“I WANT A PSEUDONYM.”
I looked at my friend like he was saying he wanted manicured eyebrows.
“Come again?” I asked.
“You heard me. I don’t want to use my real name.”
“Sure, but a pseudonym? Why not just get it legally changed?”
“I don’t need to get a new driver’s license. I just don’t want my name on the manuscript.”
“Look at me. You’re cool. You’re brilliant. Your name is awesome. “
“It’s not about what I like or don’t like. Did you see that one HTMLGiant post? Sylvia Plath went as Victoria Lucas in the first editions of The Bell Jar. There's a whole book on pseudonyms." He poured himself a shot of Cutty Sark. “I like my real name just fine. But I don’t want an editor googling my name when she or he picks it up.”
I sighed. “Okay, fine. But you’ll get it published with your real name?”
“Sure, if you say so. We’ll have to see what the marketing people say. They got Jo Rowling to call herself J.K. Rowling, and it worked.”
“So what kind of name were you thinking of?”
“I don’t know. Something classy, something aristocratic.”
“Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald is taken. So's Edward St. Aubyn.”
“Wasn’t Evelyn Waugh good?”
“Sure, but why copy him?” I thought for a second. “Hey, I knew this guy named Cambrian.”
He snorted. “Cambrian? The geologic era?”
“Hey, you wanted sophisticated. You can’t do better than Latin. Throw on a double-barreled name, and you’ll fit right in at the Crillon Ball.”
“Okay. So I could be Cambrian Williams-Burke.” He emptied his glass. I poured him another.
“I think you should be a bit more honest, though. You’re from the South. Say you’re from the South.”
“I could do that. If I want to say I’m like Breece D’J Pancake or that Confederacy of Dunces guy, I’ll just find myself a hillybilly name. Clayton Rambler. Colt McCoy!”
“That’s a cheap joke,” I said as I poured myself some Cutty as well. “You can do better than that. Come on, make it an honest pseudonym. Just use your pet and street name and make a Porn Star name.”
“I never had a pet, though. I’ll make my first name Wythe.”
“I like first names as last names. James, Ryan, Kirby...”
“Kirby. Wythe Kirby. That works.”
I smirked. “Hey, that rhymes with your real name. See, I told you your real name was good enough.”
“Nah, man. ‘Wythe Kirby’ doesn’t pull anything real up on Google. I’m using it.”
“Great. Does that mean you’re ready to start writing your book now?”
image: vice.com
A friend and I were preparing deviled eggs for a Superbowl party when I insisted on enhancing our deviled egg production with a few choice sentences from Diane Williams’ new story collection, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty. How could I not—with the enthusiasm gathering in us of crushed yolks, globs of mayo, secret relish—pull my friend over to take a look at these sentences, these other small, new bursts of pleasure?
When I talk about Diane Williams, author of seven excellent short story collections and founding editor of the literary annual NOON, I tend to talk about her sentences more than I talk about her stories. Her sentences contain an awful lot, and when put together into a whole story, the entirety gives me too much to say in one sitting. Too much to say, and a fear of ruining the pleasurable effect the story’s just had by putting too many other words around it.
The other main thing as to why I talk about her sentences, is that her sentences are brilliant. Her sentences can be plucked from their stories and stand alone devastating people.
So, in order to say a little, but not too much, and as an excuse to publish a list of some of my very favorite sentences from Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, I’d like to suggest a few methods by which pleasure can come about. First, the sentences:
“Another one of my boyfriends said helpfully there is a great difference between love, hatred, and desire, but nothing compels us to maintain these differences.”
From "Mood Which Gripped Me"
“The mother experiences her losses with positivity. She even frames the notion of her own charm as she heads into her normal amount of it.”
From "Chicken Winchell"
“Her fate was being rigged for the rough surface.”
From "Mrs. Keable’s Brothers"
“The suspense in that moment had drawn me in and I was fascinated to hear my answer to her that was delivered in a weepy form.”
From "Arm Under the Soil"
“I seriously did not think I was in the state I describe as reserved for me.”
From "Expectant Motherhood"
My friend, who was helping with the deviled eggs, and who is well on her way to becoming a doctor, confessed to feelings of inadequacy with regard to talking about very smart literary fiction. I say put the fear aside. The point of reading is not always to then get a hold of something, as if the story is some riddle. Allow for the simple, intense pleasure in the sound of the words. Let the sentence make you think in a way you had not before, with a logic to the syntax that is surprising and fresh, somehow both very true at the same time that it is utterly unfamiliar. Permit yourself to remain in a state of uncertainty and wonder.
Image: mcsweeneys.net
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