How Books Got their Titles

A whiff of camphor

2010-07-03T03:51:00.000-07:00

Hi visitors,

This blog is mothballed. However, the posts are all still here if needed (click on the link to the right to see an index). There are 181 stories of how books got their titles.

In this blog I set myself three conditions for inclusion. Firstly, each title should be the title of a major work: a book or play, rather than, say, a poem or short story. Secondly, the title should not be explicable by reading the text of the book or play itself: some additional biographical or other information should be essential for full comprehension. Thirdly, I have not dealt with too many books that take quotations as sources for titles, unless there is some rather unusual reason for the quotation.

I have relied on the efforts of a great many scholars to write this blog, and a list of sources is given at the end of each post.

Please continue to comment on any of these posts as you see fit and I will certainly respond.

Many thanks to all the visitors and commenters so far.

Gary

181. Fame is the Spur by Howard Spring

2010-04-06T04:08:00.000-07:00

Here's one for the day they announce the UK general election.

The title of Howard Spring’s bestseller of 1940 — about the rise to power of a Labour politician — encapsulates the truth that all politicians seek to deny: that they seek personal aggrandizement first and foremost, and that serving the people comes second. It came originally from Milton’s Lycidas (a poem which incidentally also provided the title for Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel). But Fame is the Spur is not a ‘quotation-title’ in quite the ordinary sense that, say, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath or A Handful of Dust are quotation-titles (if you can name the sources for all three, award yourself the points that you need today). The key is in what comes after. The full quote from Milton runs:

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days.

The penultimate word of the sentence, bearing in mind the political affiliation of the hero, is the pun that Spring wishes the reader to find.

180. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

2010-03-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

What is the connection between Ray Bradbury and Robert Pirsig? We tend to think of Pirsig’s novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) as having a title of unique quirky brilliance. But it drew for inspiration on a whole corpus of earlier books, many of which had been extremely well-known and successful. They included Zen in the Art of Archery (Eng trans. 1953) by Eugen Herrigel, a German philosophy professor who popularized Zen in the West; Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement (Eng trans. 1958) by Gustie Herrigel; Zen in the Art of Photography (1969) by Robert Leverant; and several others. These are all ‘Zen in’ rather than ‘Zen and’ titles: but Pirsig was not first in this either, since Ray Bradbury had written an influential and frequently-anthologized essay on the craft of fiction, ‘Zen and the Art of Writing’, as long before as 1958.

179. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

2010-03-04T01:40:00.000-08:00

The Good Soldier was published in the middle of the First World War, in 1915, and its title has misled many into thinking it is a tale of the trenches. It is not, of course: it is a story of romantic love and betrayal, set (and written) before the outbreak of war. The title came about by means of testy remark of its author. Ford’s original title was The Saddest Story, but his publishers felt that in wartime this would be a drug on the market, and asked for an alternative. Ford wrote back ironically: ‘Why not call the book “A Roaring Joke”? Or call it anything you like, or perhaps it would be better to call it “A Good Soldier” — that might do.’ In 1915 nothing was selling better than books about the war, and, to Ford’s ‘horror’, his publishers took up the suggestion. Ford saw that the real subject of the book had been entirely leached out; it was only partially restored by a new subtitle, A Tale of Passion.

Consulted:
Max Saunders: Ford Madox Ford: Volume I: The World Before the War (1996)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

178. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

2010-02-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

The titles of Jane Austen’s first two published novels have a symmetry it is impossible to ignore. They are Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). Both feature two opposed abstract nouns, and in doing so they drew on a titling strategy common at the turn of the nineteenth century: abstract noun titles, either dual or single, were very fashionable, especially as productions of women writers. We have, for example, Nature and Art (1796) by Elizabeth Inchbald; Love and Fashion (1799) by Fanny Burney; Self-Control (1811) and Discipline (1814) by Mary Brunton; and Patronage (1814) by Maria Edgeworth. We might recall that one of Jane Austen’s earliest efforts at prose fiction was called Love and Freindship (sic) and that the first draft of Pride and Prejudice (completed in 1797) was entitled First Impressions. Jane Austen also wrote to her niece Anna in 1814 about Anna’s novel, tentatively entitled Enthusiasm, saying that such a title was ‘something so very superior.’

So in her early career Jane Austen was writing to capture a market, deploying her abstract-noun titles as fashionable bait. But with Pride and Prejudice something else was happening under the surface.

Jane Austen was a great admirer of the playwright and novelist Fanny Burney. Burney’s first two novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), were bestsellers, and she went on to have further success with Camilla (1796). In Northanger Abbey Austen referred to Cecilia and Camilla as the patterns of achievement in the novel form:

'And what are you reading, Miss — ?' 'Oh! It is only a novel!' replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda'; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

In a letter of 1796 Jane talks about an acquaintance, a Miss Fletcher, who admires Camilla – this being one of two ‘pleasing’ aspects of her personality, the other that ‘she drinks no cream in her tea’ – and in Persuasion she has Anne Elliot mention a character from Cecilia (‘the inimitable Miss Larolles’). And it seems that it was from Cecilia that Austen got the title for her best-loved novel. Cecilia ends with a paragraph in which the capitalized phrase ‘PRIDE and PREJUDICE’ recurs three times:

'The whole of this unfortunate business,’ said Dr Lyster, ‘has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Your uncle, the Dean, began it, by his arbitrary will, as if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature! and as if he had power to keep alive, by the loan of a name, a family in the male branch already extinct. Your father, Mr Mortimer, continued it with the same self-partiality, preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife. Yet this, however, remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination: for all that I could say to Mr Delvile, either of reasoning or entreaty, – and I said all I could suggest, and I suggested all a man need wish to hear, – was totally thrown away, till I pointed out to him his own disgrace, in having a daughter-in-law immured in these mean lodgings!’

Austen, then, was an admirer of Burney, and in many ways was indebted to her. But as the critic Janet Todd has pointed out, Pride and Prejudice marks an important departure from the conventions of Cecilia – and indeed from the conventions of the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century ‘courtship novel’ in general. In Cecilia the ‘pride and prejudice’ the unhappy lovers encounter are the pride and prejudice of society against their union. In Austen’s treatment, by contrast, pride and prejudice are internalized, existing within the breasts of the main characters: Fitzwilliam Darcy is the embodiment of pride, and Elizabeth Bennet the embodiment of prejudice. This represents a major psychological shift. No longer is the heroine a passive repository of virtue, as in the standard eighteenth-century novel (one might think in this context of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa): Elizabeth Bennet is a heroine of considerable personal charm and wit, but is not without faults. Jane Austen wanted a more rounded heroine. ‘Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked,’ she wrote to Fanny Knight in March 1817.

Pride and Prejudice therefore continues the Burney line but introduces new elements. They were new enough to make her more celebrated than any female novelist before George Eliot.

Consulted:
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice, ed. Tony Tanner (Penguin Classics, 2003)
Todd, Janet M.: Jane Austen in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Austen, Jane, and Chapman, RW (ed.): Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others‎ (OUP, 1969)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

177. Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring

2010-02-15T05:27:00.000-08:00

Arsenic and Old Lace is generally associated with the 1944 film starring Cary Grant, about two old ladies who murder their gentlemen-visitors. Before that, though, it was a long-running play on Broadway, the most successful of the plays of Joseph Kesselring. The play got its title from a previous, and now largely forgotten, sentimental novel of 1902, Lavender and Old Lace, by Myrtle Reed. Reed’s titles tended towards the fey (e.g. Old Rose and Silver; Threads of Grey and Gold) and were much parodied as a result. Now that her fragrant opus has dropped out of folk memory it is Arsenic and Old Lace that we think of as the original. The two titles were neatly conjoined by Carl Sandburg in his poem ‘Now They Bury Her Again’ (an elegy on the death of poetry): ‘Under the sod with regrets and embellishments/ they lay away a lady in lavender and old lace,/ in arsenic and old lace.’

Consulted:
Herzberg, Max John: The Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature‎ (1962)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

176. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima

2010-02-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

When made into a film in 1976, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea was described by Punch as ‘an everyday tale of torture, scopophilia, copulation, masturbation, dismemberment and antique dealing’. All true, though the original title of Mishima’s 1963 novel was rather different. It was Gogo no Eiko, which hinges crucially on the homonym eiko, and can be rendered either ‘An Afternoon’s Glory’ or ‘An Afternoon’s Towing’. Mishima’s English translator, John Nathan, was stumped (all he could think of was Glory is a Drag) and went to the author for help. Mishima, who hungered after the Nobel Prize, decided he wanted ‘a long title in the manner of À la Recherche’ — perhaps to impress the committee — and chose The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, in reference to the (extremely gruesome) downfall of the main character. But it did him little good: sales were disappointing, even in Japan.

Consulted:
Nathan, John: Mishima: A Biography‎ (1975)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

175. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

2010-02-05T00:48:00.000-08:00

The Importance of Being Earnest contains a pun, that much seems clear. Shaw said in his review of 1895 that the wordplay on Ernest/Earnest was not in fact a very good pun, and that the title as a whole was rather laboured and old-fashioned. But Shaw might have missed something. ‘Earnest’ quite likely plays on Urning, the German word for ‘homosexual’ coined in the 1860s by the sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and a term much in vogue in the England of the 1890s. That its derivative was ‘Earnest’ is borne out in the title of a collection of homoerotic love lyrics, Love in Earnest, by John Gambril Nicholson, published in 1892 (three years before Wilde’s play). One poem in the collection, ‘Of Boys’ Names’, makes the point clear:

Old memories of the Table Round
In Percival and Lancelot dwell,
Clement and Bernard bring the sound
Of anthems in the cloister-cell,
And Leonard vies with Lionel
In stately step and kingly frame,
And Kenneth speaks of field and fell,
And Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

One name can make my pulses bound,
No peer it owns, nor parallel,
By it is Vivian’s sweetness drowned,
And Roland, full as organ-swell;
Though Frank may ring like silver bell,
And Cecil softer music claim,
They cannot work the miracle,—
’Tis Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

Cyril is lordly, Stephen crowned
With deathless wreaths of asphodel,
Oliver whispers peace profound,
Herbert takes arms his foes to quell,
Eustace with sheaves is laden well,
Christopher has a nobler fame,
And Michael storms the gates of Hell,
But Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

Envoy.
My little Prince, Love’s mystic spell
Lights all the letters of your name,
And you, if no one else, can tell
Why Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

Consulted:
Craft, Christopher: Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920 (1994)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

174. Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca

2010-02-02T01:13:00.000-08:00

The Spanish title of Lorca’s great modernist play is Bodas de Sangre, or ‘Wedding of Blood’. The title and theme came from a murder committed in 1928 in the town of Nijar in the Spanish province of Almería, when a young woman, Francisca Cañada Morales, ran off with her cousin, Francisco Montes Cañada, moments before her wedding to a local man. The cousin was then shot dead by the prospective bridegroom’s brother. Lorca read about the incident in the Heraldo de Madrid newspaper and kept the cutting until he came to write the play in 1932. One odd titular circumstance remains to complicate matters, however. In 1927, a year before the murders, a film called Bodas Sangrientas (‘Bloody Wedding’) was shown in Barcelona and Madrid, based on the novel Beatrice Cenci by Luciano Doria. It’s not known whether Lorca saw the film; some critics are more sanguine than others.

Consulted:
Lima, Robert: The Theatre of García Lorca‎ (1963)

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173. A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift

2010-01-28T14:56:00.000-08:00

A Tale of a Tub sounds simple, but isn’t. Swift explained that it derived from a nautical tradition in which sailors, when menaced by a whale, would throw a tub overboard for it to play with; symbolically, the whale was Hobbes’s atheistical tract Leviathan, and the tub Swift’s own book, intended to distract it from scuttling the ship of state.

But this can only be a partial explanation. The phrase ‘a tale of a tub’ was slang for ‘a cock-and-bull story’, and had been the title of a 1596 comedy by Ben Jonson, as well as featuring in works such as Webster’s The White Devil. A ‘tub’, too, was slang for a pulpit, and Swift was a clergyman.

Perhaps another important influence was Rabelais: Swift greatly admired Rabelais and modelled his prose style partly on him, and the phrase ‘a tale of a tub’ appears several times in the Urquhart translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Consulted:
Jonathan Swift, Angus Ross, and David Woolley: A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (Oxford World's Classics, 2008)

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172. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus

2010-01-26T06:53:00.000-08:00

The phrase ‘oldest living confederate widow’ came to Allan Gurganus in the form of a newspaper headline — he had merely to add ‘tells all’ and the title was ready for dispatch. It was 1981, and Gurganus was staying at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in New York State while working on his novel The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church (Mr Gurganus has an eye for titles). On his way to the swimming-pool one day he spied the newspaper in the foyer and, despite already having put in a good days’ work, ran immediately back to his room to type the ninety-nine-year-old Lucy Marsden’s confessions. In 1981 there were indeed still living confederate widows, having married ex-soldiers at young ages: the last widow, Daisy Cave, who married her husband in 1919 when she was in her twenties and he 75, survived into the early 1990s.

Consulted:
Gee, Robin: Novel and Short Story Writer's Market (1991)

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171. The Revolt of Islam by Percy Bysshe Shelley

2010-01-19T11:38:00.000-08:00

The title of Shelley’s epic The Revolt of Islam is perhaps better known today than it used to be. But in its earliest edition the poem was called Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City. In 1818 ‘revolution’ inevitably meant France, and Shelley’s publishers were nervous chaps; they quickly requested a change to something more innocuous, and The Revolt of Islam, strange to modern ears, was chosen so as not to frighten the horses. Oriental exoticism, in publishing terms, was ‘safe’. But ‘Islam’, which refers to the religion of the tyrant Othman in the poem, has little to do with the poem’s main themes, which are concerned with political liberty and doomed love: Shelley himself admitted that the poem was ‘without much attempt at minute delineation of Mahometan manners’, and that it ‘might be supposed to take place in an European nation.’

Consulted:
Nigel Leask: British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (2004)

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170. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

2010-01-16T03:35:00.000-08:00

Wilde did not choose the title De Profundis. After composing his famous letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) in Reading Gaol in 1897, he gave it to his friend and literary executor Robert Ross, with a semi-serious suggestion for a title: Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis (‘Letter: In Prison and in Chains’). Ross, however, ignored the suggestion, publishing it in 1905, five years after Wilde’s death, with the title De Profundis (‘from the depths’, an allusion to Psalm 130). Ross’s title stands in a long line of literary De Profundises. Baudelaire had tried one, as had Christina Rossetti (though they both were considerably briefer than Wilde’s); later on Dorothy Parker and CS Lewis had a go. One other note of titular interest is that in 1924 Douglas published his sonnet sequence In Excelsis (‘from the heights’). This was also written in prison — he got six months for libelling Churchill — and was intended to mirror Ross’s title.

Consulted:
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Ian Small, Russell Jackson (2005)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

169. How Come? by Eddie Hunter

2010-01-11T03:15:00.000-08:00

‘How come?’ would be a good question for the author of any perplexing title. In this case the question is: 'How come How Come? ?'

Eddie Hunter was a comedian and writer of the Harlem Renaissance who, during a dry spell in his career, took work as a lift attendant. He worked in a building frequented by Enrico Caruso, and would perform skits and songs for the illustrious tenor as he took him up and down. On one occasion Caruso asked him: ‘How come you are always on duty when I take the elevator?’ and the title was born. The play How Come? opened at the Apollo Theatre, New York, in 1923, though with a plot little to do with opera or elevators — it featured a crooked secretary who steals from a bootblack parlour. It was less successful than his other plays (Struttin’ Hannah, Good Gracious, Going to the Races), but did include an acting part for Sidney Bechet.

Consulted:
Kellner, Bruce: The Harlem Renaissance (1984)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

168. Timber by Ben Jonson

2010-01-08T13:47:00.000-08:00

Timber, or Discoveries, is a posthumous work of 1640 by Ben Jonson. It is a loose volume of literary reflections and observations, and is notable for containing one of the few contemporary accounts of Shakespeare, including the famous words: ‘I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.’ 'Timber' is a pun, one that Jonson worked almost to death in the rest of his literary output. The Latin for ‘wood’ or ‘forest’ is silva, and silva can also mean ‘a collection’ (as in the Silvae of the Roman poet Statius). 'Timber' thus signifies a collection of useful, consumable offerings. Other works of Jonson that played on the same idea were The Forest (1616) and The Underwood (1640).

