Books: Model Lives

THE FABULOUS ORIGINALS (317 pp.) Irving Wallace—Knopf ($3.95).

Two British ships hove to off the Pacific islet Más a Tierra, one day in 1709, and prepared to take on fresh water. When the crew glimpsed flashing lights on the supposedly uninhabited island, an armed small boat was sent in to investigate. Awaiting the sailors on the beach, waving his arms and dancing, was an extraordinary figure “cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who look’d wilder than the first Owners of them. He had been [cast away] on the Island Four Years and four Months . . His name was Alexander Selkirk, a Scotch man … He had so much forgotten his Language for want of Use, that we could scarce understand him.”

On the long voyage home, Selkirk told the full story of his four solitary years—how he had built two log huts; how he had conquered a plague of rats by domesticating cats; how he had lived on goat flesh, fish, turtles and wild fruits. A century ago his countrymen placed a plaque on the site of Selkirk’s lookout, reading simply: IN MEMORY OF ALEXANDER SELKIRK, MARINER. But a far greater memorial has stood for more than 200 years—Daniel Defoe’s The Life & Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. So lifelike has this novel seemed to generations that Virginia Woolf spoke for many when she said: “To have been told that Robinson Crusoe was the work of a man with a pen in his hand would either have disturbed us unpleasantly or meant nothing at all.”

All great characters in fiction enjoy this glorious distinction of seeming too lifelike to have sprung from an inkwell. Like Robinson Crusoe, they have often been modeled on real people. Now Irving Wallace, a Hollywood scenarist with a yen for bizarre personalities, has had the bright idea of telling the life stories of 20-odd famed originals. Among them:

¶Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh, the original Sherlock Holmes. As a medical student, Author Conan Doyle listened in awe as the astonishing Dr. Bell “would sit in his receiving room, with a face like a red Indian, and diagnose people as they came in before they even opened their mouths.” Deduction, based on observation of trifles, was Bell’s method. “Most men,” he said drily, “have … a head, two arms, a nose, a mouth.” But only the weaver has a weaver’s tooth (jagged from biting threads), only a peasant woman smoking a short-stemmed clay pipe has “the ulcer on her lower lip and the glossy scar on her left cheek indicating a superficial burn.” Dr. Bell himself was delighted with Doyle’s great detective, and liked to brag: “I am Sherlock Holmes.”

¶Courtesan Marie Duplessis, the real Camille. “Seven gentlemen pooled their money to keep her, and each was given a separate night of the week to visit her. They symbolized their collective devotion by combining to present her with a magnificent dressing-table containing seven drawers.” Marie was 18 and notorious when Alexandra Dumas the Younger fell in love with her. She warned him off bluntly: “[I am] a woman who spits blood and spends a hundred thousand francs a year.” But young Dumas insisted—and one year later tottered ruefully away, brokenhearted and loaded with debts.

Among the other originals: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (Madame Delphine Delamare, the faithless young wife of a middle-aged doctor who had studied medicine under Flaubert’s father); Edgar Allan Foe’s Marie Roget (Mary Cecilia Rogers, a beautiful clerk in a tobacconist’s shop Poe patronized); Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Deacon William Brodie, by day a respectable Edinburgh town councilman who at night led a notorious gang of thieves and kept two mistresses). Most of them were interesting people; some were fascinating. But they all have one thing in common that distinguishes them from other human beings—their real lives seem to be those of ghosts, so illusory do they appear when set side by side with the literary creations they inspired.