'Beautiful Accidents'

The vogue for titles drawn from literature seems largely to have passed. Once popular sources included Shakespeare, Donne’s sermons and the King James Bible. I suspect writers no longer read much and they assume the same is true of prospective readers. The cachet associated with taking your novel’s title from Ecclesiastes or Paradise Lost is long gone. 

In 1944, William Maxwell had completed his third novel and was having difficulty settling on a title. He considered something from Julius Caesar and asked his friend the poet and poetry reviewer for The New Yorker, Louise Bogan, what she thought. In a letter dated September 28, 1944, she called the Shakespearean title “v. good” but suggested:

 

“[W]hy don’t you just sit around for a month or two, reading all sorts of snippets of things, in anthologies and elsewhere (in books opened by chance)—while your publisher is going through the manuscript; pray to St. Anthony (of Padua) [patron saint of lost things] and St. Teresa (of Avila)—I’m sure the most beautiful and appropriate title possible will just fall in your lap.”

 

Bogan denies having undergone a conversion but says “waiting and praying” may result in “Beautiful Accidents.” She adds:

 

“The prettiest title for a novel I have heard for some time, is being held in suspension for the book to be written to it, by a frail young man in the Library [of Congress, where Bogan served as Poet Laureate] called Herbert Cahoon. He is rather given to surrealism, but the title comes from ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ by Thomas Moore: All the Lovely Are Sleeping. I’m sure there are numbers of other titles hidden under our very noses, in the most familiar poetry and prose possible.”

 

Cahoon (1918-2000) went on to become a curator for the Morgan Library but never published the book. Maxwell soon settled on a title for his novel: The Folded Leaf (1945). It was suggested to him by Bogan and comes from the third section of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”: “Lo! in the middle of the wood, / The folded leaf is woo’d from out the bud.” Maxwell dedicated the novel to Bogan.

 

[The passages from Bogan’s letter are taken from A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005.]