110. While England Slept by Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill was not above re-titling his works to suit the Yanks. In 1938, Putnam’s, his American publishers, cabled him to ask for an alternative title for Arms and the Covenant, a volume of his collected speeches. Churchill suggested The Years of the Locust, but the cable operator garbled the message and it arrived as The Years of the Lotus. Putnam’s were puzzled. They knew that the lotus was a plant famous for its soporific properties, and, in an attempt to give a sense of this, settled on While England Slept. This was an inspired choice in the climate of German rearmament, and the book went on to be a best-seller. It also had one unexpected consequence: in 1940 the young John F Kennedy, searching for a title for his graduate thesis on the build-up to war, called it Why England Slept (i.e. 'Why' not 'While').

Consulted:
Lockhart, Robert Hamilton Bruce: Your England‎ (1955)

109. The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning

In June 1860 Robert Browning was browsing at an open-air flea-market in Florence. Among the cheap picture-frames and dog-eared prints he came across a battered yellow book. He bought it for one lira — eightpence in English money at the time — and took it home. It proved to be a compendium of legal documents relating to a celebrated murder case of 1698, put together at the time by a lawyer called Francesco Cencini. The picture that emerged from the documents was tragic, squalid and...rather entertaining.

In 1693 Count Guido Franceschini, a 50-year-old nobleman of Arezzo, in somewhat reduced circumstances, decided to take a bride to bolster his fortune. He settled on the 13-year-old Pompilia Comparini, a Roman girl with a small dowry. Pompilia hated her aged, dissolute husband, and after four years of cruelty she decided to run back home to her parents, aided by a young priest who had befriended her, Giuseppe Caponsacchi. The couple were overtaken by Guido at Castelnuovo and arrested on a charge of flight and adultery. It was soon discovered that Pompilia was pregnant — whether by Guido or Caponsacchi it was never discovered — and she was given into the care of an order of nuns for her protection. In December 1697 she was delivered of a baby boy, and went back to live with her parents. Meanwhile Guido was gnashing his teeth, and on January 2 1698 travelled to Rome with four accomplices and murdered the Comparinis, fatally wounding Pompilia, who died four days later. Guido and his bravoes were arrested, tried and sentenced to death, despite an appeal to the Pope.

Such was the story that Browning gleaned from the various depositions and letters of the yellow book. He realized that he had a subject worthy of an epic poem, but before he could do anything with it, tragedy of his own struck: his wife Elizabeth died in June 1861. Browning left Italy for England with his young son, unable to remain at the house, Casa Guidi, where he had enjoyed such a happy married life. The story of the yellow book remained untouched. Browning tried to interest other poets in developing the story, among them Tennyson, but there were no takers. Finally, in 1864, he began himself to work solidly on the poem.

He decided on a poetic structure that mirrored the yellow book. It was to consist of twelve chapters, each reflecting a particular viewpoint as found in the trial material. The finished poem, The Ring and the Book, included superb portraits of Guido, lecherous and unctuous, and fresh from torture on the rack; Pompilia, dying and sad, telling how she had been sold to a hideous old man who had taken her as she was playing with her toys; Caponsacchi, full of scorn for the legal profession that had failed to protect a child; and the Pope, struggling to come to judgement amid the political and moral complexities of the case. The whole was a staggering 21,000 lines long, took Browning four years, and had to be published in four volumes. It was the quintessential High-Victorian epic, and made his reputation.

But the yellow book was only half the title. The ‘ring’ was a gold circlet of Etruscan design, stamped with the letters AEI — Greek for ‘evermore’ — that had belonged to his wife Elizabeth, and which Browning kept on his watch-chain after her death. The poem opens, in a memorable address to the reader, with the ring:

Do you see this ring?
‘T is Rome-work, made to match
(By Castellani’s imitative craft)
Etrurian circlets found, some happy morn,
After a dropping April; found alive
Spark-like ‘mid unearthed slope-side fig-tree roots
That roof old tombs at Chiusi...

Browning goes on to explain the significance of the ring. It is a symbol of the process of poetic composition. Just as the gold of the ring has been allowed to emerge from the ore surrounding it, so has the story been shaped and rounded from the yellow ore of the yellow book. But a ring is more than a ring. It symbolizes marriage, and the marriage that Browning has in mind is not just the doomed and criminal marriage of the Franceschinis, but his own dead marriage to Elizabeth. Elizabeth seems to breathe everywhere in the poem. As Browning’s friend Alexandra Orr put it: ‘Its subject had come to him in the last days of his greatest happiness. It had lived with him, though in the background of consciousness, though those of his keenest sorrow. It was his refuge in that aftertime, in which a subsiding grief often leaves a deeper sense of isolation.’

Until The Ring and the Book, Browning did not have a wide readership. After its publication in 1868 he was acclaimed as a genius, and earned enough with it to secure himself financially. The Athenaeum, which until that point had been hostile to him, declared The Ring and the Book to be ‘the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since the days of Shakespeare.’ The reasons for this were to do with the great dramatic achievement of the poem, certainly, but also to do with Elizabeth’s death. Elizabeth was celebrated above all for the poetry which expressed her love for Robert (see this blog on Sonnets from the Portuguese), and now Robert was to be celebrated for his own hymn to Elizabeth. It was the evocation in his title of one of the most famous love-stories of the nineteenth century that earned him his final, belated recognition.

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

108. Fam and Yam by Edward Albee

Edward Albee is most famous for his play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (see this blog’s post on the title here). Fam and Yam was an earlier piece, written in 1958 when Albee was completely unknown. It is a ‘young man’s play’ (in more ways than one), only a few pages long, written while Albee was still finding his feet in the theatre.

