Fool-the-Squares

Imprisoned for political offenses under Louis XV, Francois Marie Arouet changed his name to Voltaire in order to make a fresh start as a writer. The Rev. C. L. Dodgson used the pseudonym Lewis Carroll because he thought it beneath the dignity of a clergyman and a mathematician to write a book like Alice in Wonderland. Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) and Lucile-Aurore Dupin (George Sand) used men's names because they felt women au thors were discriminated against in the 19th century. These days, pseudonymity is again in vogue, but the reasons are hardly as compelling as they once were.

Raymond D. Senter. One explanation for all the artifice is that this is the age of the put-on, or the game of fool-the-squares. Could be, however, that the pseudonymists are fooling themselves.

As Manhattan Behavioral Psychologist Andrew Salter sees it, the title of the pseudonymous novel The Exhibitionist refers to more than just the strip-prone heroine. It describes the author, David Slavitt -- alias Henry Sutton -- as well. Pseudonymous writers, says Salter, are basically exhibitionists; they are just dying to be found out.

They usually get their wish. The co author of that salacious little novel Candy was billed as Maxwell Kenton until he was unmasked as Terry Southern. Mark Epernay was supposed to have written the pseudoscientific McLandress Dimension, a book measuring the ego capacity of prominent people.

But he turned out to be that chronic spoof John Kenneth Galbraith, who recently carried pseudonymity to its logical extreme by reviewing the pseudonymous Report from Iron Mountain under the pseudonym Herschel McLandress. One of the mysteries of the 1962 Vatican Council was the man named Xavier Rynne who wrote so knowingly of the proceedings for The New Yorker; it later developed that a Catholic theologian, Father Francis Xavier Murphy, then residing in Rome, did much of the writing. One author who has so far escaped detection is Raymond D.

Senter, a dissenter (get it?) from Defense Department policies who writes for the New Republic and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

William Randolph Hirsch. Whatever pseudonyms may do for the individual ego, editors still insist that there are practical reasons to use them. For 50 years, Hearst papers used the byline Cholly Knickerbocker to cover several writers. The single name, editors found, gave the column an identity it would not have had if the names had kept switching. When Society Columnist Aileen Mehle came along, she was dubbed Suzy Knickerbocker, and she took the name with her when she joined the New York Daily News. Then, too, when a publication runs more than one piece by the same person in the same issue, it often insists on a pseudonym. Freelance Writer Ken Purdy contributed two articles to a recent Playboy, one under his own name, one under that of Karl Prentiss. Even when they give up their real names, pseudonymists often like to hang on to their real initials.

Some writers, of course, use pseudonyms for the sheer fun of it. It was never very credible that a man named William Randolph Hirsch wrote the Red Chinese Air Force Exercise, Diet & Sex Book. In a review of the manual, Humorist Marvin Kitman revealed that he was the author, with an assist from other editors of Monocle magazine. Not that he entirely approves of the practice. "The four most shocking pseudonyms in use today," he confides, "are Walter Lippmann, Art Buchwald, James Reston and Arthur Krock."

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