On Literary Names and Destinies

Just as I was born into a literary name, so were Darien and Toby.  Before telling the story, I will follow up on the allusion in my last post to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the impact of names on people’s destinies.

Tristram, the narrator, says that his father believed that “there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our characters and conduct.”  Why were Julius Caesar and Archimedes so great?  According to Walter Shandy’s theory, it’s because they bore the names Julius Caesar and Archimedes:

“How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many, he would add, are there, who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus’d into nothing?”

In Mr. Shandy’s view, the greatest name one can have is “Trismegistus” while the worst (or at least on a par with Judas) is Tristram.  As Tristram reports,

“But, of all the names in the universe, he had the most unconquerable aversion for Tristram;–he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of anything in the world—thinking it could possibly produce nothing in rerum natura, but what was extreamly mean and pitiful.”

A major theme of Tristram Shandy is how nature and circumstance constantly disrupt our plans for the world. (How do you make God laugh?  Tell Her your plans.) The novel is a comic indictment of Enlightenment and scientific optimism.  Through a midwife mistake Walter Shandy is doomed to have a son named Tristram.

So how did Julia and I name our sons and are their names shaping their destinies?

Believe it or not, I actually flirted with the name Tristram for my oldest son (just to defy Walter Shandy?), but Tristram was hard to pronounce and somehow we found our way to Justin.  (All my sons can be grateful that we did not name them Hermes Trismegistus.)  Toby, on the other hand, does owe his name to a character from the novel, as well as to my dissertation topic, the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett.  Looking at my son, who is now 25, I can see the shaping power of the name.

Uncle Toby is one of the kindest characters you will encounter in literature, and kindness is also one of the major qualities of my youngest son.  Some of the best teachers have the ability to win their students’ trust instantly, and Toby has this gift.  (I do not.)   I have seen him draw upon it as a resident hall assistant, as a tennis camp counselor, and as a tutor for athletes at the University of Pittsburgh.  He exudes an air of friendliness and warmth that is hard to describe but that people recognize instantly.  His namesake, meanwhile, is most famous for his refusal to kill a fly that has been bothering him:

“My uncle Toby was a man patient of injuries;—not from want of courage,—I have told you in a former chapter, ‘that he was a man of courage:’—And will add here, that where just occasions presented, or called it forth,—I know no man under whose arm I would have sooner taken shelter;—nor did this arise from any insensibility or obtuseness of his intellectual parts;—for he felt this insult of my father’s as feelingly as a man could do;—but he was of a peaceful, placid nature,—no jarring element in it,—all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly.

“—Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand,—I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

Incidentally, “kind” does not describe Tobias Smollett, who was an irascible satirist—sometimes comic, sometimes cranky—and someone that Laurence Sterne could not stand.  In fact, Sterne got so irritated with Smollett that he started referring to him as Dr. Smellfungus.  (“Dr.” because Smollett had been a ship surgeon before he was a novelist.)  My Toby has nothing cranky about him but he is the funniest of all the Bateses, so I’ll conclude that he owes his character to Uncle Toby and his comic touch to Smollett.

Darien (27) derives his name from a John Keats sonnet, and once again his subsequent life seems to prove Walter Shandy right.  The poem is “Upon First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and describes the awe that Keats felt upon first reading George Chapman’s translation of  The Iliad.  It makes sense, now that I think of it, that I would be drawn to a poem about the joy, mystery, and grandeur of reading literature.  Keats is searching around for analogies for his reading experience, and the ones he comes up with are awe-inspiring in their own right.  Here they are:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Ignore the historical inaccuracy (Keats should have said Balboa) and focus on the sense of wonder.  Faced with the vast expanse of the Pacific, the men can only stare at each other in mute amazement.  Which is, in fact, sometimes how I feel in the presence of both my sons.  More to the point, the images capture my Darien’s excitement about new ideas and ventures.  The name of Darien’s new Manhattan marketing company, set up to publicize the arts and non-profit organizations, says it all: Discovering Oz.

Of course, I don’t really agree with Walter Shandy.  It’s more the other way around: I admire kindness, named one son after a kind character, and find it no surprise that he has grown up kind.  I am curious about new ideas and new areas of interest, was drawn to a poem that captured my excitement, and now have a son who throws himself passionately into new endeavors.   Still, it fun to play with Walter Shandy’s idea.

One more thought: our last name conjures up for many people the split personality killer of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Norman Bates.  Norman, of course, ends the movie by assuring us that he “wouldn’t harm a fly.”  Does that put Toby’s first name at war with his last?  Or are there sides of my son that I don’t know about?  Just asking.