God, the Flesh, and America

I really like “The Undressing of America.” One of my personal favorites among the titles I’ve come up with for my own books. And titles I like aren’t easy to come by—I like “Men of Tomorrow” a lot, and so far “Lost Hero” feels good for the book Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson and I are starting to write. But “Killing Monsters” was one of those “best the editor and I could come up with before we ran out of time” titles, “The Comic Book Heroes” is fine but none too thrilling, and “The Beaver Papers” was the publisher’s suggestion, not bad when people still remembered the Pentagon Papers but not so evocative now. I’m fond of “The Trouble with Girls” because it’s such an odd match with the subject matter (and the subject matter is so odd), but it doesn’t have that perfect-title-for-the-project punch that’s always so nice to find.
      But “The Undressing of America” had that, and it had the additional appeal of coming to me slowly, after a series of other titles that never quite cut it. So I’ve clung hard to it, continuing to use it as the working title of this book even as the book evolved and evolved. I still think it’s the perfect title for that book.
      The trouble is, this book ain’t that book no more. It’s evolved so much over the years that it’s become an entirely different story, with a subject matter only partially overlapping the original’s. And that title, while still an intriguing set of words, no longer matches it. It’s like calling a creature Tyrannosaurus rex and thinking what an awesome name it is, but 65 million years later you discover it’s evolved into a house finch. It’s still a great name, but calling that bird stealing crumbs off your picnic table a Tyrannosaurus rex somehow just doesn’t...ring.

Tyrannosaurus rex

      I’d probably still be tempted to try to get away with using Undressing (and it does almost, kind of, work), except that I actually intend to finish that original book one of these days. I wrote a whole rough draft of it, after all, and polished up quite a bit of it. It’s still a very appealing story: a bodybuilder/health guru who accidentally creates the whole “true confessions” approach to publishing while fighting with Christian moral reformers for his right to show pictures of women doing calisthenics and so changes the course of modern media. (That’s a bit glib, but it’s more or less it.) It’s just that the current book, which started as a sort of prologue to that one, demanded to be finished and published first. The Undressing of America has become the perfect sequel.
      So I’m saving that title for the book it was meant for, which means I have to come up with a new one for this book. It’ll only be a working title, of course, because the editor and the marketing department and several other people will want to have some input into it before FSG commits to it. But I find working titles powerful. They shape what I’m thinking about the work, standing as a sort of micro-mission statement for the whole project, and they affect how I feel when I tell people about the book in progress. Saying a title I don’t like makes me feel lame, and saying I don’t have a title yet makes me feel lamer.  

Not

       To find my way toward a new title, I wrote a list of the things the book is most about. There are quite a few—media, morality, censorship, exposure, privacy, social reform, church vs. state—but there are three that, more than any others, drive what the people in the story do and send them into interesting collisions. There’s all that stuff about sex, desire, and the body, including prostitution, pornography, health education, and a lot else. There’s religion in all its forms (in which I include a certain kind of secular political idealism). And there’s the forming of the United States—politically, culturally, religiously, morally—in its first sixty or so years.
      Those are each boil-downable into quite a few pithy phrases, but I kept coming back to “the flesh” for the first. Broad in scope but with an archaism and a slightly Biblical edge that evokes the people and times I’m focusing on. For the second, I liked the monosyllabic punch of “God.” For the third, “America” felt a lot stronger and brighter than “the republic” or “the United States.”
      I like three-word titles. They’ve been done to death, of course. Guns, Germs, and Steel is only the best of many, and now we're seeing a lot of the Elizabeth Gilbert variation: Noun, Noun Noun, no conjunction. But still, there’s something so intrinsically, almost biologically satisfying about the rhythm of three that I’d hate to abandon it just to seem different. I also like the flow of starting with a shorter word and building to something longer. All of which brought me to the title I’m calling this book by, starting today: God, the Flesh, and America. 
      And that’s the title I intend to keep calling it by until...well, until I change my mind. Or my editor talks me out of it. Which could be tomorrow or never. I have to admit, it doesn’t hit me with the instant on-the-nose perfection of The Undressing of America. But it does resonate strongly with the story I’m telling and the voice I’m using to tell it. It focuses me when I say it to myself, like a little mantra. And that’s the most important thing about a working title. That it helps me work.

