I think that real figures should be used in novels as spice should be used in cooking- sparingly or liberally in flavoring but never as the main dish. Cameos are probably best, as to try and use them much more seriously risks changing them too much.
What irks me most when a real person is made a central character is when they completely change the person’s personality or whereabouts, etc… I don’t care if it’s a fairly minor change: if Thomas Jefferson’s a character and they have the main character visit him at Monticello on a day when records indicate he was actually at another of his plantations or visiting his daughter (both a few miles away) that’s not a really big deal. It’s a bigger deal if they have somebody visit him at Monticello when in fact he was in D.C., or in Paris even- it’s such an easily checked thing.
Still more irksome, however, and I’m using actual examples in various novels I’ve read:
-Jefferson is portrayed as old and feeble and senile in his 70s (those who knew him in his last years, even those who didn’t like him, stated he was a man much younger than his years until the final few months of his life)
-Jefferson being irreverently and sardonically funny (he wasn’t known for his sense of humor and he was actually respectful of other’s religions, especially in their presence)
- Jefferson whispering in Sally Hemings’ ear, her giggling, and then him slapping her backside all while entertaining a dinner guest (never in a million years would he have done this- he didn’t even like to have slaves or servants anywhere in the dining room when he dined or entertained and PDA of any kind even for man-wife was the height of gauche)
-The relationship with Sally portrayed as a great tragic love affair of two peole who would have marreid but couldn’t, or
-The relationship of Sally being a rapist and his victim for 30 years
when most biographers- and Sally’s own son for that matter- viewed the relationship as neither of these things. They seemed to see it as a practical arrangement of mutual convenience; they probably each cared (almost impossible to have sex with someone for years and not care about them) but it’s highly unlikely either regarded the other as a spouse. TJ got a young pretty sex partner who probably looked like his wife and that he didn’t have to marry, Sally got [according to her son Madison] preferential treatment for herself/her children and his promise of freedom for her and their children upon his death (which he honored [Sally was never formally freed, but in effect she was- she was never sold when the rest of his slaves but lived with her sons (who, as part of the preferential treatment, were allowed to remain in Virginia as free men- most freedmen had to leave).
Gore Vidal is one of the best at using historical characters: he was such a stickler for detail he actually tried to change the text of Lincoln when he found out Kate Chase Sprague [daughter of Salmon Chase and not particularly well known to most people today] wasn’t really where he placed her in the novel on a particular day. I thought it was great in Lincoln (by far his best historical fiction imo) that he takes you inside the minds of several people- you read what they’re thinking, their opinions, etc.- but never of Lincoln himself, he’s never the storyteller or the person whose eyes you’re seeing through. This makes him remain enigmatic. The real characters you do see through are people like John Hay, Kate Chase and her father, William Seward, and others who, while historical characters, are not so well known- and he changes nothing that is VITAL to understanding them or to their backgrounds (i.e. he’s not going to portray a character as gay who was straight or as born rich who was born in poverty).
I also loved how he did the subject of the duel in Burr. Because it’s a novel he has a lot more leeway than a biographer or historian, thus you learn what the duel was about in the book:
Hamilton was spreading the gossip that Burr was having an incestuous relationship with his daughter Theodosia, a rumor all the more damning because [in the novel at least- and Vidal was not the first to imply this- there’s a chance it was true {Burr and his daughter were inordinately close and physically affectionate far more than the norm and are known to have been amazingly frank about their sex lives in their letters [her about her relations with her husband, him about his relations with various women he met in Paris and in NYC]}
Anyway, while this revelation is fictional and presented as such, it makes perfect sense. It’s a pretty good hypothesis- in all likelihood we’ll never know what the actual insult was, but Vidal uses the skills and liberties of a novelist to present a hypothesis that while unprovable, and that you definitely couldn’t use in a biography, doesn’t really distort reality that much, and may even be factual. I think this is the best way to deal with historical characters in fiction.
