63. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s parents, David and Elizabeth Poe, were both professional actors. Two of their friends, Noble Luke Usher and Harriet L’Estrange Usher, a husband and wife team, founded the Montreal Theatre in 1808, and appeared on stage with the Poes in the early 1800s. Edgar Allan Poe undoubtedly named his story about the ‘House of Usher’ – and its fall – after them. But why would Poe name a horror story after some friends of his parents? The answer may be linked to Poe’s preoccupation with premature death. The Ushers both died young, in 1814, in their twenties. Poe’s mother had also died young, aged 24, in 1811 (as Poe’s wife was to die young, also aged 24, in 1847). In the story, the twins Roderick and Madeline Usher die young, and their ‘House’ - their family line - is destroyed, the physical building dramatically collapsing into a brooding tarn (a mountain lake) at the end of the tale.

It seems likely that the choice of name in the title reflected Poe’s horror at something he knew well: the extinction of young life and the pain of being left behind.

Consulted:
Silverman, Kenneth: Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance‎ (1992)

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62. Oleanna by David Mamet

There is no character called Oleanna in Oleanna, nor is the name ever mentioned. There are only two people in Mamet’s play: John, an American college professor, and Carol, his student. The action deals with an accusation of rape — which may or may not be justified — brought by Carol against John, and the threat to John’s career that results.

The title is in fact a remarkably obscure allusion to a nineteenth-century Utopian community in Pennsylvania called Oleana (one ‘n’), after its Norwegian founder, Ole Bull (1810-80), a famous violinist, and his mother Anna (Ole + Anna = Oleana).

Ole Bull was ranked second only to Paganini in the nineteenth century’s pantheon of violin virtuosi. After a triumphant concert tour of the USA in 1852 Bull decided to leave a permanent mark on the Continent by purchasing 11,000 acres of land in Potter County, Pennsylvania, as a settlement for Norwegian immigrants.

Bull’s fiefdom had four main settlements: Oleana, New Bergen, New Norway and New Valhalla. Pioneers flooded in, attracted by the prospect of free land, but it soon became clear that most of the 11,000 acres, located in a narrow valley between thickly forested hills, were completely unsuitable for farming. The community failed. By the mid-1850s the colonists had either returned to their old homes or sought new homes elsewhere in the USA.

The debacle inspired a satirical folk-song called ‘Oleanna’, originally composed in Norwegian and later recorded in a translation by Pete Seeger, as follows:

Oh to be in Oleanna,
That's where I'd like to be
Than to be in Norway
And bear the chains of slavery.

Little roasted piggies
Rush around the city streets
Inquiring so politely
If a slice of ham you'd like to eat.

Beer as sweet as Muncheners
Springs from the ground and flows away
The cows all like to milk themselves
And the hens lay eggs ten times a day.

Mamet included the first verse of this song as the epigraph to the printed version of his play.

The most immediate connection is to do with land. In Oleanna John spends much of the time on the phone to his wife or his lawyer talking about the purchase of a new house, while Carol, mute and waiting, listens. Both John and Ole Bull’s plans are eventually blighted by legal restrictions on the purchase of land. But John’s failure to negotiate the sale of land, and Ole Bull’s failure to pioneer a new Utopia, are paralleled, in the play, by another failure: the failure of the Utopian project of university education. John admits to Carol in a careless moment that he regards the whole university system as flawed and worthless, and that he is willing to break the rules and give her an ‘A’ grade, even though her work has been poor. He has the power to do it, and so why not? ‘We won’t tell anybody,’ he says. Carol is shocked, puzzled, and finally outraged at the failure of the university system to supply what she has a right to expect: legitimate instruction, value for money. She berates John rather as a Norwegian colonist might have addressed Ole Bull — she has no ‘security’; as in the song, she is a ‘slave’:

CAROL...But to the aspirations of your students. Of hardworking students, who come here, who slave to come here — you have no idea what it cost me to come to this school — you mock us.
[...]
CAROL...But we worked to get to this school [...] To gain admittance here. To pursue that same degree of security you pursue. We, who, who are, at any moment, in danger of being deprived of it.

One might bear in mind that Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet’s play of 1984, is about real estate agents who swindle members of the public by selling worthless parcels of land, and Mamet himself worked briefly for a real estate company in the 1960s. Oleanna, it seems, picks up where Glengarry Glen Ross left off, exploring the inability of capitalism to ensure ethical social behaviour and the ever-present danger of getting royally ripped off. In both Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross there are dangerous people willing to bend the rules for their own ends. This is the meaning of Oleanna as a title: in the USA of David Mamet, the dream of security and social mobility through education and hard work is just another fantasy exploited by the unscrupulous to trap the gullible.

Consulted:
http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/ppet/olebull/page1.asp?secid=31
Bigsby, Christopher: The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

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61. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

‘Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.’
— Lolita

Lolita is one of those novels in which the protagonist-narrator is so coruscatingly brilliant that we are ready to forgive him almost anything. Twelve-year olds? Well, she did seduce him. And she’d already had that boy at summer camp. For prose this dazzling, this ardent, this clever...tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner...

But plagiarism?

This is the most recent charge against Nabokov’s notorious book, explored notably in Michael Maar’s The Two Lolitas (2005). The facts are these. In 1916 a German journalist, Heinz von Eschwege, writing under the name of Heinz von Lichberg, published a collection of stories called The Accursed Gioconda. Buried about half-way through the collection was a little story — only twelve pages long — called ‘Lolita’. It is a ghost story in a sub-Poe vein, perhaps with a dash of Thomas Mann thrown in. The narrator, a student living in Southern Germany, stays at a hotel and meets the daughter of the household, Lolita, a young girl (he does not say how young, but ‘by our northern standards she was terribly young‘), and is smitten by an unholy lust. One night his dirty young man’s dreams come true:

Lolita sat on my balcony and sang softly, as she often did. But this time she came to me with halting steps on the landing, the guitar discarded precipitously onto the floor. And while her eyes sought out the image of the flickering moon in the water, like a pleading child she flung her trembling little arms around my neck, leaned her head on my chest, and began sobbing. There were tears in her eyes, but her sweet mouth was laughing. The miracle had happened. ‘You are so strong,' she whispered.

After a few weeks of passion (no details are given) the student discovers that Lolita has died in the night. Lolita’s father, who takes the news quite phlegmatically, reveals to the student that her death is the result of a family curse.

The story is short, silly and uninvolving. The book as a whole did not sell particularly well. But the similarities with Nabokov’s Lolita seem too many to discount. In Nabokov’s novel, the narrator, Humbert Humbert, who recounts his ‘Confession of a White Widowed Male’ while in prison for murder, tells how, having recently arrived in the USA from France, he stays at a small boarding-house in a small town and is smitten with unholy lust for the landlady’s 12-year-old daughter, Lolita. He marries Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze, who dies conveniently in a car accident leaving him free to ‘look after’ Lolita. Finally Lolita dies (a few weeks after giving birth, though not to his child) and he kills her lover, Quilty.

The main similarities of plot and construction, then, are these: both have a first person narrator who turns up at a boarding-house; Lolita in both cases is the daughter of the house; she ‘seduces’ him; sex and death are presented as different aspects of the same violence, or as cause and effect; and finally the book/story’s title is ‘Lolita’.

Of course, Nabokov would probably not have read those twelve pages in an obscure, untranslated book by a minor German writer, published when he (Nabokov) was 17 and still living in Russia. Or would he? Nabokov left Russia with his family in 1919, and after three years studying at Cambridge, settled in Berlin in 1922. He remained there for fifteen years — until 1937 — married there, had a son, wrote several novels, and made his pre-Lolita reputation. These were fifteen years in which von Lichberg was a fellow Berliner, even living in the same part of Berlin. The book was still in the shops, and Nabokov spoke German quite adequately. Lichberg, meanwhile, was becoming quite prominent as a public figure. He was one of the commentators in a well-known German newsreel of 1933, on the occasion of the torchlight parade celebrating Hitler’s accession to the Reichs-Chancellorship. After serving in the military police of the Abwehr in Poland during the Second World War, von Lichberg retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and died in 1951.

