Some 20 years ago A. N. Wilson published a novel entitled Gentlemen in England. It was savagely reviewed in The Spectator by the late Lord Lambton. He complained that two characters were portraits of old friends of his, whom, for the purpose of the review, he called Mr F and Mr Q. (Alastair Forbes and Peter Quennell, one guessed, without much difficulty.) Quoting a snatch of dialogue, he declared that Mr F (or it may have been Mr Q) would never have said such a thing, and therefore the whole edifice fell flat. This prompted me to write a letter pointing out that since Mr Wilson had written a novel in which neither Mr F not Mr Q was a character, how either would have spoken in real life was utterly irrelevant.
I remembered this when reading William Waldegrave’s review of Justin Cartwright’s novel The Song Before it is Sung. Unlike Lambton’s it wasn’t a hatchet job. Indeed it was for the most part admiring. Nevertheless some of the criticisms Lord Waldegrave offered seemed to me to arise from the same sort of misunderstanding of the difference between fiction and what for want of a better term one must call ‘real life’.
Few readers with any knowledge of the 1930s and of the aristocratic German opposition to Hitler will fail to realise, only a few pages into the novel, that the two principal characters are modelled on Sir Isaiah Berlin and Adam zu Solz von Trott; and indeed Cartwright adds an ‘Afterword’ in which he says that ‘the story is based in part on the friendship between’ them. Nevertheless this is a work of fiction and Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg are distanced from their originals.
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