Dryden and Cowley, amongst others, also wrote Silvae, but the genre has no real modern equivalent. Is the art of disconnected literary ramblings dying out?

Consulted:
The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson‎, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (2000)

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167. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak

2010-01-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

In the Night Kitchen (1970) won the Caldecott medal and was Sendak's follow-up to the success of Where the Wild Things Are. It had its origin in a childhood resentment against bakeries that worked at night. ‘When I was a child,’ Sendak said in an interview, ‘there was an advertisement which I remember very clearly. It was for the Sunshine bakers, and it read: “We Bake While You Sleep!” It seemed to me the most sadistic thing in the world because all I wanted to do was stay up and watch…It bothered me a good deal, and I remember I used to save the coupons showing the three fat little Sunshine bakers going off to this magic place at night, wherever it was, to have their fun, while I had to go to bed. This book was a sort of vendetta book to get back at them and to say that I am now old enough to stay up at night and know what's happening in the Night Kitchen!’

Consulted:
Margaret Meek: The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children's Reading (1977)

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166. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

2009-12-27T01:06:00.000-08:00

There is no pier at Wigan, of course: Wigan is inland. The original ‘pier’ was a small staithe for discharging coal into barges on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, and was made famous long before Orwell’s time in a music hall joke by George Formby senior (the joke ran something like this: some miners are on their way to Southport for a day out, but their train is delayed when the tracks are flooded: they ask where they are and the signalman says ‘Wigan Pier’). Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier mentions the pier briefly only once, in the form of a regret that he couldn’t find it — unsurprising since it had been demolished around 1929, several years before he wrote the book.

The staithe today has been reconstructed as part of a ‘Wigan Pier experience’ project, including a museum and pub — named, inevitably, ‘The Orwell’.

Consulted:
Wigan Heritage Services: phone 01942 828020 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 01942 828020 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

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165. Peter Pan by JM Barrie

2009-12-22T00:06:00.000-08:00

It is well known that Peter Pan was named after Peter Llewellyn-Davies, one of the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies, friends of Barrie’s and the models for Mr and Mrs Darling: ‘Pan’ came from the Greek god. What is perhaps less well known is that Peter Llewellyn-Davies was named after another fictional character, Peter Ibbetson, the eponymous hero of George Du Maurier’s popular novel of 1891 (Du Maurier was Peter’s grandfather). Peter, then, was sandwiched between two well-known fictional creations, a burden for later life to rival Christopher Robin Milne’s (the original of Winnie-the-Pooh's Christopher Robin) or Alice Liddell’s (of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). He threw himself under a train in 1960: by then he had survived the Somme and the violent deaths of two of his brothers, and so had plenty of reasons for his fragile mental state — but the papers still insisted on reporting it as ‘Peter Pan's Death Leap’.

Consulted:
Birkin, Andrew: J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys‎ (1979)

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164. The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan

2009-12-17T23:52:00.000-08:00

The Browning Version – familiar to many from the film of 1951 starring Michael Redgrave, but originally a stage-play of 1948 - was inspired by the playwright, Terence Rattigan’s, experiences at Harrow from 1925 to 1930. The emotionally-entombed classics master Andrew Crocker-Harris (‘the Crock’) was based on one JW Coke Norris, a classics master, whose moribund manner was much at variance with the passionate nature of the texts he was supposed to be teaching. Coke Norris, like ‘the Crock’, was also in charge of the school timetables, and retired during Rattigan’s time at the school. The ‘Browning version’ of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon — mirrored in the relationship between Crocker-Harris and his wife Millie (a modern Clytemnestra) — was Rattigan’s own passionate reading-matter during this time; and the basis of the relationship between Taplow and ‘the Crock’ was Rattigan’s homosexual crush on another master at the school.

Consulted:
Wansell, Geoffrey: Terence Rattigan‎ (1995)

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Brief hiatus

2009-12-02T15:40:00.000-08:00

To all Titleists, I'm off on holiday for a fortnight. Check back again around the 17th December - there are plenty more title stories to come.

Bye for now
Gary

163. Oh! Calcutta! by Kenneth Tynan and others

2009-12-01T06:03:00.000-08:00

The title Oh! Calcutta! was inspired by a painting by the Surrealist Clovis Trouille (1889-1975) called Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta!; it depicts a reclining woman draped in rich fabrics and revealing a pair of plump buttocks decorated with tattooed fleur-de-lis. The choice came about in 1966. Ken Tynan’s wife Kathleen was writing an article on Trouille, and knew that Ken admired the derrière in question: when she suggested it as the title of his play he accepted with alacrity. What neither Katherine nor Ken knew, however — until later — was that the title Oh! Calcutta! Calcutta! was a pun. Calcutta stands in for ‘Quel cul t’as!’, or ‘What an arse you’ve got!’ Similar punning potentialities were of course exploited by Marcel Duchamp in his famous study of a moustachioed Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q. (‘Elle a chaud au cul’, or, ‘She’s got a hot arse’).

Consulted
Tynan, Kathleen: The Life of Kenneth Tynan (1987)

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162. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

2009-11-27T05:26:00.000-08:00

One day in January 1931 Stella Gibbons was having lunch with her friend Elizabeth Coxhead. The pair were young journalists at The Lady, and neither had yet published a book (Coxhead was later a novelist and biographer). Gibbons told Coxhead that she was writing a take-off of ‘all the grim farm novels’ (such as those of Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb, DH Lawrence, and others, sometimes known as the 'loam and lovechild' genre), to be called Curse God Farm; Coxhead replied that it was a good idea but that she should call it Cold Comfort Farm. When asked where she had got such a marvellous name, Coxhead told her that it was the name of a farm near Hinckley belonging to a grammar school where her father was headmaster. So Gibbons, recognising that nature always trumps art, changed the title of her book. It was an enormous success and won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933.

The real ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ still exists, although the present owners have re-named it ‘Comfort Farm’. It is not known whether or not it has a woodshed.

Consulted:
Oliver, Reggie: Out of the Woodshed: Portrait of Stella Gibbons (1998)

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161. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

2009-11-25T00:29:00.000-08:00

Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose suffered from lifelong mental illness, and underwent a pre-frontal lobotomy in 1937. The operation was new and untested, and in Rose’s case was a disastrous failure, leaving her permanently brain-damaged. She spent the rest of her life in institutions, unsure who she or her family were, and convinced that she was forever twenty-eight years old. Tennessee Williams’ attempt to explore the tragedy of Rose gave rise to many of his greatest plays, and Rose herself appears in various guises throughout his work.

The Rose-theme begins with Tennessee Williams’ earliest major work in the theatre, The Glass Menagerie. This play began around 1941 as a short story called ‘Portrait of a Girl in Glass’, which was later expanded into a screenplay entitled The Gentleman Caller, before becoming The Glass Menagerie in 1944. The plot is as follows. The Wingfield family live a drab existence in a cramped flat in St Louis, Missouri. Amanda, the matriarch, aspires to a life of delicate Southern gentility, but this has long ago become impossible: her husband walked out on her fifteen years ago, leaving her to bring up her two children. As the play opens the children are in their twenties. They are Tom, a warehouseman with literary aspirations, and Laura, a mentally-fragile young woman with a limp who seeks solace in her collection of little glass animals. Laura’s nickname in the play is ‘Blue Roses’, a reference to a bout of pleurisy (pleuroses/blue roses) she’d had as a youngster. When one day Tom brings his friend Jim home from work, Amanda makes lavish preparations, hoping Jim might make a husband for Laura, and things appear to augur well when Laura realizes that Jim is the young man she’d fallen in love with at school. Amanda and Tom leave Laura and Jim together for a sultry evening, but Jim reveals that he is engaged to be married. Before leaving he accidentally knocks over and breaks one of Laura’s glass animals (a unicorn). After he has gone Amanda rounds hysterically on Tom, accusing him of bringing Jim home under false pretences, saying that Tom must have known all along about the engagement. The play ends as Tom addresses the audience, from the perspective of several years in the future:

Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger – anything that can blow your candles out! For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura – and so good-bye.

'Tom’ was Tennessee himself (‘Thomas’ was Tennessee’s original name); ‘Amanda’ was his mother, also a heroically-declining Southern Belle; and ‘Laura’ was his sister Rose, who did indeed own a menagerie of little glass animals. Tennessee said in an interview with the New York Times in 1945 that the play was

semi-autobiographical, based on the conditions of my life in St Louis. The apartment where we lived wasn’t as dingy and poverty-stricken as that in the play, but I can’t say much for it, even so. It was a rented, furnished apartment, all over-stuffed furniture, and the only nice room in it was my sister’s room. That room was painted white and she had put up a lot of shelves and filled them with little glass animals. When I’d come home from the shoe place where I worked – my father owned it, I hated it – I would go and sit in her room. She was the member of the family with whom I was most in sympathy, and, looking back, her glass menagerie had a meaning for me. Nostalgia helped – it makes the little flat in the play more attractive really than our apartment was – and as I thought about it the glass animals came to represent the fragile, delicate ties that must be broken, that you inevitably break, when you try to fulfill yourself.

Tennessee’s brother Dakin went further and said it was ‘a virtually literal rendering of our family life at 6254 Enright Avenue, St Louis, even though the physical setting is that of an earlier apartment, at Westminster Place. There was a real Jim O’Connor, who was brought home for my sister. The Tom of the play is my brother Tom, and Amanda Wingfield is clearly my mother.’

The glass animals therefore represent the fragility of his sister Rose, her sad attempt at feminine delicacy in a rundown flat, and the bonds that must be broken if anyone is to find personal freedom.

Tennessee never forgave his parents for authorizing the lobotomy that left Rose so scarred, and continued writing about Rose for the rest of his life. The desire to document the tragedy of Rose can be seen clearly in The Glass Menagerie, but it is also present in plays such as The Purification, The Two-Character-Play, Suddenly Last Summer – in which one character, Catherine, is also threatened with a lobotomy – and The Rose Tattoo, where she even appears in the title.

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160. Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo

2009-11-21T02:28:00.000-08:00

On 12 December 1969 a bomb exploded at a bank in the Piazza Fontana, Milan, killing 16 people and injuring scores more. Several anarchists were immediately arrested, and one, Giuseppe Pinelli, a 41-year-old railway worker, died after three days in police custody when he plummeted from a fourth-storey window. No charges were brought against the police. This was the event that inspired Dario Fo’s play, though there is no mention of Pinelli in it, and the events are fictional: the main characters instead are one Inspector Bertozzo and an unnamed ‘Maniac’. The nicely-judged irony of the title goes some way to explaining why Fo won the Nobel Prize: it is not Murder of an Anarchist but Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Pinelli was posthumously exonerated of the crime, which was later attributed to terrorists on the far right.

Consulted
Behan, Tom: Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre‎ (2000)

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159. Pass Me a Meatball, Jones by James Matthews

2009-11-18T00:26:00.000-08:00

This collection of poems by anti-apartheid campaigner James Matthews (author of No Time for Dreams and Cry Rage!) was written while under detention at Victor Verster Maximum Security Prison in 1976. It was published the following year, and, like his other work, promptly banned. A highly personal volume, it contains much about loneliness, despair, fear of torture and yearning for freedom, but nothing about meatballs, or anyone by the name of Jones. Matthews said in an interview in 2002 that the title came about after the inmates won a legal battle for the right to buy provisions from outside, and he was thus at long last able to indulge his craving for meatballs: Jones was Peter Jones, a fellow prisoner. The volume was later shorn of its baffling title and re-published as Poems from a Prison Cell.

Consulted:
Adhikari, Mohamed: Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (2005)

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158. Prufrock and Other Observations by TS Eliot

2009-11-15T02:40:00.000-08:00

This sombre volume was Eliot’s first collection, and the title poem — ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ — was what brought him to the attention of Ezra Pound. The rest, of course, is history: Pound was forever after heavily involved in Eliot’s career, and ‘The Waste Land’, as we now know it, would have been impossible without him.

The name of J. Alfred Prufrock was almost certainly suggested by the Prufrock-Littau furniture company, at Fourth and St. Charles Streets, St Louis, the city of Eliot’s birth and poetic evolution. The company had a literary connection: it advertised its wares in Reedy’s Weekly, a St Louis literary periodical of the 1900-1920 period. When asked by a correspondent in the 1950s whether this was indeed the origin of the name, Eliot replied: ‘I did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any recollection of having acquired the name in this way, but I think that it must be assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated.’ (He might have added: ‘And now go away.’)

Consulted:
Modern Language Notes, Vol. 66, 1951, p 401 (accessed via JSTOR)

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157. The Admirable Crichton by JM Barrie

2009-11-12T02:38:00.000-08:00

Rhetorician, scholar, wit, musician, fencer, lover and all-round good guy, James Crichton of Clunie (1560-82) was the origin of the ‘admirable’ Crichton of Barrie’s famous play. Crichton lived his short life at tornado pace: he gained his MA at fifteen, could speak ten languages (including Chaldean) by the age of 20, and became a military advisor to the Duke of Mantua aged 21, in which capacity he was assassinated by a rival aged only 22. He was soon dubbed the ‘admirable’ Crichton (and appears as such in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair). Barrie, a fellow Scot, chose the epithet for the title of his play about a butler stranded with his employers on a desert island, but the stolid figure of Crichton the butler (who despite being the obvious superior of his aristocratic employers finally insists on his own lowly place in the social order) is rather incongruously at odds with that of the dashing 16th-century prodigy.

Consulted:
Tytler, Patrick Fraser: The Life of James Crichton of Cluny, Commonly Called the Admirable Crichton (1819)

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156. A Man’s a Man by Bertolt Brecht

2009-11-09T05:30:00.000-08:00

For English readers, the title of Brecht’s play A Man’s a Man (1926) has echoes of Rabbie Burns —‘A man’s a man for a’ that’. But the original German title has a twist it is impossible to render in English. It is Mann ist Mann, which can, in German, be heard either as ‘Man is Man’ or ‘Man Eats Man’, since ‘ist’ (‘is’) and ‘isst’ (’eats’) are homophones.

The play, set in British India, deals with a fish porter who is brainwashed into assuming the identity of a dead soldier, and, as the action progresses, witnesses and commits numerous atrocities. Brecht claimed the play presented a ‘new human type...mendacious, optimistic, flexible’: and in the light of current events of 1926 — thousands were joining the Nazis — this seems prescient. Man is predatory and cannibalistic, and Germany, under the guise of national renewal, was consuming itself.

Consulted:
Hayman, Ronald: Brecht: A Biography‎ (1983)

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Index

2009-11-04T04:05:00.000-08:00

A clickable index of titles covered so far...

