Howard Pollack | The Ballad of John Latouche: An American Lyricist’s Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)

slipping again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard Pollack The Ballad of John Latouche: An American Lyricist’s Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)

 

Pollack’s wonderful new biography of lyricist/poet John Latouche is, at times, frustratingly academic in its often-overbearing detail of somewhat insignificant facts and is not the most gloriously written book one has read—but it is so utterly fascinating and revealing that one can forgive most of its flaws.

      First of all, a man who was fairly close friends with most of the major composers of the day, including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Vernon Duke, Virgil Thompson, Marc Blitzstein, Duke Ellington, Jerome Moross, Ned Rorem, Harold Arlen, Douglas Moore, John Cage, and so many more; who was a confidante to writers spanning from James Branch Cabell and Tennessee Williams (he introduced the playwright to his to his longtime companion) to Gore Vidal, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Frank O’Hara, Jane and Paul Bowles, W. H. Auden—he even briefly shared the famous Brooklyn house where the Bowles’ and Auden lived—William S. Burroughs, John Ashbery, and E. E. Cummings, artists and gallerists such as Larry Rivers and John Bernard Myers, and who was the companion of poet Kenward Elmslie for the last five years of his life; and who  simultaneously was great friends with numerous New York social figures—all of whom, except for a very few, thought him witty, entertaining, and utterly fascinating, even if— they nearly all agreed—he could be completely demanding and self-centric, is simply someone worth documenting.

     Besides all that, Latouche worked with numerous Europeans, helping or attempting to introduce American audiences to figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Bertolt Brecht, and numerous lesser figures. You might describe him as simply a seminal figure in the brilliant 1950s artistic, very gay New York world. And Pollack’s significant biography reveals aspects of US cultural history, bringing to the forefront what might otherwise have simply been forgotten. If nothing else, Latouche was a connecting link in the American cultural scene between European traditions, a new attempt to interconnect dance, music, and theater, and the so-called underground gay cabaret New York work that infused new life in the US theater scene throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s.        

                                                                                                                                                                

     More importantly, however, is the fact that the Richmond, Virginia-born writer also contributed significant lyrics to numerous musicals, operas, and other performative pieces, challenging the notions of Broadway musicals and operatic conventions in a way that was quite often frustrating yet totally liberating to his collaborators. Besides his remarkable literary salons, his lyrical compositions for the underground New York cabaret performers, and his tossed-off poetic contributions, Latouche had a rather remarkable theatrical career, including the lyrics for Vernon Duke’s and Lyn Root’s all-black musical (and later film, directed by Vincente Minelli) Cabin in the Sky (with Ethel Waters, Todd Duncan, Rex Ingram, J. Rosamond Johnson, Katherine Dunham and her dancers); Banjo Eyes, also composed by Vernon Duke, as a vehicle for Eddie Cantor;  The Lady Comes Across, music again by Vernon Duke, with book by Dawn Powell, choreography by George Balanchine, with Misha Auer, Gower Champion, and Eugenia Delarova, among many other notable dancers; a musical celebrating the Polish war efforts, Polonaise, with music by Chopin and directed by Stella Adler; Beggar’s Holiday, yet another version of The Beggar’s Opera, this with music by Duke Ellington, with an interracial cast; the well-received Ballet Ballads, with music by Jerome Moross and choreography by Hanya Holm, including 3 of the 4 verbally composed ballets by Latouche: Willie the Weeper, Riding Hood Revisted, and the notable The Eccentricities of Davy Crockett, all of which the singers both danced and sang; the award-winning The Golden Apple (again with music by Jerome Moross, and starring Kaye Ballard and Stephen Douglas, which won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for Best Musical of 1954); The Vamp (with James Mundy and starring Carol Channing); the successful American opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe, composed by Douglas Moore; as, finally, the lyrics to, at least the first act, for Leonard Bernstein’s and Lillian Hellman’s musical Candide—all before he died in 1956 at the young age of 42! These contributions all from a man who himself thought he was perhaps “lazy” and “desultory,” and who was, in fact, an extreme alcoholic, and who most friends would have described as a person who really was more of a raconteur than a creator. Most of these works, accept The Ballad of Baby Doe, alas were also Broadway failures, why most Americans have never even heard of his name!  How do you begin explaining such a remarkable life? Pollack had clearly a large task in undertaking this biography.

