The Subversive Wit of Jerry Leiber

 

I believe I here mention every Leiber song recorded from 1952-1956 but among the later songs, I discuss only those that strike me as useful to emphasize a point.  Mike Stoller is marginal here as I discuss only the texts of the songs without comment on the music.

 

 

     Rock and roll, though the genre has always tolerated a significant element of schlock and  corn, cultivates its rebellious image.  With its roots in the subculture of Black blues and, to a lesser extent, that of the white working class, rock and roll a was born with a bit of an attitude.  The very name, like jazz, is a euphemism for the sexual act, and the music is thus transgressive from the start.  Jerry Leiber, one of the greatest rock and rhythm and blues lyricists, excelled at witty, subversive lyrics, clever and pointed like the songs of Noel Coward, but from the point of view not of glittering high society, but of ordinary American Blacks and youth.  Though his songs were unabashedly commercial, he managed to skewer many sacred cows, in most of his work maintaining a richly comic ironic tone.

     Leiber’s popularity and his counter-cultural satire go uneasily together.  While much popular culture tends to emphatically reinforce received ideas, creating social coherence by reassuring people with a set of shared beliefs, some pockets of commodified art designed for the marketplace suggest contrary attitudes.  Subversive songs often find an enthusiastic audience among subcultures whether ethnic or sexual minorities, drug users, criminals, or, in the nineteen-fifties, teenagers who, for the first time, were viewed as a distinct group, likely to resist their parents’ values.

     By the time of his own teenage years Jerry Leiber had assimilated Black language and attitudes so well that he could produce songs that played on pre-existing conventions and gave them novel, often amusing, twists. [1]  His first recorded song, "That's What the Good Book Says," tropes on gospel themes to imagine Biblical times as a dance party when even the devils are having a high time drinking wine. 

 

Well back in the days of old King Saul

Every night was a crazy ball

The cats smoked hay through a rubber hose

And the women, they wore transparent clothes

 

The song was recorded by Bobby Nunn [2] and the Robins establishing Leiber’s career as a rhythm and blues lyricist, writing songs for a very nearly entirely Black audience.  The humorous tone that led many of his compositions to be devalued as “novelty” numbers animates his professional debut.

     Leiber’s second recorded song, "Real Ugly Woman" (1950) sung by Jimmy Witherspoon, proved as humorous and considerably more popular.  The singer turns upside-down the expected praise of his beloved’s beauties, saying instead that the lady in question “runs all my friends away.”  She is a “female Frankenstein” with “big feet” [3].  Apart from what Fats Waller called in another song “her pedal extremities,” she weighs three hundred pounds. [4]

 

She ain’t built for power,

she ain’t built for speed,

but that woman built for comfort

and that’s what every man need

 

In spite of her bulk the singer affirms “Yes, I love that woman, and she’s ugly as can be.” 

     Having played with attitudes associated with religious devotion and romantic love conventions, Leiber then turned to social inequity with  “Hard Times” (1952), a belated Depression lament recorded by Charles Brown.  Recalling songs with similar titles by Ida Cox, John Lee Hooker, and others, the singer protests the hardships of the life of the poor.

 

When I had to pawn my clothes

Just to pay my rent

Talkin' about hard times

Hard time oh yeah, yeah

 

As sincere-sounding as Tennessee Ernie Ford’s retooling of Merle Travis’ coal-mining songs “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon,” also popular in the ‘fifties, after Ford had adopted an exaggerated hillbilly persona, Leiber’s lyrics deliver a message of protest the more poignant by being here passed down from mother to son.  The singer expects suffering to be relieved only by death.

 

There'll be no more sorrow

When I pass away

And no more hard times

 

     In the next two of Leiber’s songs to be released “Kansas City” and “Hound Dog,” Leiber displayed the fluency of his appropriation of American Black idiom, a skill which would propel him, willy-nilly, to the center of early rock and roll.  The same year that “Hard Times” came out, Little Willie Littlefield recorded Leiber’s “Kansas City” (at first titled "K. C. Lovin'"), a driving song which so perfectly conforms to blues conventions that it is often taken to be traditional.  The narrative of the song is a typical blues scenario: the speaker leaves an unsatisfactory lover (“Now if I stay with that woman/ I know I'm gonna die”) and heads for the  sensual paradise of Kansas City, known as a party town.  In this urban version of Eden, he is “standin' on the corner” drinking “a bottle of Kansas City wine” with “my Kansas City baby,” presumably one of those adepts in the “crazy way of loving” practiced there.  The propulsive rhythms convey the excitement of erotic anticipation. 