It tells the story of an encounter between two unnamed playwrights, a Famous American Man (‘Fam’) and a Young American Man (‘Yam’). Yam goes to Fam’s penthouse apartment to interview him and is impressed by its luxury: it has ‘white walls, a plum-coloured sofa, two Modiglianis, one Braque, a Motherwell and a Klein’. Yam begins by praising Fam, then tells him of an article he wants to write about the venality of theatre producers, the corruption of agents and managers, and the witlessness of audiences. Fam starts laughing. He encourages Yam to go ahead by all means. What he doesn’t realize is that Yam is suggesting what Fam might say in his interview, and in fact putting words into his mouth. All of these attacks are going to be presented as if they are by Fam himself. The penny finally drops when Yam phones him from the lobby. Then ‘[Fam’s] face turns ashen...his mouth drops open. One of the Modiglianis frowns...the Braque peels...the Klein tilts...and the Motherwell crashes to the floor.’

The play stemmed from an interview Albee did with William Inge (the author of Bus Stop and numerous other Broadway hits) in around 1958. Inge was then at the height of his fame and Albee was unknown: Albee, pretty clearly, was the ‘Yam’ of the title and Inge was the ‘Fam’. The interview was respectful enough but the play, written about the interview, was a different matter. It represented Inge as an insecure establishment bore (though ‘Yam’ hardly comes off better). Inge was deeply hurt, and wrote to a friend: ‘God, what a smug little creature he must be, to write as though perfectly assured about his own future prestige.’

But if Albee was perfectly assured, he was right. The 1960s were his decade, and Inge, abandoned by theatre-goers and overcome by depression, took his own life in 1973.

Consulted:
Gussow, Mel: Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (1999)

107. The Hothouse by Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter originally conceived of The Hothouse as a sixty-minute radio play. He summarized it thus in 1958:

The play is set in a psychological research centre. One department of this establishment is engaged in conducting tests to determine reactions of the nervous system to various stimuli. The subjects for these tests are drawn from volunteers who are paid an hourly rate for their services, in the interests of science. The play will demonstrate the indifference of this particular department (in the persons of the doctor and her assistant — also female) to the human material on which it bases its deductions. It will demonstrate the excesses to which scientific investigation can lead when practised by adherents dedicated to the point of fanaticism.

This scenario substantially survived in the finished stage-play, which is set in a government rest-home where the patients are given electric shocks. The ‘heat’ of the hothouse suggests both the electric shocks and the sexual and emotional arousal of both torturers and tortured.

But the theme and title came from Pinter’s own turn in the hot-seat in 1954, when he submitted himself to medical experiments for cash. He recalled to Michael Billington:

I went along in 1954 to the Maudsley Hospital in London, as a guinea-pig. They were offering ten bob or something for guinea-pigs and I needed the money desperately. I read a bona fide advertisement and went along. It was all above board, as it seemed. Nurses and doctors all in white. They tested my blood-pressure first. Perfectly all right. I was put in a room with electrodes. They said, “Just sit there for a while and relax.” I’d no idea what was going to happen. Suddenly there was a most appalling noise through the earphones and I nearly jumped through the roof. I felt my heart go...BANG! The noise lasted a few seconds and then was switched off. The doctor came in grinning and said, “Well, that really gave you a start, didn’t it?” I said, “It certainly did.” And they said, “Thanks very much.” There was no interrogation, as in the play, but it left a deep impression on me. I couldn’t forget the experience. I was trembling all over. And I would have been in such a vulnerable position if they had started to ask me questions. Later I asked them what it was all about and they said they were testing levels of reaction. That mystified me. Who exactly were they going to give this kind of shock-treatment to? Anyway, The Hothouse was kicked off by that experience. I was well aware of being used for an experiment and feeling quite powerless.

Consulted:
Billington, Michael: Harold Pinter (1996)

106. Pamela by Samuel Richardson

Pamela Anderson, Pamela Stephenson, Pam Shriver, Pam Ayres...none of them would have existed without Samuel Richardson. Why? Because with his epistolary novel Pamela (1740) he popularized the name, and started a Pamela craze that lasted well into our own century. Pamela was so successful that it became one of the world’s first total branding enterprises: there were Pamela prints and engravings, Pamela waxworks, Pamela fans (for cooling maiden cheeks), racehorses called Pamela, Pamela murals, Pamela sermons, Pamela stage-plays, Pamela playing-cards and Pamela operas.

But Richardson himself owed a debt to, of all people, Sir Philip Sidney (see this blog's post on Astrophil and Stella). Pamela was the heroine of Sidney’s Arcadia, a pastoral romance in prose dating to 1590. Sir Philip, it seems, invented the name, cobbling it together from the Greek pan and mela — ‘all honey’.

Richardson had more than a tangential connection to Sir Philip. His day-job – before Pamela and his smash-hit follow-up Clarissa really took off and made him rich - was as a printer, and in this capacity he produced an edition of the Arcadia in 1724-5. He drew from it not just the name of the heroine, but several plot devices: both Pamelas are imprisoned, both resist attempts on their virtue, and in the final crowd-pleaser both reap the eventual reward of their honey-like sweetness and virtue.

One anecdote about Samuel Richardson, from Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), is not related to the title but I find it irresistible. It is as follows:

One day at his country-house at Northend, where a large company was assembled at dinner, a gentleman who was just returned from Paris, willing to please Mr. Richardson, mentioned to him a very flattering circumstance — that he had seen his Clarissa lying on the King’s brother’s table. Richardson observing that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected then not to attend to it. But by and by, when there was a general silence, and he thought that the flattery might be fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman, ‘I think, Sir, you were saying something about —’, pausing in a high flutter of expectation. The gentleman, provoked at his inordinate vanity, resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisitely sly air of indifference answered, ‘A mere trifle, Sir, not worth repeating.’ The mortification of Richardson was visible, and he did not speak ten words more the whole day. Dr. Johnson was present, and appeared to enjoy it much.

Consulted:
Boswell, James, Life of Johnson (1791)
Sabor, Peter (ed., intro.), Richardson, Samuel: Pamela (1992)
Sabor, Peter; Keymer, Tom: 'Pamela' in The Marketplace (2005)
See also this blog's post on Shamela.

