Cultural Amnesia (14 page)

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) is one of those minor English prose writers
whose reputations are always rediscovered in times of crisis, because they had a gift for rhythm that forecast the language of the future, and it is in times of crisis that the English
language is most easily seen to be a treasure house of humanism. During World War II, European exiles in London—the future Nobel laureate Elias Canetti was one of them—learned to
value Browne’s style as an example of what English could do in a short space. Since written English can so easily run to specious prolixity, we can always use examples from the past to
remind us that it doesn’t have to be like that. The English language has always made its main initial impact through the turn of a single phrase. Book titles, when they catch our
attention, are a constant reminder that this is so. One of the earliest unforgettable book titles was devised by Browne himself:
Urn Burial
. No sooner
seen but memorized, even when you don’t yet know quite what is meant.

Dreams out of the ivory gate, and visions before midnight.

—SIR THOMAS BROWNE,
On Dreams

W
HEN I
FIRST
read this magnificent line, the second half of it begged to be the title of a book. I copied the line into an early instalment of my journal, so it must have been when I was at
Cambridge, where I had a brief period one winter of joining Browne’s collected works in Pembroke Library after the early nightfall, as if those moulting leather-bound volumes were a gang of
old drinking chums. At the time I had no idea what kind of book mine would be. The phrase was a cap looking for a head to fit. Later on, when I was assembling my first book of television
criticism, it took me a while to remember that there was a suitable title all set to go.
Visions Before Midnight
seemed just right: the television
programmes were visions, they happened before midnight, and the falling phrase had something in it of a civilization coming to an end, which was roughly the way the BBC sports commentators made
me feel.

Since Thomas Browne thought of it first, I need not fear a show of immodesty in saying
that “visions before midnight” is an exquisitely balanced phrase. Browne had an infallible sense of cadence that could operate through a whole sentence, making it a long poetic line.
Characteristically the first half of the sentence rolled up the hill and the second half rolled down, so the second half had more momentum. “It cannot be long before we lie down in
darkness,” he wrote, “and have our light in ashes.” In that sentence the first half itself falls into two halves. (One of those halves was borrowed by William Styron as a title:
Lie Down in Darkness
.) Another three-part two-parter should be more famous than it is. “Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the
grave.” Really there should be a colon after “animal,” and everything after the colon is a single clause, soaring first and then coming in to land. Browne’s section of
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
is full of lines like that, but they are best studied in context, in the oldest edition of his works that you can find.
The musculature of his style should be appreciated through time, as the beauty of a leopard should be seen through trees. For a writer like him, an anthology is a zoo of the bad old kind, where
the animals were stymied behind bars or on concrete islands.

Dreams out of the ivory gate—pause to consider the power of a single comma—and visions before midnight. I
never contemplated stealing the first half of this particular sentence and thought that nobody
ever would, but years later I found that someone already had. (These were still
the days before “to Google” had become the infinitive that could search infinity.) There it was in a second-hand bookshop:
Dreams out of the Ivory
Gat
e, by J. B. Priestley. Why he picked the less dramatic half of the sentence is beyond comprehension, but he might have thought it the more poetic. I would call it the more poeticized,
and thus the less durable. On its own, “dreams out of the ivory gate” sounds like an average moment from James Elroy Flecker’s
Hassan
or
The Golden Journey to Samarkand
. Not that Flecker is without his covetable jewellery impatiently waiting for the right burglar. “Tonight or any other
night / Will come the gardener in white / And gathered flowers are dead, Yasmin.” As a title, all
The Gardener in White
so far lacks is a book to fit.
It also has the virtue of being hard to misquote. Both in real life and in the media, I have had interlocutors wanting to talk about some obscure work called
Visions at Midnight.
Since they have probably been misled by nobody less than Shakespeare (“I have heard the chimes at midnight,” says Falstaff, as if aware
that Orson Welles will come along one day to borrow the last three words), I ought to feel complimented, but actually it drives me to distraction. Similarly, my novel
Brilliant Creatures
comes back to me as
Beautiful Creatures
. When I lifted that title from a poem by Yeats (“The Wild Swans
at Coole”) I thought it was fluff-proof. To hear it misquoted is like stealing a piece of Lalique glass for a high-maintenance girlfriend and then watching her drop it.