     Leiber’s next tune was far more down home and even more familiar.  “Hound Dog” (“Big Mama” Thornton, 1952) is Southern slang for a man who is dependent on his lover.  The spare lyrics blend a bit of current slang (“You ain't no real cool cat”) with a hokum-like double entendre in the repeated lines “You can wag your tail/  But I ain't gonna feed you no more.”  The song’s conclusion, punctuated by Thornton’s  cries, mimics the howls of frustration from a dog deprived of his object of desire. 

     Though he had written the words specifically with “Big Mama” Thornton in mind, Leiber found her daunting at the recording session.  She was, indeed, “big,” and her hard-driving, tough-woman sound ideal, he thought, for the suggestive complaint of a woman saddled with a no-good man.   When she at first “crooned” the words like a ballad, and Leiber suggested she “attack” it with more energy, she grabbed her crotch, telling the nineteen-year-old he could “attack this!” [5]  After he demonstrated the effect he was after with his own voice, though, the recording was completed, and the record turned out to Thornton’s biggest hit, selling a half million copies.

     “Hound Dog” was so successful that it was recorded by ten other artists even before Elvis ever heard of it.  Though Elvis had heard and admired Black musicians, it was a sanitized version by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a white group that played a number of rhythm and blues songs and performed at the Sands in Las Vegas, that caused him to sing it himself.  The suggestive line about tail-wagging had been changed to “you never caught a rabbit” and the specifically Black vernacular terms “daddy” and “cool cat” vanished.  More importantly, the singer, originally a woman complaining about her good-for-nothing lover, became a man, apparently, as Leiber complained, actually singing about a dog. [6]  

     Despite his disgruntlement about the changes to his song, Leiber realized that, though he and Stoller had considered Big Mama’s version to be definitive – it went, after all, to the top of the R and B charts, selling over a half a million copies and inspiring not only covers but response songs  all based on the excitement generated  by Thornton’s powerful performance  -- pop music might bring even more lucrative success.  The rise of rock and roll, much of it based on blues and rhythm and blues material,  eased the transition from the thoroughly bluesy, “brusque and badass” [6] effrontery of “Hound Dog” to thr lighter and more digestible form he and his partner Mike Stoller were to perfect.  Though they had started out “looking to write songs for black artists with black feelings rendered in black vernacular” [7], they had stumbled into a new genre which required new forms. 

     Leiber’s genius for playing with listeners’ expectations emerged in a series of songs that sparkle with comic irony and satirical analysis of the pillars of society as though written by an incarnation of Cole Porter who had gleefully shed his sophistication.  The songs’ satirical elements were not always noticed by their listeners, but that mattered little.  For instance, Leiber’s “Love Me” (1954), first recorded by Willy and Ruth and rerecorded by nine other artists (including Billy Eckstine) before Elvis’s version, was originally conceived by Leiber as “a parody of a corny hillbilly ballad” [8] with its absurdly lugubrious melancholy.

 

Treat me like a fool

Treat me mean and cruel

But love me

Break my faithful heart

Tear it all apart

But love me (Won't you love me)

 

The song, of course, succeeded when understood straight and has since become a familiar sentimental pop standard.

     Some of his songs experimented with other genres, but these were rarely as effective as the hits which either maintained strong blues roots or allowed free play to his comic inventiveness. For instance “Jack O’ Diamonds,” which was recorded by Jacki Fontaine (1954), plays with formulas in several older traditions [9].  Some of his work, whether produced with Black or white artists was unexceptional.  “Bazoom, I Need Your Loving” (1954) is an anodyne bit of love-longing in which the odd word in the title lurks like a code for suppressed lust, the most exciting moment of the tune.   Among his more pedestrian compositions are "I Want to Do More" (recorded by Ruth Brown in 1955) and “Ruby Baby” (The Drifters, 1956).  Even the most well-crafted of his straightforward love songs such as “Lovin’ You” (Elvis, 1957), fail to spotlight Leiber’s unique talent.

