160. Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo

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

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

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

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

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

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 Carroll
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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152. The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett

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

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

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

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

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