       Perhaps the only thing you can do is return to the lyrics, which my friend Kenward Elmslie asked me to do time again. I wish I’d known of Elmslie’s relationship with Latouche—with my love of all things theater, I did, in fact, know a little (very little I now perceive) of Latouche—and, of course, I wish I had then read more about the lyricist: I’d have immediately done a book! We can never truly forgive ourselves for youthful ignorance.

       But I will take a few of the lyrics to try to redeem myself. Latouche, as Pollack makes quite clear, often with excellent poetic analysis, was truly a brilliant lyricist. Let’s begin with his early lyric from Cabin in the Sky, a song sung by the always remarkable singer/actor Ethel Waters (a song performed by nearly every major singer including Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and numerous others), and which might almost characterize Latouche’s life, who fell in love again and again—a true romantic of the old Southern tradition:

 

Here I go again

I hear those trumpets blow again

All aglow again

Taking a chance on love

Here I slide again

About to take that ride again

Starry eyed again

Taking a chance on love

I thought that cards were a frame-up

I never would try

But Now I'm taking the game up

And the ace of hearts is high

Things are mending now

I see a rainbow blending now

We'll have a happy ending now

Taking a chance on love

 

Here I slip again

About to take that tip again

Got my grip again

Taking a chance on love

Now I prove again

That I can make life move again

In the grove again

Taking a chance on love

I walk around with a horseshoe

In clover I lie

And brother rabbit of course you

Better kiss your foot good-bye

On the ball again

I'm riding for a fall again

I'm gonna give my all again

Taking a chance on love

 

     This combination of Cole Porter and the great American romantic tradition is so remarkable that I think I hardly need delineate the line by line transitions. But it is important to note, that despite the repeat again and again of precisely that word, Latouche uses inner rhyme such as, in the first stanza, “blow”/”aglow”/ “slide”/ “ride”/ “eyed”/ “tired”/ “mending” / “blending,” etc. But it is his metaphors about luck and change that truly stand out in his clever lyrics—the horseshoe, clover, and the rabbit who she even warns ahead of time—that demonstrates her leap into the impossible world of love that is so totally engaging that we share her leap into that new world with joy and pleasure. As many critics have noted, Latouche is a kind of later-day Lorenz Hart, and not just because both were gay, but because of how they used basically gay situations to express heterosexual relationships. One only need compare Latouche’s highly clever lyrics with Hart’s beautiful ballad, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” to recognize their similarities.

 

Seen a lot

I mean I lot

But now I'm like sweet seventeen a lot

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I

 

I'll sing to him

Each spring to him

And worship the trousers that cling to him

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I

 

     It’s clear just from the lyrics that the poet took chances far too often but did finally find love. And it’s painful to comprehend the difficult transition, just as it is for even the breezy renditions sung by Waters and Fitzgerald. But for me, Judy Garland’s and Barbara Streisand’s slower versions really capture the nature of Latouche’s happy/rather frightening possibilities of new love. Isn’t that what love is all about, wonderfully possible but terribly frightening in the same very moment, which is what his lyrics truly express?

