A cardboard Christmas
Benny Green
So far as the creative muse at Christmas is concerned, there is just no telling. Sometimes the conduct is unseasonable without being unreasonable, as in the case of Mark Twain in London in 1896, mourning the recent agonising death of a beloved daughter. Concealing himself behind the pallisades of his own grief in a Chelsea backwater, Twain virtually disappeared from society for six months, venturing out for a solitary stroll on Christmas morning and, hardly surprising under the sad circumstances, noting that the square and adjacent streets are not merely quiet, they are DEAD. There is not a soul. At intervals a Sundaylooking person passes along — The family have been to breakfast. We three sat and talked as usual, but the name of the day was not mentioned.
Twain's behaviour is at any rate perfectly understandable, but what is the rational mind to make of the PreRaphaelite antics of 1849? William Rossetti, evidently overcome by festive enthusiasm, passed Christmas Day adding 50 lines to a short story which has• remained very nearly unread ever since; the following day his brother, Gabriel, doggedly painted away at the head of yet another Virgin. But it was that messianic booby, Holman Hunt, who exceeded the bounds of even his own far-flung decorum. On Friday 28 December he decided to pay William Michael a visit: Hunt called here. Having been disappointed of a model this morning, he has been catching sparrows in a trap and painting them. Afterwards he has been decorating their heads with green and sending them on their way rejoicing.
Of course it would be foolish to expect anything even remotely resembling the authentic spirit of Christian charity from a man who later announced that only death would be good enough for Oscar Wilde, but even allowing for Hunt's engaging blend of humbug, hubris and blockheadedness, it is surprising that he could find nothing more rewarding to do over the holidays than to daub sparrows' heads with green paint.
Dickens was much more practical about Christmas, combining an excess of sentimentality with an even greater excess of commercial acumen, shedding crocodile tears even as the royalties for his Christmas stories soared up into history. It was Dickens more than any other Englisman who bequeathed to the western world the idea that, unless a man feels suitably contrite at Christmas, even for those few sins he has not committed, unless he can lift himself to that pitch of hysteria which will sob salt tears when confronted by a cardboard effigy of a robin on a stile, unless he succumbs to the urge to advise his debtors to settle at sixpence in the pound, then he suffers from some fearsome congenital defi ciency. It was the ghost of Dickens past who impelled Bernard Shaw, that otherwise devoted Dickensian, to lament the fact that 'we must buy things that nobody wants, and give them to people we don't like; we must go to absurd entertainments that make even our little children satirical; we must writhe under venal officiousness from legions of freebooters, all because it is Christmas'. And yet, even as he fulminated, Shaw knew that there • was nothing to be done about it. In fact, since the rise of Tiny Tim in 1843, only one suggestion of any practical use has been offered, and it has been ignored; as recently as 1971 the American essayist E.B. White, wrote to a friend: This country is nuts. One date I would like to see shifted is 25 December, which I would like to see shifted to 29 February, so that it occurs only once in every four years.'
White's predicament was much, much worse than Shaw's or Holman Hunt's, for he lived in a society which finally took hold of Christmas, examined it with a fishy eye, and saw that as an overdose of alcohol tends to nullify the critical faculty, stimulating the tear ducts to torrential madness, then it must be at Christmas that the soft underbelly of human sentiment is most gratuitously vulnerable, and that therefore it would be commercial folly not to cash in on the situation by filling the void in Christmas's cranium with tenth-rate ballads.
That one-time Spectator reviewer, Sammy Cahn, has given a graphic account of the difficulties confronting the modern songwriter asked to produce a new Christmas song. There are two serious problems, one of them traditional, the other of more recent origin and much more terrifying. The traditional hazard has always been the time-lag between the gestation of a Christmas song and its eventual arrival in the drunkard's throat at the appropriate moment. Cahn explains: Most Christmas songs, I should say, are written in the heat of June or at the latest July, in order to give the singer, publisher, the record company, the promotion people, and the weather a chance to get together.
However, as songwriters as a breed tend to feel the cold no matter what the time of year, the problem Cahn describes is by no means insuperable. It is the second bogey which causes most aspirants to throw in their hand and start looking for a proper job.
In 1942 Irving Berlin finally put his mind to the drafting of the insurance policy to end all insurance policies. There had been no outstanding, worldwide Christmas song for at least a generation, perhaps even since the British had so perversely insisted on lacerating their own sensibilities by taking to their hears that imperishable work of George R. Sims, 'It Was Christmas Day in the Workhouse', a pearl subsequently put to the sword by the parodists. The profes rofes sion sion was ripe for another killing. It was time.
In 1919 Berlin had written the words and music of a turkey called Smile and Show Your Dimples. This piece had deservedly sunk without trace, and yet Berlin the old fox of the business, remained convinced that there was something there which might be turned to advantage. In 1933, 14 years after the event, he suddenly realised what the trouble was. Berlin the lyric-writer had defamed Berlin the composer. Berlin re-examined the words of that 1919 song: Smile and show your dimple, it's really very simple.
He looked at those phrases and he saw that they were not good. So he ditched them and wrote new words: In your Easter bonnet with all the frills upon it.
creating for himself the ultimate dream of Tin Pan Alley, a self-recurring hit song. It was this Berlin who now produced the ultimate Christmas song. At the time of going to press 'White Christmas', which received its debut in a 1942 Bing Crosby picture called Holiday Inn , has sold over one hundred million records; Crosby's version alone has accounted for more than a quarter of those total sales. 'White Christmas' does not rate among Berlin's 50 finest songs; it is arguable that it is not even the best song in Holiday Inn . But the alliance of sentimentality, the war, soldiers and those cardboard robins has proved too much for a softhearted world. Today there remains only one last glittering prize to tempt the songwriter. Berlin has wrapped up Easter and Christmas, which leaves only New Year's Eve, still accompanied by nothing much more recent that 'Auld Lang's Syne'. Only the fact that Berlin is now 92 years old would explain his negligence.
As for the most egregious Christmas song of all time the British are strong contenders. It would be hard to think of a more convincing argument in favour of mercy killing than 'The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot', or the sexually ambivalent 'I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus'. On the other hand, the same British have at least partly redeemed themselves with calculated lunacy of the 'Please Let Me Sleep on Your Doorstep Tonight' and 'All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth' style. Nor should we forget the homely delights of Stanley Holloway's Sam, who, not content with dropping his musket, one day so neglected it as to see a sparrow fly out of the barrel, for which misdemeanour the Iron Duke ordered that he forgo his portion of Christmas pudding.
The yuletide booby prize, however. probably goes neither to Berlin for 'White Christmas', nor to Sammy Cahn for: Merry Christmas, may dreams come true, and this song of mine in three-quarter time wishes you and yours too. your New Year the same thing but to an American singer-writer called. Eddy Arnold, who, not content with halv,, ing perpetrated an outrage called , WII4 Santy come to shanty town?', followed up with the most gratuitous displaY.° erudition ever recorded in connectiogn, with the season, an item entitled .C-11, I-S-T-M-A-S, that spells Christmas'. A res, tive image begins to form of HO1maouf Hunt, pausing for a moment in his ta0„41. painting sparrows green, listening to 'of Arnold's claim, and then nodding sagils in agreement before resuming ornithological studies.
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