Original Preface to
Advise and Consent
(Previously Unpublished)
This preface, which I still consider an honest statement that should have been in Advise and Consent, got as far as the galley proofs. At that point, Doubleday’s lawyer said in great alarm, “You can’t say that. If you even admit in the slightest that some of the characters might have been suggested by actual people, you’ll have given away your case before you ever get to court”—assuming libel. “Of course,” he added, “the standard statement about ‘Any resemblance being strictly coincidental’ doesn’t mean anything, either, legally.” The upshot was that I finally yielded to these fear-filled counsels and left out the Preface. And when the book came out, it did not even bear the standard “Any resemblance, etc.,” so I really don’t quite know where that left us. But fortunately no one sued.
To the Reader
It would be an insult to the mentality, though perhaps a sop to the legal profession, to make here the standard disclaimer that any resemblance to any actual person living or dead of any of the people you are about to meet herein is entirely coincidental. It would not only be an insult to your mentality, it would be an insult to mine.
Still and all, I would not want you to think that just because there is an obvious parallel to Orrin Knox, for instance, or because there is within the recent memory of the Senate a situation somewhat analogous to Brigham Anderson’s, or because there can be found one who did in some ways resemble Seab Cooley, that the people and the episodes in this book are based in major part upon reality, for they are not.
This is difficult for a non-writer to understand, but you will have to take a writer’s word for it, because it is true. There are people and events in this book as in any that are akin to people and events in reality, but they are not the people and events of reality. Such resemblances as they do bear are transmuted through the observations and perceptions and understandings of the author into something far beyond, and basically far different from the originals in those cases where originals can be argued to exist.
Thus if you spend all your time reading Orrin Knox to find the Senator you think Orrin Knox is, you are quite likely going to miss Orrin Knox, because he isn’t that Senator at all; and if you keep comparing notes on Seab and his analogue you will miss the real reality of the senior Senator from South Carolina. Seab and Orrin are the Senators some of you may think they are, plus a lot of other people, plus some very definite and individual characteristics of their own, all boiled down into amalgams upon which there has been imposed, I hope, the calculated imprint of conscious narrative.
So, while I cannot always claim that resemblances herein are entirely coincidental, neither can anyone else claim that they are deliberate. It goes beyond that, into an area where the cautious hedgings of the law no longer apply.
“Are they real people?” readers are apt to ask about a book. Well, yes and no—they aren’t. The important thing, and the only thing that really matters, is whether they are real for this book and for this story. If they are, then the writer knows he is quite safe, because their reality here has taken them many, many miles away from the reality they may once have had somewhere sometime, in some other existence, far from the purview and the purpose of his book.
—Allen Drury