143. Chamber Music by James Joyce

Chamber Music is a book of short love-lyrics published by James Joyce in 1907 (long before he had produced any of his major novels). The title Chamber Music had been suggested by his brother Stanislaus several years before publication, but Joyce had doubts, describing it as ‘too complacent.’ (And indeed it is without any leavening of Joycean humour: it sounds more like an Eliot title, along the lines of Four Quartets).

What saved it was a double entendre conferred as a result of an incident in 1904 (still three years before the book appeared). Joyce and his friend Oliver Gogarty visited the house of young widow called Jenny, and Joyce read his poems aloud. After the performance Jenny retired behind a screen and made use of a chamber pot. As the men listened, Gogarty commented: ‘There’s a critic for you!’ Joyce told Stanislaus the story, and he agreed it was ‘a favourable omen’. The incident is echoed in a line from Ulysses: ‘Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that.’

Consulted:
Anderson, Chester G.: James Joyce and His World‎ (1978)

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142. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Eco said that he chose the title The Name of the Rose because the symbol of the rose ‘is so rich in meanings that by now it hasn’t any meaning’ and it ‘disorientated the reader who was unable to choose any one interpretation’ (thanks a lot Umberto!).

The evocation of a rose is not, however, entirely random: in fact it is keyed closely with the end of this very complex book, which features a Latin hexameter by Bernard of Cluny that translates roughly as ‘The rose of the past endures only in its naked name.’ This hexameter is interesting because ‘rose’ here seems to be a misreading of the original text: earlier texts refer to ‘Rome’ ('Roma' as opposed to 'rosa', a one-letter slip). Eco realized this only later, and admitted the mix-up in a lecture of 1990. The full quote from the lecture is as follows:

An author who has entitled his book The Name of the Rose must be ready to face manifold interpretations of his title. As an empirical author I wrote that I chose that title just in order to set the reader free: ‘the rose is a figure so rich in meanings that by now it hasn’t any meaning: Dante’s mystic rose, and go lovely rose, the War of the Roses, rose thou art sick, too many rings around Rosie, a rose by any other name, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, the Rosicrucians.’ Moreover someone has discovered that some early manuscripts of De contempu mundi of Bernard de Cluny, from which I borrowed the hexameter ‘stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus,’ read ‘stat Roma pristina nomine’ – which after all is more coherent with the rest of the poem, which speaks of the lost Babylonia. Thus the title of my novel, had I come across another version of Cluny’s poem, could have been The Name of Rome (thus acquiring fascist overtones).

The Name of the Rose or The Name of Rome – which is better? (Harry Hill might have an answer to this.) In an alternative literary universe – where Nineteen Eighty-Four is called The Last Man in Europe and Catch-22 is called Catch-18, there is certainly a book called The Name of Rome. Perhaps it exists – in fact it most certainly exists – in Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Library of Babel’.

Consulted:
Umberto Eco: ‘The Author and his Interpreters’, in Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992)

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141. Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald’s only published novel, is a strange, flawed work, barely readable in places, written in a few weeks in a sanatorium. It is highly autobiographical, detailing her life with her husband F Scott Fitzgerald, and making use of events that Scott was simultaneously drawing on for Tender is the Night. In the first drafts, the Zelda-figure, the heroine Alabama Beggs, is married to Amory Blaine, who bears the same name as the Scott-figure in This Side of Paradise. Scott insisted that she change this name (it became instead David Knight: Knight/Night?) and that she cut and rewrite large chunks of the novel. He also objected to the original title, now lost: Zelda, casting around for a substitute, found a song called ‘Save Me the Waltz’ in a Victor Records Catalogue.

The story of Save Me the Waltz brings out the large extent to which the couple were involved in one another’s work: many scholars now claim that Zelda had a much larger hand in Scott’s work than was formerly generally recognized, and Scott certainly had an executive role in bringing Zelda’s work into being, negotiating with his own agent, Max Perkins, to get her a publishing deal. But Zelda often seemed to resent Scott’s interference, and in her review of The Beautiful and Damned in The New York Tribune of 2 April 1922, she both implicitly and explicitly accused her husband of being boring, pretentious, unoriginal, tasteless and foolish:

It is a wonderful book to have around in case of emergency. No-one should ever set out in pursuit of unholy excitement without a special vest pocket edition dangling from a string around his neck.

