The Best American Poetry

The Death Cross (and Other News) [by David Lehman]

They asked me to write "poetry in real time," and I said I would do it if I could do it in prose. "Even better," they said.

So I sat and waited, waited and sat, and read the news, turning as always to the financial pages first.

Einstein said that "the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." Twice in one week I have come across this quote -- in an annual report and in today's Wall Street Journal.

You’re looking as dismissive as you did fifty years ago. "That's poetry? You call that poetry?"

I looked as lofty as Shelley, repressing a cruel sneer. “I merely proposed it as the first line of a Pope couplet.”

"And what will you follow it up with?"

 "It may sound a bit sensationalistic, but the bearish death cross has been an excellent predictor of the 10-year yield's significant slide over the last six years," said Abigail Doolittle, a technical analyst at The Seaport Group.

The death cross is what happens when the yield on the fifty-day moving average of the ten-year treasury bond falls below its 200-day moving average.

Isn't that beautiful?

In other news, Apple reportedly (1) pays no tax on billions of dollars of revenue earned abroad, and (2) tells its investors that it pays more tax than it does on domestic revenue.

"There are lies, damn lies, and statistics," says a character actor who looks a bit like Edmund O'Brien but is not dressed like a grown-up. Meanwhile, everyone else on the beach is naked when the tide goes out, as Warren Buffett, the oracle of Omaha, is fond of saying with a twinkle in his eye.

A man with two first names gets on television thumping the table demanding that Congress apologize to Apple.

One senator whispers to another, during a lull in the hearings. What do you think they are saying? Can you read lips? I'd like to believe that the comely senator from Oregon is asking, "Do you think it is a coincidence that the Beatles called their recording company Apple and that Steve Jobs chose the same name for their computers?" And the courtly senator from Virginia, nodding sagely, mentions Sinatra's choice of Reprise for his outfit when he fired Capitol just as Columbia had once fired him.

Sooner or later that's what's playing in the background of this old movie.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Charles Baudelaire for his wonderful prose poems such as the one about the loss of a halo -- or the one I would translate as "Let's Beat up Some Beggars."

I was reading Northrop Frye last night. He was a great lecturer. He was also a great Canadian. In one of his books, "The Modern Century" I believe, he remarks that the name Canada derives from a Portuguese phrase meaning "nobody here." In the same book, Frye says that Satan tempting Eve in the garden was the prototype for modern propaganda and advertising campaigns.I love his name: Frye. Like Miss Froy in "The Lady Vanishes."

My friend Maggie, a Henry James fanatic whom I knew in graduate school, phoned today and casually mentioned her new novel in progress about a modern-day Adam and Eve named Elbert Renwick and Eureka Janeway, two ordinary kids in the vast middle America of fading memory, who were high-school sweethearts but drifted apart, married others, raised families, lived on opposite coasts, got divorced, got promoted, read Rilke, changed their lives, met at a class reunion and now they are living together, making their own beer, growing their own high-octane pot. The two are known by their nicknames, Butch and Jane. They dress provocatively. They have experimented. They have strong opinions on sports teams, national politics, abortion, the Middle East, the twenty-first century, the 1960s as a decade, drugs, and music. But I bet I can teach them a thing or two about the death cross and its significance, whether symbolic, semantic, or poetic -- as a financial markets indicator, on the one hand; on the other hand, as a magnificent figure for the religious impulse, which is always threatening to make a ghostly comeback.

"Was there a question?" -- DL

Mother's Day (by David Lehman)

The brain has chambers
on different floors
a warren of offices
upstairs a library
a wine cellar below
but the soul is simple
like a mother who
packs your lunchbox
and you walk home
wearing the raincoat
she made you take
though it is sunny
and mild my mother
when I was four was
talking to another
mother and I strayed off
and went to the park
and found someone to
walk me home where I sat
on a car waiting for
her to come back she was
frantic but when she saw
me she laughed the soul
is a hungry boy eating
her soup in the kitchen

-- David Lehman

Note: "May 6" from The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000). May 6 1996, when this poem was written, was Mother's Day. The author's mother died on May 10, 2009 -- which was Mother's Day that year.

