Title Chase: The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac

I've been working my way through Kerouac's first and, until it was released posthumously two years ago, rightly unpublished, novel The Sea is My Brother . The book draws on Kerouac's own brief experience in the Merchant Marine. Or, at least, that's what I thought it would be about. Here's where the title comes from:

“Perhaps the old adage, “We’re all in the same boat” went without saying in the Merchant Marine and seamen resigned themselves to one another quite philosophically. And of course, like the slogan he had heard of—a famous placard above the door of the Boston Seamen’s Club—which said, very simply, that all those who passed under the arch of the door entered into the Brotherhood of the Sea—these men considered the sea a great leveler, a united force, a master comrade brooding over their common loyalties.”

I'll have more to say about the book later on, but I thought the title was a good one. That is, until you consider the make-up of the book:

Perhaps Kerouac's "brief experience" in the Merchant Marine was briefer than we thought. Afterall, we know his active duty in the US Navy lasted all of 8 days before he was diagnosed with dementia praecox and honorably discharged.

Title Chase: The Red Badge of Courage

Yesterday we reviewed Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage , but said next to nothing about what the title actually means. Is it a military insignia? An honor bestowed by one’s superiors for valor on the field of battle? Not exactly. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 9, the one and only place the term is mentioned in the narrative:

“The youth fell back in the procession until the tattered soldier was not in sight. Then he started to walk on with the others.

“But he was amid wounds. The mob of men was bleeding. Because of the tattered soldier's question he now felt that his shame could be viewed. He was continually casting sidelong glances to see if the men were contemplating the letters of guilt he felt burned into his brow.

“At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”

Title Chase: Catch-22

We’ve all come across certain frustrating situations where you’re “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” Those of us born after the sixties probably came to know the term “catch-22” long before we were introduced to the book that gave its own name to these classic no-win situations. Here’s how Joseph Heller described the self-contradictory bureaucratic blooper that condemned Yossarian to an endless string of combat missions:

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.”

But did you know that this circular puzzle was originally known as Catch-18? Here’s what wikipedia has to say about why it was so hard to land on just the right title:

“The opening chapter of the novel was originally published in New World Writing as “Catch-18” in 1955, but Heller's agent, Candida Donadio, requested that he change the title of the novel, so it would not be confused with another recently published World War II novel, Leon Uris's Mila 18 . The number 18 has special meaning in Judaism (it means Alive in Gematria) and was relevant to early drafts of the novel which had a somewhat greater Jewish emphasis.

“The title Catch-11  was suggested, with the duplicated 1 paralleling the repetition found in a number of character exchanges in the novel, but because of the release of the 1960 movie Ocean's Eleven, this was also rejected. Catch-17  was rejected so as not to be confused with the World War II film Stalag 17, as was Catch-14 , apparently because the publisher did not feel that 14 was a "funny number." Eventually the title came to be Catch-22 , which, like 11, has a duplicated digit, with the 2 also referring to a number of déjà vu-like events common in the novel.”

I think Catch-22 has a nice ring to it, but come on, calling the number 14 unfunny? 14 is a hilarious number: the glottal stop right there in the middle? The only “teen” without an e or an i sound?… Catch-14  would have been comedy gold.

The Elsinore Vacillation

What if Robert Ludlum wrote the title for Hamlet?- and other title what-ifs, with Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens.

What's In A Name?

MacEvoy has been rolling around in the elk miscarriage of literature titles as of late . . . which has caused me to do a lot of thinking. Of my favorite 25 (or so) novels, I have strong feelings when it comes to the titles. I hate them (i.e. "The Catcher in The Rye"). Or I love them (i.e. "The Angle of Repose") and wish that I had a book with just such a title.

It often befuddles me that a writer can produce a novel of such sustained prominence and genius, while completely striking out on a workable title (i.e. "All The Pretty Horses"). The tile should be the easy part, in theory, I mean it's ten words or less. But yet these "misses" do occur, as I will point out below. Keep in mind, every book on these lists is, in my mind, important and ground breaking and wonderful, in spite of its great or terrible title.

