33. Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

One often hears talk of the ‘Faust legend’ as if the story of the pact-making necromancer were just that - a legend. But there was a real Faust, and one not too far distant in time from Marlowe.

We even know his first name – George.

Among the dozen or so contemporary references, documents from 1532 show that the city council of Nuremberg refused one Georg Faustus safe conduct, reviling him as a ‘great sodomite and necromancer.’ In 1536 Joachim Camerarius (a teacher of Greek at Erfurt) wrote to Daniel Stibar (a councilman at Würzburg): ‘I owe to your friend Faust the pleasure of discussing these affairs with you. I wish he had taught you something of this sort rather than puffed you up with the wind of silly superstition or held you in suspense with I know not what juggler’s tricks.’ As proof that he was no mere piece of diabolical froth but a figure of some significance, he was mentioned in dispatches by both of the great figures of the German Reformation, Luther and Melanchthon. In Luther’s Table-Talk of 1566 (published 20 years after Luther’s death in 1546) there are two references, one of which is the following:

Mention was made of magicians and the magic art, and how Satan blinded men. Much was said about Faust, who called the devil his brother-in-law, and the remark was made: ‘If I, Martin Luther, had given him even my hand, he would have destroyed me; but I would not have been afraid of him — with God as my protector, I would have given him my hand in the name of the Lord.’

Melanchthon, who may have met Faust, wrote that Faust had tried to fly at Venice in the manner of Simon Magus, but had been dashed to the ground; and that at Vienna he had ‘devoured another magician who was discovered a few days later in a certain cave.’

Such was Faust’s notoriety that a book of his deeds, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, spiced up with some previous tales of devil-dealing, was published in German in 1587. Its English translation a few years later was Marlowe’s chief source. The character of Doctor Faustus that Marlowe drew from the English Faust-book became one of the most influential in world literature. Marlowe’s Faustus is a man drunk with knowledge, at war with God for having made him a weak and mortal human, but aspiring nonetheless towards the superhuman. Faustus thinks himself better informed than both God and the Devil (‘Come, I think Hell’s a fable’), but when he is cast into the pit realizes that all along he has been a mere pawn in the struggle of the eternal powers. His last-minute hedging and attempt to recant is one of the most moving episodes in Renaissance drama:

Or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.
O lente, lente currite noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
O, I'll leap up to my God: Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament.

One of the eerie things about The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is that the protagonist reminds us irresistibly of someone else: the author. After Marlowe’s death in 1593, aged 29, in a tavern fight, Thomas Kyd said that Marlowe was prone to ‘jest at the divine Scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men.’ An informer called Richard Baines said at Marlowe’s inquest that ‘almost into every company he cometh he persuades men to Atheism, willing them not to be afeared of bugbears and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both God and his ministers.’ Thomas Beard in 1597 said that he ‘cursed and blasphemed to his last gasp, and together with his breath an oath flew out of his mouth.’

Consulted:
Marlowe, Christopher: The Complete Plays (introduction by JB Steane, Penguin, 1985)
Palmer, Philip Mason, and More, Robert Pattison: The Sources of the Faust Tradition from Simon Magus to Lessing (Octagon, 1966)
Thomas, Vivien, and Tydeman, William: Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and their Sources (Routledge, 1994)

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Brief hiatus

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32. Life in London by Pierce Egan

The title may not seem to require much explanation until one looks at the subtitle: The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his Elegant Friend, Corinthian Tom in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis. This is the first entrance of Tom and Jerry, dated 1821. In this collection of scenes of London night- and day-life by the Regency writer Pierce Egan (1772–1849), Tom was a fashionable rake and Jerry his country cousin. ‘Corinthian’ was a reference to the biblical sins of Corinth, meaning profligate or debauched, and a Corinthian, in the Regency period, was simply a bit of a lad.

The journey from Regency England to MGM was a tortuous one. Life in London, now just called Tom and Jerry, transferred to the stage; ‘Tom and Jerrying’ became a slang term for raising hell; a ‘Tom and Jerry’ was the name for an eggnog cocktail; and several other cartoon pairings were named Tom and Jerry before the cat and mouse. And they say cartoons aren’t educational…

Consulted:
Reid, John Cowie: Bucks and Bruisers (1971)

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31. Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a competent translator, producing, among other works, versions of Aeschylus and Chaucer. Sonnets from the Portuguese, however, was not among her translations. The title was a cover for the author’s own love-poems to Robert Browning, one of which was her famous ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’ (no. 43). The choice of ‘Portuguese’ was significant. Robert Browning’s nickname for Elizabeth was ‘the Portuguese’, in reference to a poem of hers published before they had met, ‘Catarina to Camoens’ (the story of Camoens, the poet, and his tragic love for a Portuguese maiden). Reluctant to publish the sonnets as her own work, she introduced them as anonymous lyrics in the 1850 edition of her Poems. Elizabeth explained in a letter to her sister Arabel in January 1851 that the title ‘did not mean (as we understood the double-meaning) “from the Portuguese language”...though the public (who are very little versed in Portuguese literature) might take it as they pleased.’

