FRANK McNALLY, the resident Diarist, has called John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World"one of the all-time great book titles" and described Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hatas "a candidate for catchiest book title of all time". His claims sent me searching for other candidates - and their origins. (Is there a technical term for the study of book titles?)
Many people have often wondered, for instance, where Beckett got the title of his play Waiting for Godot, written in French in 1948. It seems that on meeting a large crowd at a Paris street corner hours after an annual Tour de France had ended, he asked what they were doing, and was told: "We're waiting for Godot" - a competitor famous for always finishing last.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by another Dublin-born writer, was also based on a real person's name, a friend of Oscar Wilde named John Gray, who worked in Britain's Foreign Office and was known to Oscar as Dorian. He was ordained a priest in 1901 and did parish work for 33 years as Fr Gray.
When James Joyce began writing his 1939 story about Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, he offered 1,000 francs to anyone who could guess what he had already decided to call it - Finnegans Wake. And while working on his earlier 933-page blockbuster, an intricate allegory of the Odyssey(whose hero's name he Latinised from Odysseus to Ulysses), he said: "The character of Ulysses has fascinated me ever since boyhood". So he had no difficulty choosing the title. (The Bookseller magazine recently reported that a bookshop was once asked for a copy of "James Joyce is Useless"!)
While J.M. Synge, yet another Dubliner, was writing his great comedy, he first thought of calling it "The Fool of Farnham" before opting for The Playboy of the Western World, a strong candidate for "catchiest title of all time".
Many other books with well-known, if not catchy, titles also began with other names. "Judah: A Tale of the Christ" was changed to Ben-Hur, "First Impressions" to Pride and Prejudice, "The House of the Faith" to Brideshead Revisitedand "The East Wind" to Bleak House. Early in 1858 Dickens began writing another novel and as time went by jotted down many possible titles for it, such as "Long Ago", "Fallen Leaves" and, believe it or not, "Rolling Stones". A year later he wrote triumphantly: "I've got exactly the title that fits the story to a tee, A Tale of Two Cities."
Ernest Hemingway was but one of many other novelists who also suffered from "title-itis". He once admitted: "I make a list of titles after I've finished the book - sometimes as many as a hundred. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them." He spent nearly 30 years working, on and off, on his last book, for which he toyed with many titles, like "Love is Hunger"; it was published posthumously as A Moveable Feast.
Among other well-known books that got new names are The Great Gatsby(originally "Trimalchio in West Egg"), Moby Dick("The Whale"), Gone with the Wind("Pansy") and 1984("The Last Man in Europe"). Tolstoy's masterpiece War and Peacewas first called "1825". "The Sea-Cook" was changed to Treasure Island, "A Rose for Our Lady" to The Rose Tattooand "Please Do Not Erase", Bel Kaufman's 1964 novel about teaching in America, to Up the Down Staircase, a phrase that has entered the language - as has Catch-22, Joseph Heller's 1961 anti-war satire. He first called it "Catch-18", but when Leon Uris published his Mila 18some weeks before, Heller had to find another title and 22 sounded better than 21 or 23. And if Catch-22isn't a catchy title, what is? But who'd have guessed that a most un-catchy title, "Four-and-a-Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice", by one of history's greatest mass-killers, would become notorious when changed to Mein Kampf?
The Bible and Shakespeare have provided countless titles. Among those taken from the Bible are James Agee's Let us now Praise Famous Men(Ecclesiasticus), Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!(2 Samuel), Steinbeck's East of Eden(Genesis), Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy(1 Corinthians) and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept(Psalm 137). Even Shakespeare took a title, Love's Labour Lost(1 Thessalonians) from the Bible.
His own 37 plays have since been ransacked for titles, such as Huxley's Brave New World(The Tempest), Frederick Forsyth's The Dogs of War(Julius Caesar), Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury(Macbeth) and Maugham's Cakes and Ale(Twelfth Night).
Other poets have also provided many titles, such as Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls(John Donne), Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd(Gray's Elegy) and Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men(Burns).
The longest title must surely be The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade - later mercifully shortened to Marat/Sade. And the shortest? Well, there are many one-word titles, such as Kipling's Ifand Hugh Leonard's Da. But could anything be shorter than the title of Thomas Pynchon's 1963 novel V?Yes: in 1930 the American poet E.E. Cummings published a book with no title at all!
For the past 60 years a British publishing firm has been giving an annual prize for "the oddest book-title of the year". Among recent winners have been Fancy Coffins to Make Yourselfand The Flat-Footed Flies of Europe.