153. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

By the age of 31 Stevenson had made many attempts at writing a novel, but to his despair each attempt had ‘stopped inexorably like a schoolboy’s watch.’ In 1881, in Kinnaird, near Pitlochry, he found himself house-bound by rainy weather, and to pass the time joined his young step-son, Lloyd Osbourne, in painting pictures. Stevenson later wrote:

On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance 'Treasure Island.' I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the STANDING STONE or the DRUIDIC CIRCLE on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.

Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of 'Treasure Island,' the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters.

With the visual stimulus of the map Stevenson had at last found fluency — and a title. However, the novel was at first christened The Sea Cook: only later was the original source of the inspiration re-enshrined on the title page.

Consulted:
Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure Island‎ (intro. by John D. Seelye, 1999)

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152. The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett

This, one of Arnold Bennett’s best-loved novels, would not have had its theme and title without an interruption to his fastidious dining habits. He wrote in his journal of 1903:

‘Last night, when I went into the Duval for dinner, a middle-aged woman, inordinately stout and with pendent cheeks, had taken the seat opposite to my prescriptive seat. I hesitated, as there were plenty of empty places, but my waitress requested me to take my usual chair. I did so, and immediately thought: “with that thing opposite to me my dinner will be spoilt!” But the woman was evidently also cross at my filling up her table, and she went away, picking up all her belongings, to another part of the restaurant, breathing hard. Then she abandoned her second choice for a third one. My waitress was scornful and angry at this desertion, but laughing also. Soon all the waitresses were privately laughing at the goings-on of the fat woman, who was being served by the most beautiful waitress I have ever seen in any Duval. The fat woman was clearly a crotchet, a 'maniaque', a woman who lived much alone. Her cloak (she displayed on taking off it a simply awful light puce flannel dress) and her parcels were continually the object of her attention and she was always arguing with her waitress. And the whole restaurant secretly made a butt of her. She was repulsive; no one could like her or sympathize with her, but I thought — she has been young and slim once. And I immediately thought of a long 10 or 15 thousand words short story, The History of Two Old Women. I gave this woman a sister, fat as herself. And the first chapter would be in the restaurant (both sisters) something like to-night — and written rather cruelly. Then I would go back to the infancy of these two, and sketch it all. One should have lived ordinarily, married prosaically, and become a widow. The other should have become a whore, and all that; 'guilty splendour'. Both are overtaken by fat.

Bennett did indeed give the fat woman a sister and put them both in a novel, rather than a short story, tracing their lives from girlhood, to young womanhood, to middle age, bulk, sciatica, rheumatism and death. This was The Old Wives’ Tale, and one of history’s more elaborate revenges for indigestion.

Consulted:
Bennett, Arnold: The Old Wives' Tale (Introduction by John Wain, 1990)

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151. The Mystery of Marie Roget by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe has been credited with inventing almost every modern literary genre: the detective story (the Dupin tales), the horror story (‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’), the science fiction story (‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym’), and so on. What he certainly did in The Mystery of Marie Roget was to pioneer the ‘real-life murder mystery’. Marie’s murder closely paralleled the unexplained demise of Mary Rogers (note the similarity of names), a New York salesgirl who was found floating in the Hudson River in 1841. Poe offered his ‘Parisian’ version of the story to Snowden's Ladies' Companion in 1842, persuading the editor that he had advanced the Rogers investigation by his fictional analysis, and that the real murderer, would, as a result, soon be brought to book: but Poe had done little by way of research except read the papers, and when evidence later emerged that Mary Rogers had died as a result of a botched abortion, he revised the tale to fit the new, grisly details.

Consulted:
Stashower, Daniel: The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder (2006)

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150. Generation X by Douglas Coupland

Coupland said that the title of his 1991 book was taken from a work of sociology by Paul Fussell called Class, in which ‘Category X’ was used to denote a voluntarily disenfranchised para-class who ‘wanted to hop off the merry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing that so often frames modern existence.’ Maybe so, but Coupland would have been hard put to ignore the fact that by 1991 the phrase ‘Generation X’ already had wide currency, not only as the name of the band Generation X (formed in 1976), but the 1965 book Generation X by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson that had inspired the band’s name (a copy of it was owned by Billy Idol’s mother).

Hamblett and Deverson’s book had reflected on teenagers in the 60s and found that they were disrespectful, sexually promiscuous and irreligious: with a small tinge of irony, this was the ‘baby-boomer’ generation that Coupland’s disrespectful, sexually nihilistic and irreligious slacker kids were 'rebelling' against.

