Word: clef
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...figures, under various disguises, in several of Waugh's novels. On the whole this problematic relationship between author and subject is exploited only for good reasons. Sykes's indentifications of the real identities of Waugh's characters (and almost all his books have a large dose of roman a clef in them) are much more convincing as he makes it clear that he knew them all personally. The only area of restraint caused by his close relationship is Waugh's marriage, a subject on which he sheds almost no light, aside from denying that Laura Waugh was a "doormat...
...expression of personal bitterness, a la Positively 4th Street, he appears to become more and more conscious of the distinction between himself and his persona--like Proust who, when he saw his readers approaching the early volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a roman a clef, had his narrator relate an internal monologue in which he addresses himself as Marcel, then hastens to add, in parentheses, "if indeed the narrator of this novel can be called Marcel...
John Ehrlichman, who was President Nixon's domestic policy chief, has finished a roman à clef describing a CIA plot to blackmail a Nixon-like chief of state upon discovering a secret White House plumbers' unit engaged in spying and dirty tricks. After reading the 385-page manuscript of The Company, New York Times Columnist William Safire, also a former Nixon aide, reports that Ehrlichman portrays "President Richard Monckton" as a "self-deluding, hate-filled moralizer...
...Witness, Chambers explained that he was influenced in his choice of hiding place by the memory of a Soviet film featuring pumpkin-like papier-mâché figures in which revolutionaries hid weapons. Lionel Trilling, however, in a new introduction to his Chambers-era roman à clef, The Middle of the Journey, suggests a more bizarre psychological reason: shortly after Chambers quit the Communist Party and emerged from the underground, friends who feared for his life asked him to a Halloween party to establish his public identity and so forestall murder. The memory of this experience may have...
...hard to discern the parallels here, almost to see the play as a kind of roman a clef. The weak, frightened character who appears both as the mother of the Hubbard family. Lavinia, and as a neighbor named Birdie Bag try, a young flower wilting on the broken vine of old Southern aristocracy, seems to be drawn from Hellman's own mother, the former Julia Newhouse. Like Living, whose one fixed idea throughout the play is to embark on her "mission" to teach "the little colored children." Julia constantly took refuge in religion, mouthing the words to prayers or ducking...