Best Books I've Ever Read with GREAT (I'm jealous) Titles:

• The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)
• The Angle of Repose (Stegner)
• The Great Gatsby (Joyce)
• For Whom The Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
• East of Eden (Steinbeck)
• Dharma Bums (Kerouac)
• The Autumn of the Patriarch (Garcia Marquez)
• My Name is Asher Lev (Potok)
• Ask the Dust (Fante)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Garcia Marquez)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
• Blood Meridian (McCarthy)

Best Books I've Ever Read with TERRIBLE (how could such a good novel have such a shitty title) Titles:

• Dancing At The Rascal Fair (Doig) (sounds like grocery store romance lit)
• All The Pretty Horses (McCarthy) (sounds like lesbian cowgirl lit)
• Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (Joyce) (Note: I actually don't like the novel either)
• Travels With Charlie (Steinbeck) (John thought this one up in 10 seconds, surely)
• The House of Spirits (Allende) (sounds like a "universe" book you'd see featured on Oprah)
• Love In The Time of Cholera (Garcia Marquez) (Can't have "love" in a title, sorry Gab).
• Cry, The Beloved Country (Patton) (sorry MacEvoy, but this one misses the mark for me)
• A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O'Connor) (sounds like my Jewish mother-in-law)
• The Stranger (Camus) (too bland)
• Out Stealing Horses (Petterson) (sounds like a 12 year old wrote the title)
• The Savage Detectives (Bolano) (After reading it, I am still unsure what the title means, so I hate it)
• A Moveable Feast (Hemingway) (Makes me think of Thanksgiving?!)
• Freedom (Franzen) (sounds like a George Bush speech title)

Now, keep in mind that aside from Joyce, I've LOVED each of these novels and count them as important to my development as a person and thinker. And these titles represent opposite ends of the spectrum with plenty of titles that fall in between the Great v. Terrible debate ("Don Quixote de la Mancha" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Old Man & The Sea").

What I've gleaned from my self-made lists are that most writers find themselves on both ends of the spectrum depending on the novel. They write a stellar title for one novel, and a pitiful title for the next.

Can anyone disagree with my list(s)?

Title Chase: The Grapes of Wrath

Yesterday we sniffed out the title of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. Today we do the same for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Why did the one book make me think of the other? Well, despite their vastly different subject matter the two books are very similar stylistically. Paton came across Steinbeck's masterpiece on the same international tour of penal institutions during which he wrote his own novel. You can trace the American writer's influence in Paton's use of a preliminary dash to offset dialogue and, as we discussed yesterday, his use of intercalary chapters to make one family's tragedy a symbolic statement about the world at large.

Steinbeck's intercalaries are some of the most interesting parts of Grapes in my view. They range from abstract descriptions of banks as insatiable monsters, to bits of dialogue set on used car lots and roadside shanty towns. They allow Steinbeck to turn the Joad familiy's plight into a broad condemnation of the Depression Era powers that be.

So where do we get the title, The Grapes of Wrath? From the heartrending descriptions of agricultural waste that have left Oakies and migrant workers like the Joads hungry and destitute:

"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. 

"And the smell of rot fills the country... 

"The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

-Page 477 in my 1972 Viking Compass paperback

Title Chase: Cry, the Beloved Country

There are a few things I always pay attention to when reading any book. If it happens to have an interesting title, one of the things I keep an eye out for is the passage where the title originates.

Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country was a book that had spent a few years on my bookshelf before I finally cracked it open. And I'd always wondered where that particular title could have come from. Certainly not in dialogue- people just don't talk that way. And it didn't sound like any sort of standard narrative description, so what then? Maybe a song? A Poem? I just didn't know.

Turns out it comes from Paton's use of intercalary chapters to tell his story. Intercalary chapters are simply passages that are inserted in between various sections of the narrative to expand the scope or provide context for the central characters and their story. Rather than disturb the flow, they're meant to create a mood, or show flashes of what's happening in the larger world. In Cry, the Beloved Country, intercalaries are used to cast Stephen Kumalo's story against the backdrop of percolating racial tensions in South Africa, and against the ruthless gravitational pull that large cities seem to exert on the rural poor.

The effect is pure awesomeness. Here's the intercalary passage that gave the book its title:

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

But I'm not alone in thinking it's a great title. There's an interesting story about how this exact passage was chosen. Paton was staying with two acquaintances in California, on the condition that they read his manuscript. When they finished it they asked him what he would call it. He suggested that they have a little competition. Each of them would write their own proposed title, and then they would compare notes. When they showed each other their suggestions, all three of them had written "Cry, the Beloved Country."