The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 8: September 5

Today I went to the Columbia library for the first time in four months. Despite my regular absences, I have two spots I consider permanently mine. Both are located in a catwalk; both are desks separated from other desks by tall bookshelves. In the bookshelves of the first spot (where I am today) is a series of large bronze volumes called Germanstik. Best I can tell (I do not speak German) this is a Who’s Who in Germany, scanning the years 1960–2007, after which the library’s subscription ran out, or nobody was anybody in Germany anymore. There is a book called Shadows in the Attic, which I thought might be a V. C. Andrews title. I would have so much respect for the Columbia University library if it could count V. C. Andrews among its holdings. But Shadows in the Attic is “A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction” from 1820 to 1950. According to this book, one of the enduring themes of supernatural fiction is “the little people,” which I did not know, but which explains Murakami’s 1Q84 to me a bit better (there are characters in the novel called “the little people”). Shadows in the Attic is useful for other reasons as well. It is highly recommended (by me) as a source for character names and story titles. The following is a list of real authors who, depending on their spiritual disposition, may haunt you from beyond the grave if you repurpose their names for use on fictional characters:

Oliver Onions

Harrington Hext (pseudonym for Eden Phillpotts)

Ernest R. Suffling

Nina Toye

Allen Upward

Weatherby Chesney (pseudonym for C. J. Cutliffe Hynde)

John Gloag

W. P. Drury

Here are some excellent book and story titles that, if appropriated for reuse, may come with the same risk:

“The Persecution Chalice”

“A Carnation for an Old Man”

“In the Cliff Land of the Dane”

“Another Little Heath-Hound”

“Uncle Phil on TV”

“A Blue Pantomime”

“The House Which Was Rent Free”

“The Weirdale Assize”

“A Strange Christmas Game”

The Carpet with a Hundred Eyes

“The Haunted Physician”

“The Case of the Thing That Whimpered”

Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey

I have stolen names and I have stolen titles, two at this point; I intend to steal more. (I will, at a future point, steal the title of this book from my daughter. We will be at lunch following a visit to an Egyptian museum in Berlin; we will have bought a book on hieroglyphics. We will be trying to learn the picture letters, one of which is based on a drawing of folded cloth. “Folded clock?” my daughter will ask. “Folded cloth,” I’ll correct. And then I’ll pickpocket her accident.)

Once I stole the name of a fetus. I was at a baby shower for a friend, and the table talk came around to names. My friend wasn’t disclosing the names she and her husband were considering; she revealed only that they’d winnowed the choices to two, and each of them had a favorite. She was trying to convince her husband to back her top name candidate. He was trying to do the same to her. I wondered what sort of campaigning was involved. And then I didn’t. In most couples there is the person who wins and the person who doesn’t. The winner isn’t necessarily stronger or smarter or righter. The winner is the person who won’t give up, and the non-winner (“loser” is not the correct word for the person who does not win), at a certain point, realizes the battle is a silly one, and the spoils are not worth the extended warfare. I am the winner in my relationship, which is why I have so much respect for the non-winner. The non-winner, i.e., my husband, doesn’t give a shit whether or not he’s going to win the fight over the new dishwasher’s load capacity, or how to best teach children to calculate military time. I wish I were not always the winner. But this is like wishing I were not a girl.

The pregnant woman at the shower was the winner in her relationship. Whatever name she wanted, such would be the baby’s name. This did happen. At the shower, however, since she wasn’t disclosing either name candidate, we talked about the names other people she knew were considering for their babies. One of her friends, whose last name was Sheidegger, wanted to name her daughter Violet.

Violet Sheidegger was the best name I’d ever heard. I urged her to tell her friend (whom I did not know) to name her daughter Violet. The name Violet Sheidegger inspired me to write the short story that gave me my first big publishing break, and which subsequently inspired a person in publishing to pay me a stunning sum of money for my partially finished (actually scarcely begun), and really not very good, first novel. Since I didn’t know this Sheidegger woman, and would likely never meet her, and lived 3,000 miles from her, I didn’t consider it stealing to use a name she hadn’t committed to using, and which, in fact, she did not use.

I later heard that my friend disapproved of what she considered my “theft.” She believed I’d invaded this stranger’s privacy; I’d stolen what was hers to use or not, as she chose.

Four years later I also had a daughter. I found her name on a tombstone near our Maine house. I stole it, I guess. This name is not in my family. I have no rights to it or to the story that accompanies it (the woman on the tombstone died unmarried; she was, according to my neighbor, a bootlegger). I thought using her name was an interesting way for my family to take part in the history of our town, but not everyone agreed. My neighbor didn’t accuse me of stealing. He didn’t get mad at me. He just found the whole thing strange.

Not long after my daughter was born, my husband and I disseminated not only the fact of her birth but other relevant statistics, such as what we intended to call her. My disapproving friend’s husband, the non-winner in the battle to name his daughter, wrote me a congratulation note. He revealed, somewhat mournfully, that his first choice had been the same name I’d chosen for my daughter. He did not accuse me of stealing the name. And I hadn’t, of course, at least not from him. Given his wife’s discretion, I’d had no idea what he’d failed to name his daughter four years ago. But I worried, though this time I was mostly innocent, that I still somehow qualified as a thief.