The Birth and Naming of a Book

                  

A couple of weeks ago, I read a book by one of my favourite British authors, David Lodge. I have read and enjoyed a number of Lodge’s novels, particularly those set on university campuses – and a few of his lit-crit offerings, both academic and merely artisanal. The Year of Henry James falls in the latter category. It is a book about a book or about two books – no, about many books.

 In the first and longest essay in the book Lodge writes about how several novels which feature the British-American writer came out within a couple of years of one another. His novel Author, Author is one of the books. A few months before the publication of Author, Author, the Irish writer Colm Toibin had released The Master, a masterful novel about Henry James.

In The year of Henry James Lodge writes, with a soupҫon of detachment, about how the coincidence of writing a book of fiction about the same person (Henry James) as Colm Toibin threw him into a self-divided seesaw of emotional highs and lows. Lodge shows how relationships between writers, while merely cordial even in the best of times, can also be fraught with envy, suspicion and even plain animus.

Apart from the title essay Lodge, the book also carries pieces Lodge had earlier written about writers like Nabokov, George Eliot and Graham Greene. But apart from this sort of minor literary pickings, Lodge also touches on the mechanics of book publishing, the wheeling and dealing between agents, authors and publishers. However, something else which also stands out for me is the mental exertion that goes into giving a book a title. After settling for the repetitive ‘Author Author’ as the title of his book about Henry James, Lodge hassled over whether he should put a comma between the words or whether he should qualify the title with an exclamation mark. He settled for the comma’ed and exclamation-mark-less title at last.

Like most writers, long before I finished writing my book, I thought about what to call it – this is one authorial job that even the most celebrated, fawned-over author would not farm out to anyone; there is an inalienable sense of ownership about giving one’s book a title, a name.  I was torn between Babies of the Family and Schopenhauer’s Child. In a literal sort of way, Babies of the Family is far more relevant to the theme of the book than Schopenhauer’s Child. But then, anyone who follows my blog and other writings may have run into the name of the philosopher Schopenhauer. Among other things, I have written about Schopenhauer’s antinatalism – here was a man who, although paradoxically had an illegitimate child who died early, set his face against what he considered the silly pointlessness of procreating. Entertaining the thought of calling my book Schopenhauer’s Child was a function of both the symbologising and ‘metaphoring’ of what I see as the truth of Schopenhauer’s views. But while Babies of the Family was a title that was wrung from the heart, Schopenhauer’s Child was more of a cerebral choice, a decision I ought to have made with my head.

Although the book uses philosophy, psychology and literature (even religion, defaultingly) to tell a story of loss and love and other experiential, humanist tales about life, heart won over head, and I called the book Babies of the Family. Immediately after I received the initial print run, it struck me that the title was a dud. Babies of the Family was wrong. 
Aesthetically speaking, the title had failed. It didn’t look right on the cover – which goes to prove that you can indeed judge a book by its cover! Besides, a few people had asked whether Babies... was about my children, so there would always be the misconstrual that the book was about certain babies in a certain family. Of course, the book mentions babies, but it is essentially not about sucklings – far from it. I guess it would sound rather bookish of me to say I also thought the title was too pedestrian, too lightheaded, too infantile, too mumsy – but, truly, all of these had sauntered through my mind. And it began to dawn on me that in the publishing business, 'head' is everything.

Ultimately, I made the decision to swap Babies of the Family for Schopenhauer’s Child  – an over-mixed oxymoron, if you ask me – when I thought about how the former title could also cause cataloguing mayhem. Babies of the Family could end up on a mothercraft shelf in any bookshop or library, alongside books like The Joys of Breastfeeding. Again, I plumped for Schopenhauer’s Child because the ghost of the German uber-pessimist and atheist appeared to me raging that he considered it lese majeste, a filial sell-out, that I should give up his esteemed name for a sappy quasi-Christian title like Babies of the Family! 

Anyway, reader, I introduce you to Schopenhauer’s Child.