Quote of the Week: The 99-cent Slice

On Monday morning, April 15, with taxes on people's minds -- before the bombs went off in Boston -- commuters reading the Wall Street Journal got to ponder the implications of the ninety-nine cent slice of pizza, a new development in Manhattan. You see stands advertising dollar slices on Eighth Street and Second Avenue, for instance, and the competition and inferior product are leaving some proud pizza makers feeling pretty vulnerable. So let's hear from an expert, and obligingly one steps forth, and these deathless sentences emerge:

<<<
"The 99-cent slice is a giant step towards killing the classic New York pizza experience," said John Arena, who teaches a class on pizza history and culture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "What's next, $1 lox and 10-cent bagels?"
>>>

Say, dear reader, what is the most remarkable element in this little graf? Though there's more than one candidate, my vote goes to "a class on pizza history and culture." -- DL

“PEACE AND WAR IN AMERICAN POETRY” by David Lehman

 

"daybreak gray and dim . . . "

The US Library of Congress invited David Lehman to contribute to a series of essays by leaders in the literary field, including former Poets Laureate and Consultants in Poetry, that illustrate how poems by Americans helped define the country. This presentation aims to complement conventional historical texts and showcase poetry’s place as an essential tool for recording our nation’s past. The authors are expressing their own opinions in these essays, which may not necessarily reflect the position of the Library of Congress. Here is David Lehman's contribution:

 

Peace and War in American Poetry

War and Peace: the title of Tolstoy’s massive novel of Napoleonic Europe trips off the tongue. Not so “peace and war”: the inversion of the customary word order represents a victory of hope over experience — or of the poetry of aspiration over the prose of sad actuality. As a subject for poetry, war has an immediate advantage over peace, because war entails action, whereas the experience of peace is an absence, not noticed until not there, like the absence of pain.

War was the first subject to quicken the pen of an epic poet. But the author of The Iliadknew that the scenes of the Trojan hero Hector in battle with Patroclus and later with Achilles would not be so remarkable if there were not also a tender scene of Hector bidding farewell to Andromache, his wife, and their baby boy, who is scared of daddy’s helmet. Epic poets have followed Homer’s lead, widening the scope of war inevitably to include peace – whether peace be construed as the absence of hostilities or as something positive in its own right.

In book XVIII of The Iliad, Homer describes the shield of Achilles that the lame god Hephaistos has fashioned for him. The shield depicts two cities – one embattled, besieged; the other functional, with a wedding and a court of civil law where disputants can settle their differences without violence. In layers of concentric circles the shield also shows some of the things conspicuously lacking in fields of battle: a vineyard, a herd of cattle, a circle of young men and women dancing, the bounty of the harvest – the fruits of peace.

continue reading

New Trilling Essay Talk of the Town [by David Lehman]

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristicslly fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung camupuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity.

That may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Publc Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be cariacatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said John Kelly, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Jacques Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."

continue reading here.

Most Popular Funeral Songs [by DL]

In the age of sabermetrics, they ("they, they who are known as they," as Kenward Elmslie has it), have tallied up the songs (and versions of same) most popular to play in funerals. Click here for a full run-down or take away these teasers.

-- Sinatra leads the pack with "My Way."

-- Both Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlem are represented in the top ten, though the most popular version of "Over the Rainbow" is said to be by Eve Cassidy rather than the star of "The Wizard of Oz" -- and people would apparently rather hear Gerry and the Pacemakers sing "You'll Never Walk Alone" than, say, John Raitt.

-- Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" comes in at number ten.

-- -- Vera Lynn's "We'll Say Gooodbye" makes the list, which reminds me that the song puts in an appearance at the end of "The Singing Detective" -- which makes exceedingly smart use of songs popular in the year of the action, 1945: "Peg o My Heart," "Accentuate the Positive," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "It Might As Well Be Spring," "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" . . .but I see I'm digressing into a different list. --

Meanwhile, I think of the wit of Larry Rivers, at whose funeral they played a recording of the painter singing "Everything Happens to Me." For Sinatra's funeral the choice was inevitable: his signature song onn radio and TV, "Put Your Dreams Away."   -- DL

"I follow Winchell and read every line. . ." [by David Lehman]

