“Love takes time to overcome.”--Confucius
Certain love songs beloved by men are listened to with something like derision by women. So I have been assured, by a woman, and I wonder about that. I don’t doubt it, but I wonder. I have known for many years that most of the canonical American songbook “torch songs,” for example, were written by men but in their classic versions sung by women. Imagine Sarah Vaughn singing “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.” We are to believe she would never get over loss of the man for whom she carried forever “a torch.” Right.
But I would like to consider a song almost diametrically the opposite of a torch song. I mean “On the Street Where You Live,” jaunty and upbeat, its lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, from the musical play My Fair Lady (Frederick Loewe wrote the music), first staged in 1956, when I was five. The film version, which I saw in a theater in St. Louis with my parents and sister, appeared in 1964, right about the time I crashed face-first into puberty. I remember being resistant to the improbable fact that the handsome young Englishman was standing on the street and singing, with orchestral accompaniment, but I also remember thinking that such a feeling as he expressed (turns out the actor was lip-synching; someone else did the expressing), that that feeling might be—I didn’t know—real. I suppose I wanted it to be. Why wouldn’t I? He seemed so happy, so thrilled, that young man, and the lyrics of the song represented his happiness very convincingly, even to, or perhaps especially to, a thirteen year old boy.
Somehow, I’m sixty-eight now, a year older than Alan Jay Lerner was when he died in 1986 of lung cancer, impoverished, owing the IRS over a million dollars, and unable to pay his medical bills. Lerner was married eight times. He said once, “All I can say is if I had no flair for marriage, I also had no flair for bachelorhood.” (Something in that quip and its delivery is in his best lyrics too.) It seems that Mr. Lerner might have felt the exhilaration his song expresses a few more times than anyone ought to.
The character who sings the song in My Fair Lady, one Freddy Eynsford-Hill, is lost in infatuation with Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl taken in by Professor Henry Higgins, after she comes to him seeking elocution lessons. The play, of course, is adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Professor Higgins wagers with his friend and houseguest, Colonel Pickering, that he can turn Eliza into a passable young “lady,” one who can, with his lessons, function in the upper social caste of which he and Pickering are a part.
The scene in which Freddy falls for Eliza takes place at a gathering of exceeding privilege and decorousness, at a race track. Women in gowns and elaborate, even outlandish, hats; men in tophats, tails, and spats. The musical number in the scene is “Ascot Gavotte” (also known as “Ascot Opening Day”—its opening lines: “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here/Ev’ryone who should be here is here”). Eliza does quite well among the hoity-toity until, in the midst of the race’s final stretch she can stand it no longer and with all her suppressed Cockney fervor bellows at her favored horse, “Come on, Dover! Move yer bloomin’ arse?” The vocal intro to “On the Street Where You Live” includes Freddy remembering, and repeating, Eliza’s unfortunate (or fortunate) ejaculation; it even suggests that that ejaculation may be what, beyond Eliza herself (played in the film by Audrey Hepburn), precipitates his headlong fall.
Soon thereafter Freddy arrives at Professor Higgins’s house with flowers. Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza are having dinner. The maid takes the flowers and invites Mr. Eynsford-Hill in, but he declines and at the bottom of the stair, back on the street, sings his song.
The plays, both the musical and its Shavian model, are fraught. Shaw took as his inspiration an ancient Greek myth. Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with one of his statues, which—presumably so deeply and intimately loved and, much more importantly, so perfectly created—comes to life. In Lerner and Loewe’s version, Eliza is matter, medium, raw material fashioned by a man into an acceptable, respectable, lovable, and cravable woman—made so, created even, by a man.
To say that the gender issues in the movie went right over my head at thirteen is accurate and predictable and an understatement. Although one might also say that the issues went over a lot of heads: both the plays and the film were enormously successful.