But it might have been very different. At least, according to Edmund Gosse it might. In his 1896 collection Critical Kit-Kats he claimed that the title of the book had nearly been (incredibly) Sonnets from the Bosnian:

It was in the second or 1850 edition of the Poems in Two Volumes that the Sonnets from the Portuguese were first given to the public. The circumstances attending their composition have never been clearly related. Mr. Browning, however, eight years before his death, made a statement to a friend, with the understanding that at some future date, after his own decease, the story might be more widely told. [...] When it was determined to publish the sonnets [...] the question of a title arose. The name which was ultimately chosen, Sonnets from the Portuguese, was invented by Mr. Browning, as an ingenious device to veil the true authorship, and yet to suggest kinship with that beautiful lyric, called Catarina to Camoens, in which so similar a passion had been expressed. Long before he ever heard of these poems, Mr. Browning called his wife his ‘own little Portuguese,’ and so, when she proposed ‘Sonnets translated from the Bosnian,’ he, catching at the happy thought of ‘translated’, replied, ‘No, not Bosnian — that means nothing — but from the Portuguese! They are Catarina's sonnets!’ And so, in half a joke, half a conceit, the famous title was invented.

Without Browning’s intervention, then, ‘Bosnian’, not ‘Portuguese’, would have been irrevocably associated in English-speaking countries with the muse of love.

Consulted:
Gosse, Edmund: Critical Kit-Kats (1896)
Taplin, Gardner B.: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1957)

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30. My Man Jeeves by PG Wodehouse

My Man Jeeves (1919) was Wodehouse’s first Jeeves title (Jeeves’ first appearance was in the short story ‘Extricating Young Gussie’ in 1915). The name came from the world of cricket. Percy Jeeves was, by all accounts, a very useful player. An attacking right-hand bat, medium fast bowler, he played first-class cricket from 1912–14, and in 1913 Wodehouse, a keen cricket fan, saw him play at Cheltenham. Several decades later, RV Ryder, the son of the Warwickshire club secretary who had originally signed Percy Jeeves, wrote to Wodehouse to ask for confirmation that the Jeeves of literature really was named after the Jeeves of cricket. Wodehouse replied:

Dear Mr Ryder.
Yes, you are quite right.
It must have been in 1913 that I paid a visit to my parents in Cheltenham and went to see Warwickshire play Glos on the Cheltenham College ground. I suppose Jeeves’s bowling must have impressed me, for I remembered him in 1916 [actually 1915, see above – ed.], when I was in New York and just starting the Jeeves and Bertie saga, and it was just the name I wanted.
I have always thought till lately that he was playing for Gloucestershire that day. (I remember admiring his action very much)
Yours sincerely,
PG Wodehouse.

Percy Jeeves went on to even greater distinction in the 1914 season, and was tipped by England captain Plum Warner as a future England player.

On August 4 1914, however, Britain declared war on Germany, and Jeeves signed up with the 15th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. In July the following year he was in the thick of the fighting in the battle of the Somme. The 15th battalion was ordered to make an attack on High Wood, a forested area on the crest of a hill near the village of Bazentin le Petit in the Somme département. High Wood was a crucial part of the German line, and heavily defended with machine-gun emplacements able to rake down the slopes at every approach. The ground between the British trenches and the hilltop was open, unforested and strewn with dead bodies from previous actions. On the night of July 22/23 the order was given for a major assault, in which the 15th battalion was a small component. The assault made no headway whatever. Jeeves’ body was never found. It was only in September 1915 that High Wood was captured, after the loss of around 6,000 men.

September 1915 was also, coincidentally, the month of the appearance of the first Jeeves story. Jeeves never got to play for his country, but did die for it.

Consulted:
Donaldson, Frances: PG Wodehouse (Futura, 1982)
Usborne, Richard: Wodehouse at Work to the End (Penguin, 1976)
http://content-uk.cricinfo.com/ci/content/player/15666.html

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29. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

In July 1814, two years before the composition of Frankenstein, Mary eloped with Percy Shelley – not for the purposes of marriage, since Percy was already married – to France and then Switzerland, Germany and Holland. She was sixteen and Percy was twenty-one. By all accounts it was a rather miserable trip, made worse by the fact that Mary’s step-sister, Jane Clairmont (also called Claire Clairmont), was tagging along. By September 1814 they were all on their way back home, returning by way of the river Rhine through Germany and Holland. As noted in both Mary’s and Jane’s diaries, on September 2 they moored at Gernsheim in Hesse. From here the threesome would have been able to see, on a hill, a half-ruined castle: the Castle Frankenstein. It was the former home of one Konrad Dippel (1673-1734), also known as Dippel Franckensteina (Dippel of Frankenstein), who in the early eighteenth century had conducted experiments on animal bones and had been expelled from Strasbourg University after an accusation of grave-robbing. Dippel was an alchemist, and had produced an Arcanum chymicum (a secret substance, possibly an 'elixir of life') which he offered to the Landgrave of Hesse in return for being restored to his family estates. As it happened, the Shelley party met three students from the University of Strasbourg around the date of the mooring near Gernsheim, and it is possible that the castle, and its legend, came up as a topic of conversation.

Or is this link altogether too tenuous? A castle formed no part of Mary Shelley’s book: the castle only appears in the film. The name of Frankenstein and his reputed experiments are the only points of possible influence, and the name Frankenstein could have arisen from other sources: there is a tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, for example — admittedly published only in 1816, the year that Mary was writing her book, but existing in oral versions previous to that — in which two brothers called Frankenstein slay a dragon. Or Mary could have encountered it elsewhere. The ‘Franken’ of ‘Frankenstein’ is a common component of German names such as ‘Frankenthal’ or ‘Frankenwald’, and ‘stein’, meaning ‘stone’ is an equally common suffix. The names ‘Frankheim’ and ‘Falkenstein’ appear in Matthew (‘Monk’) Lewis’s Gothic horror tales, which she read in 1815, the year before writing Frankenstein. Given all this, the idea of the distant castle and its semi-legendary occupant being a likely influence is not a completely convincing one, even if her proximity to the castle that day remains tantalizing.

