In the British satirical magazine Private Eye, there is a regular column entitled “Pseuds Corner.” What, exactly, it means for a writer to be a pseud in Private Eye’s terms it is not easy to explain. Certainly it may involve pretension, pomposity, vanity, circumlocu tion, name-dropping, fashionable thinking, fine writing, and, above all, self-importance, although none of these qualities by itself may be enough. There must also be an obvious disproportion, sometimes comic, sometimes pathetic, between the writer’s ambition and his achievement, between largeness of theme and smallness of material.
It helps if there is also an ad hominem ele ment. Any painter, for example, who said “Some artists paint flowers; I paint what the flower is thinking” would be a pseud, but pseudery in this case is raised to a higher power since the painter is Sylvester Stallone. It would be merely anodyne for an ordinary person to make a Christmas wish for “a shining star to lead the rich and privileged people of the world to the realization that they must share their wealth with the hungry and the sick” and so confer upon themselves a gift “more precious than the most ex pensive Christmas present in Harrods,” but it is pseudery in the mouth of the chairman of Harrods.
Yet it is possible for any writer, almost by in advertence, to join the ranks of the pseuds, as does this unsuspecting contributor to the Antiques Trade Gazette:
Titled La