What can we make of the similarities between the two stories? Coincidence? Theft? Unconscious borrowing? Or deliberate quotation? This last of the four possible options is perhaps the most convincing. Nabokov was certainly not above sly references, nor a stranger to obscure ones. One of the subtlest involves the quotation given above: ‘Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did.’ These are among the opening words of the novel Lolita, in which Humbert explains that his thirst for nymphets is an amatory hangover from his childhood, when he had loved, although never to the point of consummation, a girl called Annabel Leigh:

She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion [...]
But that mimosa grove — the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since — until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

But ‘Annabel Lee’ is the heroine of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe (whose own child-bride was 14 when he married her):

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love
I and my Annabel Lee.

So Lolita did have a precursor, one whom ‘he loved, one summer.’ But it was a literary precursor. Replace the word ‘loved’ with the word ‘read’ (not such a gigantic shift for Nabokov, for whom the pleasure of the text was the most exquisite of all) and we get, possibly, a truer reflection of the state of affairs. Nabokov’s nymphets were literary nymphets. ‘Annabel Leigh’ had her true origins in a work of the imagination. Was the inclusion of this ‘certain initial girl-child’ Nabokov’s way of telling us that the same was true of her sister Lolita, and that lurking behind Lolita was a Nazi called Heinz von Lichberg?

Consulted:
Karlinsky, Simon, ed.: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson 1940-1971 (Harper and Row, 1979)
Maar, Michael: The Two Lolitas (Verso, 2005)

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60. The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

Ever wondered why Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is obsessed with happenings in Spain and Italy? The answer lies substantially with one man: William Painter. In 1566 he published The Palace of Pleasure, a collection of translations into English of tales from the Decameron, the Heptameron, Bandello’s Novelle, and others. The book led to a flood of interest in gory goings-on at foreign courts - giving Shakespeare the plot for All’s Well That Ends Well and other works - and supplied Webster with the idea for The Duchess of Malfi.

The Duchess, however, was a real flesh-and-blood woman. Her name was Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi. Married at 12 in 1490, her husband died young, and she secretly married a servant, Antonio Bologna. Over the next couple of years she bore him two children. By the time of her third pregnancy, her brothers, who wanted power for themselves, got wind of the scandal, and in 1510, the lovers, with the two children and the new baby, decided to flee. The Duchess and her two youngest children didn’t get very far: they were soon captured, brought back to Amalfi and imprisoned. Antonio escaped with the eldest son but was murdered in Milan. The Duchess then disappeared from history. Her first son, from her first marriage, became ruler of Amalfi in her place.

Thus ends the melancholy tale of the doomed Duchess. The story was picked up by Bandello in his Novelle, and, mediated through the French of François de Belleforest, was subsequently rendered into English by William Painter, to the delight of English audiences and playwrights.

Webster was thus handed his title by history. The transformation from ‘d’Amalfi’ to ‘of Malfi’ is easy to see. ‘La Duchessa d’Amalfi’ in Italian became ‘La Duchesse d’Amalfi’ in the French of Belleforest: ‘d’Amalfi’ was mistaken for ‘de Malfi’, and translated into English as ‘of Malfi’.

Consulted:
Webster, John: The Duchess of Malfi (Dover, 1999)
Boklund, Gunnar: The Duchess of Malfi: Sources, Themes, Characters (Harvard University Press, 1962)

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59. The Playboy of the Western World by JM Synge

The plot of The Playboy of the Western World is as follows (as summarized by an unsympathetic reviewer in the Dublin Freeman’s Journal of February 2 1907):

A broken-down, evil-looking tramp enters a low public-house on the coast of Mayo, and after some inquiry admits to those gathered there that he has murdered his father. The doubting, mistrustful attitude of his hearers at once changes into one of awe and admiration. He is installed as pot-boy at the request of the publican’s daughter, and is left in charge of the shebeen by the father.

In the second act we are shown the countryside flocking to pay homage to the man who, in the language of the dramatist, has ‘killed his da’. The women are depicted wooing with no trace of modesty this delightful type of strong, passionate man. Pegeen-Mike, the publican’s daughter, jilts her timid betrothed for him. Ultimately, however, the supposed murdered parent turns up, and recognises his son, whose popularity then declines as a natural consequence.

The play is thus a story of Irish peasant life. The ‘playboy’ — slang of the day for a champion or sportsman — is a poor farmer, Christy Mahon, who boasts that he has killed his father by striking him with a ‘loy’ (a spade). The ‘Western World’ is the rugged and backward west of Ireland.

During the composition of the play Synge made several attempts at a title — among them The Fool of Farnham, The Murderer (A Farce) and Murder Will Out, or, The Fool of the Family — before arriving at his final choice. The very different title The Playboy of the Western World was of great significance to the reception of the play and his own career. The reasons were largely political.

In 1907, in the period before the creation of the Irish Free State, the whole of the island of Ireland was still under the control of the British parliament. The nationalist movement was flexing its muscles — it was the period immediately before the Easter Rising of 1916. The Dublin Abbey Theatre, home of the ‘National Theatre’ of Ireland, was a forum for debate on the meaning of Irishness and the practicability of home rule. Founded in 1904 as an offshoot of the Irish Literary Theatre, the Abbey had staged plays by WB Yeats, JM Synge, Lady Gregory, Æ, Oliver St John Gogarty and Thomas MacDonagh. It was seen as key to the Irish Literary Revival.

In this context, when The Playboy, with its low characters, disturbing violence and glorification of parricide, received its première at the Abbey in February 1907, it was seen in some quarters as a treacherous attack on Irishness itself, and particularly on the ordinary Catholic peasantry of the rural West. What happened next has come to be known as ‘the Playboy riots’. The Irish Independent described events on opening night as the play approached its second act:

The act went on, but not a soul in the place heard a word, so great was the din created by the folk in the gallery.

The latter sang songs, hissed, called the policemen names, denounced the players, invited the author to a free fight, and before the act was over the curtain went down amidst terrific hissing and boohing. There were again cries for the author, but he did not come forward; and Mr. Fay, coming to the footlights, said something which was not audible, and the curtain went down again amidst cheers.

At this juncture Lady Gregory and the author of the play entered the auditorium, and there were again cries for the author’s speech. Mr. Synge, who took his seat near the orchestra, when asked by a reporter if he would say anything, replied that he was suffering from influenza, and could not speak; and owing to the rigorous cries of the audience he was obliged to leave the auditorium.

The final act was then proceeded with, but no one in the house heard a word of it owing to the din created by the audience, many of whom cried ’Sinn Fein’; ‘Sinn Fein Amhain’ and ‘Kill the Author’.

The audience was in no doubt that ‘the Western World’ referred specifically to the Western counties of Ireland. As the Evening Mail reported, during the disturbances ‘...someone called out “That’s not Western life”. At the close of this act a burly young fellow in the front of the pit started to sing in lusty tones, “The Men of the West”, and the chorus was taken up by those around him.’ Letters in the newspapers in subsequent days included comments such as the following, from ‘A Western Girl’: ‘I am well acquainted with the conditions of life in the West, and not only does this play not truly represent these conditions, but it portrays the people of that part of Ireland as a coarse, besotted race, without one gleam of genuine humour or one sparkle of virtue…’

It is difficult to see the use of ‘Western’ in the title as anything other than a piece of deliberate provocation by Synge. It raised the stakes significantly, pointing a finger straight at the salt-of-the-earth stereotype of rural Ireland which was so dear to the heart of the growing nationalist movement.

As in many later controversies, the play was attacked by people who had obviously never seen it. One reviewer spoke of ‘a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform’. Apart from a couple of ‘bloodies’ there is in fact nothing offensive in the language of the play, and the sexual content is muted even by 1907 standards. But perhaps the reviewer had been unable to hear the actors. During every performance the audience had drowned out the dialogue. Unrest only died down when the play was taken off, after one week. The riots spelled the end of Synge’s career in Ireland: the Abbey Theatre decided not to risk staging his next play, The Tinker’s Wedding, his last completed work. He died in 1909.

The Playboy of the Western World therefore has some interesting resonances. It is not difficult to think of recent works where the title alone has been enough to damn them. Neither are calls for authors to be killed very uncommon. Synge, by crafting such an incendiary play, with such an incendiary title, knew he was playing with fire. Like others that came after him, he probably didn’t realize how badly he’d be burned.

