171. The Revolt of Islam by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The title of Shelley’s epic The Revolt of Islam is perhaps better known today than it used to be. But in its earliest edition the poem was called Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City. In 1818 ‘revolution’ inevitably meant France, and Shelley’s publishers were nervous chaps; they quickly requested a change to something more innocuous, and The Revolt of Islam, strange to modern ears, was chosen so as not to frighten the horses. Oriental exoticism, in publishing terms, was ‘safe’. But ‘Islam’, which refers to the religion of the tyrant Othman in the poem, has little to do with the poem’s main themes, which are concerned with political liberty and doomed love: Shelley himself admitted that the poem was ‘without much attempt at minute delineation of Mahometan manners’, and that it ‘might be supposed to take place in an European nation.’

Consulted:
Nigel Leask: British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (2004)

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170. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

Wilde did not choose the title De Profundis. After composing his famous letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) in Reading Gaol in 1897, he gave it to his friend and literary executor Robert Ross, with a semi-serious suggestion for a title: Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis (‘Letter: In Prison and in Chains’). Ross, however, ignored the suggestion, publishing it in 1905, five years after Wilde’s death, with the title De Profundis (‘from the depths’, an allusion to Psalm 130). Ross’s title stands in a long line of literary De Profundises. Baudelaire had tried one, as had Christina Rossetti (though they both were considerably briefer than Wilde’s); later on Dorothy Parker and CS Lewis had a go. One other note of titular interest is that in 1924 Douglas published his sonnet sequence In Excelsis (‘from the heights’). This was also written in prison — he got six months for libelling Churchill — and was intended to mirror Ross’s title.

Consulted:
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Ian Small, Russell Jackson (2005)

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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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