How Books Got their Titles

A whiff of camphor

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 10:51:00 +0000

Hi visitors,

This blog is mothballed. However, the posts are all still here if needed (click on the link to the right to see an index). There are 181 stories of how books got their titles.

In this blog I set myself three conditions for inclusion. Firstly, each title should be the title of a major work: a book or play, rather than, say, a poem or short story. Secondly, the title should not be explicable by reading the text of the book or play itself: some additional biographical or other information should be essential for full comprehension. Thirdly, I have not dealt with too many books that take quotations as sources for titles, unless there is some rather unusual reason for the quotation.

I have relied on the efforts of a great many scholars to write this blog, and a list of sources is given at the end of each post.

Please continue to comment on any of these posts as you see fit and I will certainly respond.

Many thanks to all the visitors and commenters so far.

Gary

181. Fame is the Spur by Howard Spring

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:08:00 +0000

Here's one for the day they announce the UK general election.

The title of Howard Spring’s bestseller of 1940 — about the rise to power of a Labour politician — encapsulates the truth that all politicians seek to deny: that they seek personal aggrandizement first and foremost, and that serving the people comes second. It came originally from Milton’s Lycidas (a poem which incidentally also provided the title for Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel). But Fame is the Spur is not a ‘quotation-title’ in quite the ordinary sense that, say, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath or A Handful of Dust are quotation-titles (if you can name the sources for all three, award yourself the points that you need today). The key is in what comes after. The full quote from Milton runs:

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days.

The penultimate word of the sentence, bearing in mind the political affiliation of the hero, is the pun that Spring wishes the reader to find.

180. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:32:00 +0000

What is the connection between Ray Bradbury and Robert Pirsig? We tend to think of Pirsig’s novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) as having a title of unique quirky brilliance. But it drew for inspiration on a whole corpus of earlier books, many of which had been extremely well-known and successful. They included Zen in the Art of Archery (Eng trans. 1953) by Eugen Herrigel, a German philosophy professor who popularized Zen in the West; Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement (Eng trans. 1958) by Gustie Herrigel; Zen in the Art of Photography (1969) by Robert Leverant; and several others. These are all ‘Zen in’ rather than ‘Zen and’ titles: but Pirsig was not first in this either, since Ray Bradbury had written an influential and frequently-anthologized essay on the craft of fiction, ‘Zen and the Art of Writing’, as long before as 1958.

179. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:40:00 +0000

The Good Soldier was published in the middle of the First World War, in 1915, and its title has misled many into thinking it is a tale of the trenches. It is not, of course: it is a story of romantic love and betrayal, set (and written) before the outbreak of war. The title came about by means of testy remark of its author. Ford’s original title was The Saddest Story, but his publishers felt that in wartime this would be a drug on the market, and asked for an alternative. Ford wrote back ironically: ‘Why not call the book “A Roaring Joke”? Or call it anything you like, or perhaps it would be better to call it “A Good Soldier” — that might do.’ In 1915 nothing was selling better than books about the war, and, to Ford’s ‘horror’, his publishers took up the suggestion. Ford saw that the real subject of the book had been entirely leached out; it was only partially restored by a new subtitle, A Tale of Passion.

Consulted:
Max Saunders: Ford Madox Ford: Volume I: The World Before the War (1996)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

178. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:34:00 +0000

The titles of Jane Austen’s first two published novels have a symmetry it is impossible to ignore. They are Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). Both feature two opposed abstract nouns, and in doing so they drew on a titling strategy common at the turn of the nineteenth century: abstract noun titles, either dual or single, were very fashionable, especially as productions of women writers. We have, for example, Nature and Art (1796) by Elizabeth Inchbald; Love and Fashion (1799) by Fanny Burney; Self-Control (1811) and Discipline (1814) by Mary Brunton; and Patronage (1814) by Maria Edgeworth. We might recall that one of Jane Austen’s earliest efforts at prose fiction was called Love and Freindship (sic) and that the first draft of Pride and Prejudice (completed in 1797) was entitled First Impressions. Jane Austen also wrote to her niece Anna in 1814 about Anna’s novel, tentatively entitled Enthusiasm, saying that such a title was ‘something so very superior.’

