David K. Wheeler is the author of Contingency Plans, a collection of poetry. His essays have been featured at TheMorningNews.org, as well as in The Pacific Northwest Reader. He'll be at Village Books on Wednesday, April 6, 7:00pm.
Once, a woman asked me if Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim was a book about textiles; and, accidentally, I laughed at her. I can imagine David Sedaris holding forth on the rival merits of durable fabrics. I can even imagine enjoying the diatribe, but by the end of its first essay you can safely assume this book is not intended for the amateur haberdasher, as each installment depicts the writer, his parents and siblings, his partner and friends, in trials simultaneously painful and hilarious, in a We’ll look back on this one day… kind of way. Once through the essay “Blood Work,” and its mortifying case of mistaken identity, you might wonder if much dressing will take place at all. For this, the beloved humorist still seems a bit sore, making passing reference in his follow up collection to his publisher’s deeming the book in question’s title “willfully obtuse.”
In my undergrad at Western, I heard from each of my professors that titles are a finishing touch. From a writer’s standpoint, titling a piece is more akin to giving away in marriage than christening a new car. Raised and reared and ready for life on its own, a book, a poem, et al., practically chooses its own name. Sure, there’s the phase when Mandy only answers to Tiffany and I’d rather have been a Mark, but the right title, to me, seems more a realization of the work than arbitrary labeling of the merchandise.
My years as a bookseller have ruined me. With lust for another’s hard-earned title, I work on a new poem or story with the cart put firmly in front of the horse, as though it were as simple as picking the book from the shelf and reading page one. Sometimes it pans out for me, usually only after accessing something of substance, deeper than the word cartography or the phrase a clever ruin. You have no idea how much I’ve wanted to write An Exhaustive History of the Kaleidoscope: a novel but stayed my keystrokes because those few words were the extent of my inspiration.
Still, there are worse things than a title being willfully obtuse. Worse than titles dangling with no body of work, never to see the light of day. How about titles a certain publisher might deem “desperately transparent” or perhaps “wantonly contrived”? I won’t name names. We know them when we see them.
Nevertheless, while a title should rarely, if ever, be my first inspiration as a writer, as a reader, it is often a draw. I fell for a slim volume simply called The Actual last month. Modest, articulate, and delightfully enticing. Authored by Saul Bellow (a stunner of a name itself), the novella is a meditation on first love—realistic, not like in a greeting card. Here are friends who have been in love for decades but because of their separate marriages, trysts, and infidelities, have failed to realize and admit it until death and divorce proceedings cross their mutual paths yet again.
In just over a hundred pages Bellow broke my heart and rebuilt it. Then, after the renovation, The Actual rearranged. The title revealed its, till now, hidden depths, evoking not only authenticity, not only singularity, but also impact assessment and uncertainty when its relationship to the word actuary is considered.
On a single shelf, I might be enticed by titles aplenty; and, I wonder how many are read differently among us. Do we access such a spare economy of words in as varied the ways we access the book’s content? I’d imagine so, considering how differently I relate to covers of books I’ve read. For instance: What you might expect as an informational guide to innocuous textiles and their uses might more deeply resemble a series of lessons about a man and his family, as its members and circumstance test the overall durability of the whole over time.
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