation case is nigh on impossible—I suspect that people who feel they’ve been ‘defamed’ may turn to ‘humiliation’ instead, on the rationale that they may have a better chance of victory. This didn’t work out for Ms Cooper, mainly because there was a time bar in the way:

The lawsuit was filed in February by Ablene Cooper, a longtime maid for Ms. Stockett’s brother’s family in Jackson. In the suit, Ms. Cooper argued that the book’s protagonist, Aibileen Clark, was clearly based on her given the first name as well as some other significant biographical details. The lawsuit, which sought $75,000 in damages, described the portrayal as offensive and “emotionally upsetting.” Such suits against an author generally have low odds of succeeding, but given that Ms. Cooper filed it with the blessing of her employers it raised some eyebrows in Jackson and elsewhere.

In April, Ms. Stockett filed a motion for summary judgment, arguing that the suit was filed well outside the one-year statute of limitations for misappropriation claims. Responses went back and forth, but this argument alone was good enough for Judge Tomie Green of Hinds County Circuit Court, who dismissed it on that basis. The judge, who did not delve into the merits of the case, noted that Ms. Cooper had been given a copy of the book in 2009, but had not sued until 2011.

Defamation is also different from invasion of privacy, although in jurisdictions like Australia, where there is no tort of invasion of privacy, claims that are actually about privacy are often made in other areas of law: defamation, as mentioned, or breach of confidence.

England and Scotland—following the ECHR’s jurisprudence—are on the way to developing a tort of invasion of privacy, in part due to the late Max Mosley’s historic litigation. He had the money and clout to push the privacy issue hard, although he was adamant that he wanted privacy protection extended to ordinary people on council estates who were often made the subject of prurient interest by the ‘Red Tops’ or tailed down the street by the more scurrilous purveyors of television ‘news’.

Already, in 2011’s Cooper-Stockett controversy, we see in miniature what will become a gate wide enough to drive a coach and horses through. The book and film ‘centred’ white people rather than ‘the women who inspired its title.’ Of course, because it’s 2011 and not more recent, the conflict between what would become the core ‘own voices’ trope of literary wokery—especially in children’s fiction, where staying in one’s lane is paramount—moves uneasily between Ablene Cooper’s version of herself (with a particular concern for good manners and behaviour) and the social justice manqué her activist ‘allies’ wanted from her.

I suspect—but cannot prove—that Cooper’s embarrassment turned on the baking-shit-in-a-pie incident in the film. Yes, it’s hilariously funny, but the idea that a skilled au pair with many years unblemished service and a reputation for personal honour would be happy about it strikes me as fanciful. A telling detail is that her ‘supporting employers’ just happen to be Kathryn Stockett’s brother and sister-in-law, suggesting an older pattern—where the writer exploits family and friends—was in play.

All of this, of course, took place in a world where exhibitionism has never been easier, where information has never been more available, and where the public/private distinction has been so eroded that many people often have no sense of what is legitimately their business and no-one else’s. Everyone lives their lives in more or less public ways now, all of us potential subjects for both romans à clef and subsequent falls from grace.

Kathryn Stockett has disappeared: took her millions from both book and film and ran. That The Help would probably be self-published—if published at all—today is a reminder that 2009 may as well be 1959 in terms of the moral gulf that has opened between the present and, well, five minutes ago.