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke

A

Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo
The Admirable Crichton by JM Barrie
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol l
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara
Arden of Faversham, possibly by William Shakespeare
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
Astrophil and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney

B

The Bald Prima Donna by Eugene Ionesco
Blade Runner (a Movie) by William Burroughs
Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca
The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan

C

Cahoot’s Macbeth by Tom Stoppard
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Chamber Music by James Joyce
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Chrononhotonthologos by Henry Carey
Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper, by Charles Perrault
Clélie by Madeleine de Scudéry
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville
Crash by JG Ballard

D

La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
Difficulties with Girls by Kingsley Amis
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

E

The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud
Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb
The Escaped Cock by DH Lawrence
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

F

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
Fam and Yam by Edward Albee
Fanny Hill by John Cleland
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
The Four Million by O Henry
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

G

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
Generation X by Douglas Coupland
The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius
Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
Goodbye Mr Chips by James Hilton
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Great American Novel by Philip Roth
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

H

Hamlet by William Shakespeare
High Windows by Philip Larkin
The Homecoming by Harold Pinter
The Hothouse by Harold Pinter

I

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol
The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott

J

Jaws by Peter Benchley
John Thomas and Lady Jane by DH Lawrence

K

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

L

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Life in London by Pierce Egan
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord Emsworth and Others by PG Wodehouse
Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Marquez

M

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
Married Love by Marie Stopes
A Man’s a Man by Bertolt Brecht
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
The Mint by TE Lawrence
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham
My Man Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
The Mystery of Marie Roget by Edgar Allan Poe

N

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Necronomicon, not by HP Lovecraft
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The New Testament by Various Hands
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
No Thanks by EE Cummings
Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith

O

Oh! Calcutta! by Kenneth Tynan and others
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by TS Eliot
Oleanna by David Mamet
The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
Othello by William Shakespeare

P

Pamela by Samuel Richardson
A Passage to India by EM Forster
Pass Me a Meatball, Jones by James Matthews
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Peter Pan by JM Barrie
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Playboy of the Western World by JM Synge
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell by The Brontes
The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain
The Prelude by William Wordsworth
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Prufrock and Other Observations by TS Eliot

R

The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope
Rasselas by Samuel Johnson
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
The Republic by Plato
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
The Revolt of Islam by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Rhymes to be Traded for Bread by Vachel Lindsay
The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning
The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
The Room by Harold Pinter
The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams

S

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Salt Seller by Marcel Duchamp
Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
The Scum Manifesto by Valerie Solanas
The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence
Shamela by Henry Fielding
Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens
Something Happened by Joseph Heller
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

T

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America by Anne Bradstreet
The Threepenny Opera by Elisabeth Hauptmann and Bertolt Brecht
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
Timber by Ben Jonson
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

U

Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry
Ulysses by James Joyce
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
Utopia by Thomas More

V

Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton by Dennis Potter

W

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Waste Land by TS Eliot
While England Slept by Winston Churchill
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
Winnie-the-Pooh by AA Milne
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The Worm and the Ring by Anthony Burgess

XYZ

You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe

155. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

2009-11-03T01:26:00.000-08:00

Often cited as the most ingenious of Christie’s novels, And Then There Were None has had a chequered titular history. It was originally Ten Little Niggers, after a Victorian minstrel show song published by Frank Green in 1869, in which ten boys are bumped off in various unpleasant ways. Christie’s novel, following the song, involved ten deaths, and was set on the consummately un-PC ‘Nigger Island’ off the coast of Devon. As the twentieth century wore on, the title was tweaked variously as Ten Little Indians and And Then There Were None (the last line of the original song): but Ten Little Niggers persisted in Fontana reprints until (quite astonishingly) as late as 1981. When adapted as a play and film the work acquired several further titles, with one production trying to mend matters by calling itself Ten Little Redskins.

Consulted:
Sanders, Dennis; Lovallo, Len: The Agatha Christie Companion (1984)

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154. Chrononhotonthologos: The Most Tragical Tragedy that ever was Tragediz’d by any Company of Tragedians by Henry Carey

2009-11-01T02:56:00.000-08:00

This play has the most ludicrous opening in the whole of English literature:

[Enter RIGDUM-FUNNIDOS and ALDIBORONTIPHOSCOPHORNIO]

RIG.-FUN.: Aldiborontiphoscophorniol
Where left you Chrononhotonthologos?
ALDI.: Fatigu’d with the tremendous Toils of War,
Within his Tent, on downy Couch succumbent,
Himself he unfatigues with gentle Slumbers.

Written around 1734 by Henry Carey, the Tory wit and Scriblerian, it mocks the doings of Robert Walpole and the monarchy, and revolves around such matters as the Queen’s diarrhoea and the King’s insomnia. As the historian of burlesque VC Clinton-Baddeley put it: ‘Carey is important because of his delight in pure extravagance.’ The play’s sesquipedalian title was inspired by antique models such as the Batrachomyomachia (a parody of the Iliad), and became so well-known that for decades afterward a ‘chrononhotonthologos’ (the King’s name in the play) was a synonym for a braggart or blusterer: it might be rendered ‘one who spends time over hot words’. It certainly got Carey into hot water. It was one of the plays that goaded the Whig establishment into passing the Licensing Act of 1737, which effectively muzzled the theatre.

Carey invented the word ‘namby-pamby’, by the way, to describe a fellow scribbler, Ambrose Philips.

Consulted:
Clinton-Baddeley, V. C.: The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (1952)

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153. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

2009-10-28T04:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-26T04:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-13T00:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-07T01:44:00.000-07:00

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)

See a clickable index of all titles covered
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

2009-10-04T02:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-02T09:31:00.000-07:00

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)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

143. Chamber Music by James Joyce

2009-09-28T01:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-25T04:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-22T02:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-19T02:08:00.000-07:00

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.)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

139. Clélie by Madeleine de Scudéry

2009-09-16T01:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-13T04:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-07T00:13:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-04T01:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-01T01:48:00.000-07:00

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)

133. Grimus by Salman Rushdie

2009-08-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

Grimus (1975) was Rushdie’s first novel. The book is a riot of wordplay in which anagrams take a central role. Among its characters are the Gorfs, who live on the planet Thera in the galaxy of Yawy Klim (the Frogs who live on the planet Earth in the Milky Way): and the figure who gives the book its title, the creator Grimus, has a name which is an anagram of Simurg, the mythical bird of Persian mysticism, a symbol that ties the book together.

Books with anagrammatic titles are few and far between. Erewhon by Samuel Butler is an anagram, rather than a perfect reversal of ‘Nowhere’ (see this previous post). Rocket Boys, by Homer Hickam Jr, is an anagram of ‘October Sky’, and October Sky was the name of the film based on the book. Rocket Boys was then re-published as October Sky to tie in with the film.

Francis Heaney’s Holy Tango of Literature is perhaps the ne plus ultra of the phenomenon. ‘Holy Tango’ unscrambles to ‘Anthology’, and each chapter is a parody of a writer based on an anagrammatic rendering of that writer’s name. Among the funniest is ‘Kong Ran My Dealership’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (below, with permission of the author):

Kong Ran My Dealership

TO OUR SALES LEADER

I hired last summer someone simian, King
Kong of Indies islands, fifty-foot-fierce gorilla, out of hiding
After falling, feigning final death but breathing yet, and biding
Time there, how he swore that he could sell any third-rate thing
In a car lot! To the old, old Ford with a ding,
As a snake oil sales spiel hooks a hill-hick, the ape was guiding
A mark by monstrous hand, the rube then riding
Afar in that car, – to escape him, an appeasement in the wing!

Brute blarney to offer as options wheels, brakes, boot, seat
Buckles, AND to roar. He breaks from his pen, he lumbers
Towards pale patrons, so dangerous, O who will he eat?

No wonder of it: sheer fear makes Kong’s sales numbers
Rise, though swift syringe stuck in his feet
Can tranquilize, so King Kong slumbers.

Any other books with anagrammatic titles? If you know of any let me know.

I'm now off on holiday till the 1st September, but check back soon.

132. The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire

2009-08-21T00:36:00.000-07:00

Baudelaire’s famous and influential collection (remember Eliot’s ‘Hypocrite lecteur’? That was Baudelaire) was originally entitled, and advertised as, The Lesbians. Then, some time before publication in 1857, Baudelaire changed his mind (there are precious few lesbians in the book) and decided on Limbo. But Limbo, as it happened, had recently been used by another poet, Georges Durand. In the throes of his disappointment Baudelaire retired to his favorite café and there held a naming competition. The critic Hippolyte Babou came up with Les Fleurs du Mal, and the suggestion was cheered by the company. Baudelaire saw the title’s oxymoronic force, and saw too the way it suggested the medieval idea that plants are the emblems of sins: he later he drew up a frontispiece in which seven evil plants are shown stifling the tree of knowledge.

Not everyone liked the title. Henry James used it to focus on what he thought were the deficiencies of Baudelaire’s poetry:

‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ was a very happy title for Baudelaire’s verses, but it is not altogether a just one. Scattered flowers incontestably do bloom in the quaking swamps of evil, and the poet who does not mind encountering bad odours in his pursuit of sweet ones is quite at liberty to go in search of them. But Baudelaire has, as a general thing, not plucked the flowers — he has plucked the evil-smelling weeds (we take it that he did not use the word flowers in a purely ironical sense) and he has often taken up mere cupfuls of mud and bog-water. He had said to himself that it was a great shame that the realm of evil and unclean things should be fenced off from the domain of poetry; that it was full of subjects, of chances and effects; that it had its light and shade, its logic and its mystery; and that there was the making of some capital verses in it. So he leaped the barrier and was soon immersed in it up to his neck. Baudelaire’s imagination was of a melancholy and sinister kind, and, to a considerable extent, this plunging into darkness and dirt was doubtless very spontaneous and disinterested. But he strikes us on the whole as passionless, and this, in view of the unquestionable pluck and acuteness of his fancy, is a great pity. He knew evil not by experience, not as something within himself, but by contemplation and curiosity, as something outside of himself, by which his own intellectual agility was not in the least discomposed, rather, indeed (as we say his fancy was of a dusky cast) agreeably flattered and stimulated. In the former case, Baudelaire, with his other gifts, might have been a great poet. But, as it is, evil for him begins outside and not inside, and consists primarily of a great deal of lurid landscape and unclean furniture. This is an almost ludicrously puerile view of the matter. Evil is represented as an affair of blood and carrion and physical sickness — there must be stinking corpses and starving prostitutes and empty laudanum bottles in order that the poet shall be effectively inspired.

A good way to embrace Baudelaire at a glance is to say that he was, in his treatment of evil, exactly what Hawthorne was not — Hawthorne, who felt the thing at its source, deep in the human consciousness. Baudelaire’s infinitely slighter volume of genius apart, he was a sort of Hawthorne reversed. It is the absence of this metaphysical quality in his treatment of his favourite subjects (Poe was his metaphysician, and his devotion sustained him through a translation of ‘Eurekal’) that exposes him to that class of accusations of which M. Edmond Schérer’s accusation of feeding upon pourriture is an example; and, in fact, in his pages we never know with what we are dealing. We encounter an inextricable confusion of sad emotions and vile things, and we are at a loss to know whether the subject pretends to appeal to our conscience or — we were going to say — to our olfactories. ‘Le Mal?’ we excIaim; ‘you do yourself too much honour. This is not Evil; it is not the wrong; it is simply the nasty!’ Our impatience is of the same order as that which we should feel if a poet, pretending to pick ‘the flowers of good’, should come and present us, as specimens, a rhapsody on plumcake and eau du Cologne.

Consulted:
James, Henry: ‘Charles Baudelaire’, The Nation, 27 April 1876, in The Portable Henry James, ed. J Auchard (2004)
Poulet, Georges; Kopp, Robert: Who was Baudelaire?‎ (1969)

131. The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

2009-08-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of short stories has a title that relates to one of its characters, a Gujarati man who works in Orissa as a translator for a doctor who cannot speak Gujarati. Lahiri recounted that the title originated from her student days in Boston, when she met a translator for a doctor who had several Russian patients. It’s interesting as an account of the primacy of a title – i.e that a title can exist in some ways prior to and independently of a work of art:

The title came to me long before the book did, or, for that matter, the story to which it refers. In 1991, during my first year as a graduate student at Boston University, I bumped into an acquaintance of mine. I barely knew him, but the year before, he had very kindly helped me move...to a one-bedroom apartment. When I asked him what he was doing with himself, he said he was working at a doctor’s office, interpreting for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients who had difficulty explaining their ailments in English. As I walked away from that brief conversation, I thought continuously about what a unique position it was, and by the time I'd reached my house, the phrase ‘interpreter of maladies’ was planted in my head. I told myself, one day I'll write a story with that title. Every now and then I struggled to find a story to suit the title. Nothing came to me. About five years passed. Then one day I jotted down a paragraph containing the bare bones of ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ in my notebook. When I was putting the collection together, I knew from the beginning that this had to be the title story, because it best expresses, thematically, the predicament at the heart of the book—the dilemma, the difficulty, and often the impossibility of communicating emotional pain and affliction to others, as well as expressing it to ourselves. In some senses I view my position as a writer, in so far as I attempt to articulate these emotions, as a sort of interpreter as well.

Consulted:
Houghton Mifflin (Lahiri’s publishers) website: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/interpreter_maladies.shtml#conversation

130. Erewhon by Samuel Butler

2009-08-15T01:54:00.000-07:00

Butler’s utopian satire, and the land it described, with its Musical Banks and Hospitals for Incurable Bores, took its name from a reversal of ‘Nowhere’: that much we know. Although it’s not quite a perfect reversal: properly reversed, ‘Nowhere’ would be ‘Erehwon’. Why did Butler leave the central ‘wh’ unreversed?

The answer may lie in the fact that the book emerged from Butler’s experiences in New Zealand in the early 1860s. It drew extensively on New Zealand life, and particularly on Maori customs and names, such as the characters ‘Kahabuka’ and ‘Mahaina’. The name ‘Erewhon’ fits the Maori template. By leaving unreversed the central ‘wh’, Butler echoed Maori place-names such as Arowhena (North Island; a name also given to Mr Nosnibor’s daughter) and Arowhenua (South Island, near Temuka). It seems likely that the imperfect reversal was intended to add one more level of specifically New Zealand-inspired satire.

Consulted:
Jones, Joseph Jay: The Cradle of Erewhon: Samuel Butler in New Zealand‎ (1959)

129. Cahoot’s Macbeth by Tom Stoppard

2009-08-11T23:48:00.000-07:00

Stoppard’s play Cahoot’s Macbeth was written as a companion-piece to an earlier play, Dogg’s Hamlet. ‘Cahoot’, which to an English audience suggests ‘cahoots’, in the conspiracy sense — the play deals with a sort of linguistic conspiracy — was in fact named after a Czechoslovakian playwright, Pavel Kohout (or Kahout), who Stoppard met briefly in 1977.

Theatre in Czechoslovakia following the post-Dubçek crackdown had been heavily restricted, and Kahout, in response, had devised a ‘reduced’ Macbeth that could be performed out of a suitcase in the living-room of a Prague flat. In homage to Kahout, Cahoot’s Macbeth contains a similar edited Macbeth, but this time interlarded with a plot that features some of the characters from Dogg’s Hamlet, as well as a critic in the form of a secret policeman.

Consulted:
Billington, Michael: Stoppard (1987)

128. Salt Seller by Marcel Duchamp

2009-08-09T00:48:00.000-07:00

Salt Seller is everything the titular enthusiast could desire. Originally entitled Marchand du sel, it contains firstly an English pun, supplied by the translator: ‘salt seller’ sounds the same as ‘salt cellar’. Secondly, the French title contains a sort of French Spoonerism (the transposition of elements of the phrase to form a new phrase). ‘Marchand du sel’, twisted around, is ‘Marcel Duchamp’, the author of the book. (Just take the ‘champ’ of ‘Duchamp’ and put it after the ‘Mar’ of ‘Marcel’, and the ‘cel’ of ‘Marcel’ and put it after the ’Du’ of ‘’Duchamp’ and you get ‘MarChamp Du cel’ – or ‘Marchand du cel’.)

Duchamp’s brand of subversion always leaned heavily towards the linguistic — his best known painting, the mustachio’d Mona Lisa, was, of course, subtitled ‘LHOOQ’, or ‘elle a chaud au cul’ (‘she has a hot ass’) — and Salt Seller is full of similar jokes, many in dubious taste, usually penned under the name of Duchamp’s female alter ego, the inscrutable Rrose Sélavy, whose name itself is a tortured pun, meaning both ‘Eros, c’est la vie’ (‘love, that’s life’) or ‘arroser la vie’ (‘make a toast to life’).

