Any Other Name

RoseDon’t worry about names, Juliet says to Romeo. They don’t mean anything; or so I paraphrase that famous monologue of hers that Romeo overhears. She tells him a rose would smell as sweet no matter what its name, and he would still be the same man she loves  with another patronymic; but would he be?

I can’t argue with the fact that when one of the five senses is affected, the label it’s identified by will not be. Even though the highly sensitive Anne Shirley In L.M. Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables,  doubts that a  rose would hold the same appeal if it was called a thistle or a skunk-cabbage, most of us would have no problem agreeing its scent wouldn’t be altered. Likewise the satisfying sweetness of a teaspoon of honey would be unchanged if we called it salt, the pleasure of seeing a sunset would be no less if it was called a thunderstorm, and the feel of a summer breeze on the skin would surely be as soothing if it was called a winter freeze.  How about a Mozart sonata? Would it be any less satisfying to listen to if the program notes said it was a Crickets’ Cantata? Not likely.

Yet call something  in the realm of a sixth sense something else and the translation gets a lot more challenging, if not impossible. I think Juliet might well find her Romeo had different personality traits entirely, at least in her own eyes, if she had to call him Buster. I’m not implying that either name carries good or bad connotations, just different ones, and that thought has often reared its ugly head when I’ve been working on a novel of my own. Naming my characters is a big deal, and often supports a losing battle with the characters themselves. I was relieved beyond measure to read that was so for Edith Wharton as well.

Having been admonished by numerous MFA instructors that the names you GIVE your characters are vitally important to the success of your novel, I’ve spent many unsuccessful and wasted hours trying to adjust the names they introduced themselves to me with, It didn’t work for Wharton, so she said, and it doesn’t for me, either. But she had such a healthy ego! Where I’m ready to jump up and shriek to all those know-it-alls who said you had to choose carefully, ‘you see! Edith Wharton says you’re wrong!!’, Edith would calmly admit we all write differently. She was the first to say it worked for Thackeray, Balzac, Dickens and her dear friend Henry James; but not for her, She blames it on her own ‘peculiarity…of mental makeup’. I’d credit her with the confidence to let things happen beyond her control. Personally, I feel such a deep level of trust and respect when I have the good fortune of happening upon a writer like her that the world she creates becomes totally real for me. She never forces anything, my back is never up against the wall, and I can tell we’re going on a trip together. Truly that’s the way I prefer to deliver my fiction, too.

Faced with such unlikely mid-19th century names as Princess Estradina and Laura Testvalley, Wharton begged for deliverance for both herself and her “tale”, as she put it, each “burdened” with such unlikely and odd patronymics. But she makes the point often in her memoir that their personalities are so directly tied to those identifiers that her reality of plot is thrown off if she forces a more comfortable or aesthetically pleasing name on a protagonist who arrived in her head fully formed and obstinately proud of it.  I loved this admission that her story and it’s population start talking to her and she to it and them without a template or outline of any kind. That sense of adventure and being along for the ride is surely the most important aspect of Wharton’s revelations about the specters who live this other life within her, calling out to have their stories told when she can finally identify them fully by sight and name.

I chuckled audibly when I read of Wharton’s personal battle with Laura Testvalley’s name, silently winking at my writing teacher who first suggested success would be impossible if the names were wrong, Princess Estradina haunted Wharton for years before she wrote “The Customs of the Country”, one of her greatest triumphs. I think I could handle even a little of that ‘success’ without complaint. The patriarch in my second novel, Certain Liberties struggles with the name of Klaas de Koningh, both the sir and given name a challenge to spelling and pronunciation. His son, one of the main protagonists, announces his name to his new friend at the beginning of the novel: Adriaan Hindrick Klaas Van Cortland de Koningh III was indeed a mouthful for his playmate, though he allowed as how Corey worked for most of his friends. One would assume his nickname to be a contraction of Van Cortland, though how should I know? He never told me. His new friend, Emily Alden, informs him that his name means ‘the king’, so he’s likely descended from royalty. Being very proud of his democratic Dutch heritage, he vehemently denies her charge, but she tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I side with Emily on that one.  But I warned her from the start, since she had no idea what her own name meant, Corey would undoubtedly repay her ignorance with something interesting, which indeed he did. They both learned how important names are, as did I through them.

“O, be some other name!’ Juliet begs Romeo, no less forcefully than Edith Wharton argues with her protagonists before they’ve taken their rightful places in her finished novels. “So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title”, Juliet assures us. NO he wouldn’t, Juliet. Look where all that manipulating and over-wrought plotting got you! Your tale did not end well, just as many writers find their fiction goes awry when they try to fit it to a geometric plan or outline. One would think it best, just as Edith Wharton, Harold Pinter, and too many others to mention, including me (oh, what exalted company I keep in the imaginary world of writers!) have found out the hard way. Writing’s an adventure offering the most intoxicating freedoms, maybe one of the few things in life that does, so for heaven’s sake, writers, why not just hang on and enjoy the ride!

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