What’s in a pseudonym?

One of the reasons criminals want to stay anonymous is that they don’t want to get caught. Others knowing your identity when you’re up to no good can make it harder for you to shake the law off your back — unless, of course, you’re loaded and can charm your way through the long corridors distributing goodies. But why on earth are there so many legitimate things that bear no sign of their authorship? Any theories Dr Watson, creation of Arthur Conan Doyle?

Take the famous cave paintings in Lascaux in southern France. There are lovely depictions of horses, bisons and what I’m told are cave hyenas (but I suspect to be midget giraffes) along with a few human stick figures. It’s famous, lovely, making the place a great tourist attraction and lights up the whole business of the Stone Age. And yet the bloke who drew all this — or, at least, curated the show or led the group of artists — hasn’t left his name anywhere on the walls. (If it’s one of the stick figures, then it’s a terribly stupid signature of authorship, I’m afraid.)

The same holds true for the paintings that illuminate the walls of the Ajanta caves in western India, bearing exquisite images of figures some 17,500 years before (let’s just call him) Leonardo da Uggh completed his masterpiece in France.

So you think it’s about humility? A mark of innocent times when everything was everyone’s and nothing was nobody’s alone? Rubbish. I suspect the artists were simply unsure how their art works would be received, so left matters like authorship unclear for safety. Art critics must have been far more vicious both in Paleolithic Europe as well as during the Gupta Empire in India. Imagine the patron of an artist who has just finished his cave mural finding the animals ridiculously unrealistic, or the humans looking like Manga cartoon characters (before the Manga style became cool, that is). He would have been speared or decapitated or both. Nowadays, the worst that can happen is the under-performing artist being taken off the grant and having to spend the rest of his professional career designing greeting cards for Hallmark.

Anonymity must have had the same reasoning when applied to all those dull English poems we were made to read in school — I suspect to simply learn the English language. Take Advice to a Lover by ‘Anonymous’. “The sea hath many thousand sands/ the sand hath motes as many/ the sky is full of stars, and Love/ As full of woes as any/ Believe me, that do know the elf, and make no trial by thyself!”

If I had written that, I would have definitely wanted to remain a 
million miles away from that stupid poem (sic).

But what about pseudonyms? If writers cooking up names when writing books were really keen to keep them a secret, how come we know that Mark Twain was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, George Orwell was Eric Arthur Blair, and Robert Galbraith is JK Rowling? In the case of the first two gentlemen, they probably picked up their noms de plume to have the option of junking them if their literary careers didn’t pick up.

The case of Rowling is a bit different. ‘JK Rowling’ itself is a pseudonym, the author of Harry Potter actually publishing her first book way back in 1997 AD under her real name ‘Joanne Rowling’. As in the case with some women writers who don’t want to come across as women writers, acronyms were chosen over an ‘opened-up’ name. Writers like PD James (Phyllis Dorothy), AL Kennedy (Alison Louise) decided to let their readers not know whether they were women — or not. Although this did lead me to believe for a while that AJ Cronin (Archibald Joseph) and TC Boyle (Tom Coraghessan) are women.

At least, these ladies hadn’t taken the drastic marketing step that Mary Anne Evans took, by writing under the name of George Eliot. Rowling wrote under the very alpha male name of Robert Galbraith not only to ensure that her first crime novel was judged for what it is — rather than as “the crime novel written by THE HARRY POTTER WRITER” — but also that it settled down without an intrusive splash in the still overwhelmingly male-dominated pool of crime fiction.

Which brings me to the point where I might as well get it off my chest: Indrajit Hazra is a name I made up to hide from my fame and be judged by the readers of this column without any other baggage. My real name is Dan Brown. I do hope that you will continue reading me here even after this disclosure.