     Or, consider his wonderful song “Lazy Afternoon” from The Golden Apple, where, basically that young Helen seduces Paris:

 

It's a lazy afternoon

And the beetle bugs are zooming

And the tulip trees are blooming

And there's not another human in view,

But us two

It's a lazy afternoon

And the farmer leaves his reaping

In the meadow cows are sleeping

And the speckled trout stop leaping up stream

As we dream

A fat pink cloud hangs over the hill

Unfolding like a rose

If you hold my hand and sit real still,

You can hear the grass as it grows

It's a hazy afternoon

And I know a place that's quiet, except for daisies running riot

And there's no one passing by it to see

Come spend this lazy afternoon with me

This is basically Jerome Moross’ song, with its it curling in melody, undulating into completely sleepy rhythms that simultaneously seduce the figures into a sexual drowsiness; but it’s Latouche’s wonderful lyrics that reconfirm that, with the “zooming” / “blooming” end rhymes surprising us with how the “view” suddenly zooms in the “us two,” seducing the couple to sit “real still” to hear the grass grow and the “daisies running riot.” The “reaping”/ “sleeping”/ is suddenly cut by the “leaping” by the interruption of “up stream,” a place distant from this “hazy afternoon.” And even the daisies’ “riot,” is cut short by the fact that “no one passing by it to see.” The central focus of this lovely, falling melody is, finally, the “me,” Helen who is singing it. Song lyrics don’t usually have such marvelous subtlety. But Latouche always gave them his whole, which makes a basically end-rhyme lyric something more important that what it first seems.

      Even more profound, in many respects are Latoche’s lyrics, highly romantic again, and even suggesting fellow Virginian Edgar Allen Poe, for The Ballad of Baby Doe, these from the opening stanzas of the Moore operatic work “The Willow Song.”

 

Ah!

Willow, where we met together

Willow, when our love was new

Willow, if he once

should be returning

Pray tell him I am weeping too.

 

So far from each other

While the days pass

In their emptiness away.

Oh my love, must it be forever

Never once again

To meet as on that day?

And never rediscover

The way of telling

The way of knowing

All our hearts would say.

 

Gone are the ways of pleasure

Gone are the friends I had of yore

Only the recollection fatal

Of the word that was spoken:

Nevermore.

 

     Here Latouche delays the rhymes, “day” / “say,” “yore” / “nevermore,” while even holding other end rhymes into other stanzas such as “together” / “forever” / “Never” and postponing the other off-rhyme “pleasure.” Everything in this lyric is delayed, attenuated as the couple’s love has been, pushed into a realm that neither of them can any longer comprehend. Rhyme itself is used as a strange device of delay, “away” / “day” / “say.” As Moore’s music arches into high soprano arias, Latouche’s language keeps her weeping down to earth, delayed, and, just perhaps, a bit too knowing and rehearsed, subtly suggesting that the loving Baby Doe is just a bit more knowledgeable about her power over the wealthy Horace than we might suspect. Yet, she remains a kind of innocent here, trying to “rediscover” what “All our hearts would say.” In short, Latouche makes this aria one in which Baby Doe is both wise and innocent, a woman on the make who is, nonetheless very much in love. That balance in a single two stanzas is what I might describe as pure genius.

     I have to admit, finally, by the time I finished Howard Pollack’s long (565 pages, with notes) volume, I had too fallen in love with John Latouche. Wish I’d known him, and I also wish my friend Kenward had told me more about him. But even friends don’t always truly communicate their deepest feelings, do they?

 

Los Angeles, February 17, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2018).

Rodrigo de Souza Leäo | Todos os cachorros ão azuis (All Dogs Are Blue)

rimbaud wants to marry me

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rodrigo de Souza Leäo All Dogs Are Blue, translated by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler from Todos os cachorros são azuis) (High Wycombe, Bucks, United Kingdom: And Other Stories, 2013)

 

Let me just begin this review by stating the obvious: Brazilian writer Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs Are Blue is like no other book in the world. That is not to say it is entirely original; one of its charms is its many literary and social references, including the author’s own re-summarization of the commonplaces (if you can describe any such experience has having something in common with anything or anyone else) of living in a lunatic asylum. Although the author may not have read Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or seen the Hollywood social-shocker, Anatole Litvak’s 1948 film The Snake Pit, these works, at moments, have a kinship with Souza Leão’s exuberant depiction of his life in hell.

