I’ve been thinking a lot about character names lately and admiring other writer’s choices and inventions. For example, in Mark’s novel, Harry, Revised, the main character is named Harry Rent, and it’s such a good name — simple, but suggestive of grief (i.e., the rending that follows a death, which fits as Harry’s a widower) as well as of the provisional, semi-permanent state (i.e., renting, not owning) that sets off Harry’s “revision” process.
Then there’s the less subtle, still marvelous class of character names: Uriah Heep, Augustus Gloop, Undine Sprague (possibly my favorite ever), Fevvers, Stephen Dedalus, the fragile Glass family, and so on.
So, I was amused to come across this letter today in The Notebooks of Henry James. It was written in response to a reader of The Liar with a personal interest in James’s use of “Capadose” for a character name:

34 De Vere Gardens, W.
13 Oct. 1896.
My dear Sir,
You may be very sure that if I had ever had the pleasure of meeting a person of your striking name I wouldn’t have used the name, especially for the purpose of the tale you allude to.
It was exactly because I had no personal or private associations with it that I felt free to do so. But I am afraid that (in answer to your amiable inquiry) it is late in the day for me to tell you how I came by it.
The Liar was written (originally published in The Century Magazine) 10 years ago–and I simply don’t remember.
Fiction-mongers collect proper names, surnames, &c.–make notes and lists of any odd or unusual, as handsome or ugly ones they see or hear–in newspapers (columns of births, deaths, marriages, &c.) or in directories and signs of shops or elsewhere; fishing out of these memoranda in time of need the one that strikes them as good for a particular case.
“Capadose” must be in one of my old note-books. I have a dim recollection of having found it originally in the first column of The Times, where I find almost all the names I store up for my puppets. It was picturesque and rare and so I took possession of it. I wish–if you care at all–that I had applied it to a more exemplary individual! But my romancing Colonel was a charming man, in spite of his little weakness.
I congratulate you on your bearing a name that is at once particularly individualizing and not ungraceful (as so many rare names are).
I am, my dear Sir,
Yours very truly
Henry James

I also like how you could set this letter to “This Is Just To Say“: I have named a character with your surname … Forgive me, it was too tempting: so picturesque, so rare.” (Commas, &c. added to make it suitably Jamesian.)

