Wednesday
Yesterday, when my eldest granddaughter turned nine, I looked back at the post I wrote when she was born. As I have done with each of my grandchildren, I looked into the literary antecedents to her name. The most famous Esmé in literature, I believe, is J.D. Salinger’s “To Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Nine years later, I can report the prediction I made at that time has proved fairly prescient.
Reprinted from June 18, 2012
My son Toby and his wife have just managed to accomplish what neither my paternal grandparents, my parents, nor Julia and I could do: they have given birth to a baby girl. Esmé Eleanor Wilson-Bates arrived 2:58 Friday morning, turning me instantly into the cliché of the doting grandfather. I’m also pleased to report that her parents are keeping alive a Bates tradition of giving their children literary names. Esmé is the enchanting little girl in the J. D. Salinger short story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” which bodes well for Esmé Eleanor’s future.
At least it does if you subscribe to the Walter Shandy theory of naming, which I’ve written about here. According to the father in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, names determine destiny. To Walter Shandy, it’s self-evident why Julius Caesar grew up to become a great general and leader of men. After all, he bore the name “Julius Caesar.” (Also according to Walter, the worst name that one can possibly have, a name that will doom one forever, is “Tristram”—and how his son ends up with that name is part of the comedy of the novel.)
So how have literary names shaped destiny in our family? I was named after Christopher Robin and there was indeed a way in which, as the oldest son, I saw myself as the chief game master in my family, with my brothers as so many Poohs, Piglets and Eyores. To this day I still like to run things. [Slight amendation: My mother points out that the actual source of my name was the family name of “Robins,” with my poet father dropping the “s” because “Robin Bates” scans better. While I accept this explanation, names are often overdetermined so Milne’s character is in there as well.]
Meanwhile Darien, who owes his name to the Keats sonnet “Upon First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” is a bold explorer like Cortes/Balboa, starting his own Manhattan marketing agency at the height of the recession with virtually no capital. Toby, meanwhile, is one of the kindest men I know, sharing similarities with his namesake Uncle Toby, who refuses to hurt a fly in Tristram Shandy.
By naming their daughter Esmé, then, Toby and Candice have given her a real gift. Salinger’s Esmé is an English girl in her early teens who befriends a U. S. soldier (the narrator) in a restaurant on the eve of his being sent over to France in the D Day invasion. She has lost both parents, her father in the African campaign, and is reaching out to Americans. She is earnest, sensitive, and precocious—she likes to use big words—and the soldier is captivated. When she learns that the narrator is a writer, she asks him if he will write a story about her:
“I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.”
I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.
“It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and silly.” She reflected. “I prefer stories about squalor.”
“About what?” I said, leaning forward.
“Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.”
And later:
“Are you at all acquainted with squalor?”
I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I’d do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.
Her final words are, “ I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact.”
Esmé doesn’t appear to know what squalor means, but the narrator does indeed become better acquainted with it when he undergoes combat, as did Salinger. His faculties, furthermore, take a beating: we next see him stationed in a house in Germany after the war suffering from PTSD. He has the shakes and a facial twist, and he vomits when he gets too close to real emotion. At one point he recalls the Brothers Karamazov passage that hell is the inability to love, and he himself finds himself unable to answer, or even to read, the letters which his wife and relatives are sending him. He wraps himself in a protective shield of irony.
Esme’s letter pulls him out of the worst of his illness. Here’s her postscript:
P.S. I am taking the liberty of enclosing my wristwatch which you may keep in your possession for the duration of the conflict. I did not observe whether you were wearing one during our brief assocition, but this one is extremely water-proof and shock-proof as well as having many other virtues among which one can tell as what velocity one is walking if one wishes. I am quite certain that you will use it to greater advantage in these difficult days than I ever can and that you will accept it as a lucky talisman.
The narrator knows the meaning of the watch, which belonged to Esmé’s father. It helps him recover enough to return to his wife and begin his life anew.
I can imagine Esmé Eleanor 12 years from now as an alert, curious, and gregarious girl (“gregarious” is a word that fascinates the fictional Esmé). I see her, like Salinger’s heroine, wearing a Campbell tartan dress and being sensitive to people in distress (as her father was at a very early age). She will reach out to lonely souls.
I pray that she won’t be forced to grow up too fast, even though I’m aware that tragedy happens. Her father, after all, wrestled with the death of an older brother when he was just 16.