Consulted:
Benson, Eugene: JM Synge (Macmillan, 1982)
Kilroy, James: The ‘Playboy’ Riots (Dolmen, 1971)

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58. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald agonized over the title of his third novel. Among the candidates he rejected, and then lighted on again, and then re-rejected, in a series of letters and telegrams to his editor Max Perkins, were Trimalchio, Trimalchio’s Banquet, Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, The High-Bouncing Lover, The Great Gatsby, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, Gatsby, On the Road to West Egg, Incident at West Egg, Trimalchio in West Egg and several others. Perkins steered him gently towards The Great Gatsby, despite Fitzgerald’s doubts.

By the time The Great Gatsby was at the printers, Fitzgerald had changed his mind once again, asking Perkins for the book to be re-titled Under the Red, White and Blue — a reference to the American Dream so horribly mutilated in the book — and continued to swing back and forth, later writing to Perkins: ‘I feel Trimalchio might have been best after all’, but by then it was in the bookshops. The Great Gatsby it had to stay.

Why Gatsby? It is not a common name, and Fitzgerald was careful with names. One must recall that in the book Jay Gatsby is the hero’s assumed name, not his real name. His real name is James Gatz. (His father, Henry Gatz, makes an appearance in the book’s last few pages.) It seems likely that the significance of Gatsby and Gatz is in ‘gat’ — the gun which ends Gatsby’s life. Violent death lingers around Gatsby. As the book opens he is just back from the war in Europe, which he is reputed to have quite enjoyed. And if ‘Gatsby’ is significant, so is ‘Great’. In early drafts Fitzgerald had Gatsby refer to himself as ‘great’:

‘Jay Gatsby!’ he cried in a ringing voice, ‘There goes the great Jay Gatsby! That’s what people are going to say — wait and see.’

But despite his legendary parties Gatsby is not ‘great’. He is rootless, friendless, loveless and ultimately lifeless. Only three people come to his funeral. ‘Great’ is irony. Gatsby is a rich nobody.

Perhaps there is another echo in the ‘great’ of The Great Gatsby: that of ‘the Great American Novel’. This was an artefact Fitzgerald was consciously trying to construct, after the pattern of Melville or James, and to which he paid homage in one of his final choices of title, Under the Red, White and Blue. Fitzgerald thought of The Great Gatsby as his greatest work; many of his readers have agreed.

The Great Gatsby, then, can be seen as Fitzgerald’s attempt to represent his country in the medium of the novel. If this is so, it is a representation in which the dreams of greatness, wealth and success that form the nation’s myth are brutally dispelled. In an atmosphere of high-class squalor Gatsby is meaninglessly shot down. In calling his book The Great Gatsby it seems that Fitzgerald was gunning for America.

Consulted:
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby (introduction by Matthew J Bruccoli, Scribners, 1991)
Long, Robert Emmet: The Achieving of The Great Gatsby (Bucknell University Press, 1979)

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57. The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham

Maugham complained that after 1919 he was plagued with letters asking him the meaning of the title The Moon and Sixpence. After all, it seemingly has little to do with the plot of the novel, which is concerned principally with the painter Charles Strickland (based on Paul Gauguin), his experiences in London, Paris, Marseilles and Tahiti, and his tragic involvement with Dick and Blanche Stroeve.

The explanation that Maugham gave to all these earnest enquirers was that the title concerned a previous novel, Of Human Bondage (one thinks of TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a title transferred from a previous, unsuccessful work). It so happened that when Of Human Bondage was reviewed in The Times, the reviewer said of the main character, Philip Carey: ‘Like so many young men he was so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet’.

Maugham liked the phrase, stole it, and transferred it to the title of his next book.

Consulted:
Cordell, Richard Albert: Somerset Maugham, A Writer for All Seasons (1969)

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56. Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard

‘Either/Or is an excellent title. It is piquant and at the same time it also has a speculative meaning.’ So wrote Kierkegaard of his own book. The title was intended to suggest the possibility of choosing between different modes of life (aesthetic, ethical and religious), and was written in two huge, rambling volumes, one called ‘Either’, the other ‘Or’. The title’s deliberate opacity, lack of descriptive content and Janus-faced quality place it at the forefront of a modern discipline that upholds ambiguity and polysemy as a virtue: literary theory. The use of the slash, or oblique, in the translation (the original was Enten – Eller, with a dash) was also influential. It seems - at least to the present author - that titles such as S/Z by Roland Barthes, Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly, Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, and academic papers by the truckload with titles such as Alien/ations, C/lit Culture, Pre/Text, Pragmatic/Machinic, Power/Knowledge - now all with a slightly dated feel - all have their intellectual roots in the tormented ambivalence of Kierkegaard.

Consulted:
Kierkegaard, Søren: Either/Or, trans.David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (1959)

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55. Goodbye Mr Chips by James Hilton

Mr Chips, for readers not familiar with the 1934 novel by James Hilton – or with the 1939 movie starring Robert Donat - is the archetypal crusty-but-humane public school master. His subject is Latin, his theatre the Lower Fourth, and his finest moment comes during the First World War as the Germans are bombarding the school from a zeppelin. ‘You cannot judge the importance of things by the noise they make,’ he says to a classroom of boys as the drone of zeppelin engines gets nearer. ‘These things that have mattered for a thousand years are not going to be snuffed out because some stink-merchant invents a new kind of mischief.’

But it wasn’t originally Chips, but Chops. That in any case was the nickname of a master, so-called because of his impressive mutton-chop whiskers, at the Leys school in Cambridge attended by the young James Hilton. This is the probable origin of the name: the actual personality of Mr Chips came from a different source - another master, William Balgarnie. Hilton wrote: ‘Balgarnie was, I suppose, the chief model for my story. When I read so many other stories about public school life, I am struck by the fact that I suffered no such purgatory as their authors apparently did, and much of this miracle was due to Balgarnie.’

Hilton’s other great best-seller was Lost Horizon, which introduced the Himalayan paradise of Shangri-La: it and Goodbye Mr Chips were both novels about lost utopias, one set in an idealized public school, the other in a hidden mountain valley.

The Oxford Companion to English Literature notes tersely: ‘Hilton became a Hollywood scriptwriter and died in California.’

Consulted:‘Who was the real Mr Chips?’, The Daily Telegraph, 8 Dec 2002
The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2000)

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54. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

Is a theme developing?

‘Fear and Loathing’ was something of a cash-cow for Hunter Stockton Thompson. After the success of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - his rollercoaster ride across the West accompanied by his legal adviser and a carload of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, 'a pint of raw ether', mescaline and nihilism - he went on to produce several other works bearing the ‘Fear and Loathing’ franchise. They included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Fear and Loathing at the Watergate, Fear and Loathing in Limbo, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist 1968-1976, and Fear and Loathing at the Superbowl: No Rest for the Wretched.

Oddly enough the franchise seems – it’s just a theory – to have originated with Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s play Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (1938) translates as ‘Fear and Wretchedness of the Third Reich’. Note that one of the books above - Fear and Loathing at the Superbowl: No Rest for the Wretched – also includes the word ‘wretched’, the adjectival version of the German noun Elend, or wretchedness.

Could Thompson have encountered this play and been consciously or subconsciously influenced by it? Whatever the truth, he often used Nazism as a benchmark for the hilarious insanity of totalitarian power, and styled the USA ‘the Sixth Reich’. And when asked by his biographer to collaborate in a book called Rise of the Body Nazis, his response was typical: ‘Any book with Nazis in the title is my kind of book.’

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53. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

The title Mein Kampf ('My Struggle') wasn't Hitler's first choice. His preferred title for his autobiography - dictated to Rudolf Hess in prison - was A Four and a Half Years’ Battle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice: A Reckoning with the Destroyers of the Nazi Party Movement. Max Amann, Hitler’s publisher, took one look at it and suggested cutting it to a more manageable length for sales reasons. He left the text substantially alone, however, and the book’s 600 pages are very much in the style of the rejected title - a mélange of paranoia and bombast. Along with A Brief History of Time it is probably one of the world’s least-read bestsellers. Its foreign editions disagreed about the translation of ‘Kampf’, which in English is less ‘struggle’ than ‘battle’ or ‘fight’: they included My Battle in the USA, Mi Lucha in Spain and La Mia Battaglia in Italy.