"That's why the lady is a tramp." Of all the classic American popular songs, the one I am most often asked to explain is "The Lady is a Tramp," my favorite Rodgers & Hart uptempo song. You know, she goes to Coney -- the beach is divine; she goes to ballgames -- the bleachers are fine; she follows Winchell -- and reads every line. "That's why the lady is a tramp." At the opera she stays wide awake because people expect you to snooze; she gets to the theater on time, not fashionably late, because she doesn't give a hoot about fashion. And snobbism is for the birds if your budget leads you to the bleachers, Coney Island, and Cantral Park lake rather than a box seat and a summer share in the Hamptons. She's genuine, baby, as independent of mind as Emerson recommends, and as natural. "I like the free, fresh wind in my hair, / Life without care. / I'm broke. / It's oke."  So the title is flat-out ironic, and "tramp" is a word of abuse redeemed into a term of praise. A list song, "The Lady is a Tramp" is, by implication, a kind of dictionary of receved ideas. . .Flaubert wrote a "dictionary of received ideas." He names a subject and gives you the proper response to make if said subject comes up at a soiree or the latter day equivalent, a cocktail party. What would be a good example today? Let's see. How about "Congress: They should be ashamed of themselves" or "The Sequester: I thought that was something that happened to juries" . .It's like a game of unfree association.. .Who is Winchell, you ask, and why is it a big deal to "read every line"? Walter Winchell was the nation's most popular gossip columnist, though evidently the smart set affected indifference to his columns. . . which consisted of sundry items juxtaposed with triple dots as here. The subjects could vary widely, weirdly, and with no logic, no unity either except for the cigar-smoking voice of Mr. Winchell firing off his telegrams. Winchell, a Roosevelt fan who vehemently opposed isolationism in the late 1930s, liked to say "I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret". . .If you've seen Sweet Smell of Success with Burt Lancaster you've seen a satire on Winchell and the power he wielded. . .He also had a radio show that topped the charts in the year of my birth and I think there too he leaped from one subject to another with the abandon of a street fighter leaping across air shafts on rooftops in movies about growing up in the Bronx. . .In the year of my birth three teams played in New York City and none of them were the Mets. . .What was the worst trade or free agent signing in Mets' history? Jeepers (creepers), there's a lot of competition. Trading Tom Seaver to the Reds for four nice guys in 1977 takes the cake, I guess, though they also traded Nolan Ryan before he was Nolan Ryan. . .The best trade they ever made was undoubtedly the one that brought Mike Piazza to New York from the Dodgers via the Florida Marlins two decades later . . . There is a good chance that Seaver knows a bunch of Rodgers & Hart songs. There is almost no chance that Piazza does. . . The woman who played the organ in Shea Stadium back in the day was a very talented jazz pianist named Jane Jarvis. . .She favored "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" between the top and bottom half of an early inning. Rodgers wote that song with Hammerstein, not Hart, . . With Hart he wrote "Ten Cents a Dance," which Ruth Etting introduced in, I think, 1930. . . You know Ruth Etting, don't you? If not, drop everything, listen to her sing and then rent the movie about her starring Doris Day, "Love Me or Leave Me." Extra points if you name the authors of the film's title song and no, they're not Dick and Larry, pictured above. That's Ruth to the left and Doris playing Ruth on the right . . . Playing Ruth's rendition of "It All Depends on You" followed by Sinatra's of the same number is something I would do on my first day as a disc jockey in tandem with Jamie Katz who will punctuate my Ella and Torme with Art Tatum or Tommy Flanagan or the Modern Jazz Quartet. . . .But I'm not going to tell you the point of the exercise, the reason for the particular conjunction of, say, Bud Powell's "Just One of Those Things" with a Sinatra take on that Cole Porter standard. . There's a sign on a Brooklyn building as you approach the Williamsburg Bridge: What's the Point in all caps but no question mark, from which I deduce that the author of the line in question has read Ashbery. And Jim, if you're listening. . . Dude, there are some pretty sick tags in my street. . .Or maybe it said There's no point but I prefer the more open-ended version, which is the starting point of a poem I wrote for Ron Horning . . . What I like about this escape from poetic form is that it lets you name some of your favorite things and dwell on them as a frog dwells on a rock before leaping onto another rock and then refreshing himself in a pool covered with lily pads while a Japanese poet listens for the splash, watches, and imagines being somewhere else recalling this moment. . . In his notebook he writes, "even in Kyoto, I miss Kyoto," which was not necessarily on Cole Porter's mind when he wrote "I Love Paris". . .I was listening to "The Lady is a Tramp" on Ella's Rodgers and Hart Songbook driving to Bennington in June 1996. It turned out that Ella died that day and was reading my mind in heaven. . . I guess hers is my favorite cover of the song. . . Once at a reading I recited "The Lady is a Tramp" as poetry but when I got to the release I couldn't help myself and everyone and I started singing. . .

