The Browser - Bingo Baggins

A weekly letter from the founding editor of The Browser. Topics may vary. Comments and correspondence welcomed: robert@thebrowser.com

This week: Yet more names, and Thomas Pynchon  

My thanks to Browser friends and subscribers including BB, JC, JH, TS, LP, PL, FR, DN and SP, who wrote with additions and improvements to last week's letter on names.

I have learned ...

— that the surname "Shaw" may be an Anglicisation of "Macghillesheathanaich"

— that the first ever Olympic boxing competition in 688 BC was won by a man named Named (in Greek, Onomastos)

— that the member of parliament for Windsor in the time of Queen Elizabeth I was called Sir Julius Caesar

— that a Swedish couple, protesting against their country's naming laws, tried to name their child Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssql-bb11116, to be pronounced "Albin"

— that English baptismal records of the 17th century included babies called Preserved Fish, Thankful Thorpe, Repentance Water, Kill-Sin Pimple, and Humiliation Hinde

— that surnames of that same time included Blackinthemouth, Blubber, Crookbone, Felon, Hatechrist, Mad, Measle, Milksop, Peckcheese, Pudding and Sweatinbed

— and that Frodo, cousin to Bilbo Baggins in Lord Of The Rings, was about to be called "Bingo Baggins" until Tolkien revised this and some other names at a relatively late stage in the writing.

I have also hugely enjoyed reading Literary Names (2012), by Alastair Fowler, to the existence of which I was tipped off by Colin Burrows's review in the LRB.

I owe to Fowler the news that Henry James spent what must have been quite large chunks of his time copying names out of each day's London Times newspaper for possible use in future fiction. Could you imagine Lev Tolstoy doing anything similar in Russia?

On one day alone, 27th July 1891, James noted the following names:

Pickerel–Chafer–Bullet–Whitethorne–Dash–Elsinore (place)–Douce– Doveridge (person or place)–Adney–Twentyman (butler)–Firminger–Wayward (place)–Wayworth–Greyswood (place)–Nona (girl’s name)–Runting–Scruby– Mellifont (a place, or still better, title. Ld. Mellifont)–Undertone (for a country house)–Gentry–Butterton–Vallance–Ashbury–Alsager–Bosco (person or place)–Isherwood–Loder–Garnet–Antram–Antrim–Cubit–Ambler–Urban (Xtian name)–Windle–Trivet–Middleship–Keep–Vigors–Film–Philmor– Champ–Cramp–Rosewood–Rosin–Littlewood–Esdaile–Galleon–Bray– Nurse–Nourse–Reul–Prestige–Poland–Cornice–Gosselin–Roseabel (Xtian name)–Shorting–Sire–Airey–Doubleday–Conduit–Tress–Gallup– Farrington–Bland–Arrand–Ferrand–Dominick–Heatherfield–Teagle–Pam– Locket–Brickwood–Boston-Cribb–Trend–Aryles–Hoyle–Flake–Jury–Porches (place)–Morrish–Gole.

We touched last week on Charles's Dickens's gift for naming, which, as I now discover from Literary Names, was as much a matter of perspiration as of inspiration. The surnaming of Martin Chuzzlewit evolved, over many notes and drafts, thus:

Pick, Tick, Flick, Flicks, Fleezer, Sweezer, Sweezleden, Sweezlebach, Sweezlewag, Cottletoe, Sweetletoe, Pottletoe, Spottletoe, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzlebog, Chubblewig, Chuzzlewig, Chuzzlewit

Dickens, like James, was constantly updating notebooks of usable names, though gathered from more diverse sources. Dickens published several articles on names and naming in a magazine which he himself edited, Household Words, including one that he co-wrote which was called, Received, A [Blank] Child, about the process of naming foundlings — abandoned babies — at the London Foundling Hospital. The hospital began in Hatton Garden in 1741 and moved to a permanent home at what is now Coram Fields in 1745.