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today’s installment comes from journalist David Samuels, who has two new books out from New Press: Only Love Can Break Your Heart, which collects a decade’s worth of reportage and essays for Harper’s and The New Yorker, and The Runner, an expansion of Samuels’s well-known New Yorker article on James Hogue, the 28-year-old drifter who conned his way into Princeton.
In a favorable review of Only Love Can Break Your Heart that ran in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, the reviewer noted how Samuels’s journalism, which is populated with portraits of the self-deluded, the washed-up, and con artists, is “a tribute to the twin American traditions of self-invention and self-deceit.” Fitting then that what Samuels chose to contribute here is his top five books featuring double agents.
1. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. Joseph Conrad’s answer to Crime and Punishment is a sophisticated portrait of the psychological blankness and lack of any settled sense of self that are essential ingredients for at least one major character in every decent modern spy novel. Narrated by an old Conrad-like Englishman living in Switzerland, the novel tells the story of a Russian university student named Razumov who betrays the confidence of the revolutionary terrorist Victor Haldin only to fall in love with Victor’s sister, Natalie. The story of Razumov’s serial betrayals and the final disappointment of his hopes for redemption and forgiveness are opens up the cold landscape of betrayal that generations of brilliant spy novelists like Eric Ambler, John Le Carre, Charles McCarry and Alan Furst would populate with betrayers and seducers whose job was to teach readers the cruel lessons of the 20th century, etc.. A much better novel than The Secret Agent.
2. Out of the Night by Jan Valtin. Jan Valtin’s account of his life as an agent of the Communist International — the Comintern — working to destroy the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 1930s is one of the most horrifying and illuminating political memoirs of the 20th century. The communist decision to form a strategic alliance with Hitler proves to be one of the most deluded and disastrous political miscalculations of modern history. Valtin is captured, then tortured and imprisoned by the Gestapo for three years before he offers to become a Nazi agent in the hopes of saving his dedicated and long-suffering wife Firelei and their young son. Secretly remaining under communist discipline, Valtin finds himself caught between the horrors of the Stalinist purges and dank Nazi torture chambers. He eventually immigrates to America, though it is hard to say that this book — a huge bestseller when published in 1941, and almost entirely forgotten today — ends well. A good primer on 20th century Europe, and how political ideologies eat the brains of their adherents.
3. Really The Blues by Mezz Mezzrow. Famous as a friend and sometime musical collaborator of the brilliant and canny jazz originator Louis Armstrong in the 1920s and 1930s, Mezz Mezzrow was equally famous in jazz circles for selling some of the best marijuana on the East Coast. His autobiography tells the story of the birth of jazz as American popular music with a fan’s love and a musician’s insight. Mezzrow’s hipster vibe is balanced by his personal modesty and his unbounded admiration for Armstrong’s genius. Mezzrow eventually came to believe that his deep love for black music and his years of sharing the Negro condition had actually transformed him from a dark-skinned, curly haired Detroit Jew into a black man, a form of personal rebirth that was formally certified by the New York State prison system when Mezzrow was incarcerated as a Negro, making him the first official White Negro, Wigger, or what have you.
4. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré. John Le Carré, now an ill-tempered author of crappy thrillers, once wrote cold, witty, mean-spirited books with a painterly feel for the shades of gray inhabited by the middle-aged men who fought the battles of the Cold War. While Graham Greene may be hopelessly overrated, Le Carré is a great 20th century novelist whose four or five best books about the shadowy intelligence and counter-intelligence wars of the Cold War are sure bets to be read fifty or a hundred years from now for subtle psychological portraiture and for pure entertainment. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is Le Carré’s thoroughly depressing version of the Philby-Burgess-MacClean spy scandal that exposed the rottenness of the British ruling class. Wives betray their husbands, pudgy men read old documents in ill-heated rooms, idealism dissipates into the disappointments of late middle age, and hate and spite reign superior to generosity and love. The BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness is nearly as good as the book; the BBC version of LeCarre’s sequel, Smiley’s People, is even better.
5. Libra by Don DeLillo. The displaced, cocky, abusive idealist who makes defining choices only to end up as a pawn in someone else’s game is Don DiLillo’s greatest fictional character (the character named Jack Ruby in this novel might rank fourth or fifth). Like many other DeLillo’s novels, Libra is both a po-mo book about storytelling and a brilliant rendering of life on the fringes of American mass society. What makes this novel special is DeLillo’s ability to concentrate for so long and at such a high poetic pitch on the contradictions of Oswald’s character until he breaks free from the mass of conspiracy theories and counter-conspiracy theories to become a flesh and blood character in DeLillo’s own novel. DeLillo may be a poor heir to the mantle of Pynchon and Gaddis but he does have the makings of a truly great modern spy novelist. I would like to suggest that Mr. DeLillo read Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games by former CIA counterintelligence officer Tennent “Pete” Bagley, and get to work on a double agent novel about the fake KGB defector Yuri Nosenko. I’d love to read it.

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today’s installment comes from my friend Mark Sarvas, proprietor of The Elegant Variation and author of the new novel Harry, Revised. New York magazine gave Harry a thumbs up, praising the author’s “sure hand for vivisecting 21st-century absurdities.” New York readers can catch Mark when he reads tomorrow night — that’s Wednesday! — at the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca (more info).
Here Mark shares five beloved books he’s afraid to re-read for fear they won’t hold up.
1. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. John Steinbeck’s legacy hasn’t held up particularly well. Robert Gottlieb just took several thousand words in the New York Review of Books to bury him, not to praise him. “The extraordinary thing about John Steinbeck,” he began, “is how good he can be when so much of the time he’s so bad.” I have fond memories of Of Mice and Men, one of the first “serious” literary works I read at a young age. Besides being proud of myself for my leaps in reading comprehension, I was completely drawn in by Lenny, George and those damned rabbits. I cried for hours when I finished the book but felt I had glimpsed something about friendship that was rare and true. But I’ve had my own love/hate with Steinbeck since — I think he’s better than Gottlieb allows but he can frequently be astonishingly ham-fisted. So I think I’m going to leave this one untouched in the well of memory.
2. The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I’ve read this one well over a dozen times but not in the last ten years or so. Rob Reiner famously did a fine job, but, for me as for many others, he simply could not compete with the Inigo and Fezzik of my own memory. Of course, in my first youthful reading, I didn’t realize Goldman was funning with us with all that Florin/Guilder stuff — until I went to Holland and handled actual florins and guilders. My fear here is all the stuff I thought was cool before — the breaking of the fourth wall, the book within the book stuff — is likely to just read like bits of business now and, knowing Goldman, the emotion I found back then would probably come off as mawkishness today. It’s another one I daren’t touch, though the hard-cover reissue sits proudly on the shelf.
3. The Tanglewood Murder by Lucille Kallen. Although I seem to have a reputation as an anti-genre snob, I retain very fond memories of this whodunit written by a former “Your Show of Shows” writer, who died in 1999. I actually enjoyed the whole C.B. Greenfield series so much that I had her sign first editions of all her books years ago at Murder Ink, the now-defunct New York mystery bookstore. But this one was always my favorite, and I’d picked up a paperback copy on my way up to Tanglewood one summer with my family. The mystery includes a Stradivarius, Ravel and Shakespeare and is forever associated in my mind with those summer evenings with the Boston Symphony Orchestra — and I tend to be suspicious of reading experiences too steeped in nostalgia. But I do remember it as a witty and surprising mystery.
4. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Like most of the free world, I was completely blown away when I read White Teeth, and the initial first flurry of pages I wrote of my own novel came out in a sort of Zadie Smith-soaked haze. (Those pages, thankfully, no longer exist.) What I admired most was her sheer fearlessness — no turn of phrase seemed to outrageous, no outré scenario off limits, and yet she had the chops to pull them all off — or so it seemed at the time. Those are precisely the bits I fear might not read as well today. Smith herself has disavowed the book, characterizing it as “the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old,” and though I think she goes overboard there, her prose has matured and quieted down in a way that fulfills the promise of her debut without making me eager to revisit it.
5. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. I mentioned this “5 x 5” idea last week to a novelist friend, who immediately piped up with The English Patient, a book which wasn’t in my original list but one she had recently re-read. But she was so convincing in her case, suggesting that what I fondly remember as the book’s lush lyricism read to her as overripe, and that the absence of the plot that I swear I remember being there adds up to a book that’s a lovely slog. I trust and respect her enough that I’m suddenly terrified to crack this one open.