So perhaps Frankenstein was undreamt-of until Mary came to write her book by the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816.

Consulted:
Bennett, Betty T, ed.: The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)
Florescu, Radu: In Search of Frankenstein (Robson Books, 1996)
Ozolins, Aija: ‘Recent Work on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein,’ Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1976)
Seymour, Miranda: Mary Shelley (Picador, 2001)
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein (introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle, Penguin, 1992)

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28. John Thomas and Lady Jane by DH Lawrence

Lady Chatterley’s Lover could quite easily have been called John Thomas and Lady Jane: and in a sense, was called that: a variant of the text was published as John Thomas and Lady Jane in 1972.

The story is as follows.

Lawrence wrote three full-length versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover between 1925 and 1928. They are, in order of composition, The First Lady Chatterley (title chosen by Frieda Lawrence, published 1944), John Thomas and Lady Jane (published 1972) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (the final, but first-published version, of 1928). On 9 March 1928 Lawrence wrote to Aldous and Maria Huxley about this final version: ‘Today [...] we took the MS of the novel to the printer: great moment. Juliette [Huxley] who read the MS and was very cross, morally so, suggested rather savagely that I should call it: ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’. Many a true word spoken in spite, so I promptly called it that. Remains to be seen if Secker and Knopf will stand it.’ A week later Lawrence had had second thoughts, or rather had been persuaded to have second thoughts by his publishers, and had changed it to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan on 13 March 1928: ‘Now I’m so busy with my novel. I want to call it "John Thomas and Lady Jane" ("John Thomas" is one of the names for the penis, as probably you know) but have to submit to put this as a sub-title, and continue with Lady Chatterley’s Lover: for the publisher’s sake.’ In the event it didn't even make it into the subtitle, and Lady's Chatterley's Lover got a title a little less outrageous than it probably should have.

Consulted:
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: March 1927-November 1928
(ed James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton, Gerald M. Lacy, 2002)

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27. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America by Anne Bradstreet

In 1650 a major publishing event occurred: the appearance of the first book of poetry by a resident of the North American continent. While her family and neighbours in Puritan New England were hacking a living from the forest and fighting disease and famine, Anne Bradstreet found time to compose the collection subsequently known as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. It was published without her permission in London, where it had been smuggled by her brother-in-law – as a surprise for her – and became a best-seller. Anne did not choose the title, which made reference to her as an addition to the nine existing muses (Greek goddesses covering remits such as dance, tragedy, comedy, poetry, etc.) It was tacked onto the poems by her publishers.

A number of real women have been put forward as ‘the tenth muse’. They have included Sappho, the French poet Antoinette de la Garde Deshoulières, the French novelist Madeleine de Scudéry, Queen Christina of Sweden, the Spanish poet and writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the English writer and dramatist Hannah More. Interestingly, all of these post-Sappho tenth muses (apart from Hannah More – 1745-1833) lived in the seventeenth century, as did Anne Bradstreet. It seems that the soubriquet was a piece of seventeenth-century publishers’ hype. It is unlikely that any of the women themselves actually chose it. Anne Bradstreet in particular certainly did not: as a Puritan wife and mother she would have been quite disturbed to find herself in the company of Sappho.

Consulted:
Bradstreet, Anne: Poems (introduction by Robert Hutchinson, 1969)
Piercy, Josephine K: Anne Bradstreet (1965)

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26. The Room by Harold Pinter

The Room was Pinter’s first play. Set in a single, imprisoning, claustrophobic room, in which the characters wait with dread for some malign intruder, it is the template for many of his later plays, and its origins lie in something that happened to the author one night in London around 1955. Pinter was at the time playing in rep in Colchester, and went with an actress friend to a party in a big house in Chelsea. He said that on entering a small room he encountered two men, one a little man with bare feet, who was ‘carrying on a lively and rather literate conversation, and at the table next to him sat an enormous lorry driver… And all the while, as he talked, the little man was feeding the big man – cutting his bread, buttering it, and so on. Well, this image would never leave me…I told a friend, Henry Woolf, who was studying in the Drama Department of Bristol University, that I would write a play about them… It was The Room.’

An odd detail to add. The ‘little man’, according to Michael Billington’s biography of Harold Pinter, was none other than Quentin Crisp. Crisp (1908-99), for those not familiar with the name, was the extraordinary violet-haired and be-hatted author of The Naked Civil Servant. In another interview Pinter said: ‘He welcomed us in, gave us a cup of tea, discussed philosophy and metaphysics, literature, the weather, crockery, fabrics. The little chap was dancing about cutting bread and butter, pouring tea and making bacon and eggs for this man who remained quite silent throughout the whole encounter... We left after about half an hour and I asked the woman what the little chap’s name was and she said Quentin Crisp.’

It is astonishing, but one can only conclude that without Quentin Crisp there would be no Harold Pinter.

