Titles & What They Tell Us

89}WHAT’S IN A TITLE:
MYTHICAL SNAKES IN THE GRASS

As with a first sentence, a title raises expectations. When those expectations aren’t met, readers may be left unsatisfied. On the other hand, when writers must struggle to title their stories, it’s often an indication that they haven’t yet found the central metaphor or meaning of what they’ve written.

A student titles his story “Sucker Punched.” A sucker punch is an unexpected blow, an assault that catches its victim off guard, a definitive but fiendish clout that leaves no room for argument or fair play. A cheap shot.

Sometimes (the story tells us) fate deals the sucker punch. His breath smelling of booze, Ava’s drunken father teaches his daughter to throw a sucker punch as a means of defending herself against the bully who for weeks has been tormenting her at school. But Ava’s dad is oblivious to the even crueler blow dealt by fate to his offspring in saddling her with an irresponsible, alcoholic, inadvertently harmful father: himself.

Here, theme and story are perfectly wed. And—like those little thermometers that come with frozen turkeys to tell you when they’re cooked—the title “pops.”

In other cases, our titles tell us that our stories aren’t fully baked. In “Eurydice’s Shadow,” a woman who once aspired to be a concert pianist has sacrificed that dream at the altar of motherhood. Louise is married to a benevolent but distant man, saddled with children she can barely tolerate, and locked away in a provincial rural setting far from the cities where she might have pursued her musical dreams (and possibly a little romance on the side).

At least Emma Bovary could have an affair! But Louise’s plight is familiar not only through classic works like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, but contemporary ones like Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (and the film based on it)—or novels by popular contemporary authors like Barbara Taylor Bradford, who specializes in stories of women trapped in dreary marriages and “willing to pay any price” (to quote one dust jacket blurb) “for their dreams.”

The exhausted theme here gets a facelift through its title, which refers to the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, a couple who were inseparable in their love until one day Eurydice was bitten by a serpent and cast down to Hades. To rescue her, Orpheus appeals to the overseer of the underworld with his lyre, playing a tune so sweet and moving he is allowed to descend and reclaim her, but only on one condition: Orpheus must not look back; he must trust that Eurydice is following him out of Hades. At the last moment, of course, Orpheus breaks his vow and looks back, and Eurydice is snatched back into the underworld.

Here, wrapped like a mummy in a myth thousands of years old, is the story-within-the-story—not yet unraveled by its author. Instead we get the static tableau of a character trapped in a dead marriage, when what’s called for is a character trapped in a dead marriage who does something about it, or tries to, and pays a price.

In the spirit of hypothetical reflection, I offer you my own take on the story—one of many possible treatments of the material suggested by its title.

Wishing to earn extra income and keep a hand in her playing, Louise gives private piano lessons to locals, including Oren, a farmer who lives down the road and who lacks any musical talent. Nonetheless, Louise is taken with him, with his rugged looks and his guileless innocence. She falls in love and in doing so begets her own downfall: While making love to Oren in a soybean field she’s bitten by a rattlesnake. At ten miles-per-hour in his International Harvester tractor, Oren “rushes” Louise to the emergency room. On the way they’re intercepted by an SUV driven by Louise’s husband, and their affair is exposed.

This scenario exploits the Eurydice myth. Louise survives, and her husband agrees to stay married to her on several conditions: that she will give up piano playing and teaching, devote herself fully to her children, and never cast eyes on Oren again.

But just like Orpheus, Louise can’t keep her word. In the last scene we see her playing Clark’s Requiem for Lost Children loudly, in an empty house, as her husband pulls out of the driveway with the children in his packed SUV.

“Eurydice”? “Rattlesnake”? “The Snake Bite”? “The Serpent”? Each of these titles points to the myth exploited by the story, and to the heart of the story itself.

Look to your titles as keys to what your stories are—or are not—about.

90}ENDYMION ON BOURBON STREET:
A TITLE FLOATS THROUGH A STORY

Occasionally a title stares us in the face, yet we fail to see it or to connect its metaphoric meaning to the material at hand.

During Mardi Gras in New Orleans, a woman decides to end her love affair with a married man. Heartache, guilt, lust, confusion— all set against a seedy New Orleans backdrop. How can the author go wrong?

Indeed, much goes right, including having the image of Endymion hover over this tale of a woman’s need for companionship and sex. Endymion was a mortal, the lover of the moon goddess Selene, who kissed him to sleep nightly and who begged Zeus to grant him eternal life so she might embrace him forever. But Zeus went a step further, putting Endymion into an eternal sleep on Mt. Latmus. In the story, Endymion is the subject of a garish float parading through the French Quarter during Mardi Gras.