     Sometimes his touch is a light one.  In “Dancin’” (1957) the couple “keep on dancing” after the band has stopped playing.  The continue to dance down the street, past an erotic landscape in which “couples parked in cars were romancin',” and “when we reached your door,” “we kept right in dancin’,” conflating, as songs often do, dancing with more intimate contact.

     Whereas people had before conceptualized life as a passage from an incompetent childhood to responsible adulthood, during the ‘fifties, teen-agers came to regard themselves as a unique group, not only in a vulnerability to tragic or frustrated love, but also as adversarial to social control.  The problem of “juvenile delinquency” was publicized in films like Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause.  Just as he had identified with the Black American experience, Leiber, by now a man in his twenties, learned to effectively express the social ferment of the new rock and roll demographic.  He paid tribute to the clothing fetishism of the young with  "Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots" (1955) [10] which gave Leiber his first hit in the pop chart’s top ten [13].  “Hipness,” the subcultural assertion that one is more enlightened than others, melts in the face of romantic heat in "(You’re so Square) Baby I Don’t Care" (Elvis, 1958). 

     Leiber began exploring a different model for his songs, small comic vignettes he was later to call “playlets.” [11]  In 1954 he wrote “Framed” for the Robins, a highly entertaining song which by the way indicts the racist American justice system.  The singer objects that “I never knew nothing but I always get framed.” [12]  The humor succeeds because of its irony.  A comic take on judicial injustice, the song is funny rather than angry as the singer protests too much, and the listener supposes he may not be entirely innocent. In a lighter teenage variant, Leiber featured a similar protagonist later in “Charlie Brown,” the high school cut-up who “calls the English teacher Daddy-O” (1959) [14].  

     In the scenario of “Smokey Joe’s Café” (The Robins, 1955), a short story in slightly under three minutes, the diner is struck with a “chick” who has entered, but others, and then Smokey Joe himself, caution him that she is taken.  “The Chicken and the Hawk" (Big Joe Turner, 1956) in which the chicken is seized and carried off by a hawk [15] only to be challenged by a “bald-headed eagle” sounds like a slightly sinister folk-tale.

     The most successful “playlets” were performed by the Coasters, a group organized around two of the Robins with whom Leiber had earlier worked.  Their first release was “Down in Mexico” (1956), an atmospheric tune about a Mexicali “honky-tonk” run by “a cat named Joe” (is the venue Smokey Joe’s again?) who plays blues.  Suddenly he is dazzled by the sudden appearance of a “chick” clad in fishnets.  The location, of course, is arbitrary, signifying, as border towns often have, the pleasures of the senses.  The few words of Spanish and Carl Gardner’s synthetic accent in the spoken part only serve to emphasize the point that this is a place where you can “get your kicks.” 

     That same year the Coasters recorded "One Kiss Led to Another,"  a masterpiece of suggestive narration in which the persona brings “soda pop” and “sandwich meat” which they never quite get around to eating when he visits with his girlfriend who is babysitting (and thus unchaperoned).   Listeners had no difficulty understanding all sorts of love-making concealed behind the final words of the song.

 

One kiss led to another

And another and another

And another and another

And another and another

And another and another

 

     Similarly, a mother predicts a life of loving for her son whose “Lucky Lips” (1957) mean, she tells him, that “you’ll always have a baby in your arms,” an ambiguous expression that allows the listener to infer a settled domesticity as well as the preceding pleasures of love-making.  While blues songs, rhythm and blues, and country all appealed to audiences of all ages, the songwriter, now approaching his mid-twenties, maintained a sharp focus on the target demographic of teen-agers.  Thus, in “Fools Fall in Love,” when not making fun of the love song genre (“Just play them two bars of Stardust/ Just hang out one silly moon”), the couple, who “should be back in school,” are clearly on the verge of dropping out to get married.  “Searchin’” (Coasters 1957) also playfully alludes to Larry Stock and Al Lewis’s song, made a hit by Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill” before cataloguing pop culture sleuths familiar to the young: Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Sergeant Friday, Charlie Chan, and Boston Blackie.  In “Young Blood” (Coasters, 1957) the singer suffers love-longing and follows his beloved to her home, only to be rejected by her father with stern words, “You better leave my daughter alone.” 

