When Joseph Heller died last December, obituary writers pointed out that his intriguing book title (and enduring phrase to describe the vagaries of modernity) “Catch-22” came into being by chance–and publisher-dictated necessity.
Originally, Heller planned to call his surrealistic yet somehow true-to-life story “Catch-18.” But 18 had already been taken, so to speak, by author Leon Uris for “Mila-18,” a novel based on the Warsaw uprising during World War II. To reduce confusion about two war novels with similar titles, Heller increased his “catch” by four, strengthening the title in the process. (For some reason, possibly the repeating “t” sound, 22 sounds more absurd.)
“Catch-22” appeared in 1961, the same year as “Mila-18.” More recently, though, with an ever-greater number of books bring printed, the earlier impulse of seeking originality or at least distinctiveness in book titles appears to have been abandoned in the mania to get out more books.
Even though it’s now easy with the Internet to check the Library of Congress catalog and other Web sites to find titles that have already been used, authors and publishers seem inclined to recycle certain phrases, regardless of prior publication. Something that worked before might work again, so their thinking must go.
For instance, in 1996, Edward Klein’s “All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy” came out. Three years later, former Clinton administration adviser George Stephanopoulos dissected the president he’d served in “All Too Human: A Political Education.” Both titles bring to mind Nietzsche’s late 19th Century treatise “Human, All Too Human.”
When Seymour Hersh’s “The Dark Side of Camelot” appeared in 1997, I checked my study’s shelf devoted to politicians and their private lives (an increasingly crowded section) and found a copy of Nelson Thompson’s “The Dark Side of Camelot,” which the Playboy Press put out in 1976. Same subject, same title.
In a similar vein, Murray Sperber called his 1993 study of the early years of Notre Dame football “Shake Down the Thunder.” Two decades before, Wells Twombly’s biography of former Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy was titled–you guessed it–“Shake Down the Thunder.” The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980 triggered several books, including Barbara Henneger’s “October Surprise” in 1989 and Gary Sick’s “October Surprise” in 1991. But Bonnie MacDougal’s recent thriller, “Out of Order,” is not to be confused with Thomas E. Patterson’s “Out of Order,” a 1993 study of the media’s coverage of political life.
Browsing in a library not long ago, I felt as if I were trapped in a batting cage–or a verbal echo chamber. I kept running into books with the word “Hardball” on the cover.
On the “Just Published” rack was the new edition of columnist and commentator Chris Matthews’ analysis of contemporary politics, which sparked the high-hard-one approach to civic discourse he conducts nightly on the cable talkfest “Hardball.” Over in sports, there was a copy of “Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner,” by Bowie Kuhn, who redefined the word controversy during his stint as the game’s czar. Nearby were two other “Hardball” books about the same sport: Doug Honig’s, which appeared in 1985 (two years before Kuhn’s memoir), and Dick Giebel’s baseball journal that came out in 1993. In the section devoted to urban affairs, there was Daniel Coyle’s “Hardball: A Season in the Projects,” about inner-city baseball in Chicago, which was also published in 1993.
Up in fiction, a wandering reader found English mystery writer Jimmy Sangster’s 1988 novel “Hardball,” which goes with his series that includes “Snowball” and “Blackball.” Chicago author Barbara D’Amato launched her string of successful Cat Marsala mysteries with her version of “Hardball” in 1990. Since then D’Amato (and Marsala) have engaged audiences with “Hard Tack,” “Hard Luck,” “Hard Women,” “Hard Case,” “Hard Christmas,” “Hard Bargain” and “Hard Evidence.”
Like John D. MacDonald’s use of colors for his Travis McGee novels (“The Deep Blue Good-By” or “Free Fall in Crimson”), or Sue Grafton’s alphabetical approach (” `A’ Is for Alibi” to the most recent, ” `O’ Is for Outlaw”), or Harry Kemelman’s reliance on days (“Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red” or “Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry”), D’Amato’s titles have an internal consistency reflecting a certain originality. Despite the gimmicky quality to such a series, the titles remain distinctive and memorable, which should be an author’s abiding objective.
” `The Ancient Mariner’ would not have taken so well if it had been called `The Old Sailor,’ ” British writer Samuel Butler once remarked of Samuel Coleridge’s ballad, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” That’s true, but somehow “The Old Man and the Sea” works perfectly as the title of the Ernest Hemingway novella. It’s direct, definite and descriptive, suggesting one person’s confrontation with nature. The phrase, in fact, mirrors the stark simplicity of the book’s prose.
Hemingway took titles seriously, commenting at one point: “I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the book–sometimes as many as a hundred. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them.”
Coming up with a striking word or phrase for a title is serendipity squared. Although Hemingway was one author who waited until the end, other writers begin with a title, using it as the guiding star to a new book’s last page. Sometimes a titular epiphany occurs midway into a project, helping to order and clarify the work-in-progress.
Walker Percy, who wrote such sensitively probing novels as “The Moviegoer,” “Love in the Ruins” and “The Thanatos Syndrome,” believed, “A good title should be like a good metaphor: It should intrigue without being too baffling or obvious.” Percy’s own titles illustrate his point, as does his collection of essays, “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.” They arouse curiosity in a natural way. Percy also helped bring about the posthumous publication of John Kennedy Toole’s aptly named comic tour de force, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” those words being a clever reworking of a line by Jonathan Swift.
Harper Lee took four words directly from the prose of her novel and artfully called what she’d written “To Kill a Mockingbird.” William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory” are compelling phrases from other sources (a play, a hymn and a prayer, respectively), but they effectively arouse a reader’s interest–as well as make a point about the work they name.
I might be too much of a purist in this matter, but a book should be one of a kind, standing on its own as a unique creation of fiction or non-fiction. A copycat title is by no means the same as a copycat crime, yet it makes a reader wonder whether other words in the book are echoes of someone else’s voice.
