All That's in a Name

Being an Inquiry Into the Titles of Books and Plays and Other Things

GILBERT W. GABRIEL

THERE are all ways of falling into inspiration; but, among writers, the usual one seems to be to stub their wits on a fine title. Go through those authors' notebooks which literary executors love to let slip indecorously into print, and you will invariably find them full of stray titles, chapter headings, catch-quotations, which have given the key to a whole fantasia of fiction. The novel-writing industry owes half its annual output to phrases from Shakespeare.

Somebody has taken the trouble to prove that fact by collecting a catalogue of novels entitled by Shakespearian phrases. The size of it would amaze you. Indeed, it would probably amaze Shakespeare, too. Rose Macauley's Told by an Idiot is by no means the latest example. Go to hear Macbeth or Hamlet', nowadays, and it will sound to your literary ear like a publisher's Autumn List, so many familiar book titles are rccitablc in it. And then, of course, there is the Bible.

But, whither the titles come is a minor matter. The point to play on is the fact—and it is a fact beyond quibbling—that the names of books arc so often the books' beginnings. Novelists' minds move like that. So do the short-story makers'. Perhaps playwrights' do, too. But you never can tell about plays and playwrights. Titles mean such vastly different things in the theatre. They have to be put up in huge, shining letters, to snare the winking jostle of night-time crowds. And, besides, a play can always be relied upon to change its name at least four times before it comes into its first big city. You may have written it under the splendid delusion that it ought to be called Egeria of Iceland. New York will probably flock to it under an electric sign which reads: Lust!

WE are just now enjoying an age of monosyllabic titles. Novels bark their various wares as Brass, Salt, Sin. Plays of the past two seasons have called themselves unblushingly, Sex, Flesh, Thrills. The scare-line influence is upon us. We adore calling a thing a spade in the fewest possible letters, so that the given space may then be filled by the largest possible type. We have gone to school to the display advertisers, and learned that such a dear, quaint title as What Will He Do With It? cannot readily be deciphered on a book-jacket ten feet away from the shopwindow. And that Midsummer-Night's Dream is four letters too long for a maximum in Mazda lights. Sydney Howard's recent They Knew What They Wanted was an odd exception. Perhaps it was a reaction from the same author's title of Swords.

There was a time when the names of works of art were, of their own accord, contemplative, graceful, decently neutral. Even such a sentimentalist as Stevenson w'ould call his most coloured romance by the rather glum, grizzled title of The Master of Ballantrae, and be content that he had thereby put together some cadences memorable and richly phonetic. Samuel Butler would take it for granted that you would know where he hit upon the beauty of that phrase, The Way of All Flesh, that you could unravel for your self the riddle of Erewhoti.

Mystery stories have always had a special bill of rights to rough, tersely terrifying titles. Wilkie Collins might hit upon the tuppenny alliteration of The Woman in White and still be within bounds of an excellent indication of the sort of tale he would spin. When he came to his most celebrated yarn, however, he had only to designate it The Moonstone and know that would suffice a public ever allured by the blunt mention of a precious stone.

From Collins the mystery-story writers have taken that and many another cue. The stuff they have brewed about black pearls, rajahs' rubies, idols' eyes seems to pour from a never empty jug. Or, taking a tip from Poe, they have only to entitle something The Murder in the Manor Garden or The Murder in Any Place at All to insure it so and so many readers. The crime plot is stereotyped; its title is no less so.

But the popular novel or play of today must have a hoarse, exhortatory name. A name which, being artificially short, thinks itself thereby ruddy, vivid, masculine, ironic, strong. When you come to think of it, the French fictioneers of a generation ago were the first offenders. DeMaupassant, with the sneering implications of the title of Bel Ami; with the inflated humility of the name, Une Vie. And, after DeMaupassant, Zola ejected his titles like a thick, bitter spittle. Turgenev used titles as simple and common, sometimes, for his Russian tales; so did Tchekov—yet with what gentler melancholy mixed into the choice. Stnoke, Spring Freshets, The Darling, Three Years: these names grieve, but they do not growl or slobber.

By the titles which lure them to choice, you can often tell so much concerning various authors. The modern Englishmen, for instance: the earth-bound, slightly plaintive idealism of Wells, with one eye cocked at distant planets, the other eye shifting humorously up and down the Cockney slums; Arnold Bennett's Anglo-Gallic inner struggle; the ever-cropping dramatist in Maugham the novelist; the exquisitely aesthetic bewilderment of Aldous Huxley; W. L. George disappearing deeper and deeper under a mound of nuptial bedclothes. You need only glance at the backs of their successive books to know these writers' histories— and to know where their pens have taken them.