According to Dickens, when the Foundling Hospital was new and fashionable, the British upper classes happily lent their names for group baptisms, such that the early registers of the hospital “swarmed with the most aristocratic names in the land”. Once the hospital had run through the peerage, the governors named their charges after figures from history, then after characters from novels, and, eventually, after the governors themselves. This last practice was discontinued when, "some of their namesakes, on growing up, occasioned inconvenience (and possibly scandal) by claiming kith and kin with them”. The hospital subsequently relied for names on the Post Office London Directory.

Given Dickens's fascination with techniques of naming, it seems all the sadder that his genius should have deserted him when it came to naming his real-life sons.

Dickens called his first son "Charles", after himself. So far, so good. But he called his second son, "Walter Landor", after Walter Savage Landor; his third son, "Francis Jeffery" after the founding editor of the Edinburgh Review; his fourth son, "Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson", wrapping the name of the poet laureate around that of a French painter; his fifth son, "Sydney Smith Haldimand", appending the name of a retired MP to that of a writer and preacher; his sixth son, "Henry Fielding"; and his seventh son, "Edward Bulwer Lytton". All, surely, were destined by Dickens for literary greatness. None achieved it.

I left it too late in last week's letter to linger upon Thomas Pynchon's gift for naming his fictional characters. But having started dipping back into Pynchon these past few days to refresh my memory, I find it almost impossible to dip out again. Does any author start a novel better? The opening of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), "A screaming comes across the sky", is justly one of the most famous first lines in literature.

With V (1963) it is the first page rather than the first line which does the hooking. Rare must be the reader who, having once encountered Benny Profane on East Main Street, can resist following him into the Sailor's Grave bar, where "a small fight is in progress between sailors and jarheads", and where every bartender is called Beatrice. I opened V yesterday looking for an early reference to Pig Bodine, and by now I am 100 pages into my re-reading.

Having claimed casually last week that J.K. Rowling was surely the most gifted namer of fictional characters since Dickens, I must now correct myself: Rowling divides that honour with Pynchon. Even if you have never read a word of Pynchon nor ever wish to do so, you might still enjoy glancing at the Pynchon Wiki, which includes an index for each of Pynchon's novels.

Here are six lines which I have plucked at random from the Pynchon Wiki's index to Vineland:    

Cheryl · supplied Zoyd's chainsaw; 6, 8
Chickeeta · Dr. Elasmo's receptionist; 225-226
Chinese Three Ways · three ninja moves; 127
Chipco · multinational corporation; 142, 145, 146, 170, 383
Chloe · Van Meter's dog & Desmond's mother; 319, 385
Chuck · the world's most invisible robot; 14

There are another 400 or so proper names in the index to Vineland alone; and Vineland is just one of eight novels written by Pynchon over the past 60 years. Is there even a word in the English language to capture Pynchon's dizzying ingenuity, of which these lines give the merest glimpse?

Pynchon's names and tags are so fantastic and suggestive, even on the surface, that I am only now starting to realise how much deeper Pynchon's naming strategies can go, thanks largely to my recent purchase of Patrick Hurley's Dictionary Of Pynchon Character Names, an impressively scholarly but also — given the material with which it has to work — an oddly humourless work of reference.

Thanks to Hurley's Dictionary, I have learned, for example, that aghtina, the surname of Mrs Aghtina in the Maltese sub-plot of V, is the Maltese word for "give us", as in the line, "Give us this day our daily bread", from the Lord's Prayer, which would read, in Maltese, Agħtina llum il-ħobż tagħna ta’ kuljum. As Hurley points out, Mrs Aghtina "is praised for her generosity and dignity after she provides a hearty porridge for a starving Maijstral after an air raid".    

The latest of Pynchon's novels to make the cut for Hurley's 2008 Dictionary was Against The Day (2006). Since then Pynchon has published Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013). Somewhere in the wind there is talk of another novel for which Pynchon is said to have contracted but has never or not yet written, about an insurance adjuster flown in to Japan to assess the damage done by Godzilla.

