The Book Show

Coming up with the perfect title for a book can be a challenge for writers. In his collection Why Not Catch 21: the Stories Behind the Titles Gary Dexter has compiled some explanations for how our favourite works ended up with their names.

From Plato's Republic to Catch 22, he uncovers the debate and the lingering questions about titles we now take for granted.

So how did Joseph Heller come up with the title Catch 22? Gary Dexter explains.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Ramona Koval: Coming up with the perfect title for a book can be a challenge for writers. In his collection Why Not Catch 21: the Stories Behind the Titles Gary Dexter has compiled the stories of how our favourite works ended up with their names. From Plato's Republic to Catch 22, he uncovers the debate and the lingering questions about titles we now take for granted.

So how did Joseph Heller come up with the title Catch 22? Here's Gary Dexter with his explanation.

Gary Dexter: It's passed into the language of course, 'Catch 22', as a description of the impossible bind. But when Heller was writing the book...he began writing the book in 1953 and the book was called...his working title for it was Catch 18 and he thought of it as Catch 18 all the way up to 1961. He famously took quite a long time to complete this book, eight years, all the time thinking of it as Catch 18.

And just at the point of publication in 1961 the blockbuster novelist Leon Uris published a book called Mila 18 which also has a WWII theme, and it was felt that Heller, who was the first-time novelist, should be the one to blink and change his title because it was felt that it wouldn't be a good idea to have two books with the numeral '18' in the title in any one particular year. So there began a process of numerical agonising in which Heller and his publisher at Simon & Schuster, Robert Gottlieb, went through all the integers from one onwards trying to find a substitute for 18.

Catch 11 was one of the first substitutes lighted upon, but that was felt not to be a good idea because of the film Ocean's 11 which had come out either that year or the previous year. Catch 14 was another one that Heller liked. I think Gottlieb didn't like it or visa versa. Finally they decided on Catch 22, and '22' does seem to be appropriate in a way that '14' and '18' could never have been because of the doubling of the digits, so you had a certainly amount of...one doubled making two, two doubled making 22, if you like.

And in the book there is a huge amount of duplication and reduplication, repetition in the book, so you have a situation in which one of the light motifs is that Yossarian, the hero, he bombs Ferrara twice, so there's a soldier who sees everything twice. There's a character called Major Major, who is in fact Major Major Major Major. So this doubling seems to be a stylistic device reflecting the qualified nature of reality, if you like, nothing is singular, nothing is unblurred or unambiguous. So it seems that when Leon Uris published this book this was quite a stroke of luck for Heller, and that's where Catch 22 came from.

Ramona Koval: Gary Dexter there explaining how Catch 22 got its name. His book is called Why Not Catch 21: the Stories Behind the Titles and it's a Frances Lincoln book, distributed here by Bookwise.

Guests

Gary Dexter
Columnist for the British paper, Sunday Telegraph

Publications

Title: Why Not Catch 21: The Stories Behind the Titles
Author: Gary Dexter
Publisher: Frances Lincoln distributed by Bookwise
ISBN: 978 071 122 7965

Presenter

Gary Dexter

Producer

Sarah L'Estrange