Since I dislike the name Everett so much, people sometimes wonder why I have it printed on my checks and often use it in formal communications. Why not just drop it all together?
My mother always regretted that she and my father had not named me Lee Everett instead of Everett Lee. But I have to admit that, with all three names together, Everett Lee Lady is a really nice monicker. E. Lee Lady or Lee Everett Lady just doesn't have the same impressive effect.
There are certain writers whose names are some fabulous that one can't help but think that their writings must be equally magical. Unfortunately, in my experience the writings seldom live up to the writer's name, so it is best to leave their books unread.
The best of all, though, is when such a writer's works almost equal the magic of his/her name. Below, there are some writers who fall in each category.
Note: Many of the following names are given from memory, and my memory ain't always that good.
And speaking of which...
Northrop Frye
Somehow, his parents must have known from the beginning
that they were giving birth to a future noted scholar.
Alexander Wolcott
A very serious name for someone whose reputation was made
as a humorist.
I'm not sure I've ever read any of his stuff.
Somehow I always had a hard time believing
that someone with a name like that could be funny.
Anais Nin
An incredibly exotic and quasi-Oriental name.
One would expect her to write incredibly delicate stories and poems,
like Japanese water colors.
(From seeing the Henry Kaufmann film
Henry and June,
I learned that her first name has three syllables,
with the stress (in so far as French words have stress)
on the third syllable.
I've never been able to read much of her diaries,
but an audiorecording shows
that she did have a very delicate and precious
way of speaking.)
Francine du Plessix Gray
From the sound of it, a very highbrow French intellectual.
Someone who might have consorted with Jean-Paul Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir.
Simone de Beauvoir
From the sound of it,
someone very aristocratic and probably a writer of theology.
(In fact, of course,
she and Jean-Paul Sartre were two of the leading
French existentialists in the Forties and Fifties.
Probably her best known book is
The Second Sex.)
Marguerite Yourcenar
This sounds like French aristocrat, but maybe not so theological.
A bit exotic, actually. I don't think
there are many French words in which y occurs as a consonant.
Is she from Algeria or Morocco?
Aug 30, 1997:
I am indebted to Dr. Louis Lohlé-tart in France
for informing me that
Marguerite Yourcenar is indeed an aristocrat,
whose true name is Marguerite de Crayencourt.
She is Belgian, not French and certainly not Algerian.
Dr. Lohlé-Tart further informs me that
the Y in her name is fairly common in Belgian names
and is an old equivalent of the Flemish diphthong IJ.
Mallarmé
A truly sensuous name for a poet.
Apollinaire
A pseudonym, and perhaps not all that great,
but I always found it attractive and
was attracted to his poetry.
Rainer Maria Rilke
There's something about his name that always made me think
that his poetry must be very profound,
but also somewhat formal and forbidding.
In the fall of 1996 I took a poetry course and actually
read a fair amount of it (in the excellent Stephen Mitchell translation).
I think that ``formal and forbidding'' is not very accurate.
Some of it is certainly difficult, but certainly not formal.
Definitely profound, though.
Rather emotional, in its own way.
All about loneliness and the feeling of being apart, alienated
from the world.
Adam Gopnik
With a name like that, one doesn't know what to expect.
A humorist, one would suppose.
Or a punk rocker.
Colette
A pseudonym, but one that perfectly expresses who she was.
Very French, very feminine, erotically adventurous.
Zora Neale Hurston
It's hard to make up one's mind about this one.
Maybe a middle-class woman with an exotic first name.
Madison Smartt Bell
I have to admit that this is a monicker even grander than
``Everett Lee Lady.''
Besides, anyone whose parents gave him
the middle name Smart (except with two t's)
is definitely worth paying some attention to.
(Presumably, of course, Smartt was the surname
of some relatives of the Bell family.
Incidentally, until recently I'd assumed for some
reason that this was a woman.)
Sylvia Plath
I'm not sure that the name all by itself is that wonderful,
but the combination of the name with the title
The Bell Jar always attracted me.
But I never read her, because what everybody seems to find most
interesting about Sylvia Plath is her suicide,
and that didn't make me want to read her poetry.
Zubin Mehta
Aha! I slipped in a conductor.
But the name was just too good to pass up.
The fact that I remember it, despite my general lack of interest
in classical music, is testimony to its power.
Vannevar Bush
As I recall, one of the inventors of television.
Dashiell Hammet
Sounds like someone very aristocratic,
always well dressed and very very proper.
Probably a member of the Social Register.
(In actual fact, of course,
as the author of The Maltese Falcon,
The Thin Man,
etc, he was the creator of the hard-boiled school
of detective fiction.
He had been a Pinkerton detective himself when young.)
Emma Goldman
Nothing exotic about that name.
But somehow it just perfectly fits who she was.
A stubborn woman,
plain-spoken, not much given to compromise.
Armand Hammer
A petroleum executive.
But how could I leave out such a wonderful name,
with its very ambiguous overtones?
On the one hand, the very aristocratic sound of the first name.
And yet at the same time,
the inherent joke in the name,
making one think that he might be a character in Dickens or Trollope.
Hamilton Fish
A Secretary of State in the early part of the century.
One is used to cabinet members, especially Secretaries of State,
having rather unusual and often aristocratic sounding names.
But this particular name always fascinated me.
He sounds like a character in a
P.G. Wodehouse novel,
maybe a member of the Drones Club.