How 10 classics got their titles
I have just stumbled across a fantastic blog that has totally and inexplicably passed me by till now. It’s called How Books Got Their Titles and it does exactly what it says on the tin (or should that be spine?)
In it, Gary Dexter, who writes the Title Deed column in the Sunday Telegraph, delves into the stories behind the titles of classic books - often as weird and wonderful as the narratives themselves. Here are ten of his most brilliant insights:
Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again
Thomas Wolfe’s first novel Look Homeward, Angel cast a critical eye on the small town of his birth, where it was subsequently greeted with outrage.
Wolfe later recounted the experience over dinner to a friend, the Communist activist Ella Winter, who exclaimed, ‘But don’t you know you can’t go home again?’
Wolfe replied: ‘Can I have that? I mean for a title...I’m writing a piece...and I’d like to call it that. It says exactly what I mean.’
E.M Forster’s A Passage to India
Takes its title from the poem of the same name by Walt Whitman:
Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d
(The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,)
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
As, fill’d with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.
PG Wodehouse's Love Among the Chickens
Wodehouse had a life-long friend called William Townend who, one day, told him about another acquiantance...
"A prep-school master" writes Dexter, "blessed with the unlikely and rather Wodehousian name of Carrington Craxton, [who] had embarked on a disastrous chicken-farming venture in Devonshire"
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in a Time of Cholera
Got its title through an opportunity for pun that does not exist in English.
Cólera, in Spanish, means both ‘cholera’ and ‘anger’.
William Shakespeare’s Othello
Shakespear's Moor has a possible precursor in French medieval romance: Sir Othuel, a Moorish companion of Roland, of noble birth, who had converted to Christianity.
"Shakespeare could easily", Dexter writes,
"have Italianized Othuel by adding a final ‘o’, thus giving the name a
Venetian ring." Winston Churchill's While England Slept
In 1938, Churchill's American publishers, Putnam’s, cabled him to ask for an alternative title for a volume of his collected speeches.
The cable operator garbled Churchill's suggestion, The Years of the Locust, so that it arrived with Putnams as The Years of the Lotus.
"Putnam’s were puzzled", writes Dexter. "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."
Joseph Heller's Something Happened
Heller himself explained:
"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."
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace
Six years before the novel's publicated, Tolstoy had visited the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in exile.
Proudhon showed him a copy of his own book, just finished, on international armed conflict. What was it called? War and Peace.
"Tolstoy", writes Dexter, "seems to have decided to appropriate his title as an act of deliberate homage."
W Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence
Owes the brilliance of its name to The Times! After the publication of his previous novel, Of Human Bondage, a Times reviewer wrote of its main character:
“Like so many young men he was so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet.”
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf:
Hitler's first choice for his autobiography was A Four and a Half Years’ Battle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice: A Reckoning with the Destroyers of the Nazi Party Movement.
For reasons unknown, his publisher, Max Amann, decided that a snappier title might be better advised
... Got any others?