105. Rhymes to be Traded for Bread by Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay was one of the great poets of American egalitarianism – an early twentieth-century Whitman. He got his start through a suggestion from his art teacher, Robert Henri. In March 1905 Lindsay was urgently in need of money, and asked Henri if he would ever cut it as an artist. Henri tactfully replied that he would do better trying to sell his poetry. Lindsay, either in desperation or inspiration, rushed off some copies of his poems and took them out in the streets of Manhattan, those most ‘world-sharpened and business-bitten avenues’ of New York. Pricing them at two cents per poem, he earned 15 cents on the first day (one doctor paid 5 cents for two poems) — and was elated. After binding his oeuvre into the collection Rhymes to be Traded for Bread, he began a series of tramps all over America bartering recitals for food and shelter. His first trek was in the spring of 1906, ranging on foot from Florida to Kentucky, traversing some 600 miles, selling poetry readings as he went. He undertook a similar tramp in the spring of 1908, this time from New York to Ohio, and again in the summer of 1912. He became famous, read for Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet, was praised by Yeats, and published several further collections.

Consulted:
Masters, Edgar Lee: Vachel Lindsay; A Poet in America (1969)

104. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway's first major novel began its textual life in 1925 as a short story entitled ‘Cayetano Ordonez’ (the name of the bullfighter who provided the model for the fictional Pedro Romero). All the characters were based on Hemingway’s friends, people with whom he had travelled in France and Spain: Brett Ashley was the real-life Lady Duff Twysden, Mike Campbell was Pat Guthrie, Bill Gorton was Donald Ogden Stewart and Robert Cohn was Harold Loeb. In early drafts the main character (Jake Barnes) was even called ‘Hem’. The relationships between the main characters — particularly Hem’s (Jake’s) unfulfilled love for Brett, Brett’s affairs with Cohn, Mike and Romero, and Hem’s antipathy to Cohn — were all closely modelled on life. ‘I’m tearing those bastards apart’, Hemingway wrote to a friend in September 1925 as he was struggling with the book. ‘I’m putting everyone in it and that kike Loeb is the villain.’ And yet just after the title page Hemingway, the butter unmelted in his mouth, noted: ‘No character in this book is the portrait of any actual person.’

As the story lengthened the title was changed to Fiesta: A Novel (which became its European title), and then, shortly before publication, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway was a great user of quotations in titles, and The Sun Also Rises came from Ecclesiastes:

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

Hemingway gave the quotation in full as the epigraph to his book, counterposing it with an off-the-cuff remark from Gertrude Stein, which subsequently became as famous as (or more famous than) Ecclesiastes: ‘You are all a lost generation’. Hemingway meant to contrast the two quotes, containing as they both did the word ‘generation’, and later said that his purpose in so doing was to set the current generation of flawed humanity against the enduring power of the earth itself, the earth which ‘abideth forever’.

There is perhaps another nuance in The Sun Also Rises. It should be remembered that the central tragedy of the book is the genital wound of the hero, Jake Barnes. Jake, it has been pointed out by more than one commentator, rather closely parallels the ‘Fisher King’ in TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, published three years earlier in 1922. Jake’s sexual incapacity is reflected in the decadent and morally sterile environment of Europe after the spiritual cataclysm of the First World War. Jake finds equilibrium only when he is fishing. Whether or not Eliot was a conscious influence, Jake’s wound does symbolize the inability of any of the characters to find real meaning in their lives. It is because of Jake’s wound — which Hemingway implies is a wound to his penis rather than just to his testicles — that Jake and Brett are unable to consummate their love for one another. Jake is instead forced into helping Brett seduce Romero. So if the book is closely autobiographical, and Jake is Hem, and Hem is Hemingway, where does that leave us?

On July 8, 1918, while serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front at the end of the First World War, Hemingway was seriously injured by a trench mortar, receiving over 200 separate shrapnel wounds to his lower body. His scrotum was pierced twice, and had to be laid on a special pillow while it recovered. His testicles were undamaged and his penis intact. He had not lost his penis. But he knew a man who had:

Because of this I got to know other kids who had genito urinary wounds and I wondered what a man’s life would have been like after that if his penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact. . . . [So I] tried to find out what his problems would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and there was nothing that they could do about it.

Jake has all the desires of a man but is never able to consummate them. The horror of such a wound represented the greatest of all horrors, and in The Sun Also Rises Hemingway was consciously confronting it. The fundamental act of masculinity, sexual penetration, is denied Jake, and the whole of the rest of masculinity which, for Hemingway, flowed from it — the bulls, the fights, the boxing, the hunting, the drinking, the bullshitting — is rendered pointless, a dreadful joke. It had so very nearly been a joke on Hemingway. He made the sexual connotations of the title clear in a letter to F Scott Fitzgerald in late 1926, saying he was going to insert a subtitle in the next printing of the novel: ‘The Sun Also Rises (Like Your Cock If You Have One).’

Consulted:
Berg, A. Scott: Max Perkins, Editor of Genius (Hamish Hamilton, 1979)
Bruccoli, Matthew J: Scott and Ernest (Random House, 1978)
Corral, Carmen: ‘The Textual History of The Sun Also Rises’ (Sigma Tau Delta Convention, St Louis 1999,
http://www.bama.ua.edu/~sigmatau/texts/sun.html)
Meyers, Jeffrey: Hemingway (Macmillan, 1985)

103. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

This is not the story of À la recherche du temps perdu, as such, but the story of its English translation, Remembrance of Things Past. In 1920 Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff began the Englishing of Proust's magnum opus, and after several false starts decided to give it a title from Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 30:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste [...]

