Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  Riverhead Books, the publisher of Love and Consequences, promptly canceled the author’s publicity tour, recalled copies of the book, and offered refunds to those who had purchased it. For her part, Seltzer claimed that her intentions had been honorable. “I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” she said in an interview. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us, because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing—I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.” Seltzer had written much of the book at a Starbucks in Los Angeles.

  The morbidly shy young writer JT LeRoy, a teenage drifter and recovering drug addict from West Virginia, courted (mostly by phone, mail, and fax) the sympathetic attention of Hollywood celebrities such as Winona Ryder and Drew Barrymore, and prominent authors including Mary Karr and Dennis Cooper. Another fan of his work, Madonna, once sent LeRoy some books on kabbalah as a gift. No one actually met him.

  He maintained an enigmatic allure, and it wasn’t long before rumors circulated that there was no JT LeRoy. (Chloë Sevigny said that he was definitely real because “he’s left several messages on my answering machine.”) When the writer Mary Gaitskill wanted to meet him in person, the “real” LeRoy—Laura Albert, a former phone-sex operator from Brooklyn—paid a nineteen-year-old boy she’d met on the street (“You want to make fifty bucks, no sex?”) to meet Gaitskill quickly at a San Francisco café, “get freaked out,” and leave. Later, other “stunt doubles”—always wearing sunglasses and a blond wig—were hired to embody LeRoy for public appearances.

  Following publication of the cult favorites Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, LeRoy was praised as a wunderkind and his work described as a “revelation.” Although both books were works of fiction, LeRoy’s marketability (and his many celebrity friendships) depended on his image as a wounded kid with a hardscrabble background. The director Gus Van Sant spoke to LeRoy by phone for hours every day, and gave him an associate-producer credit on the 2003 film Elephant. Dave Eggers edited (and wrote the foreword to) LeRoy’s 2005 novella, Harold’s End, which appeared first in McSweeney’s. Eggers wrote that LeRoy’s books would prove to be “among the most influential American books in the last ten years.”

  Several months later, a journalist revealed LeRoy’s true identity, and the fallout was immediate and severe. A company that had optioned the film rights to Sarah successfully sued Albert for fraud. Still, in the wake of the ignominious scandal, the middle-aged author was unapologetic: “I went through a minefield,” she said, “and I put on camouflage in order to tell the truth.” Albert felt victimized by the media and insisted that she could not have written LeRoy’s works under her own name. She denied that she had perpetrated a hoax. “It really felt like he was another human being,” she told the Paris Review in a 2006 interview. “He’d tell the story and I was the secretary who would take it down and say, OK, thank you, now I’m going to try to turn it into craft. But while I wouldn’t sit there and think of myself as JT, as long as I was writing I didn’t have to be Laura either.”

  What’s in a name? Everything. Nothing. Some writers find that crafting prose under the name they were born with is too restrictive. It can seem oddly false, or perhaps not grand enough to accompany their literary peregrinations. A name carries so much baggage; it can seem tired and dull. Too ethnic. Too stultifying. Too old. Too young. In such instances, an author may be unable to proceed if he is, say, Samuel Clemens, but feels capable of achieving impressive feats if he is Mark Twain. Imagination blooms. Assume an alias, and the depths of the mind can be plumbed at last, without fear of retribution, mockery, or—worst of all—irrelevance. The erasure of a primary name can reveal what appears to be a truer, better, more authentic self. Or it can attain the opposite, by allowing a writer to take flight from a self that is “true” yet shameful or despised.

  A nom de plume can also provide a divine sense of control. No writer can determine the fate of a book—how the poems or novels are interpreted, whether they are loved or grossly misunderstood. By assuming a pen name, though, an author can claim territory, seize possession of a work before the reader or critic inevitably distorts it. In this way, the author gets the last laugh: despise my book as much as you like; you don’t even know who wrote it. However petty, such trickery yields infinite pleasure. Obfuscation is fun!

  “Every writer—after a certain point, when one’s labors have resulted in a body of work—experiences himself or herself as both Dr. Frankenstein and the monster,” Susan Sontag once lamented. Authorial identity can become a trap that causes creative fatigue or even halts literary output altogether. As many writers know firsthand, the literary world is tough: one minute you’re the toast of the town; the next minute you’re just toast. The desire to emancipate oneself from the shackles of familiarity and start anew, under an altogether different name, makes perfect sense. In fact, why not more pseudonyms?

