P.S. (18 page)

 

She was great, impeccable.

 

 

Well, to make the transition from verse writing to songwriting is like a leap from Peter’s foot to Satan’s knee, or Satan’s foot to Peter’s knee. It’s an altogether different medium. Verse writing is an intellectual pursuit. You sit at home with a book, you are quiet, you absorb the thought, you chuckle to yourself. A song done in the theater is an emotional explosion. At the end of it you expect applause. You’ve got to move an audience, not only with the words, but with the emphasis on the music.

 

 

Right. That’s why we call it act one, act two. You act things out. When you act things, you’re dramatizing, to have drama, song, give you that extra dimension that plain conversation does not give you. It’s the same as novel writing and histrionic writing,
dialogue writing for the stage. They’re two different things. One has to have movement, emotion, drama, force, explosion. The other has to have intellectual perception, peace, absorption, in a quiet way. And that’s why for every thousand novel writers and prose writers, there’s one playwright, all right.

 

 

Shaw was a master of both. But not only that; he was not only a master of prose and the stage, but he was a master of political science; he was a master of what the world was about. He knew the theory of evolution, the Darwinian theory. He knew Freud. In other words, he was a total man. And to be a good writer, even a lyric writer, you must be a total man. You must know you’re living in a world of Darwin, and Freud, and Shaw, and Einstein. If you don’t know that, and if you don’t combine all these things in an entertaining way in what you do, then you’re meaningless; then you’re only getting a hit record and making a million dollars.

 

 

That’s right; that’s right.

 

The realist in me.

 

What have you from
At This Point in Rhyme
?

 

Well, here’s a couple I seem to like. This is called “Fail Safe.”

 

This one is called “The Enemy List,” of which I happened to be a victim once.

 

And years later they’re called patriots. Yeah. That happened to a fellow named Tom Paine, remember? Galileo.

 

I have one. I have some people who are my favorite poison ivies, if you’ll forgive me. And this is called “A Saint He Ain’t.” It’s a person I have to listen to every time I turn the radio on, once in a while, by mistake.

[
Chuckles
]
Here’s one. It’s about critics. This is Shaw—you’re quoting Shaw at the beginning.

 

“The professional critic is a frustrated writer”—GBS. Here’s Harburg.

[
Chuckles
]
Shaw would have liked that very much.

 

Yes. He influenced me a great deal, this kind of thinking. Here’s one I like, a little quick one called “Of Thee I Sing, Babel.”

 

There’s no doubt about it. From all my reading, from all my thinking, and don’t forget, I’ve reached an age now where I can claim a little wisdom.

 

 

And I think that the world is an experiment. That the way a man in a laboratory experiments with a test tube, the world is an experiment for something on the outside, for nature. Nature wants to survive. Nature wants to have birth, creation, growth. And it is constantly trying to find a species that will live in harmony with its laws and all its elements. And she is trying very hard to get that superman, the man that will live in conjunction with nature, with all its elements. So that he won’t be neurotic. So that he will be at peace. So that he can enjoy the beauty of all that life offers us. And so far, she has tried many species. She has tried the albatross, and the albatross went out of business. She has tried the dinosaur; the dinosaur went out of business. As soon as they get too big for themselves, and too powerful, something happens to the species. In fact, nature has tried hundreds and hundreds of species. Man is nothing more than another species of nature, which so far has shown the greatest acumen for survival. But he is not beyond all the others; he is not any greater than any of these other species. And nature has no use for a guest that is not a good guest in its logistics.

 

 

Right. If we can’t be decent human beings and have respect for one another, and know the laws of nature, and the laws of mankind, nature’s got no use for us and will wipe us out as easily as she did any of the insects.

 

I’m thinking
At This Point in Rhyme
really wittily, funnily, nimbly says all this with humor. One more from that, and then I’ve got to ask you about
Bloomer Girl.

 

Well, now here is a poem, I think, in which I offer, “The Far Out Generation,” in respect to what we’re saying.

But then, as you say that, you also are saying, you speak always of the beauty. I’m thinking of that song from
Finian’s
, “Look to the Rainbow.”
By the way, we haven’t talked about
Bloomer Girl. Bloomer Girl
dealt with the suffragists, Seneca Falls, and abolitionists all at the same time. If ever there were a contemporary musical . . . When was
Bloomer Girl
written?

 

Nineteen forty-four.

 

 

That’s right.

 

If ever there were a woman’s movement musical . . . Now, you called the shots then. That could run for years, it seems to me. If
MS
magazine could sponsor a month of that, and now could sponsor a year of it.

 

Well, I’m hoping that somebody will revive it again because it’s so apropos now. It’s everything that the people working for the ERA are saying.

 

You know, just as everything is related, and I think . . . you speak of the whole man—you’re a whole man, all around. In
Bloomer Girl
, just as you were saying a moment ago about the human species and the need for a whole man, your artistry reflects that. Because in
Bloomer Girl
is a song the slave sings—Dooley Wilson, “the runaway slave.” It’s about when the world was an onion, the eagle and me. And you describe in a way—you remember how those lines go again?

 

Yes. We showed that the women’s movement was part of an indivisible fight for equality. Equality cannot be divided. If there’s no equality for the black man, there is no equality for
anybody, because if you can do that to one minority, you can do it to all. And the women knew that, and so they kept an underground railway in 1860, and they helped the runaway slaves to get across the border. So one of the songs in
Bloomer Girl
was “The Eagle and Me,” which went . . . I wish I had some music to keep me on pitch. [He recites]

FRAN ANSLEY, 21: My mother had a really big family . . . she was one of seven kids. And she brought me up, not on fairy tales, but on stories about what she and her family used to do, and that meant the Depression, and other stuff, too. So they feel almost like fairy tales to me, because she used to tell me bedtime stories about that kind of thing.

 

TOM YODER: My mother has a fantastic story, in my opinion, of growing up in the Depression in a small town in central Illinois. And, I don’t know, from what she says, and I don’t think she tries to glamorize it . . . these were times that were really tough. And it just seems absolutely . . . it’s almost, in a black humorous sense, funny to me that, to realize that, you know, a hundred miles from Chicago, about forty years ago, my mother’s older brothers, whom I know well now, were out with little rifles hunting for food to live on. And if they didn’t find it, there were truly some hungry stomachs. And this is just . . . this is just too much as far as I’m concerned. I don’t
think that my generation can really fully comprehend exactly what all this means.

 

PAM: It’s weird, because my mom is very much ashamed of the hard times in the Depression. But my aunt and uncle are very different; they’re very—they’re almost proud of it, and I think a lot of that is because they made it, and they got a lot of money. So they say to me . . . they talk about lazy people, and I know my parents sit there and think: Well, does that mean I’m lazy, you know, and that kind of jazz. And yet, they know they’ve really worked their hearts out. And I think, thinking back on that, and on my parents’ feelings, and on finding out what happened, had a lot to do with my feeling like you gotta have money to make it. And my mom had the habit of having little piles of money stashed away around the house, and we thought that was really weird.