DECEMBER 26
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 Cambridge
shire 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
laugh at Christopher Columbus
When he said
the world was round;
They all
laugh when Edison recorded sound.
-Gershwin,
again
If she then
wants an all-by-herself night,
Let her rest
ev'ry 'leventh of "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 rhyme.
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 / 1999