The Shakespearian quotation (however beautiful) did little to render Proust’s title, and the intrusion of the words of a foreign author must have seemed to Proust like a blow in the face (rather as if a Frenchman had translated Great Expectations by giving it a title from Balzac). Proust wrote to Scott-Moncrieff to protest, saying that the translation missed the ‘deliberate amphibology’ of the French, and particularly mentioned the inadequacy of ‘things past’ as a substitute for ‘temps perdu’ (a phrase significantly mirrored in the title of the last volume, Le Temps retrouvé: ‘temps perdu’ can mean either ‘time lost’ or ‘time wasted’). The Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English by Olive Classe puts the matter thus:

In fact that title [Remembrance of Things Past] seriously distorts Proust’s intention, diverting the prospective reader’s attention away from the work’s subject, largely a series of minute analyses of feelings to which a particular view of the function of memory is central. The distraction is especially important, because writers were already beginning to explore imaginatively the phenomena of indeliberate mental associations, before Freud had published anything of importance, and before World War I made obviously urgent the examination of the corporate psychologies of Western European cultures.

But Proust’s protests were ignored. It was only in 1992 that the title was more accurately rendered as In Search of Lost Time.

Consulted:
Carter, William C.: Marcel Proust: A Life‎ (2002)
Classe, Olive: Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (2000)

102. Something Happened by Joseph Heller

Something Happened (1974) was Heller’s second novel, published 13 years after the brilliant success of Catch-22. It tells the story of Bob Slocum, a fearful company man with a loveless marriage, a brain-damaged child to look after at home, and a predilection for office affairs with secretaries who call him ‘Mr Slocum’ in bed.

Asked about the genesis of the title, Heller said: ‘Something Happened turned up in the fall of ’63 when I was walking with George Mandel past Korvettes or Brentano’s [in Manhattan] and a kid came running past and yelled over his shoulder to another, “Hey, come on, something’s happened” — some sort of traffic accident I guess it must have been.’ Heller didn't run after the kid to find out, but the idea of 'something' happening - the fictionalized version of this ‘traffic accident’ - provided the dramatic ‘something’ that happens at the end of the book (it involves traffic, but it would be unfair to reveal more; suffice to say it is an ending of nightmarish proportions). It dismayed critics who had expected more of the clowning of Catch-22, and established a new, bleaker voice for Heller.

Consulted:
Sorkin, Adam J., ed: Conversations with Joseph Heller‎ (1993)

101: Ulysses by James Joyce

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.
— George Orwell, letter to Brenda Salkeld, 1933

In 2006 the poet laureate Andrew Motion recommended that all schoolchildren read Ulysses as part of their essential grounding in English literature. One can see why. To read Ulysses is to realize that the whole of twentieth-century literature is little more than a James Joyce Appreciation Society. Among the many writers who would have been different, or even nonexistent, without Ulysses, are Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Flann O’Brien, Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick and Bernard Malamud (to name but a few). Even a writer as unlikely as George Orwell deliberately echoed the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses in the play scene of A Clergyman’s Daughter. Joyce’s hectic layering of styles, his unstoppable neologizing, his blurring of viewpoint, his love of parody and imitation, his obscenity, his difficulty, obscurity and outright incomprehensibility was the beginning of the high modernist style in world literature. Andrew Motion was right in seeing Ulysses as fundamental. But in another way his suggestion was absurd. Ulysses is not a book for children. It is barely even a book for adults. The paradox of Ulysses is that one needs to read it to understand twentieth-century literature, but one needs to read twentieth-century literature to build up the stamina to read Ulysses.

The problem starts with the title. Early readers of Ulysses, exhilarated and appalled after 800 pages, were often still left thinking ‘Why Ulysses?’ Ulysses is barely mentioned. (The name is mentioned four times, twice in passing as a proper name, Ulysses Grant and Ulysses Browne, and twice as a brief mention among other heroes and notables. David Lodge in The Art of Fiction wrote that the title, as a clue to the allegorical nature of the book, was ‘the only absolutely unmissable one in the entire text’.) The solution, as we now know, after a century’s worth of scholarly investigation and Joyce’s own prompting, is that the book is an intricate allegory of the Odyssey (the hero being latinized from Odysseus to Ulysses). Ulysses is divided into eighteen parts, or ‘episodes’ as Joyce scholars call them, each written in a different style and with a different Odyssean name, though the names themselves are not given in the text. The names are:
‘Telemachus’,
‘Nestor’,
‘Proteus’,
‘Calypso’,
‘Lotus Eaters’,
‘Hades’,
‘Aeolus’,
‘Lestrygonians’,
‘Scylla and Charybdis’,
‘Wandering Rocks’,
‘Sirens’,
‘Cyclops’,
‘Nausicaa’,
‘Oxen of the Sun’,
‘Circe’,
‘Eumaeus’,
‘Ithaca’ and
‘Penelope’.
Each episode is assigned, tacitly, a colour theme, a dominant organ of the body, an hour, a setting and other characteristics, though many of these remain a matter of scholarly dispute. The action takes place in Dublin on a single June day (June 16 1904) and its three main characters are Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom, who represent Ulysses, Telemachus and Penelope. Other characters and places also have their Homeric counterparts.

The problem is that one can know all of this and still be left thinking ‘Why Ulysses?’ The choice of the Odyssey seems somewhat arbitrary. Why not Oedipus Rex as a background text? That way Bloom could be Oedipus, Molly Jocasta and Dedalus Tiresias (or someone else). Ulysses is not so much a novel as a symbolic system, rather like a clock or a computer programme. Underlying the final, visible product, the time-telling or the computer display, is a corresponding machinery, the cogs or the binary code. Why did Joyce choose the Odyssey for his code?

The answer is that it could hardly have been anything else. Joyce was from an early age deeply in love with the Odyssey. ‘The character of Ulysses has fascinated me ever since boyhood,’ he wrote to Carlo Linati in 1920. As a schoolboy he read Charles Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses, an adventure-yarn version of the story which presents, in Lamb’s words, ‘a brave man struggling with adversity; by a wise use of events, and with an inimitable presence of mind under difficulties, forcing out a way for himself.’ Joyce said later that the story so gripped him that when at Belvedere College (he would have been between the ages of 11 and 15) he was tasked to write an essay on ‘My Favourite Hero’, he chose Ulysses. (The essay title ‘My Favourite Hero’ actually appears in Ulysses, on page 638 of the World’s Classics edition .) He later described Ulysses to Frank Budgeon as the only ‘complete all-round character presented by any writer...a complete man...a good man.’