This is the world we made edition:
• Virginia Heffernan reports that the Oxford English Dictionary may soon be out of print as it moves to a web-only format. Luddites cry, “O.E.D. no!” Relatedly, in this week’s Publishers Weekly, Gwenda Bond explores how Wikipedia’s dominance is affecting the publishing model for encyclopedias and other reference works.
• Janet Maslin gives James Frey’s new novel a rave. But the review is written in a bad James Frey imitation. Which made this reader squirm, cringe.

Remember that point in Bleak House when Krook, the drunken rag-and-bone guy, spontaneously combusts in his shop? In my mind I always related the fatal combustion less to Krook’s drinking than to his oiliness and the general blackness of his soul, as if he were a one-man grease fire lit by his own evil (as it were).
Then a couple weeks ago, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! had a segment on Prohibition, and one of the questions had to do with the claim of early temperance activists that alcohol consumption could lead to spontaneous combustion, the logic being that alcohol burns.* And I thought, “Krook! Krook!”
Sure enough, that’s the folk belief that Dickens drew on to plot Krook’s end. Although, according to this website (be warned: there’s a spooky photograph there that Will Haunt Your Dreams), Dickens maintained that Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) wasn’t superstition but fact:

Krook was a heavy alcoholic, true to the popular belief at the time that SHC was caused by excessive drinking. The novel caused a minor uproar; George Henry Lewes, philosopher and critic, declared that SHC was impossible, and derided Dickens’ work as perpetuating an uneducated superstition. Dickens responded to this statement in the preface of the 2nd edition of his work, making it quite clear that he had researched the subject and knew of about thirty cases of SHC. The details of Krook’s death in Bleak House were directly modeled on the details of the death of the Countess Cornelia de Bandi Cesenate by this extraordinary means; the only other case that Dickens actually cites details from is the Nicole Millet account that inspired Dupont’s book about 100 years earlier.

Now, you have to consider any Google search that has already delivered the sentence, “Over the past 300 years, there have been more than 200 reports of persons burning to a crisp for no apparent reason,” as a clear success. But there’s more!** The incidents surrounding the death of the Countess are covered in detail here. Meanwhile, the BBC website sheds light on the other case Dickens mentioned in his preface, Nicole Millet’s death:

However, the first reliable documentation of SHC dates back to 1763 when Frenchman Jonas Dupont compiled a casebook of SHC cases in a book called De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis, having been compelled by the Nicole Millet case, which involved a man who was acquitted of the murder of his wife when the court ruled that the unfortunate woman’s death had been due to spontaneous combustion.
Nicole Millet was the wife of the landlord of the Lion d’Or in Rheims, who was supposedly found burnt to death in an unburnt chair in February, 1725 (on Whit Monday). Her husband was accused of her murder and arrested; however, a young surgeon named Nicholas le Cat managed to convince the court that her death was caused by SHC. The court ultimately ruled her death as ‘by a visitation of God.’ However, the investigative author Joe Nickell stated in his book, Secrets of the Supernatural, that Millet’s body was not actually found in the chair, but that a portion of her head, several vertebrae and portions of her lower extremities were found on the kitchen floor, the surrounding ground of which had also been burnt. Three accounts were cited: Theodric and John Becks’s Elements of Medical Jurisprudence (1835), George Henry Lewes’s Spontaneous Combustion from Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine No. 89 (April 1861) and Thomas Stevenson’s Principals and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence (1883). Strangely, there was no mention of Nicholas le Cat.