But Freddy seems head over heels for a fully-formed woman, as far as he can tell, one who is just enough like but not at all like the other women in his circle. Something about class is involved in it too, of course; Eliza’s sudden coarseness is electrifying. Who knows what it might suggest to Freddy? But what I’m curious about is this: could “On the Street Where You Live” be one of those love songs beloved by men but derided by women? Does the man’s infatuation seem, well, fatuous? The word “love” is never spoken in the song. Does infatuation really have anything to do with love? (One might ask something similar about music or poetry.) Freddy has seen but hardly even met Eliza—just once—but he is intoxicated by her, the possibility of her. He’s smitten. Is it Freddy’s smittenness itself that is suspect? Is the very act of feeling smitten by another person suspect? In the hetero-world, in and out of movies, it’s usually the man who is smote, so to speak, and his condition, in terms literary and historical—and in reality—is all too often dangerous for the woman. Think of Daphne and Apollo, Zeus and Leda. The list is endless; it is added to every day in brutal stories in the news. Vastly more women are killed by obsessed lovers and husbands than by infatuated strangers.
Is Freddy’s smittenness a form of potentially dangerous, power-mad insanity? Probably not. He seems too callow to be a monster. Shaw resisted the “happy ending,” with Eliza and Higgins in love and together; the musical, not so much. Higgins seems to realize his love, or his loss (though of what, exactly? His dejected song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” is another of the musical’s long-lived chestnuts). But then Eliza returns. The happy ending is at least implied. As for Freddy, when Eliza leaves Higgins earlier, she tells him she’ll marry Freddy because he, at least, is one who loves her. But in the end, that doesn’t matter. She comes back to the man who, as it were, made her what she is.
(Tupelo Press, North Adams, MA)
Love poems themselves don’t usually seem to be after something more, or other, than love, the feeling of it, the joy or wretchedness that accompanies it. Not even Donne’s “The Sun Rising” seems interested in the building of some sort of significant cultural edifice (I almost used “erection” instead of “building” but thought better of it; WWJDD?).
The world of song, however, is still dominated by, one could even say drowned in, the subject of love. Love gone wrong, love lost, love in the midst of its lavishness. Schlock and corniness and worse abound. Then again, there’s a lot to say about love. Isn’t there? (I was in a rock band in high school, a cover band, and it is with no little shame and great reluctance that I confess to you that we learned to play, and actually performed, at least once or twice, “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I Got Love in My Tummy.”) One of my favorite old jokes goes like this: A piano man in a bar plays a song so beautiful that everyone in the place is practically in tears. Someone asks, who wrote that song? Piano man responds that he did, but that no one’s ever been interested in recording or publishing it. The patrons are shocked. I call it, says the piano man, “I Love You So Fucking Much I Could Shit.”
But what about “On the Street Where You Live”? Read it on the
page and it automatically loses an edge, maybe its best edge. This is the nature of popular songs, of course. Or possibly it is the nature of all songs.
How close is “On the Street Where You Live” to poetry? Is such a measurement useful or even possible? My assumption has always been that Lerner wrote the lyrics first, knowing the situation (the book) and the narrative of the play, then Loewe set the words to music.
Here’s the first verse:
I have often walked down this street before,
But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before.
All at once am I several stories high,
Knowing I’m on the street where you live.
The opening line, divided midway by an unpunctuated caesura, is almost perfectly syncopated between stressed and unstressed syllables. Ten syllables, all the odd-numbered ones stressed. Line two is perfectly syncopated, but thirteen syllables long, with a double, almost identical, rhyme—“street before” / “feet before.” Line three is the most interesting to me, simply because it contains its own rhyme: “all at once am I several stories high.” And yet, as with line one, it’s ten syllables in exactly the same meter as line one, with an identical unpunctuated caesura. The presence of that in-line rhyme manages to disguise the fact that line four rhymes with nothing, except perhaps itself, as the final phrase, the song’s title, the refrain at the end of each verse. And interestingly, line four, though it is similarly syncopated as the other lines, has a trimeter feel. It is, in fact, a line of three cretic feet (stressed-unstressed-stressed) in nine syllables.