 

    But then again, this young author, who died, at the age of 43, just as this book was published, may have known both of those works. For a man who spent so many years locked away in an asylum, his mind and body interminably altered by drugs, Souza Leão relies on a huge body of international film, Brazilian, South American and European poetry, music, television, and popular events that might put many authors free from any of these strictures to shame. Indeed, two major poets of the 19th century, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, regularly visit him in his cage in the little room to which he has been consigned in the favela-adjacent institution along with not only numerous other mad men and women, but criminals, and the elderly who have nowhere else to go. Although there are evidently beautiful plants and trees surrounding his building, all day long his fellow prisoners cry out, bang their heads against the wall, and listen to loud television, while at night the endless music and screams of the slums washes over his troubled dreams.

 

                 Night came and along with it came the worst thing of all: the soundtrack.

                 Our asylum was next to a favela. Rio funk played all night long and all

                 day too. Go Lacraia, go Lacraia, go Lacraia! Go Serginho, go Serginho.

                 Sleeping with the rubbish playing…blaring!

 

    Our hero’s entire world turns different colors depending upon which drug has just been injected into his veins: Benzetacil, Haldol (blue, like the color of his stuffed dog at home), and numerous other concoctions that force the patients to hallucinate and vegetate through what they have left of their lives. Part of the problem, lucidly argues the author, is that clinics mix up their types of patients, trying to medicate them as if they were all suffering from the same problems.

      It’s little wonder that in such an interruptive world, Souza Leão has created a work that is not only raw in its vocabulary, filled with descriptions of and events that refer to bodily functions—spit, vomit, urine, shit, etc.—but linguistically lurches from association to association, radically moving from passages of description, to narrative events past and present, moving from the external to the internal in mid-sentence. “Real” visits from his mother and father are confused with his magical camaraderie with Rimbaud and his more casual friendship with Baudelaire. A discussion of electroshock therapy quickly grows into a serious consideration of why women are not allowed to cohabit with men, which, in turn, brings up the subject of sex, which the narrator associates with his own loneliness and his ultimate sense of nothingness. The lunatics’ performances on a karaoke machine are quickly interrupted by the appearance of B agents, searching for the killer of the clinic’s former locked-away criminal, Fearsome Madman, who previously killed many people but was afraid of the narrator because he sounded like his father. Some associations function through a sort of psychological undercurrent, while others seem to come out of nowhere. Readers who seek for coherent and an authorially controlled narrative, will certainly be frustrated in reading All Dogs Are Blue. Stylists will find the work rough-going, and logicians will quickly abandon it with despair.

      Yet this short fiction, in its subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle repetitions of names, events, slang and cultural experiences, in the end, makes sense in a way that those whom we might describe as sane might never perceive:

 

                  Finally they gave me some glasses. But with the glasses I could

                  only look inside people.      

     

And there are moments when Souza Leäo and his narrator philosophize in a manner that reaches near profundity:

 

                  Violence is so fascinating, and our lives, so normal. I’m talking

                  about a specific kind of violence. Everything can be violent. Even

                  God.  

 

Clearly the narrator of this sometimes maddening work is mad throughout, but he recognizes that in that madness he can at least say what he wants. And in his recognition of his own madness, our hero recognizes his own condition in a way that few us do. He is aware not only that someday he will die, but just how he might die:

 

                  I take Haldol* to be under no illusions that I’ll die mad one day,

                  somewhere dirty, without any food. It’s the way every madman

                  ends.

 

His friend Rimbaud falls in love with him, contacts AIDS, and even asks the narrator to marry him, but Souza Leão and his persona doesn’t lose sight of his own reality, the fact that he, himself, is not gay. And, in the end, both Rimbaud and Baudelaire disappear, only to be replaced by other hallucinations of a vast supportive society of peace-loving Todogs, who, despite the narrator’s imprisonment, grow to include millions of members, altering the reality of the planet. Aren’t all such dreamers described as mad? Even if one’s dream and the whole of one’s past ends up in the rubbish like the narrator’s blue dog, it can always be restored through the imagination, no matter how troubled and sick it has become.