Consulted:
Hitler, A: Mein Kampf, trans and intro by Watt, D.C. (1969)

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52. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The legend of Hamlet dates to at least 400 years before Shakespeare. In around AD 1200 the Danish scholar Saxo Grammaticus (Saxo the Grammarian) wrote a History of the Danes which included the story of Amleth, a prince of Jutland. The tale was translated from its original Latin into French as part of François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques in 1570, and made its first appearance in English in 1608. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in around 1600, which means that the tale from Saxo would have been available to him only in French.

There was, however, another source, this time in English: a play, now lost, referred to in Shakespearian circles as the ‘ur-Hamlet’. It is often ascribed to Thomas Kyd, the author of The Spanish Tragedy. We know about this early ‘Kydian’ Hamlet through several contemporary references.

These, then, one surviving text and one lost, were Shakespeare’s two known sources. He didn’t add a great deal in plot terms: Saxo/Belleforest has the murder by an uncle, the marriage to a submissive widow, the ghost (only in Belleforest), Hamlet feigning madness, the trip to England accompanied by two courtiers, the letter ordering Hamlet’s execution, the Ophelia-figure and the killing of a hidden spy. The main elements that appear only in Shakespeare’s version — but which themselves could have been taken from the ur-Hamlet — include the murder of Hamlet’s father in secret (in Saxo/Belleforest everybody knows about it), the use of a play ‘to catch the conscience of the king’, and the death of Hamlet in the melee that ends the play.

Such is the general state of scholarship on the sources for Hamlet. But an odd little fact exists. Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet — Hamnet, with an ‘n’. ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Hamlet’ are so close that Shakespeare must either have named his son after his play, or his play after his son. Hamnet was born in 1585, and Hamlet was written fifteen years later in 1600, and so the obvious conclusion is that it must have been the latter. However, complications immediately arise. Hamnet and his twin sister Judith were named after Shakespeare’s neighbours in Stratford, Hamnet and Judith Sadler. The spellings ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Hamlet’ seem to have been interchangeable in the records of the period: Hamnet Sadler was also recorded as ‘Hamlet’ Sadler.

Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died, aged eleven, in 1596. This was four years before Shakespeare came to write Hamlet.

What does this mean? There are several theories concerning the influence of Hamnet on Hamlet. The first is that father and son were not particularly close (Shakespeare spent all of Hamnet’s life away in London) and that the story of the Danish prince was just a random subject for a revenge tragedy: Hamnet was not in his mind. A second theory has Shakespeare turning to the Hamlet legend as a way of exploring his grief over the death of his son. This idea has recently been given a new spin by the critic Stephen Greenblatt, who has pointed out that certain strange features of Hamlet — particularly Hamlet’s protracted indecision about whether or not to act on the ghost’s advice — exist because Shakespeare wished to draw attention to the changeover from Catholic to Protestant burial rites, a changeover he had recently witnessed at his son’s graveside.

A third theory, however, gives Shakespeare as the author — or co-author — of the ur-Hamlet. This has several points in its favour. The chief suspect for the author of an early version of a famous play must be, in the absence of any convincing evidence to the contrary, the author of the famous play himself. The contemporary references would be to a lost play by Shakespeare himself (and, possibly, A.N. Other – Kyd?) called Hamlet. The dates for Hamnet’s birth now fit. Hamnet was born in 1585, and the ur-Hamlet was written some time in the mid 1580s. In this scheme of things, the choice of the Hamlet-legend as a subject for a play would have been made at the same time as Shakespeare named Hamnet after his neighbour. It would have been a christening-present.

It is an intriguing possibility. Shakespeare was twenty-one years old in 1585, just at the beginning of his playwrighting career. If he did indeed write his first Hamlet in that year, in a spirit of celebration at the birth, and perhaps with a happy ending — Saxo and Belleforest both have happy endings — it would probably not have occurred to him that in fifteen years’ time he would feel compelled to re-visit the play with a new, darker understanding of the bond between a father and a son.

Consulted:
Shakespeare, William: Hamlet (edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, 2006)
Greenblatt, Stephen: Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare (2004)
Hadfield, Andrew: ‘The Ur-Hamlet and the Fable of the Kid’, Notes and Queries, Vol. 53, No. 1 (2006)
Hansen, William F.: Saxo Grammaticus and the Life of Hamlet (1983)
Jump, John, ed.: Hamlet: A Casebook (1968)

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51. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

One night in the mid-1850s, Wilkie Collins, his brother Charles, and John Millais were out walking. Millais’s son later wrote:

It was a beautiful moonlight night in the summer time, and as the three friends walked along chatting gaily together, they were suddenly arrested by a piercing scream coming from the garden of a villa close at hand. It was evidently the cry of a woman in distress and while pausing to consider what they should do, the iron gate leading to the garden was dashed open, and from it came the figure of a young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes that shone in the moonlight. She seemed to float rather than to run in their direction, and, on coming up to the three young men, she paused for a moment in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then, suddenly seeming to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on and vanished in the shadows cast upon the road.

The woman fled and Collins pursued her. When he persuaded her to halt he learned that her name was Caroline Graves, and that she had been imprisoned at the villa under the mesmeric influence of an unnamed suburbanite. One thing led to another (often the case in the nineteenth century in regard to mysterious fleeing women in diaphanous clothing), and she became Collins’s lover. The episode was later plundered by Collins in his novel The Woman in White, which stands at the forefront of the nineteenth century ‘novel of sensation’, in the meeting between Walter Hartwright and Anne Catherick:

I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met [...] when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road - there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven - stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

The theory that Caroline Graves was the original Woman in White is still contentious, if not frankly disbelieved by many critics. Millais’s son’s account was written forty years after the events, after all. But it received support in the 1930s from Kate Perugini, Wilkie’s sister-in-law and Dickens’s daughter.

Consulted:
Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White (ed. and introduction Scott Brewster, 1993)
Watt, George: The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth-century English Novel (1984)

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50. The Four Million by O Henry

In 1892 Mrs Caroline Astor was throwing a party, and asked the New York socialite and tastemaker Samuel Ward McAllister to draw up a list of people to invite. She asked him to limit his choice to 400 names, because that was the maximum that would fit into her ballroom. McAllister obliged, and later was heard to remark that the number 400 was fortunate, since there were not more than 400 socially significant people in New York in any case. The remark was picked up by the press and caused outrage. Soon the controversy came to the attention of a young New Yorker who had already made his name as a short-story writer and chronicler of the lives of the poor, the hard-working, the struggling masses... i.e. William Sydney Porter, a.k.a. O.Henry. O. Henry’s book of short stories The Four Million, although not making it explicit in the text, was intended as a riposte to McAllister, reflecting the actual number of living, breathing - and, most importantly, working - people in the city. ‘I,’ he said in a letter to a friend, ‘am going to make the four million step into the shoes of the four hundred.’

Henry had history on his side, and became one of the best-loved short-story writers of the early 20th century, with an influence extending to writers such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, James Thurber and PG Wodehouse.

Who remembers McAllister?

Consulted:
Nolan, Jeannette Covert: O. Henry: The Story of William Sydney Porter (2007)

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49. Jaws by Peter Benchley

Jaws was born out of a struggle between an author, an editor and a father. In 1964 Peter Benchley came across a New York Daily News article about the capture of an enormous 4,550-pound Great White shark by a fisherman at Long Island, and began writing the story that would become Jaws: initially, however, he wrote it as a comedy. Realizing half-way through that a comedy about shark attacks was never really going to work – it was, as he said in an interview, ‘a nearly perfect oxymoron’ – he switched into thriller mode. But on completion of his novel he was still minus a title. His working titles had included Great White and A Silence in the Water, but none of them seemed quite right. With publication looming, he appealed to his father, the humorist Nathaniel Benchley (himself the son of the Algonquin Round Tabler Robert Benchley), who came up with over 200 suggestions, including Wha's That Noshin' on My Laig? Unsurprisingly, the editor at Doubleday, Thomas Congdon, didn’t like any of them, and suggested The Jaws of Leviathan. Peter Benchley pointed out that Leviathan was a mammal, not a fish. Finally ‘Jaws’ turned into the only word editor and author could agree on. ‘At least it's short,’ Congdon commented. When Benchley broke the news to his father, his father asked, ‘What's it mean?’ ‘I have no idea,’ Benchley said. ‘But at least it's short.’