House of Cards: Whist versus Bridge (or the British versus the US Versions) [by David Lehman]

No spoiler-alerts needed here. We refuse to give away the goods. Only a week has gone by since the Netflix release of the new "House of Cards" and we have watched all thirteen episodes in a state of heightened pleasure. This is the best thing I've seen on television since "Mad Men." The script is very smart and so is the cast, beginning with Kevin Spacey as Congressman Francis Underwood (South Carolina, a Democrat), Robin Wright as the resourceful and cunning straight-faced Mrs. with the butch haircut and Kate Mara as the feisty reporter with the perfect source for a scoop. We promise to keep radio silence. We've also watched -- multiple times -- the old (1990) British series of the same name (with Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhardt, the Tory Party's chief whip). We loved both versions of "House of Cards," and as both are streaming on Netflix, we recommend warching them, in either order. But be prepared to lose a lot of hours that could otherwise have gone into reading "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Bleak House."

 

Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart

The we here is neither editorial nor royal but factual; Stacey and I watched the new HOC together at our own pace, which averaged out to 2.16 episodes a night. Six nights are better than a binge, though it is easy to see why the issue has surfaced. This is living-room entertainment of the highest order. Seeing it with a companion adds tremendously to the pleasure if you're anything like us. My wife knows her "television conventions," as she'll be the first to admit, and she is almost always right when she anticipates a plot development that would have taken me by surprise.

Very soon in the first episode you can tell that the American version (the AV for short) and the English (EV) are completely different in tone. What surprised me was how different the series are in plot and character as well -- so much so that you might risk a few generalizations on the basis of a comparison. The English version relies on wit, bite, satire. There is a nasty sado-masochistic undertone in the way the inimitable Ian Richardson wields power ("I put a bit of stick about"). Richardson -- as the FU figure at the center of the action who is also our chief narrator, making frequent asides to the viewer --- dominates. It is black humor in the stiff-upper-lipped English manner. And because it is technically a comedy, you suspend your ethical sense. You identify yourself with an incorrigibly charming but thoroughly despicable master of deceit.

The AV, twenty three years younger, is naturally more sophisticated in visual presentation. Equally naturally, the AV reflects certain all-important digital facts that were unknown in 1990: the cell phone, the text message, the increased surveillance of the civilian population, the rate of acceleration in technological upheaval. These are the inevitable changes brought on by time and a bigger budget. But there are changes in spirit dictated by differences in the national temper. The English version radiates charm and a certain amount of Schadenfreude. The American version is filled with heartache and bile, guile and guilt.

In contrast to the EV, with its London cool, its cheerful irreverence signaled in the trumpet fanfares of the theme music, the AV is saturated with Washington, DC, a place that considers itself the center and capital of the Western world. The AV has its dark humor, but it is fraught with high anxiety, tension, heartbreak, the possibility of redemption or the premonition of tragedy. In the EV, sex is a sport, indulged in for robust pleasure, forbidden or otherwise, and sexual infidelity parallels political treachery. In the AV, sex is many things, but a sport is not one of them. Sex in the AV can involve infatuation, redemption, desperation, hostility, or the weakness of an addiction, which is also a paying profession. The thematic linkage of prostitution to politics is established early on in the AV and is powerfully sustained. Addiction is a key plot element. In the EV, we have the irony of a government minister routinely breaking the law by snorting cocaine and funding the habit at his party's expense. It is a proof of his weakness and seals his doom as a mere instrument of someone else's power. In the AV it is not an irony but a tragedy when a recovering alcoholic drops off the wagon -- and it is entirely possible that his AA sponsor will betray him when the stakes are down.

