Stein on Writing (28 page)

The Door to Your Book: Titles That Attract

O
ne day in 1962 an elderly woman with a marked Greek accent came to see me in my apartment in New York. Elia Kazan’s mother arrived holding in her hand an advance copy of her son’s first book,
America America,
which I was about to publish. Her voice betraying a slight quiver, she said that when the plays her son directed won Pulitzer Prizes and his direction of films twice won Academy Awards, her friends were not impressed because they, also Greek immigrants, did not go to the movies or see Broadway plays. Now, she said, holding
America America
up triumphantly, at long last she had something that she could show her friends!

The book, which had a modest first printing, was selected by the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club, reprinted in mass market paperback, translated into many languages, made into a film, and widely reviewed as the best fiction ever on the uniquely American theme of immigration. All of that might not have happened. When the manuscript arrived, Kazan’s name for it was
The Anatolian Smile,
which, I thought, closed the door against a wide readership.
The Anatolian Smile
was not a title designed to attract readers, nor did it resonate with the book’s grand theme, how a young man, beset by the hardships of the old world, determined to emigrate to America, and stopped at nothing—even murder—to get to the United States.

Given Kazan’s considerable reputation as a director and his known ability to say no in a voice designed to quash an opponent, others might have been tempted to go with the original title. Kazan’s first book also happened to be the first book that I would be publishing under the Stein and Day imprint; my idealistic determination was to make every book a winner. That title,
The Anatolian Smile,
would not help. I contributed one word twice, the title
America America.

I have met many talented writers who insulate their books from the public with titles that are not likely to arouse a reader’s interest or to promise a rich experience. That stubbornness is persistent. Many years after Kazan’s book left my care, he recycled his original title and had another publisher, perhaps less willing to oppose his strong will, issue a novel with the title
The Anatolian.
That was the first time one of his novels missed a run on the bestseller list. The author was the same. The quality of writing was the same. The title, an avoidable mistake, may have turned off the many millions who were part of his longstanding audience. The novel quickly dropped from sight, its door closed.

A book’s life depends on reviewers, booksellers, and readers. Picture a reviewer standing before shelves loaded with the many dozens of review copies that arrive from publishers each week. He can review only one. Which does he pull down from the shelf to see if he might be interested in reviewing it? Would he pull down a book called
Argghocker!
And how will people know
Argghocker
is wonderful if it doesn’t get reviewed?

Venture into any bookstore and look at the titles of new novels on display. Take note of your reactions to the titles of books by authors you don’t know. You’ll see how many books
don’t
tempt you to pick them up because of their titles, and which titles intrigue you enough to want to take them down off the shelf and read the flaps.

Titles are equally important in nonfiction. While the subject matter of an ordinary nonfiction book is often enough to attract initial interest to it, a lively title will help even a how-to book. As nonfiction ascends in ambition and achievement, the title becomes as influential as for a novel. One of the authors I worked with closely over many years was Bertram D. Wolfe, whose best work became classics. Wolfe wanted to do a biography of Diego Rivera, one of the great twentieth-century painters Wolfe had known well. The hitch was that two decades earlier Wolfe had already written a biography of Diego Rivera that was published by Alfred A. Knopf, one of the finest publishers in America. The book was titled simply
Diego Rivera.
Though published in a beautiful edition, it did not do well. Wolfe put forward that Rivera had lived another eighteen years after the first biography was published, the events of those years unrecorded. Moreover, Wolfe asserted, in the intervening years he had acquired more insight into the artist and his work. And so he embarked on a new biography, which he titled
The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera.

Consider this: The author was the same. The subject was the same. But the title had a power and a resonance that the earlier title lacked. The
new book was selected by a book club, nominated for a National Book Award, sold well, and became a standard work. I attribute that success in large measure to the excellent title of the second book.
The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera
promised the reader much more than the earlier title.

How do you go about finding the right title for a book? Let’s look at a spectacular example of a bad title and how it was changed. In the early eighties, one of my editors brought in a manuscript by Cecil B. Currey, a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, a professor of military history, and the author of eight previous books. The book described, sometimes in harrowing moment-by-moment detail, the destruction of an American infantry division in World War II. The manuscript, based on previously classified documents and firsthand testimony from both German and American survivors, demonstrated the tragic consequences of inept commanders. Despite the book’s importance, I thought the author’s straightforward title for it would kill sales. He called it
The Battle of Schmidt.

First, nobody had heard of a place called Schmidt, much less of a battle fought there. And Americans, including the members of our editorial board, couldn’t keep from laughing at the sound of
Schmidt,
not an appropriate response to a serious book. What we needed was an intriguing title with the right resonance.

Many effective titles have come from poems and songs, and I thought of a song that would likely be remembered by a prime audience for the book, the tens of thousands of infantry officers of World War II. In Officers Training School at Fort Benning, Georgia, young men sometimes kept their spirits up during the “eighteen weeks of hell in Georgia” by singing a ditty someone anonymous had composed to the tune of the Cornell University alma mater, “High Above Cayuga’s Waters.” See if you can pick out the words that became the title of Cecil Currey’s book:

High above the Chattahoochee

Near the Upatoy

Stands an old abandoned shithouse

Benning School for Boys.

Onward ever, backward never

Follow me and die

To the port of embarkation

Next of kin goodbye.

