A book by any other name ...

Catch-22 (1961)

“Catch-22” has passed into the language as a description of the impossible bind. Author Joseph Heller complained that the phrase was often used by people who did not seem to understand what it meant. This is not surprising. There are no catches 1 to 21, or 23 onwards, in Heller’s book. There was only one catch, and that was Catch-22. Its very uniqueness meant Heller had to think carefully before naming or numbering it. And his choice was—Catch-18.

In the Second World War, Heller was a bombardier with the 12th Air Force, and flew 60 missions over Italy and France. Yossarian in Catch-22 is a bombardier flying the same missions. In 1953, Heller began writing a book called Catch-18. When, three years later, he submitted the first large chunk of it to Simon & Schuster, it was accepted for publication, and Heller worked on it steadily—all the time thinking of it as Catch-18—until its completion in 1961. Shortly before publication, however, Leon Uris produced a novel entitled Mila 18 (also about the war). It was thought that Heller, the first-time novelist, should be the one to blink.

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Heller said in an interview in 1975: “I was heartbroken. I thought 18 was the only number.” A long process of numerical agonizing began in which the author and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, worked their way through the integers looking for the right formula. “Catch-11” was one of the first suggestions, but was rejected because of the film Ocean’s Eleven. Heller at one point settled on Catch-14, but Gottlieb threw it out for being too nondescript. When 22 came up, Gottlieb felt it had the right ring, and Heller acceded two weeks later. “I thought 22 was a funnier number than 14,” Gottlieb said in 1967.

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)

How did Winnie-the-Pooh get his name? It is a question that A.A. Milne was often asked—and came to dread. He came to dread any mention of Pooh at all. If a review of his serious books or plays—of which there were many—mentioned Winnie-the-Pooh anywhere in its opening sentences, Milne would know that the review was going to be a hostile one.

But at the risk of offending Milne’s shade, it is rather a good story.

The first strand came from the First World War. In 1914, Lt. Harry Colebourn, a veterinary surgeon with the Canadian cavalry, was en route to Europe from his hometown of Winnipeg when his troop train stopped at White River, Ontario. Colebourn spotted a hunter there with a female black bear cub. The hunter had shot the cub’s mother, and Colebourn asked if he could buy the young bear. Colebourn named the cub Winnipeg, or Winnie, after his hometown. A few weeks later, he and Winnie embarked with the Canadian Army Veterinary Corps for England, the first stop before the battlefields.

The cub became a popular mascot during the corps’ initial encampment on Salisbury Plain, but in December 1914 it was decided that Flanders was not going to be a suitable place for a bear, and Colebourn was ordered to find her alternative accommodation. On Dec. 9, 1914, he entrusted Winnie to the staff at London Zoo. He then left for the war.

Colebourn survived the fighting, intending all the time to pick up Winnie on his way back from France. But in 1919 he went home without her. One possible reason is that in the war years she had grown into a huge adolescent bear.

The second strand came from a holiday the Milne family took near Arundel, Sussex, some time between 1921 and 1924. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin (born in 1920), was in the habit of feeding a swan on a nearby pond. As Milne noted in the introduction to When We Were Very Young (his first book for children, published in 1924): “Christopher Robin, who feeds this swan in the mornings, has given him the name of ‘Pooh.’ This is a very fine name for a swan, because if you call him and he doesn’t come (which is a thing swans are good at), then you can pretend that you were just saying ‘Pooh!’ to show how little you wanted him.” At this point there is no suggestion that Pooh is anything other than a swan—although the volume does have a poem about a bear called “Teddy Bear,” illustrated by E.H. Shepard with a drawing that looks very much like Winnie-the-Pooh, wearing his little armpit-high red jacket.

The third strand was to do with this very bear, Christopher Robin’s favorite toy, whose name was simply Bear, Teddy Bear, or Edward Bear. Milne explains in the introduction to Winnie-the-Pooh:

“Well, when Edward Bear said that he would like an exciting name all to himself, Christopher Robin said at once, without stopping to think, that he was Winnie-the-Pooh. And he was.”

The Swiss Family Robinson (1812)

Der Schweizerische Robinson was written by a Swiss pastor, Johann David Wyss. It tells the story of a pious Swiss family marooned on an island in the East Indies following a shipwreck. It is 600 pages long. To keep themselves in comfort, family members build a luxurious treehouse, plant and harvest corn, boil up a whale, manufacture isinglass and cochineal, gather honey, tap rubber, and salt herrings. By the end of the book they have created a Calvinist paradise in which nature has been subdued and largely exterminated, and where disease, sex, and conflict have been banished. In a final act of dour appropriation, they christen their island “New Switzerland.”