A bad example is a book I just read entitled The 19th Wifeby David Ebershoff. I panned it (in great detail) on Amazon for many reasons, but foremost was the fact that he fictionalized real characters and in so doing he completely changed them. One of the 19th wives the title refers to (there are two- the lesser one fictional one in a present day polygamous cult) is Ann Eliza (Webb Dee) Young, one of the last wives of Brigham Young who became famous for a couple of years when she divorced him, went on the lecture circuit, and wrote a bestselling memoir called Wife No. 19: My Life in Mormon Bondage. (One thing the novel does address [any historical accuracy in it is surprising] is that nobody really knows where the number 19 came from as she was by the most conservative of estimates at least his 20-something, probably much higher a number than that.)
What irks me about the book isn’t that he uses real characters (Ann Eliza, her parents, and her brother) or even that he drastically changes them, but that he drastically changes them in a way that makes them less interesting. For example, he portrays Ann Eliza as a freedom fighter on a mission to end polygamy- no, she was a woman with 2 kids [by her first husband] who wanted alimony to support them and when she couldn’t get turned to lecturing and writing in order to find financial security (it was the 1870s, not a time when a woman could realistically go out and get a decent paying job and put the kids in day care). What’s more frustrating is that he reprints very long sections from her real memoir, but completely re-writes them- it’s like a re-imagining:
-The real Ann Eliza’s mother was a teenaged foster child when she converted to Mormonism, whereupon she worked her way to Ohio to join the settlement there. In Ebershoff’s reimagining, she’s a riverboat prostitute with an illegitimate child, and Ann Eliza tells all about her escapages in her book. In the first place this is a ridiculous change worthy of a romance novel, in the second, Ann Eliza would almost certainly not have mentioned it had it been true. For all the provocative nature of its title, the book is almost frustratingly tame, and in the real book she speaks of her mother in hagiographic terms.
Far more interesting but not even mentioned: the real Ann Eliza’s mother was among the most devout of Mormon converts there was, and yet she supported Ann Eliza in the divorce and apostasized. THAT’S an interesting thing to look at, but nope, he doesn’t.
-Ann Eliza’s father has a looooooooooooonnnnnnngggg autobiographical excerpt (from a sealed manuscript in the Mormon archives) in the novel in which he talks about his horniness for a landlady in England, but pretty much everything but his name is manufactured crap; his real backstory and for that matter his actual wives were all completely different from the persons portrayed- by the same names- in the novel.
Far more interesting but not even mentioned: the real Ann Eliza’s father had at least 8 wives and over 30 children, yet by the end he was a monogamist due to having outlived all but one, and he and his surviving wife were cared for by her spinster niece. Irony all around: he sired dozens of kids to increase his family in the afterlife and had more wives than there are days in the week and yet he ended up as alone as anybody and cared for by an unmarried woman.
-Ann Eliza’s brother Gilbert is portrayed (in llloooooooooonnnnngggg rambling stream of consciousness first person narratives [excerpts from a fictional deposition no less!]) as an illegitimate self loathing polygamist with 2 wives who questions his faith. The real man was not illegitimate (was a “Jr.” in fact), was suspected of participation in the Mountain Meadows Massacre (which the book never mentions at all even though it covers that area and even though at the time he’s writing his deposition in the novel he was also being deposed over what he knew about the MMM), and a few years after his sister’s divorce he and his many sons are believed to have robbed a payroll train and used the $28,000 in gold they stole to establish a polygamous community in Mexico in protest of the government and church’s ban on polygamy- not only interesting but COMPLETELY relevant to both timethreads in the book- and never mentioned.
He also portrays Brigham as a completely devout man of unquestioning faith, when even Young himself admitted he’d questioned his faith many times, plus it’s almost certain that the real BY had a bit of the charlatan about him. Brigham Young also writes incredibly well in the novel considering the real man had only 9 days of school in his life and required secretaries for all correspondence to correct his spelling and grammar (he was a brilliant man, no question, but uneducated).
you read it and you don’t even know whether her marriage to Brigham was consummated (argument either way- he was old but still virile [had a couple of kids born to other wives after he married her], but also had many other wives and was henpecked as hell by his favorite, Amelia, and Ann Eliza lived many miles away for a time.
So point is- too long of one at that- I don’t like historical characters used in most fiction writers because too many are too willing to bend the character to have them do and say what advances the plot. I think that when they’re used they must be iron poles that YOU work the plot around when possible.