So in her early career Jane Austen was writing to capture a market, deploying her abstract-noun titles as fashionable bait. But with Pride and Prejudice something else was happening under the surface.

Jane Austen was a great admirer of the playwright and novelist Fanny Burney. Burney’s first two novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), were bestsellers, and she went on to have further success with Camilla (1796). In Northanger Abbey Austen referred to Cecilia and Camilla as the patterns of achievement in the novel form:

'And what are you reading, Miss — ?' 'Oh! It is only a novel!' replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda'; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

In a letter of 1796 Jane talks about an acquaintance, a Miss Fletcher, who admires Camilla – this being one of two ‘pleasing’ aspects of her personality, the other that ‘she drinks no cream in her tea’ – and in Persuasion she has Anne Elliot mention a character from Cecilia (‘the inimitable Miss Larolles’). And it seems that it was from Cecilia that Austen got the title for her best-loved novel. Cecilia ends with a paragraph in which the capitalized phrase ‘PRIDE and PREJUDICE’ recurs three times:

'The whole of this unfortunate business,’ said Dr Lyster, ‘has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Your uncle, the Dean, began it, by his arbitrary will, as if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature! and as if he had power to keep alive, by the loan of a name, a family in the male branch already extinct. Your father, Mr Mortimer, continued it with the same self-partiality, preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife. Yet this, however, remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination: for all that I could say to Mr Delvile, either of reasoning or entreaty, – and I said all I could suggest, and I suggested all a man need wish to hear, – was totally thrown away, till I pointed out to him his own disgrace, in having a daughter-in-law immured in these mean lodgings!’

Austen, then, was an admirer of Burney, and in many ways was indebted to her. But as the critic Janet Todd has pointed out, Pride and Prejudice marks an important departure from the conventions of Cecilia – and indeed from the conventions of the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century ‘courtship novel’ in general. In Cecilia the ‘pride and prejudice’ the unhappy lovers encounter are the pride and prejudice of society against their union. In Austen’s treatment, by contrast, pride and prejudice are internalized, existing within the breasts of the main characters: Fitzwilliam Darcy is the embodiment of pride, and Elizabeth Bennet the embodiment of prejudice. This represents a major psychological shift. No longer is the heroine a passive repository of virtue, as in the standard eighteenth-century novel (one might think in this context of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa): Elizabeth Bennet is a heroine of considerable personal charm and wit, but is not without faults. Jane Austen wanted a more rounded heroine. ‘Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked,’ she wrote to Fanny Knight in March 1817.

Pride and Prejudice therefore continues the Burney line but introduces new elements. They were new enough to make her more celebrated than any female novelist before George Eliot.

Consulted:
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice, ed. Tony Tanner (Penguin Classics, 2003)
Todd, Janet M.: Jane Austen in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Austen, Jane, and Chapman, RW (ed.): Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others‎ (OUP, 1969)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

177. Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:27:00 +0000

Arsenic and Old Lace is generally associated with the 1944 film starring Cary Grant, about two old ladies who murder their gentlemen-visitors. Before that, though, it was a long-running play on Broadway, the most successful of the plays of Joseph Kesselring. The play got its title from a previous, and now largely forgotten, sentimental novel of 1902, Lavender and Old Lace, by Myrtle Reed. Reed’s titles tended towards the fey (e.g. Old Rose and Silver; Threads of Grey and Gold) and were much parodied as a result. Now that her fragrant opus has dropped out of folk memory it is Arsenic and Old Lace that we think of as the original. The two titles were neatly conjoined by Carl Sandburg in his poem ‘Now They Bury Her Again’ (an elegy on the death of poetry): ‘Under the sod with regrets and embellishments/ they lay away a lady in lavender and old lace,/ in arsenic and old lace.’

Consulted:
Herzberg, Max John: The Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature‎ (1962)

See a clickable index of all titles covered

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:48:00 +0000

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)

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174. Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:13:00 +0000

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)

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173. A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:56:00 +0000

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)

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172. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:53:00 +0000

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)

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171. The Revolt of Islam by Percy Bysshe Shelley

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:38:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:35:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:15:00 +0000

‘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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:47:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:47:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:06:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:06:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:52:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:40:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:03:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:29:00 +0000

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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160. Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:28:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Gary) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:26:00 +0000

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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