  In the nineteenth century, the curious phenomenon of pseudonymity reached its height, and as early as the mid-sixteenth century, it was customary for a work to be published without any author’s name. It is interesting that the decline of pseudonyms in the twentieth century coincided with the rise of television and film. As people gained more access to the lives of others, it became harder to maintain privacy—and perhaps less desirable. In today’s culture, no information seems too personal to be shared (or appropriated). Reality television has increased our hunger to “know” celebrities, and even authors are not immune to the pressures of self-promotion and self-revelation; we are in an era in which, as the biographer Nigel Hamilton has written, “individual human identity has become the focus of so much discussion.” This is not entirely new, but with the explosion of digital technology, things seem to have spiraled out of control. Fans clamor to interact, online and in person, with their favorite writers, who in turn are expected to blog, sign autographs, and happily pose for photographs at publicity events. Along with their books, authors themselves are sold as products. Even though the practice of pseudonymity is still going strong, it has lost the allure it once had, and for the most part it is applied perfunctorily in genres such as crime fiction or erotica. Today, using a pen name is less often a creative or playful endeavor than a commercial one. Reticence is not what it used to be.

  For each of the authors in this book, hiding behind a nom de plume was essential. However varied their literary styles and their reasons for going undercover, all of them longed to escape the burdens of selfhood—whether permanently or for a brief period in their lives. To publish their work, many risked their reputations, their means of subsistence, and even the relationships they held most dear. Three of the authors committed suicide (Sylvia Plath, Romain Gary, and Alice Sheldon); others had contemplated killing themselves or attempted it; at least one author (Alice Sheldon) was bipolar; and several—including the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Isak Dinesen, and George Orwell—suffered from chronic health issues. Many succumbed to strange compulsions, addictions, and self-destructive habits. Almost all were lonely, and few were adept at friendship, marriage, or parenthood. One was a convicted criminal. A number of them, including Henry Green, Georges Simenon, and Patricia Highsmith, were alcoholics. Some achieved literary success in their twenties, while others were late bloomers who found recognition in midlife. But the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who channeled more than seventy different identities, lived in obscurity and never achieved acclaim. At the time of his death, he left behind more than thirty thousand fragments of his unpublished writings in a trunk. For Romain Gary, the best-selling French author of the twentieth century, pseudonymity became a cage, much like fame.

  Most of these authors had endured childhoods with domineering, neglectful, or cruel parents. They suffered profound trauma early on, such as the death of a parent (in the case of Dinesen’s father, by hanging hi
mself) or of one or more siblings. Mark Twain outlived his spouse and all but one of his children; Georges Simenon’s daughter killed herself. For these troubled authors whose lives seemed to bring impediments without surcease, an alter ego served as a kind of buffer, protecting them (at least up to a point) from the painful aspects of their lives.

  This book is a selective chronicle of pseudonymity over a hundred-year period, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending in the mid-twentieth century. To explore this peculiar tradition is to tap into, among other themes, the complex psychological machinery of authorial identity; the perils of literary fame; the struggles of the artist within a society generally hostile to such a vocation; courage and faith; and the nature of creativity itself. In certain respects, delving into pseudonymity is a frustrating endeavor. No pithy or singular conclusions can be made. It’s a puzzle. By definition, this is a history riddled with lacunae: there are thousands of recorded noms de plume, but many more that we will never know.

  In reflecting on the tumultuous lives of the authors in this book, it’s hard not to consider the literary deprivation we might have suffered had they not found the protective cover they needed to write. But that would mean contemplating a world without, say, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, or Alice in Wonderland. Instead, let us celebrate the sense of liberation, however short-lived, that these writers found through pseudonymity. In carving out their secret identities, they went to astonishing lengths. Each of these authors possessed extraordinary determination and resilience.

  Here are their stories.

  They were dead by the age of forty

  Chapter 1

  Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë & ACTON, CURRER, AND ELLIS BELL

  Once there were five sisters. In 1825, Maria and Elizabeth Brontë, the two eldest, died of tuberculosis. That left Charlotte (born in 1816), Emily (born in 1818), and Anne (born in 1820), as well as a brother, Branwell, born in 1817. Their mother, Maria Branwell Brontë, died of cancer a year after Anne’s birth. Their Irish minister father, Patrick, would outlive them all, dying in 1861 at the age of eighty-four.

  The Brontë children grew up in a manufacturing village at the edge of the Pennine moors in West Yorkshire, England, and would spend, almost without exception, their entire lives at their father’s parsonage at Haworth. The plain, two-story early Georgian building where they once lived is now a museum. Eventually, Haworth would be known as Brontë country. It might have been known as Brunty country, had their father not changed his family surname while studying at Oxford. (“Brontë” means “thunder” in Greek.)

  Living with their father and an aunt, Elizabeth, who helped raise them (and whom they did not love), the children lacked playmates but had one another. Precocious and bookish, they retreated into their own private world. They roamed the moors, and, as Charlotte later wrote, Emily especially loved doing so. “They were far more to her than a mere spectacle; they were what she lived in and by, as much as the wild birds, their tenants, or the heather, their produce. . . . She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was—liberty.”