Consulted:
Esslin, Martin: The Peopled Wound: The Work of Harold Pinter (1970)
Billington, Michael: Harold Pinter (1996)

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25. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain

Cain’s noir thriller of 1934 was originally entitled Bar-B-Q. His publisher, Alfred Knopf, didn’t like the title and asked for a change, so Cain substituted The Postman Always Rings Twice. Knopf was mystified. There is no postman in the book, and no mention of the phrase. Cain said that while searching for an alternative he got talking to a playwright friend, Vincent Lawrence, who told him how nervous he often felt while waiting to hear from his producer. Cain reported the following conversation:

Then, [Lawrence] said, ‘I almost went nuts. I’d sit and watch for the postman, and then I’d think, ‘You got to cut this out,’ and then when I left the window I’d be listening for his ring. How I’d know it was the postman was that he’d always ring twice.’
He went on with more of the harrowing tale, but I cut in on him suddenly. I said: ‘Vincent, I think you’ve given me a title for that book.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The Postman Always Rings Twice.’
‘Say, he rang twice for Chambers, didn’t he?’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘And on that second ring, Chambers had to answer, didn’t he? Couldn’t hide out in the backyard any more.’
‘His number was up, I’d say.’
‘I like it.’
‘Then that’s it.’

This would be the end of the story behind The Postman Always Rings Twice were it not for the fact that no-one ‘rang twice’ for Frank Chambers (the hero of the book), nor did he ‘hide out in the backyard’, nor did he ‘have to answer’. Cain, it seems, was speaking metaphorically. The book is structured around two main events: the murder of the husband and the death of the wife. Chambers had a hand in both of them, but after the second death, ‘his number was up’, ‘he couldn’t hide’. He had played deaf to the first ring, but was forced to respond to the second. The ‘postman’ was fate, nemesis, retribution, divine justice; and the parcel that awaited Frank was the recorded delivery of his own demise. The postman, after all, always rings twice. Justice will be done.

The ready way that Lawrence understood Cain’s meaning is believable, given that they were both exponents of a craft in which there is a preoccupation with what lies behind events: three-act structure, reversals and re-reversals, etc. Or perhaps it is not so believable. Wouldn’t ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ have been a more likely response from Lawrence? In the final analysis we only have Cain to go on, and the line of least resistance is to trust him.

The Postman was a huge best-seller, and Cain became rich and famous. The title was a major contributor to the book’s success. The image of the postman is a particularly good one. The postman is a lone male, not unlike his co-worker the iceman — or like Frank Chambers. Lone males calling on houses during the daytime may encounter lone females. What are the two rings but a secret signal? What is on the end of a secret signal but love? The title is suggestive but enigmatic, domestic but menacing, gnomic but nonsensical. It is hard to believe that The Postman Always Rings Twice would have been filmed with Lana Turner and John Garfield, and later with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson, had it been called Bar-B-Q.

Consulted:
Cain, James M: Three of a Kind (introduction by James M Cain, Knopf, 1944)
Madden, David: James M. Cain (Twayne, 1970)

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24. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Naked Lunch was from the first a sprawling, uncontrolled project that Burroughs (and Allen Ginsberg, his editor) spent a great deal of time pummelling into shape. Oliver Harris wrote in his edition to The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-59 that Burroughs began by conceiving the novel ‘as a tripartite work consisting of sections entitled “Junk”, “Queer” and “Yage”’ and that the finished work could be read in any order. Neither was the title fixed until a late stage: Burroughs was enamoured with the idea that eels seal up their anuses before travelling to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, and suggested numerous Sargasso-related titles: ‘Meet Me in Sargasso’; ‘I’ll See You in Sargasso’, ‘The Sargasso Trail’...

Burroughs always credited Jack Kerouac for suggesting the title Naked Lunch, and Kerouac wrote to Allen Ginsberg in June 1960 confirming this was true: ‘Don’t hear from Burroughs [lately] but was pleased he mentioned I named Naked Lunch (remember, it was you, reading the ms., mis-read ‘naked lust’ and I only noticed) (interesting little bit of litry history tho).’

Burroughs explained: ‘The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED lunch – a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.’ Naked Lunch, therefore, is to do with a moment of existential clarity, perhaps a little too clear, perhaps a little disgusting (after all, what is on the end of someone else’s fork is not necessarily very nice). It is certainly nothing to do with gastronomy. In the book there is no lunch, nor dinner, barely even a snack. For Burroughs, food is allied to the cow-like existence that he seeks to escape through the more cerebral virtues of drugs and sex. The apotheosis of his disgust for food in the book appears in a restaurant menu which is composed entirely of the inedible: ‘Filet of Sun-Ripened Sting Ray basted with Eau de Cologne and garnished with nettles/The After-Birth Supreme de Boeuf, cooked in drained crank case oil served with a piquant sauce of rotten egg-yolks and crushed bed-bugs.’

Consulted:
Burroughs, WS: Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (ed. Grauerholz and Miles, 2005)

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23. High Windows by Philip Larkin

Larkin’s last collection takes its title from one of its major poems, ‘High Windows’, which begins: ‘When I see a couple of kids/And guess he’s fucking her and she’s/Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,/I know this is paradise…’ He thinks of his own childhood, of ‘sweating in the dark’ and minding what you have to say to the priest, and then arrives at an unexpected, mystical resolution: ‘Rather than words comes the thought of high windows…’

But high windows where? In a cathedral perhaps? A skyscraper? What do the high windows represent?

From 1956 to 1974, during his stint as head librarian at the Brynmor Jones library at Hull University, Larkin lived in a flat overlooking Pearson Park, Hull. (I too lived in Hull briefly in the 1980s and once met Larkin; he told me to stop eating my sandwiches in the reference section.) It was a top floor flat, giving him a good view of the park and surrounding streets. It was here that he wrote High Windows. These Pearson Park windows were, in part, the high windows he refers to, where (as he puts it in 'Vers de Société' in the same collection) he could sit ‘under a lamp,/hearing the noise of wind,/ and looking out to see the moon thinned/ To an air-sharpened blade.’ The ‘high windows’ seem to stand for poetry, the solitary life, and the alternative to envy and bitterness.

