Nom de Plume (2 page)

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 himself) 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

O
nce 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 peculiar 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.

“My hopes ebb low indeed about Branwell,” Charlotte
wrote of the brother she had once idolized. “I sometimes fear he will never be
fit for much.” He was dead at thirty-one.

Charlotte took the initiative with regard to
publication by sending query letters to publishers, but she had trouble even
getting a response. Presenting herself as an “agent” writing on behalf of the
authors, she sent a letter to the firm Aylott & Jones in January 1846:

Gentlemen—May I request to be informed
whether you would undertake the publication of a Collection of short poems in I
vol. oct.

If you object to publishing the work at your
own risk, would you undertake it on the Author's account—I am gentlemen,

Your obdt. Hmble. Servt.

C. Brontë

They agreed to accept the book for publication,
provided it was at the authors' own expense. Charlotte had very specific ideas
about how the book should be presented: “I should like it to be printed in 1
octavo volume of the same quality of paper and size of type as Moxon's last
edition of Wordsworth,” she wrote. “The poems will occupy—I should think from
200 to 250 pages.” She also expressed herself emphatically on the printing:
“
clear
type—not too small—and good paper.”

Having reached an agreement, Charlotte sent the
manuscript (as “C. Brontë Esq”) to Aylott & Jones. “You will perceive that
the Poems are the work of three persons—relatives—their separate pieces are
distinguished by their separate signatures,” she explained.

When
Poems
by Currer,
Ellis, and Acton Bell came out in the summer of 1846, the savvy Charlotte
oversaw advertising and promotion. She had directed the design, and now she
suggested how the book should be released to the public and which publications
ought to review it. She was gratified by the positive critical reception that
Poems
received. “It is long since we have
enjoyed a volume of such genuine poetry as this,” one reviewer wrote, expressing
curiosity regarding “the triumvirate” and wondering whether the Bells might be
pseudonymous authors. Another contemplated the possibility that the trio might
be “one master spirit . . . that has been pleased to project
itself into three imaginary poets.” Charlotte was more than happy to feed public
curiosity: writing a letter to one magazine editor (under her pseudonym), she
thanked him for his very kind review and referred to “my brothers, Ellis and
Acton.”

Four years later, in the posthumous editions of
Wuthering Heights
and
Agnes
Grey
, Charlotte would explain fully the motive behind their
pseudonyms:

Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our
own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice
being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names
positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women,
because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking
was not what is called “feminine”—we had a vague impression that authoresses are
liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use
for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a
flattery, which is not true praise.

Despite the positive reviews of the book, it was a
failure financially. Only two copies were sold. (The initial print run was
around a thousand.) Charlotte was not the least bit discouraged. “The mere
effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence,” she wrote. “It must
be pursued.”

A year later, seeing that nothing had come of their
poetic debut, Charlotte, tenacious as ever, sent copies of the slim green volume
to various celebrated authors, including Tennyson, Wordsworth, and De Quincey,
with an imploring letter to each:

Sir,

My relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell, and
myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers,
have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.

The consequences predicted have, of course,
overtaken us; our book is found to be a drug; no man needs or heeds it. In the
space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what
painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of these two, himself only
knows.

Before transferring the edition to the
trunk-makers, we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what
we cannot sell—We beg to offer you one in acknowledgement of the pleasure and
profit we have often and long derived from your works.

I am, sir, yours very respectfully,

Currer Bell.

Undeterred by the Bells' lackluster debut,
Charlotte wrote a follow-up letter to Aylott & Jones, advising them that “C.
E. & A. Bell are now preparing for the Press a work of fiction—consisting of
three distinct and unconnected tales which may be published together as a work
of 3 vols. of ordinary novel-size, or separately as single vols—as shall be
deemed most advisable.” And she brashly advised them to respond soon, as other
publishers might be interested as well. They declined the solicitation.

What they foolishly turned down, of course, were
novels that would become part of the canon of English literature: Anne was
writing
Agnes Grey.
Emily had begun
Wuthering Heights
(whose ferocity of emotion Charlotte
found rather off-putting). And Charlotte had collected all the material she
needed for her novel
Jane Eyre
, having worked, quite
miserably, as a governess—but the novel she'd written first was
The Professor
, with its male narrator, Charles
Grimsworth, who teaches at a girls' school in Brussels. The story, which she'd
completed in June 1846, was based on her own formative time at a Brussels girls'
school, where she fell in love (unrequited) with her headmaster before
homesickness set in and she returned, deeply depressed, to the refuge of
Haworth.