  The children kept dogs, cats, and birds as pets, made drawings, and invented stories, creating elaborate fantasy worlds in which they could lose themselves. Lonely in the absence of their mother, the children developed rich sagas of imaginary cities and kingdoms. Their grand creation was “Great Glass Town Confederacy,” presided over by the “Four Genii,” named Tallii, Brannii, Emmii, and Annii. They conceived histories of Glass Town and even composed Glass Town songs. Later came the kingdoms of Angria, invented by Charlotte and Branwell, and Gondal, as dreamed up by Emily and Anne. There were kings, queens, pirates, heroes, romances, armies, schools, and struggles between good and evil. These apparently silly children’s games gave rise to a flurry of literary activity, proving to be exercises in developing their craft. By their late teens, the Brontës had a command of plot, characterization, and pacing.

  Another significant detail from their childhood was the rather unorthodox pedagogical method their father applied with them: the children would put on masks, and Patrick would question them intensively, one by one, about various subjects to test their knowledge. He believed that by wearing masks the children would feel unself-conscious and learn to speak with confidence and candor.

  When Branwell created the Young Men’s Magazine at the age of twelve, the siblings (most of all Charlotte) contributed essays, plays, and illustrations. Like Charlotte, Branwell was ambitious about his writing and desired a readership beyond the family. He believed he was destined for greatness. At twenty, he wrote a sycophantic letter about his literary efforts to William Wordsworth, enclosing samples of his own work, but the poet never replied. (Wordsworth reported to others that he was “disgusted” by Branwell’s letter.)

  At twenty-one, Charlotte also took the bold step of writing to a famous author, the poet laureate Robert Southey, asking for his opinion of her work. She shyly confessed to him that she longed “to be forever known” as a poet. Southey was a poor choice for a potential mentor; cranky, elderly, and in poor health, he had no interest in a young woman’s literary aspirations. (She wrote to him using her own name.) Three months later, he replied by acknowledging her obvious talent and then putting her in her place. He issued a stern admonition that young poets hoping to get published “ought to be prepared for disappointment,” and that, above all, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.” Surely he did not expect or even want a response to his missive, but he got one anyway: a letter from Charlotte that was almost comical in its expression of meek obedience. “In the evenings, I do confess, I do think,” she wrote, “but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of preoccupation and eccentricity, which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits. . . . Sometimes when I’m teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself.” She closed her letter by thanking him again “with sincere gratitude” for essentially crushing her dreams. If her misguided literary ambition should arise again, Charlotte told him, she would simply reread his letter “and suppress it.”

  The vast trove of Brontë juvenilia is larger than all their published works put together. Most of the material was recorded in nearly microscopic handwriting, on tiny folded sheets of paper—some only 2 inches by 1½ inches. These were stitched and bundled together, complete with title pages and back covers made from scraps of wrapping paper and bags of sugar. For her part, Charlotte was already documenting her own literary accomplishments—all twenty-two volumes—with a detailed record titled “Catalogue of My Books, With the Period of Their Completion Up to August 3, 1830,” when she was just fourteen years old. Three years later she wrote a novella, The Green Dwarf, under the name “Wellesley.”

  The sisters wrote constantly, but had it not been for Charlotte, their efforts might have remained private. She dreamed of making writing her vocation and was unafraid to pursue it. Her foray into publishing was inspired not by her own work, however, but by Emily’s.

  Charlotte later described how she came across one of her sister’s small notebooks and, although this was a violation of privacy, read what Emily had written: “One day, in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a MS volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me—a deep conviction that these were not common effusions nor at all like the poetry women generally write. . . . To my ear, they had also a pecul
iar music—wild, melancholy and elevating.” Emily was furious when she found out what Charlotte had done. It was only after breaking down her sister’s resistance that Charlotte “at last wrung out a reluctant consent to have the ‘rhymes’ as they were contemptuously termed, published.”

  Left to her own devices, Emily probably would have kept her work private, much like another nineteenth-century Emily—Dickinson, the “belle of Amherst”—with whom she had a certain temperamental kinship. (Brontë’s poem “Last Lines” would be read at Dickinson’s funeral in 1886.)

  Unlike Anne or Charlotte, Emily was by nature reclusive and always the least inclined to speak. She felt no need to reach the world beyond Haworth. As Charlotte later explained, her sister tended toward seclusion, and “except to go to church, or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home.”

  Anne, too, Charlotte noted, had “a constitutional reserve and taciturnity,” but she was also ambitious. Finally, at Charlotte’s urging, the sisters decided to publish, under assumed (and gender indeterminate) names, a volume of poems by all three of them: twenty-one poems by Emily, nineteen by Charlotte, and twenty-one by Anne. Branwell was excluded from this endeavor. His life—and his tremendous artistic potential—would be curtailed by alcoholism, opium addiction, and the often reckless behavior that embarrassed his family. He understood his predicament but felt helpless to fix it. “I have lain during nine long weeks utterly shattered in body and broken down in mind,” he wrote during one of his typical bad stretches. Branwell was too much of a mess to be let in on his sisters’ secret identities; they had to shut him out. He was a loudmouth drunk who would, they were sure, inevitably spill the news of their pseudonyms.