Consulted:
Brandon, Ruth: Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-1945‎ (2000)
Kuenzli, Rudolf E., Naumann, Francis M.: Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century‎ (1989)

127. The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville

2009-08-06T00:19:00.000-07:00

Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857) — his last published novel, and written when he was notably short of confidence after the poor reception of Moby-Dick — concerns a trickster who, in various guises, fleeces the passengers on a Mississippi steamboat. It was based on the exploits of a real-life swindler of late-1840s New York, one Samuel Thompson. Remarkably, Thompson was the first person to whom the epithet ‘confidence man’ was ever applied (giving us the words ‘con-man’, ‘con-trick’, etc). According to newspaper reports of the time, his method was to claim former acquaintance with his victim and then ask for their ‘confidence’ with the notorious words: ‘Are you really disposed to put any confidence in me?’ In the novel this became: ‘Could you now, my dear, under such circumstances, by way of experiment, simply have confidence in me?’ If the answer was yes, the inevitable response came: ‘Prove it. Let me have twenty dollars.’

Consulted:
Reynolds, MS: ‘The Prototype for Melville’s Confidence-Man’, Publications of the Modem Language Association of America 86, No. 5., October 1971.

126. Crash by JG Ballard

2009-08-03T00:20:00.000-07:00

Crash by JG Ballard, the book that later became the David Cronenberg film, and which explored, as Ballard put it, ‘the latent sexual content of the automobile crash’, had some rather personal origins. It started life as a short story, ‘Crash!’ in 1968, then became an exhibition of real crashed cars curated by Ballard (accompanied by a topless hostess) in 1969. Then, about a year prior to the publication of the novel in 1973, it manifested itself as a real automobile accident. Ballard suffered a tyre blow-out while travelling at speed in his Ford Zephyr, crossed the central reservation, flipped over and careered upside-down into the oncoming traffic. Luckily he escaped uninjured. His brush with death happened just as he completed the book, and for so personal a subject it is perhaps unsurprising that the narrator of Crash is called — James Ballard.

Ballard loved cars but wished at the same time to make explicit their connection with death. In the context of the so-called ‘pandemic’ that is sweeping the world at the moment it is interesting to read Ballard’s own definition of a pandemic:

Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundred of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies?

Consulted:
Ballard, JG: introduction to Crash (1973)
Ballard, JG: The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

125. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

2009-07-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) is by that darling of literary theorists, John Barth, who later went on to write Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse and other early American postmodernist works. The novel recounts the story of Ebenezer Cooke, an 18th-century American ‘sot-weed factor’, or tobacco merchant. The title gives some indication of the book’s playful concerns. It is unapologetically ripped off from a previous work, a long satirical poem called ‘The Sot-Weed Factor’ (1707) by one Ebenezer Cooke, a real-life 18th-century merchant and traveller. Cooke’s poem is quoted extensively throughout the book, along with Barth’s copious invented additions, so that the reader is never quite sure what is ancient and what modern. Postmodernism re-defined many things, but perhaps among the most significant was the meaning of theft.

Consulted:
Harris, Charles B: Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth‎ (1983)

124. Arden of Faversham, possibly by William Shakespeare

2009-07-27T23:34:00.000-07:00

Arden of Faversham is a literary mystery. It got its title as a result of a real-life murder, that of Thomas Arden (of Faversham in Kent) by his wife Alice, and her lover Mosby, on February 15, 1551. The story was first written up by Holinshed, then published as an anonymous play in 1592, with the title The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent. Who was most wickedlye murdered, by the means of his disloyall and wanton wyfe, who for the love she bare to one Mosbie, hyred two desperat ruffins Blackwill and Shakbag, to kill him. Wherin is shewed the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman, the unsatiable desire of filthie lust, and the shamefull end of all murderers. To this day the authorship of the play is uncertain, and some have claimed it for William Shakespeare. This is regarded by most mainstream Shakespeare scholars as at best a stretch, but there are some intriguing links. Despite its not appearing in the quarto or folio Shakespeares, it seems to have received an early attribution as a work of Shakespeare in Edward Archer’s play-catalogue of 1656, and it was later championed as an authentic Shakespeare play by critics including Swinburne and J A Symonds. 21st-century computer analysis has also provided support for authorship or part-authorship by Shakespeare. But the title may be the final pointer. Shakespeare’s mother’s maiden name was Arden, and he later set As You Like It in the Forest of Arden. Did he revisit the story of the murdered man as a familial joke?

Consulted:
Wine, ML, ed.: Arden of Faversham‎ (1973)

123. The Mint by TE Lawrence

2009-07-26T00:05:00.000-07:00

'”C*** thinks he's drilling the f***ing depot,' snarled Nobby, beside his thin soul with rage. “Get those forks, and shift the pig-s*** into the lorry.”' This is a fairly representative sample of The Mint, TE Lawrence’s only full-length autobiographical fiction apart from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A record of his time in the RAF, it did not see the light of day until long after his death, mainly because of its obscenity, and was circulated in private until publication in 1955. It really is very rude: David Lean, one feels, could not have filmed it successfully.

The title was for many something of a puzzle. There are no mints, after-dinner, numismatic or any other in the book, and the word ‘mint’ is never mentioned. In a letter to RAF chief Sir Hugh Trenchard in 1928 Lawrence explained that he had called it The Mint as an obscure metaphor for the way RAF recruits were trained: ‘we were all being stamped after your image and superscription’.

Consulted:
Garnett, D., ed.: The Letters of TE Lawrence (1938)

122. Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara

2009-07-23T22:51:00.000-07:00

Appointment in Samarra (1934) is John O’Hara’s first novel and one of the great texts of Depression-era America. It concerns the life and self-destructive career of Julian English, a preppy socialite who finally (spoiler here) commits suicide. But the title is rather odd. There is nothing in the book about Samarra, nor anything else Middle-Eastern (Samarra of course is in modern-day Iraq).

The title came about during a meeting with Dorothy Parker. O’Hara confessed he couldn’t think of a good title for his novel, and Parker mentioned a play called Sheppey, by Somerset Maugham. In the play there is a reference to an Arabian tale in which a Baghdad servant tries to elude Death by fleeing to Samarra, only to find that Death has already planned an ‘appointment’ with him there. The inevitability of death, therefore, is the reference. O’Hara reportedly said, on reading the play: ‘There’s my title.’ Parker replied, ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Mr O’Hara.’ But he ignored her, and later wrote: ‘Dorothy didn’t like the title, Alfred Harcourt [his publisher] didn’t like the title, his editors didn’t like it, nobody liked it but me. But I bullied it through.’

Consulted:
Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph: John O'Hara: A Documentary Volume‎ (2006)

121. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

2009-07-21T23:52:00.000-07:00

Tennessee Williams’s most influential play was originally called The Moth, then changed to Blanche’s Chair in the Moon, then to The Poker Night, before he lighted on A Streetcar Named Desire. He explained the title’s origin in an essay of 1946: ‘I live near the main street of the Quarter. Down this street, running on the same tracks, are two streetcars, one named “Desire” and the other named “Cemeteries”. Their indiscourageable progress up and down Royal Street struck me as having some symbolic bearing of a broad nature on the life in the Vieux Carré — and everywhere else, for that matter.’ Blanche’s first line in the play is ‘They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, then transfer to one called Cemeteries’: and it seems to be Williams’ conviction that unrestrained desire leads to destruction – a conviction that drives the play towards its terrible end.

Consulted:Kolin, Philip C.: The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia‎ (2004)

120. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton by Dennis Potter

2009-07-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, Dennis Potter’s fourth broadcast TV play (his first four TV plays were all broadcast in 1965), concerns the experiences of an unsuccessful Labour candidate. Its title derived ultimately from a US Civil War song, ‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys are Marching’ (a popular tune later adapted as a children’s skipping game: ‘Vote, Vote, Vote for Billy Martin’). What makes the play particularly interesting is that it might almost have been called Vote, Vote, Vote for Dennis Potter. Potter was an unsuccessful Labour candidate for Hertfordshire East in the 1964 general election. All of his experiences, from being mistaken for a Jehovah’s Witness to encountering racist Labour supporters, went straight into the play, and Potter reported that his agent remarked: ‘Bloody hell, Dennis, you’re the only candidate I’ve had who has recycled his own speeches.’

Consulted:
Carpenter, Humphrey: Dennis Potter (1998)

119. The Great American Novel by Philip Roth

2009-07-18T00:08:00.000-07:00

Roth’s book — a satirical novel about baseball — is one of several, by various hands, called The Great American Novel. All were responses to a challenge laid down in 1868 by the writer John William De Forest, in an article in The Nation entitled ‘The Great American Novel’. In it De Forest said that a true depiction of American life had yet to be written:

This task of painting the American soul within the framework of a novel has seldom been attempted, and has never been accomplished further than very partially — in the production of a few outlines. Washington Irving was too cautious to make the trial; he went back to fictions of Knickerbockers and Rip Van Winkles and Ichabod Cranes; these he did well, and we may thank him for not attempting more and failing in the attempt. With the same consciousness of incapacity Cooper shirked the experiment; he devoted himself to Indians, of whom he knew next to nothing, and to backwoodsmen and sailors, whom he idealized; or where he attempted civilized groups, he produced something less natural than the wax figures of Barnum's old museum. If all Americans were like the heroes and heroines of Cooper, Carlyle might well enough call us "eighteen millions of bores." As for a tableau of American society, as for anything resembling the tableaux of English society by Thackeray and Trollope, or the tableaux of French society by Balzac and George Sand, we had better not trouble ourselves with looking for it in Cooper. [...] Hawthorne, the greatest of American imaginations, staggered under the load of the American novel. In "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Blithedale Romance" we have three delightful romances, full of acute spiritual analysis, of the light of other worlds, but also characterized by only a vague consciousness of this life, and by graspings that catch little but the subjective of humanity. Such personages that Hawthorne creates belong to the wide realm of art rather than to our nationality. They are as probably natives of the furthest mountains of Cathay or of the moon as of the United States of America. They are what Yankees might come to be who should shut themselves up for life to meditate in old manses. They have no sympathy with this eager and laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds so many railroads, does the most business on a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion to its population, believes in the physically impossible and does some of it. [...] The profoundest reverence for this great man need prevent no one from saying that he has not written "the Great American Novel." The nearest approach to the desired phenomenon is "Uncle Tom's Cabin." There were very noticeable faults in that story; there was a very faulty plot; there was (if idealism be a fault) a black man painted whiter than the angels, and a girl such as girls are to be, perhaps, but are not yet; there was a little village twaddle. But there was also a national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking, and plenty of strong feeling. Though comeliness of form was lacking, the material of the work was in many respects admirable. [...] Then, stricken with timidity, the author shrank into her native shell of New England.

It is a remarkable essay, considering what was to come. Melville, Wharton, James, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wolfe – all were in the immediate future of 1868 (Melville was in the past, but had not yet flitted across De Forest’s radar). Most (if not all) of these writers must have been aware of De Forest’s famous challenge, must have known of the phrase ‘The Great American Novel’, and been aware of the implicit lack that it described. All were goaded into action, at least in part, by the challenge of De Forest.

But the definitive Great American Novel proved as ungraspable as America itself. By the time Roth attempted it, all hope had gone. Talking about his book in a 1973 essay, he said: ‘I don’t claim to know what America is really like.’

Consulted:
DeForest, John William: 'The Great American Novel', The Nation, 9 January 1868: online at http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/articles/n2ar39at.html

118. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

2009-07-16T00:57:00.000-07:00

Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) — now a major motion picture, and one, I imagine, full of lush greenery, magnificent flashing eyes and flowing drapery, though I haven’t seen it — got its title through an opportunity for a pun that does not exist in English. Cólera, in Spanish, means both ‘cholera’ and ‘anger’.

Of course! Cholera, choler, choleric...choler was one of the four medieval humours, responsible, when present in excess, for fits of anger and bile. The disease must have been so named in the past because of this relation to medieval diagnostics. But to relate love and cholera so closely? That’s class. In fact, love, cholera and anger are all related in the novel: the symptoms of cholera are explicitly identified with those of love, and it is love that inspires the anger of Florentino Ariza against his rival Juvenal Urbino, who happens to be an expert...in cholera.

Punning titles in foreign novels of course pose difficulties for the translator. Another interesting example is Balzac’s Le Peau de Chagrin, usually translated, a little inadequately, as The Wild Ass’s Skin (and mentioned in a previous post). Chagrin is a pun in French meaning both ‘grief’ and ‘shagreen’ (a type of leather made from a wild ass skin); and in the story it is the magic ass’s skin, which grants any wish, that ensures that the hero comes to grief.

117. A Passage to India by EM Forster

2009-07-14T00:02:00.000-07:00

Normally in this blog I wouldn’t investigate books with quotations as titles. There are many of these, of course, tending to cluster around the early part of the twentieth century (when this titling strategy was particularly fashionable): Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Books with quotations as titles are not usually very interesting (purely from a titular point of view), because after having uncovered the source of the quotation there is usually little else to say. But I’d like to make an exception for A Passage to India because the source of the quotation (and quotation it is) was, to me, very surprising. A Passage to India was lifted from the poem ‘Passage to India’ by Walt Whitman.

Whitman was the pioneering gay poet of the nineteenth century, and a man with an important influence on Forster’s career (a man who, Forster wrote, ‘went the “whole hog”’). Forster was of course himself homosexual and wrote several short stories with gay themes (‘The Obelisk’ being one of the most notorious, and funniest), and a novel, Maurice, none of which was published during his lifetime. Whitman’s 'Passage to India' is not explicitly homosexual in theme – it is instead a rapturous allegorical address to the voyaging soul – but in certain of its lines we get some sense of why the author of Maurice esteemed him so highly:

Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d
(The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,)
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
As, fill’d with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

Consulted:
Lago, Mary: E.M. Forster: A Literary Life‎ (1995)

116. Othello by William Shakespeare

2009-07-11T23:30:00.000-07:00

It has often been assumed that Shakespeare simply made up the name ‘Othello’. It does not appear in his chief source, Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (where the main character is simply ‘a Moor’), nor is it found in any previous text. But one theory suggests a possible precursor in French medieval romance. The person in question is Sir Othuel (or Otuel/Otuwel). Sir Othuel was a Moor, a companion of Roland who had converted to Christianity (as Othello had in Shakespeare’s play, but significantly had not in Cinthio), and a man of noble birth (again in Shakespeare, but not in Cinthio). Shakespeare could easily have Italianized Othuel by adding a final ‘o’, thus giving the name a Venetian ring. The theory hinges on whether Shakespeare knew the romances. There seems little doubt that that he did: other names he very probably filched from them include Oberon and Fortinbras.

Consulted:
Guilfoyle, Cherrell: ‘Othello, Otuel and the English Charlemagne Romances’, The Review of English Studies, 1987, XXXVIII (149)

115. Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse

2009-07-10T01:04:00.000-07:00

Love Among the Chickens (1906) is a highly significant work in the Wodehouse canon. For a start, it is Wodehouse’s first novel for adults. It is also his first fiction of any kind to feature Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge — he of the ‘big, broad, flexible outlook’, the yellow mackintosh and the pince-nez held in place with ginger-beer wire. And it is the only Ukridge novel; all subsequent Ukridge offerings were short stories.

This epoch-making work had its origins in Wodehouse’s friendship with William Townend (with whom he went to Dulwich College and who was a lifelong friend; the letters in Performing Flea are written to Townend). One of Townend’s other friends, a prep-school master blessed with the unlikely and rather Wodehousian name of Carrington Craxton, had embarked on a disastrous chicken-farming venture in Devonshire, and Townend told Wodehouse about it. Wodehouse realized that Craxton’s melancholy experience would make a good novel, and used many of the details he had heard from Townend, such as an outbreak of disease that nearly wiped out the flock, and various incidents involving Craxton's numerous angry creditors. He added a love interest in the relation of the narrator, Jerry Garnet, with an attractive neighbour. The whole was a musical-comedy-esque romance that more or less formed the template for Wodehouse’s novelistic career over the next seventy years.

Consulted:
McCrum, R, ed., Wodehouse, PG: Love Among the Chickens (2002)

114. The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler

2009-07-07T22:59:00.000-07:00

The phrase 'the ghost in the machine' was coined by Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, and was intended to point out the absurdity of traditional Cartesian mind-body dualism; presumably there was also an attempt to echo the phrase deus ex machina, or ‘god from the machine’, i.e. an artificial solution to a complex problem.