Unsurprisingly therefore, this ‘complete man’ surfaced as early as Joyce’s first major prose work — Dubliners of 1914. Joyce had originally planned that it include a short story called ‘Ulysses’, the plot of which was based on an incident which took place in June 1904. Joyce was involved in a scuffle on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, after accosting another man’s lady-companion, and was rescued and patched up by one Albert H. Hunter. Hunter, according to Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, was ‘rumoured to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife’ (in both of these respects a prototype for Leopold Bloom). In 1906 Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus: ‘I have a new story for Dubliners in my head. It deals with Mr Hunter.’ In a letter written shortly afterwards he mentioned its title: ‘I thought of beginning my story Ulysses but I have too many cares at present.’ Three months later he had abandoned the idea, writing: ‘Ulysses never got any forrader than its title.’ The incident with Hunter was only written up later, in Ulysses itself, in a passage at the end of episode fifteen in which Bloom rescues Dedalus ‘in orthodox Samaritan fashion’ from a fight. The idea of Ulysses as symbolic hero — and as a title — was therefore present as early as 1906. Its centrality to the early plan for Dubliners was revealed in a conversation with Georges Borach:

When I was writing Dubliners, I first wished to choose the title Ulysses in Dublin, but gave up the idea. In Rome, when I had finished about half of the Portrait, I realized that the Odyssey had to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses.

The figure of Ulysses could not therefore have been less arbitrary. He existed as a thread through all of Joyce’s prose works from ‘My Favourite Hero’ onward. He was there in embryo in Dubliners, was being considered halfway through A Portrait of the Artist, and burst out in his full, final and inevitable form in the work that bore his name. It was only after publication of Ulysses in 1922 that Joyce was free of his ‘favourite hero’, and could allow his literature to expand to its ultimate extent. The book that came after Ulysses was Finnegans Wake, a work not tied to one hero but inclusive of all heroes, not tied to one myth but including all myths, and using not one language but all languages.

Consulted:
Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1959)
Ellmann, Richard: Selected Letters of James Joyce (Faber, 1975)
Joyce, James: Ulysses (introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson, Oxford World’s Classics, 1993)
Owen, Rodney Wilson: James Joyce and the Beginnings of Ulysses (UMI Research Press, 1983)

100. From the title desk

Dear readers and casual browsers, searchers after ‘Lolita’ and frustrated viewers of information about Nabokov, small-hours surfers and bored procrastinators, purveyors and consumers of the flotsam and jetsam of the internet:

Having reached 99 titles I am going to scale this down a bit and post every other day (instead of every day). I have at least another 99 title stories I would like to consider, and I hope you will tune in and have a look. Special thanks to loyal followers and commenters who have made it all worth doing.

‘Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.’
- Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room.

Gary

99. The Worm and the Ring by Anthony Burgess

The title of this 1961 novel by Burgess (the author of A Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers, etc) is rather odd. There is little mention in the book of either worms or rings, and the plot, set in a grammar school (Burgess was for several years a schoolteacher at Banbury near Oxford), is about the theft of a diary. Then one realizes — or is told by some kindly person — that the whole book is in fact a re-telling, on one level, of the Wagnerian ring cycle.

It opens with Albert Rich (Alberich in the ring cycle, a dwarf) a schoolboy, pursuing some giggling schoolgirls (three Rhine-maidens), then introduces the headmaster Woolton (Wotan, the chief of the Gods) and his wife Frederica (Fricka, the consort of Wotan); there is another character called Lodge (Loge, or Loki, god of fire), a girl called Linda (Woglinde, one of the Rhine-maidens), and a pub called ‘the Dragon’ (‘worm’ being an archaic word for dragon). The stolen diary stands in for the stolen ring.

It’s all very interesting, and makes one wonder whether all novelists shouldn’t be weaving a rich vein of arcane symbolism into their work, accessible only to the initiated. Burgess certainly thought so, at least in this early period (The Worm and the Ring was only his second foray into the novel, completed around 1954, though not published until later). He had a particular taste for mirroring musical plots: his Napoleon Symphony was a later attempt to re-cast Beethoven’s Eroica symphony as a novel. He commented about the whole business that novel-writing was in a sense too easy: the composer had to write a score weaving together the contributions of dozens of instrumentalists: why should the novelist be let off the hook?

In a symphony many strands conjoined, in the same instant, to make a statement; in a novel all you had was a single line of monody. The ease with which dialogue could be written seemed grossly unfair. This was not art as I had known it. It seemed cheating not to be able to give the reader chords and counterpoint. It was like pretending that there could be such a thing as a concerto for unaccompanied flute. My notion of giving the reader his money’s worth was to throw difficult words and neologisms at him, to make the syntax involuted. Anything, in fact, to give the impression of a musicalisation of prose. I saw that that was what Joyce had really been trying to do in Finnegans Wake — clotting words into chords, presenting several stories simultaneously in an effect of counterpoint. I was not trying to emulate Finnegans Wake — which had closed gates rather than opened them — but I felt that Ulysses had still plenty to teach to a musician who was turning to fiction.

Consulted:
Burgess, Anthony: Little Wilson and Big God (1987)
Biswell, Andrew: The Real Life of Anthony Burgess‎ (2006)

98. Perfume by Patrick Süskind

Before I go any further I should probably say that this theory of mine may well be completely wrong. I have written to Patrick Süskind for confirmation but received no reply. Not surprising - I imagine he receives a lot of post.

As most readers will know, Perfume is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a boy with a preternatural sense of smell who embarks on a homicidal campaign to steal the scents of young women and blend them into a super-perfume that will be able to capture the heart of anyone who smells it. The novel was an enormous international hit after publication in 1987 – deservedly in my opinion – and it was made into a film which I assume to be a load of old cobblers.

