The Cultural Literacy Monster first raised its ignorant head for me some fifteen or so years ago, when I gave a lecture to several hundred freshmen at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. It was a lecture no doubt too heavily peppered with proper names, and even as I gassed away, I saw that what I was saying was sailing right over the heads of my youthful audience. One sentence ran: “We see this phenomenon in the journals of the Goncourt brothers, taken over by Edmond after the death of Jules in 1870.” A faculty member, commiserating with me afterwards, had a good chortle over this. “You have to understand,” he said, “it’s not that they’ve never heard of the Goncourt brothers, which of course they haven’t, but that they’ve never heard of 1870.”
Professors love to tell stories about the amusingly ample blank spots in their students’ knowledge. (“This kid thought that the greatest achievement of the Ottoman Empire was the invention of the footstool.”) As a quondam university teacher who was never much of a student himself, I try not to add to the stock of such stories. But I must say that I was amazed, appalled, aghast, and a little saddened to learn last week, from a contemporary, that two highly intelligent young editors with whom she works had no notion that the phrase “the last time I saw Paris” comes from the Jerome Kern song of the title. Everybody in the West, I thought, knew that. I can hear Maurice Chevalier — no, fellas, he didn’t play goalie for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1940s — singing the next phrase, “her heart was young and gay,” and feel pity for those who can’t. How, I ask myself, can anyone not know that lovely, lilting song? Sacrebloodybleu!
One of the things that separate generations is the popular culture that each has grown up with. As a boy who grew up listening to radio, I was perfectly content to leave much of early television culture to Beaver. Which may explain why a show such as The Simpsons has never, to quote The Doors, “light[ed] my fire.” I long ago made the decision to retain my pristine ignorance of Bruce Springsteen — and it hasn’t taken much character on my part never to have wavered on this point. I know only slightly more about Billy Joel — and am, in any case, too old to go changing — whose real last name, I have long suspicioned, must be something like Hochberg.
Most of the songs that play in my head were written before I was born or when I was a child. Cultivated folk of the generations before my own carried reams of poetry in their heads. My generation carries instead the tunes and lyrics of the Brothers Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Sammy Kahn, Irving Caesar, Yip Harburg, and a few others. And they continue to give pleasure.
The great difference between the popular culture under which I grew up and that of subsequent generations is that — apart from comic books and certain radio shows — popular culture had not, in my time (the 1940s and ’50s), been divided into youth and grown-up culture. A national popular culture existed, shared by all. The middle and late 1960s and the advent of rock ‘n’ roll changed all that — and changed it for the worse. Popular culture is richer when the audience for it is large and non-exclusionary.
My own self-imposed exclusion from popular music came soon after the early Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. After this, I pretty much lost interest in contemporary music; and the super-sensitive sentimentality of Paul Simon’s songs was already pushing it. Far from wishing to keep up, I went backwards, hugely enjoying some American songs from well before my time. Most amusing of all, I discovered, Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Louis Prima sang songs with the proper spirit of wit, parody, and mockery of show business. With some laboriousness, I typed out the lyrics of some of these songs — “Stars Fell on Alabama,” “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” “Just a Gigolo,” and the never-popular “I Guess I’ll Get the Papers and Go Home” — and attempted to commit them to memory, for the simple satisfaction of rehearsing them in the shower.
Knowing the same songs is one of the things that draws one closer to people. I don’t believe I could live with a woman who didn’t know, say, “A Foggy Day (in London Town),” “Tenderly,” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Unthinkable. Bruce Johnston, who I am reliably informed sang with but was not an original member of the Beach Boys, composed a song with the memorable line, “I write the songs that make the young girls cry.” I myself wouldn’t care to do that. If it’s all the same — and it isn’t — I much prefer to sing the songs that make the older girls smile.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