Koestler, in writing The Ghost in the Machine in 1967, appropriated Ryle's phrase, although he had a pretty low opinion of Ryle himself – he dismissed him as a 'snickering' Oxford don with no knowledge of any of the sciences that would have given his ideas more weight. Ryle nevertheless had the philosopher's gift for analogy, and used a number of metaphors for the mind-body problem, all of which could have supplied titles: they included 'the sealed signal box', 'the two parallel theatres' and 'the horse in the locomotive'. What if Koestler had chosen differently? Perhaps, in one parallel reality, we might all be listening to an album by The Police called The Horse in the Locomotive.

Consulted:
Harris, Harold, ed: Astride The Two Cultures: Arthur Koestler At 70‎ (1975)

113. You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe

2009-07-06T00:36:00.000-07:00

Thomas Wolfe’s first novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929; the title comes from Milton’s Lycidas) cast a critical eye on the small town of his birth, and was greeted with outrage by his townsfolk. There was more than one threat to lynch his ‘big overgroan karkus’ if he ever returned. When he did finally pluck up the courage to visit (eight years later) he was mercifully unharmed, but realized that his connection to his birthplace had been severed forever.

At a dinner with a friend, the Communist activist Ella Winter, he told her of the experience, and she commented, ‘But don’t you know you can’t go home again?’ Wolfe asked her: ‘Can I have that? I mean for a title...I’m writing a piece...and I’d like to call it that. It says exactly what I mean.’ And indeed it did: the ‘piece’, You Can't Go Home Again, published after his death, was a record of what happens when one writes a novel excoriating the town of one’s birth, i.e that one receives death threats and poison pen letters and is mortally afraid to go back home. As the book itself puts it, 'You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, [...] back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.’ Rather neat, in a sense. Wolfe's first book had, by its very existence, created the conditions necessary for his final one to be written.

Consulted:
Donald, David Herbert: Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe‎ (2002)

112. In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus

2009-07-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

In Praise of Folly (1509) was a best-seller that went into 43 editions in Erasmus’ lifetime: it is still his best-known book. Following in the tradition of Latin authors who had composed ironic Encomia on such subjects as flies and parasites, it was an extended joke extolling all forms of foolishness, and was written in seven days while Erasmus was staying with his friend Sir Thomas More at his estate at Bucklersbury. In tone, In Praise of Folly is rather reminiscent of More’s Utopia: one is never sure whether the author is being serious or satirical, and there is the strong sense that he does not want you to know.

Its title, Morias Enkomion, was a pun: it meant both the ‘Praise of More’ and the ‘Praise of Folly’ (Moria = Folly). Erasmus explained the genesis of the book in a letter to More: ‘What the devil put that into your head? you’ll say. Well, the first thing that struck me was your surname More, which is just as near the name of Moria or Folly as you are far from the thing itself.’

Other punning titles? I can think of three interesting ones: A Man’s a Man by Bertolt Brecht, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Wild Ass’s Skin by Balzac. I’ll wait for later posts to explain why. If anyone knows of any others – let me know!

Consulted
Rogers, TNR, ed,: In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus (2003)

111. The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams

2009-07-02T03:31:00.000-07:00

Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose suffered from lifelong mental illness, was institutionalized at a young age, and underwent a pre-frontal lobotomy in 1943. She was the deepest love of Williams’ life, and appears in various guises throughout his work, notably as Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Catherine (a character also threatened with lobotomy) in Suddenly Last Summer.

The Rose Tattoo is one more such exploration, and, from a titular point of view, the most explicit. The play deals with the delle Rose family: mother Serafina, daughter Rosa (‘Rosa delle Rose’), and dead husband Rosario, who bears the rose tattoo on his chest. Roses are everywhere in the play, right down to the rose-patterned wallpaper and rose-coloured carpet. More ‘Rose’ you can’t get.

Why did Tennessee Williams’s sister suffer in the way she did? Williams believed that her upbringing, and particularly their mother, was partly to blame; and this too is explored in The Rose Tattoo, the central situation of which is a repressive mother striving to rein in a sexually-developing young daughter.

Consulted:
Kolin, Philip C.: The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia‎ (2004)
Thornton, Margaret Bradham, ed.: Notebooks By Tennessee Williams (2006)

110. While England Slept by Winston Churchill

2009-06-30T00:32:00.000-07:00

Winston Churchill was not above re-titling his works to suit the Yanks. In 1938, Putnam’s, his American publishers, cabled him to ask for an alternative title for Arms and the Covenant, a volume of his collected speeches. Churchill suggested The Years of the Locust, but the cable operator garbled the message and it arrived as The Years of the Lotus. Putnam’s were puzzled. They knew that the lotus was a plant famous for its soporific properties, and, in an attempt to give a sense of this, settled on While England Slept. This was an inspired choice in the climate of German rearmament, and the book went on to be a best-seller. It also had one unexpected consequence: in 1940 the young John F Kennedy, searching for a title for his graduate thesis on the build-up to war, called it Why England Slept (i.e. 'Why' not 'While').

Consulted:
Lockhart, Robert Hamilton Bruce: Your England‎ (1955)

109. The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning

2009-06-27T23:29:00.000-07:00

In June 1860 Robert Browning was browsing at an open-air flea-market in Florence. Among the cheap picture-frames and dog-eared prints he came across a battered yellow book. He bought it for one lira — eightpence in English money at the time — and took it home. It proved to be a compendium of legal documents relating to a celebrated murder case of 1698, put together at the time by a lawyer called Francesco Cencini. The picture that emerged from the documents was tragic, squalid and...rather entertaining.

In 1693 Count Guido Franceschini, a 50-year-old nobleman of Arezzo, in somewhat reduced circumstances, decided to take a bride to bolster his fortune. He settled on the 13-year-old Pompilia Comparini, a Roman girl with a small dowry. Pompilia hated her aged, dissolute husband, and after four years of cruelty she decided to run back home to her parents, aided by a young priest who had befriended her, Giuseppe Caponsacchi. The couple were overtaken by Guido at Castelnuovo and arrested on a charge of flight and adultery. It was soon discovered that Pompilia was pregnant — whether by Guido or Caponsacchi it was never discovered — and she was given into the care of an order of nuns for her protection. In December 1697 she was delivered of a baby boy, and went back to live with her parents. Meanwhile Guido was gnashing his teeth, and on January 2 1698 travelled to Rome with four accomplices and murdered the Comparinis, fatally wounding Pompilia, who died four days later. Guido and his bravoes were arrested, tried and sentenced to death, despite an appeal to the Pope.

Such was the story that Browning gleaned from the various depositions and letters of the yellow book. He realized that he had a subject worthy of an epic poem, but before he could do anything with it, tragedy of his own struck: his wife Elizabeth died in June 1861. Browning left Italy for England with his young son, unable to remain at the house, Casa Guidi, where he had enjoyed such a happy married life. The story of the yellow book remained untouched. Browning tried to interest other poets in developing the story, among them Tennyson, but there were no takers. Finally, in 1864, he began himself to work solidly on the poem.

He decided on a poetic structure that mirrored the yellow book. It was to consist of twelve chapters, each reflecting a particular viewpoint as found in the trial material. The finished poem, The Ring and the Book, included superb portraits of Guido, lecherous and unctuous, and fresh from torture on the rack; Pompilia, dying and sad, telling how she had been sold to a hideous old man who had taken her as she was playing with her toys; Caponsacchi, full of scorn for the legal profession that had failed to protect a child; and the Pope, struggling to come to judgement amid the political and moral complexities of the case. The whole was a staggering 21,000 lines long, took Browning four years, and had to be published in four volumes. It was the quintessential High-Victorian epic, and made his reputation.

But the yellow book was only half the title. The ‘ring’ was a gold circlet of Etruscan design, stamped with the letters AEI — Greek for ‘evermore’ — that had belonged to his wife Elizabeth, and which Browning kept on his watch-chain after her death. The poem opens, in a memorable address to the reader, with the ring:

Do you see this ring?
‘T is Rome-work, made to match
(By Castellani’s imitative craft)
Etrurian circlets found, some happy morn,
After a dropping April; found alive
Spark-like ‘mid unearthed slope-side fig-tree roots
That roof old tombs at Chiusi...

Browning goes on to explain the significance of the ring. It is a symbol of the process of poetic composition. Just as the gold of the ring has been allowed to emerge from the ore surrounding it, so has the story been shaped and rounded from the yellow ore of the yellow book. But a ring is more than a ring. It symbolizes marriage, and the marriage that Browning has in mind is not just the doomed and criminal marriage of the Franceschinis, but his own dead marriage to Elizabeth. Elizabeth seems to breathe everywhere in the poem. As Browning’s friend Alexandra Orr put it: ‘Its subject had come to him in the last days of his greatest happiness. It had lived with him, though in the background of consciousness, though those of his keenest sorrow. It was his refuge in that aftertime, in which a subsiding grief often leaves a deeper sense of isolation.’

Until The Ring and the Book, Browning did not have a wide readership. After its publication in 1868 he was acclaimed as a genius, and earned enough with it to secure himself financially. The Athenaeum, which until that point had been hostile to him, declared The Ring and the Book to be ‘the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since the days of Shakespeare.’ The reasons for this were to do with the great dramatic achievement of the poem, certainly, but also to do with Elizabeth’s death. Elizabeth was celebrated above all for the poetry which expressed her love for Robert (see this blog on Sonnets from the Portuguese), and now Robert was to be celebrated for his own hymn to Elizabeth. It was the evocation in his title of one of the most famous love-stories of the nineteenth century that earned him his final, belated recognition.

Consulted:
Gosse, Edmund: Critical Kit-Kats (Heinemann, 1896)
Taplin, Gardner B.: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (John Murray, 1957)

108. Fam and Yam by Edward Albee

2009-06-26T02:02:00.000-07:00

Edward Albee is most famous for his play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (see this blog’s post on the title here). Fam and Yam was an earlier piece, written in 1958 when Albee was completely unknown. It is a ‘young man’s play’ (in more ways than one), only a few pages long, written while Albee was still finding his feet in the theatre.

It tells the story of an encounter between two unnamed playwrights, a Famous American Man (‘Fam’) and a Young American Man (‘Yam’). Yam goes to Fam’s penthouse apartment to interview him and is impressed by its luxury: it has ‘white walls, a plum-coloured sofa, two Modiglianis, one Braque, a Motherwell and a Klein’. Yam begins by praising Fam, then tells him of an article he wants to write about the venality of theatre producers, the corruption of agents and managers, and the witlessness of audiences. Fam starts laughing. He encourages Yam to go ahead by all means. What he doesn’t realize is that Yam is suggesting what Fam might say in his interview, and in fact putting words into his mouth. All of these attacks are going to be presented as if they are by Fam himself. The penny finally drops when Yam phones him from the lobby. Then ‘[Fam’s] face turns ashen...his mouth drops open. One of the Modiglianis frowns...the Braque peels...the Klein tilts...and the Motherwell crashes to the floor.’

The play stemmed from an interview Albee did with William Inge (the author of Bus Stop and numerous other Broadway hits) in around 1958. Inge was then at the height of his fame and Albee was unknown: Albee, pretty clearly, was the ‘Yam’ of the title and Inge was the ‘Fam’. The interview was respectful enough but the play, written about the interview, was a different matter. It represented Inge as an insecure establishment bore (though ‘Yam’ hardly comes off better). Inge was deeply hurt, and wrote to a friend: ‘God, what a smug little creature he must be, to write as though perfectly assured about his own future prestige.’

But if Albee was perfectly assured, he was right. The 1960s were his decade, and Inge, abandoned by theatre-goers and overcome by depression, took his own life in 1973.

Consulted:
Gussow, Mel: Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (1999)

107. The Hothouse by Harold Pinter

2009-06-23T23:14:00.000-07:00

Harold Pinter originally conceived of The Hothouse as a sixty-minute radio play. He summarized it thus in 1958:

The play is set in a psychological research centre. One department of this establishment is engaged in conducting tests to determine reactions of the nervous system to various stimuli. The subjects for these tests are drawn from volunteers who are paid an hourly rate for their services, in the interests of science. The play will demonstrate the indifference of this particular department (in the persons of the doctor and her assistant — also female) to the human material on which it bases its deductions. It will demonstrate the excesses to which scientific investigation can lead when practised by adherents dedicated to the point of fanaticism.

This scenario substantially survived in the finished stage-play, which is set in a government rest-home where the patients are given electric shocks. The ‘heat’ of the hothouse suggests both the electric shocks and the sexual and emotional arousal of both torturers and tortured.

But the theme and title came from Pinter’s own turn in the hot-seat in 1954, when he submitted himself to medical experiments for cash. He recalled to Michael Billington:

I went along in 1954 to the Maudsley Hospital in London, as a guinea-pig. They were offering ten bob or something for guinea-pigs and I needed the money desperately. I read a bona fide advertisement and went along. It was all above board, as it seemed. Nurses and doctors all in white. They tested my blood-pressure first. Perfectly all right. I was put in a room with electrodes. They said, “Just sit there for a while and relax.” I’d no idea what was going to happen. Suddenly there was a most appalling noise through the earphones and I nearly jumped through the roof. I felt my heart go...BANG! The noise lasted a few seconds and then was switched off. The doctor came in grinning and said, “Well, that really gave you a start, didn’t it?” I said, “It certainly did.” And they said, “Thanks very much.” There was no interrogation, as in the play, but it left a deep impression on me. I couldn’t forget the experience. I was trembling all over. And I would have been in such a vulnerable position if they had started to ask me questions. Later I asked them what it was all about and they said they were testing levels of reaction. That mystified me. Who exactly were they going to give this kind of shock-treatment to? Anyway, The Hothouse was kicked off by that experience. I was well aware of being used for an experiment and feeling quite powerless.

Consulted:
Billington, Michael: Harold Pinter (1996)

106. Pamela by Samuel Richardson

2009-06-22T02:56:00.000-07:00

Pamela Anderson, Pamela Stephenson, Pam Shriver, Pam Ayres...none of them would have existed without Samuel Richardson. Why? Because with his epistolary novel Pamela (1740) he popularized the name, and started a Pamela craze that lasted well into our own century. Pamela was so successful that it became one of the world’s first total branding enterprises: there were Pamela prints and engravings, Pamela waxworks, Pamela fans (for cooling maiden cheeks), racehorses called Pamela, Pamela murals, Pamela sermons, Pamela stage-plays, Pamela playing-cards and Pamela operas.

But Richardson himself owed a debt to, of all people, Sir Philip Sidney (see this blog's post on Astrophil and Stella). Pamela was the heroine of Sidney’s Arcadia, a pastoral romance in prose dating to 1590. Sir Philip, it seems, invented the name, cobbling it together from the Greek pan and mela — ‘all honey’.

Richardson had more than a tangential connection to Sir Philip. His day-job – before Pamela and his smash-hit follow-up Clarissa really took off and made him rich - was as a printer, and in this capacity he produced an edition of the Arcadia in 1724-5. He drew from it not just the name of the heroine, but several plot devices: both Pamelas are imprisoned, both resist attempts on their virtue, and in the final crowd-pleaser both reap the eventual reward of their honey-like sweetness and virtue.

One anecdote about Samuel Richardson, from Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), is not related to the title but I find it irresistible. It is as follows:

One day at his country-house at Northend, where a large company was assembled at dinner, a gentleman who was just returned from Paris, willing to please Mr. Richardson, mentioned to him a very flattering circumstance — that he had seen his Clarissa lying on the King’s brother’s table. Richardson observing that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected then not to attend to it. But by and by, when there was a general silence, and he thought that the flattery might be fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman, ‘I think, Sir, you were saying something about —’, pausing in a high flutter of expectation. The gentleman, provoked at his inordinate vanity, resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisitely sly air of indifference answered, ‘A mere trifle, Sir, not worth repeating.’ The mortification of Richardson was visible, and he did not speak ten words more the whole day. Dr. Johnson was present, and appeared to enjoy it much.

Consulted:
Boswell, James, Life of Johnson (1791)
Sabor, Peter (ed., intro.), Richardson, Samuel: Pamela (1992)
Sabor, Peter; Keymer, Tom: 'Pamela' in The Marketplace (2005)
See also this blog's post on Shamela.