      All Dogs Are Blue is no book for literary purists, but is a great read for anyone who can embrace the human spirit behind any written text.

 

*Haloperidol, used in the treatment of schizophrenia, acute psychosis, mania, delirium and other serious psychological illnesses.

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2014

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Fall 2014) [on-line edition]

William J. Lederer and Eugen Burdick | The Ugly American / 1958

efforts to communicate

by Douglas Messerli

 

William J. Lederer and Eugen Burdick The Ugly American (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1958)

 

Given our increasingly dismissive attitude for individuals who lie outside of the latitudes of our so-called sacred domain, and given our President’s absolute inability to comprehend our interrelationships with the world at large and our commitment to many different countries, both long-term allies and others, like the Kurds, who have and might continue to have worked with us in difficult international dilemmas, I thought it might be time to reread the 1958 political fiction, The Ugly American, by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick—a book of immense importance in my childhood, which along with much of the nation I remember having read at the age of 11. To me, in retrospect, it seemed at the time as a terrifying revelation of the American inability to perceive how to relate to the numerous cultures in which we were embedded. How could we not, I wondered even as a child, attempt to comprehend what the world might look like in Burma, Sarkhan (the fiction’s mythical title for Viet Nam), and other countries in Southeast Asia, not to speak of what the book suggested about our nefarious involvements in South America and elsewhere?

      The book, one of the great bookselling works of all time by Lederer, previously a special assistant and political scientist II to the commander in chief of the US forces in the Pacific and Asian theater and Burdick, who had served in the Navy during World War (it has sold more than 4 million copies), truly influenced the US political values, and led President John Kennedy to create—after Senator Hubert Humphrey had attempted and failed to establish such a program—founding the Peace Corps to bring everyday Americans into the broader world in order to help poorer countries across the world to deal with everyday problems in poorer international countries which the US had basically ignored.

      I so admired this program that I truly wanted, when I approached college age to go “abroad” (how we spoke in those days about countries other than our own), and to commit myself so some country—I imagined going to Afghanistan for some inexplicable reason—but I was still too young and needed to get a college education. My now-dead acquittance John McLaughlin (married for years to my long editorial assistant Diana Bing Daves McLaughlin) and artist Martin Puryear (who we also knew well) in the African country of Sierra Leone, both served together in the Peace Corps and were proud of doing so.

      Rereading this iconic text, I perceived that it was not quite as radical as I might have originally imagined. Mostly, it is a dichotomous interchange between lower underlying American officials such as Homer Atkins and Tom Knox, working with locals in an intimate way, greeting the citizens they met in Southeast Asia, below an example of Tom Knox’s friendly stick-out-the-hand greetings of his constituents—

 

     “Hey there, feller,” Tom would say to the first man he saw in a village. “Who/s the

     Number One man around here? My name is Tom Knox. He spoke a chaotic mixture of

     Cambodian, French, and farmyard English. But no one failed to understand him,

     And everyone valued the sincerity of his efforts to communicate.—

 

who then went on to talk about their local chicken problems. Comparing these local yokels with the Embassy heads such as "Lucky" Lou Sears, one of who many isolate themselves in their headquarters, seldom meeting any of the locals.

      It’s a simplistic, if probably true, dichotomy that speaks for the vast differences between those who might care and those who simply didn’t comprehend what they were representing a far more important position of the USA. Most of the higher-ups can’t speak the local languages—which I am certain is even more true today—while their Soviet counterparts spoke the local languages and assimilated into the local societies. It’s a simplistic, if very powerful tale, that demonstrates, chapter by chapter, just how much we failed to comprehend, as governmental representatives, how we might have truly related our presumably good intents while evidently having abandoned local involvement. We chose the latter, and today have continued that that abonnement to even a further degree.

      We are now a culture of abandonment, a culture, as Trump proclaims, again and again, that is interested simply in “America first.”