     Leiber’s wit is on full display in “Jailhouse Rock” (Elvis, 1957).  Whereas “Framed”: had been comic at the same time as it exposed social inequity, incarceration in “Jailhouse Rock” is a pure frolic.  In the carnival spirit of the rock and roll dance party, the contradictions of society vanish, homoeroticism emerges (“You the cutest jailbird I ever  did see”), and the prisoners voluntarily remain incarcerated.  “Shifty Henry” and “Bugs” are harmless and colorful characters like the people in Damon Runyon and the Purple Gang, who brought violence to Detroit for years, is merely part of the colorful background.  

     In "Idol with the Golden Head" (1957) the lover consults a magic fetish in his search for his beloved “big foot May,” [16] only to find her by a creek among empty beer cans dancing  “hopping and a-bopping and a-bumping and a-jumping” to rock and roll music.  “Feeling so blue,” he again consults his oracle, who advises him that he, too, must learn to “boogie.”  Again the music promises entry to a paradise of the celebration of the senses.

     The obstacles to such unrestrained pleasure appear in the form of super-ego parental authority in what is surely one of the greatest Leiber “playlets” of teen-age life, “Yakety Yak” (Coasters, 1958).  There the singer is told that, if he fails to do his household chores, “You ain't gonna rock and roll no more.”  The nonsense phrase of the title indicates how absurd the youth finds these limitations, but it is always immediately answered by the stern mandate “don't talk back,” all the sterner since it seems that the parents in their time may have seen enough of life for them to know what risks their child may run: “Your father's hip, he knows what cooks.”  To the parents their son’s friend is a “hoodlum,” one of the “juvenile delinquents” so much in the news.  No clearer delineation of the “generation gap” appeared until “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (Dylan, 1964). 

     Apart from ambivalent relations with the older generation, Leiber eloquently wrote of the dangers of love.  In “Poison Ivy” (Coasters, 1959), a tune which Leiber flatly called a warning against sexually transmitted disease [17], the woman’s beauty is paired with warnings that she offers a threat worse than whooping cough or smallpox or any number of other diseases.  The repeated lines “Late at night while you're sleepin'/ Poison ivy comes a-creepin' around” suggests the frighteningly involuntary character of desire, and the concluding section which four times repeats “La da la da la da” employs Leiber strategy of using nonsense syllables to signify a sexual experience so extraordinary as to be beyond words.  Yet, at the same time, it is poison ivy.

     Far more amusing and equally haunting “Love Potion No. 9” (Coasters, 1959) in which the singer, who  complains that he has been “a flop with chicks” since 1956, and enlists the aid of a gypsy who provides him with the title preparation.  The effect, however, is not to improve his dating life, but instead to bring him into an erotic delirium in which he “started kissin' everything in sight,” including, in the punch line, the  “cop down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine.”  The song caricatures with exaggeration both the young person’s romantic self-consciousness and the titanic force of libido under the surface. 

     Leiber’s partner Mike Stoller said that in his opinion their best “playlet” was “Little Egypt” (Coasters, 1961) [18] about a “hoochie coochie” dancer who so captivates the singer that he periodically dissolves into a yammering and helpless “ying ying ying ying.”  In place of anatomical features, he mentions studying her tattoos, reminding the listener of Groucho Marx’s “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” and the song on the same theme in the style of the music hall that was a hit for the Kingston Trio.  After all the “ying ying” and sexual objectification, the punch line is that he marries her and has seven children, obliging her to retire from her dance career as “She's too busy mopping and a-takin' care of shopping.”

    Just as Leiber had mastered the language practices of Black Americans and of teenagers, he wrote a country music classic in “Jackson” (1963), co-written with Billy Edd Wheeler and originally recorded by the Kingston Trio, which became a hit four years later sung by Johnny Cash and June Carter.  The man’s sexual assertiveness meets effective ridicule from his wife who predicts that before long he will have his “tail tucked between your legs.”  

