What’s in a Name?

Picture of Nobody by Philip Owens. McNally Editions, 288 pages. 2026.

“It’s literature that counts,” one character states early on in Picture of Nobody. To which another replies: “So does my landlady.” This little aperçu sums up the tension that occupies the entire novel. Unless a poet is lucky enough to be born with money—like Sidney, Cavendish, Shelley, or Milton—they must find a way to simultaneously square their accounts with literature and their landlady.

This balancing act would’ve been familiar to the novel’s author, Philip Owens. In 1931, the editor Samuel Putnam published European Caravan, an anthology meant to introduce American readers to the “after-War” writers who were contending with the “spiritual chaos” and “breakdown of reality” brought about by the Great War—to literary modernism, in other words. The anthology included Beckett, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot, Auden, Lorca, and others. It also included many who would not go on to become household names. Owens, a thirty-year-old poet, was among them. His inclusion in this anthology is the most distinguished fact about him in his two-inch Wikipedia page. He published a few pieces in literary journals, an anthology about—coincidentally—landladies, and two little known novels. None of this brought him fame or fortune. When he died, in June 1945, three months before the end of the Second World War, he was a sergeant in the British Intelligence Corps. The personal inscription on his grave, at a war cemetery in Greece, reads: “And the time came and I followed.”

Picture of Nobody was his second novel, published in 1936 and soon forgotten. A satirical tragicomedy, the novel follows a young poet navigating the literary scene of interwar London, trying to make it and survive in the meantime. It’d be a simple autofictional exercise, except the “nobody” in question is named William Shakespere—not Shakespeare—and his world is peopled by men named Marlowe, Kyd, Rosencrantz, and Falstaff, who variously help and hinder our hero. McNally Editions calls it a “reimagining of the milieu of Elizabethan London in modernist dress,” which is basically true, although it neglects the novel’s irreverence and understates the complexity of the relationship between its worlds. For it is not simply the historical Shakespeare’s biography transposed by three centuries, nor is it simply Owens’s biography lived by another name. Rather, the life of the fictional Shakespere blends the obscure and the famous poets’ lives. The reader will recognize enough landmarks from the Bard’s mythology to understand that the novel is, in one sense, a work of alternate history. But the reader will also count enough differences to grasp that this poet is only loosely based on his namesake.

The most notable difference between Shakespere and the Bard is that the character, like Owens and most poets, struggles mightily against poverty. Indeed, poverty is his main antagonist. When we meet Shakespere, he’s living like the poor poet in Carl Spitzweg’s painting. His bed is one mattress stacked on another. He has no table, no electricity, no gas light. There is, however, a “row of books.” When the historical Shakespeare retired, around 1613, he retired to one of the largest houses in Stratford. The question driving the protagonist throughout the novel is not: How do I write the best poetry possible? It is, more modestly: How do I get from here to there? How do I escape this squalid room, attain a degree of economic self-sufficiency, and also manage to keep writing poetry? The novel offers an extended meditation on the last question, the answer to which adds up to a hard-boiled theory of what makes for literary success in a rapacious capitalist society. Ninety years later, the theory remains distressingly applicable.

For one, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And it’s not who you think you want to know, either. Shakespere’s first break, for instance, comes by way of Anne, his out-of-town lover and soon-to-be wife, who happens to run into his old school friend, Richard Field, now the publisher of the Adonis Press. Field, always on the lookout for new poets, is delighted to hear that Shakespere still writes and invites him to visit his office in London. One day, Shakespere doesn’t know any publishers; the next, he finds he’s old friends with one. Field ends up publishing Shakespere’s first poem, Venus and Adonis, and serves as a conduit to the literary world. Who would’ve thought, when the two met in school, that one day they’d end up in business together?

Yet Shakespere’s most valuable connection is also his least literary. Captain Oldcastle begins as Shakespere’s class-dysphoric landlord, the man he studiously avoids on rent day. They share a few beers before Shakespere’s big break, but we assume, after Field, that Oldcastle will be left behind as the poet ascends. Not so. Oldcastle turns out to be Shakespere’s good luck charm. First, he meets Field and volunteers as a traveling salesman for the press. On the road, he runs into the Honorable Elizabeth Tidder, England’s premier literary tastemaker, and secures a meeting for Shakespere and Field—another remarkable stroke of luck.

Later, after abandoning his wife and swindling Field, Oldcastle reappears, rechristened as Falstaff, an up-and-coming advertising entrepreneur. Feeling he owes Shakespere from their salad days—“unexpected information” to the poet—Falstaff appoints himself Shakespere’s patron and awards him a sinecure. The support comes not a moment too soon. If Falstaff hadn’t come along, it’s doubtful whether Shakespere would’ve found the fortitude, not to mention the money, to keep writing. And not only does Falstaff cover the rent and get him a job, he also vows to make Shakespere famous. It is Falstaff who eventually connects Shakespere to the powerful editor Rosencrantz, who gives Shakespere his second, more profitable ride on the publishing merry-go-round.

Without this adventitious network, Shakespere’s career would have continued to flounder. The novel concurs: You have to network to get work. But it’s not just as “connections” that people matter to a poet. Sometimes, they’re important simply because they’re generous. This was particularly important for freelance poets in interwar, post-depression England, a state with a threadbare social safety net. When Field treats Shakespere to lunch, it could be described as a business expense—but not when, afterward, he gifts the poet his second coat. Nor, later, is the generosity transactional when Anne’s friends, the political Mountjoys, let the down-and-out couple live in their house for nothing but the chance to convert them to communism. Without the unofficial mutual aid of friendship, Shakespere would have frozen or starved. The novel makes clear that the most immediate factor that makes it possible for the poet to survive is other people.

