169. How Come? by Eddie Hunter

‘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)

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168. Timber by Ben Jonson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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