Consulted:
Coupland, Douglas: ‘Generation X’d’, in Details Magazine (June 1995)

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149. Persuasion by Jane Austen

Persuasion is Austen’s only title consisting of a single abstract noun.

As we all know, in the matter of titles, Austen liked to link two nouns (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility) and in other works she favoured proper names or real estate. So the solitariness of Persuasion makes it a minor oddity. All the more so since Jane Austen did not actually choose it. Her brother and sister did.

The book was unpublished and untitled on her death, and Henry and Cassandra Austen brought it out in December 1817. Evidence (from Jane’s great-niece) suggests that Jane wanted to call the book The Elliots (another proper-name title), but had not made up her mind.

This might lead readers to ponder that titles, like text, are often a matter of style. A writer, when she is writing, will often have a bias for particular grammatical forms or constructions. Computer programs can analyse a text and say it is by Shakespeare and not Middleton: authors will also be trapped by these habits of style when it comes to choosing titles. Certain forms will occur to them and other forms will not. What seems to have happened with Persuasion is that Henry and Cassandra took an approach that Jane herself would have been unlikely to take, given previous evidence.

Nevertheless, Persuasion, as a title, was a brilliant stroke. ‘Persuasion’ is almost a pun, since it contains the meanings both of ‘influence’ and ‘opinion’, both of which are thematically significant to the novel: e.g. we can say both ‘She succumbed to persuasion’ and ‘She was of this persuasion’. It thus functions almost as a double-noun title in itself – it is Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility in a smaller package.

Consulted:
Jane Austen: Persuasion‎ (introduction by Janet M. Todd, Antje Blank, 2006)

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148. Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Huysmans’ rich and strange 1894 novel (‘the breviary of the Decadence’ as Arthur Symons dubbed it) has a title it has been notoriously difficult to translate. In French it is A rebours, which has been rendered variously Against Nature and Against the Grain, neither of which really cut the mustard. A rebours really signifies a sort of obstinacy or contrariety, and has much play in French idiom: comprendre à rebours means to get the wrong end of the stick, prendre quelqu’un à rebours to rub someone up the wrong way, and prendre l’ennemi à rebours to take the enemy from behind. The hint of anality makes it the perfect idiom for the book, whose hero, Des Esseintes, has not only devoted much of his life to ‘bizarre sexual practices and deviant behaviour’ but gains his nutrition via enemas, ‘unquestionably the ultimate deviation from the norm that anyone could realize.’

As an aside, Against Nature is generally agreed as being the book Dorian Gray becomes obsessed with in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, though it is never mentioned by name.

Consulted:
Collins Robert English-French Dictionary
Introduction to Penguin Classics edition of A rebours by Patrick McGuinness (2003)

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147. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The simplicity and power of this novella, the story of the terrible encroachment of death on a shallow man spiritually unprepared for it, has staggered millions (on reading it in 1886, Tchaikovsky feverishly recorded in his diary: ’I am convinced that the greatest author-painter who ever lived is Leo Tolstoy.’)

The tale’s original title was The Death of a Judge. It was inspired by events surrounding the death of a judge at the court of Tula in 1881, Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, which Tolstoy had heard about from Mechnikov’s brother, and began as a diary in the first person. But as Tolstoy developed the idea he moved the story to the third person, retaining only Mechnikov’s name and patronymic for the title. By crafting a title that stripped Ivan Ilyich of his family name (later echoed by Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) he presented him as a disconcerting everyman.

146. Goldfinger by Ian Fleming

It began on a golf course.

In the 1950s, Ian Fleming’s regular golfing partner was a businessman called John Blackwell. One day, at the St George’s Golf Club in Sandwich, Blackwell mentioned that his cousin’s husband was the architect Ernö Goldfinger. Fleming liked the name ‘Goldfinger’ and thought he might be able to use it: he was always on the look-out for new or unusual names, and had given several of his previous characters the names of real people (and in fact in the final text of Goldfinger he used John Blackwell’s name for a minor character, a ‘pleasant-spoken Import and Export merchant’).

Ernö Goldfinger was one of post-war Britain’s most prominent architects and designers. Prominent, and notorious. A Jewish-Hungarian émigré, he was one of the leaders of the so-called ‘Brutalist’[1] movement. Brutalism was essentially a love affair with unadorned cast concrete, and in Goldfinger’s case led to buildings such as the Daily Worker headquarters at Farringdon Rd (a building run by the British Communist party), and the severely sculptural residential high-rises of Balfron Tower and Trellick Tower in London. He was a highly flamboyant character with a love of fast cars, cigars and young women, and was thought by some to be rather a bully: there were stories that he was given to frog-marching uncooperative clients out of his offices. Such character traits, one might have thought, would have made him a hero in the eyes of the creator of James Bond. Instead he ended up as a villain.