Except... Larkin’s offices at the Brynmor Jones Library had another commanding view, this time over the concourse where the students would walk in from the main road to the lecture halls and student union. According to his secretary, one of Mr Larkin’s favourite recreations was to observe from this office, through ever-warm binoculars, the female students as they walked beneath him (‘When I see a couple of kids…’) He called the attractive ones his ‘honeys’.

Consulted:
Motion, Andrew: Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life

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22. Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens

This one tripped me up, because I was used to pronouncing it ‘Sketches by Bozz’.

Sketches by Boz was Dickens’s first book – not a novel, but a selection of observations of London life. It was extremely successful, and Dickens, for a time, was Boz. He signed letters as Boz, published extensively in the periodical press as Boz, and even christened his first son Charles Culliford Boz Dickens. In 1842 there was a ‘Boz Ball’ in New York attended by 5,000 people. It has often been thought that the name derived from ‘Boswell’, and in fact a reviewer of Sketches by Boz called Dickens ‘a kind of Boswell to society’. But the name actually came from Dickens’s younger brother Augustus, who was nicknamed Moses (after the character in the Vicar of Wakefield, not the patriarch). Moses, pronounced ‘by a younger girl, who could not then articulate plainly’ became ‘Bozie’ or ‘Boz’. Later Dickens took 'Boz' for his pseudonym.

This rather argues that Sketches by Boz should not be pronounced ‘Sketches by Bozz’ but instead ‘Sketches by Boze’.

Consulted:
Pearson, Hesketh: Dickens, His Character, Comedy, and Career‎ (1949)
Garlington, JC: The Men of the Time; Or, Sketches of Living Notables (1853)

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21. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

‘Catch-22’ has passed into the language as a description of the impossible bind:

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. ‘Is Orr crazy?’
‘He sure is,’ Doc Daneeka said.
‘Can you ground him?’
‘I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.’ [...]
‘And then you can ground him?’ Yossarian asked.
‘No. Then I can’t ground him.’
‘You mean there’s a catch?’
‘Sure there’s a catch,’ Doe Daneeka replied. ‘Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.’

Orr is crazy, and can be grounded, but if he asks to be grounded he is sane - and he can only be grounded if he asks. Joseph Heller complained that the phrase ‘a Catch-22 situation’ was often used by people who did not seem to understand what it meant. Given the mental contortions of the catch, this is not surprising.

But it could have been Catch-18. This was Heller’s original title - and his title throughout all the long years of composition, from 1953 to 1961. However, just before the book was published Leon Uris produced his novel Mila 18. Heller’s publishers, Simon and Schuster, thought two books with ‘18’ in the title in one year was one book too many, and suggested a change. Heller was distraught (‘I thought 18 was the only number’ he said in an interview) and there began a long period of numerical agonizing in which numbers such as 11 and 14 were considered and rejected. Finally Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster suggested 22, which Heller approved as a more significant number, reflecting the theme of doubling: Yossarian bombs Ferrara twice, Giuseppe sees everything twice, all Yossarian can say to the dying Snowden is ‘There, there’, and to comfort his mistress, ‘Please, please’ – and Major Major is actually Major Major Major Major. As Yossarian comments of the Catch, ‘There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art…’

Consulted:
Greenfeld, Josh: ’22 was Funnier than 14’, New York Times Review of Books, March 3 1968
Nagel, James, ed.: Critical Essays on Catch-22 (Dickenson, 1972)
Sorkin, Adam J, ed.: Conversations with Joseph Heller (University Press of Mississippi, 1993)
JP Stern, ‘War and the Comic Muse: The Good Soldier Schweik and Catch-22’, Comparative Literature, 20 (1968)

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20. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

‘And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.’ I’d always vaguely thought this came from Shakespeare, but in fact it appears in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, his treatise on ‘the social contract’ between rulers and ruled (Hobbes was speaking specifically about the life of man in time of war, but ‘nasty, brutish and short’ has since been taken as a summation of the human condition.) So – if this is the case, and man is in this parlous position, what is to be done? Hobbes’ answer is that social stability can only be achieved if citizens surrender themselves to the rule of an absolute monarch, who is tasked to protect the state from invasion. This is his chief duty – to preserve peace. At other times he can do more or less as he likes. This monarch Hobbes explicitly compared to the Biblical Leviathan, ‘a king over all the children of pride’ (Job 41:34), and a terrifying mixture of crocodile, sea serpent and whale. To be lorded over by such a monster was hardly ideal, though given human nature it was probably the best option available.

There was another layer of irony in the religious reference. Hobbes was reviled as an atheist throughout his life - his writings were even blamed by some clergy for the Great Plague and Fire of 1665-6 - and giving his book a Biblical title was a deliberately provocative step, the devil quoting scripture for his own ends. Just to rub it in, Hobbes named his last major work (on the Civil War) after another Biblical monster: Behemoth.

Consulted:
Hobbes, Thomas and Schuhmann, Karl (ed.): Leviathan (2003 ed.)
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (2001 ed.)

