Tobogan Flapsack Changes His Name

To the despair of his editor, fiction writer Spindles O’Malley, falls in love with names.

“What sort of name,” asked the stunned fiction writer, “is Malcolm Brown? Goodness gracious, Brown, couldn’t you add a hyphenated something, just to make it a wee bit more interesting?”

They were in Brown’s brown office discussing books and careers and reporting on the manuscript recently submitted in a completely non-brown manner.

“The question,” said Brown, “is what sort of name is Tobogan Flapsack for the hero of a love story?”

“I think it fits,” said the writer.

“I think it sucks,” said Brown, brownly. He was paid to be brown.

This was the impasse reached. Publishers, Muckleberry, Carlson and Poofjeebs – usually referred to as MCP - insisted that their blithe word monkey labour under the cautious Brown, an editor with a reputation for restraint. There are few eventualities in the whole wide world, however, that the writer - his name was the far more interesting “Spindles O’Malley” - disliked more than a new editor. He determined to be eccentric. Besides, he had a genuine dislike for people named after colours. Blacks, Whites, Greens, Browns. Women named Scarlet. He had no time for them at all. He was, nevertheless, upon a contractual obligation and despite a pique of artistic resentment he went away, revised, and then returned the manuscript for a new Brown perusal. The editor read a few pages and then put it down.

“All you’ve done,” said Brown, brownly again, “is add the letter H. as an initial throughout. So now it is Tobogan H. Flapsack instead of just plain Tobogan Flapsack!”

“I think its an improvement,” said the writer. “Don’t you?”

“Look,” said Brown, “You’ve got a character here named Thomas Quartermain. Now that’s a sensible name. Why not use that name for the main character? Instead of Tobogan Flapsack.”

“Tobogan H. Flapsack,” said Spindles, correcting. He’d worked on the revised version for weeks.

“Why not,” asked the editor, “just use ordinary names that actually fit the character? I think it would sell a lot more books!” This was his professional opinion.

At this point Spindles decided that he had pricked upon a sore one where Brown was very sensitive. His assessment of the new editor was that, deep down, he didn’t think of himself as a Brown. No. He thought of himself as a Perry Dilsonwangle II. So Spindles determined that he should help his editor face this truth.

“I’m gonna call you Perry,” he announced. “Perry Dilsonwangle. The second.”

“I’m very happy with Brown,” said Dilsonwangle.

This claim was so obviously untrue that Spindles chose to just ignore it.

“I asked your secretary earlier,” said Spindles, “and she said you are definitely a Dilsonwangle. I tell you Perry, I’ve met several Dilsonwangles in my time, and I’m looking at one right now!”

Their relationship didn’t improve after that. The writer insisted on referring to his editor as “Perry” and the editor refused to answer to it. The editor insisted on changing the names of his writer’s characters but the writer wouldn’t hear it. It had no music. It didn’t twist his quirk.

“Don’t you think, Perry,” said Spindles at one juncture, “that in most novels the best thing about them is the names of the characters?”

“No,” said Dilsonwangles, “I don’t.”

“Where would Tessa of the Durbeyvilles be if she wasn’t named Tessa of the Derbeyvilles?” Spindles wanted to know, citing an example.

“You mean, Tess of the D’Urbevilles,” said the editor. “By Thomas Hardy.”

“Or if Oliver Twist was named Oliver Smith. It just wouldn’t work, would it?”

Dilsonwangles complained that Dickens had a fetish for silly names and that Hemingway was a better writer precisely because he didn’t.

“Tom Bombadill! Now there’s a name for a character!” said the Spindles.

“Perhaps. But Bilbo Baggins is corny,” said Dilsonwangles, sour. Being an editor he felt at liberty to pour scorn upon all the great writers of the English language. Indeed, he felt an obligation to do so. In his world, writers were the natural enemy. They were an unruly breed of difficult temperaments that caused publishers sleepless nights.

“Once,” said Spindles, “I read a story where the main character was named O. Disseus! And he poked Polly Squeamish in the eye with a stick!”

“Homer,” said the editor.

“You see! What sort of name is that? Homer. Someone who goes home. It is at once the name of the greatest poet of classical antiquity and the name of an animated underachiever!”

“Your point being?”

“It couldn’t work if he was named John. Or Malcolm. You couldn’t have ‘Malcolm’s Iliad’, could you?”

At this rhetorical high-point the editor and his client gazed at each other silently for a second. Then Spindles pleaded, “Do you see what I’m getting at Perry?”

At their next meeting O’Malley declared a change of pace.

“I’m writing a new book,” he announced.

“Good,” said Brown, encouraged. “What’s its about?’

“Its an autobiography.”

“Ah ha. Do you have a working title?”

“Its called Clueless In Denver Colorado.”

“An autobiography?”

“Yeah. Its about this guy. He lives in Denver Colorado and…”

“Have you ever been to Denver Colorado?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever been to Denver Colorado?”

“Oh, I see. Why? Does it matter?”

“I’m just wondering why its called Clueless in Denver Colorado?”

“Because the main character is clueless and he lives in Denver Colorado.”

“Is this main character you? You did say it was an autobiography.”

“Yes. It is me. But, to protect the innocent, he’s named Randy the Soapbox. The third.”

“Randy the Soapbox?”

“The third. There were two earlier Randy the Soapboxes and its important not to confuse them.”