The plot of Goldfinger is as follows: Auric (rather than Ernö) Goldfinger is a Russian agent working for the underground organization SMERSH. His mission is to capture the West’s gold stocks by robbing Fort Knox and exporting one billion dollars’ worth of bullion to the Soviet Union, so precipitating an economic crisis. His villainy does not end there: he loves gold to the point of insanity, prefers his women to be decorated all over in gold paint before he has sex with them, and at one point executes an unfaithful secretary by leaving her to languish in this paint until her blocked pores cause her to suffocate (actually an impossible method of execution, though the victim might eventually die of heatstroke). At one point there is a golf match between Bond and Auric Goldfinger (who cheats, being foreign), perhaps as a nod to the original moment of titular inspiration on the golf course. Goldfinger is a typical James Bond romp, full of sexually voracious females with silly names, joke thermonuclear warheads, flash gadgets and casual racism. Auric Goldfinger is assumed to be Jewish and is introduced as follows: ‘You won’t believe it, but he’s a Britisher. Domiciled in Nassau. You’d think he’d be a Jew from the name, but he doesn’t look it.’ So even if Goldfinger is not actually fingered as Jewish he is tainted by association.

Some time before publication the real Goldfinger got wind of the book’s impending appearance and asked his solicitors to contact Jonathan Cape, Fleming’s publisher, for an explanation. Jonathan Cape sent a pre-publication copy of the novel to Goldfinger so that he could check it for libel. Libel was not difficult to spot. Both the real and the fictional Goldfinger exhibited Communistic tendencies (Ernö was a lifelong Marxist and had designed the Daily Worker building); in both cases there was the Jewish connection; a third similarity was a love of fast cars. Driving while a Jewish Communist was not, of course, a crime, or libellous in itself, but the fact that the fictional Goldfinger was also a murdering traitorous pervert was enough to give Ernö a good case for a libel suit if he so chose. He decided to sue.

Jonathan Cape behaved as sensible publishers do. They soothed the architect and suggested a number of concessions. They would not go as far as removing Goldfinger’s name from the jacket, but they would make sure that whenever it was mentioned in the text of the book it would be in the full form ‘Auric Goldfinger’, thus detaching the villain from his nominal model. There would also be the standard disclaimer at the front of the book: ‘The characters in this book are all fictional and no reference is intended to any person, alive or dead.’ Ernö would be sent six copies of the novel with the author’s compliments, and the publishers would pay all costs of the legal action incurred so far. Rather generously, Ernö agreed, and took no further action.

Fleming, however, was not pleased. It was a clash of two egos of rather similar size and shape. Fleming (also a womanizer, fast-car lover, occasional bully[2], etc.) considered getting his revenge by renaming the villain ‘Goldprick’ and inserting a slip into all the books explaining why this had had to be done: eventually he cooled off and the book went to press with the provisos Goldfinger’s solicitors had stipulated.

Fleming might have taken comfort from the fact that the huge success of the book and later the 1964 film produced some minor inconveniences for Ernö in later years. As Nigel Warburton reports in his biography of Goldfinger, the architect was often called late at night by people singing the song from the film (‘Gold... FINGer...’) or impersonating Sean Connery. Finally he began to enjoy his alter ego’s notoriety. He never had to repeat his name at parties. And in his office he kept prominently displayed one of his free first-edition copies of the novel.

Oddly enough Ernö Goldfinger inspired another literary creation. This time the book concerned did not bear his name but drew inspiration from his career. It was JG Ballard’s High Rise of 1975, which was almost certainly instigated by the furore associated with Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, a building completed a couple of years earlier. Trellick Tower was the most notorious of Britain’s high-rise residential blocks, and was given the tabloid nickname ‘The Tower of Terror’. The particular scale of Trellick Tower – the tallest of the Goldfinger buildings at thirty-one storeys – made it a symbolic scapegoat for all the perceived disadvantages of high-rise living: anonymity, lack of surveillance, multiple escape routes for criminals. In Ballard’s High Rise a tower block erected with the Le Corbusian ideals of a ‘machine made for living’ descends into anarchy as the inhabitants first retreat from one another, and then, as social conditions worsen, emerge with rudimentary weapons to shed one another’s blood. The high-rise dwelling becomes, as Ballard put it, ‘an environment built not for man, but for man’s absence’. As far as the real Trellick Tower was concerned, most of its problems with crime and drug-dealing had cleared up by the late 1980s, and by the turn of the century flats in the Tower were among the most sought-after in London: two-bedroom flats there now sell for £422,000 (2009 prices), and it is now a Grade II star listed building, which means it can never be demolished. It is certainly the best-known Brutalist high-rise in Britain, and among the most famous in Europe. High Rise, then, like many of Ballard’s other apocalypses (The Drowned World, The Burning World) seem, with the advantage of hindsight, more valuable as expressions of Ballard’s literary psychology than as social commentary or ‘prophecy’ in any conventional sense.

