An Irishman's Diary

ON THIS date in 1947, there opened on Broadway a play that might have been called "The Moth". Another of its early titles was "The Poker Night". And if I mention that a third, weirdly, was "Blanche's Chair on the Moon", you will probably guess the production was of Tennessee's Williams's classic, now and forever known as A Streetcar Named Desire.

It’s such a resonant title you might think the play could never have been called anything else. And the writer’s prevarication seems all the more inexplicable because the name was gifted to him by circumstances. In the Latin Quarter of New Orleans, where he wrote and set the drama, there were two streetcars sharing the same line. One was called Desire, the other Cemeteries.

That was a play in itself. In reality, Desire and Cemeteries were just the different neighbourhoods where the trams ended up. But rarely can public transport have been synchronised so perfectly as in the drawled opening line of Streetcar’s pathetic heroine, Blanche Dubois: “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries . . .”

Even less-resonant book titles become indelible from fame, of course. There's no particular reason that Catch 22should have been so called. In fact Joseph Heller originally preferred Catch 18 and became so attached to this during the book's long gestation that he was distressed when, on the eve of publication, Simon and Schuster decided it had to change.

The problem was that Leon Uris's book, Mila 18, had just appeared. Having two novels with 18 in the title wouldn't do, the publishers decreed. So much agonising ensued. Catch 11 was suggested, but the film Ocean's Elevenwas still too fresh in people's memories. Similarly, the second World War movie Stalag 17ruled out another favoured option.

Heller quite liked the number 14 too, but the publishers thought 14 wasn’t sufficiently funny to express the novel’s eponymous paradox (that a character is not sane enough to fly any more bombing missions, but that he cannot be grounded until he asks, and if he asks to be grounded he must be sane enough to fly after all). So they finally went with 22, which seems to have worked.

Speaking of numeric titles, the process by which George Orwell chose 1984was not quite so convoluted. But like a man missing deadlines, he first thought about calling it 1980 and then 1982, before settling on an inversion of the year he wrote the book, 1948. Not that he was attached to any number, unlike Heller. When his US publishers wanted a different title, he happily suggested The Last Man in Europe.

We have Shakespeare to blame for one of the worst translations of a book title: Remembrance of Things Past. Yes it sounds lovely in Sonnet No. 30: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past." But outside the manicured confines of iambic pentameter, the question arises: What other sorts of thing can you remember except past ones? And is "things" necessary, either? Why not just call the book "Remembrance"? It's true that verbal economy is not a priority in Proust's sprawling masterpiece. But tautology aside, his original translator Charles Scott Moncrieff has also been criticised for not conveying the true sense of the book's French title, À la recherche du temps perdu.

That said, the literal translation, In Search of Lost Time, has its critics too. And it has been claimed in Scott-Moncrieff's defence that, not only was he quoting Shakespeare, but that when Voltaire translated the sonnets, he rendered "remembrance of things past" as "à la recherche du temps perdu". Which neat circularity would destroy the prosecution case; except that last I heard, nobody has produced evidence that Voltaire translated Shakespeare's sonnets one way or another.

But getting back to great titles that nearly never happened, War and Peaceis another example of a novel you would think could not have been named anything else. Au contraire. It was serialised as "The Year 1805" and only in book form did it acquire the title by which it is now famous. All's Well that Ends Well, I hear you say: and you're doubly correct, because the cliché at the start of this sentence was what Tolstoy wanted to call it before belatedly settling on War and Peace.

Despite giving us such resonantly-titled novels as The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden, John Steinbeck once commented of a book: "I have never been a title man. I don't give a damn what it's called." By contrast, Raymond Chandler wrote sarcastically to his publisher: "I'm trying to think of a good title for you to want to change." But writers often need editing, even with their titles. Adolf Hitler was such a case. Mein Kampf is not a great title, perhaps, and it certainly isn't a great book. But "My Struggle" at least has the virtue of brevity, unlike Four-and-a-half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice which was Hitler's preference.

Other titles were shortened only after publication. You might think, for example, that Gulliver's Travelswas unusually pithy for a title published in the 1720s. Right again. The editing was here provided by posterity. The book's official title was and remains: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon and then a Captain of Several Ships.