Word: cleffed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...other hand, ex-Actor Tryon is canny enough to know that it is a crock of gold. He has not, after all, chosen to unmask malaise on the assembly line or among welfare mothers. Crowned Heads is crammed with enough props to put MGM back in production. No clef is needed for this roman. Real stars parade by in abundance. Tryon also provides long lists of plausible but fictive movies and imaginary songs that set America humming (Ditto, Really Truly True). Even the four principal characters are amalgams of known personalities. Fedora owes something to Garbo, Dietrich and Gloria Swanson...
...official sheet, dated May 22,1971, are recorded two games of ticktacktoe between Ehrlichman and the Secretary of State. One game is a draw. The other game shows Ehrlichman a winner. In the shade of this trophy−this fun-and-games scalp−Ehrlichman wrote his roman à clef, The Company, in which Kissinger, under the thinnest of disguises, has taken a second clobbering that the old ticktacktoe loser could hardly have dreamed of five years...
What exactly is a roman à clef? There is no equivalent in English for this phrase that literally means novel with a key−a story whose characters are modeled on real people. The roman à clef, a reader is tempted to answer, is ticktacktoe with a one-move handicap. Naturally there is more to it than that, and the question deserves a sober−but not too sober−answer. For, thanks to Ehrlichman and The Company, Truman Capote and Answered Prayers, and Elizabeth Ray and The Washington Fringe Benefit, the roman à clef may become not only...
...roman à clef as a genre cannot be blamed. It holds an eminent position in literary history. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), the villainous seducer, Lovelace, happened to be the Duke of Wharton. Robinson Crusoe was based on the desert-island experiences of one Alexander Selkirk off the coast of Chile, and Tristram Shandy caused not-always-comic shocks of recognition among the York neighbors of the puckish Laurence Sterne...
...roman à clef was once a cosy affair. But one touch of TV makes the whole world kin. Readers will have no difficulty in making out the shaggy outlines of Presidents J.F.K., L.B.J., R.M.N., not to mention Henry Kissinger (Carl Tessler in the book), J. Edgar Hoover (Elmer Morse) and others, including, eventually, E. Howard Hunt (Lars Haglund), who (yes, indeed) is planted on President Monckton...