I fancy myself a connoisseur of the naming of Americans, and as such have discovered that we gringos do a few things in this line that no one else does. George W. Bush — whose middle initial has all but become his last name — may be mildly amused to learn that only Americans go in for middle initials. Henry James does a nice bit on the comedy of American middle initials in Daisy Miller, where Daisy’s brat brother Randolph cites each member of his family with his or her middle initial included. Thank goodness that Europeans don’t go in for middle initials, or we might have had to refer to Dante R. Alighieri, William C. Shakespeare, or Marcel G. Proust.
Apart from monarchs and popes, Americans are also alone, I believe, in using the ennobling suffix, in which one adds roman numerals to one’s name, as in J. Bryan III, or George Frazier IV. A tough thing to stick a kid with, an ennobling suffix. I went through basic training with an entirely unpretentious guy named Daniel Thomas III, whose suffix was a fat pitch right in the kitchen of every sergeant he encountered: “You, Third, get you ass down there and give me twenty of your best or there ain’t going to be no Fourth.”
Much of the pretension in naming today seems to be invested in first names: all those Whitneys, Kellys, Camerons, Brittanys, and Tiffanys; those Tylers, Travises, Zacharys, Lucs, and more Scotts than you can shake a Fitzgerald at. One sighs over the yearning for elegance on the part of parents who pinned those names on their children. How long this has been going on is not clear. The philandering husband in Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn (1983) claims to have gone out with the first Jewish Kimberly, though he doesn’t, if I remember correctly, give an exact date.
The first names of my co-religionists have undergone a number of alterations over the years. The Jewish men of my father’s generation were given rather stately names: Sidney, Bernard, Louis, Saul, Maurice, Irving. (“If you’re named Irving,” I once heard a man say upon introduction to someone so named, “you must have been born in 1920. All Irvings were born in 1920.”) Occasionally, things would go awry, and the stately became comically grandiloquent. The poet Delmore Schwartz claimed that his parents, in naming him, must have had a Pullman car in mind.
The mothers of my own generation of Jewish boys tended to give their sons first names that were Anglo-Saxon last names: Arnold, Norman, Sheldon, Marvin, Barry. Put a definite article in front of any of these names and it sounds like a hotel. The slightly comic oddity of many American Jewish last names makes it a bit tricky to lash up a fit first name to them. How many first names go easily with, say, Blumenthal or Birnbaum I am not prepared to say, but Lance and Schuyler aren’t two of them.
For the same reason, Jews cannot, as certain old-family Wasps could, supply a family last name as a first name. Townsend Hoopes and McGeorge Bundy seem to work well enough; Goldstein Ginsburg and Pinsky Epstein do not. We are now emerging from a period of giving Jewish boys soft names. In my class lists at Northwestern, lots of Jonathans, Jeremys, Joshs, and Jaimies still turn up. The reversion to older names had a brief fling, and for a while many a newly minted Max or Sam or Ben felt the mohel’s blade. Some old Jewish names — Melvin, Isaac, Myron — appear to have become African-American first names. Others — Maurice, Seymour, Barney — do not seem destined for immediate recycling.
English professors from olden days used to have triple-barreled names, like George Barrow Woodbury, names that all but put a wing-collar under their possessors’ chins. Jewish men and women, I note, are now three-naming themselves. They are probably attempting not so much to add distinction to their names as to make themselves distinguishable from other Jews.
This might be the motive for Suzanne Jill Levine, the biographer of Manuel Puig, for there are innumerable Sue, Susan, and Suzanne Levines. Steven Lee Meyers, a reporter, must have wanted to be more than just another Steve Meyers. John Burnham Schwartz, author of Bicycle Days, perhaps wished to establish that he is the child of a mixed marriage. Barry Alan Shain, a political scientist, and Louis Daniel Brodsky, a poet, and Stanley Myron Handelman, a comedian, must have liked the rhythm that adding on their middle names gives, though Mr. Handelman, surely, plays his Stanley Myron for a small laugh.
None of these names can lay a glove on my own favorite of all public names, that of the writer who calls herself Pepper Schwartz, Ph.D. I’ve never read any of her books — they are chiefly on marriage and sex — but I shall always revere her for her unconscious comic genius in placing Pepper and then Ph.D. around the name Schwartz. Others, doubtless, have made fun of her name. Poor Dr. Pepper, so misunderstood.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
