Once you’ve decided on your characters’ names, you’ve still got the problem of what to actually call them. Take, say, Dr. Derek Burlington. Is he the Doctor, Doctor Burlington, Doctor Derek, Derek Burlington, Doc, Burlington, Derek, Bones, Del, Uncle Derek, D.B. or Burley?
Another Derek: Derek Trotter from British TV series Only Fools and Horses. He’s Delboy to his friends; Derek or Trotter to people he’s in trouble with; the name Trotter is spat out with contempt; and he’s the complete Derek Trotter when he’s trying to appear professional or gain somebody’s trust.
Remember Nabokov?
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Introducing his biography of Lawrence Durrell, Ian MacNiven faces similar concerns:
As I began writing, Durrell’s first name intruded itself more and more insistently. Durrell-the-writer had a comfortable fit, but “Durrell” sorted oddly with Larry the son, brother and centre of a circle of friends. There was also the ebullient and imposing shadow of the Other Durrell, Gerald Malcolm, Gerry, zoologist and best-selling author. Larry Durrell invited informality while retaining his privacy; from his tightly shuttered core he would give the cue to the personality required for each occasion—Lawrence Durrell inscribing books at Hatchard’s in his beautiful hand, Durrell as director of Information Services at Cyprus, Larry the bon vivant, companion, lover. His books seem to me to have emanated from a source that could better be called Larry than any other part of his name. A more formal biography can Durrell him; the man himself preferred to be Larry.
