130. Erewhon by Samuel Butler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'”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

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

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)