It’s an apt symbol, but one the author hardly exploits; instead it is served up as a splash of local color and discarded.

In the story’s main action, Laura, a married woman on vacation with some friends, makes her way through the already thronged streets of the Quarter to a hotel where her illicit lover waits. Perhaps the heroine thinks of her paramour as her Endymion; perhaps his features remind her of the pagan god of lust? Maybe the story ends with the image of Endymion floating past her along Bourbon Street?

In any case, such a strong symbol demands to be put to good use. That particular float should be described in such a way that it sticks in the reader’s mind, vividly.

The story might open with Laura making apologies to her friends, perhaps saying that she has a business appointment. Then we see her out on the street looking guiltily over her shoulder, making sure she’s not being watched as she passes by policemen and parade floats being outfitted. Approaching her lover’s hotel, she relives their first meeting, and her later discovery that he’s married. She mentally replays their whole sordid affair, complete with vivid lovemaking. She gets to the hotel and has the concierge ring up for him, or maybe she rushes into the elevator—an old-fashioned caged elevator—and starts up to his suite. In the elevator (reeking of the aged elevator operator’s cheap drugstore cologne), Laura has her epiphany. By the time she reaches her floor she has come to her senses. She scribbles a quick note and slides it under Jason’s door, then hurries to rejoin the parade with her friends.

As her friends toss doubloons and beads she watches Endymion glide toward—and then past and away from—her.

My student titled her story “Affair in New Orleans.” This sums up the situation, but does little justice to the story or the myth it embodies. Other suggestions?

91}TRIMALCHIO IN WEST EGG:
MORE ON TITLES

Great titles are made, not born—and made often with great deliberation and struggle. To some they come easily, to most not. Few books get published with their original titles, and that may be a good thing. Jane Austen’s original title for Pride and Prejudice was First Impressions. Tennessee Williams’s original titles for the play that became A Streetcar Named Desire were The Moth and The Poker Night.³⁹ Joseph Heller wanted to call his first novel Catch-18, but his publisher asked him to change it when another World War II novel, Leon Uris’s Mila 18, came out the same year.⁴⁰ Had Ezra Pound not talked T.S. Eliot out of it, The Waste Land, the greatest of all modernist poems, would have been called He Do the Police in Different Voices. Before (and after) arriving at The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald weighed a dozen other possible titles for his masterpiece, including Trimalchio in West Egg, The High-Bouncing Lover and Under the Red, White, and Blue.

Women in Love was originally The Wedding Ring; The Red Badge of Courage: Private Fleming, His Various Battles. From Here to Eternity was originally titled If Wishes Were Horses. Gone With the Wind began as Tote the Weary Lode; A Farewell to Arms was They Who Get Shot. And so on.

Not all title changes are for the better, nor are they always the inspirations of authors. Often publishers pull rank, and for good reason. Does anyone question why The Village Virus, Sinclair Lewis’ original title for Main Street, didn’t survive his publisher’s marketing department? And among fans of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, how many would prefer his original title, Bar-B-Q?!

But publishers don’t always err on the side of literary or commercial success, and occasionally their choices even raise doubts about their sanity. The publishers of the English translation of Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (literally, If This Is a Man)—his poetically stark memoir of life in a concentration camp—chose, none too bravely or wisely, to retitle it Survival in Auschwitz, confining the book’s vision while diminishing its broader human implications.

Although they don’t always get the final word, authors do have a strong say in the titling of their works. And so, though I may not judge a book by its cover, I don’t hesitate to read meaning into its title.

Titles are great carriers of information. They tell us not just what we’re reading, but what we’re writing, about its thematic, metaphoric, or symbolic content (or lack thereof). If there are going to be problems with a novel or story, those problems often announce themselves in the title, like the smell of ozone before a storm.

A story called “The Boiler Room” forms a solid image, piquing my interest and connoting (for me) a dark world of fiery but suppressed desire, an Inferno; another, called “Daydreaming,” connotes nothing and lowers expectations—as does any work titled “Untitled.”

Good titles don’t have to be complicated, poetic, or clever in any way. Often the greater the work, the simpler the title: The Odyssey, Hamlet. Of course, any truly great work lifts its title to greatness, explaining why so few great works have awful titles.

Titling our stories forces us to arrive at a deeper understanding of what they are about—what central metaphor operates in them. They give us our focal point, or make it clear that we have none.

I encourage you to arrive at a working title as early as possible, and to modify it often as your vision of the work-in-progress grows clearer.