‘HOW DO you pronounce your middle name?” asked the pleasant man in the Passport Office, so I told him, adding that I pronounce it as rarely as possible. Among words, names are surely the most loaded.
Rumpelstilskin, in the fairy story, is defeated when the heroine discovers his name. In Arthurian legend, a knight who loses a duel must reveal his name to the victor, but is allowed only to request the victor to do the same. In the Catholic rite, a demon can be expelled only when the exorcist has forced him (her, it?) to utter their name. I have to date kept stumm about the unfortunate result of my parents’ enthusiasm at the arrival of their first born on a particular feast-day. They didn’t even need to placate grandparents. Friends have suggested that I join, or found, a self-help group for others similarly afflicted, but more of that later.
Americans have traits that both endear and alarm, for instance their undaunted readiness to flaunt what they have, to refuse to be victims, even of parents’ injudicious choices. The Middle Name Pride festival offers people who dare not speak their unusual, out-of-fashion or unpronounceable middle names, the opportunity to come out to at least three others. I have no information about how well supported the festival is. Burdensome names are perhaps among the less troubling secrets that people whisper to the universe, via the internet.
Using one’s middle name is, in any case, more of an American than a European convention. The practice stems from the influence of German immigrants. They habitually used the second or third name in preference to the first, which was often a generic religious one, hence Johann Chrystostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Johan Wolfgang von Goethe. By the early 19th century, middle names had caught on widely in the United States. With their evocation of ancestors (often the mother’s maiden name), they helped to transfer historical resonance to a newly settled land. In 1840, about 92 per cent of the students at Princeton had middle names.
Names, including middle names, are also thought to signal, or even to influence, the owner’s destiny, the direction they should, or will, take in life. Did his parents’ choice of Byron for James Dean shadow his life with fame, fast living and an early death? An IRA letter bomber, Shane Paul O’Doherty, credited his mid-life repentance to his middle name patron, the most famous convert of all.
If someone is already derided, to insist on their middle name adds to the scorn: Nixon’s middle name, Milhous, gave further ammunition to his critics, and survives, by way of the Simpsons, though little Milhouse has an extra E. But it would have taken more than the revelation of his Muslim-sounding middle name to scupper Obama. Brand names generate their own force fields of energy. The middle name of Teresa Heinz Kerry, a code for wealth, rankled during her husband’s campaign for the US presidency. “John Charles” for many still summons up, not only the Archbishop of Dublin who signed his pronouncements with both names, but the chill of an entire era.
Hollywood is fertile in middle names. The credits for Magnolia, for instance, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, list William H Macey, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Baker Hall, and John C Reilly. The movie trade demands differentiation above all, so the Screen Actors Guild
advises the use of middle names. American college professors and senior bankers invariably have three names, so too have lone assassins: John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Mark David Chapman.
Serial killers, on the other hand, usually have only two: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer.
A sound instinct guided Gregory Peck to drop his first name, Eldred.
It’s not so obvious how doing the same accelerated the careers of so many British prime ministers: James Ramsey McDonald, Arthur Neville Chamberlain, Robert Anthony Eden, Maurice Harold McMillan, James Harold Wilson, Leonard James Callaghan, and James Gordon Brown.
Again, in the US, an initial can suggest the cachet of a middle name without actually divulging it. Harry Truman’s parents reputedly wished to accommodate two sets of grandparents whose names began with S, and gave him the middle initial without specifying a supporting name.
Groucho Marx’s persona (essentially the same in all his movies) always boasts the extra flourish of an initial. We know the initial is empty, but then so is the name, but then Rufus T Firefly, Otis B Driftwood, Dr Hugo Z Hackenbush, and Wolf J Flywheel know that also.
The initial may come before the middle name, as in F Scott Fitzgerald, J Edgar Hoover, L Ron Hubbard, W Somerset Maugham and E Annie Proulx. When they finally accepted her first book, JK Rowling’s publishers advised her to hide her gender under initials, lest it deter young boy readers: another testimony to the magical spell that names cast, and for which marketing has so acute an ear. There is a long established tradition of writers using initials: DH Lawrence, HG Wells, EM Forster, TS Eliot, PG Wodehouse, for example. The final stage is when initials alone summon up the person: FDR, JFK.
Charles J Haughey aspired to the same kind of immediate recognition, but CJH never quite embedded itself.
Now, to step out of the closet, I admit to sharing a middle initial with the appalling Dubya: an initial, so familiar, last year at least, that it served as a movie title on its own. Now more inclined to live by the motto if you have it, flaunt it, I have started to build my signature around W. I don’t think I’ll actually participate in next year’s Middle Name Pride festival, (held in March, in case you want to start bracing yourselves). It will be more fun to pay a respectful visit to the statue of St (also King) Wenceslaus in Prague.