But the title Perfume – Das Parfum in German - had an interesting forerunner in a much earlier work, Profumo (‘Perfume’), an Italian novel of 1890 by the verismo writer Luigi Capuana. In Capuana's Perfume there is the same fascination with the scent of the female body: it deals with a young woman who uncontrollably emits the odour of orange blossom. Orange blossom also crops up frequently in the Süskind novel, and at the climax of the book, as Grenouille is about to be executed, ‘from the valley of Grasse a warm wind came up, bearing the scent of orange blossoms.’ Did Süskind read Capuana? The parallels are certainly there, and perhaps Süskind was paying tribute to the Italian maestro when he made Grenouille’s own master an Italian, Giuseppe Baldini.

As a footnote, the Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (2003) suggests that Capuana probably derived his theme, in turn, from Ernest Monin's Un nouveau chapitre de semiologie, Essai sur les odeurs des cops humains (Paris, 1885).

Consulted:
Read Profumo online (in Italian) at http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ITA1080/_IDX013.HTM

Bondanella, Peter E. , Ciccarelli, Andrea: The Cambridge Companion to the Italian novel (2003)

97. Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith

Novel on Yellow Paper was published in 1936 while Stevie Smith was working as a secretary at Newnes, the stationery company. Her original suggestion for a title was Pompey Casmilus, after the book’s heroine, but this was rejected by her publishers, Jonathan Cape, and for a long time the manuscript hung around at the Cape offices where the staff referred to it as ‘the novel on yellow paper’ because of the cheap yellow Newnes stationery it was typed on. This finally became the title adopted.

The book is written in a rapid, breathless, at times incoherent style – the story goes that it was completed in ten weeks – but was a huge success on publication. Smith’s name was unknown at the time, and many assumed ‘Stevie Smith’ to be a pseudonym’: the poet Robert Nichols even wrote to Virginia Woolf congratulating her on her latest novel.

The book’s subtitle was Work It Out for Yourself. This was partly because of the novel’s perplexing surface, but also because Smith – a Teutonophile who had visited Germany and made friends there – intended her book as a call to face facts about the rise of Nazism and the persecution of Germany’s Jews. ‘God send the British Admiralty and the War Office don’t go shuffling on with their arms economies too long-o,’ she wrote. ‘And how many uniforms, how many swastikas, how many deaths and maimings, and hateful dark cellars and lavatories. Ah how decadent, how evil is Germany today.’

Consulted:
Spalding, Frances: Stevie Smith (1989)
http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9924

96. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The original title of War and Peace was War: What is It Good For?

No, no...wait a minute, I'm getting confused. It was a little less catchy than that. As published in serial-form in The Russian Herald from 1865, it was actually The Year 1805. When it came to be published as a book in 1867, Tolstoy needed a new title, and briefly considered All’s Well That Ends Well before deciding, very soon before publication, on War and Peace.

The choice reflected events six years earlier, when Tolstoy, aged 32, had visited the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in exile at Ixelles, Brussels. Proudhon showed him a copy of his own recently-finished tract on international armed conflict: War and Peace. Greatly impressed by Proudhon and his philosophy of benevolent anarchism — which Tolstoy later developed into his own form of Christian anarchism in works such as The Kingdom of God is Within You — Tolstoy seems to have decided to appropriate his title as an act of deliberate homage.

Consulted:
Troyat, Henri: Tolstoy (Doubleday, 1967)

95. Mere Christianity by CS Lewis

Mere Christianity consists of a collection of radio talks on the central precepts of Christianity, broadcast by Lewis from 1941-44. The words ‘mere Christanity’ – which do not appear anywhere in any of the talks – were an echo of a phrase in an obscure work by the 17th-century theologian Richard Baxter, who in his had used the word ‘meer’ in its archaic sense of ‘essential’, ‘pure’:

I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church… I am against all Sects and dividing Parties: But if any will call Meer Christians by the name of a Party, because they take up with Meer Christianity, Creed, and Scripture, and will not be of any dividing or contentious Sect, I am of that Party which is so against Parties.

(This odd – to modern ears – use of the word ‘mere’ in fact survived into the nineteenth century, as can be seen from a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper for January 3, 1874, in which he is reported to have described the poet Swinburne as a ‘perfect leper’ and a ‘mere [i.e. thoroughgoing] sodomite’.)

It is unlikely that Lewis intended ‘mere’ to have any of its modern meaning of ‘only’ or ‘just’, even in irony: he didn’t mean to say ‘oh, it’s just Christianity, nothing more.’ The talks have no sense either of downplaying Christianity or of defending Christianity from those who might seek to trivialize it.

So why use it, when it would almost certainly be misunderstood? The use of the archaic word stands in marked contrast to the talks themselves, which are composed in a deliberately clear and demotic manner, as if addressed to enquiring factory-hands.

My explanation is this: the obscurantist in Lewis – let’s not forget he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon literature at Oxford, and a connoisseur of the arcane – was in mild rebellion against the transparency of his own text. He could not resist one donnish flourish. If the talks were clear, he wished to make their title, at least, a little bit puzzling.

Consulted:
Dexter, G: Poisoned Pens (2009)
Hooper, W and Green, RL: CS Lewis (1974)
http://www.theologian.org.uk/churchhistory/baxterianae.html

94. Lord Emsworth and Others by PG Wodehouse

Clarence, 9th Earl of Emsworth, is of course the dithering, sister-ridden, pig-obsessed peer who features in the Blandings Castle novels and short stories. His first substantial appearance was in Something Fresh (1915) and he went on to feature in books such as Heavy Weather (1933), Full Moon (1947) and Pigs have Wings (1952). Lord Emsworth and Others was a collection of short stories from 1936.