For this book tells exactly, and with compelling lucidity, just what to do when cast off by a grandfather or when sitting around a station platform at 4 a.m., or when spilling champagne in a fashionable restaurant, or when told that one is too old for the movies. Any of these things might come into any one’s life at any minute. Just turn the pages of the book slowly at any of the above-mentioned trying times until your own case strikes your eye and proceed according to directions. Then for the ladies of the family there are such helpful lines as: ‘I like gray because then you have to wear a lot of paint.’ Also what to do with your husband’s old shoes — Gloria takes Anthony’s shoes to bed with her and finds it a very satisfactory way of disposing of them. The dietary suggestion, ‘tomato sandwiches and lemonade for breakfast’, will be found an excellent cure for obesity.

Now, let us turn to the interior decorating part of the book. Therein can be observed complete directions for remodeling your bathroom along modern and more interesting lines, with plans for a bookrack by the tub, and a detailed description of what pictures have been found suitable for bathroom walls after years of careful research by Mr. Fitzgerald.

The book itself, with its plain green back, is admirably constructed for being read in a tub — wetting will not spoil the pages; in fact if one finds it growing dry simply dip the book briskly in warm water. The bright yellow jacket is particularly adapted to being carried on Fifth Avenue while wearing a blue or henna colored suit, and the size is adaptable to being read in hotel lobbies while waiting to keep dates for luncheon.

It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

[...] But don’t let that deter you from buying the book. In every other way the book is absolutely perfect.

The other things I didn’t like in the book — I mean the unimportant things — were the literary references and the attempt to convey a profound air of erudition. It reminds me in its more soggy moments of the essays I used to get up in school at the last minute by looking up strange names in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Consulted:
Review of The Beautiful and Damned in The New York Tribune, 2 April 1922, in F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, ed. JR Bryer (1978)
Milford, Nancy: Zelda‎ (1970)

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140. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke

2001: A Space Odyssey was drawn from a 1948 short story by Clarke, ‘The Sentinel’. The short story was entered in a BBC competition that year and failed to win, or even be placed. Nevertheless, many years later, in 1964, ‘The Sentinel’ was selected by Clarke and Kubrick as the basis for the film 2001. Although not quite the basis. Clarke said: ‘2001 is often said to be ‘based on’ ‘The Sentinel’ but that is a gross oversimplification; the two bear much the same relationship as an acorn and an oak-tree.’ In fact material from several other short stories was also used (such as ‘Encounter in the Dawn’), and much of the material was new.

Most of the film screenplay was bashed out in a series of brainstorming sessions between Clarke and Kubrick, and written by Clarke in Room 1008 of the Hotel Chelsea in West 23rd St, New York. Kubrick’s idea was that Clarke and he should write a complete novel before writing the film script (to let their ‘imaginations soar freely’) but in the event the novel was written more or less simultaneously with the film screenplay.

As far as the title is concerned, the date came from Kubrick, and the second half, the ‘Odyssey’ component, was Clarke’s idea. It is a neglected key to the project’s interpretation. Clarke said that the ‘Odyssean parallel’ was ‘a deliberate attempt at creating a myth’. It was a myth that had been in his mind for some time as a template for man’s spacefaring adventure to come. Long before the film, in a 1958 book of essays, he had written:

Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of rockets merges now with the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space.

The hero of 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowman, is therefore a modern Odysseus: and if anyone should doubt how explicitly Clarke meant that parallel, consider his name, with its satisfyingly Achaean ring: ‘Bowman’. Consider also his fate – Bowman is a wayfarer who completes a circular journey fraught with epic peril. Clarke even inserted the book The Odyssey into the novel itself. Bowman’s favourite reading aboard ship is – of course – The Odyssey, ‘which of all books spoke to him most vividly across the gulfs of time.’

Consulted:
Clarke, Arthur Charles: The Challenge of The Spaceship: Previews of Tomorrow's World‎ (1959)
Clarke, Arthur Charles: ‘Back to 2001’, Preface to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1997 ed.)