Spacey, a brilliant actor at his best (except when he forgets his South Carolina accent), has his asides, but there are fewer of them, and they do not resemble theatrical soliloquys. He is masterful when he has to shuttle between his home district and a labor dispute in Washington. Ruthless he is, but vulnerable as well. Robin Wright as Clare Underwood is a far more complicated mystery than the deliciously diabolical Diane Fletcher, who gives Lady MacBeth a run for the money as Elizabeth Urquhart in the EV. We see Elizabeth entirely in relation to her husband's aspirations and the obstacles in his path. But Clare, though in cahoots with her husband, has her own professional identity, her own lover, and her own agenda, which can clash with his. There is a scene where she visits a trusted former aide of her husband's, who is dying in his hospital bed. I refuse to say another word about that scene here but I know we will want to to talk about it sometime. That is true as well of the scene at the military academy that Francis Underwood attended, the Citadel -- I mean the Sentinel -- where they sing Dixie when they're feeling patriotic, and the boys get drunk and two of them remember just how close they had once been.

This was the first time I heard one woman call another "a twitter twat." Ditto the joke told by the owner of the "Washington Herald" (they mean the "Post" but my guess is they didn't get permission). The last line of the joke is, "Where do you come from, cunt?" The newspaper owner is a woman. On the other hand, the crack about "sleeping your way to the middle" could have been left on the cutting room floor.

There are so many moments or sequences that one would like to single out for praise. Several characters are interesting enough to warrant a thousand words of speculative analysis. Journalist Zoe Barnes played by Kate Mara, for one; the Pennsylvania congressman played by Corey Stoll, for another. But I will end this note by recalling the speech Kevin Spacey makes at a church in his own congressional district where a tragic accident (and potential public relations disaster) has occurred. The speech is brilliant and brilliantly delivered, and by "brilliant" here I should explain that I mean something very unusual. The rhetoric is effective politically in winning sympathy for the speaker but it also manages the crisis in a way that enables the victim's parents to come to terms with calamity. The ironies mount up; a bad guy can do a good deed for unholy ends. In the middle of the speech Spacey turns to us, the viewers, his confidantes and confreres, to make sure we get it, and we do: See, it's all cynical -- even or especially this oratory that helps a community heal. I wondered, watching the scene, and I wonder still whether it would have been better without the Brechtian interruption. What do you think O reader? -- DL

Among My Souvenirs [by David Lehman]

 

        Jazz standards and Hollywood movies of the 40s, usually in black and white, often in a noir mode, go together like streetlamps and shadows, seam stockings and high heels, fedoras and belted trench-coats, scotch and soda. They’re as right for each other as Rogers and Astaire -- or Rodgers and Hart. The pleasure in developing this thesis lies in furnishing apt illustrations. Let me give a few. You’ll note that certain names recur; they “keep coming back like a song,” to quote a lyric Irving Berlin wrote for Bing Crosby in 1946.

 

         Max Steiner composed some exciting suspense music for The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks’s 1946 movie of Raymond Chandler’s novel. It is very effective, and so, in its way, is the swinging number Lauren Bacall and band perform at the casino run by racketeer Eddie Mars: And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine (music Stan Kenton and Charles Lawrence, lyrics Joe Greene). The lyric locates us in noir central: “She’s a real sad tomato, she’s a busted valentine.” But my favorite musical moment in The Big Sleep is subtle enough that you might not notice it the first time around. Bacall (as one of the notorious Sternwood sisters) and co-star Humphrey Bogart (as detective Philip Marlowe) are bantering in a restaurant. In the background, a piano player is playing two great jazz standards: I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan (music Arthur Schwartz, lyrics Howard Dietz) and Blue Room (music Richard Rodgers, lyrics Lorenz Hart). At first you might think that what you’re hearing is just tremendously appealing café music. Only later do you realize that the two songs themselves have captured, in a whimsical fashion, the structural meaning of the scene.

        The Big Sleep will culminate in the image of two lighted cigarettes in an ashtray as the words THE END appear on the screen. It’s a fitting image for the romance of Bogart and Bacall, who like to smoke and drink and make witty repartee in a roadhouse café. The by-play between the two romantic leads is utterly charming, but it is also, for much of the picture, utterly incongruous because incompatible with the story-line. The movie needs them to be lovers, the audience expects them to flirt, to link, and to clinch, and this duly happens, but at considerable violence to the logic of the plot, which puts their characters on the opposite sides of a quarrel.

