135. The Necronomicon, not by HP Lovecraft

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

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

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

Such is the power of a good title.

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

134. The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol

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

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

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

133. Grimus by Salman Rushdie

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

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

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

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)