I MET the late Harold Pinter only once, at a dinner party about six months ago, and I don't think that I have ever encountered anyone less Pinteresque. There were no ominous pauses in the conversation. There was no oblique and enigmatic dialogue. The atmosphere could not have been less sinister.

Pinter spent much of the evening ranting with happy profanity about the sins of Tony Blair, George Bush and all Americans, and gently reminiscing about cricket. (He recited the short poem he had written about the world's finest sport: “I saw Hutton in his prime/ Another time. Another time,” and recalled how he had sent this little gem to his friend, the playwright Simon Gray. After several weeks without a response, Pinter said he sent an angry note to Gray demanding to know what he thought of the poem, and got the reply: “Harold, I haven't finished reading it yet.”)

Pinter was hilarious, mischievous, voluble and entertaining. But he was not remotely Pinteresque. I wonder if Pinter felt saddled by his own adjective - an adjective, moreover, that does not so much describe his writing as the spaces between his writing. Sadly, it is now too late to ask him.

In the same way, I doubt that Charles Dickens would have struck one as Dickensian. He was amusing, energetic and good company, yet his name has come to denote all that is grim, decayed and doom-laden.

Few writers earn the distinction of morphing into an adjective and Pinter is the only modern playwright to have done so during his own lifetime. Indeed, the process by which a writer becomes an adjective is a sort of linguistic alchemy, a combination of fame, stereotyping and chance.

Most auctorial adjectives are formed simply by adding -ian, -ean, -esque, or -ic, and hoping that the word sticks. Hence Brechtian, Kafkaesque and Byronic. But why not Byronesque, Brechtic or Kafkean? Some writers who surely deserve the honour never win eponymous adjectival status. Others have been eclipsed by their own literary creations: we have Sherlockian and Holmesian, but not Conan Doylean, Doylesque, or Doylish.

Perhaps because they cannot be easily pinned down to specific literary characteristic, writers such as Eliot, Tolstoy and Austen have somehow escaped adjectival capture.

George Bernard Shaw, partly through his own efforts, managed to ensure that his adjective would be forever Shavian. (Not to be confused with “the Shavian adjective”, which was the euphemism used by the English press to avoid having to use the word “bloody”, after Shaw dared to have Eliza Doolittle say “Not Bloody Likely!” in Pygmalion.)

Shavians insist that the word Shavian means a “mixture of quixotic seriousness and harsh laughter”. To me the word means “not nearly as funny as it was when it was first written”.

By the same etymological principle, the Marlovian theory holds that Christopher Marlowe wrote the poems and plays of Shakespeare, and the writing of Henry David Thoreau is sometimes described as Thoreauvian. But otherwise the Shavian precedent has never really caught on. In theory, Saul Bellow's style should be Bellovian. The works of Michael Moore should be Moorvian, or possibly Moravian. But would anyone seriously describe the style of Evelyn Waugh as Wavian?

Writers unfortunate enough to have names that are already words are doomed never to have their own adjective. Graham Greene's writing cannot be described as Greenish. Alexander Pope was a Roman Catholic, but his legacy is hardly Popish. Thomas Mann was definitely not Mannish. And how to adjectivise Edgar Allan Poe? Polish?

Political names that evolve into adjectives almost invariably end in -ite: Blairite, Thatcherite, Reaganite - which can double up as nouns. Eponymous political adjectives imply a specific set of beliefs, a degree of partisanship, but on very rare occasions a politician rises above politics in the public mind, and is accorded a grander ending to his adjective. I can think of only two examples of this in modern times: Kennedyesque and Churchillian.

Eponymous adjectives, on the whole, are dangerously overused, a portentous way of saying something very simple, lazy literary shorthand boiling down an entire writer to a single trait. Lawrentian is often used to mean “sexy” and Platonic is a pretentious way of saying “unsexy”. If a writer makes up words, and he gets a sympathetic reviewer, he is Joycean.

A run-in with a traffic warden may be Orwellian - a way of describing anything we dislike done by someone in authority - whereas a battle involving government bureaucracy, the tax office or doctors' waiting rooms is another grade up: ie, Kafkaesque.

Shakespearean has come to mean anything that involves a powerful figure getting into trouble. US political commentators insisted that Bill Clinton's imbroglio with Monica Lewinsky was Shakespearean, when it was really Pythonesque.

But perhaps the most unlucky victim of the simplified auctorial adjective is poor Proust: the greatest novelist of the 20th century, 3,200 pages of monumental prose with more than 2,000 literary characters, reduced, in common parlance, to a smell. Whenever anyone of literary bent sniffs something that reminds them of something, it is all but obligatory to describe the experience as Proustian.

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