Posted by Peter Ceresole on April 14, 2008 at 07:46:45 from 80.176.146.133 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Mixed Moss posted by John Cowen on April 14, 2008 at 03:12:04:
Mixed Moss. I always thought that it was from 'A rolling stone gathers no moss'
I'm sure that's right. And that, in SA, the book was intended to be CF's memoirs; there's plenty of evidence for that in SA itself. But does it have to refer to a 'real' book?
There's a long tradition, in novels, of invented book titles used for satirical effect, the essential feature of them being that they are funny, but believable and relevant. One of my favourite lists of would-be titles comes near the end of Anthony Powell's 'Books do Furnish a Room' in which he lists a slab of titles coming up for publication after the second world war. He uses them to satirise the somewhat imaginary authors and the publishers; for instance Boggis and Stone (who are an oblique take on Gollancz, the well known left wing publishers who were having trouble with Powell's friend George Orwell and his anti-Party line on Spain) were said, out of Party duty, to be struggling with a volume of Soviet poetry entitled 'The Pistons of Our Locomotives sing the Songs of our Workers', which they finally published under the title 'Engine Melody', which then did suprisingly well... Another was a war memoir by one of the characters in the book, 'Sad Majors', which is the subject of dispute and un-comradely dirty tricks because of its un-Party line on the partisan war in Yugoslavia. There are many more. It was a long list, extremely funny, and each title made a point.
The point was that all the titles were totally believable as examples of the authors and publishers productions at the time. And 'Mixed Moss' is certainly in that line.
I'm not sure that 'Racundra's First Cruise' qualifies as a prototype, nor that AR used the experience of writing it as a direct model for MM. After all, even at the SA stage, he already had a considerable experience of writing full scale books, as well as his shorter journalistic pieces.