On the Use of Pseudonyms

On one page of the Observer, Will Hutton warns that the French presidential contender Nicolas Sarkozy favours creating "an Orwellian-sounding ministry for immigration and national identity". On another, Sean O'Hagan discusses the claim by the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies that our consumer culture threatens something even more dire than "a Huxleyan or Orwellian nightmare future". Such a useful word, Orwellian, summoning up in four syllables the kind of totalitarian horrors the master evoked in some 300 pages in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Overused? Certainly. And yet we are lucky to have it. Had George Orwell stuck to the name he grew up with, Eric Arthur Blair, then Nineteen Eighty-Four would have left us with the adjective Blairian, or even possibly Blairite. Then again, he might have settled for one of the other pseudonyms he contemplated when Down and Out in Paris and London was due to be published. Kenneth Miles, for instance. Could "Milesian" ever have entered the language? Or, worst of all, H Lewis Allways. "An Allwaysian nightmare future"... what a nightmare that would have been.

There are lots of lists on the internet, not all of them entirely reliable, of the pseudonyms adopted by writers, artists and others. Brewer's Modern Dictionary of Phrase and Fable lists well over a hundred. Many of these were invented by Hollywood studios. Who can blame them for turning Betty Joan Perske into Lauren Bacall, or deciding that Frederick Austerlitz and Virginia Katherine McMath might do better as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? Nor was this practice invented in Hollywood - Henry Irving started life as John Henry Brodribb.

But what I yearn to know, and what the lists cannot tell me, is why people with less obvious problems decided to shed their real names, and how they came to pick the ones they adopted. With Orwell the explanations are clear. He was anxious that Down and Out should not embarrass his parents. (Sylvia Plath, to spare her family pain, published some of her early work under the name Victoria Lucas.) Orwell was also initially fearful about the book's chances: failure might have imperilled his established reputation as EA Blair, writer for newspapers and magazines. As an English patriot, he settled for Orwell, a Suffolk river, and the name of its patron saint, George.

A desire to put some distance between different forms of activity is a common generator of pseudonyms. Brewer's lists no fewer than 24 used by the crime novelist John Creasy for books of assorted kinds. Jonathan Freedland, political, social and cultural commentator in this newspaper and elsewhere, reinvented himself as Sam Bourne (two easy to grasp modern monosyllables) when he took up writing thrillers. No mystery was intended. Everyone was welcome to know that Bourne was Freedland, as they do that Barbara Vine is Ruth Rendell. Indeed, you even see lines on covers that would once have seemed quite bizarre, describing the author as Ruth Rendell "writing as Barbara Vine".

There may once have been fears that scribbling was incompatible with the dignity of one's person or office. Thomas Love Peacock, employee of the East India Company, published the first of his novels, Headlong Hall, anonymously. The second named him merely as "the Author of Headlong Hall". The most famous set of pseudonyms was that of the three Bronte sisters: Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell, names designed to suggest they were men. Other writers were saddled with names that did not fit their image, which is why Marxist literary critic Christopher Caudwell abandoned the name Christopher St John Sprigg, and Cicely Fairfield found a designation that sounded less prissy: Rebecca West.

One assumes that the choice of a pseudonym is long pondered, especially since, as with Orwell, it may become the name by which you're remembered (though Orwell was buried as Eric Blair). But some were picked on a whim. Jan Ludwik Hoch, later more famous as Robert Maxwell, at one point called himself du Maurier, a name he found on a cigarette packet. There used in my youth to be a comedian who called himself Nosmo King. How odd, I thought, of Mr and Mrs King to call their boy Nosmo; but Nosmo, it transpired, had simply adapted a sign he had seen on a railway train. My most cherished pseudonym, though, is one I found in an early edition of Brewer's. The knight Sir Tristram, fleeing the wrath of his enemies, had the brilliant idea of adopting a sobriquet. Which was why he was known from then on as Sir Tramtrist.