105. Rhymes to be Traded for Bread by Vachel Lindsay

2009-06-20T00:46:00.000-07:00

Vachel Lindsay was one of the great poets of American egalitarianism – an early twentieth-century Whitman. He got his start through a suggestion from his art teacher, Robert Henri. In March 1905 Lindsay was urgently in need of money, and asked Henri if he would ever cut it as an artist. Henri tactfully replied that he would do better trying to sell his poetry. Lindsay, either in desperation or inspiration, rushed off some copies of his poems and took them out in the streets of Manhattan, those most ‘world-sharpened and business-bitten avenues’ of New York. Pricing them at two cents per poem, he earned 15 cents on the first day (one doctor paid 5 cents for two poems) — and was elated. After binding his oeuvre into the collection Rhymes to be Traded for Bread, he began a series of tramps all over America bartering recitals for food and shelter. His first trek was in the spring of 1906, ranging on foot from Florida to Kentucky, traversing some 600 miles, selling poetry readings as he went. He undertook a similar tramp in the spring of 1908, this time from New York to Ohio, and again in the summer of 1912. He became famous, read for Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet, was praised by Yeats, and published several further collections.

Consulted:
Masters, Edgar Lee: Vachel Lindsay; A Poet in America (1969)

104. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

2009-06-18T00:33:00.000-07:00

Hemingway's first major novel began its textual life in 1925 as a short story entitled ‘Cayetano Ordonez’ (the name of the bullfighter who provided the model for the fictional Pedro Romero). All the characters were based on Hemingway’s friends, people with whom he had travelled in France and Spain: Brett Ashley was the real-life Lady Duff Twysden, Mike Campbell was Pat Guthrie, Bill Gorton was Donald Ogden Stewart and Robert Cohn was Harold Loeb. In early drafts the main character (Jake Barnes) was even called ‘Hem’. The relationships between the main characters — particularly Hem’s (Jake’s) unfulfilled love for Brett, Brett’s affairs with Cohn, Mike and Romero, and Hem’s antipathy to Cohn — were all closely modelled on life. ‘I’m tearing those bastards apart’, Hemingway wrote to a friend in September 1925 as he was struggling with the book. ‘I’m putting everyone in it and that kike Loeb is the villain.’ And yet just after the title page Hemingway, the butter unmelted in his mouth, noted: ‘No character in this book is the portrait of any actual person.’

As the story lengthened the title was changed to Fiesta: A Novel (which became its European title), and then, shortly before publication, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway was a great user of quotations in titles, and The Sun Also Rises came from Ecclesiastes:

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

Hemingway gave the quotation in full as the epigraph to his book, counterposing it with an off-the-cuff remark from Gertrude Stein, which subsequently became as famous as (or more famous than) Ecclesiastes: ‘You are all a lost generation’. Hemingway meant to contrast the two quotes, containing as they both did the word ‘generation’, and later said that his purpose in so doing was to set the current generation of flawed humanity against the enduring power of the earth itself, the earth which ‘abideth forever’.

There is perhaps another nuance in The Sun Also Rises. It should be remembered that the central tragedy of the book is the genital wound of the hero, Jake Barnes. Jake, it has been pointed out by more than one commentator, rather closely parallels the ‘Fisher King’ in TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, published three years earlier in 1922. Jake’s sexual incapacity is reflected in the decadent and morally sterile environment of Europe after the spiritual cataclysm of the First World War. Jake finds equilibrium only when he is fishing. Whether or not Eliot was a conscious influence, Jake’s wound does symbolize the inability of any of the characters to find real meaning in their lives. It is because of Jake’s wound — which Hemingway implies is a wound to his penis rather than just to his testicles — that Jake and Brett are unable to consummate their love for one another. Jake is instead forced into helping Brett seduce Romero. So if the book is closely autobiographical, and Jake is Hem, and Hem is Hemingway, where does that leave us?

On July 8, 1918, while serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front at the end of the First World War, Hemingway was seriously injured by a trench mortar, receiving over 200 separate shrapnel wounds to his lower body. His scrotum was pierced twice, and had to be laid on a special pillow while it recovered. His testicles were undamaged and his penis intact. He had not lost his penis. But he knew a man who had:

Because of this I got to know other kids who had genito urinary wounds and I wondered what a man’s life would have been like after that if his penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact. . . . [So I] tried to find out what his problems would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and there was nothing that they could do about it.

Jake has all the desires of a man but is never able to consummate them. The horror of such a wound represented the greatest of all horrors, and in The Sun Also Rises Hemingway was consciously confronting it. The fundamental act of masculinity, sexual penetration, is denied Jake, and the whole of the rest of masculinity which, for Hemingway, flowed from it — the bulls, the fights, the boxing, the hunting, the drinking, the bullshitting — is rendered pointless, a dreadful joke. It had so very nearly been a joke on Hemingway. He made the sexual connotations of the title clear in a letter to F Scott Fitzgerald in late 1926, saying he was going to insert a subtitle in the next printing of the novel: ‘The Sun Also Rises (Like Your Cock If You Have One).’

Consulted:
Berg, A. Scott: Max Perkins, Editor of Genius (Hamish Hamilton, 1979)
Bruccoli, Matthew J: Scott and Ernest (Random House, 1978)
Corral, Carmen: ‘The Textual History of The Sun Also Rises’ (Sigma Tau Delta Convention, St Louis 1999,
http://www.bama.ua.edu/~sigmatau/texts/sun.html)
Meyers, Jeffrey: Hemingway (Macmillan, 1985)

103. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

2009-06-16T01:03:00.000-07:00

This is not the story of À la recherche du temps perdu, as such, but the story of its English translation, Remembrance of Things Past. In 1920 Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff began the Englishing of Proust's magnum opus, and after several false starts decided to give it a title from Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste [...]

The Shakespearian quotation (however beautiful) did little to render Proust’s title, and the intrusion of the words of a foreign author must have seemed to Proust like a blow in the face (rather as if a Frenchman had translated Great Expectations by giving it a title from Balzac). Proust wrote to Scott-Moncrieff to protest, saying that the translation missed the ‘deliberate amphibology’ of the French, and particularly mentioned the inadequacy of ‘things past’ as a substitute for ‘temps perdu’ (a phrase significantly mirrored in the title of the last volume, Le Temps retrouvé: ‘temps perdu’ can mean either ‘time lost’ or ‘time wasted’). The Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English by Olive Classe puts the matter thus:

In fact that title [Remembrance of Things Past] seriously distorts Proust’s intention, diverting the prospective reader’s attention away from the work’s subject, largely a series of minute analyses of feelings to which a particular view of the function of memory is central. The distraction is especially important, because writers were already beginning to explore imaginatively the phenomena of indeliberate mental associations, before Freud had published anything of importance, and before World War I made obviously urgent the examination of the corporate psychologies of Western European cultures.

But Proust’s protests were ignored. It was only in 1992 that the title was more accurately rendered as In Search of Lost Time.

Consulted:
Carter, William C.: Marcel Proust: A Life‎ (2002)
Classe, Olive: Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (2000)

102. Something Happened by Joseph Heller

2009-06-14T00:25:00.000-07:00

Something Happened (1974) was Heller’s second novel, published 13 years after the brilliant success of Catch-22. It tells the story of Bob Slocum, a fearful company man with a loveless marriage, a brain-damaged child to look after at home, and a predilection for office affairs with secretaries who call him ‘Mr Slocum’ in bed.

Asked about the genesis of the title, Heller said: ‘Something Happened turned up in the fall of ’63 when I was walking with George Mandel past Korvettes or Brentano’s [in Manhattan] and a kid came running past and yelled over his shoulder to another, “Hey, come on, something’s happened” — some sort of traffic accident I guess it must have been.’ Heller didn't run after the kid to find out, but the idea of 'something' happening - the fictionalized version of this ‘traffic accident’ - provided the dramatic ‘something’ that happens at the end of the book (it involves traffic, but it would be unfair to reveal more; suffice to say it is an ending of nightmarish proportions). It dismayed critics who had expected more of the clowning of Catch-22, and established a new, bleaker voice for Heller.

Consulted:
Sorkin, Adam J., ed: Conversations with Joseph Heller‎ (1993)

101: Ulysses by James Joyce

2009-06-12T00:41:00.000-07:00

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.
— George Orwell, letter to Brenda Salkeld, 1933

In 2006 the poet laureate Andrew Motion recommended that all schoolchildren read Ulysses as part of their essential grounding in English literature. One can see why. To read Ulysses is to realize that the whole of twentieth-century literature is little more than a James Joyce Appreciation Society. Among the many writers who would have been different, or even nonexistent, without Ulysses, are Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Flann O’Brien, Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick and Bernard Malamud (to name but a few). Even a writer as unlikely as George Orwell deliberately echoed the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses in the play scene of A Clergyman’s Daughter. Joyce’s hectic layering of styles, his unstoppable neologizing, his blurring of viewpoint, his love of parody and imitation, his obscenity, his difficulty, obscurity and outright incomprehensibility was the beginning of the high modernist style in world literature. Andrew Motion was right in seeing Ulysses as fundamental. But in another way his suggestion was absurd. Ulysses is not a book for children. It is barely even a book for adults. The paradox of Ulysses is that one needs to read it to understand twentieth-century literature, but one needs to read twentieth-century literature to build up the stamina to read Ulysses.

The problem starts with the title. Early readers of Ulysses, exhilarated and appalled after 800 pages, were often still left thinking ‘Why Ulysses?’ Ulysses is barely mentioned. (The name is mentioned four times, twice in passing as a proper name, Ulysses Grant and Ulysses Browne, and twice as a brief mention among other heroes and notables. David Lodge in The Art of Fiction wrote that the title, as a clue to the allegorical nature of the book, was ‘the only absolutely unmissable one in the entire text’.) The solution, as we now know, after a century’s worth of scholarly investigation and Joyce’s own prompting, is that the book is an intricate allegory of the Odyssey (the hero being latinized from Odysseus to Ulysses). Ulysses is divided into eighteen parts, or ‘episodes’ as Joyce scholars call them, each written in a different style and with a different Odyssean name, though the names themselves are not given in the text. The names are:
‘Telemachus’,
‘Nestor’,
‘Proteus’,
‘Calypso’,
‘Lotus Eaters’,
‘Hades’,
‘Aeolus’,
‘Lestrygonians’,
‘Scylla and Charybdis’,
‘Wandering Rocks’,
‘Sirens’,
‘Cyclops’,
‘Nausicaa’,
‘Oxen of the Sun’,
‘Circe’,
‘Eumaeus’,
‘Ithaca’ and
‘Penelope’.
Each episode is assigned, tacitly, a colour theme, a dominant organ of the body, an hour, a setting and other characteristics, though many of these remain a matter of scholarly dispute. The action takes place in Dublin on a single June day (June 16 1904) and its three main characters are Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom, who represent Ulysses, Telemachus and Penelope. Other characters and places also have their Homeric counterparts.

The problem is that one can know all of this and still be left thinking ‘Why Ulysses?’ The choice of the Odyssey seems somewhat arbitrary. Why not Oedipus Rex as a background text? That way Bloom could be Oedipus, Molly Jocasta and Dedalus Tiresias (or someone else). Ulysses is not so much a novel as a symbolic system, rather like a clock or a computer programme. Underlying the final, visible product, the time-telling or the computer display, is a corresponding machinery, the cogs or the binary code. Why did Joyce choose the Odyssey for his code?

The answer is that it could hardly have been anything else. Joyce was from an early age deeply in love with the Odyssey. ‘The character of Ulysses has fascinated me ever since boyhood,’ he wrote to Carlo Linati in 1920. As a schoolboy he read Charles Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses, an adventure-yarn version of the story which presents, in Lamb’s words, ‘a brave man struggling with adversity; by a wise use of events, and with an inimitable presence of mind under difficulties, forcing out a way for himself.’ Joyce said later that the story so gripped him that when at Belvedere College (he would have been between the ages of 11 and 15) he was tasked to write an essay on ‘My Favourite Hero’, he chose Ulysses. (The essay title ‘My Favourite Hero’ actually appears in Ulysses, on page 638 of the World’s Classics edition .) He later described Ulysses to Frank Budgeon as the only ‘complete all-round character presented by any writer...a complete man...a good man.’

Unsurprisingly therefore, this ‘complete man’ surfaced as early as Joyce’s first major prose work — Dubliners of 1914. Joyce had originally planned that it include a short story called ‘Ulysses’, the plot of which was based on an incident which took place in June 1904. Joyce was involved in a scuffle on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, after accosting another man’s lady-companion, and was rescued and patched up by one Albert H. Hunter. Hunter, according to Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, was ‘rumoured to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife’ (in both of these respects a prototype for Leopold Bloom). In 1906 Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus: ‘I have a new story for Dubliners in my head. It deals with Mr Hunter.’ In a letter written shortly afterwards he mentioned its title: ‘I thought of beginning my story Ulysses but I have too many cares at present.’ Three months later he had abandoned the idea, writing: ‘Ulysses never got any forrader than its title.’ The incident with Hunter was only written up later, in Ulysses itself, in a passage at the end of episode fifteen in which Bloom rescues Dedalus ‘in orthodox Samaritan fashion’ from a fight. The idea of Ulysses as symbolic hero — and as a title — was therefore present as early as 1906. Its centrality to the early plan for Dubliners was revealed in a conversation with Georges Borach:

When I was writing Dubliners, I first wished to choose the title Ulysses in Dublin, but gave up the idea. In Rome, when I had finished about half of the Portrait, I realized that the Odyssey had to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses.

The figure of Ulysses could not therefore have been less arbitrary. He existed as a thread through all of Joyce’s prose works from ‘My Favourite Hero’ onward. He was there in embryo in Dubliners, was being considered halfway through A Portrait of the Artist, and burst out in his full, final and inevitable form in the work that bore his name. It was only after publication of Ulysses in 1922 that Joyce was free of his ‘favourite hero’, and could allow his literature to expand to its ultimate extent. The book that came after Ulysses was Finnegans Wake, a work not tied to one hero but inclusive of all heroes, not tied to one myth but including all myths, and using not one language but all languages.

Consulted:
Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1959)
Ellmann, Richard: Selected Letters of James Joyce (Faber, 1975)
Joyce, James: Ulysses (introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson, Oxford World’s Classics, 1993)
Owen, Rodney Wilson: James Joyce and the Beginnings of Ulysses (UMI Research Press, 1983)

100. From the title desk

2009-06-10T01:26:00.000-07:00

Dear readers and casual browsers, searchers after ‘Lolita’ and frustrated viewers of information about Nabokov, small-hours surfers and bored procrastinators, purveyors and consumers of the flotsam and jetsam of the internet:

Having reached 99 titles I am going to scale this down a bit and post every other day (instead of every day). I have at least another 99 title stories I would like to consider, and I hope you will tune in and have a look. Special thanks to loyal followers and commenters who have made it all worth doing.

‘Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.’
- Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room.

Gary

99. The Worm and the Ring by Anthony Burgess

2009-06-09T00:55:00.000-07:00

The title of this 1961 novel by Burgess (the author of A Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers, etc) is rather odd. There is little mention in the book of either worms or rings, and the plot, set in a grammar school (Burgess was for several years a schoolteacher at Banbury near Oxford), is about the theft of a diary. Then one realizes — or is told by some kindly person — that the whole book is in fact a re-telling, on one level, of the Wagnerian ring cycle.

It opens with Albert Rich (Alberich in the ring cycle, a dwarf) a schoolboy, pursuing some giggling schoolgirls (three Rhine-maidens), then introduces the headmaster Woolton (Wotan, the chief of the Gods) and his wife Frederica (Fricka, the consort of Wotan); there is another character called Lodge (Loge, or Loki, god of fire), a girl called Linda (Woglinde, one of the Rhine-maidens), and a pub called ‘the Dragon’ (‘worm’ being an archaic word for dragon). The stolen diary stands in for the stolen ring.