But the fact that Ballard attached himself to Ernö Goldfinger was a strange coincidence. What was it about this man? Goldfinger tended to accrue, as if by magnetism, a completely undeserved reputation for villainy.

[1] Goldfinger always denied that he had anything to do with the ‘Brutalist’ movement, which is not in itself surprising: the label was originally pejorative.
[2] Fleming’s wife Ann once wrote to him: ‘It's very lonely not to be beaten and shouted at every five minutes.’

Consulted:
Fleming, Ian: Goldfinger (Jonathan Cape, 1959)

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Warburton, Nigel: Ernö Goldfinger, The Life of an Architect (Routledge, 2004)
Gasiorek, Andrzej: J.G. Ballard‎ (2005)

145. The Threepenny Opera by Elisabeth Hauptmann and Bertolt Brecht

And now for something unashamedly feminist. Bertolt Brecht was a bastard. He wasn’t just a bastard, he was a talentless bastard. He stole all his best ideas from other people, usually the women in his life. He never had fewer than three mistresses on the go (always different ones) and expended most of his dramatic gifts in lying to them to keep them apart. When he wasn’t lying to them he was making them work as unpaid amanuenses. And one of his chief slaves, and one of the most unrecognized women in German theatrical history, was Elisabeth Hauptmann.

Well, all his might be a rather exaggerated and partisan way of putting it. But it is certainly the impression you get from reading John Fuegi’s The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (1994). What Fuegi does is to take apart the history of the plays and show that the works that we think of as being ‘by Brecht’ are more fruitfully approached if we think of them as being by the ‘Brecht production line’ (rather in the way that James Patterson’s novels are now written by ‘helpers’). Let’s take The Threepenny Opera as a test case.

When the theatrical impresario Ernst Aufricht accepted the manuscript of The Threepenny Opera from Brecht in mid-1928, the work he saw was almost entirely by Elisabeth Hauptmann. Hauptmann was Brecht’s lover and theatrical factotum, and had worked up the piece from a translation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Additions by Brecht, mainly in the form of material stolen from Villon and Kipling — and of course the music of Kurt Weill — completed the play we know today, but the basic structure was essentially a Hauptmann-Gay affair. By sheer force of personality Brecht is now known as its author.

Anyway, this is all a little irrelevant to the subject at hand, which is titles. So let’s look at the title. Brecht did not invent this either. His working titles had included Gesindel (Riff-Raff) and Ludenoper (Ragamuffin’s Opera), but the final name was bestowed one August evening in 1928 at Schlichter’s Café in Berlin by Lion Feuchtwanger, who came up with The Threepenny Opera in reference to the cut-price nature of the entertainment.

Bastard!

Consulted:
Hayman, Ronald: Brecht: A Biography‎ (1983)
Fuegi, John: The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (1994)

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144. The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Possessed, Dostoevsky’s novel of revolutionary politics in the pre-Soviet era, is one of those foreign-language titles that has more than one English variant: it has also been translated as The Devils, simply Devils, and Demons. The Possessed was Constance Garnett’s choice in her translation of 1913, but later critics noted that it really misses the point: Besy – the original Russian title – refers to possessors, not possessed. This makes for quite a change of emphasis: instead of the protagonists being ‘possessed’ by demonic forces, they themselves are the demons/devils, and must thus be held accountable for the misery they inflict. The Devils and Demons might therefore be considered more accurate.

Titles affect interpretations: perhaps the worst case of multiple-translation sickness is that of Sartre’s best-known play, Huis Clos, which has been variously rendered No Exit, Sequestered, Closed Hearing, Dead End, No Way Out and In Camera.

Hell is other titles?

Consulted:
F. Dostoevsky: Demons (see intro. by translators Pevear and Volokhonsky) (1995)

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