Consulted:
‘Back to the beach for Benchley’, USA Today, 23rd May 2002

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48. Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl

Dahl made a sort of franchise out of Tales of the Unexpected. Following the nude-dancing Anglia TV series of 1979, his great early collections Over to You, Someone Like You, Switch Bitch and Kiss Kiss were pillaged and re-packaged as ‘More Tales of the Unexpected’, ‘Further Tales of the Unexpected’, ‘New Tales of the Unexpected’ and so on in limitless pile-‘em-high editions. Any new stories were generally unconvincing, and with Jeffrey Archer’s entry into the surprise-ending market with A Twist in the Tale (1988) the genre died an ignominious death.

The title Tales of the Unexpected did not originate with Dahl, however. There was an earlier US TV series which aired in 1977 called Tales of the Unexpected. And the ultimate owner of the franchise was a far greater writer: HG Wells. His original Tales of the Unexpected was published in 1922, and included classic stories such as ‘The Door in the Wall’ and ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’.

Consulted:
Treglown, Jeremy: Roald Dahl (1994)

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47. Utopia by Thomas More

The full title (More’s book was written in Latin) was De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia (‘On the Best Form of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia’). The name ‘Utopia’ was More’s neologism, and contained a double pun. It derived both from the Greek ou topos, ‘no place’, and eu topos, ‘good place’. The double pun was invoked by More, perhaps a little cryptically, in an introductory poem, ‘Lines on the Island of Utopia by the Poet Laureate Anemolius, Hythlodaeus’s Sister’s Son’:

UTOPIA was once my name,
That is, a place where no one goes.
Plato’s Republic now I claim
To match, or beat at its own game;
For that was just a myth in prose,
But what he wrote of, I became,
Of men, wealth, laws a solid frame,
A place where every wise man goes:
EUTOPIA is now my name.

(translation by Paul Turner, slightly modified)

The two terms ‘Utopia’ and ‘Eutopia’ suggest that the country is both good and nonexistent — too good to be true, one might say. Other names in the book also undermine the idea that what is being said is actually true or indeed sane: the traveller from whom More hears the report is Raphael Hythlodaeus, literally ‘Raphael the dispenser of nonsense’. And there are other Latin and Greek names that can be Englished as ‘Tallstoria’, ‘Blindland’ ‘Nolandia’, Aircastle’, ‘Nopeople’ and ‘Nowater’.

Consulted:
More, Sir Thomas: Utopia (translation and introduction by Paul Turner, Penguin, 1965)
Kautsky, Karl: Thomas More and his Utopia (Russell & Russell, 1959)

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46. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel, two giants, father and son, were created by the French doctor and monk François Rabelais in the mid-sixteenth century. Rabelais is careful to give exact etymologies for their respective names. The origin of ‘Gargantua’ is as follows:

While that good man Grandgousier [Gargantua’s father] was drinking and joking with the others he heard the horrible cry made by his son as he entered the world, bawling out for ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’ Whereupon he said, ‘Que grand tu as.’ — What a big one you’ve got! — (the gullet being understood); and when they heard this the company said that the child ought properly to be called Gargantua — after the example of the ancient Hebrew custom — since that had been the first word pronounced by his father at his birth. The father graciously agreed to their suggestion; it was most pleasing to the mother as well; and to quiet the child they gave him enough drink to break his larynx.

‘Pantagruel’ is explained thus:

And because Pantagruel was born on that very day, his father gave him the name he did: for Panta in Greek is equivalent to all, and Gruel, in the Hagarene language, is as much as to say thirsty; by this meaning to infer that at the hour of the child’s nativity the world was all thirsty, and also seeing, in a spirit of prophecy, that one day his son would be ruler over the thirsty, as was demonstrated to him at that very hour by another sign even more convincing. For when the child’s mother Badebec was being delivered of him and the midwives were waiting to receive him, there came first out of her womb sixty-eight muleteers, each pulling by the collar a mule heavily laden with salt; after which came out nine dromedaries loaded with hams and smoked ox-tongues, seven camels loaded with salted eels; and then twenty-four cartloads of leeks, garlics, and onions: all of which greatly alarmed the said midwives.

Both of these thirst-orientated explanations are side-swipes at the truth. The name ‘Gargantua’ existed before Rabelais, in a popular book about a giant of that name published anonymously in the early 1500s, the Great Chronicles of Gargantua. The ‘garg’ of ‘Gargantua’ does indeed have to do with the gullet, or throat: in the Provençal dialect, throat is gargamallo and in Languedocien it is gargamela. Gargantua’s mother is called Gargamelle, and his father, Grandgousier, takes his name from gosier, the French for ‘throat’. Gargantua’s family therefore derive their appellations, both in Rabelais’s comic philology and in actuality, from the throat and from thirst. Pantagruel is the same. His name, Rabelais assures us, means ‘all-thirsty’. But the ludicrous appeal to an origin in the ’Hagarene’ language covers up the fact that his real source, again, is in popular literature and folklore. In Rabelais’ time ‘Penthagruel’ was a dwarf-devil who preyed on drunkards, throwing salt in their mouths while they were asleep so that they woke thirsty, hung-over and dying for a glass of wine. Pantagruel is born during a drought and is preceded from the womb by a wagon-train of thirst-inducing victuals. His mother, the poor giantess Badebec, is ‘suffocated’ by the effort of giving birth and expires.

So the unavoidable theme of the giants’ names is drink, drinking, thirst, thirstiness, and the quenching of it with floods of life-giving wine. Wine bubbles everywhere throughout Rabelais’ work, an invigorating prelude, accompaniment and postscript to any and every activity. So much is consumed that when the giants relieve themselves, the streams of urine work water-wheels and wash away villages. Wine is literature, symbolic of the intoxication of learning; wine is companionship, necessary for the intercourse of man and man; wine is heretical salvation. The obsession with drinking culminates in a voyage to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle, the last chapter of the five books, where Panurge (Pantagruel’s sidekick) wishes to get an answer to the question of whether or not he should get married. The Oracle’s answer is one word — ‘Trink!’ The solution even to the basic problem of man and woman is liquid in nature.

Perhaps in the light of this we should re-define ‘Rabelaisian’. Most of us think of it as denoting bawdiness or coarseness. The bawdy and scatological — two styles which are barely distinguishable from one another in Rabelais, the act of love being comically treated as a lusty evacuation — are present in great quantity throughout the 800 pages of Gargantua and Pantagruel. But they come a poor second and third to Rabelais’ main preoccupation. Delight in bibulosity is the chief Rabelaisian characteristic, and it’s right there in the title.

Consulted:
Rabelais, François: Gargantua and Pantagruel (translation and introduction by JM Cohen, 1955)
Screech, MA: Rabelais (1979)

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45. The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was born in 1925 and grew up in the period before the Second World War. He was sixteen when the war began, and lived his late teenage years in the expectation of conscription and violent death. But he flunked his army medical and spent the latter part of the war working in a factory. Survival, and the end of the war, he experienced as disaster. ‘For me – me alone – it meant that fearful days were beginning,’ he wrote. ‘It meant that, whether I would or no, and despite everything that had deceived me into believing such a day would never come to pass, the very next day I must begin my life as an ordinary member of society. How the mere words made me tremble!’

As the war ended there were a spate of suicides, mainly among military leaders, but also among civilians, one of whom was the writer Hasuda, a friend of Mishima’s. Hasuda had written: ‘I believe one should die young in this age. To die young, I am sure, is the culture of my country.’ Mishima would not have disagreed. Many of the novels, plays and short stories he later produced are preoccupied by the idea of suicide and violent, young death. The persistence of the theme makes one suspect that it was not just the war that shaped this element of his psyche. He wrote in Confessions of a Mask that from an early age ‘My heart’s leaning towards Death and Night and Blood would not be denied.’

Hara-kiri, or, as it is also known in Japan, seppuku, is especially prominent in his fiction. Seppuku is the ancient ritualized form of self-killing involving the cutting open of one’s own belly, usually in tandem with an accomplice called a kaishaku who delivers a decapitating sword-blow. All of these suicides were of young men with firm, beautiful flesh: Mishima was bisexual, and his fascination with seppuku had an undoubted homoerotic aspect. He was a fanatical body-builder, and in the essay 'Sun and Steel' he candidly outlined the reasons, linking physical beauty with death: ’Specifically, I cherished a romantic impulse towards death, yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle.’

