125. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) is by that darling of literary theorists, John Barth, who later went on to write Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse and other early American postmodernist works. The novel recounts the story of Ebenezer Cooke, an 18th-century American ‘sot-weed factor’, or tobacco merchant. The title gives some indication of the book’s playful concerns. It is unapologetically ripped off from a previous work, a long satirical poem called ‘The Sot-Weed Factor’ (1707) by one Ebenezer Cooke, a real-life 18th-century merchant and traveller. Cooke’s poem is quoted extensively throughout the book, along with Barth’s copious invented additions, so that the reader is never quite sure what is ancient and what modern. Postmodernism re-defined many things, but perhaps among the most significant was the meaning of theft.

Consulted:
Harris, Charles B: Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth‎ (1983)

124. Arden of Faversham, possibly by William Shakespeare

Arden of Faversham is a literary mystery. It got its title as a result of a real-life murder, that of Thomas Arden (of Faversham in Kent) by his wife Alice, and her lover Mosby, on February 15, 1551. The story was first written up by Holinshed, then published as an anonymous play in 1592, with the title The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent. Who was most wickedlye murdered, by the means of his disloyall and wanton wyfe, who for the love she bare to one Mosbie, hyred two desperat ruffins Blackwill and Shakbag, to kill him. Wherin is shewed the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman, the unsatiable desire of filthie lust, and the shamefull end of all murderers. To this day the authorship of the play is uncertain, and some have claimed it for William Shakespeare. This is regarded by most mainstream Shakespeare scholars as at best a stretch, but there are some intriguing links. Despite its not appearing in the quarto or folio Shakespeares, it seems to have received an early attribution as a work of Shakespeare in Edward Archer’s play-catalogue of 1656, and it was later championed as an authentic Shakespeare play by critics including Swinburne and J A Symonds. 21st-century computer analysis has also provided support for authorship or part-authorship by Shakespeare. But the title may be the final pointer. Shakespeare’s mother’s maiden name was Arden, and he later set As You Like It in the Forest of Arden. Did he revisit the story of the murdered man as a familial joke?

Consulted:
Wine, ML, ed.: Arden of Faversham‎ (1973)

123. The Mint by TE Lawrence

'”C*** thinks he's drilling the f***ing depot,' snarled Nobby, beside his thin soul with rage. “Get those forks, and shift the pig-s*** into the lorry.”' This is a fairly representative sample of The Mint, TE Lawrence’s only full-length autobiographical fiction apart from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A record of his time in the RAF, it did not see the light of day until long after his death, mainly because of its obscenity, and was circulated in private until publication in 1955. It really is very rude: David Lean, one feels, could not have filmed it successfully.

The title was for many something of a puzzle. There are no mints, after-dinner, numismatic or any other in the book, and the word ‘mint’ is never mentioned. In a letter to RAF chief Sir Hugh Trenchard in 1928 Lawrence explained that he had called it The Mint as an obscure metaphor for the way RAF recruits were trained: ‘we were all being stamped after your image and superscription’.

Consulted:
Garnett, D., ed.: The Letters of TE Lawrence (1938)

122. Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara

Appointment in Samarra (1934) is John O’Hara’s first novel and one of the great texts of Depression-era America. It concerns the life and self-destructive career of Julian English, a preppy socialite who finally (spoiler here) commits suicide. But the title is rather odd. There is nothing in the book about Samarra, nor anything else Middle-Eastern (Samarra of course is in modern-day Iraq).

The title came about during a meeting with Dorothy Parker. O’Hara confessed he couldn’t think of a good title for his novel, and Parker mentioned a play called Sheppey, by Somerset Maugham. In the play there is a reference to an Arabian tale in which a Baghdad servant tries to elude Death by fleeing to Samarra, only to find that Death has already planned an ‘appointment’ with him there. The inevitability of death, therefore, is the reference. O’Hara reportedly said, on reading the play: ‘There’s my title.’ Parker replied, ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Mr O’Hara.’ But he ignored her, and later wrote: ‘Dorothy didn’t like the title, Alfred Harcourt [his publisher] didn’t like the title, his editors didn’t like it, nobody liked it but me. But I bullied it through.’