It’s all very interesting, and makes one wonder whether all novelists shouldn’t be weaving a rich vein of arcane symbolism into their work, accessible only to the initiated. Burgess certainly thought so, at least in this early period (The Worm and the Ring was only his second foray into the novel, completed around 1954, though not published until later). He had a particular taste for mirroring musical plots: his Napoleon Symphony was a later attempt to re-cast Beethoven’s Eroica symphony as a novel. He commented about the whole business that novel-writing was in a sense too easy: the composer had to write a score weaving together the contributions of dozens of instrumentalists: why should the novelist be let off the hook?

In a symphony many strands conjoined, in the same instant, to make a statement; in a novel all you had was a single line of monody. The ease with which dialogue could be written seemed grossly unfair. This was not art as I had known it. It seemed cheating not to be able to give the reader chords and counterpoint. It was like pretending that there could be such a thing as a concerto for unaccompanied flute. My notion of giving the reader his money’s worth was to throw difficult words and neologisms at him, to make the syntax involuted. Anything, in fact, to give the impression of a musicalisation of prose. I saw that that was what Joyce had really been trying to do in Finnegans Wake — clotting words into chords, presenting several stories simultaneously in an effect of counterpoint. I was not trying to emulate Finnegans Wake — which had closed gates rather than opened them — but I felt that Ulysses had still plenty to teach to a musician who was turning to fiction.

Consulted:
Burgess, Anthony: Little Wilson and Big God (1987)
Biswell, Andrew: The Real Life of Anthony Burgess‎ (2006)

98. Perfume by Patrick Süskind

2009-06-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

Before I go any further I should probably say that this theory of mine may well be completely wrong. I have written to Patrick Süskind for confirmation but received no reply. Not surprising - I imagine he receives a lot of post.

As most readers will know, Perfume is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a boy with a preternatural sense of smell who embarks on a homicidal campaign to steal the scents of young women and blend them into a super-perfume that will be able to capture the heart of anyone who smells it. The novel was an enormous international hit after publication in 1987 – deservedly in my opinion – and it was made into a film which I assume to be a load of old cobblers.

But the title Perfume – Das Parfum in German - had an interesting forerunner in a much earlier work, Profumo (‘Perfume’), an Italian novel of 1890 by the verismo writer Luigi Capuana. In Capuana's Perfume there is the same fascination with the scent of the female body: it deals with a young woman who uncontrollably emits the odour of orange blossom. Orange blossom also crops up frequently in the Süskind novel, and at the climax of the book, as Grenouille is about to be executed, ‘from the valley of Grasse a warm wind came up, bearing the scent of orange blossoms.’ Did Süskind read Capuana? The parallels are certainly there, and perhaps Süskind was paying tribute to the Italian maestro when he made Grenouille’s own master an Italian, Giuseppe Baldini.

As a footnote, the Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (2003) suggests that Capuana probably derived his theme, in turn, from Ernest Monin's Un nouveau chapitre de semiologie, Essai sur les odeurs des cops humains (Paris, 1885).

Consulted:
Read Profumo online (in Italian) at http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ITA1080/_IDX013.HTM

Bondanella, Peter E. , Ciccarelli, Andrea: The Cambridge Companion to the Italian novel (2003)

97. Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith

2009-06-07T00:33:00.000-07:00

Novel on Yellow Paper was published in 1936 while Stevie Smith was working as a secretary at Newnes, the stationery company. Her original suggestion for a title was Pompey Casmilus, after the book’s heroine, but this was rejected by her publishers, Jonathan Cape, and for a long time the manuscript hung around at the Cape offices where the staff referred to it as ‘the novel on yellow paper’ because of the cheap yellow Newnes stationery it was typed on. This finally became the title adopted.

The book is written in a rapid, breathless, at times incoherent style – the story goes that it was completed in ten weeks – but was a huge success on publication. Smith’s name was unknown at the time, and many assumed ‘Stevie Smith’ to be a pseudonym’: the poet Robert Nichols even wrote to Virginia Woolf congratulating her on her latest novel.

The book’s subtitle was Work It Out for Yourself. This was partly because of the novel’s perplexing surface, but also because Smith – a Teutonophile who had visited Germany and made friends there – intended her book as a call to face facts about the rise of Nazism and the persecution of Germany’s Jews. ‘God send the British Admiralty and the War Office don’t go shuffling on with their arms economies too long-o,’ she wrote. ‘And how many uniforms, how many swastikas, how many deaths and maimings, and hateful dark cellars and lavatories. Ah how decadent, how evil is Germany today.’

Consulted:
Spalding, Frances: Stevie Smith (1989)
http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9924

96. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

2009-06-06T02:04:00.000-07:00

The original title of War and Peace was War: What is It Good For?

No, no...wait a minute, I'm getting confused. It was a little less catchy than that. As published in serial-form in The Russian Herald from 1865, it was actually The Year 1805. When it came to be published as a book in 1867, Tolstoy needed a new title, and briefly considered All’s Well That Ends Well before deciding, very soon before publication, on War and Peace.

The choice reflected events six years earlier, when Tolstoy, aged 32, had visited the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in exile at Ixelles, Brussels. Proudhon showed him a copy of his own recently-finished tract on international armed conflict: War and Peace. Greatly impressed by Proudhon and his philosophy of benevolent anarchism — which Tolstoy later developed into his own form of Christian anarchism in works such as The Kingdom of God is Within You — Tolstoy seems to have decided to appropriate his title as an act of deliberate homage.

Consulted:
Troyat, Henri: Tolstoy (Doubleday, 1967)

95. Mere Christianity by CS Lewis

2009-06-05T01:15:00.000-07:00

Mere Christianity consists of a collection of radio talks on the central precepts of Christianity, broadcast by Lewis from 1941-44. The words ‘mere Christanity’ – which do not appear anywhere in any of the talks – were an echo of a phrase in an obscure work by the 17th-century theologian Richard Baxter, who in his had used the word ‘meer’ in its archaic sense of ‘essential’, ‘pure’:

I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church… I am against all Sects and dividing Parties: But if any will call Meer Christians by the name of a Party, because they take up with Meer Christianity, Creed, and Scripture, and will not be of any dividing or contentious Sect, I am of that Party which is so against Parties.

(This odd – to modern ears – use of the word ‘mere’ in fact survived into the nineteenth century, as can be seen from a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper for January 3, 1874, in which he is reported to have described the poet Swinburne as a ‘perfect leper’ and a ‘mere [i.e. thoroughgoing] sodomite’.)

It is unlikely that Lewis intended ‘mere’ to have any of its modern meaning of ‘only’ or ‘just’, even in irony: he didn’t mean to say ‘oh, it’s just Christianity, nothing more.’ The talks have no sense either of downplaying Christianity or of defending Christianity from those who might seek to trivialize it.

So why use it, when it would almost certainly be misunderstood? The use of the archaic word stands in marked contrast to the talks themselves, which are composed in a deliberately clear and demotic manner, as if addressed to enquiring factory-hands.

My explanation is this: the obscurantist in Lewis – let’s not forget he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon literature at Oxford, and a connoisseur of the arcane – was in mild rebellion against the transparency of his own text. He could not resist one donnish flourish. If the talks were clear, he wished to make their title, at least, a little bit puzzling.

Consulted:
Dexter, G: Poisoned Pens (2009)
Hooper, W and Green, RL: CS Lewis (1974)
http://www.theologian.org.uk/churchhistory/baxterianae.html

94. Lord Emsworth and Others by PG Wodehouse

2009-06-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

Clarence, 9th Earl of Emsworth, is of course the dithering, sister-ridden, pig-obsessed peer who features in the Blandings Castle novels and short stories. His first substantial appearance was in Something Fresh (1915) and he went on to feature in books such as Heavy Weather (1933), Full Moon (1947) and Pigs have Wings (1952). Lord Emsworth and Others was a collection of short stories from 1936.

Unlike most other Wodehouse proper names, which often tended toward the onomatopoeic and parodic – Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Honoria Glossop – Lord Emsworth had a concrete starting-point[1]. He was named after Emsworth, a village in Hampshire, and more specifically after a prep school in the town, Emsworth House, where PG Wodehouse stayed as a guest on and off from 1903. Wodehouse liked Emsworth so much that in 1910 he bought a house in the village called ‘Threepwood’. Wodehouse aficionados will recognize the name Threepwood: it is Lord Emsworth’s family name (and that of Galahad, his brother, and Freddie, his son). Emsworth House thus supplied the dynastic title, and Threepwood, Wodehouse’s more modest accommodation, the humbler family name. Wodehouse was nothing if not alive to the existence of class distinctions.

Consulted:
Donaldson, Frances: PG Wodehouse (Futura, 1982)
Usborne, Richard: Wodehouse at Work to the End (Penguin, 1976)

[1] One important exception is Jeeves – see post no. 30.

93. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects by Marshall McLuhan (text) and Quentin Fiore (design)

2009-06-03T00:49:00.000-07:00

Massage? Shouldn’t that be ‘message’? Well, yes, it should. When the book came back from the typesetter there was a misprint in the title. According to his son Eric, McLuhan took one look at it and exclaimed, ‘Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!’.

It was a typical McLuhan strategy. The phrase ‘the medium is the message’ – coined by McLuhan in the early 60s and denoting the way new media such as film and television had by their very nature begun to manipulate the way ideas were conceived and received - was already a cliché by the time the book came out in 1967, and McLuhan must have welcomed the chance to ring the changes on it. As Eric writes on the Marshall McLuhan website: ‘Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: "Message" and "Mess Age," "Massage" and "Mass Age."’

Never just a stuffy theorist, McLuhan was a precursor of maverick cultural critics like Camille Paglia or Slavoj Zizek, and The Medium is the Massage, far from being a dry work on communications theory, is a riot of images, jumbled typefaces, blank and black pages, cartoons, prophetic maxims and scholarly jokes. It’s part photo essay, part harangue, part spoof. It's never boring, which given its subject – communications theory – is quite an achievement.

Consulted:
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/

92. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

2009-06-02T01:05:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of 1892, stories were appearing in the London press claiming that Dorian Gray, the hero of Wilde’s notorious book, was modelled on a real person, a minor poet named John Gray. They said that John Gray was a protégé of Wilde’s, a person under his ‘protection’. Wilde acted to scotch the rumours. In late February 1892 he wrote in a letter to the Daily Telegraph:

Allow me to state that my acquaintance with Mr John Gray is, I regret to say, extremely recent, and that I sought it because he had already a perfected mode of expression both in prose and verse. All artists in this vulgar age need protection certainly. Perhaps they have always needed it. But the nineteenth-century artist finds it not in Prince, or Pope, or patron, but in high indifference of temper, in the pleasure of the creation of beautiful things, and the long contemplation of them in disdain of what in life is common and ignoble, and in such felicitous sense of humour as enables one to see how vain and foolish is all popular opinion, and popular judgment, upon the wonderful things of art. These qualities Mr John Gray possesses in a marked degree. He needs no other protection, nor, indeed, would he accept it.
I remain, sir, your obedient servant,
Oscar Wilde.

Wilde had published The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Magazine in June 1890, and therefore, since his acquaintance with John Gray had been ‘extremely recent’, John Gray could not have anything to do with ‘Dorian’ Gray.

This though was false.

John Gray was born into a poor family in Islington in 1866. At a young age he began work in a forge at the Woolwich Arsenal, later becoming a boy clerk in the offices there. In 1882 he took a civil service examination and qualified as a clerk at the Post Office Savings Bank. In 1887 he rose still further by passing the matriculation examination for London University, maintaining himself by continuing in his work as a clerk. He then transferred to the postal department of the Foreign Office. This was a remarkable vaulting of class barriers by the standards of the time, and around 1887 he vaulted still higher by making the acquaintance of some of the figures in the circle of Wilde: Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and others. John’s good looks, it seems, were much appreciated. Early photographs show a young man of some beauty: a very white, smooth skin; a strong, rounded nose and chin; delicate, well-formed lips; and short, dark curling hair.

Gray and Wilde began to be seen together increasingly at parties, dinners, the theatre, galleries, the opera, and at the Café Royal. Gray was now writing his own poetry, much of it in the ‘decadent’ style of the 1890s. There is no doubt that by 1890 Wilde was referring to John as ‘Dorian’. Several lines of evidence support this. Ernest Dowson wrote in a letter of November 1890 (after the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in its magazine form in June that year, but before the appearance of the book in April 1891): ‘Thursday at Horne’s was very entertaining: [...] “Dorian” Gray [read] some very beautiful and obscure versicles in the latest manner of French Symbolism.’ The writer Lionel Johnson, shortly after meeting John in the early 1890s, wrote: ‘I have made great friends with the original of Dorian: one John Gray, a youth in the Temple, aged thirty, with the face of fifteen.’ Arthur Symons recalled that he had been introduced by Wilde to ‘the future Dorian Gray’ at some point around the end of 1890. And John Gray himself signed one surviving letter to Oscar, of January 1891, ‘Yours ever, Dorian.’ So when Wilde wrote in the Daily Telegraph in 1892 that his friendship with John Gray was of ‘extremely recent’ origin, this was not the truth. He had known him for several years. It is likely that the lie was an attempt by Wilde to protect Gray, in his position at the Foreign Office, from the scandal that was already attaching to Wilde and would eventually break over his head in March 1895.

Why ‘Dorian’ though? Almost certainly it was a reference to the ‘Greek love’ (the Dorian Greeks were a tribe that descended into the Greek peninsula around 1000 BC) of Plato’s Symposium and other works. It is a phrase which appears frequently in the literature of the period. In the 1890s there were a number of competing words for homosexuality. The word ‘homosexual’ had been invented, along with ‘heterosexual’, by the Hungarian-German writer Károly Mária Kertbeny in around 1868, but had failed to catch on. Instead there were other terms: ‘Uranian’ was common for male homosexuals, in reference to the god Uranus, who had given birth to Aphrodite without intervention from any woman (Aphrodite had stepped from the foam produced when his testicles were cut off and thrown into the sea). Others favoured ‘unisexual’ (for example the writer Marc André Raffalovich, a life-long close friend of Gray, who wrote a treatise on homosexuality) or ‘invert’ (‘inversion’ was a neutral term with no pejorative connotations, used by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, among others). ‘Dorian’ was merely one more way, perhaps more coded than others, to signify ‘homosexual’.

Whether Wilde and Gray were ever lovers is not known. The friendship however did not long survive the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Gray was displaced by Alfred Douglas (to whom he bore a physical similarity) in 1892, and Gray broke with Wilde completely in 1893.

Gray went on to publish numerous other collections of poetry, critical works and other books, but his later life — almost his whole life, considering how young he was when he mixed with the Wilde circle — was in notable contrast to his ‘decadent’ youth. He resigned his position at the Foreign Office in 1897 and in 1898 enrolled at the Scots College seminary in Rome, where he trained for the Roman Catholic priesthood. From 1901 until his death in 1934 he was, not Dorian Gray, nor John Gray, but ‘Father Gray’.

Consulted:
McCormack, Jerusha Hull: The Man Who Was Dorian Gray (2000)
Ellis, Havelock: Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol I, Sexual Inversion (1897)

91. The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope

2009-06-01T00:52:00.000-07:00

Some time early in 1712, The 7th Lord Petre, perhaps at a ball or card party, furtively snipped a lock of hair from the head of a young beauty, Arabella Fermor, and carried it off as a trophy. The Fermors and the Petres, two prominent Catholic families, stopped talking to one another, and Alexander Pope (another Catholic) was brought in, a poetic troubleshooter, to defuse the tension. This he did with the mock-epic The Rape of the Lock, a poem intended to ‘make a jest of it, and laugh them together again’. It apparently achieved its object, since Arabella Fermor ‘took it so well as to give about copies of it’ and later posed for a portrait in which she was shown wearing a prominent crucifix-necklace, one specifically described in the poem.

In the poem, Arabella appears as ‘Belinda’ (Arabella — Bella — Belinda) and Lord Petre is cast as ‘the Baron’. Canto I sees Belinda at her dressing-table; in Canto II she makes a pleasure cruise on the Thames (a joking reference to the sea-voyages of heroic poetry); Canto III is set in Hampton Court, where the barbering offence takes place; and Cantos IV and V are focused on a skirmish between the nymphs and fops, and the ascent of the lock to heaven, where it becomes a comet (comet, from kometes, ‘long-haired’).