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139. Clélie by Madeleine de Scudéry

Clélie (1654-61) is not now very widely read, though it was, in the words of one biographer, ‘the best-selling book of the 17th century’ – and Mme de Scudéry was known as ‘the Tenth Muse’ (ie. in addition to the traditional nine Greek muses; probably a seventeenth century back-of-book blurb). The name of the heroine conceals a pun: clé or clef means ‘key’, and the novel is itself a highly complex roman à clef or ‘key novel’ in which the characters represent contemporary celebrities. This spot-the-celebrity game, substantially invented by Scudéry, was crucial to her success, and she used it in all her other major productions, including such classic sextuple-deckers as Cyrus and Ibrahim.

The key novel went on to be developed by writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, who satirized Coleridge, Byron and Shelley in Nightmare Abbey, and Aldous Huxley, who satirized DH Lawrence in Point Counter Point: other examples of key novels are legion, and a good guide to them can be found in William Amos’s The Originals: Who’s Really Who in Fiction and Alan Bold and Robert Giddings’s almost-identically-entitled Who Was Really Who in Fiction.

Consulted
McDougall, Dorothy: Madeleine de Scudéry: Her Romantic Life and Death‎ (1972)

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138. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott

Ivanhoe is a rollicking tale of the deeds of metal-clad heroes and their fragrant paramours in the wilds of medieval Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. It was massively popular on publication in 1819 and was an important spur to the Victorian Middle-Ages craze: one of its characters was Robin Hood, whose mythos Scott did much to develop. The name Ivanhoe, however, was taken from a rather more sedate source — a town in Buckinghamshire called Ivinghoe, whose name appears in a traditional rhyme (‘Tring, Wing and Ivinghoe/Three dirty villages all in a row/And never without a rogue or two/ And would you know the reason why?/Leighton Buzzard is hard by.’) Scott quoted the rhyme from memory in his introduction, but misspelled Ivinghoe as ‘Ivanhoe’. Scott also accidentally invented the name ‘Cedric’ in Ivanhoe, by misspelling the Anglo-Saxon name ‘Cerdic’. Ivanhoe, Ivinghoe; Cedric, Cerdic: was Scott dyslexic?

As a footnote, Mark Twain had a very strange take on Ivanhoe. He considered that it was responsible for the American Civil War. In Life on the Mississippi he says:

Sir Walter Scott [...] sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner — or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it — would be wholly modern, in place of modern and mediaeval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person.

Consulted:
Scott, Walter: Ivanhoe‎ (Oxford World’s Classics, notes by Ian Duncan, 1998)
Twain, Mark: Life on the Mississippi (1883)

137. The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius

Lucius Apuleius’ 2nd century AD comic novel ­deals with the adventures of a man transformed into a donkey, and was an influence on the work of Cervantes, Shakespeare and much of the rest of the Western literary canon. But why ‘golden’? Apuleius’ ass is not particularly associated with gold, and in fact the original title was simply Metamorphoses. It became known as The Golden Ass through the intervention of St Augustine, who assured his readers that this was Apuleius’ own name for his book. And it was ‘golden’ almost certainly because of a piece of Latin wordplay: Golden Ass in Latin is De asino aureo or alternatively asinus aureus. To get a similar effect in English we would have to call it The Dinky Donkey or The Cool Mule.

Works of antiquity often have names added to them much later, and these may sometimes be at odds with their content. Aristotle’s Metaphysics was so named as a result of a decision by one Andronicus of Rhodes. Andronicus was responsible for ordering Aristotle’s collected writings, and he put a group of writings dealing with subjects such as ‘being’, ‘potential’, ‘substance’, after the book called the Physics. This new book was therefore called Ta meta ta phusika, or ‘[The book that comes] after the Physics’ – a title that arose purely because of its placement, not its content. Meta phusika gave rise to our current word ‘metaphysics’, which Aristotle himself, of course, did not use: it had not yet been invented.

A similar story obtains with Plato’s Republic. This was originally called Politeia (‘The State’), but when it was translated in Latin it was given the title Respublica, or ‘public affairs’, ‘affairs of state’. Only later, when political entities that derived power from electors rather than unelected bodies began to be known as ‘republics’, did this title look rather odd – because Plato’s book actually recommends a sort of philosophical dictatorship, unsullied by any democracy whatever: a very long way from anything we would understand as ‘republican’ government.

