DECEMBER 26 [1999]

Christmas: Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter

One of the things I liked about living in England in the 1970S was Boxing Day. It's the name the English gave to the day after Christmas. No one is quite sure where it came from. Possibly there was a time when the villages held holiday boxing matches. It has come to seem to mean the day you lounge around in a litter of boxes and recover from Christmas. In the 1970s the BBC celebrated Boxing Day by showing a day-long festival of old American musicals. In the winter of 1976 they did musicals based on the songs of George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter. It was also a day when one had endless invitations to drop in at other people's houses.

We made a round of the local villages in Cambridgeshire with names like Little Shelford and Long Melford and Cherry Hinton. That year it was an icy cold day with huge clouds scudding over the flat, muddy East Anglian landscape that Thomas Constable had painted with such accuracy for the piled, looming grandeur of the clouds, and a North Sea wind his paintings

suggested that was, however, cruelty itself.

I approved of the idea of a second day of celebration to recover from the first day of celebration. The social round could be intense. There was ale and toasted cheese at the flat of an Hungarian literary scholar in Cambridge. It was supposedly the flat in which Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had lived briefly and seemed, I was willing to think after a couple of pints, haunted by their presence. A Swedish poet out in a village called Whittlesford had a roaring fire, three or four kinds of pickled herring, and a choice of strong tea or little shot glasses of single malt whiskey. If the drive between parties was long, you could also stop in at the pubs.

The heater in our English Ford wasn't especially effective, and our kids loved the pubs with their coal fires and steaming pork pies, so we made a few stops. As the designated driver, I nursed mulled ciders. Everywhere we went, we would hear, from a television set somewhere in the room, fragments of the lyrics of Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter. Occasionally a group would gather around it and sing along. So our day was punctuated by bits and pieces of those songs and their inventive lyrics.

They laughed at me wanting you,

Said I was reaching for the moon;

But oh, you came through-

Now they'll have to change their tune.

*

Maybe I shall meet him Sunday,

Maybe Monday-maybe not;

Still I'm sure I'll meet him one day-

Maybe Tuesday

Will be my good news day.

-Ira Gershwin

You're a rose,

You're Inferno's Dante,

You're the nose

On the great Durante.

-Cole Porter

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus

When he said the world was round;

They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.

-Gershwin, again

If she then wants an all-by-herself night,

Let her rest ev'ry 'leventh or "Twelfth Night"

*

It's the wrong time and the wrong place,

Though your face is charming, it's the wrong face

*

Even overeducated fleas do it

Let's do it, let's ...

-Porter

'S awful nice! 'S paradise-

'S what I love to see!

-Gershwin

I remember at the party in Whittlesford a Mexican scholar explaining that in Mexico City the shot glasses of whiskey (or tequila) were called caballitos, "little horses." This led to jokes about "one-horse open sleighs" and "laughing all the way." And this led, via the television, to an impressive rendition in fluent English with trilled r's of "I Got Rhythm."

It seems, in retrospect, an odd way to spend an English Christmas. I thought about it last week because I had spent a day shopping on Madison Avenue in New York. In every store some of those songs were playing in the background, Fred Astaire versions and Billie Holiday versions and Ella Fitzgerald versions. It called up the city of the 1920s and 1930s as a magical place and time. Much of the magic, it seemed, had to do with the wit of a playful or unexpected rhythm. Strange that a New York that was already a fantasy of the young lyricists of the time has become our fantasy, the Christmas poetry of a consumer culture. In the electronics store, some of the lyrics even seemed prophetic:

the radio and the telephone

and the movies that we know

May just be passing fancies-

And in time may go,

But oh,-

-Gershwin

Robert Hass: Now & Then