Verse two:
Are there lilac trees in the heart of town?
Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?
Does enchantment pour out of every door?
No, it’s just on the street where you live.
The meter’s identical to verse one. Maybe this is Lerner’s musical knowledge at work. Loewe might have appreciated the metrical unity. Three questions metrically identical to three declarative statements; that’s nice. Is that almost an in-line rhyme (lark/part) in line two? The in-line rhyme of the third line is in place again, as in the first verse, and metrically it has to be “No, it’s just,” to begin the final line; imagine the composer’s chagrin (not to mention the singer’s) if the meter were inside out and it read “It’s only ….” There is surely something valuable, even treasured, in a lyric’s singability. The final line is, again, composed of three cretic feet.
The bridge, altered by the melody, is also altered by meter.
Bridge:
And, oh, the towering feeling,
Just to know somehow you are near.
The overpowering feeling
That any second you may suddenly appear.
The first three lines are shortened to eight syllables, lines 1 and 3 with a pyhrric foot (two syllables, neither stressed) in the third position. The fourth line is twelve syllables, six iambs, the first, the only, strictly iambic line in the song.
Something about the bridge also makes it the weightiest passage in the lyric. The towering, overpowering feeling may be the closest the song gets to a central issue and aspect of love. Then again, maybe not. It may be the imagined dream of love through the eyes, or the heart, of the one who is, at this point, no more than infatuated.
Final verse:
People stop and stare, they don’t bother me,
For there’s nowhere else on earth that I would rather be.
Let the time go by, I don’t care if I
Can be here on the street where you live.
Back to the beginning all over. Ten almost syncopated syllables, a punctuated caesura this time. Another thirteen syllables, syncopated, in line two (if you insist on stressing “there’s” you complicate the stress of the first syllable in “nowhere,” which, sorry, would be tin-eared and barbaric). Line three: internal rhyme, same meter as all other lines one and three. The most interesting thing is way this line three ends with the subject of the familiar clause that is line four. It might seem poetically a radical enjambment, but it facilitates the meter of the final near-refrain line and the internal rhyme. It also employs the same long-I rhyme as line three in the first verse, in which the subject is the first person pronoun, both the speaker/singer and the poem’s true concern. Line four: three cretic feet yet again.
That’s all, folks.
This precision, if that’s what it is (or dogged metrical regularity?), of the lyric’s form, verse after verse, including the bridge, is what pleases and delights me, and that delight is something I feel reading the lyric on the page. However, even if I read the verses aloud, I still hear them being sung in my mind’s ear. I wonder if that metrical precision, or that mechanical sameness, is too much for poetry but exactly what is necessary in a song.
Wait, though. Is it still, somehow, a poem? Or rather, is it—can it possibly be—poetry? Probably not, though it is a song lyric of impressive achievement, if not a lot of intellectual or even emotional heft. Part of the pleasure of it is wit—syntactical wit, rhyme wit, metrical wit; wit at the level of musical enactment; wit expressed as a mode of sweetness, rather than as something sharper or darker. There’s nothing at all ironic about these lyrics. Well, maybe the people who stop and stare, as if it were some sort of meta-commentary on the bizarre existence of musical theater and film.
It’s worth noting that, in poetic terms, the lyric’s an apostrophe. It’s spoken to someone not-there as though she were. Freddy’s Eliza as Petrarch’s Laura. Sometimes, in the world of poetry, and of song, as in the world itself, one meets—or does not meet but merely sees—another person and is something like thunderstruck. Or to use a word I confess I am especially fond of, gobsmacked. Most often the thunderstruck or gobsmacked one does not bring flowers and walk along the street singing, nor does he write 366 sonnets to/about/for his never-to-be requited love and its object. If you were a woman whose appearance or passing acquaintance provoked singing in the street or hundreds of sonnets—enough to build an immortal career around (not to mention one of the most enduring verse forms in literary history)—might you, nevertheless, feel uneasy? Even stalked, in some way? Harassed or menaced? Maybe. (I don’t think anyone ever asked Laura.) “On the Street Where You Live” may not be a love song at all, but a sub-species of the love song, which might be what would make some women, or even men, deride it. It’s about fixation, obsession; and it speaks not at all of the target of that fixation and what such an obsession might feel like to her.