Consulted:
Carver, Robert HF: The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2008)
Plato: The Republic (ed. and notes HDP Lee, 1955)
Kim, Jaegwon; Sosa, Ernest: A companion to Metaphysics‎ (1995)

136. Blade Runner (a Movie) by William Burroughs

Blade Runner (a Movie) (1979) is not a movie. Nor is it a screenplay for a movie, at least in the usual sense. It is a book – a novella, in fact – and one unconnected with the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, which came three years later. Calling it parenthetically ‘A Movie’ was Burroughs’ attempt to suggest a blending of the literary and cinematic idioms – since the book is presented in a series of short scenes with an emphasis on visual direction and dialogue.

Neither did Burroughs’ book deal with any of the themes of the Ridley Scott film, which is about a bounty hunter who is tasked to ‘retire’ fugitive androids by gunning them down in neon-lit alleyways. Blade Runner (a Movie) in fact took its title and theme from an earlier book, The Bladerunner, by Alan E Nourse. Both books dealt with a crisis in medical care leading to the sale of black-market supplies (such as scalpels, or blades). Nothing about androids. Blade Runner, the film, took its title from the Nourse and Burroughs books, after Scott had bought the rights to the title (for a pittance). Scott then took the project in a completely different direction, basing the film instead on Philip K Dick’s 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?', a story which supplied the plot about the bounty hunter.

The story of Blade Runner, two books and a film, shows the way a title can propagate almost as an independent literary entity.

Consulted:
Bukatman, Scott: Blade Runner‎ (BFI Modern Classics, 1997)

135. The Necronomicon, not by HP Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft was one of the early exponents of horror fantasy, best known for the series of works known collectively as the Cthulhu Mythos. He peppered his books with references to an occult work called The Necronomicon, and, as his fame grew, he was besieged by readers asking where they could find a copy of it. But the truth was that Lovecraft had invented the book and its title. He wrote in a letter of 1937: ‘The name Necronomicon (necros, corpse; nomos, law; eikon, image = An Image [or Picture] of the Law of the Dead) occurred to me in the course of a dream, although the etymology is perfectly sound.’ So the title came before everything else, and substituted, perfectly reasonably, for the work itself.

This is a game that many writers have played, and the history of literature is full of references to books that don’t, in fact, exist. Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Dorothy L Sayers, Frank Herbert, Martin Amis, Arthur Conan Doyle and many, many others have all joined in. Some of my favourite fictional titles are from Kurt Vonnegut, who, as Kilgore Trout, writes non-existent works such as The Barring-Gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Year's Masterpiece, which are usually accompanied by helpful plot summaries. Perhaps the most notorious fictional-book-inventors have been writers such as Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges; naturally enough, since their writing often draws attention to literature as itself an artefact.

With the Necronomicon there was a difference, however. Other writers began to treat it as if it really did exist, quoting from the nonexistent work and even composing large sections of it; several Necronomicons were in fact later published, by hoaxers including L. Sprague De Camp and Colin Wilson.

Such is the power of a good title.

Consulted:
Lovecraft, H. P.: Selected Letters 1934-1937‎ (1976)

134. The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol

The Inspector General (also known as The Government Inspector) has proved one of Gogol’s most enduringly popular works, and has been translated into other media such as film and opera. To an extent it prefigures Gogol’s masterwork, Dead Souls, in that its central trope is the arrival of a stranger in a small town, and the reactions of its inhabitants as they jostle selfishly to milk the situation for their own benefit.

The idea for the play was supplied to Gogol by his friend Alexander Pushkin. In 1835 Gogol importuned Pushkin for a subject for a comedy, and Pushkin gave him one that he was going to write himself: a nobody arrives at a provincial town and is mistaken for an important dignitary. This was based on an experience Pushkin had had when visiting Nizhny Novgorod, when he had been taken for an envoy from Moscow on a secret mission and fêted accordingly. The theme, though, had already been treated by several other Russian writers. There was even a play by Polevoy, published three years before, called The Inspectors General, or, Who Comes from Afar May Lie All he Likes: a title which puts Gogol’s play in a nutshell.

Consulted:
Ehre, Milton: Gottschalk, Fruma: Gogol: Plays and Selected Writings‎ (1994)
Troyat, Henri: Divided Soul: The Life of Gogol‎ (1973)