Though this duality may threaten the coherence of the picture, it makes the scenes between Bogart and Bacall doubly entertaining. The dialogue is full of double meanings and playful digressions. In the restaurant scene with the piano soundtrack, the two are nursing their drinks. They employ an extended racetrack metaphor to communicate their sexual interest. She: “Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first, see if they're front-runners or come from behind, find out what their hole-card is. What makes them run.” He invites her to take a stab at summing him up. “I’d say you don't like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the backstretch, and then come home free.” He: “You don't like to be rated yourself.” She: “I haven't met anyone yet that can do it. Any suggestions?” He: “Well, I can't tell till I've seen you over a distance of ground. You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how far you can go.” She: “A lot depends on who's in the saddle.”

 

The ostensible purpose of the encounter is for Bacall to pay Bogart off – to pay him for the work he has done and get him to drop the case. Thus: I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan. Once this plot requirement is out of the way, Bacall and Bogart get down to the real cinematic purpose of their being there: to tease and flirt and advance their budding romance. And now the piano player plays Blue Room, which idealizes the successful outcome of such a romance. Lorenz Hart’s lyric stars you and me and the prospect of our betrothal and a subsequent time ever after when “every day’s a holiday, because you’re married to me.” It’s a song second perhaps only to Tea for Two (music Vincent Youmans, words Irving Caesar) as an idealized fantasy of marriage so beautifully innocent it almost brings tears to your eyes.

 

The Big Sleep needs the two songs in the background, and not simply because they are in exact counterpoint to the course of the conversation between Bogart and Bacall. A soundtrack of popular songs by Rodgers and Hart, Schwartz and Dietz,  Irving Berlin, and the other great masters of the thirty-two bar song is as necessary in noir movies of the 1940s as the city streets, the silhouette in the window, the Mickey disguised as a highball, and the night spots the characters frequent, from Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca (1942) to Eddie Mars’s casino in The Big Sleep, where beautiful costumed girls check Bogart’s coat, offer to sell him cigarettes, and vie for the privilege of delivering him a message.

 

Nor do the songs suffer from being relegated to background music, shorn of lyrics. The solo piano renditions of I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan and Blue Room insinuate themselves in your consciousness. If you don’t recognize them, fine; if you know them, so much the better. When you listen to an instrumental version of a song whose lyrics you know and like, what you’re hearing is a metonymy of the song: a part standing for the whole. The text is not altogether absent if you the listener can supply it. (When the septuagenarian Frank Sinatra went up on the lines of The Second Time Around the audience helpfully sang them). But to make my point about the interdependence of Hollywood films and popular songs, let me offer this montage:

 

-- -- What better way to convey the faithful consistency of “iron man” Lou Gehrig, the Yankee first baseman who long held the record for most consecutive games played, than with Irving Berlin’s song Always? In Pride of the Yankees (1942), the song does double duty as the musical affirmation of Gehrig’s loving fidelity to his wife, Eleanor, played by Teresa Wright.

        -- Johnny Mercer’s lyric for Tangerine (music Victor Schertzinger) extols the charms of a vain and fickle Latin beauty. To the strains of this song, Barbara Stanwyck plays the ultimate femme fatale in Double Indemnity (1944), who conspires with insurance man Fred McMurray to eliminate her husband. In a flashback in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), the same song plays on the car radio when Stanwyck, playing a neurotic heiress this time, flaunts her father’s wealth to betray a friend and seduce Burt Lancaster. The great Jimmy Dorsey big band version of this song features Bob Eberle’s romantic solo followed by Helen O’Connell’s brassy satirical retort.  

        -- As David Raksin’s theme for Laura (1944) plays in the background, the homicide detective played by Dana Andrews becomes obsessed with the murder victim, a beautiful dame (Gene Tierney), whose picture hangs on the wall. Laura obligingly returns to life -- the corpse in the kitchen belonged to somebody else – and whenever in future we need to summon her up, we need only hum Raksin’s theme. Johnny Mercer added his lyric to the music months after the movie was released.