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19. Fanny Hill by John Cleland

American readers may wonder what the fuss is about, but in Britain ‘fanny’ is a slang term not for one’s ‘ass’, but for one’s more intimate parts (if female). Cleland’s erotic classic - of 1748 - poses some problems both for arbiters of taste and for lexicographers. Did Cleland invent the word 'fanny' (the lexicographer Eric Partridge certainly thought so), or was he drawing on a usage that already existed? The first printed citation explicitly giving ‘fanny’ as a slang term is more than a hundred years later, so this gives no clue.

It may help to know that Fanny Hill was not originally Fanny Hill at all. The book was originally entitled Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and it was only in the later eighteenth century that the title was usurped by Fanny herself. ‘Hill’ is a pun - on the mons veneris or ‘mount’ of Venus. This rather supports the idea that the whole name – ‘Fanny Hill’ – was a sort of double pun. The fact that it originally did not appear in the title is also suggestive: Cleland was at pains to mollify the censor (he wrote most of the book while in the Fleet Gaol for debt, and after the book was published went back to prison, this time for obscenity) and deployed a whole vocabulary of euphemism and euphuism for the female genitals, including ‘the rose-lipped ouverture’, ‘the treasure of love’, ‘the pleasure-thirsty channel’ and ‘the etcetera’ – and for the male, ‘the pleasure pivot’, ‘the flesh brush’, ‘love’s true arrow’ and ‘the plenipotentiary instrument’.

The book exists today in a rather schizophrenic form. For the no-frills paperback reprint market it is Fanny Hill. For the ‘classics’ market, with scholarly introductions and notes, it is Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Fanny is both saucy harlot and demimondaine. We are left to ourselves to decide whether Cleland’s novel is an unpretentious slice of porn or a canonical eighteenth-century novel alongside Tom Jones and Humphrey Clinker.

Consulted:
Cleland, John: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (introduction and notes by Peter Sabor, 1985)
Epstein, William Henry: John Cleland: Images of a Life (1975)
Green, Jonathon: ‘Dating Slang on “Historical Principles”’, Revue d’Études Françaises, No. 11 (2006)

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18. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Dahl was a lifelong chocoholic. When at school at Repton, he and his classmates were each periodically sent a box of prototype chocolates by Cadbury’s for market research. Dahl wrote: ‘For me, the importance of all this was that I began to realise that the large chocolate companies actually did possess inventing rooms and they took their inventing very seriously. I used to picture a long white room like a laboratory with pots of chocolate and fudge and all sorts of other delicious fillings bubbling away on the stoves, while men and women in white coats moved between the bubbling pots, tasting and mixing and concocting their wonderful new inventions. [...] It was lovely dreaming those dreams, and I have no doubt at all that, thirty-five years later, when I was looking for a plot for my second book for children, I remembered those little cardboard boxes and the newly-invented chocolates inside them, and I began to write a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in fact began life as a story written by Dahl in 1960 for his daughters, and was originally entitled 'Charlie’s Chocolate Boy'. In 1964 the book appeared in the USA with its familiar title but this had to be changed for the 1971 film to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory because 'Charlie' was a slang term, synonymous with 'whitey'. This decision was later reversed with the Burton/Depp version of 2005, when 'Charlie' was reinstated in the title.

But would there really have been confectionery-inspired race riots in 1971?

Consulted:
Treglown, Jeremy: Roald Dahl: A Biography (1994)
Dahl, Roald: Boy (1986)

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17. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

Behind Holmes stand two older fictional detectives: Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin and Émile Gaboriau’s Lecoq. Both were exponents of the deductive method, both were ardent examiners of footprints and cigar ash, and both had devoted sidekicks whose main function was to be testily interrupted. Conan Doyle was quite open about his debt to both Poe and Gaboriau, and A Study in Scarlet, the story in which Holmes first meets Watson, contains a concealed homage to Gaboriau: the title is in fact a pun on Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge. Despite his acknowledgement of these influences, some contemporary commentators were less than indulgent when they discovered the extent of Conan Doyle’s debt. As Arthur Guiterman’s poem ‘The Case of the Inferior Sleuth’ put it:

'Holmes is your hero of drama and serial;
All of us know where you dug the material.'

Consulted:
Edwards, Owen Dudley: The Quest for Sherlock Holmes (1983)
Stashower, Daniel: Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (2000)

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16. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Color Purple is the story of Celie, an African-American girl who endures a series of disasters, recounted in a series of letters: she is raped by her step-father, has her children taken away from her, and is forced to marry a man she hates. Surprisingly, it ends happily. But why purple? At one point one of the main characters, the singer Shug Avery, says (during a discussion about God): 'I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.' The insistence on purple as God's favourite colour (as opposed to red, green, orange, etc) may be to do with something Walker wrote in a book called In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, in which she defines her experience as a ‘womanist’: ’Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.’ In The Color Purple, when one character is beaten, she turns ‘the color of an eggplant’; towards the end of the book Celie thinks of purple as a majestic colour, associating it with the garments of her lover, Shug Avery. Purple therefore seems to signify both the bruising defeats as well as the triumphs of African-American women.

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15. The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s blank-verse epic The Prelude remained unpublished during his lifetime and was known to family and friends simply as ‘the poem to Coleridge’. After his death in 1850 it was published and given its familiar name by his wife, Mary. There's rather a sad story behind her choice of title. Throughout his life Wordsworth worked on an immense philosophical poem called The Recluse, which was to be the 19th century’s answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. The Prelude was merely its introduction. But despite sweating mightily over it, Wordsworth only completed one section of The Recluse (published as The Excursion in 1814); The Prelude, having grown during composition to a weighty 14 books, constantly siphoned off its best material. The Recluse was left not only unwritten, but unwriteable.

