100. From the title desk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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)