“I see,” said the editor. He was getting annoyed. “Listen! O’Malley! Here we are clueless in Elegant Ridge, and as far as I know you’ve never been very far out of Elegant Ridge, and so I do not see how you could possibly justify calling your autobiography Clueless in Denver Colorado, when you have never even been to Denver Colorado! And as for the name Randy the Soapbox….”

Eventually, the writer saw what his editor was driving at, so he went away, secluded himself in a lonesome cabin, and produced his new ouvre. A few months later he returned manuscript laden as Dilsonwangles had requested. It took the sharp-eyed editor less than three minutes to make a raw assessment. The work consisted of page after page of names. Names such as Nicolette Lagubra, Gordon Pittnargle, Demitrio Clanbollocks, Dusty the Sandbag, Silvester ‘Fridgemagnet’ Davies, Argyle Lowly, Teddy Smegdrifter, Philip the See-through Tube, Lydia Muff-Johnson, O. Toby Flipjar, Sonya the Plastic-Wrapper. Tony the Throttle, Evalyn Honeytribes, Barack Obama, Stella May Trippenwort, Scratchy Blonde Eileen, Sir Marcus Driftwood-Pottengroober and his wife Lady Shirley-Maree.

“This is just a list of silly names!” Dilsonwangles complained.

“I know,” said Spindles. “Its called ‘Telephone Book’. Do you like it?”

“It doesn’t even have a plot!”

“A what?”

“A plot!”

“You don’t really see where I’m taking this, artistically, do you?” the writer observed.

“I don’t,” confessed the editor. “Are you being deliberately difficult?”

“Next I want to write a trilogy called ‘The Electoral Roll’,” said Spindles, excited.

It was his conviction as a creative individual, he went on to explain, that nouns are the best sort of words you can get and so, ipso logico, proper nouns must be the very best sort of words of all. He liked the way Germans treat all nouns like proper nouns and for that reason alone wished they’d won the war. He had long before decided, however, that most of the characters in his tales were absolutely dull. They lived, loved and died, usually in that order. It was necessary, therefore, if he wasn’t going to start disliking them, to enhance them – as he understood it – with interesting names. The best thing going for Jonathon Swift was his surname, O’Malley maintained, and Gulliver only traveled because he was named Gulliver. If he had been named Paddy or Sean he would have lived in Dublin working mill for five kids and a fish wife. “Now, J. Alfred Prufrock! There’s a name!” O’Malley declared, and said he saw T. S. Eliot as a distant founder of his style. “Thomas Stearns Eliot. Stearns. That’s slightly silly,” he said.

“Let’s get back to Tobogan Flapsack, shall we?” the editor suggested.

“OK.”

“I really don’t care for the name. I think it detracts from an otherwise reasonable sort of love story.”

It was a story about how Tobogan had almost mutilated his heart-strings on a winsome lassy who accidently had to move to Canada in a hurry. At the last minute their romance came crashing down like a failed baked cheesecake in a cold kitchen. O’Malley was trying to show that he understood the female reader.

“What about with the H.?” the writer wondered.

“No. Doesn’t work for me.”

“Come on, Perry, you don’t think the H. gives the character more depth?”

“No.”

The impasse remained impassable. That is, until - depleted from a series of creative writing workshops on the extended metaphor – O’Malley finally relented and said he’d consider other options. “What about,” he asked, “Stilts McNoughton-Von Rishing?”

Dilsonwangle screwed up his nose.

“What about Blinko Treadmill the Wildcard from Wadonga?”

“Nope.”

“Jim the Frilly Fingermittens?’

“No!”

“Laraby Huddleberger? Carlos J. Slingturban-Eastway?”

The editor shook his head.

“Frisky McKindlay the Great Nong of the North?”

Another no.

“Milton G. Flicktosser? Harold the Wheely Bin? Heath Grimwaddle III? Lotar Snorganmeister of Bremnen? Paltry Nicholls? Rubbery John? Tommy Sleekmurple? Leroy Henderson?”

The editor was unimpressed with every suggestion, except for the last.

“What was the last one again?” he said.

“Leroy Henderson,” said O’Malley.

“No middle initial?”

“No. Just Leroy.”

It was an eleventh minute breakthrough.

“Done!” said the editor, seizing the moment. “We’ll call him Leroy. Just plain Leroy Henderson.”

“I don’t see how its going to work,” said O’Malley, “but we can try it.”

The story, replete with Leroy, was subsequently published in the annual Redfern Tractor Repairs Lower Murray-Darling Literary Omnibus and was widely enjoyed, but with reservations expressed best by a raft of critics. Reviewer for the Elegant Ridge Express, Morris Skunkenbustle, put it most succinctly. “One has to wonder why, in such a tale of twisted hearts,” he wrote, “the author could not think of anything more interesting than the name ‘Leroy Henderson’ to brighten up an otherwise almost flat characterization.” And he asked the question many readers asked, “Is O’Malley losing his touch?”

The author – hero of our tale – was thus vindicated, while the editor – our villain – was taken off the case by MCP and relegated to metro magazines. To mend his reputation among once avid readers O’Malley rushed back into print with a new story called ‘Tobogan Flapsack Changes His Name’, a satirical endeavor describing the author’s own tangle with that deadly breed of misery guts and literary killjoy, Agent Brown, thereafter affectionately named Perry. This was the third editor O’Malley had successfully dispensed with. “There are,” he concluded, “some hardened bastards in the publishing world. Bastard coated bastards. But in most cases, even in the brownest of Malcolms there is usually a Dilsonwangle trying to escape.”