The Subtitle of This Book

       Subtitles -- like printed dedications, notes on titles, author's introductions, forewords, sonnets and epistles dedicatory, and the rest -- should be avoided. Get on with it. Get on with it.

       But if you must use a subtitle, at least eschew the archaizing or, followed by cutesy fake earlier-centuryisms. Or, the Whale is quite all right for Moby-Dick, or was in the nineteenth century. Erica Jong's Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout Jones, can be justified as the title and subtitle of a twentieth-century novel humorously imitative of eighteenth-century fiction -- a category of humorous twentieth-century fiction one would have thought exhaustible by a single instance, but its appeal seems to be as perennial to Americans as other fake colonialisms.

       Subtitles are usually made necessary by titles with more "grab" than straightforwardness. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language requires no subtitle. Book-Titles Should Be Straightforward is intelligible but requires at least the subtitle Essays and Other Nonfiction to make it meaningful. Sub-subtitles like Subtitles Should Be Avoided should be avoided if only because though fairly straightforward they necessitate a sub-sub-subtitle, in this case Essays and Other Nonfiction, which, had it been used as the book's title in the first place, would have been perfectly straightforward and required no subtitles.

       This is not to say that no straightforward title requires subtitling. It is useful to know whether the title Baltimore is subtitled A Picture History or Telephone Directory. Straightforwardness, moreover, while a virtue, is not the only virtue; therefore one sees titles which sin against no other principle of titling than straightforwardness and are doubtless more arresting or engaging than Fifty Stories or Tales of the Chesapeake, but may require subtitling. Should you perpetrate such a title, follow it with a subtitle which not only is straightforward but manages also to avoid the as fetish worshipped in particular by literary critics: Literature as Equipment for Living. Language as Gesture. Subtitles as Literary Genre. Say it straight. Get on with it.

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