Unlike most other Wodehouse proper names, which often tended toward the onomatopoeic and parodic – Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Honoria Glossop – Lord Emsworth had a concrete starting-point[1]. He was named after Emsworth, a village in Hampshire, and more specifically after a prep school in the town, Emsworth House, where PG Wodehouse stayed as a guest on and off from 1903. Wodehouse liked Emsworth so much that in 1910 he bought a house in the village called ‘Threepwood’. Wodehouse aficionados will recognize the name Threepwood: it is Lord Emsworth’s family name (and that of Galahad, his brother, and Freddie, his son). Emsworth House thus supplied the dynastic title, and Threepwood, Wodehouse’s more modest accommodation, the humbler family name. Wodehouse was nothing if not alive to the existence of class distinctions.

Consulted:
Donaldson, Frances: PG Wodehouse (Futura, 1982)
Usborne, Richard: Wodehouse at Work to the End (Penguin, 1976)

[1] One important exception is Jeeves – see post no. 30.

93. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects by Marshall McLuhan (text) and Quentin Fiore (design)

Massage? Shouldn’t that be ‘message’? Well, yes, it should. When the book came back from the typesetter there was a misprint in the title. According to his son Eric, McLuhan took one look at it and exclaimed, ‘Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!’.

It was a typical McLuhan strategy. The phrase ‘the medium is the message’ – coined by McLuhan in the early 60s and denoting the way new media such as film and television had by their very nature begun to manipulate the way ideas were conceived and received - was already a cliché by the time the book came out in 1967, and McLuhan must have welcomed the chance to ring the changes on it. As Eric writes on the Marshall McLuhan website: ‘Now there are possible four readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: "Message" and "Mess Age," "Massage" and "Mass Age."’

Never just a stuffy theorist, McLuhan was a precursor of maverick cultural critics like Camille Paglia or Slavoj Zizek, and The Medium is the Massage, far from being a dry work on communications theory, is a riot of images, jumbled typefaces, blank and black pages, cartoons, prophetic maxims and scholarly jokes. It’s part photo essay, part harangue, part spoof. It's never boring, which given its subject – communications theory – is quite an achievement.

Consulted:
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/

92. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

At the beginning of 1892, stories were appearing in the London press claiming that Dorian Gray, the hero of Wilde’s notorious book, was modelled on a real person, a minor poet named John Gray. They said that John Gray was a protégé of Wilde’s, a person under his ‘protection’. Wilde acted to scotch the rumours. In late February 1892 he wrote in a letter to the Daily Telegraph:

Allow me to state that my acquaintance with Mr John Gray is, I regret to say, extremely recent, and that I sought it because he had already a perfected mode of expression both in prose and verse. All artists in this vulgar age need protection certainly. Perhaps they have always needed it. But the nineteenth-century artist finds it not in Prince, or Pope, or patron, but in high indifference of temper, in the pleasure of the creation of beautiful things, and the long contemplation of them in disdain of what in life is common and ignoble, and in such felicitous sense of humour as enables one to see how vain and foolish is all popular opinion, and popular judgment, upon the wonderful things of art. These qualities Mr John Gray possesses in a marked degree. He needs no other protection, nor, indeed, would he accept it.
I remain, sir, your obedient servant,
Oscar Wilde.

Wilde had published The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Magazine in June 1890, and therefore, since his acquaintance with John Gray had been ‘extremely recent’, John Gray could not have anything to do with ‘Dorian’ Gray.

This though was false.

John Gray was born into a poor family in Islington in 1866. At a young age he began work in a forge at the Woolwich Arsenal, later becoming a boy clerk in the offices there. In 1882 he took a civil service examination and qualified as a clerk at the Post Office Savings Bank. In 1887 he rose still further by passing the matriculation examination for London University, maintaining himself by continuing in his work as a clerk. He then transferred to the postal department of the Foreign Office. This was a remarkable vaulting of class barriers by the standards of the time, and around 1887 he vaulted still higher by making the acquaintance of some of the figures in the circle of Wilde: Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and others. John’s good looks, it seems, were much appreciated. Early photographs show a young man of some beauty: a very white, smooth skin; a strong, rounded nose and chin; delicate, well-formed lips; and short, dark curling hair.

Gray and Wilde began to be seen together increasingly at parties, dinners, the theatre, galleries, the opera, and at the Café Royal. Gray was now writing his own poetry, much of it in the ‘decadent’ style of the 1890s. There is no doubt that by 1890 Wilde was referring to John as ‘Dorian’. Several lines of evidence support this. Ernest Dowson wrote in a letter of November 1890 (after the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in its magazine form in June that year, but before the appearance of the book in April 1891): ‘Thursday at Horne’s was very entertaining: [...] “Dorian” Gray [read] some very beautiful and obscure versicles in the latest manner of French Symbolism.’ The writer Lionel Johnson, shortly after meeting John in the early 1890s, wrote: ‘I have made great friends with the original of Dorian: one John Gray, a youth in the Temple, aged thirty, with the face of fifteen.’ Arthur Symons recalled that he had been introduced by Wilde to ‘the future Dorian Gray’ at some point around the end of 1890. And John Gray himself signed one surviving letter to Oscar, of January 1891, ‘Yours ever, Dorian.’ So when Wilde wrote in the Daily Telegraph in 1892 that his friendship with John Gray was of ‘extremely recent’ origin, this was not the truth. He had known him for several years. It is likely that the lie was an attempt by Wilde to protect Gray, in his position at the Foreign Office, from the scandal that was already attaching to Wilde and would eventually break over his head in March 1895.

Why ‘Dorian’ though? Almost certainly it was a reference to the ‘Greek love’ (the Dorian Greeks were a tribe that descended into the Greek peninsula around 1000 BC) of Plato’s Symposium and other works. It is a phrase which appears frequently in the literature of the period. In the 1890s there were a number of competing words for homosexuality. The word ‘homosexual’ had been invented, along with ‘heterosexual’, by the Hungarian-German writer Károly Mária Kertbeny in around 1868, but had failed to catch on. Instead there were other terms: ‘Uranian’ was common for male homosexuals, in reference to the god Uranus, who had given birth to Aphrodite without intervention from any woman (Aphrodite had stepped from the foam produced when his testicles were cut off and thrown into the sea). Others favoured ‘unisexual’ (for example the writer Marc André Raffalovich, a life-long close friend of Gray, who wrote a treatise on homosexuality) or ‘invert’ (‘inversion’ was a neutral term with no pejorative connotations, used by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, among others). ‘Dorian’ was merely one more way, perhaps more coded than others, to signify ‘homosexual’.

