New & Noteworthy
Lots of new Irving Berlin; more of the same from John Barth; the ideal courier
The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin
edited by Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet
Knopf, 558 pages, $65.00
In the aftermath of September 11 the whole country seemed to be singing "God Bless America," underscoring Irving Berlin's incomparable role in American song. (Berlin wrote the piece toward the end of World War I but suppressed it until the outbreak of World War II, fearing that it might be too broad or corny.) His anthems include "White Christmas," "Easter Parade," and "There's No Business Like Show Business"; no other songwriter has written as many. No one else has written as many popular songs, period. Yet although he was lauded as a tunesmith of genius as far back as 1911, when he debuted "Alexander's Ragtime Band," Berlin is often undervalued as a lyricist and said to lack Cole Porter's erudition, Lorenz Hart's interior rhymes, and Johnny Mercer's homespun wisdom. The Complete Lyrics, which spans eighty-one of the composer's 101 years (1888-1989), demands that we reconsider this appraisal. In addition to highlighting his gift for economy, directness, and slang, it presents Berlin as an obsessive, often despairing commentator on the passing scene.
By the late 1960s Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood lyrics had come to be seen mostly as hackwork. Robert Kimball helped to redress that view with a series of oversized anthologies of great lyricists. He began in 1983 with The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter—a shrewd choice, because Porter's wit suited the printed page especially well. He moved forward with complete editions of the equally intricate work of Hart and George Gershwin. Last year, with his longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, Kimball compiled an indispensable anthology, Reading Lyrics, which, surprisingly, includes more songs by Berlin than by anyone else. Now, in collaboration with one of Berlin's daughters, Linda Emmet, he has broken the locks off Berlin's fabled archive, giving us Berlin's oeuvre, a third of which—nearly 400 songs—was unknown.
Berlin wrote about everything: the wars, of course; and most aspects of show business, all the national holidays, and every kind of cooing and wooing; but also economics, FDR, Al Capone, nudist colonies, censors, Bolsheviks, lynchings, Prohibition, New York's finest, sex, loneliness, isolation, and insomnia. On balance, Berlin was sadder and funnier than we knew. As a parodist, he took on Porter ("I'm a eunuch who / Has just been through an op— / But if, baby, I'm the bottom, / You're the top") and himself ("God bless America, / Land I enjoy, / No discussions with Russians / Till they stop sending arms to Hanoi"). A swarm of puns on the word "step," in "Everybody Step," is worthy of the Marx Brothers, and "I've Got My Captain Working for Me Now" remains a rare comic response to the aftermath of war. Some of his lines might have passed muster with Dorothy Parker: "Someday I'm going to murder the bugler; / Someday they're going to find him dead— / I'll amputate his reveille, / And step upon it heavily, / And spend the rest of my life in bed."
Berlin's lyrics are often crude, though never cruel, and many of them are pure swill. Yet from the beginning he had an ear for the telling phrase, employing dialects to freshen familiar tropes: "I just couldn't stop her, for dinner and supper / Some kisses and hugs was the food; / When she wasn't nice it was more better twice, / When she's bad she was better than good." Still, his greatest work is that which instantly entered the public imagination, and if it is impossible to read "Isn't This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?," "How Deep Is the Ocean (How High Is the Sky)," "Let's Face the Music and Dance," "All By Myself," "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm," "How About Me?," and many more without hearing the melody in the mind's ear, that's the way it's supposed to be. The trick was to find the right words for the right tune, and no one did it better than Berlin.
by John Barth
Houghton Mifflin, 406 pages, $26.00
Devotees of literary postmodernism may feel compelled to read every word generated by one of its pioneers, John Barth. That's why the best part of Coming Soon!!!—Barth's latest "narrative," as he vaguely labels it in a subtitle—is on page 344, where the aging master promises to write no more. "Done done done, as best Yrs T can do it. Or, rather—like century, like millennium, like career and soon enough life itself, anyhow the able span thereof—all but done, whenafter let Authority be Transferred, Torch Passed, to whoever merits same." In addition to being such a relief, that passage is actually comprehensible, unlike vast portions of the rest of the book.
