Book dedications are usually mundane little affairs, a couple of initials perhaps, or the name of a parent, spouse, or child. Certainly, you wouldn't expect to see one included in a dictionary of quotations—unless, that is, the author was P.G. Wodehouse. "To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time."
But a humorous dedication only works if you are a humorist. A literary novelist has to set an appropriate tone. Nearly all of Julian Barnes's 16 novels are dedicated to the same person, the agent Pat Kavanagh, his late wife—which shows either admirable devotion or imagination fatigue. Other authors prefer to be more cryptic. Zadie Smith dedicated On Beauty to "My dear Laird," while Grace Metalious dedicated Peyton Place to "George, for all the reasons he knows so well."
In the various books I've written, I've used up my wife and first son (in one go), my two other sons (one book each), and my parents. My latest, a novel called The Blasphemer, is dedicated to someone who is dead, which, upon reflection, may be a little pointless. It reads, "To my grandfather, Private Alfred Farndale, who died in the mud of Passchendaele, and again seventy years later in his bed."
This dedication may sound willfully enigmatic, but it is relevant to the novel, I promise. And there are precedents for dedicating books to the dead. Edwin Way Teale, author of Autumn Across America, lost his son at the age of 18 in the Second World War. The book was dedicated "to David, who traveled with us in our hearts."
Besides, decoding dedications can be fun. Zadie Smith's playful dedication is not to her "laird and master" but to her husband, Nick Laird. Brave of her, perhaps, because novels have a habit of outlasting marriages. Peter Carey—two-time Booker winner and one-time divorcé—asked his Australian publishers to remove the dedications to the ex-Mrs. Carey from future editions of his work.
Saul Bellow, meanwhile, went through five wives, and his dedications reflect his ever-changing muses. His novel Ravelstein even contains an attack on his fourth wife and a dedication to his fifth. Norman Mailer dealt with the "which wife" problem with typical style, dedicating The Presidential Papers to "some ladies who have aided and impeded the author in his composition." F. Scott Fitzgerald tended to write "Once Again to Zelda." And with hindsight—his marriage was not a happy one—that "once again" is rather melancholy.
J.D. Salinger sidestepped the wife issue altogether in his rather long-winded dedication for Franny and Zooey: "As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book."
More typically, the words dropped into those preliminary white pages are almost poetic in their brevity, sometimes nothing more than an initial. Before Graham Greene left his wife, Vivien, in 1948 for Lady Catherine Walston, he dedicated The End of the Affair to "C." By the time the American edition came out he could afford to be less coy. The C was replaced by "Catherine."
For as long as people have been writing books they have been dedicating them. Horace's odes and Virgil's Georgics, for example, were dedicated to Maecenas, a wealthy patron. But the dedication reached its apotheosis of sycophancy in the 19th century. Jane Austen, who was contemptuous of the prince regent, nevertheless dedicated Emma to him because one of his circle suggested it might please him if she did. Admiring but not knowing the dedicatee can be equally problematic. Charlotte Brontë dedicated Jane Eyre to William Thackeray. She must have been the only person in literary England who did not know that Thackeray (like the novel's antihero Mr. Rochester) was married to a woman who had gone insane. Or perhaps she was pretending not to know. Novelists can be quite contrary.
My favorite dedication is the one Helene Hanff wrote in Underfoot in Show Business, because it has its own self-contained narrative. "The day I finished the book, I celebrated by phoning Maxine in Hollywood. ‘Do you want to hear the dedication?' I asked her. ‘Go ahead,' said Maxine. So I read it to her: ‘To all the stagestruck kids who ever have, or ever will, set out to crash the theatre.' ‘What do you think of it?' I asked. ‘It's much too sentimental,' said Maxine. ‘Why don't you just dedicate it to me?' So what the hell: This book is for Maxine."
Crown will publish Nigel Farndale’s new novel, The Blasphemer, this month.