Whether Wilde and Gray were ever lovers is not known. The friendship however did not long survive the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Gray was displaced by Alfred Douglas (to whom he bore a physical similarity) in 1892, and Gray broke with Wilde completely in 1893.

Gray went on to publish numerous other collections of poetry, critical works and other books, but his later life — almost his whole life, considering how young he was when he mixed with the Wilde circle — was in notable contrast to his ‘decadent’ youth. He resigned his position at the Foreign Office in 1897 and in 1898 enrolled at the Scots College seminary in Rome, where he trained for the Roman Catholic priesthood. From 1901 until his death in 1934 he was, not Dorian Gray, nor John Gray, but ‘Father Gray’.

Consulted:
McCormack, Jerusha Hull: The Man Who Was Dorian Gray (2000)
Ellis, Havelock: Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol I, Sexual Inversion (1897)

91. The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope

Some time early in 1712, The 7th Lord Petre, perhaps at a ball or card party, furtively snipped a lock of hair from the head of a young beauty, Arabella Fermor, and carried it off as a trophy. The Fermors and the Petres, two prominent Catholic families, stopped talking to one another, and Alexander Pope (another Catholic) was brought in, a poetic troubleshooter, to defuse the tension. This he did with the mock-epic The Rape of the Lock, a poem intended to ‘make a jest of it, and laugh them together again’. It apparently achieved its object, since Arabella Fermor ‘took it so well as to give about copies of it’ and later posed for a portrait in which she was shown wearing a prominent crucifix-necklace, one specifically described in the poem.

In the poem, Arabella appears as ‘Belinda’ (Arabella — Bella — Belinda) and Lord Petre is cast as ‘the Baron’. Canto I sees Belinda at her dressing-table; in Canto II she makes a pleasure cruise on the Thames (a joking reference to the sea-voyages of heroic poetry); Canto III is set in Hampton Court, where the barbering offence takes place; and Cantos IV and V are focused on a skirmish between the nymphs and fops, and the ascent of the lock to heaven, where it becomes a comet (comet, from kometes, ‘long-haired’).

The style is that of the mock-heroic, in which trivial actions are magnified as if they were the doings of gods or heroes. The work which almost certainly influenced the choice of title was Alessandro Tassoni’s mock-epic The Rape of the Bucket, from 1622. (‘Rape’ in both poems was ultimately from ‘rapere’, to steal or snatch, and did not have a primarily sexual signification.) In this piece of scholarly ludicrousness, two Italian towns, Modena and Bologna, go to war with one another over the theft of a bucket from a well. The gods take sides in the struggle, sometimes rather ridiculously. Saturn travels to the celestial parliament sitting on a chamber pot, and Juno is unavailable because she is having her hair cut.

The Rape of the Bucket was a best-seller in Italy and was known Europe-wide, and while Pope could have read it in Italian, he probably encountered it in English. A translation of the first part of Tassoni’s poem appeared in 1710, two years before the composition of The Rape of the Lock. ‘Done from the Italian into English Rhime’, it was the work of John Ozell, one of the powerhouses of English translation in the early eighteenth century, the man responsible for English editions of Molière, Racine, Cervantes, Corneille and many others. In 1712 he produced an important edition of the Iliad, which Pope drew on in his own translation.

But Mr Pope and Mr Ozell were not on very good terms. Ozell had attacked William Wycherley, a friend of Pope’s, and by doing so had drawn the wrath of the Scriblerians (Ozell was also satirized by Swift). In 1708 Pope caricatured Ozell as the very model of a time-serving literary hack:

Reviving Perrault, murdering Boileau, he
Slander'd the ancients first, then Wycherley;
Which yet not much that old bard's anger raised,
Since those were slander'd most whom Ozell praised.

Things went from bad to worse when Ozell was one of the fools mentioned by name in the Dunciad of 1729. That same year Ozell decided to bite back, as reported by Theophilus Cibber (son of Colley) in 1753:

Ozell was incensed to the last degree by this usage, and in a paper called The Weekly Medley, September 1729, he published the following strange Advertisement. 'As to my learning, this envious wretch knew, and every body knows, that the whole bench of bishops, not long ago, were pleased to give me a purse of guineas for discovering the erroneous translations of the Common Prayer in Portugueze, Spanish, French, Italian, &c. As for my genius, let Mr. Cleland shew better verses in all Pope's works, than Ozell's version of Boileau's Lutrin, which the late lord Hallifax was so well pleased with, that he complimented him with leave to dedicate it to him, &c. &c. Let him shew better and truer poetry in The Rape of the Lock, than in Ozell's Rape of the Bucket, which, because an ingenious author happened to mention in the same breath with Pope's, viz.

'Let Ozell sing the Bucket, Pope the Lock’,

the little gentleman [i.e. Pope, who never reached a greater height than 4’6”] had like to have run mad; and Mr. Toland and Mr. Gildon publicly declared Ozell's Translation of Homer to be, as it was prior, so likewise superior, to Pope's.’

The wars between the singer of the Bucket and the singer of the Lock seem as fevered and ridiculous as the battles between Modena and Bologna or the nymphs and fops of Hampton Court. One asks oneself why Pope was so angry with Ozell. An obvious answer presents itself. Ozell had committed the unpardonable sin of helping Pope write his best-known poem.

Consulted:
Hunt, John Dixon, ed.: The Rape of the Lock: A Casebook (Macmillan, 1968)
Rousseau, GS, ed.: Twentieth Century Interpretations of ’The Rape Of The Lock’: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1969)
Williams, Abigail: ‘John Ozell’, Dictionary of National Biography (Sept 2004)