As you may have guessed,
The Battle of Schmidt
became
Follow Me and Die,
with the subtitle
The Destruction of an American Division in World War II.
“Follow me” was the motto of the Infantry School, and the cynical use of it in the song had the perfect reverberation for the book, which went on to be selected by the Military Book Club, and had a life in hardcover and later in paperback, none of which would likely have happened with the original title.

Nonfiction titles are usually easier to come by because in the great majority of cases the author can and does fall back on a short description of what the book is about. If Henry Kissinger calls his book
Diplomacy,
that’s enough. But
Diplomacy
by an author whose name is not widely known would be what book sales reps call “a tough sell.”

What many nonfiction writers neglect is the appeal more imaginative titles hold for readers. Take the simple matter of making a book of shorter pieces of previously published nonfiction. Saul Bellow, whose novel titles are admirable, in 1994 published a collection called
It All Adds Up.
Some of the content is vintage Bellow, but if you’re not familiar with Bellow’s shorter nonfiction, would you hurry to look inside a book called
It All Adds Up!
(The subtitle is no better: “From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future.”) John Updike published a collection that he called by the blah title
Picked-Up Pieces,
which seems to minimize the content. Long ago I published a collection of such pieces by Lionel Trilling, which he called by the charming title
A Gathering of Fugitives.
There is no reason to give any book a handicap in its title.

Titles by academicians are sometimes intentionally dull in order to sound serious. However, Allan Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, presumably knew that a typical academic title might restrict his readership to other academicians. When he wrote a book on “how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students,” Professor Bloom called it
The Closing of the American Mind,
which surely contributed to the book’s becoming a bestseller.

Can an imaginative title help a how-to book? Indeed it can. I recall several people resisting the title of Jo Coudert’s first book,
Advice from a Failure.
“Who wants to listen to advice from a failure?” is what they said as we deliberated over the title. The author and I stuck with her provocative title.
Advice from a Failure
turned into a long-lasting, popular success.

Even better as a title was one that came with a child-care manuscript from a pediatrician with sound advice and a sense of humor. He called
his book
How to Raise Children at Home in Your Spare Time.
It was taken by twenty-eight book clubs, and I’m certain the title helped.

One of the more influential nonfiction editors of our time, Alice Mayhew, has a particular talent for devising resonant titles for major books. Witness
All the President’s Men, Den of Thieves,
and
Parting the Waters.

Good article titles can help catch the attention of the reader browsing through a periodical. An intriguing title is sometimes sufficient to promote an article to the front cover of a magazine. James Thurber called one of his pieces “The Secret Life of James Thurber.” Readers are attracted to secrets the way anteaters are attracted to anthills. Edward Hoagland attracted attention to an article by calling it “The Courage of Turtles.” Most readers would not think of courage in the context of turtles. The title arouses curiosity. Long ago, William Hazlitt entitled an essay “On the Pleasure of Hating.” Hatred as a pleasure? The reader’s curiosity piqued, he wants to see what the author has to say.

A title that people respond to can spur completion of the work. For years F d been writing an autobiography called
Passing for Normal,
which I began working on seriously only after the title became known to my friends and they responded enthusiastically without having read a word.

I recall asking participants in one of my Fiction Weekends for their titles, and at least two of them were so good I hoped their novels-in-progress made it to publication:
Driving in Neutral
and
Scenes from a Life in the Making.

Good titles are hard to come by, even for some writers of the first rank. Consider a book once called
The Parts Nobody Knows.
Is it a medical text? The talented author retitled the book,
To Love and Write Well,
which sounds amateurish, though the author was by that time world famous. Still struggling to find a title for the book, he tried again, this time calling it
How Different It Was,
which might excite some curiosity about what “it” is, but is a weak title nevertheless. The author, still searching, went from not so good to much worse, coming up with yet another title,
With Due Respect.

With due respect, that title is simply awful. Then the author made his final decision, and called the book
The Eye and the Ear.
That had to be his final choice because Ernest Hemingway died before the book was published.

His widow, Mary, had a better ear for titles. She took the book’s final title from another manuscript. The book was published as
A Moveable Feast.

Hemingway, one of the great innovators of twentieth-century American fiction, was often inept when it came to titling his work. One novel he at various times called
As Others Are, The World’s Room, They Who Get Shot, and The Carnal Education.
Another title for that book was
An Italian Chronicle,
later changed to
The Sentimental Education of Frederick Henry.
By now you may have guessed that the book’s final title was
A Farewell to Arms,
a resonant metaphor that lingers in the mind. And there you have the first clue as to what many great novel titles have in common, the use of metaphor.

Another American author, winner of the Nobel Prize, had a novel that for a while he called
Twilight.
Not exactly a grabber that invites you to open to the first page. The author is William Faulkner. Does
Twilight
conjure up the energy of
The Sound and the Fury?

One way of enticing a reader is to title a novel with the name of the leading character plus an energizing factor. Saul Bellow’s
The Adventures of Augie March
promises more than the name Augie March. His
Henderson the Rain King
resonates; the name Henderson would not. D. H. Lawrence discarded an inadequate title,
Tenderness,
before he called the book
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
It’s hard to imagine that Scott Fitzgerald used
Hurrah for the Red White and Blue
before he hit on
The Great Gatsby.
What makes that title intriguing is the adjective “Great.”