*
Does this kind of enchantment, or smittenness, the fact of thunderstruckness, actually happen? Sure. Does it happen to women, so that women feel it for men? I believe it surely does. Is it as potentially dangerous for the man who is the object of it (we’ve all seen Fatal Attraction)? Of course not. Are love songs more significant culturally than love poems? Almost certainly. More artful? No.
It may simply be that poems are poems and songs are songs. Love songs are not love poems but love songs. And still, according to the Nobel Committee, songs are literature.
Neither, I might say in response, are all poems.
“On the Street Where You Live” has been recorded hundreds of times, by (to name just a few) Shirley Horn, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Rickie Lee Jones, Nancy Wilson, and Marvin Gaye. Great performers all and, as the short list here shows, as many women singers as men. (We presume male singers of many love songs, probably mistakenly. It intrigues me that Ella Fitzgerald, Karrin Allyson, Ernestine Anderson, Shirley Bassey, Chris Connor, and Dee Dee Bridgewater, among many other women, have recorded “Angel Eyes.” Why should we have a harder time imagining a woman singing “Drink up, all you people?”) Is a woman’s infatuation with a man more difficult to imagine or to accept?
“On the Street Where You Live” is a good song, but if you take it away from its melody, it falls out of delightfulness into something clever, very well-composed lyrically, even deft, but almost ordinary, if there is an ordinary way to say I am gobsmacked. I have heard a number of musical renditions of Byron’s “She Walks In Beauty,” and none of them has been nearly as pleasing to my ear as Nat King Cole singing “On the Street Where You Live.”
Byron’s poem is better without music. Can anyone name a song lyric that is better without its music?
It was a 1992 recording of “On the Street Where You Live” by Harry Connick, Jr., I heard on the local jazz station a month or so ago. I was driving, alone. I’m sure I’ve heard many other versions of the song in the fifty-five years since I was thirteen, with my parents and sister in the St. Louis theater, but something about this particular rendition made me hear the song a little differently, or a little more clearly. Maybe it was the minimal accompaniment. There’s no orchestra, no band, no combo, just Connick, Jr. on the piano and singing. Nothing special about the piano work, finally. He’s a very fine pianist, but not a great player. And Connick’s singing clearly riffs on Sinatra, the latter’s phrasing and tonal modulations. But for some reason I found myself engrossed in the lyrics, in the meter and rhyme, in the formal components that make song lyrics so much like poetry. When I got home, I looked up the song on the internet, printed off the lyrics, scanned them, and made notes. I actively—although it’s not an especially demanding text—studied the meter of those lyrics.
What was I after? I knew it wasn’t poetry before I started. Didn’t I? Still, I want to say that I know the feeling the song expresses, I’m sure of it. I have felt it, I’m absolutely certain. I remember it well. But I don’t know, or don’t know anymore, if it is, or was, real, or how it might have been, or what it meant, if it were real. Or if it mattered, or mattered to anybody else. But I remember the feeling as extraordinary. To me. Or did I merely import Freddy Eynsford-Hill’s gassed up idea of it when I was thirteen? It might be that this is the thing about certain love songs some women might recognize. And mistrust, at least.
They’re all about Freddy, or the Dylan of “Lay Lady Lay.” Or Alan Jay Lerner, or me.
I love the familiar old past, the reference of the broadway musical. The angles, the voice,the invitation to walk down the street where you live. I vow to read more of Robert Wrigley's essays.
Posted by: Kathy Evans | April 07, 2021 at 06:07 PM