There are many reasons to reject a child’s name: it’s a dog’s name, it has too many letters, it sounds like the kind of name a kid who smelled of urine would have, it’s too posh … But “Posh and Becks might use it”? How could I have guessed that Posh and Becks, whose previous choices (let’s run through them) are Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz, might use Harper?
I don’t mind, per se, my daughter Harper having the same name as another Harper. There’s someone who lives in the next street with a child called Harper, only hers is a boy. Rather archly, I said: “Well, I named mine after Harper Lee,” as if to suggest she’d called hers after Harper Collins. She replied: “Of course, Harper Lee was called it only because it’s a boy’s name and she was a bit of a tomboy.”
That was me told, but I never felt moved to regret it, because unisexuality was part of the point. I think you choose your children’s names to be in perfect balance: neither hyper-feminine nor quintessentially masculine; hopefully without class overtones, so they can move freely about society, like foreigners (that’s why American names are good); neither traditional nor edgy, so that they can invest them with as much of their own personality and, more to the point, as little of yours, as possible.
I think everybody really wants a tabula rasa, but the interpretations of that are huge. Some people would say there is nothing plainer than Peter and Jane, or — along those lines — short, simple names like Ben, Sam, Emma, Will, Sarah. I think the plainness is its own message, but I’m aware that the names I’ve chosen aren’t seen as tabulae rasae by everyone either. I wrote about them once and a commentor on the internet said, “of all the tragic, try-hard wank” (that was about Thurston, my son) and “middle-class, ‘this is my favourite book, ya’, posey, fake intellectualism” (that was Harper) —
What is not plain, though, is having a name with pop-culture resonance. You could not be called Kylie and move freely about the world without people assuming certain things about you, your parents and your interests. And now you will not be able to be called Harper. It has gone from being neutral-cum-ambiguous to being as culturally freighted as weaving diamanté into your pubic hair. And the fact that she is two years older than the main Harper won’t make any difference, because people who can remember the exact ages of pop stars’ children are, well, I don’t want to use the word “lunatics”, so let’s just say “rare”.
If Harper (my Harper) were a handbag and Posh bought one the same, I could just take it back. But it’s grown on her now — that’s her name.
There is an undertone of snobbery here, I can see that — Harper had a resonance before and it was literary (or, if you prefer, a “middle-class, posey, fake” one). I am kidding myself if I think it has gone from neutral to loaded. It’s just gone from being loaded in one direction to being loaded in another.
And, post-Posh and Becks, people will never again call daughters after Harper Lee, because they’ll be scared of being mistaken for the kind of people who call their children after the Beckhams. They’ll go instead for “Scout”; there will be a rash of Scouts, in a mini echo of the spate of post-Posh Harpers. What I object to is not that the Beckhams aren’t middle class, but that they are celebrities. There is something classlessly sad about emulating celebrity, aching for their blessedness, on behalf of your children.
As aggrieved as I sound, I don’t mind that much (this is the opposite of my normal state, where I appear not to mind and underneath am seething with bile). It’s a lovely name. No wonder someone else chose it. I’d go as far as to say it’s the best name. The only mystery is why more people didn’t realise that sooner. —