Book titles are not a true study, but they are a lasting interest. Often they are the first clue to the sensibility of the
author who chooses them. In my novel
The Remake
(much excoriated by critics, and therefore cherished by me) I indulged myself with two separate passages of
clever-dick dialogue in which characters vied with each other to name the best book titles ever. Before re-creating the game on paper I had played it many times in real life, and I am still ready
to play it with all comers. From any contestant, the author most often drawn upon, as an adept of the seductive title, turns out to be Hemingway. Sylvia Beach, founding proprietress of the
legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Co., used to say that one of the secrets of Hemingway’s commercial success was his unerring choice of titles, which resonated across the bookshop
to ensnare the customers with their silent music. Some of his best titles, whether for novels or short stories, were made up: “A Way
You’ll Never Be,”
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro,”
Across the River and into the Trees
. (The last, probably his worst book, inspired a telling critical parody by E. B.
White, “Across the Street and into the Grille,” and after White came the deluge: every hack had a stab at the same construction—across the this, or these, and into the that, or
those.) But a surprising number of Hemingway’s best titles were borrowed from established literature, and among them were two of the very best:
The Sun Also
Rises
and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Thus to establish a continuity with classic English prosody was not only clever of him, it was appropriate. Eugene
O’Neill worked an appearance of the same trick with the title of his play
Mourning Becomes Electra
: the use of “becomes” hints at a
hallowed archaism, and also, when the meaning is grasped, encourages you to emphasize the right word, thereby releasing from a short sentence its endless melody. William Faulkner went all the way
by choosing a biblical quotation that had the Old Testament written all over it:
Absalom, Absalom!
But it was just as characteristic of him to call a book
Sanctuary
, bringing the browser close by opening up the echo chamber of a single word.

A knack for titles is not necessarily the prerogative of genius. Gifted journeymen can do it too. Raymond
Chandler’s titles were as good as his books:
The Big Sleep
,
The Little Sister
,
The Lady in the Lake
. Dashiell Hammett’s were better than his books:
The Glass Key
,
The
Thin Man
,
Red Harvest
. Ira Levin’s can be poetic in the best sense:
A Kiss Before Dying
. Newly minted
technical terms are an exploitable source for jobbing writers with no particular inspiration but a reasonable ear:
Fail-Safe
. The word “last”
carries an automatically romantic charge which has made it too popular with title-seekers to be used now:
The Last Romantics
,
The Last Tycoon
,
Last Exit to Brooklyn
. The prolific inventor of the Saint, Leslie Charteris, got in early with the most lasting
use of “last”:
The Last Hero
. There have even been outright bad writers blessed by the visitation of a poetic title. Ayn Rand had one with
The Fountainhead
, and another with
Atlas Shrugged
: a bit of a mouthful, but nobody has ever spat it out without first
being fascinated with what it felt like to chew. Yet if those were not two of the worst books ever written—the worst books ever written don’t even get published—they were
certainly among the worst books ever to be taken seriously.

A foreign title often loses something when brought over into English,
but sometimes there is an even
match—
Der blaue Engel
and
The Blue Angel
,
La Peste
and
The Plague
—and occasionally there is a substantial gain. Françoise Sagan got lucky in that respect:
Those Without
Shadows
. So did Gabriel García Márquez: not for
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, a title I find as spongy as the book, but for
The Autumn of the Patriarch
. In the original German,
The Tin Drum
is
Der
Blechtrommel
. Though it is always hard to judge the weight and balance of words in a language that is not one’s first, it is just as hard to believe that Günter Grass lost
anything there, because the English phrase gives you two clear beats on the drum, while the long German word sounds like someone choking.
If on a Winter’s
Night a Traveller
is a faithful rendition of the Italian original, and is therefore ridiculous, because no Italian of any real literary judgement believes that Calvino, when he conceived
that title, was doing anything else except putting on the dog, plus a feather boa, a plumed hat and a pair of platform shoes. (This is not to say that long titles don’t sometimes succeed:
Elizabeth Smart’s
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
is still good, although it was never really a good book—it was an
indulgence.)

When the language is so far away from English that the translator can afford to rebuild the title from
the ground up, the results are more likely to be good, and in the case of Mishima they were marvellous.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
is one
of those ear-catchers that wear better than you think they might, and
The Decay of the Angel
is one of my favourite titles ever: desolate and lavish at the
same time, like Cleopatra’s barge at the breaker’s yard. (The actual book, of course, has all the taste and judgement of a photo of Mishima in his posing pouch, pectorals oiled and
motorcycle aching to be embraced between his bandy thighs.) Tanizaki, a far more important writer than Mishima, should have been as lucky with his titles, but apparently didn’t care. The
title of his masterpiece
The Makioka Sisters
is just as lacklustre in the original. If only he could have borrowed something by Mishima:
Spring Snow
would have been perfect. It would also have been irrelevant, but good titles often are. George Barker called one of his poetry collections
Eros in Dogma
. In the more than forty years since I first bought a copy in Tyrrel’s second-hand bookshop in George Street, Sydney, I have found the title of the
book as impossible to forget as the poems in it were impossible to remember.