Earlier this year the American author Ken Kalfus brought out a new book called Thirst. This caught my attention, since in 1997 I had published a book of the same name. Mine was poetry, his short stories.
At one point in Kalfus's book, in a homage to Italo Calvino, Marco Polo regales Kubla Khan with an inventory of shopping centres. I may be weird sometimes, but never that weird; no chance of anyone confusing my book with his, I thought.
Then along came another book called Thirst, by the English poet Matthew Caley. My curiosity increased when I learned that it had been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, as had mine. This was getting out of hand. Looking into the phenomenon, however, I discovered that things were worse, much worse than I imagined. Kalfus and Caley may have duplicated (nay, triplicated) my title, but waiting for me in cyberspace were legions of imposters shamelessly usurping my name.
Namesake census
A good starting point for a namesake census is to attempt to open a Hotmail address. Someone has always got there before you, so that instead of the johndoe@hotmail.com you dreamt of, you're asked to settle for something like johndoe759@hotmail.com instead.
It doesn't seem fair. Still, the people mailing you can't always be trusted to tell the difference. How else to interpret the baffling message I received a few weeks ago beginning: "It was lovely meeting on the train to Montserrat. Our choir sang in the cathedral right before the boys' choir. What a terrific experience for them."
What a terrific experience to discover I'd been in the Caribbean this year, when all I thought I'd managed was a few days in Paris. Though what a train was doing on volcano-plagued Montserrat was a mystery to me.
I turned to David Wheatley's home page: "Yes, this is what I look like. Am I what you imagined?" ran the caption to the photograph of me in a sleeveless blue shirt. The answer, by the way, was "not remotely".
The next match down on my search engine was a useful checklist of my recent cinema career. You may remember me (as Troy McClure would say) from such films as Imogen's Face, The Wingless Bird and Nobody's Children; I directed them. Or at least that's what the Internet told me.
The next match brought me up to date on my work as an archaeologist at Southampton University, where my research interests include the neolithic period and 3D reconstruction modelling.
Turning to Amazon.com, I learned that among the other works of David Wheatley is the fascinatingly titled Psychophar-macology and Sexual Disorders. My case study notes are fairly hot stuff, I don't mind confessing. To the best of my knowledge, however, they failed to make the Forward Prize shortlist.
Among the near misses is Dennis Wheatley, author of The Devil Rides Out and innumerable other soft porn satanic thrillers. I regularly get letters addressed to him, though never to date any royalty cheques.
Puzzled students
I'm not the only one to have suffered from namesakes, of course. When Thomas Docherty assumed the Chair of English at Trinity some years ago, students who keyed his name into the library catalogue were nonplussed to find the author of After Theory and Reading (Absent) Character also credited with Better Soccer for Boys, though Eric Cantona's statement about the seagull and the trawler suggests more overlap between postmodernist theory and football than we thought at the time.
There were two Standish O'Gradys, Standish James and Standish Hayes, who are forever being mistaken for each other. A glance at the telephone directory confirms the existence of several contemporary Brian Merrimans, Richard Sheridans, James Mangans (middle names unrecorded), James Joyces, Brendan Behans, a single Oliver Goldsmith and Oliver Gogarty apiece, and numerous Patrick Kavanaghs and Frank O'Connors. I didn't spot any Lafcadio Hearns or Sheridan Le Fanus.
Comes in handy
Not only must the Irish poet Tony Curtis deal with jokes about Some Like it Hot, he also has to cope with being mistaken for the Welsh poet of the same name. It does come in handy sometimes though: on more than one occasion the IASAIL bibliography in The Irish University Review credited the Balbriggan writer with the Welshman's latest production.
Perhaps namesakes trying to beef up their credentials could pool cvs? What were the names of those films I made again?
Book reviews
Of course, there are times when the namesake escape clause comes in handy. Somewhere out there is a reviewer called David Wheatley who has written unfavourable notices of various books he has been assigned, as I believe book reviewers occasionally do. On no condition must he be mistaken for me. This David Wheatley has, uniquely, only ever written favourable reviews. And while I'm on the subject of possible confusions let me get this much clear: not only have I never been to Montserrat, taught in Southampton, written The Devil Rides Out, Psychopharmacology and Sexual Disorders, Ken Kalfus's Thirst or Matthew Caley's, I am not even the author of this Irishman's Diary. It was the other David Wheatley, not me. Sorry, you've got the wrong man.