Emphasis mine.
* Another rationale for the belief, proferred at the BBC website, is that “a body saturated with such combustible fluids would be prone to combustion at the slightest spark.” However, the article continues reassuringly, “the concentration of alcohol in a body would never be high enough for ignition to occur.”
** If this post is tending a little ghoulish, my apologies. I spent most of the summer of 1978 (age 7) suffering from a morbid fear/hope that I might spontaneously combust at any moment after my best friend J. brought up the possibility during a sleepover. So, in addition to clarifying all things Krook, this research was psychologically cathartic.

• At MetaxuCafé, a cadre of great contributors are providing ongoing coverage of the PEN World Voices Festival, which continues through Sunday.
• A short film inspired by Leonora Carrington’s “The Debutante.” In a very modern piece of addenda, there’s a note from one of Carrington’s grandsons in the comments. Like the Mansfield and Keogh stories I linked to Tuesday, “The Debutante” is another very, very short story about what it’s like to be a young girl, though it’s the only one of the three to feature a hyena. I smell a bit strong, eh?
If you’re not familiar with Carrington, you can start with this profile; and I wrote a little about her amazing novel, The Hearing Trumpet here.
• His novel is still two weeks from publication, and my James Frey fatigue has already set in.

• Maud points the way to a Theodora Keogh story, published in 1957, called “The Man Who Loved Old Ladies .” It’s a short-short story, easily readable online, and it’s interesting to place it in tandem with another short-short story, Katherine Mansfield’s “The Young Girl“, especially in the way both stories close.
Keogh is a new author to me — I hadn’t heard of her before reading an obituary that ran in the Telegraph this January — but Maud, who along with others is agitating that Keogh’s books be brought back into print, can tell you more.
Mansfield’s story, by the by, is included in the Angela Carter-edited anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, put out by Virago in the ’80s. The collection’s out of print but you can still pick up a used copy dirt cheap.
• Lately, I’ve been re-reading David Copperfield as my before-bed, literary-cup-of-Ovaltine book. Last night I hit the chapter called “My First Dissipation.” It’s such a funny set piece and can be read as a stand-alone excerpt if you start here, where David first decides to have a few friends over to his new apartment for dinner (Mrs. Crupp is his landlady).
A taste of the dissipation:
I began, by being singularly cheerful and light-hearted; all sorts of half-forgotten things to talk about, came rushing into my mind, and made me hold forth in a most unwonted manner. I laughed heartily at my own jokes, and everybody else’s; called Steerforth to order for not passing the wine; made several engagements to go to Oxford; announced that I meant to have a dinner-party exactly like that, once a week, until further notice; and madly took so much snuff out of Grainger’s box, that I was obliged to go into the pantry, and have a private fit of sneezing ten minutes long.
I went on, by passing the wine faster and faster yet, and continually starting up with a corkscrew to open more wine, long before any was needed. I proposed Steerforth’s health. I said he was my dearest friend, the protector of my boyhood, and the companion of my prime. I said I was delighted to propose his health. I said I owed him more obligations than I could ever repay, and held him in a higher admiration than I could ever express. I finished by saying, ‘I’ll give you Steerforth! God bless him! Hurrah!’ We gave him three times three, and another, and a good one to finish with. I broke my glass in going round the table to shake hands with him, and I said (in two words) ‘Steerforth -you’retheguidingstarofmyexistence.’

Personal aside: Whenever my book club meets, there’s inevitably some point in the evening where we all start making plans to go on a trip to Cuba together, or Budapest, or else, you know, start a bowling team. So the “made several engagements to go to Oxford” bit hits home.

• Last week, Slate reported that The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, would face foreclosure unless the historic site managed to raise $3 million by April 24. According to The Mount’s website, that deadline’s now been extended to May 31. So far $816,753 has been raised.
• Seems like old times: Another new novel from Curtis Sittenfeld, another round of commentary re: the writerly abilities of “Mr. Sittenfeld.”
From the vaults of Web .2, an early story of Sittenfeld’s, one I’m still fond of, about New Year’s at the office.
• A history of literary tattoos. The Gutenberg Bible tats seem like an especially dedicated way to salute the printed word. (Via Bookslut.)