The family is not, of course, called Robinson. They are never named. The title refers instead to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe of 1719. In an odd twist of literary fate, the word “Robinson” had taken on a life of its own in 18th-century European publishing, appearing in the titles of hundreds of stories known as “Robinsonades”: Der Teutsche Robinson (1722), Der Americanische Robinson (1724), Der Nordische Robinson (1741), and so on. The stories never included anyone called Robinson. “Robinson” simply denoted an adventure tale. Nor did they necessarily take place on islands: There were Robinsonades set on mountains, in jungles, and in Turkish prisons. But, strangely, only The Swiss Family Robinson took root when transplanted back onto English-speaking soil. Why, it is difficult to say. Perhaps the title had something to do with it.

Moby-Dick (1851)

Moby-Dick was a real whale. In the days when whales were not sages of the deep but floating oil repositories, sailors were in the habit of giving names to individual whales that were particularly dangerous or unkillable.

One of the most famous was “Mocha Dick,” named after the island of Mocha off the Chilean coast. An albino sperm whale (like Moby-Dick), Mocha Dick was said to have drowned more than 30 men, sunk five ships, and been harpooned 19 times, which probably accounted for his mood. Melville’s chief source was an article by Jeremiah N. Reynolds in the Knickerbocker Magazine of 1839 entitled “Mocha Dick: Or, the White Whale of the Pacific.” He also took from the article the ship’s name, the Penguin, changing it to the Pequod. The transformation from Mocha to Moby is rather more difficult to explain, but it may have had its origin in another project that was on Melville’s desk at the time he was writing his whale story: This was “The Story of Toby,” about a seafaring friend, Tobias Greene. It may be that “Toby” influenced the change from Mocha Dick to Moby-Dick.

So much for the title of Moby-Dick, one might think. But there is an odd twist to the tale. Moby-Dick was not the first published title of the book. The original title was simply The Whale—just that—when first published in London by Richard Bentley on Oct. 18, 1851. Now very rare (bound in blue cloth boards and cream cloth spines with a sounding whale gilt-stamped on the spines), the English edition was also substantially different textually from the American Harper edition, which followed one month later on Nov. 14, 1851, and bore the familiar title Moby-Dick. The English editor, striving to cram Melville’s “baggy monster” of a book into three volumes, had gone at the task with great abandon, hacking out whole chapters and excising anything with any undercurrent or overcurrent of sexual innuendo—which was, and is, a great deal of the novel.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald agonized over the title of his third novel. Among the candidates he rejected, and then lighted on again, and then re-rejected, in a series of letters and telegrams to his editor, Max Perkins, were Trimalchio, Trimalchio’s Banquet, Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, The High-Bouncing Lover, The Great Gatsby, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, Gatsby, On the Road to West Egg, Incident at West Egg, Trimalchio in West Egg, and several others. Perkins steered him gently toward The Great Gatsby, despite Fitzgerald’s doubts.

By the time The Great Gatsby was at the printers, Fitzgerald had changed his mind once again, asking Perkins for the book to be retitled Under the Red, White and Blue—a reference to the American Dream so horribly mutilated in the book. And he continued to swing back and forth, later writing to Perkins: “I feel Trimalchio might have been best after all.” But by then the novel was in the bookshops. The Great Gatsby it had to stay.

Why Gatsby? It is not a common name, and Fitzgerald was careful with names. One must recall, first of all, that in the book Jay Gatsby is the hero’s assumed name, not his real name. His real name is James Gatz. The significance of Gatsby and Gatz is in “gat”—slang for the gun that ends Gatsby’s life. Violent death lingers around Gatsby. As the novel opens, he is just back from the war in Europe, which he is reputed to have quite enjoyed. Gatsby, it has also been pointed out, sounds rather like the French verb gaspiller, to waste. Fitzgerald lived in France in the 1920s and wrote the book at Valescure, near St. Raphael, so this is not impossible. Gatsby, by this reading, is thus one whose life is wasted in a violent encounter with a gat.

If “Gatsby” is significant, so is “Great.” In early drafts, Fitzgerald had Gatsby refer to himself as “great”:

“‘Jay Gatsby!’ he cried in a ringing voice, ‘There goes the great Jay Gatsby! That’s what people are going to wait and see. I’m only 32 now.’”

But despite his legendary parties, Gatsby is not “great.” He is rootless, friendless, loveless. Only three people come to his funeral. “Great” is irony. Gatsby is a rich nobody.

Perhaps there is another echo in the ‘great’ of The Great Gatsby—that of “the Great American Novel.” This was an artifact Fitzgerald was consciously trying to construct. In the book, the American Dream of greatness, wealth, and success is brutally dispelled. In an atmosphere of high-class squalor, Gatsby is meaninglessly shot down. In calling his book The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald, it seems, was gunning for America.

From the book Why Not Catch-21? by Gary Dexter. ©2007 by Gary Dexter. Used with permission of the publisher, Frances Lincoln Ltd.