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14. Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov

The three sisters in the play were Olga, Masha and Irina. The real three sisters were Zinaida, Yelena and Natasha. They were the three daughters of a widow, Madame Lintvaryova, who owned a ramshackle estate near the Ukrainian village of Luka, where Chekhov stayed in 1888. Chekhov was delighted by the clever, unmarried women, and they in turn were charmed by the tall young Muscovite. He later mined the experience for all it was worth, using it in endless stories of imprisoned, unfulfilled women in boarded-up dachas, and culminating in the play Three Sisters (1900). The sisters’ constant longing for Moscow was sharply at odds with Chekhov’s own feelings. On a warm Ukrainian night at the Lintvaryovs’ in August 1888 he wrote: ‘The thought of Moscow with its cold climate, bad plays, snack bars and Russian ideas makes my flesh creep. I wish I could spend the winters far, far away.’

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13. The Waste Land by TS Eliot

Recipe for one ‘Waste Land’: throw a bunch of aimless jottings into a bag, send the bag to Ezra Pound with instructions to pick out the best bits, season with some unhelpful notes, et voilà. It certainly shouldn’t have turned out a masterpiece, and the fact that it did was very much down to Pound – and to the title change. The poem was originally called, rather unbelievably, ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ (a quote from Our Mutual Friend). Pound recognized that it was in danger of becoming a burlesque, axed two-thirds of it, notably the opening sequence set among Sweeney-types in a brothel, and made the prophetic voice of Tiresias (‘April is the cruellest month…’) begin and dominate the poem. What could thus have been a piece of transient social satire was transformed into the twentieth century’s greatest English poem, reflecting in its title - taken from Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance - the waste and desolation of post-war Europe.

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12. Married Love by Marie Stopes

Married Love (1918), Marie Stopes’ pioneering work on sex, was entitled in manuscript They Twain, and originally conceived as a romantic novel. These origins can still be glimpsed in the final text (‘The half-swooning sense of flux which overtakes the spirit in that eternal moment at the apex of rapture sweeps into its flaming tides the essence of the man and the woman…’); most of it was more down-to-earth, treating themes such as sexual anatomy, orgasm and contraception. Such a book, however, was a risk. Her fellow campaigner Charles Bradlaugh had been prosecuted for obscenity a few years earlier. By changing the title, making it clear that the book was not a salacious piece of pulp fiction but a respectable guide for the monogamous married, it survived the courts, sold in the millions throughout the world, and became probably the most sexually influential book of the twentieth century.

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11. Rasselas by Samuel Johnson

Rasselas (1759) was an important landmark in Johnson’s writing life. It was composed in his 50th year, but recalled work done in his 23rd, when as a literary hack he had translated from the French a book by Father Jerome Lobo called A Voyage in Abyssinia. Among that book’s characters was one Rassela Christos, a general to the Sultan Sequed; Johnson borrowed the name for Prince Rasselas, his baffled seeker after happiness. Rasselas expounds the Johnsonian philosophy that in life ‘much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed’; certainly the book itself was a feat of endurance, written in the evenings of a single week to defray his mother’s funeral expenses. Its publication was a turning point. The slim volume became Johnson’s most widely-circulated work, and in 1762, in recognition of his services to literature, he received a £300-a-year pension. He never had to do hack-work for money again.

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10. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

In the late 1860s Tolstoy began writing a story called ‘The Wife-Murderer’, but abandoned it – the relationship of the central characters didn’t seem right. Twenty years later, in the spring of 1888, in the grip of his self-mortifying obsession with sex and the New Testament, he heard a private performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata at the family home at Yasnaya Polyana. The three things – story, obsession and Beethoven – fused to create ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. The wife in the early drafts of the story has an affair with a painter; in the final version she is a pianist who commits adultery with a visiting violinist. The theme is the sensual excess brought about by fashionable idleness and especially by voluptuous, purposeless music. The Kreutzer Sonata, especially the opening presto, becomes, in the mind of the half-deranged Tolstoy and his fictional protagonist, the hallucinatory expression of his own – and by extension society’s – inner sexual depravity.

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9. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Moby-Dick was a real whale. In the nineteenth century sailors were in the habit of giving names to individual whales who were particularly dangerous or unkillable; among them were ‘Timor Jack’ and ‘New Zealand Tom’. One of the most famous was ‘Mocha Dick’, named after the island of Mocha off the Chilean coast. Mocha Dick was said to have drowned over 30 men, sunk five ships and been harpooned nineteen times, which probably accounted for his mood. Melville’s chief source was an article in the Knickerbocker Magazine of 1839 entitled ‘Mocha Dick: Or, the White Whale of the Pacific.’ He also took from the article the ship’s name the Penguin, changing it to the Pequod. Around the same time Melville was also writing a piece called ‘The Story of Toby’ about a seafaring friend: it may be that ‘Toby’ influenced the transformation from ‘Mocha Dick’ to ‘Moby-Dick’.

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8. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Finnegans Wake was known throughout a good part of its history as Work in Progress, and was published as such in instalments from 1924 to 1939. The real title was a secret that Joyce revealed only to his wife Nora; not even Beckett knew it, as we can see from a critical study of the book by Beckett and others from 1929: Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. The closely-guarded title has resonances from Irish ballad (Tim Finnegan, the hod-carrier who fell from a roof) and Irish legend (Finnegan is a second Finn McCool, or ‘Finn again’), and possibly a French pun relating to the theme of circularity (fin again). The lack of an apostrophe is key: if ‘Finnegans’ is plural, then the title is an exhortation to all Finnegans to awaken, that is, to Everyman, or all who have fallen – whether from roofs or from grace.

