Quirks of the known yet unknown

second take

But though Nom De Plume: A Secret History of Pseudonyms sounds like one of those slight trivia books, it is an engaging literary excursion, illuminating for the way it uses obscure or little known things about a writer’s life to make us understand why they were compelled to invent not just another name but a different personality. We learn from Carmela Ciuraru’s book that Lewis Carroll wrote most of his books standing up, including Alice in Wonderland. He could stand writing at his desk for ten hours at a stretch. His “tea brewing was a fanatical ritual… as it brewed he would walk up and down his sitting room, swinging the pot gently back and forth –always for precisely ten minutes.” If the timing went even a little wrong, he would consider it undrinkable. 
 
The idea of printing the title of a book on its spine is his innovation, conceived first for The Hunting of the Snark. “He invented a portable chessboard…double-sided adhesive strips, a method for the right margin justification on a typewriter…a writing tablet called Nyctograph that could be used for taking notes in the dark…and an early version of what endures today as Scrabble.” Ciuraru doesn’t psychoanalyse why writers assume pseudonyms, instead she plunges us into the life of each author, brilliantly researched and detailed, digging deep into archives to offer fresh revelations. And it is in this way that she sheds light on why these writers chose to write under a nom de plume.  
What emerges is that the nom de plume conceals another personality, a secret personality who can take on a life of its own under this new name.

“Many writers,” writes Ciuraru, “have been lonely outsiders, which is why inhabiting another self offers an intimacy that seems otherwise unobtainable. In the absence of real-life companionship, the pseudonymous entity can serve as confidant, keeper of secrets, and protective shield…a pseudonym may give a writer the necessary distance to speak honestly, but it can just as easily provide a license to lie. Anything is possible. It allows a writer to produce a work of serious literature, or one that is simply a guilty pleasure.”   

When you look more closely at the lives of authors with pseudonymous names, as this book does, you realise there is more than one reason why they took pseudonyms, their other subtler compulsions. For one it librated a writer like Rev. Charles Dodgson to enjoy working in obscurity, something he craved when working on Alice in Wonderland. I had no idea until I read Ciuraru on Carroll on how passionately he sought privacy; stunningly, even more than J D Salinger, because he wanted complete anonymity. “My constant aim,” he said, “is to remain, personally, unknown to the world.”  

Another parallel with Salinger is his interest in children. While he was shy with adults, he enjoyed the company of children. Some modern scholarship that had suggested pedophilia (pointing to a series of photographs he had taken of semi nude prepubescent children including that famed photograph of little Alice, with her blouse slipped down her arms) is now fortunately revised by recent scholarship that shows how misunderstood he was. (No doubt further biographical investigation into Salinger will reveal his life too has been infantilised).  

Ciuraru’s book pushes beyond all this speculation (“one might regard him as a Victorian era Michael Jackson but that is a topic for another time”) to reveal an extraordinary, enigmatic man, all the more remarkable for going to great pains to hide his prodigious, multifaceted gifts. He absolutely had no interest in fame. “For 30 years”, he boasted in a letter, “I have managed to keep the two personalities distinct, and to avoid all communication with the outer world, about my books.” He wrote to the Bodleian Library in Oxford asking them “to delete all cross references between his names. The request was refused.” It distressed Dodgson that he could not control such publishing processes. (Remind you of anyone?)  

“By all accounts,” notes Ciuraru, “what Dodgson desired most was the power of invisibility.” He mentioned once to a friend how a pompous author “greeted someone with the line, ‘Have you read my book?’ It left him mortified. ‘If ever I ask such a question of a stranger it will be due to temporary insanity.” Ciuraru points to Carroll’s enigmatic nature, this cloistered academic wrote nearly a hundred thousand letters, many of them to children, kept a note of their birthdays and sent them the most interesting cards that contained inventive puzzles, drawings, letters written in codes or a script so small you needed a magnifying glass to read it, and best of all, looking glass letters, which required a mirror to decipher their full form. The letters were exhilarating and imaginative, adds
Ciuraru.  

The hundreds of letters he received from readers addressed to Lewis Carroll he marked as ‘Return to Sender’ and never opened them. When he had to write letters, he asked colleagues to copy out his letter, so his handwriting would remain unknown. He wrote to booksellers not to mention his name in connection with Alice in Wonderland. He never gave out photographs of himself, except to children.  The more famous he became, the more he genuinely shunned it. I think this is because he was far too passionate and curious about too many things in life, and found notoriety far too uninteresting, distracting, and distasteful. He was glad to be known, however, as the author of several mathematics books, such as the Notes on the First Two Books of Euclid.

An epigraph Ciuraru uses (by printmaker Pat Steir) in these compressed, fascinating literary précis of the lives of writers sums up this sense of ‘doubleness’ best: “The self is like a bug. Every time you smack it, it moves to another place.”