The death thus predicted by his fiction occurred on November 25 1970. It was part of a carefully-engineered drama. Mishima had spent the last two years training a private army, the Tate no kai (‘Shield Society’). It was with a detachment of five of these Tate no kai that he occupied the administrative headquarters of the army in Tokyo, taking a senior general hostage. Mishima demanded that the soldiers of the nearby barracks assemble to listen to him speak, or he would kill the general. When a crowd of several hundred had formed, Mishima came out onto a high balcony and harangued them for several minutes, calling on them to rise and overthrow the constitution. He was met with laughter and jeers. He then went inside, and, stripping to the waist and kneeling down, thrust a foot-long dagger into his belly. As he gasped on the carpet, completing the cross-cut that would disgorge his entrails, he was beheaded by one of his men acting as kaishaku. A second soldier then knelt in turn, and was himself beheaded by another of the soldiers.

Mishima’s death was greeted with incredulity in Japan, where seppuku had become virtually unknown since the end of the war. No-one, it seemed, had taken his many graphic predictions of his own death seriously. But his last book went some way to explaining what had happened. This was The Decay of the Angel. The deadline for the final instalment of this work was due on November 25 1970, the day on which he had killed himself. It had been duly completed and mailed that morning. The date that appears on the last line of the novel is also ‘November 25 1970’.

The Decay of the Angel is the last book in Mishima’s longest work, the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility. The book’s title in Japanese is Tennin Gosui, which literally means Five Signs of the Decay of the Tennin: a tennin in Buddhist theology is a supernatural being roughly equivalent to a Christian angel, but vulnerable to death. The signs or omens of a tennin’s decline, five in number, give the book its title.

Mishima’s contention in The Decay of the Angel is that eternal beauty is the prize of those who ‘cut time short’, and that in order to achieve a beautiful life, one must die a beautiful and young death, before decay has set in. The main character, who has missed his chance to do this, meditates:

Some are all the same endowed with the faculty to cut time short at the pinnacle. I know it to be true, for I have seen examples with my own eyes.
What power, poetry, bliss! To be able to cut it short, just as the white radiance of the pinnacle comes into view...
Endless physical beauty. That is the special prerogative of those who cut time short. Just before the pinnacle when time must be cut short is the pinnacle of physical beauty.
Clear, bright beauty, in the knowledge that the radiant white pinnacle lies ahead.

The meaning of the title is clear. Mishima himself was the angel threatened by decay. He knew that the death-signs were slowly becoming visible on his body, that the flesh was becoming corrupt. Mishima believed that writing could only do so much. The body had its own urgent language, one inexpressible in words. His seppuku was a carefully-orchestrated gathering of forces, sexual, aesthetic, political, literary, all converging on that same morning in November, with the aim of fixing beauty forever.

Consulted:
Ross, Christopher: Mishima’s Sword (2006)
Stokes, Henry Scott: The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (1975)

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44. The Seagull by Anton Chekhov

In 1892 Anton Chekhov was a success. He had two plays behind him (Ivanov and The Bear), and had published many of the short stories that, to the present writer's mind at least, constitute his greatest work. He was wealthy enough to buy a country estate for his family in the village of Melikhovo, about 50 miles from Moscow, and here he began to settle into the role of a country landowner - a role later mined for stories such as ‘New Villa’ and ‘My Wife’. He also took to shooting wild game for sport, à la Turgenev.

In the spring of 1892, Chekhov and a friend, Isaak Levitan, set out from Melikhovo for a day’s hunting. Neither was very experienced with guns. Levitan was actually a landscape painter, more interested in observing the scenery than shooting bits of it, and both were to some degree aware that they were play-acting. At one point Levitan, taking aim, downed a woodcock, and they both ran to find it. When they discovered its body in the grass they were disconcerted to find that it was still alive and staring up at them in mute agony. Levitan pleaded with Chekhov to finish it off. Chekhov refused, sickening of the whole business. Levitan persisted. Finally Chekhov, in disgust, smashed the woodcock’s head in with his rifle-butt. ‘And while two idiots went home and sat down to dinner,’ Chekhov wrote to his friend Alexei Suvorin on April 8 1892, ‘there was one beautiful, infatuated creature less in the world.’

Three years later Chekhov was writing the first of his major dramatic works. It was The Seagull. In the play, a loose colony of artists and malcontents live in a house by the shore of a lake, and seek ways to escape the boredom of their existence. An actress, Irina Arkadina, fears age; her son Kostya, a budding writer, is in love with Nina, a pretty neighbour; Nina loves Trigorin, a Hamlet-like writer who is obsessed with his sense of failure as an artist. At one point Kostya shoots a seagull and brings it into the house. Nina and Trigorin later notice it discarded on a table:

TRIGORIN: What’s this?
NINA: A seagull. Kostya killed it.
TRIGORIN: A fine bird. I don’t really want to leave here. Try to persuade Irina Arkadina to stay, eh? (Makes a note in his book.)
NINA: What are you writing?
TRIGORIN: Just a note or two. Had an idea for a story. (Puts the book away.) An idea for a short story: a young girl like you has been living all her life by a lake. She loves it like a seagull and is as free and happy as a seagull. Then a man happens to come along, sees her and destroys her just for the fun of it, like this seagull.

By the end of the play Nina has become pregnant by Trigorin but has lost her baby. Trigorin has deserted her. Kostya has committed suicide with the gun he used to kill the seagull. Everyone else has sunk further into the slough of despond.

It seems highly likely that Chekhov’s use of the wild bird — given a species-change for Coleridgeian resonance — and his disgust for anyone who destroys a life ‘just for the fun of it’ was linked to the woodcock incident.

There were many beautiful, infatuated creatures in Chekhov's life, and many that inspired his writings, but as far as we know this was the only one with feathers.

Consulted:
Hellman, Lillian, ed.: The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov (Hamish Hamilton, 1955)
Troyat, Henri: Chekhov (Macmillan, 1987)

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43. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

To say this title is misleading would be an understatement. The book contains hardly any of the life, and precious few of the opinions of Tristram Shandy. Tristram doesn’t get born for two hundred pages, and the story – insofar as there is one – revolves around the doings of characters such as Tristram’s Uncle Toby, Toby's servant Trim, Doctor Slop and Parson Yorick. The book is instead a massive experiment in narrative, featuring oddities such as black or blank pages, even little graphs intended to illustrate the progress of the plot (a device later independently discovered by Kurt Vonnegut). Essentially the book is a series of digressions, a shaggy dog story, or as the author sums it up in the final sentence, the story of ‘a COCK and a BULL’.

The name Tristram Shandy, does, however, reveal a secret intention. Sterne’s greatest influence was the sentimental, satiric, circumlocutory Don Quixote, the story of ‘the peerless knight of La Mancha, whom…I love more, and would actually have gone further to have paid a visit to, than the greatest hero of antiquity.’ The Arthurian name ‘Tristram’ was intended as an English knightly counterpart to the knight of La Mancha (Sir Tristram was a prince of Lyonesse, and the lover of Isolde). The derivation from the French triste allows us to arrive at ‘the sad knight’; and since ‘shandy’ is a Yorkshire dialect word for crazy (Sterne was a Yorkshire priest), the final translation can only be ‘the crack-brained knight of the sorrowful countenance’ of Cervantes himself.

Consulted:
Ricks, C, ed.: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne (1967)

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42. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Onegin is to Onega as Pechorin is to Pechora. The link is rivers. Pushkin named his hero after the freezing northern-Russian River Onega; in homage to Pushkin, Lermontov, in A Hero of our Time, named his main character after the even more freezing and even more northerly River Pechora. Both rivers yielded rather odd-sounding surnames, and it is likely that Pushkin was deliberately trying to foster the impression of an outsider, a man who did not really fit in: it is not a coincidence that Onegin was the progenitor of the ‘superfluous man’, a mainstay of the Russian nineteenth-century novel later developed in the work of Lermontov (Pechorin) and Turgenev (Rudin in the book of the same name). Educated and cosmopolitan, the superfluous man at the same time lacked purpose, identity, even Russianness, since he spoke French and modelled himself on Byron. As Pushkin wrote of his hero:

What is he? Just an apparition
A shadow, null and meaningless,
A Muscovite in Harold’s dress,
A modish second-hand edition…

Consulted:
Pushkin, Alexander and Bayley, John, ed.: Eugene Onegin (1979)
Jones, MV, and Miller, RF: The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel (1998)

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41. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

Around the World in Eighty Days, as a title, is simple, descriptive and enticing. As with any title that works superbly well, it has generated a huge number of parodies, puns and spin-offs. A short sample includes: Around the World in Eighty Ways (film), Around the World in Eighty Dreams (TV series), Around the World in Eighteen Days (film), Around the World in Eighty Dates (book), Around the World in Ninety Minutes (documentary), Around the World in 18 Minutes (film), The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (film), Around the World in Eighty Treasures (TV series) and The Simpsons: Around the World in Eighty D’Ohs. And this is only scratching the surface. Of course, it all began with Jules Verne, and his Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours. Or did it?

