What’s in an Author’s Name?

Recently, someone asked me why I was reading Zelensky’s memoir. I gently corrected her – the author’s name printed on the cover of the book was, in fact, Roger Zelazny, the late-great ‘golden age’ science fiction author. It was A Night in the Lonesome October, published in 1993, and the last novel he ever wrote. 

The book was recommended to me by a friend, who described it as a “spooky Victorian Avengers.” But it also struck me as “spooky Victorian Zootopia,” with its foregrounded cast of endearing creatures. The story comes from the perspective of Snuff, the dog of infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper, and spans over the titular month. Much of the plot is Snuff wandering around the London graveyard he lives next to, and interacting with the other animals – the pets of his macabre neighbours – who respond to a larger series of occult events. All the while, he bumps into literary contemporaries like Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula, and Larry Talbot (a.k.a the ‘Werewolf’). 

The novel felt like suitable seasonal reading leading up to Halloween, and probably not something the Ukrainian president would write. But it also made me think of literary endurance in general –the names we remember, and the names we forget.

Neil Gaiman, who cites Zelanzy as one of his major influences as an author, has often recounted the story of James Branch Cabell, a renowned fantasy writer of the early 20th century. Gaiman recounted a 1921 essay in the New Yorker (surely apocryphally, as that magazine wouldn’t exist for another four years) that claimed “[Cabell’s] place in the world of literature is completely confirmed,” only for the author to be largely forgotten by 1929.

Gaiman would later comment on the ‘wasteland’ of literature, where some authors lived briefly, and were loved briefly. Authors come, and authors go. Writing careers flicker and flash and fade. Words don’t last, and literary fame is a fleeting, transient thing that twinkles like a firefly and then vanishes into cold and dust.

But even when an author is confused with the name of a famous statesman, in their words, perhaps he can find solace that his words have reached someone. That their ideas, across the chasm of time, have resounded.

The Third Column