       -- To Have and Have Not (1944) is notable for being the first movie pairing Bogart and Bacall. It’s the one in which the foxy young actress seduces the hardened skeptic by teaching him how to whistle: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” The song she “sings” in the movie’s nightclub scene is How Little We Know (music Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics Johnny Mercer). There are three things to keep in mind about the scene. 1) It is the composer who is playing the piano. 2) The song is an under-appreciated gem in the Carmichael – Mercer canon; I like it almost as much as Skylark. 3) It is said that the young Andy Williams enhanced the voice coming out of the throat of Lauren Bacall. (4) Jacqueline Bouvier loved the song, and during her junior year in Paris, she wrote out the bridge in English and in her own French translation for the benefit of one of her French hosts.

        -- In The Clock (1945) office worker Judy Garland meets soldier Robert Walker on a two-day leave in New York City. At the moment they realize they are falling in love, the piano player in the restaurant is playing If I Had You (music Ted Shapiro, lyrics James Campbell and Reginald Connolly).

        -- Somebody puts a coin in the jukebox in the diner and out comes I Can’t Believe that You’re in Love with Me (music Jimmy McHugh, words Clarence Gaskill), triggering the recollected psychodrama in Edgar Ullmer’s strange reverie of an unreliable (unbelievable) narrator in Detour (1945). The movie is a paranoid masterpiece, and the very title of the song goes to the heart of its mystery. The viewer “can’t believe” the events he or she is witnessing, because the narrator is either delusional or a liar or both in some blend. The same song punctuates The Caine Mutiny, where it has a more conventional signification.

        -- A drunken Fredric March still in uniform and his game wife Myrna Loy dance to Among My Souvenirs (music Horatio Nicholls, lyrics Edgar Leslie) on his first night back from the war in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).  Hoagy Carmichael tickles the ivories at the gin joint where the reunited couple have gone with their daughter (Teresa Wright) and returning airman Dana Andrews.

        -- Rita Hayworth invites the American male in the form of tightlipped Glenn Ford to Put the Blame on Mame (music Doris Fisher, lyrics Alan Roberts) in Gilda (1946). In The Lady from Shanghai (1947), the same red-haired enchantress seduces Orson Welles and coyly sings Please Don’t Kiss Me (same songwriters), a phrase that says one thing and means its opposite. Given the way Hollywood films wink at one another, it’s no surprise that we hear an instrumental version of Put the Blame on Mame in the background when tough-guy Glenn Ford sets out to foil the killers in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953).

        -- The radio reliably pours out love songs in keeping with the plot twists in Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947). Humphrey Bogart plays an escaped convict with a new face who will escape to South America with Lauren Bacall if he can figure out who killed his pal and framed him for the murder. During the course of the movie we hear instrumentals of I Gotta a Right to Sing the Blues (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Ted Koehler), I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan (music Arthur Schwartz, lyrics Howard Dietz)\, and Someone to Watch Over Me (music George Gershwin, lyrics Ira Gershwin). “You like swing, I see,” says Bogart. “Yes, legitimate swing,” Bacall counters. When Dark Passage gets serious about the love story, we see a record spinning on Bacall’s record player and the golden voice of Jo Stafford sings Too Marvelous for Words (music Richard Whiting, lyrics Johnny Mercer) and legitimates the romance.

        -- In Key Largo (1948), the fourth Bogart-Bacall movie on this list, Claire Trevor plays a washed-up night-club singer and full-time lush in the entourage of gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson). Trevor sings Moanin’ Low (music Ralph Rainger, lyrics Howard Dietz) a capella, her voice faltering, and when she finishes the torch song, says, “Can I have that drink now, Johnny?”

        -- Manipulative Anne Baxter supplants Bette Davis as queen of the stage in All About Eve (1951), and the romantic Broadway ambiance of New York City is communicated in background instrumentals of all-star songs by Rodgers and Hart (Thou Swell, My Heart Stood Still), Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler (Stormy Weather), Arlen and Johnny Mercer (That Old Black Magic), and Ralph Freed and Burton Lane (How About You?).The last named begins, “I like New York in June.”