The style is that of the mock-heroic, in which trivial actions are magnified as if they were the doings of gods or heroes. The work which almost certainly influenced the choice of title was Alessandro Tassoni’s mock-epic The Rape of the Bucket, from 1622. (‘Rape’ in both poems was ultimately from ‘rapere’, to steal or snatch, and did not have a primarily sexual signification.) In this piece of scholarly ludicrousness, two Italian towns, Modena and Bologna, go to war with one another over the theft of a bucket from a well. The gods take sides in the struggle, sometimes rather ridiculously. Saturn travels to the celestial parliament sitting on a chamber pot, and Juno is unavailable because she is having her hair cut.

The Rape of the Bucket was a best-seller in Italy and was known Europe-wide, and while Pope could have read it in Italian, he probably encountered it in English. A translation of the first part of Tassoni’s poem appeared in 1710, two years before the composition of The Rape of the Lock. ‘Done from the Italian into English Rhime’, it was the work of John Ozell, one of the powerhouses of English translation in the early eighteenth century, the man responsible for English editions of Molière, Racine, Cervantes, Corneille and many others. In 1712 he produced an important edition of the Iliad, which Pope drew on in his own translation.

But Mr Pope and Mr Ozell were not on very good terms. Ozell had attacked William Wycherley, a friend of Pope’s, and by doing so had drawn the wrath of the Scriblerians (Ozell was also satirized by Swift). In 1708 Pope caricatured Ozell as the very model of a time-serving literary hack:

Reviving Perrault, murdering Boileau, he
Slander'd the ancients first, then Wycherley;
Which yet not much that old bard's anger raised,
Since those were slander'd most whom Ozell praised.

Things went from bad to worse when Ozell was one of the fools mentioned by name in the Dunciad of 1729. That same year Ozell decided to bite back, as reported by Theophilus Cibber (son of Colley) in 1753:

Ozell was incensed to the last degree by this usage, and in a paper called The Weekly Medley, September 1729, he published the following strange Advertisement. 'As to my learning, this envious wretch knew, and every body knows, that the whole bench of bishops, not long ago, were pleased to give me a purse of guineas for discovering the erroneous translations of the Common Prayer in Portugueze, Spanish, French, Italian, &c. As for my genius, let Mr. Cleland shew better verses in all Pope's works, than Ozell's version of Boileau's Lutrin, which the late lord Hallifax was so well pleased with, that he complimented him with leave to dedicate it to him, &c. &c. Let him shew better and truer poetry in The Rape of the Lock, than in Ozell's Rape of the Bucket, which, because an ingenious author happened to mention in the same breath with Pope's, viz.

'Let Ozell sing the Bucket, Pope the Lock’,

the little gentleman [i.e. Pope, who never reached a greater height than 4’6”] had like to have run mad; and Mr. Toland and Mr. Gildon publicly declared Ozell's Translation of Homer to be, as it was prior, so likewise superior, to Pope's.’

The wars between the singer of the Bucket and the singer of the Lock seem as fevered and ridiculous as the battles between Modena and Bologna or the nymphs and fops of Hampton Court. One asks oneself why Pope was so angry with Ozell. An obvious answer presents itself. Ozell had committed the unpardonable sin of helping Pope write his best-known poem.

Consulted:
Hunt, John Dixon, ed.: The Rape of the Lock: A Casebook (Macmillan, 1968)
Rousseau, GS, ed.: Twentieth Century Interpretations of ’The Rape Of The Lock’: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1969)
Williams, Abigail: ‘John Ozell’, Dictionary of National Biography (Sept 2004)

90. The Bald Prima Donna by Eugene Ionesco

2009-05-31T00:30:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the intermission - now for some more titles.

Ionesco said that The Bald Prima Donna, his first play, and a keystone of absurdist theatre, was inspired by a teach-yourself-English manual. He wrote in his autobiographical work on the theatre, Notes and Counter-Notes:

I bought an English-French conversational manual for beginners. I set to work. Conscientiously I copied out phrases from my manual in order to learn them by heart. Then I found out, reading them over attentively, that I was learning not English but some very surprising truths: that there are seven days in the week, for example, which I happened to know before; or that the floor is below us, the ceiling above us, another thing that I may well have known before but had never thought seriously about or had forgotten, and suddenly it seemed to me as stupefying as it was indisputably true.

The play drew on these banalities, spiced up with a few well-known English proverbs (‘He who sells an ox today, will have an egg tomorrow’), and was originally called English Without Pain — but when a director commented that this might lead people to believe it was a satire on the English, this was changed to The Bald Prima Donna.

This title actually emerged during rehearsals. In the episode called 'The Headcold', the script refers to an ‘institutrice blonde’ (blonde schoolmistress); instead, the actor, Henri-Jacques Huet, made a slip – or began improvising – and said ‘cantatrice chauve’ (bald prima donna). Ionesco was present at the rehearsal and realized this was a much better phrase, and indeed a better title. It was adopted, and for form’s sake, a brief reference to a bald prima donna was later inserted in Scene 10.

Consulted:
Lamont, Rosette C.: Ionesco's Imperatives (1993)
Esslin, Martin: The Theatre of the Absurd (1980)

Brief hiatus

2009-05-27T00:36:00.000-07:00

I'm off on holiday for a few days but will be returning at the weekend with more titles. And by the way, Robinson's barley water + lemonade = Robinsonade. See you later,
Gary

89. The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

2009-05-26T03:21:00.000-07:00

Der Schweizerische Robinson was published in 1812 and tells the story of a pious Swiss family, a mother, father and four young sons, marooned on an island in the East Indies following a shipwreck. It is 600 pages long. The father, who narrates the book, uses the shipwreck as a pedagogical opportunity:

‘I believe,’ said Ernest [aged 12], ‘that mangoes grow on the sea-shore in marshy soil.’
‘You are partly right, my boy,’ I said, ‘but what you say applies to the black mango, not to the grey or red species, which bear small berries and do not grow so high.’

During their stay on the island the family undertake a holocaust of its creatures. Among the species butchered are kangaroos, penguins, bears, giant land crabs, capybaras, apes, jackals, ostriches and turtles (the island contains the fauna of six continents). To keep themselves in comfort the family build a luxurious treehouse, plant and harvest corn, milk cows (rescued from the ship), boil up a whale, manufacture isinglass and cochineal, breed doves, gather honey, tap rubber and salt herrings. There is no difficulty of island life that their ingenuity and perseverance cannot resolve. By the end of the book they have created a Calvinist paradise in which nature has been subdued and largely exterminated, and where disease, sex and conflict (between humans) have been banished. In a final act of dour appropriation they christen their island ‘New Switzerland’.

The family is not, of course, called Robinson. They are never named. The title refers instead to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe of 1719 (see post 73). In an odd twist of literary fate the word ‘Robinson’ had taken on a life of its own in eighteenth-century European publishing, appearing in the titles of hundreds of adventure stories, mainly German and Dutch, but also French, Danish, Swiss, Swedish and Italian, known collectively as ‘Robinsonades’: Teutsche Robinson (1722), Americanische Robinson (1724), Nordische Robinson (1741), Hollandsche Robinson (1743), Dänische Robinson (1750), Walchersche Robinson (1752), Maldivschen Philosophen Robine (1753), Oude en Jongen Robinson (1753), Isländische Robinson (1755), Hartz-Robinson (1755), Robinson vom Berge Libonon (1755), Haagsche Robinson (1758), Robertson (sic) aux terres australes (1766), Steyerische Robinson (1791) and Böhmische Robinson (1796), among many others, all by different authors. ‘Robinson’ simply denoted an adventure tale. They didn't even have to take place on desert islands: there were Robinsonades set on mountain-tops, in jungles, among corsairs or in Turkish prisons. Many of the tales dispensed with the idea of the isolated adventurer altogether. There were even Robinsonades without ‘Robinson’ in the title.

Scholars first began to examine the Robinsonade phenomenon as early as the mid 1700s. Among the Robinsonade sub-groups identified by a French scholar were the robinsonnade gullivérienne, the robinsonnade en famille (such as the Swiss Family) and the robinsonnade de l’enfant. There were satirical Robinsonades, fantastical Robinsonades, Utopian Robinsonades and interplanetary Robinsonades. Life was a Robinsonade. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Robinsonade had mutated still further: Tarzan of the Apes, looked at in a certain way, is a Robinsonade (a robinsonnade de l’enfant?), and so is The Island of Doctor Moreau and Lord of the Flies (dystopian Robinsonades). In film and television, Lost in Space was obviously a Robinsonade (being based on the Swiss Family), and there were TV dramas such as Mountain Family Robinson and Swiss Family Robinson Lost in the Jungle.

But strangely, of the eighteenth and nineteenth century continental Robinsonades, only The Swiss Family Robinson took root when transplanted back onto English-speaking soil. Why, it is difficult to say. Perhaps the title had something to do with it. Originally, of course, it had been Der Schweizerische Robinson, and as such was indistinguishable from all the other Hollandsche Robinsons, Dänische Robinsons and Haagsche Robinsons. But the insertion of the word ‘Family’ in translation put it in a class of its own. ‘Family’ acted as a sort of pivot. Substitute anything for the ‘Swiss’ or the ‘Robinson’ and you get an infinite number of delightfully silly variations: Space Family Robinson, Beverly Hills Family Robinson, Swiss Family Treehouse, Swiss Family Orbison, Swiss Family Guy Robinson, Mouse Family Robinson, Swiss Family Mouse House, Stick Family Robinson, Swiss Bank Family Robinson, Swiss Cheese Family Robinson, and on and on (all real examples). The words ‘Swiss Family Robinson’ are close to nonsense in any case: tinkering with them reduces them to gibberish. Perhaps the reason only one Robinson made it back home was because it could be endlessly parodied.

Consulted:
Gove, Philip Babcock: The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (Holland Press, 1961)

88. Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper, by Charles Perrault

2009-05-25T00:37:00.000-07:00

The salient detail here is the glass slipper, and perhaps my French-speaking readers will correct me if I make any blunders!

The version of Cinderella that most readers will be familiar with first appeared as ‘Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre’, one of the stories in Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose Tales) in 1697. His immediate written source was ‘La Gatta Cenerentola’ from Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone of 1634. ‘Cenerentola’ comes ultimately from cinis, ash, and tollere, to carry: thus the heroine is an ash-carrier, or ash-girl. In Perrault the sisters refer to her unkindly as ‘Cucendron’ — ash-bottom, or ash-arse: this found its way into the first English translation as ‘Cinder-breech’. Perrault has all the paraphernalia we recognize from Disney: the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach, the glass slippers, the rat coachman, and so on.

It is the detail of the little glass slipper that brings Perrault’s title into an area of controversy. The glass slipper was his own addition (it does not appear in Basile, where the shoe is merely ‘the richest and prettiest patten you could imagine’), and he gives it star billing — ‘Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper’. Before modern industrial toughening, glass would have been an entirely impractical, not to say lethal, material for slippers, and appears in very few other Cinderella stories (which go back at least to dynastic Egypt). It has been suggested that Perrault drew on oral sources in which the slipper was made of vair, an archaic French word for an ermine-like fur, and changed it to verre, or glass, either because he liked the sound of it or out of a genuine error, and thus the tale was altered forever. One of the earliest champions of this theory was Balzac, in his Etudes Philosophiques sur Catherine de Medicis (1836), but its spread was guaranteed when it was taken up by encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Among the most recent encyclopedias to cite the theory uncritically is the fourth edition of Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of 1996, in front of me as I write. Folklorists still occasionally cite the vair/verre hypothesis as fact. But it is almost certainly false.

The reasons were pointed out by the folklorist Paul Delarue in a short essay in Le Monde in 1951. Essentially, the vair/verre hypothesis depends on the idea that glass is very uncommon as a slipper-material in other tales of the Cinderella cycle. Perrault invented it through this tiny slip or misunderstanding, the hypothesis runs. Any other Cinderella tales with glass slippers must therefore derive from Perrault. Certainly there are none published which pre-date Perrault. But Delarue pointed out that in other Cinderella tales with glass slippers, motif-analysis does not bear out the assertion that they are necessarily derivative of, and post-date, Perrault. A Scottish version of Cinderella, for example, which includes glass shoes, also includes the ‘helpful animal motif’, which, for folklorists, sets heads nodding. Animals helping the heroine in Cinderella stories — frogs (Africa), fish (China) and giant crabs (Java) — indicate antiquity, and in the Scottish tale it is a little black lamb, not a fairy, who dispenses the rich raiment that enables Cinderella to attract the prince.

Delarue deals his knock-out blow by finding this dangerous item of footwear in other antique tales. In a Gaelic story a heroine who desires to climb a glass mountain in order to find her husband must wear glass shoes. In an Irish tale it is the hero who wears glass shoes when rescuing a princess from a sea-serpent. The point here is that glass is a magical material, on a par with diamond and gold (all of which are materials for objects, including shoes, in fairy-tales). Thus in various stories we have a glass mountain, a boat of glass, a castle of glass, a tree with leaves of glass; there is even a story of a giant with a beard of glass (as well as a giant with a beard of copper and a giant with a beard of gold). Impossible things are permissible in the magical world, and a beard of glass is as impractical as shoes of glass. The fact that glass is likely to shatter, and that fur would be more sensible, is an absurd attempt to judge the fairytale world by the standards of our own mundane one.

Perhaps the debate will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, but the fact remains that the original story with the fur has never been located, and that Perrault wrote verre, and meant verre.

Rather a shame, because the verre/vair hypothesis is useful as a story to tell at dinner-parties, and Balzac is on your side if anyone disagrees.

Consulted:
Perrault, Charles: Histories or Tales of Past Times Told by Mother Goose with Morals (Fortune Press, 1928)
Barchilon, Jacques and Flinders, Peter: Charles Perrault (Twayne, 1981)
Dundes, Alan, ed., Cinderella: A Casebook (University of Winconsin Press, 1982)

87. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

2009-05-24T00:32:00.000-07:00

In his autobiography In Memory Yet Green, Asimov recounted how I, Robot, his short-story collection of 1950, got its title.

On June 8 I visited Fred, got my advance for The Stars, like Dust —, and handed over additional chapters. I also gave him the manuscript of the robot story collection. Martin Greenberg had rejected my notion of calling it Mind and Iron and suggested it be called I, Robot.
“Impossible, Marty,” I said. “Eando Binder wrote a short story called ‘I, Robot’ back in 1938.”
To which Marty answered, with unassailable logic, “F— Eando Binder.”
So I, Robot it was. There is no question that Marty’s title was far better than mine and probably helped sell the book.

(Eando Binder was in fact two people, the brothers, E. and O. Binder – E and O = Eando – early US sci-fi writers.)

It’s a good story, but it begs a further question — where did Eando Binder get it from? There is one other famous book with the same title formula: Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, which was a huge international hit in 1934, four years before the Binders’ I, Robot. Coincidence? You decide.

Consulted:
Asimov, Isaac: In Memory Yet Green (1979) (Back cover blurb: ‘THE AMAZING ASIMOV TACKLES HIS MOST FASCINATING SUBJECT - HIMSELF!’)

86. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

2009-05-23T00:34:00.000-07:00

The Tale of Genji (c.1010), by the Japanese noblewoman known as Lady Murasaki Shikibu, is sometimes designated the world’s first novel; perhaps it could be called the world’s first bonkbuster, dealing as it does with the irresistibly attractive Prince Genji and his many love affairs.

The name ‘Genji’ is something of a smokescreen, though. This is not his actual surname, which is never revealed. He is the son of the emperor by a low-ranking concubine, and Genji is a rendering of the Chinese characters for ‘Minamoto’, a clan name conferred on princes of the blood who were not in direct line to the imperial throne. The fact that Genji was given this name signalled that he was no longer a member of the imperial family and could never aspire to supreme power. The title The Tale of Genji thus means, in a sense, ‘the story of an outcast’.

But that doesn’t stop him having a lot of fun.

Consulted:
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji, trs and notes Royall Tyler (2001)