Several theories have been propounded for the origin of Le Tour du monde. Verne himself claimed that the idea was sparked in 1871 when he read a newspaper article about a Thomas Cook round-the-world tour package. But there is one man whose career so closely parallels the fictional Phileas Fogg that it would be rash to ignore him: an eccentric American railroad magnate called George Francis Train.

Born in 1829, Train made his fortune in opium trading and transportation (a nice mixture) and in 1869 began campaigning for the US presidency with the rather unmelodious slogan of ‘Get aboard the express train of George Francis Train!’ In the middle of his campaign, ‘Citizen Train’ announced that he would make a trip around the world in eighty days or less. This might have been a publicity stunt - perhaps he wanted to advertise his new railway and the wonders of super-rapid opium-fuelled transportation - but whatever his motives, he started from New York in late July 1870, taking the Union Pacific Railroad to California, and on August 1 shipped on board the Great Republic bound for Yokohama. From there he sailed to Hong Kong, then Singapore, the Suez Canal, and Marseilles. In Lyons his luck ran out and he was thrown into prison. After appealing to the international media for help, Train was released, but not before 13 days of his precious 80 had been wasted. He hot-footed it to Liverpool, where he boarded the steamer Abyssinia for New York, and arrived finally in late December, having missed his deadline by at least two months. He claimed he had only taken the stipulated 80 days; no-one seemed to be bothered enough to count them. His presidential hopes were soon dashed. The 1872 election was won in a landslide by Ulysses S Grant.

And there the matter might have rested, except for Jules Verne. Verne was already a highly successful writer, having produced several of the Voyages Extraordinaires series that included A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But he needed a new idea. In late 1870 and early 1871 news of Train’s exploits was arriving in France. Verne, who may have seen the Thomas Cook advertisement but had not yet made the additional conceptual leap from the idea of a leisurely sightseeing trip to a race against time, very probably saw - the coincidences are surely suggestive - the news about Train, and the 80-day limit. He quickly dashed off the tale of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout and sold the idea as a serial to Le Temps, who published it in daily instalments from late 1872.

Verne never acknowledged Train as the inspiration for his book. Train lived on until 1904, and made three more round-the-world trips, beating his record each time, finally achieving 60 days flat. He did not take kindly to Verne’s fiction, and once told an English journalist: ‘Remember Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days? He stole my thunder. I’m Phileas Fogg. But I have beaten Fogg out of sight. What put the notion into my head? Well, I’m possessed of great psychic force.’

Consulted:
Costello, Peter: Jules Verne, Inventor of Science Fiction (Hodder and Stoughton, 1978)
Wallace, Irving: The Square Pegs (Hutchinson, 1958)

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40. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Remarque’s original title in German was Im Westen nichts Neues: ‘Nothing New in the West’. It is an ironic and terrifying title - while ‘nothing new’ was happening, thousands of men were being slaughtered. In the book it is the headline of an army report on the day of the hero, Paul's, death.

When it came to an English translation, ‘Nothing New in the West’ was felt to be too Teutonic a title. Herbert Read, Remarque’s English editor, wrote to him in 1929: ‘[We] had a discussion…and we came to the conclusion that “All Quiet on the Western Front” was not so bad…I still think it is not so good as the German title, because it is not so neat and incisive. But it is a familiar phrase, and has all the ironic implication of the German title.’ This reveals a rather interesting fact. In 1929 ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ was already a well-worn phrase, and thus it did not originate with Remarque's translated title. It was almost certainly from a parallel source on this side of the Channel, perhaps from the British press, and presumably fulfilled much the same function as the German ‘Im Westen nichts Neues.’

As an odd footnote, Leni Riefenstahl said that Remarque wrote most of the book while staying in her apartment. If that’s true, then the greatest peace-propagandist of the First World War and the greatest war-propagandist of the second shared a bathroom.

Consulted:
Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith: Opposite Attraction: The Lives of Erich Maria Remarque and Paulette Goddard‎ (1995)

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39. Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

There are several competing theories as to why Thomas chose the name ‘Milk Wood’. One of the most ingenious was offered by the critic JS Dugdale, who observed that the milkwood tree secretes latex, which is used to make condoms, and that Milk Wood is mentioned in the play almost exclusively as a trysting-place for lovers (consider: ‘Lily Smalls, Mrs Beynon's treasure, comes downstairs from a dream of royalty who all night long went larking with her full of sauce in the Milk Wood dark…’ or this: ‘Which of their gandering hubbies moaned in Milk Wood for your naughty mothering arms and body like a wardrobe, love?’).

Thomas was certainly not averse to joke-names. Under Milk Wood’s working title was ‘Llareggub’ - ‘bugger all’ backwards - a joke carried over from one of his earlier stories, ‘The Orchard’. In an unpublished MS another planned work has the title ‘Llaberos and Muberab in Llareggub’ (try saying the names backwards).

Consulted:
Dugdale, JS: Dylan Thomas. Under Milk Wood (Notes on chosen English texts) (1964)
Ferris, Paul: Dylan Thomas (1977)

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38. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis

There are very few books with the title-formula ‘The x, the x and the x’. ‘The x and the x’ is very common: The Ring and the Book; The Oak and the Calf; The Naked and the Dead; The Sound and the Fury — the list could go on. The only genre in which one finds a profusion of titles of the three-barrelled variety is in fairy tales. Thus we have The Knapsack, The Hat and The Horn; The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage; One-Eye, Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes; The Spindle, The Shuttle and The Needle; The Straw, the Coal and the Bean. CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was intended to fit into the fairy-tale tradition.

In his book of essays Of Other Worlds Lewis said that it all began with mental images:

All my seven Narnia books, and my three science fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let's try to make a story about it.’ At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why He came. But once He was there, He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him.

When it came to the witch, the influences went beyond mental pictures. In 1948 Lewis remarked to a friend that he was attempting a children’s book ‘in the tradition of E. Nesbit’. Nesbit is in fact central to understanding not only the first Narnia book but the whole of the series. Nesbit wrote about dragons, magic, ancient Egypt, travel in time and space, socialism and wishes coming true; perhaps more importantly for Lewis’s fiction she wrote about extraordinary things happening to ordinary children. One of Nesbit’s adventures was The Story of the Amulet, in which we find the prototype for Jadis, the White Witch, in the person of the Queen of Babylon. Like Jadis, the Queen is haughty, magnificently dressed, physically imposing and liable to shout things such as ‘Kill the dogs!’ She is summoned to London by magic, as is Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew, where she creates a very similar style of havoc.

There are a numerous other Nesbit echoes throughout the Narnia series. One deserves special consideration: the detail of the wardrobe.

In 1908 Nesbit published a story in Blackie’s Christmas Annual called ‘The Aunt and Amabel’. Eight-year-old Amabel has displeased her aunt by cutting the heads off all the flowers in the greenhouse, and has been sent to the ‘best bedroom’ as a punishment. While incarcerated she begins looking through a book of railway timetables, and discovers a destination called ‘Whereyouwanttogoto’:

This was odd — but the name of the station from which it started was still more extraordinary, for it was not Euston or Cannon Street or Marylebone.
The name of the station was 'Bigwardrobeinspareroom.' And below this name, really quite unusual for a station, Amabel read in small letters:
'Single fares strictly forbidden. Return tickets No Class Nuppence. Trains leave Bigwardrobeinspareroom all the time.'
And under that in still smaller letters —
‘You had better go now.'
What would you have done? Rubbed your eyes and thought you were dreaming? Well, if you had, nothing more would have happened. Nothing ever does when you behave like that. Amabel was wiser. She went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle.