Consulted:
Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph: John O'Hara: A Documentary Volume‎ (2006)

121. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams’s most influential play was originally called The Moth, then changed to Blanche’s Chair in the Moon, then to The Poker Night, before he lighted on A Streetcar Named Desire. He explained the title’s origin in an essay of 1946: ‘I live near the main street of the Quarter. Down this street, running on the same tracks, are two streetcars, one named “Desire” and the other named “Cemeteries”. Their indiscourageable progress up and down Royal Street struck me as having some symbolic bearing of a broad nature on the life in the Vieux Carré — and everywhere else, for that matter.’ Blanche’s first line in the play is ‘They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, then transfer to one called Cemeteries’: and it seems to be Williams’ conviction that unrestrained desire leads to destruction – a conviction that drives the play towards its terrible end.

Consulted:Kolin, Philip C.: The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia‎ (2004)

120. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton by Dennis Potter

Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, Dennis Potter’s fourth broadcast TV play (his first four TV plays were all broadcast in 1965), concerns the experiences of an unsuccessful Labour candidate. Its title derived ultimately from a US Civil War song, ‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys are Marching’ (a popular tune later adapted as a children’s skipping game: ‘Vote, Vote, Vote for Billy Martin’). What makes the play particularly interesting is that it might almost have been called Vote, Vote, Vote for Dennis Potter. Potter was an unsuccessful Labour candidate for Hertfordshire East in the 1964 general election. All of his experiences, from being mistaken for a Jehovah’s Witness to encountering racist Labour supporters, went straight into the play, and Potter reported that his agent remarked: ‘Bloody hell, Dennis, you’re the only candidate I’ve had who has recycled his own speeches.’

Consulted:
Carpenter, Humphrey: Dennis Potter (1998)

119. The Great American Novel by Philip Roth

Roth’s book — a satirical novel about baseball — is one of several, by various hands, called The Great American Novel. All were responses to a challenge laid down in 1868 by the writer John William De Forest, in an article in The Nation entitled ‘The Great American Novel’. In it De Forest said that a true depiction of American life had yet to be written:

This task of painting the American soul within the framework of a novel has seldom been attempted, and has never been accomplished further than very partially — in the production of a few outlines. Washington Irving was too cautious to make the trial; he went back to fictions of Knickerbockers and Rip Van Winkles and Ichabod Cranes; these he did well, and we may thank him for not attempting more and failing in the attempt. With the same consciousness of incapacity Cooper shirked the experiment; he devoted himself to Indians, of whom he knew next to nothing, and to backwoodsmen and sailors, whom he idealized; or where he attempted civilized groups, he produced something less natural than the wax figures of Barnum's old museum. If all Americans were like the heroes and heroines of Cooper, Carlyle might well enough call us "eighteen millions of bores." As for a tableau of American society, as for anything resembling the tableaux of English society by Thackeray and Trollope, or the tableaux of French society by Balzac and George Sand, we had better not trouble ourselves with looking for it in Cooper. [...] Hawthorne, the greatest of American imaginations, staggered under the load of the American novel. In "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Blithedale Romance" we have three delightful romances, full of acute spiritual analysis, of the light of other worlds, but also characterized by only a vague consciousness of this life, and by graspings that catch little but the subjective of humanity. Such personages that Hawthorne creates belong to the wide realm of art rather than to our nationality. They are as probably natives of the furthest mountains of Cathay or of the moon as of the United States of America. They are what Yankees might come to be who should shut themselves up for life to meditate in old manses. They have no sympathy with this eager and laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds so many railroads, does the most business on a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion to its population, believes in the physically impossible and does some of it. [...] The profoundest reverence for this great man need prevent no one from saying that he has not written "the Great American Novel." The nearest approach to the desired phenomenon is "Uncle Tom's Cabin." There were very noticeable faults in that story; there was a very faulty plot; there was (if idealism be a fault) a black man painted whiter than the angels, and a girl such as girls are to be, perhaps, but are not yet; there was a little village twaddle. But there was also a national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking, and plenty of strong feeling. Though comeliness of form was lacking, the material of the work was in many respects admirable. [...] Then, stricken with timidity, the author shrank into her native shell of New England.

