In tune
Benny Green
Lyrics on Several Occasions Ira Gershvim (Elm Tree Books E4.95)
As a general rule, the literature of popular music is too ridiculous to have any practical use whatsoever, except possibly as a source of unintentional humour. Whether they are of fiction, biography, autobiography . or criticism, books which deal with the musical stage and film appear to have been conceived by a committee of philistines and put together in the dark by compositors wearing boxing gloves. It will come, therefore, as a shock to some people to encounter Ira Gershwin's book, written in 1959 and only now published in Britain. Largely through the intellectual snobbery of musically illiterate critics, who conceal their deficiencies by dismissing lyric-writing from the pantheon altogether, workers like Ira Gershwin rarely qualify even for a seat in the anteroom of literary endeavour. They are neither purveyors of rhymed persiflage like Ogden Nash (who, by the way, was an excellent occasional lyric-writer), nor real poets with a capital P like Hiram Z. Scruggs and many Others whose names are household words inside their own households; in fact, they hardly count as writers at all. Prepare, then, to. shed your prejudices and explore the mind of one of the most exemplary literary craftsmen of the last fifty years. Gershwin belongs to that group of versifiers--which includes Lorenz Hart, Oscar ilainmerstein and Howard Dietz—who, having been raised on the Savoy operas, took great strides forward in the evolution of an indigenous American musical theatre by Perceiving the degree to which another Nlishman, P. G. Wodehouse, had taken the Gilbertian method and colloquialised it fOr the succeeding generation. Gilbert and W.odehouse: a wholly English process, tainted neither by the florid imbecilities of he Hapsburg goulash school nor by the Jolly coarsenesses of vaudeville. It therefore c,.°1-nes as no surprise to find that in the inerarY sense Ira is a confirmed anglophile Who, in a modest attempt to describe his Working methods, turns repeatedly to lifelong sources. Apart from telling us of a lifelong deference to Gilbert as the great fOunding father, and paying handsome tributes to Wodehouse, Ira goes to Beerbohm for reliable advice on the correct term to describe the act of putting words to ITiUSIC, thanks Chesterton for giving him an idea for a good song title, takes a loving d.etour in search of the Speverend Rooner, sides with Isaac D'Israeli in the debate on the origins of rhyme, quotes D'Urfey on nonsensical hey-nonny-no devices and Carr" on portmanteau words, and even con
fesses a debt to Aphra Behn for the title of his book.
The form he uses is the reproduction of 104 of his own lyrics, ranging from famous items like 'A Foggy Day' and 'Lady Be Good,' to deep obscurities like 'The Princess of Pure Delight' and 'Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha'; having selected his favourites, he then provides annotations, in the form of either technical definition, personal anecdote or historical data. What quickly emerges from these endearing commentaries is that Ira has not been bandying about the hallowed names of English literature just for effect. For example, having been attracted by the Spooverend Renner, Ira then composes a spooneristic lyric which begins with a nosy cook, moves on to killing and booing and a lady with a sturgeon vile, and ends with Ira's regret that, too late for inclusion in the song, he has discovered in a new edition of Brewster the news that the Lord is a shoving leopard. Then there is his lyric for 'Stiff Upper Lip,' consisting entirely of Woosterian ejaculations like pip-pip, toodle-oo, old fluff and old bean. And then, with the typical quiet scholarship of a ruminative man, he adds that he subsequently discovered that the phrase 'stiff upper lip' is in fact American, having been used in a local newspaper in 1815, whereas the infallible Partridge annexed the phrase on behalf of the British only circa 1880.
By natural inclination Ira is a studious man, a scholar who wears his learning lightly in a profession where learning is fondly imagined never to obtrude at all. As one of the more succulent fruits of autodidacticism is to learn something first and discover its name later, he records an experience which parallels one of Shaw's. Having been accused by some pugnacious pacifist of not knowing what a syllogism was, Shaw went and looked it up, to discover he had been using syllogisms for years. Similarly, Ira describes his belated discovery that the term 'apocopated rhyme' means a rhyme where the end of the rhyming word is dropped—for example, 'say' with 'crazy.' Ruefully explaining he had perfected its use as a mere lad, in a song called 'Looking for a Boy,' he reflects on the continuing pageant of his own education and says, 'I now feel at one with Moliere's M. Jourdain the day he learned he'd been speaking prose for forty years.'
From the reader's point of view, the effect of this strange mélange of erudition and green room gossip, of technical discussion and personal digression, of whimsical verse and informal prose, is curious and utterly delightful. At one moment we hear that Partridge has proscribed twenty-seven clichés, only to learn that Ira has used every one of them in one lyric or another; he then adds one of the profound truths of the lyricwriting art :
The phrase that is trite and worn-out when appearing in print usually becomes, when heard fitted to an appropriate musical turn, revitalised, and seems somehow to revert to its original provocativeness.
We find him gently chiding the editors of Time for deploying false rhymes in advising readers how to pronounce surnames; we learn that Paris is a place where
girls wear bodices like goddesses that the married state means
being alone and breaking bread together reading the New Yorker in bed together that there was once a lady
who had a most immortal eye;
they called her Lorelei.
We also discover that the title 'Don't Be a Woman if you Can' was inspired by an oldtime Tin Pan Alley poetaster who lost his reason and went around saying things like 'I never liked him and I always will.' We see George and Ira one evening in their apartment awaiting the arrival for dinner of Ira's fiancée; by the time she arrives they have discussed, sketched out, completed and revised the song `Do, Do, Do.' We read of the drudgery of the out-of-town try-out, the vagaries of performers and producers, the inexplicable flops, the equally inexplicable successes. Best of all, we learn the true nature of Ira's profession. In the foreword we may find a priceless distillation of the contents to come, a touch of rueful irony which tells us a great deal about the job and everything about the man himself: Since most of the lyrics in this lodgment were arrived at by fitting words mosaically to music already composed, any resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable.
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