        The use of Among My Souvenirs in The Best Years of Our Lives is exemplary. Edgar Leslie’s 1927 lyric communicates regret at the passing of time. Trinkets and tokens diligently collected and treasured offer some consolation but do nothing to stop the flow of tears. In the movie, when the U. S. army sergeant played by March comes home he brings souvenirs of the Pacific war as gifts for his teenage son. But like the knife in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Crusoe in England,” when it has become a souvenir on the shelf after Crusoe returns home from his island, the mementos of the global conflict have lost their meaning. They seem vaguely unreal, lifeless. In contrast, the photograph of his wife that a hung-over March looks at the next morning – another sort of souvenir – has all the meaning in the world for him. And Among My Souvenirs – played on the piano by Hoagy Carmichael, hummed in the shower by a drunken March, and heard as background music -- unifies the whole sequence and endows it with the rich pathos that make the song so durable a jazz standard. I recommend that you listen to Art Tatum play it on the piano or, if you can get your mitts on it, a recording of Sinatra and Crosby doing it as a duet on television in the 1950s.

-- A version of this essay appears in Boulevard, ed. Richard Burgin.

"Gentleman's Agreement" [by David Lehman]

"Gentleman's Agreement" (1947), one of the great underrated black-and-white films from the idealistic late1940s, is now available streaming from Netflix, and I urge everyone to resist the temptation of watching all of "House of Cards" all at once and choose instead to spread the pleasure over the course of a week and to interrupt the flow by taking in this well-written, well-acted film, a monument to liberalism when it had its moment as the L word of choice. Gregory Peck stars as a journalist who comes up with a new angle on exposing anti-Semitism in America. The anti-Semitism critiqued is, to use a distinction Ezra Pound would have appreciated, the "suburban" rather than the extermination kind -- the separate but almost equal approach: country clubs and hotels restricted to gentiles; anti-Semitic hiring policies so ingrained that even in New York a well-qualified person named Cohen or Finkelstein would be wise to change her or his name when applying for a job; the assumption that a smart Jew would have figured out a way to avoid combat in World War II ("were you in public relations, Mr. Green?); even Jewish anti-Semitism -- the way a Jew will cringe in the presence of a stereotypically "kikey" (i.e. loud, vulgar, pushy) member of the faith. Elia Kazan directed the picture. The sterling supporting cast includes Dorothy McGuire, John Garfield, Celeste Holm, June Havoc, Anne Revere, Albert Dekker, Dean Stockwell, Sam Jaffe, and Jane Wyatt.

This is from the period when the script could make or break a Hollywood film. Moss Hart wrote this one and copped an Academy Award nominaation. The movie garnered eight other nominations and won thre, including the best picture Oscar. Eliza Kazan won for best director, and Celeste Holm deservedly took Holm an Oscar as best supportng actress (beating out the equally wonderful Anne Revere, who plays the journalist's mother). The lead was offered first to Cary Grant, who turned it down. But they got the the right star In Gregory Peck, who is to principled liberalism what Cary Grant is to suave urbanity. Peck took the role despite his agent's objections. I know he's supposed to be a wooden actor but I have always thought this an unfair characterization and if you see this movie (and "Twelve O'Clock High") I think you'll see my point.

You'll get no spoliers from me. The film is full of surprises, even if the most crucial one is given away in just about anything written about it. But here are some things you might like to know: (1) It's adapted from the best-selling novel of the same title by Laura Z. Hobson, which I read when I was fifteen and thought it was pretty good. (2) Darryl Zanuck, a gentile, who produced the movie for Twentieth Century Fox, decided to make it when he was turned down for membership in the "restricted" Los Angeles Country Club, whose management was under the mistaken belief that Zaniuck was Jewish. (3) More than a few facts about the making of the movie supports its central thesis. Samuel Goldwyn was among the Jewish movie moguls who feared that the making of the film would only stir up trouble -- that Jews would be wise not to call attention to themselves. (4) The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), associating Communism with Jew-lovers, called Zanuck, Kazan, John Garfield (real name: Julius Garfinkel), and Anne Revere to come to Washington and endure the committeee's contempt. Garfield, who refused to name names, suffered on the blacklist for a year and died of a heart attack shortly before being asked to testify a second time. He was only 39. (5) The movie's success was toasted at Los Angeles's Biltmore Hotel on December 12, 1948 with speeches and testimonials followed by an entertainment extravaganza in the hallowed Hollywood tradition. The night was capped off by the Hollywood debut of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. They were a hit. -- DL