The Book List: The alternative titles F Scott Fitzgerald considered for 'The Great Gatsby'

Every Wednesday, Alex Johnson delves into a unique collection of titles

No thanks: Leonardo DiCaprio in F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Trimalchio in West Egg’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it

Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires​
Trimalchio in West Egg
On the Road to West Egg
Under the Red, White and Blue
Gold-Hatted Gatsby
The High-Bouncing Lover

Choosing a title for your newly finished masterpiece can be a tricky process.

F Scott Fitzgerald came up with all the above ideas before finally settling on the famous one, largely because of his editor Max Perkins (although he still grumbled about it after it was published).

And of course he was not alone. Ernest Hemingway toyed with I Have Committed Fornication But That Was in Another Country, and Besides the Wench Is Dead before sensibly settling on A Farewell to Arms.

He also considered:

Love In War
Sorrow For Pleasure
Late Wisdom
The Enchantment
If You Must Love
World Enough and Time
In Praise of His Mistress
Every Night and All
Of Wounds and Other Causes
The Retreat from Italy
As Others Are
Love is One Fervent Fire​
Kindlit without Desire
A World to See
Patriots Progress
The Grand Tour
The Italian Journey
The World’s Room
Disorder and Early Sorrow
An Italian Chronicle
The Time Exchanged
Death Once Dead
They Who Get Shot
The Italian Experience
Love in Italy
Love in War
The Sentimental Education
Education of the Flesh
The Carnal Education
The Sentimental Education of Frederick Henry
Thing That Has Been
Nights and Forever
In Another Country
Knowledge Increaseth Sorrow
The Peculiar Treasure
One Event Happeneth To Them All
One Thing For Them All
Nothing Better For A Man
Time of War
The World’s Room
One Thing is Certain
The Long Home

So what is the best way of choosing a title?

You could try the always popular Something’s Something approach – Midnight’s Children, Schindler’s List, Homer’s Daughter; equations such as author Andy Martin’s useful “number + noun + ‘of’ + noun” (eg Seven Pillars of Wisdom); and various random title generators (some are very specific, such as the online Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator which includes The Cheers Effect: How and Why Everybody Knows Your Name).

Lulu.com even offers an automated way of checking if your title is likely to be a bestseller, generally suggesting that books with slightly more abstract titles, such as Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder, have the greatest chances of success.

Another way is simply to borrow the best bits of other people’s work, which is not only the way that Aldous Huxley usually went but can be turned into a Christmas quiz for the well read. So where do these Huxley titles come from originally? (answers below):

After Many a Summer Dies The Swan
Antic Hay
Beyond the Mexique Bay
The Doors of Perception
Eyeless in Gaza
Jesting Pilate
Those Barren Leaves

One problem with this method of choosing a title is that it requires you to be very well read (as Clive James has observed, “Nowadays, the titles of his books are more alive than his books”).

This is exactly what Huxley was. He had read everything and for good measure even travelled with a half-sized edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to make sure he had something decent to read.

As good luck would have it, there’s a much easier way. Just open your Collected Works of Shakespeare and off you go, an approach which also bore fruit for Huxley, who certainly perused his copies of The Tempest (Brave New World), Macbeth (Brief Candles), Hamlet (Mortal Coils), and Henry IV Part 1 (Time Must Have A Stop – a bit of a cheat, this one, as the actual quote from Hotspur’s death speech is “But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool; And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop”).

Answers:

Tithonus by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Edward II by Christopher Marlowe
Bermudas by Andrew Marvell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
Samson Agonistes by John Milton
Of Truth by Francis Bacon
The Tables Turned by William Wordsworth

‘A Book of Book Lists’ by Alex Johnson, £7.99, British Library Publishing

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