Ben Macintyre on the art of a good book title
16-Feb-2008 • Literary
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Fleming took the business of titles very seriously, but sometimes got it wrong. When he was casting around for a title for Live and Let Die, Fleming originally came up with The Undertaker's Wind - a reference, I believe, to a prevailing wind in Jamaica, and not to a mortician's flatulence.
Live and Let Die was only the second Bond novel, and the Bond craze had yet to take off: if Fleming had stuck to his original title the book might have bombed, he might never have written another, and the history of popular culture might have been very different.
The words that matter most in any book, of course, are neither at the beginning nor the end, but on the front cover. Would great books have become great books had they been called something else? In 1924, a young writer sent his latest novel to his publisher with what he considered to be a catchy and intriguing title: Trimalchio in West Egg. His editor loved the book and hated the title. âConsider as quickly as you can a change,â he wrote. F. Scott Fitzgerald duly considered Trimalchio, Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Under the Red White and Blue, The High-Bouncing Lover (a good title, certainly, but perhaps not for this book), Trimalchio's Banquet, On the Road to West Egg (which would have made Jack Kerouac's life more difficult), and Incident at West Egg. Finally, he settled on The Great Gatsby, which was just as well for him, and for us.
Joseph Heller had planned to call his novel Catch 18. But then it emerged that Leon Uris was about to publish a war novel entitled Mila 18, and there was an obvious danger of confusion.
âI was heartbroken,â Heller said in an interview in 1975. âI thought 18 was the only number.â He toyed with Catch-11 (rejected because of the 1960 film Ocean's Eleven), then Catch-14 and finally, with extreme reluctance, Heller dragged his catch four integers higher than originally planned, and created not only a bestseller, but an enduring part of the English language.
Looking back, Catch 18 seems pedestrian, where the gentle alliteration and duality of Catch-22, a novel in which everything is doubled, works as no other number could.
Margaret Mitchell wrestled with several titles for her novel, including Not in Our Stars, Tote the Weary Load, Tomorrow is Another Day (which sounds like a Bond film), and Bugles Sang True, before settling on the indisputably correct one, Gone with the Wind. Last year George Orwell's 1984 was voted the book that best defines the 20th century. Would that have been the case if he had maintained the title The Last Man in Europe?
Sometimes, the world might have been a better place if an author had stuck to his or her original idea. If Hitler had been allowed to call Mein Kampf (My Struggle) by its original long-winded name, Four-and-a-half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice, then perhaps its poison might have spread less easily.
Bleak House is a wonderful title, but I also like the one Charles Dickens came up with first: Tom-All-Alone's Factory that Got Into Chancery and Never Got Out. Martin Chuzzlewit was almost Martin Chuzzletoe, or even Martin Sweetledew.
Intriguingly, T.S. Eliot's original draft of The Wasteland, before Ezra Pound set to work on it, was called He Do the Police in Different Voices, taken from a passage in Our Mutual Friend in which a young man is praised by Betty for his dramatic reading.
Raymond Chandler was a master of the apt and pithy book title, but some of his best were rejected: All Guns are Loaded never saw the printer's ink, and nor did Lament but No Tears. âI'm trying to think up a good title for you to want to change,â Chandler wrote grumpily to his editor, Alfred A. Knopf.
The Dickensian-style deliberately over-explanatory title has recently become all the rage, with titles such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and A Short History of Tractors in the Ukraine. But I am of the view - and history seems to bear this out - that in book titles, less is more.
You don't have to be a brilliant publisher, let alone Raymond Chandler, to know that only one of the following four titles is destined to be a bestseller: The Summer of the Shark, The Terror of the Monster, The Jaws of the Leviathan and plain old Jaws.
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