Miles and miles and miles of Hart

Robert Cushman

THE COMPLETE LYRICS OF LORENZ HART edited by Robert Kimball and Dorothy Hart

Hamish Hamilton, £25

hen the word 'poet' is applied to a songwriter there are usually grounds for suspicion. It means that a sound dramatic versifier like Oscar Hammerstein has writ- ten something flowery, or that a mystic hack like Bob Dylan has written something obscure. There were, though, two Amer- ican lyricists who sometimes — just some- times — might be accounted poets; two who found concrete unhackneyed ways of depicting people, scenes and emotional states, and who maintained consistent, recognisable personalities in their work: Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart.

The Porter voice was frigidly sophisti- cated, though warmed (and occasionally over-heated) by his music; he wrote love songs for characters who sounded, even if they had only just met, as if they were on the brink of divorce. Hart was the oppo- site. He had a cynical turn of phrase but essentially he spent 30 years of his career writing courtship songs. The textbook view is that Hart's cleverness was made palat- able by the glow of Richard Rodgers' music. In fact Rodgers was the tougher of the two: a well-adjusted businessman whose career rode right on after Hart had succumbed to alcohol and despair. It almost seems that Rodgers could hardly wait for Hart to disappear so that he could get on with his collaboration with Ham- merstein, a partnership that established them as Broadway's favourite uncles. But with Hart he had written, apart from a heap of luscious ballads, some wire-drawn percussive rhythm tunes. When the two of them settled down to their toughest (and penultimate) assignment, Pal Joey, Rodgers' music captured the blowsiness and brassiness of the Chicago night-clubs more successfully than Hart's lyrics, most of which sounded forced.

At the beginning of their joint career, though, Hart left no doubts as to what he was about. The partners' first published song is a portent:

I'll call each dude a pest You like in Budapest.

Oh, for far Peru! I'll go to hell for ya, Or Philadelphia, Any Old Place With You.

What counts, and what attracts, is the airy chivalry of it. The trick-rhymes are less important for themselves than for the compliment they imply: all this cleverness, just for you. Puns as a love-offering. You have to be young to get away with that, or to appreciate it; but in musical comedy that hardly matters. Every show has at least one juvenile couple (the usual ration was two: one more or less straight, and one more or less funny) and Rodgers and Hart went on turning out duets for them. Their first big hit, Manhattan (1922) was a perfect exam- ple, and the locale was part of the perfec- tion:

As black as onyx We'll find the Bronnix Park Express.

Our Flatbush flat, I guess, Will be a great success, More or less.

The last line plays at world-weariness. The precociousness and the protectiveness the sense that falling in love gives you the right to try on long words as if they were long pants — comes, literally, with the territory. The show in which that song received its first public exposure, Garrick Gaieties, was originally an in-house enter- tainment for the Theatre Guild, with a cast of young actors. There's a backstage air, or a collegiate air, about all those springtime songs of Rodgers and Hart. They pursued the mood through 'Mountain Greenery' (the Manhattan kids go to the country), `Thou Swell' whose verse (`You are so gracefullHave you wings?/You have a faceful/Of nice things') is the acme of flip tenderness, and 'My Funny Valentine', a series of gently tongue-in-cheek insults: `Your looks are laughable/ Unphotographable'. How could that be cruel? 'Unphotographable' is far too clever a word to mean 'ugly'.

Smart these lyrics may be, but they are also thin-skinned. They plainly represent Hart's idea of what he would have liked love to be: what he would have liked to say, and have said. If you come across the songs in your own adolescence, you are likely to feel the same about them — that this is literacy made sexy.

Just as seductive as the happy songs are the sad ones. Hart — homosexual and guilty about it, five feet tall, apparently prone to falling in love with unresponsive girls — wallowed in self-pity but somehow did it without sentimentality. You have to be unnaturally hard-hearted not to enjoy wallowing with him. One of his song titles, `Glad To Be Unhappy', says it wonderful- ly: says it, in fact, better than the song itself, which has trouble stretching out its conceit the required 32 bars:

Like a straying baby lamb With no mammy and no pappy, I'm so unhappy, But oh, so glad.

Can we really believe in masochistic young orphaned sheep? The verse to the song, though, is tremendous. It has an arresting conversational opening:

Look at yourself.

If you had a sense of humour You would laugh to beat the band

and proceeds to

Since you took it right On the chin, You have lost that bright Toothpaste grin.

The 'toothpaste grin' is finest Hart: a moment nailed down with an up-to-the- minute image no one else had thought of using. His very best lyric, 'It Never En- tered My Mind' is a parade of such moments:

Once you told me I was mistaken.

That I'd awaken with the sun.

And order orange juice for one.

It never entered my mind.

The understated title-phrase — shorthand for heartbreak — hangs in the air. Hart's unrequited love songs are full of tossed-off phrases like that: 'Spring is here — I hear'; `I admire the moon — as a moon — just a moon.' He has the lyricist's greatest gift, and the one most glaringly absent from the world today: a feeling for the weight of words.

He could characterise by bitter under- statement, as in the celebrated dance-hall hostess's lament with its curled-lip 'dance and be merry, it's only a dime . . . come on, big boy, Ten Cents a Dance' and its wonderfully unexpected

Though I've a chorus of elderly beaux Stockings are porous with holes at the toes.

Not many songwriters would have thought of 'porous'. Pretty near the beginning of his career, in a little-known song called `This Funny World' (1928), he sounded his pessimism with a fearful clarity that cer- tainly sprang from self-pity but managed to universalise it, and turn it into compassion.

This funny world Makes fun of the things that you strive for. This funny world Can laugh at the dreams you're alive for.

There is also — though there's less of it than is sometimes assumed — a pungent vein of social satire in Hart. In 'Disgusting- ly Rich' he ridiculed the haut monde on his own outsider's terms, not, as Porter would have done, on those of the world itself. Better still was 'Too Good for the Average Man'.

Lots of kids for a poor wife are dandy. Girls of fashion can be choosy.

Birth control and the modus operandi Are much too good for the average floozy!

Hart was really flying in that one, marvel- lously inventive, sardonic, colloquial and tight, with rhymes that snap like padlocks.

Hart's most articulate critic has been the man most people would regard as his heir, Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim has raged continually at what he calls Hart's 'sloppi- ness'. As a matter of fact, he's right. Hart could often be careless; he could accent wrongly; he could force rhymes. His last show, By Jupiter, based on the story of Hercules and the Amazons, is a jungle of misremembered mythology, tired sex- reversal jokes, and embarrassingly loose anachronisms. (An Amazon's enforced husband longs for a wedding trip to 'Nige- rian Falls'.) But, in grudgingly commend- ing Hart's 'world-weary attitude', Sond- heim actually gave the game away. We judge a writer, after all, by his best work, and the point is that Hart has an attitude, has a character, has a tone. It may even limit him as a dramatic writer (all Hart's songs are finally about Hart, not about the person who officially sings them) but at the period at which he was writing, musicals were not expected to concern themselves much with plot or character.

Those who know the tunes will have been singing along as they have read this. Those who do not will probably have been baffled. It is hard to read lyrics: if they are not familiar they seem formless. So this book, which accumulates 650 of them, is more of a reference work than a literary treat. It is a very handsome artefact, like Robert Kimball's companion volume on Porter: definitely something to be thankful for. Some lyrics even these assiduous editors could not track down. But Hart's best friends never said he was tidy.