Amabel goes through the wardrobe and finds a curious railway station, whence she is launched into a little adventure. Lucy goes through the wardrobe in the spare room and encounters Mr Tumnus, the faun:

‘I — I got in through the wardrobe in the spare room,’ said Lucy.
‘Ah! If only I had worked harder at geography when I was a little Faun,’ said Mr. Tumnus, ‘I'd know all about strange countries.’
‘The wardrobe is not a country. It's only back there where it's summer,’ said Lucy.
‘It has been winter for so long in Narnia,’ said the Faun sadly. ‘Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom, would you have tea with me?’

Consulted:
Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter: CS Lewis, A Biography (Collins, 1974)
Lewis, CS: Letters to Children (Collins, 1985)
Lewis, CS: Of Other Worlds (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966)
Wilson, AN: CS Lewis, A Biography (Collins, 1990)

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37. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by TS Eliot

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was the book of poems that provided the libretto for the musical Cats. It is sometimes credited with saving Faber and Faber from extinction.

Possum, of course, was Eliot himself. The name was bestowed on him by the one he called, more sonorously, il miglior fabbro (‘the better craftsman’): Ezra Pound. It derived from a game the two poets played, in which they would talk in ‘Uncle Remus’ slang, Brer Possum being one of the Remus characters. Pound’s letters to Eliot are usually written in this manner, even when discussing Sophocles and Sextus Propertius. A typical example of 16 April 1938 begins ‘Waaal Possum, my fine ole Marse Supial…’ and ends with a pseudo-Remusian poem, which, interestingly, mentions cats and possums in the same breath but pre-dates Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by one year:

Sez the Maltese dawg to the Siam cat
‘Whaaar’z ole Parson Possum at?’
Sez the Siam cat to the Maltese dawg
‘Dahr he sets lak a bump-onna-log.’

‘Possum’ was therefore a name that Eliot could quite happily apply to himself - since he put it into his title - and it seems to have been widely understood in literary circles. Pound often wrote to others mentioning the name, for example in a letter to Ronald Duncan of 10 January 1939 on the demise of Eliot’s literary magazine The Criterion, in which he says:

Who killed Cock Possum?
Who bitched his blossom?

‘I,’ said young Duncan,
Sodden and drunken, ‘I bit The Criterion.’

‘I,’ said ole Wyndham,
‘I bloody well skinned ‘um.’

‘I,’ said Jeff Faber,
‘I, the worse neighbour,
I tightened the puss-strings.’

Consulted:
Paige, DD, ed.: The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (1971)


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36. Shamela by Henry Fielding

The title page of Shamela reads:

AN
APOLOGY
FOR THE
LIFE
OF
Mrs. SHAMELA ANDREWS.
In which, the many notorious FALSHOODS and MISREPRSENTATIONS of a Book called
PAMELA,
Are exposed and refuted; and all the matchless ARTS of that young Politician, set in a true and just Light.
Together with
A full Account of all that passed between her and Parson Arthur Williams; whose Character is represented in a manner something different from what he bears in PAMELA. The whole being exact Copies of authentick Papers delivered to the Editor.
Necessary to be had in all FAMILIES.
By Mr. CONNY KEYBER.

From this rococo beginning it can be seen that Fielding’s main target was Pamela, Samuel Richardson’s smash-hit novel of 1740. The plot of Pamela is fairly simple: the heroine is a maid in the service of Mr B., who tries repeatedly to seduce her. Pamela foils all attempts on her virtue until Mr B., frustrated beyond endurance, makes a marriage proposal, which she accepts. The End. The subtitle of Pamela — Virtue Rewarded — leaves no doubt about the high moral tone of the book. Some, however, detected a whiff of hypocrisy. Richardson claimed that he had excluded anything ‘inflammatory’ in the book — that it was intended merely as a conduct manual for young ladies — but Pamela, which is basically a tease spread over 800 pages, has a force-nine erotic charge. Almost as soon as it had left the presses Pamela had drawn mockery and parody in a genre of books now known as ‘anti-Pamelas’, and Fielding was first off the blocks with Shamela, published only five months after the book that had inspired it.

Shamela is a splendidly immoral little squib, the story of a faux-naif strumpet on the make, out to ensnare Squire Booby (the counterpart of Mr B.), all the while carrying on an affair with Parson Williams. But Pamela was not the only target of Shamela. The full title, An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, and its pseudonymous authorship by one ‘Conny Keyber’, reveals a second mark. Colley Cibber was the poet laureate, an appointee of the Whig ministry of Robert Peel, and much scorned as an establishment propagandist by his rivals, notably Alexander Pope, who made him the hero of the Dunciad. Cibber’s vainglorious memoirs of 1740 were entitled An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber. The transformation from ‘Colley Cibber’ to ‘Conny Keyber’ was in reference to Cibber’s Danish ancestry: he was regularly ridiculed in the press as ‘Minheer Keiber’. (‘Conny’, originally meaning a rabbit, was slang for the dupe of a thief or trickster.) The title-page of Shamela was an attempt to mock the Apology, and in the long introduction to Shamela, written in the form of various dedicatory and commendatory letters, there were many little anti-Cibber and anti-Walpole touches.

Shamela was an overnight success and marked an important career-change for Fielding. He had spent his youth writing plays: Shamela was his first novel. It was quickly followed, in 1742, by Joseph Andrews, the story of the brother of Shamela, and then in 1743 Jonathan Wild (another anti-Walpole production). In 1749 he produced his greatest novel, Tom Jones.

One postscript is of some interest. Three years after the death of his wife Charlotte in 1744, Fielding married, not without scandal, his wife’s maid Mary Daniel, who was six months’ pregnant at the time. One wonders if he had Shamela — or alternatively Pamela — in mind.

Consulted:
Fielding, Henry: An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (introduction by Sheridan W Baker, University of California Press, 1953)
Fielding, Henry: Shamela (introduction by Thomas Keymer, Oxford World’s Classics, 1999)
Turner, James Grantham: ‘Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson's Pamela’, Representations, No. 48 (1994)

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35. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Baum’s version went like this: one day, he was telling stories to a group of children about a magical land, a lion, a scarecrow and a tin woodman. One of the children asked what the land was called. Searching for an answer, Baum noticed a filing cabinet next to him which had a drawer marked O-Z, and replied ‘Oz’. The moment of inspiration led not only to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but to numberless spin-offs, including The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The Road to Oz, The Emerald City of Oz, The Patchwork Girl Of Oz, Little Wizard Stories of Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz, The Scarecrow Of Oz, Rinkitink In Oz, The Lost Princess Of Oz, The Tin Woodman Of Oz and The Magic of Oz. And let's not forget Zardoz, with Sean Connery.

The provenance of this account – i.e. of the magical meeting of storyteller and filing cabinet – is fairly good: Baum even gave it an exact date, May 7 1898, since he remembered that a newspaper in the room carried the story of the US Navy’s victory over the Spanish in Manila. But the story only emerged in 1903, three years after the book’s publication, in a press release by Baum’s publisher, Bobbs-Merrill. Moreover Baum was a notorious fabulist – both in life and in fiction – and two of his other books were The Magical Monarch of Mo and Queen Zixi of Ix. Filing cabinets of the specifications M–O and I–X seem rather less likely.

Consulted:
Rogers, KM: L. Frank Baum, Creator of Oz (2002)

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34. La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils

The character of Marguerite Gautier, the Lady with the Camellias in Dumas’s six-hankie novel of 1848 - the book which inspired La Traviata - was taken directly from the life of the early-nineteenth-century Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis, who became Dumas’s lover for a short time between 1844 and 1845. During her brief, consumptive life, Marie’s penchant for camellias (and dukes) was well-known; in the novel she wears white camellias for twenty-five days each month and red for the remaining five, in what is surely some kind of sexual traffic-light system. The choice of title had another influence. In Isidora (1846) by George Sand, the flower-loving courtesan-heroine is also described as ‘la dame aux Camélias’. Sand, it seemed, misspelled ‘Caméllia’, giving it one ‘l’. Dumas followed suit, admitting it was through ignorance, but adding: ‘since Madame Sand spells the word as I do, I prefer to be incorrect with her than correct with others.’

Consulted:
Dumas fils, Alexandre: La Dame aux Camélias (introduction by David Coward, Oxford World’s Classics, 1986)
Saunders, Edith: The Prodigal Father (Longmans, Green & Co., 1951)

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