It is a remarkable essay, considering what was to come. Melville, Wharton, James, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wolfe – all were in the immediate future of 1868 (Melville was in the past, but had not yet flitted across De Forest’s radar). Most (if not all) of these writers must have been aware of De Forest’s famous challenge, must have known of the phrase ‘The Great American Novel’, and been aware of the implicit lack that it described. All were goaded into action, at least in part, by the challenge of De Forest.

But the definitive Great American Novel proved as ungraspable as America itself. By the time Roth attempted it, all hope had gone. Talking about his book in a 1973 essay, he said: ‘I don’t claim to know what America is really like.’

Consulted:
DeForest, John William: 'The Great American Novel', The Nation, 9 January 1868: online at http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/articles/n2ar39at.html

118. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) — now a major motion picture, and one, I imagine, full of lush greenery, magnificent flashing eyes and flowing drapery, though I haven’t seen it — got its title through an opportunity for a pun that does not exist in English. Cólera, in Spanish, means both ‘cholera’ and ‘anger’.

Of course! Cholera, choler, choleric...choler was one of the four medieval humours, responsible, when present in excess, for fits of anger and bile. The disease must have been so named in the past because of this relation to medieval diagnostics. But to relate love and cholera so closely? That’s class. In fact, love, cholera and anger are all related in the novel: the symptoms of cholera are explicitly identified with those of love, and it is love that inspires the anger of Florentino Ariza against his rival Juvenal Urbino, who happens to be an expert...in cholera.

Punning titles in foreign novels of course pose difficulties for the translator. Another interesting example is Balzac’s Le Peau de Chagrin, usually translated, a little inadequately, as The Wild Ass’s Skin (and mentioned in a previous post). Chagrin is a pun in French meaning both ‘grief’ and ‘shagreen’ (a type of leather made from a wild ass skin); and in the story it is the magic ass’s skin, which grants any wish, that ensures that the hero comes to grief.

117. A Passage to India by EM Forster

Normally in this blog I wouldn’t investigate books with quotations as titles. There are many of these, of course, tending to cluster around the early part of the twentieth century (when this titling strategy was particularly fashionable): Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Books with quotations as titles are not usually very interesting (purely from a titular point of view), because after having uncovered the source of the quotation there is usually little else to say. But I’d like to make an exception for A Passage to India because the source of the quotation (and quotation it is) was, to me, very surprising. A Passage to India was lifted from the poem ‘Passage to India’ by Walt Whitman.

Whitman was the pioneering gay poet of the nineteenth century, and a man with an important influence on Forster’s career (a man who, Forster wrote, ‘went the “whole hog”’). Forster was of course himself homosexual and wrote several short stories with gay themes (‘The Obelisk’ being one of the most notorious, and funniest), and a novel, Maurice, none of which was published during his lifetime. Whitman’s 'Passage to India' is not explicitly homosexual in theme – it is instead a rapturous allegorical address to the voyaging soul – but in certain of its lines we get some sense of why the author of Maurice esteemed him so highly:

Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d
(The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,)
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
As, fill’d with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

Consulted:
Lago, Mary: E.M. Forster: A Literary Life‎ (1995)

116. Othello by William Shakespeare

It has often been assumed that Shakespeare simply made up the name ‘Othello’. It does not appear in his chief source, Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (where the main character is simply ‘a Moor’), nor is it found in any previous text. But one theory suggests a possible precursor in French medieval romance. The person in question is Sir Othuel (or Otuel/Otuwel). Sir Othuel was a Moor, a companion of Roland who had converted to Christianity (as Othello had in Shakespeare’s play, but significantly had not in Cinthio), and a man of noble birth (again in Shakespeare, but not in Cinthio). Shakespeare could easily have Italianized Othuel by adding a final ‘o’, thus giving the name a Venetian ring. The theory hinges on whether Shakespeare knew the romances. There seems little doubt that that he did: other names he very probably filched from them include Oberon and Fortinbras.

Consulted:
Guilfoyle, Cherrell: ‘Othello, Otuel and the English Charlemagne Romances’, The Review of English Studies, 1987, XXXVIII (149)