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7. The Scum Manifesto by Valerie Solanas

Probably the most entertaining feminist tract ever written, The Scum Manifesto (1968) was the work of Valerie Solanas, who later went on to gun down (though not terminally) her sometime friend Andy Warhol. The manifesto calls for the destruction of the male sex. ‘Rational men want to be squashed, stepped on…treated as the cur, the filth they are, have their repulsiveness confirmed,’ she wrote. ‘Scum’ has since been taken to be an acronym for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’, but nowhere is this invoked in the original publication. Solanas in fact denied that it was ever the case; it was a back-formation, with Scum originally standing for refuse, excrement, abjection, the beyond-marginal. Scum is not nice. ‘Scum will always operate on a criminal rather than a civil disobedience basis’, she declared. ‘If Scum ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.’

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6. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

'"It’s a book," I said. "It’s a book what you are writing... I have always had the strongest admiration for them as can write books." Then I looked at the top sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.' Thus Burgess’s anti-hero Alex mocks a writer whose home he has broken into, before beating him up and raping and killing his wife. Burgess claimed the title derived from ‘an old Cockney expression used to describe anything queer’, and it seems likely that such an expression was current around the time of the Second World War, and not just in London. Burgess uses the phrase to symbolize a creature ‘capable of sweetness’ but which has been made into an automaton, deprived, as Alex is, of free will. One further influence on the title was pointed out by Burgess: in Malaysia, where he had lived, the word for a human being is – orang.

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5. The Divine Comedy by Dante

The Divine Comedy, or Divina Commedia, was not always so known. Dante himself titled it simply Commedia, meaning ‘comedy’. In a letter to his patron he explained that a comedy was a work that might ‘begin in adverse circumstances, but ends happily’; a tragedy, by contrast, might begin tranquilly enough but always ended horribly. The Commedia, which progresses to the happiest of all possible endings, in Paradise with Beatrice, is thus, by this definition, practically a knockabout farce. After Dante’s death in 1321 his masterpiece quickly became popular, and Dante himself became known as the ‘divina poeta’, or divine poet. The epithet was transferred to his work at some time in the sixteenth century, and the first edition that explicitly calls it the Divina Commedia was published in Venice in 1555.

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4. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence

In Proverbs 9:1 we read: 'Wisdom hath builded her house: she hath hewn out her seven pillars.' T.E. Lawrence adapted the verse for the title of a book he wrote in 1913 about a series of adventures in seven middle-eastern cities. Finding it wanting, he burned it, but in commemoration transferred the title to his famous work on the Arab Revolt. Lawrence lost most of the manuscript of the Seven Pillars while changing trains at Reading in 1919, and, having failed to save to disk, had to re-write painstakingly from memory. The seven pillars of wisdom seemingly have no relation to a book about guerrilla warfare, but the title echoes the idea of the Seven Pillars of Islam. While most Muslims in the world recognize Five Pillars, the Isma'ilis and some others recognize seven.

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3. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Beckett was partial to literary allusions, and Waiting for Godot contains a particularly obscure one. In a play by Balzac called Le faiseur, a stock-market trader called Mercadet is going bankrupt. His funds are all tied up with his ex-partner, Godeau, who is mysteriously elusive. Mercadet makes it clear to his creditors that once Godeau arrives, everyone will get paid. Until then, all they can do is wait. Sound familiar? At one point Mercadet breaks down and admits his darkest fear: ‘Godeau!’ he screams, ‘But Godeau is a myth! He’s a fable!’ Nevertheless in the Balzac play everything ends happily. The arrival of Godeau is announced and the rapturous Mercadet exclaims, ‘Let’s go and see Godeau!’ In the last line of Waiting for Godot Estragon also says ‘Yes, let’s go.’ The stage direction then grimly reads, ‘They do not move.’

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2. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Orwell completed Nineteen Eighty-Four at Barnhill, Jura, on December 4th 1948. It is often supposed that the reversal of the digits of that tubercular Hebridean year yielded the title of the book. In fact, in early drafts of the novel, Orwell had set the action in 1980. As time went on he revised the date to 1982, then finally to 1984. Even as late as October 1948 he was undecided between Nineteen Eighty-Four as a title and The Last Man in Europe. The satisfying numerology of the year-reversal (which he was certainly aware of) probably tipped him in favour of the former, but one other circumstance may have been significant: Orwell greatly admired Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel (1908), about a future Fascist USA. In that book the date of the completion of the ‘wonder-city’ Asgard was – 1984.

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1. Winnie-the-Pooh by AA Milne

The name ‘Winnie-the Pooh’ was the co-creation of Christopher Robin Milne (AA Milne’s son) and a Canadian army lieutenant, Harry Colebourn. En route to the trenches during the First World War, Colebourn acquired a female black bear cub from a hunter, and named it Winnipeg, or Winnie for short. He left the bear for safety at London Zoo before going on to fight in France. Christopher Robin, visiting the zoo, became very fond of Winnie, and began calling his favourite teddy-bear ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ – ‘Pooh’ was the name he had given to a swan he had met while on holiday at Angmering in Sussex. AA Milne began to keep a journal of Winnie-the-Pooh’s adventures, which later did rather well at the bookshops. The real Winnie continued as a star attraction at the zoo and died in 1934.

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