Still Undressing (After All These Years)

I had a great year in 2013: rich and sane and productive, full of wonderful people, good work, and just enough adventure. But there’s one part of my life that didn’t go the way I hoped. I really, really, really thought that ’13 would be the year I finally finished The Undressing of America. And yet, here I am, even as I’m already starting my next book, still adding to it.

       This wasn’t due to a lack of work, nor to throwing it out and starting over (as I did more than once before). I wrote a good draft of a good book. But it became very clear at a certain point, as I was trying very hard to convince myself that it was good enough, that it had the potential to be a much better book. And having glimpsed that other book, I just couldn’t bear to let it never happen.

       I’m not usually a proponent of this kind of thinking. Clearly this kind of thing can lead straight into the treacherous bogs of perfectionism. There’s a saying going around out there, “Done is better than perfect.” I haven’t been able to find out who came up with it. Some have said Mark Zuckerberg, others Sheryl Sandberg; give it a while and, the internet being what it is, I’m sure we’ll see it attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, and Nelson Mandela. But wherever it came from, I like it. Because I firmly believe, as another quote has it, that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” (Which I’m pretty sure was Voltaire. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Bill Gates.)

       But there’s a spectrum here, surely. Holding something up for months in order to finesse the last few details is neurotic, but banging something out overnight even though it’s a pile of junk isn’t a sane alternative. I presented the world with several piles of junk in my comics-writing days, when I took on too much work and not only didn’t have time to worry about perfection but didn’t have enough even to worry about coherence or originality. One of the hardest parts of any job in which we have to make our own calls about whether something’s done or not is finding that magical balance point where we’re neither excessively driven by a hunger to get it over with nor a mania to make it just right. 

       In the case of this current book, I’ve finally decided that I haven’t reached that point yet. There are downsides to that, professionally, financially, and psychologically. But the downsides to stopping now look bigger to me. Because I may never write about quite this subject again, and the pragmatic realities of my life may never give me this much flexibility again, and I believe there might be real value in the not-finished book I’m seeing.

       Basically, the deal is this: the book tells the story of America’s moral and legal wars over issues of the body, sex, and privacy as they helped shape our culture from the 19th century into the 20th. As conceived up ’til now, it began with Anthony Comstock’s ferocious assault on public discussions of private matters in art, literature, politics, and public health, starting at the end of the Civil War. But what became increasingly clear to me (with some editorial prodding) is that Comstock’s war doesn’t make enough sense without understanding the men who inspired and supported him, and their evangelical crusade to reform the nation in the decades leading up to the Civil War—especially given how deeply entwined that crusade was with abolitionism and the birth of feminism. Nor did the story of his opponents make enough sense without understanding the origins of the free-thinkers and free-speechers from whom they descended, and the way their crusade got all tangled up with the early days of vaudeville and pornography. And after a while it all became just too much to cover in quick backstory.

       So now the book begins at its proper beginning: in 1827, with the arrival of the first ballerina to New York and Samuel F. B. Morse’s public denunciation of her, with Fanny Wright’s flight from her collapsing interracial free-love commune in Nashoba, with the wildfire of Charles Finney’s revolutionary evangelism, and with Elijah Pierson’s mad, doomed mission to save the souls of prostitutes. It will be a long book, and it will be an even later book than it already is. But I believe it will be a good book. Anyway, I owe it the chance to find out. 
       (As for the next book, Lost Hero, about Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and the secret origin of comic books...that one I promise to finish on time. Because on that one I have a collaborator, and she’s not going to let me get away with anything else.)