Music: The Great Ear-Wiggler

Night and day under the fleece of me T

here’s an Oh, such a flaming furneth burneth the grease of me.

Night and day under the bark of me.

There’s an Oh, such a mob of microbes making a park of me.

Night and day under the rind of me

There’s an Oh, such a zeal for spooning ru’ning the mind of me . . .

Cole Porter never wrote these lines, but he (almost) might have. They are a memorable lampoon by the late Ring Lardner of Minstrel Porter’s most famous attack of heartburn. Readers—as distinct from listeners—now have an opportunity to judge the accuracy of Critic Lardner’s aim. In a new book out this week, 103 Lyrics of Cole Porter (selected by Fred Lounsberry—Random House; $4.50) were clamped between hard covers without so much as an ocarina accompaniment. It is a rare tribute to a lyricist, but it is also a bit of a dirty trick.

What trips off a singer’s tongue often falls flat on the printed page. Yet time and again the aging (61) pixy of the Waldorf Towers flashes out with a line of verse that might be Ogden Nash at his snippiest or T. S. Eliot at his youngest. In one respect, however, Lardner was clearly right. When Porter tries to be sentimental about love (which is perhaps half the time), his music may be convincing but his words sound as invincibly phony as Porfirio Rubirosa reading Emily Dickinson to a debutante.

Asphalt Lyricism.

In one of his lyrics, Porter himself mocks the true-blue, June-Moon school:

As long as such rhymes get by,

Why don’t you go home and try

To write another sentimental song?

Porter has got by with such rhymes plenty of times: even his wizardry is hard put to improve on four basic rhymes with “love” in the English language (above, dove, glove, shove). But while he can be shamelessly obvious, more often Porter is so dazzlingly dexterous that all the Tin Pan Alleycats bristle with awe. Nobody is cozier with words: for him, Winchell rhymes with provincial, suburban with Deanna Durbin, Nina with schizophrenia. Jehovah with Casanova, Lassie with democrassy, to the bottom I with hippopotami, a fine finnan haddie with my heart belongs to daddy, and Venetia who loved to chat so is still drinkin’ in her stinkin’ pink palazzo. There are images and characters in Porter that stick in the mind because of their authentic, ginny bitterness: the lovers whose cars are seen in front of too many bars, the males whom men forget and only tailors remember, the girl who sits high above the town in her pet pailletted gown, deep in the depths on the 90th floor. Sometimes, love can be as fiercely direct, almost formal, as an angry letter: “Don’t you know, little fool, you never can win? Use your mentality! Wake up to reality!” And occasionally, in a kind of straight, asphalt lyricism, Porter can out-hammer even Hammerstein in the game of simplicity:

Yesterday

When I got my pay

I went to a park I know

And walked around

‘Til I finally found

The place where the roses grow.

When I saw those flowers all in bloom

I almost forgot my basement room.

Shavian Satire. At heart, Porter may be something of a Shavian, with a taste for social satire. This is suggested by the girl who tries to pursue Mrs. Warren’s Profession, but is driven out of business by society ladies with amateur standing, and the Doctor’s Dilemma of a medico who can’t make up his mind about a patient:

He simply loved my larynx

And -went wild about my pharynx,

But he never said he loved me.

Porter takes his sharpest bites out of the upper crust to which he himself belongs. He knows all about society bores like Mrs. Lowsborough-Goodby (“Thank you so much for that infinite weekend”), and drops names contemptuously like gold-tipped cigarette butts (“Kit Cornell is shelling peas, Lady Mendl’s climbing trees”). Porter scarcely allows himself anything like pity, but sometimes—as in the case of Mr. Fitch who once was rich, but who is now regarded as just another son of a b.—he does manage a reproachful glare at the pitiless.

The most rewarding thing about Porter in print is that it gives the reader a chance —as the radio and the jukebox do not—to examine in detail one of the most remarkable rhyming skills since W. S. Gilbert. Like Gilbert, Porter excels in the encyclopedic or catalogue verse, e.g.:

The young fall, the old fall

The red-hot mamas and the cold fall . . .

Old maids who object fall,

Old men you never would suspect fall,

Even babies, who can hardly crawl, fall . . .

The good very oft’ fall,

The hard-shell Baptists and the soft fall. . .

Small bookworms on shelves fall, Amoebas, even for themselves, fall . . .

They all fall in love.

Irving Berlin and Oscar Hammerstein 2d, in their inspired corniness, may reflect some American moods more genuinely than Porter. He puts on a mood as easily as a white tie, but the result can still be moving. Above all, he has put ideas and satire into the sentiment-swamped words of American popular songs. Porter has probably written the last word on himself:

Why be a great composer with your rent in arrears?

Why be a major poet and you’ll owe it for years!

When crowds will pay to giggle

If you wiggle

Your ears . . .