176. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima

When made into a film in 1976, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea was described by Punch as ‘an everyday tale of torture, scopophilia, copulation, masturbation, dismemberment and antique dealing’. All true, though the original title of Mishima’s 1963 novel was rather different. It was Gogo no Eiko, which hinges crucially on the homonym eiko, and can be rendered either ‘An Afternoon’s Glory’ or ‘An Afternoon’s Towing’. Mishima’s English translator, John Nathan, was stumped (all he could think of was Glory is a Drag) and went to the author for help. Mishima, who hungered after the Nobel Prize, decided he wanted ‘a long title in the manner of À la Recherche’ — perhaps to impress the committee — and chose The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, in reference to the (extremely gruesome) downfall of the main character. But it did him little good: sales were disappointing, even in Japan.

Consulted:
Nathan, John: Mishima: A Biography‎ (1975)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

175. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest contains a pun, that much seems clear. Shaw said in his review of 1895 that the wordplay on Ernest/Earnest was not in fact a very good pun, and that the title as a whole was rather laboured and old-fashioned. But Shaw might have missed something. ‘Earnest’ quite likely plays on Urning, the German word for ‘homosexual’ coined in the 1860s by the sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and a term much in vogue in the England of the 1890s. That its derivative was ‘Earnest’ is borne out in the title of a collection of homoerotic love lyrics, Love in Earnest, by John Gambril Nicholson, published in 1892 (three years before Wilde’s play). One poem in the collection, ‘Of Boys’ Names’, makes the point clear:

Old memories of the Table Round
In Percival and Lancelot dwell,
Clement and Bernard bring the sound
Of anthems in the cloister-cell,
And Leonard vies with Lionel
In stately step and kingly frame,
And Kenneth speaks of field and fell,
And Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

One name can make my pulses bound,
No peer it owns, nor parallel,
By it is Vivian’s sweetness drowned,
And Roland, full as organ-swell;
Though Frank may ring like silver bell,
And Cecil softer music claim,
They cannot work the miracle,—
’Tis Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

Cyril is lordly, Stephen crowned
With deathless wreaths of asphodel,
Oliver whispers peace profound,
Herbert takes arms his foes to quell,
Eustace with sheaves is laden well,
Christopher has a nobler fame,
And Michael storms the gates of Hell,
But Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

Envoy.
My little Prince, Love’s mystic spell
Lights all the letters of your name,
And you, if no one else, can tell
Why Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

Consulted:
Craft, Christopher: Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920 (1994)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

174. Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca

The Spanish title of Lorca’s great modernist play is Bodas de Sangre, or ‘Wedding of Blood’. The title and theme came from a murder committed in 1928 in the town of Nijar in the Spanish province of Almería, when a young woman, Francisca Cañada Morales, ran off with her cousin, Francisco Montes Cañada, moments before her wedding to a local man. The cousin was then shot dead by the prospective bridegroom’s brother. Lorca read about the incident in the Heraldo de Madrid newspaper and kept the cutting until he came to write the play in 1932. One odd titular circumstance remains to complicate matters, however. In 1927, a year before the murders, a film called Bodas Sangrientas (‘Bloody Wedding’) was shown in Barcelona and Madrid, based on the novel Beatrice Cenci by Luciano Doria. It’s not known whether Lorca saw the film; some critics are more sanguine than others.

Consulted:
Lima, Robert: The Theatre of García Lorca‎ (1963)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

173. A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift

A Tale of a Tub sounds simple, but isn’t. Swift explained that it derived from a nautical tradition in which sailors, when menaced by a whale, would throw a tub overboard for it to play with; symbolically, the whale was Hobbes’s atheistical tract Leviathan, and the tub Swift’s own book, intended to distract it from scuttling the ship of state.

But this can only be a partial explanation. The phrase ‘a tale of a tub’ was slang for ‘a cock-and-bull story’, and had been the title of a 1596 comedy by Ben Jonson, as well as featuring in works such as Webster’s The White Devil. A ‘tub’, too, was slang for a pulpit, and Swift was a clergyman.

Perhaps another important influence was Rabelais: Swift greatly admired Rabelais and modelled his prose style partly on him, and the phrase ‘a tale of a tub’ appears several times in the Urquhart translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Consulted:
Jonathan Swift, Angus Ross, and David Woolley: A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (Oxford World's Classics, 2008)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

172. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus

The phrase ‘oldest living confederate widow’ came to Allan Gurganus in the form of a newspaper headline — he had merely to add ‘tells all’ and the title was ready for dispatch. It was 1981, and Gurganus was staying at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in New York State while working on his novel The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church (Mr Gurganus has an eye for titles). On his way to the swimming-pool one day he spied the newspaper in the foyer and, despite already having put in a good days’ work, ran immediately back to his room to type the ninety-nine-year-old Lucy Marsden’s confessions. In 1981 there were indeed still living confederate widows, having married ex-soldiers at young ages: the last widow, Daisy Cave, who married her husband in 1919 when she was in her twenties and he 75, survived into the early 1990s.

Consulted:
Gee, Robin: Novel and Short Story Writer's Market (1991)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

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)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

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)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

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)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

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)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

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)

See a clickable index of all titles covered