Confessions of Bernard
Benny Green
I had intended spending my time this week reviewing a new book written by myself, so that any future reviewers might have reliable guidelines to follow. However, I find myself obliged to abandon this unusually generous plan in , order to beat off the flank attacks currently raging since my recent outrageous suggestion that people with handles like Olearius Schinderhausen and Theophrastus ' Such are never likely to become household names. I might have known something like this would happen. Even as I sat down on that fateful morning to compose , my catalogue of authors with a , spectacular ineptitude at naming their characters, I should have guessed that somewhere out there, there was bound to be a real-life counterpart of those ficti tious gentlemen (or even com pounds; Olearius Such? Theoph rastus Schinderhausen?) ctit to the quick by my aspersions.
That is always the way it is. A generation ago that bespectacled skyscraper-scaler Harold Lloyd made a comeback film called The Secret of Harold Diddlebock. Long before the premiere poor Mr Lloyd found himself embroiled in litigation of the most terrifying complexity because a real-life Harold Diddlebock had turned up from somewhere of other, claiming that if Mr Lloyd's film were allowed to girdle the earth, he, the actual flesh-and-blood Harold
Diddlebock, pride of all the Diddlebocks ani the very flower of the House of Diddlebock, would be ruined for all time. The picture was eventually released in Britain as Mad Wednesday.
Among those whose sensibilities I appear to have ruffled is a Mr John Duthie, who protests against my suggestion that his namesake, who appears in J. M.
Barrie's A Window in Thrums has
a comically outlandish title. Now you will notice that my corre spondent has been baptised John, which shows that he is not really a namesake of Barrie's character at all. Nothing like it. The chap in the book is actually labelled Jimsy Duthie, which illustrates my point that before an outlandish or ec centric name can qualify, it has to be quoted in full. There would be nothing remarkable in, say, Fred Schinderhausen or Bert Such; it is not the invention of a sorry name, but the juxtaposition of two of them that I had in mind.
Mr Duthie reckons that 'Jimsy' is no more outre a corruption of James than ' Benny' is of Benjamin, which may well be true, ex cept that Benjamin is not my real name nor ever has been, and that if it were, I would have changed it to something a great deal farther from home — Theophrastus, perhaps, or Olearius, or even, dare I say it, Jimsy. In any case. Barrie should have known better. His Jimsy Duthie was supposed to have been a poet, and poets should be shrewder than to adver tise themselves under so jejune an imprint. I know there was the case of Coventry Patmore, but he should have been shrewder too. Still, I am willing to withdraw my objections to young Jimsy, partly because I am a magnanimous man, but mainly because in that very same book, Jimsy Duthie's sister marries a man called Hendry McQumpha. Will the real Hendry McQumpha please stand up?
Apart from anything else, I do not believe that the Duthies and Diddlebocks of this world are ever really harmed by the rarity of their handles, for the simple reason that when a name is your own, it seems cosy enough to you, and that is all that matters. I once worked in the same orchestra as a brass player called Norman Baron, who had lived thirty years of his life blissfully ignorant of the fact that his name sounded like an extra in a movie spectacular of the life of William the Conqueror, before I pointed it out to him. I think that if you ever came across a firm of accountants called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern living in a hamlet, they would be puzzled by your mirth. Likewise, I have myself met a great many Joe Greens who never suspected that were they to settle in Italy they would all turn into Guiseppe Verdis overnight and be laughed at for their presumption by the natives with the same derision that the Germans would reveal if you had the temerity to show up in Bonn one morning and start telling everyone you were Ludwig Van Beethoven
For which reason I say to Mr Duthie, and also to any stray Vindex Brindlecombe of Gotthold Hohenstocknitz who might be out there, not to mention Princess Heloise Von and zu Dwornitzchek (P. G. Wodehouse), Laughton 0. Zigler (Kipling), Mother Cuxsom (Thomas Hardy), Gilbert Pot (Harrison Ainsworth) and Lambstail Skallagrim (Rider Haggard). to all of them I say that so long as they are tactful about it, nobody will notice. And if they don't believe me, let them take a stroll with me through the rustic streets of central London, until we find ourselves facing the notice boards outside that impressive synagogue just behind Marble Arch. You know the establishment I mean. The one whose secretary is called Mr Portnoy.
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