       If, after re-reading the 1958 political fiction, I might declare it to be terribly simplistic in its notion of the good and the bad Americans serving in positions around the world, I am even more disturbed today—in a time when many international positions have not even been filled, let alone with qualified or even interested officials. If once the Homer Atkins’ and Tom Knox’s of this 1958 fiction, who worked behind the lines, and later with the terribly well-meaning later Peace Corps volunteers, did offer the world a different vision of American involvement, I am afraid that we have newly become even more ugly Americans not only to those we don’t know but to our previous friends.

      One only need to read the recent The New Yorker essay (December 24/31 2018) about how absolutely rude, clumsy, and virulent Trump was to Angela Merkel and the entire NATO gathering to realize how very ugly we are now perceived.

      In the long perspective it almost appears that Lederer’s and Burdick’s terrible officials might almost be redeemed; today, I am afraid, that possibility has been utterly lost.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2018

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (December 2018)

 

George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell | Suppressed Desires / 1915, 2022 ed.

celebrating suppression

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell Suppressed Desires (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2022)

 

George Cram Cook's and Susan Glaspell's satire on Freudian analysis was first produced in Provincetown in July of 1915, as the very second play performed by the company. There is some question whether Cook and Glaspell arrived in Provincetown with the play in hand, or whether, naive as they were about theater, they presumed that, since they themselves were to be the major actors, they could simply ad lib the work. What that might mean for the character of Mabel, played in Provincetown by Lucy Huffaker, is not clear. But perhaps, since she was a close friend of Glaspell's, she knew the subject intimately.

   The issues which the play satirized were well known throughout Greenwich Village, where psychoanalyst A. A. Brill had introduced Freud's and Jung's theories, and numerous essays had been written and published, particularly Max Eastman's two-part article in June and July in Everybody's Magazine. Theater historian Jeff Kennedy argues that the playwright couple had obviously read Eastman's piece—which gives further credence to the idea that they were writing the play at the very time of the production—because of its reference to a Freudian case in which a woman had repressed feelings for her brother-in-law and Eastman's mention a quote from A. A. Brill about a woman who dreamt she was in a street with a flock of chickens.

     Some critics argue that the performance occurred before Glaspell actually wrote down most of the play's best lines, but the couple would have had to be brilliantly clever performers to ad lib some of the most hilarious of the psychoanalysts' interpretations, namely that the command Mabel hears, "Step hen," actually calls up her brother's-in-law's first name, Stephen, and that the whole image of a hen derives from her sister-in-law's first name, Henrietta. And the play, although at times no more than a one-line joke about psychoanalysis, is overall far more sophisticated than its structure might suggest.

     Henrietta may be laughed at for her complete immersion in and belief of Freud's and Jung's theories, but she is also presented as an intelligent, strong-willed, and free-wheeling woman, able—even with great pain—to give up her husband if he truly feels walled-in by their relationship. What she cannot endure is that her sister might also be in love with him and all too willing to run off with the man for whom the psychiatrist has convinced her she is repressing her love.

     This short play is a long ways from almost any other work of its day in presenting a woman who is able to speak intelligently on psychology and even write layman essays on the subject. Although Henrietta is not trained as a psychologist, she nearly as convincing in her interpretations of her sister's dream as the psychiatrist; and she is most perceptive in observing her own husband's disenchantment with his life, part of which involves her compulsion to awaken him several times each night, demanding to hear his dreams. The situation reminds me of the incidents in Marianne Hauser's novel, Dark Dominion, a work which did not appear until 1947!

     Even if upon discovering that those around her have been suppressing desires that exclude her— Henrietta changes her entire viewpoint of the psychoanalytic world too quickly—the play still reveals that she is open-minded about life, and if, at play's end, although both she and Stephen suggest that Mabel should suppress her desires, the irony of their statement is that they are not likely to celebrate suppression. For is it is clear that the couple at the heart of the play will continue being quite forthright about their likes and dislikes.

     If Suppressed Desires is not a great satire, seeming at times to be more a skit than a one-act play, it is an intelligent skit, witty and, in many respects, far ahead of its time.

 

Los Angeles, June 24, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (June 2011)