On being called "Ian"
A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. — Dale Carnegie
Samuel Taylor Coleridge called his eldest son “Hartley” in honor of David Hartley, a scientist and free-thinker Coleridge greatly admired:
Him of mortal kind Wisest, him first who mark’d the ideal tribes Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain Pass in fine surges.
Those lines were published in 1797. But 10 years later, when the young Thomas De Quincy came to speak with him about the Hartleian theory, “all this was a forgotten thing”.
Coleridge was so profoundly ashamed of the shallow Unitarianism of Hartley, [De Quincy wrote,] and so disgusted to think that he could at any time have countenanced that creed, that he would scarcely allow to Hartley the reverence which is undoubtedly his due.
To give up his Unitarianism, De Quincy said, had cost Coleridge a “painful effort” over several years — and many friendships formed in the struggle against established religion.
Meanwhile, Hartley Coleridge continued to exist. He was sent to live with Coleridge’s friend Robert Southey, and then to school, and finally to Merton College, Oxford. Eventually he became a sort of poet, though not a very successful one — yet “Because I bear my Father’s name,” he wrote, “I am not quite despised.” By “my Father’s name” I assume he means “Coleridge”, and not the name his father chose for him, the hated name of “Hartley”. But whatever he made of that name, and whatever his father may have felt, no one seems to have thought of changing it.
My name, as you may know, is “Ian Blecher”.
“Blecher” is not an especially good name. People mispronounce it: they say “Blesher” or “Belcher” or “Bleacher” or “Bleeker”. The reason may be that the correct pronunciation is even worse. The short “e” and Germanic “ch” make a sound not completely unlike vomiting.
Still there is a certain dignity in being a Blecher. When my grandfather Saul Blecher was beginning his career as a certified public accountant, an employer requested he change his name to “Blake”. He took it as a piece of anti-Semitism and quit on the spot. Years later he would tell this story with pride and indignation.
“Ian” is a bad name. I should qualify this. “Ian” is a fine name if you happen to be British or a professional golfer. It seems well-suited to a Prime Minister of Rhodesia. But I personally have found it to be the kind of name that makes people say, “Eric, is it?”
This could not have been my parents’ intention. They were cosmopolitans, they had honeymooned in London, there were posters on their bedroom wall from the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Shakespeare Company. I believe my name was supposed to compliment these artifacts of a burgeoning Anglophilia. But in the place we actually lived — northern Ohio, in the 1970s — the “Ian” had a vaguely foreign sound which made people uncomfortable. Substitute teachers would always pronounce it as “Ion”.
In New York, where I live now, it is different: here “Ian” signifies (for example) a moderately successful real estate agent from the south shore of Long Island who drives into the city on weekends to see a game at the Garden. This could not have been my parents’ intention either (though they happen to be from Long Island) — but names have a destiny of their own.
Which is just the problem: to be called “Ian Blecher”, it seems to me, is to be destined for something dull and dismal. It could have been worse: I had an uncle called “Adolf Blutman”. But I would have liked a name that sang, like “Kazuo Ishiguro”, or “John Ashbery” — or one that stung, like “Karlheinz Stockhausen”, or “Nikolai Stavrogin”.
It is hard to live under a bad name; it is harder to change it. Some people manage: whatever may be said against Pol Pot, he was remarkably successful at getting people to call him “Pol Pot”. But I assume in such cases the change answers some real or apparent need (to evade arrest by pro-government forces, say). To change your name from simple vanity, that is something else. It is a kind of refusal to accept the world as it is.
I assume that when you change your name you have to tell people that you now wish to be known as “Karlheinz” or whatever, and remind them when they forget. And you must be prepared, at least, to tell them your reason. There is bound to be awkwardness at every point: about the new name, about the reminders, about the reason (even if it is a good reason, and especially if it is not). Still, I think I can do these things. What I cannot do is — change my name.
I am not quite sure how to express this. It is just a feeling that — whatever I happened to be called — I would still be Ian Blecher. For — as Plato says — “we cannot name things as we choose; rather, we must name them in the natural way for them to be named.”
Plato’s view is no longer fashionable. Nowadays we tend to think of names as conventional. Like Hermogenes, we
believe that any name you give a thing is its correct name. If you change its name and give it another, the new one is as correct as the old. For example, when we give names to our domestic slaves, the new ones are as correct as the old. No name belongs to a particular thing by nature, but only because of the rules and usage of those who establish the usage and call it by that name.
“Ach!” said Lessing; “Namen sind nur Töne” — “what are names but air?”
I do not know what names are, but I know that is wrong; they are not air. Otherwise they would not stick so.