We have in America two remarkable title choosers, one a novelist, the other a dramatist. Christopher Morlcy I have in mind, and Eugene O'Neill. Where the Blue Begins, Parnassus on Wheels, Thunder on the Left— what captions these are to conjure with! And, again, the name of almost any O'Neill play is a clarion to imagination: The Great God Brown, Desire Under the Elms, Bound East for Cardiff, The Dreamy Kid, Beyond the Horizon. Even the plain mention of The Fountain evokes its picture and its plash.

WE have, too, the shrewdly selective titling of Lewis. Nothing inspirational about it. Babbitt meant nothing until Mr. Lewis pasted it upon a character and turned it into a generalization. Main Street was a plain, unmeaning sign in every little business district before Mr. Lewis tore it down and hammered it upon the cover of his novel. But, such felicity was in his foresight, Babbitt became actually a new word in the American vocabulary, and Main Street swelled into a symbol nation-wide. ManTrap, the latest which Lewis has given us is a handsome climax among names of adventure stories.

Which brings us to a reverent consideration of the titles of adventure books as a class—and as a mass. The authors of these arc nothing if not scenic. Future generations will know that we who inhabited America when it still possessed unharnessed streams, upstanding forests, and a few spare miles of yet unirrigated desert, will have at any rate to admit that we had an abounding love of nature. We revel in such lithographic titles. They sing of the purple sage, the white waters, the coagulated colours of the canyons, the pines against Canadian snows. They hymn God's country, they sloganize the Great Open Spaces, until those who ride effetely back and forth on tame suburban trains and Bronx expresses sec themselves as Curwood docs—poets and athletes, sound-limbed Byrons of the wilds.

Slang is the greatest refuge of the titlers of today. Perhaps it was of other days, too—and yesterday's colloquials have staled into prim, accepted terms by now. But the last two or three seasons in the theatre have seemed to take particular relish in naming their plays out of the sides of their months. Is Zal So? and The Fall Guy, for instance; The Butter and Egg Man, Laff That Off. Love 'Em and Leave 'Em, a poorish piece of hokumpokum which has scarcely kept alive throughout this year by the process of gnawing at its own shoe-string, is blessed with an excellent name of that sidewalk sort.

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A musical comedy tinge lies over all the art of naming things, nowadays. By way of assuring you that this is a play or a tale which requires no large amount of mental concentration on your part, they hit on the most casual motto, the flippest expression they can find. If it applies, so much the better. Easy Come, Easy Go, Beware of Widows, you can almost see the chorus girls do immediate backflips when you read these whoops on the billboards. Jocularity is its own reward. But when so pretty a name as Tilly of Bloomsbury, which identified Ian Hay Beith's comedy in its own native land, found itself disguised over here as Happy-Go-Lucky, tragedy was imminent, doom inevitable.

Fashions herd titles into annual groups. One year you will have a whole batch of things in black—The Black Diamond, The Sable Horror. Another season will bring flocks of birds: Wild Birds on the stage, Wild Geese in book covers, The Stork, The

Pelican, Ostriches, The Dove. Of course, that's coincidence. So is The Perennial Bachelor, quite soon after The Constant Nymph. So is Kosher Kitty Kelly, after Abie's Irish Rose.

Evidently there are certain always reliable words which publishers and public love to see in titles. Youth is one of them; add any adjective at all and it will still be a popular choice. Beauty is an even surer one. Once, when an author I know was going to write a book about a skeleton and thought to call it The Grim Beauty, his publisher swept his doubts away by proving that all volumes with the word "beauty" in their labels sell so and so many thousands of copies on that account alone. I believe that title was finally discarded, though, because of the present distaste against "the" on a book cover.

The title which includes a verb and tells off a whole sentence is much believed in, now. Heywood Broun uses it gorgeously on two of his novels, The Boy Grows Older and Gandle Follows His Nose. But then Mr. Broun is equally happy in all his namings: in Pieces of Hate, Seeing Things at Night and Sitting on the World, for instance. If this craft came out of newspaper training, then all those with books and plays to name should first sit in for a few years at copy-readers' desks.

But then, when you arrive at the names of motion pictures—but need you do that?