But if other people are heaven, they can also be hell. Writing and getting published are, if not the easy parts, only the first steps toward making a living as an artist. What comes next is making some money, for the publisher eventually expects your books to turn a profit. And besides, that’s in your interest too, when you’re living in a room with no electricity. So if your art doesn’t cater to the tastes of a lucrative market, it may become necessary to compromise.

With Venus and Adonis, the compromises are minor. The poem itself will remain unchanged, but it must, his publisher argues, be packaged for its target audience: “business men” and “snobs,” mostly in America. These people don’t want a mass-market paperback. From a “highbrow but classy” book, they expect “highbrow but classy” packaging. Thus Shakespere’s debut poem must be printed on “special paper of famous mark” and “done up with all the refinements of setting and binding.” It’s the only way to sell copies, Field declares, with the air of a career coach extolling the benefits of a robust LinkedIn presence. “‘With a bit of luck,’ and he smiled optimistically, ‘we might get rid of three hundred, especially if the book gets attacked.’” Shakespere, of course, complies. The resulting book is expensive and beautiful, and it’s lucky enough to get savaged by the eminent novelist and critic Robert Green. All press is, indeed, good press. But a salacious novel is released the next day that eclipses Venus and Adonis, and the poem, if it “could ever be said to have attracted attention,” “might also be said to have been forgotten from that moment.”

Here, the novel cuts the music. This is not a fairy tale. There’s no happily ever after. That the name is Shakespere, the poem Venus and Adonis, the lines “Lo! here the audacious lark weary of rest / From his moist cabinet mounts up”—none of this portends literary immortality. All it takes to send those lines to history’s dustbin is an unlucky pub date and the fickle tastes of the reading public. Belatedly, the reader comes to appreciates the function of the transposed name. Until now, it has triggered a sort of low-grade double vision, constantly evoking the expectation that our protagonist will achieve something of the success of his namesake. But Shakespere, it turns out, is a mediocre poet. When the poem miscarries, the parallax resolves, and reader and character realize together that he won’t become Shakespeare after all.

Our hero discovers the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happeneth to them all. Or, as Oldcastle puts it, shortly before the publication of Venus and Adonis, comparing publishing to horse racing:

“Can’t always win of course, it’s like bringing out a book, you don’t know what else is going to turn up and ruin the sales. You pick out an author for example, a real dark horse, watch him carefully, train him for a year or two, get the best out of him in the preliminaries, horse not nervous, jockey confident, critics tame, you know, will go far if he can repeat his performance, gave good account of himself last autumn, etc., looks a cert for the Book Society, so you spread yourself—and whop! a complete flop. Ain’t that so? You never never know.”

An economic depression descends on England. A “visitation more invisible than the plague,” the recession fells entire offices. Shakespere is not immune: Field can’t afford to publish his second poem, The Rape of Lucrece, and he finds himself back at square one. Poverty again “advances” on the poet, who grows more and more desperate as he struggles to find even part-time, low-wage work, as his wife gets pregnant and must quit her job, as his fellowship application is rejected, as talk grows of war. What else would a poet be expected to do when, miraculously, he’s given another turn around the track but do everything in his power to defy Fortuna? To ensure, this time, that things turn out differently?

By the time Shakespere meets the powerful editor Rosencrantz, he is prepared to make major compromises. Nothing is off the table—not diction, not title, not even form. His epic poem about a Danish prince gets massaged into the novel Murder in the Orchard, “an historical thriller, crime story, the prince as detective and all.” And, it seems, the compromises pay off. The novel is chosen by the Book of the Quarter Club. Guildenstern, his new agent, trains “more than one eye” on Hollywood. And Shakespere defeats poverty, at least temporarily. He garners some fame. He’s “enjoying himself.” But is the juice, Owens wonders, worth the squeeze? True, Shakespere remains a writer, but whether he can call himself a poet is another question. Material success has come at a high cost, and in this sense his triumph is a pyrrhic victory. Shakespere, to put it bluntly, sells out.

If Picture of Nobody is unambiguous about the nature of the decision, it is less certain about what we should make of it. So much is outside of the poet’s control: when he’s born, who he meets, the habits of American speculators and German politicians. The poet can always choose how he responds to his situation, what Sartre would call his facticity, but those responses are not unconstrained. Literature counts, but so does the landlady. Of the two, only the landlady will evict you for defaulting.

To say that Shakespere acts in bad faith, then, is to overstate the freedom of an artist under capitalism. You have to make a living, one way or another. And if a man is misfortunate enough to acquire a talent for poetry but not the luck to see that talent rewarded, can we blame him for settling for the comfortable life that providence seems willing to provide? As consolations go, you could do worse than prosperity. At least then you can afford the time to knuckle down and compose your magnum opus, your contribution to literature. And then, who knows? The arc of the reputational universe is long, and perhaps it bends toward justice. Perhaps a century later your work will be rediscovered, reissued and reevaluated, this time more favorably. Perhaps, through the wonder of compound interest, your account with literature will climb out of the red. Perhaps. Perhaps not. If I were a betting man, I think I’d sit this one out. As Oldcastle says, you never, never know.