Pynchon's talent for names shows no signs of flagging. If Hurley's Dictionary ever seeks the service of an additional editor for a new and complete edition, I will be tempted to apply for the job myself. Here are just a few of the proper names from Inherent Vice, ranked in "ascending order of awesomeness", by New York magazine:    

Mickey Wolfmann, Doc Sportello, Rudy Blatnoyd, Petunia Leeway, Scott Oof, Ensendada Slim, Jason Velveeta, Japonica Fenway, Delwyn Quight, Sauncho Smilax, Trillium Fortnight, Dr. Buddy Tubside, Flaco the Bad, Fritz Drybeam, Sledge Poteet, Bigfoot Bjornsen, and Leonard “El Drano” Loosemeat

According to the Thomas Pynchon name generator, my Pynchon Name as of yesterday was Robert "Asymmetric" Slagiatt, and my cv was as follows:

Sagiatt is a Scottish-Armenian shift manager in a bandaid factory. Though he had traveled for a number of years, being on the road had done nothing to improve his outward self, or the inward one either. Though the street had claimed a big fraction of his age, it and he remained strangers in every way.

Not a bad job. Much of the paragraph (from "nothing ..." onwards) is lifted verbatim from a description of Benny Profane in the early pages of V, but this can hardly count as a complaint, in the circumstances.

I am not sure how to pronounce "Sagiatt", but that in itself is Pynchonesque enough, given similar uncertainty about Pynchon's own name. A few weeks back I read in the New York Times that the correct pronunciation is not, as I had assumed, "PIN-shun", but "pin-CHON". When Pynchon took part in an episode of The Simpsons, he pronounced his name PIN-SHON with an equal emphasis on the two syllables. Christopher Hitchens, having recorded speaking privately to Pynchon on the telephone, made no remark on Pynchon's pronunciation — which leads me to suspect that the canonic rendering of "Pynchon" is probably "PIN-shun" after all.

The New York Times reported in May 1974 that the three judges of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction were in a state of "distress and bewilderment", after unanimously voting for Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as that year's prize-winner, only to have their vote over-ruled by the full 14-member Pulitzer board, which declared the book to be “unreadable,” “turgid,” “overwritten”, and “obscene”. In the end, no fiction prize was awarded.

I suspect that the Pulitzer board was also strongly influenced by an incident which went curiously unmentioned in that day's Times report. A month earlier, in April 1974, the National Book Awards had been presented at a ceremony in Lincoln Center, and there Gravity's Rainbow had shared the fiction prize with Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Crown of Feathers. Ralph Ellison duly welcomed to the stage a man presumed to be Thomas Pynchon, but who was, in fact a stand-up comedian called Irwin Corey. Corey, as Pynchon, delivered an acceptance speech composed of ridicule and nonsense, which ended with the words:

I do want to thank the bureau, I mean the committee, the organization, for the $10,000 they’ve given out, tonight they made over $400,000, and I think that I have another appointment.

Sadly, Mr Corey died in 2017 at the age of 102, and so will not be available to reprise his role if the Nobel Prize committee ever decides to try its luck with Mr Pynchon.

I finish with two lists of names, both without comment, or as close to without comment as I can manage:

First, English Names For Fungi, from the British Mycological Society:

Glaucus Sedge Smut
Smoky Bracket
Big Smoky Bracket
Ascot Hat
Leopard Earthball
Bog Jellydisc
Stinking Fanvault
Splendid Woodwax
Fragrant Strangler
True Booted Knight

Second, a list of wedding guests, from James Joyce's Ulysses:

Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall, Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence.

I have heard it said that Joyce parodies here Spenser’s catalogue of trees in The Faerie Queene; but enough of names, and names of names, and lists of names. Unless, of course, anybody reading this letter has in their possession The Directory Of Huntingdonshire Cabmen — Robert