Back in 1956, when he was twenty-six, Barth published a brilliant novel, The Floating Opera, and another one soon after, called The End of the Road. Although several subsequent works (The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse) were critically praised, the truth, if such a thing could be known, might turn out to be a sort of Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon, in which to admit you couldn't make head or tail of a Barth novel was to set yourself apart from the hordes who were shouting "Bravo!" very loudly from the back cover. Now seventy-one, Barth until recently taught creative writing in the graduate writing seminar of his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, and his fame rests in large part on that prestigious position and on his frequent lectures and essays. These are invariably elegant formulations of postmodern literary theory, written or told in a light, commonsensical, witty, and insightful tone that one wishes he would apply to his fiction.
The plot of Coming Soon!!! is a typical and irritating example (in fact, it's a repetition) of the stories-within-stories-within-stories fictional format that Barth so ardently loves. It concerns two novelists—a recently retired professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins and a graduate writing student there. Each is writing a variation of The Floating Opera, and the two authors engage in a sort of race: to finish their respective novels, to publish, to push the limits of postmodernism, and so forth. Coming Soon!!! is their efforts intertwined, and the verdict is that neither, finally, is worth the paper it's printed on, much less the reader's time and attention. Perhaps, instead of attempting to slog through Coming Soon!!!, readers should read, or re-read, Barth's extraordinary early contributions to American literature, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road.
The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family
by William J. Bennett
Doubleday, 207 pages, $22.95
The acknowledgments of William Bennett's new book include a nod to the weighty matters that occupy the author's workaday life: someone named Nora Burns is thanked for having "kept the office running while I was buried in fourteenth-century histories." This may well have been a demanding task, but it can hardly have been a long-lived one; the fourteenth century is mentioned in exactly one sentence of The Broken Hearth. On the other hand, poor Ms. Burns must have been run off her feet on those occasions when her employer was "buried" in accounts of the sex lives of contemporary celebrities and in the prime-time television lineup, which he apparently watched in a state of some agitation, pencil at the ready to note examples of "infidelity, promiscuity, and half-naked bodies groping in bed." The book's thesis is that we've all gone to hell in a hand basket, our moral fabric rent by the combined, malevolent forces of divorce, the women's movement, single parenthood, and Suddenly Susan. The book is so often bombastic—Bennett is one to muse on "the Promethean arrogance of the last decades"—and silly that one feels almost unsporting pointing out its failings. Feminists with any history of cardiac irregularity should be separated from The Broken Hearth by doctor's orders; they might get to Bennett's recommendation that women—not men—ought to arrive at a "compromise" between their professional and parental duties and fall face forward, casualties of the cause.
But women with sounder constitutions would do well to read this book, because Bennett is on to something here, something that ought to be of central concern to feminists. It is this: the sexual revolution and the women's movement, which are perhaps boons to middle-class and rich women, have in many respects been disastrous for poor women. The growing acceptability of fatherless families may be an agreeable turn of events for the single professional woman who harbors a greater desire for a child than for a man, but poor women impregnated by men who feel no societal imperative to stick around are "forced to go on welfare or to get by on menial jobs, and their chances of improving themselves are bleak," Bennett writes. "Abandoned by their men, they have been abandoned no less cruelly by the American Left, by the enthusiastic advocates of female sexual 'liberation' and by the noisy critics of a 'patriarchy,' from which, in a benevolent form, they could only stand to benefit." Furthermore, we learn that the Centers for Disease Control concluded in one study that "birth certificates lacking a father's name were strong predictors of infant death." Add to this the well-documented fact that children living under the same roofs as their fathers suffer far less physical and sexual abuse than those living with a stepfather (or a mother's boyfriend), and it becomes abundantly clear that the various forces in our culture that seek to render fathers unnecessary members of their own families—including those feminists who champion women's personal fulfillment over virtually all their obligations—do so at the considerable expense of the poor. What a pity it's a message that only the William Bennetts of our society have the courage to deliver.