     Leiber’s lyric sensibility dwelled in the borderland between the kind of simple alienation that could even emerge in an Elvis’s tunes such as “Trouble” (1958) as “I'm evil, evil, evil, as can be” and the hokey sentiment of narratives like “The Reverend Mr. Black” (Kingston Trio, 1962) in which the Christian protagonist resembles nothing so much as a cowboy hero [19].  The most successful and characteristic songs feature a trenchant wit criticizing received ideas about race, justice, and propriety from a perspective that privileges the joy of sexuality.  Thus, even such an inoffensive song as “Girls, Girls, Girls” (Elvis, 1961) ends with the word “girls” repeated fifteen times, punctuated by a few inarticulate utterances, indicating that the singer is all but disabled by passion.  Even lust may be satirized, however, as in (Coasters, 1958) in which the singer, dizzy with desire, declares, “This little piggy's coming over your house/ I'm gonna rock you all night long.”  The ecstasy of passion is associated with the pleasures of rock and roll dancing.  Again, even in a schlocky song like King Creole (Elvis, 1958)  expresses the liberating effect of rock music in which the performer so absorbs himself that he (and presumably his audience) is “gone, gone, gone.”

     In his combination of mischievous humor and sensual extravagance, Leiber’s lyric persona resembles the high-spirited songs of hokum, calypso, and the English music hall as well as recalling comedians like Chaplin and Harpo Marx.  The closest analogue, though, is found in the trickster figures of world mythology.  Perhaps the most relevant to Leiber’s genius is the signifying monkey of African-American lore who tells the truth obliquely and dodges the more powerful but slower-witted beasts. [20]

     While suggesting that oceans of delight await the lover (whether the bed is directly implied or only the dance-floor), Leiber mocked many  conventions of romantic love, though conceding the strength of others and thus keeping his audience guessing.  The titanic power of eros is spoofed in the “tail-wagging” of “Hound Dog,” the intoxicated frenzy of “Love Potion No. 9,” and the “piggies” of “I’m a Hog for You.”  The love object in “Little Egypt” begins as an overpowering obsession, but ends as a harried housewife, while the husband in “Jackson” strives to break free from  his marriage.  In “The Chicken and the Hawk" the beloved is figured as a prey caught by one predator and fancied by another.  He even played with homoerotic humor in “Jailhouse Rock” and “Love Potion No. 9.”

     Meanwhile, his songs expressed criticism of religion ("That's What the Good Book Says") and social equity (“Hard Times” and “Framed”) while expressing a general social nonconformity ("Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots") with particular resistance to the demands of parents (“Yakety Yak”) and school (“Charlie Brown”).  The opposition between an imagined unlimited pleasure and the obstacles to experiencing it forms the heart of much of Leiber’s oeuvre.

     With the possible exception of Dylan, Leiber is the most significant lyricist of rock and roll.  His enthusiasm for its parent, the blues, brought Black rhythms and, in part, attitudes to young white Americans in eloquent and entertaining lyrics.  His work not only contributed substantially to the dominance of the rock and roll genre in world popular music, it presaged the folk revival that followed in the early sixties, the blues emphasis of groups like the Rolling Stone and the Yardbirds, and the psychedelic era that followed.  Janis Joplin was doubtless influenced by some of the same old blues records that had inspired the young Jerry Leiber as well as by Leiber’s own songs.

     This historic contribution is undeniable, but Leiber’s real achievement is the delight that his play of wit, his clever rhymes, and his subversive narratives bring to listeners now no less than when the songs were new.  Writing for a genre that at the time lacked artistic pretensions and prestige, he created a body of work as memorable as any in popular music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.  In his devotion to Black culture he resembled other Jewish artists like al Jolson, Benny Goodman, and Mezz Mezzrow.  Of course, white people have played a creative role in jazz and blues ever since the days of Bix Beiderbecke. 

2.  The singer was Ulysses B. Nunn, not to be confused with an unrelated Bobby Nunn who recorded for Motown in the eighties.

3.  A venerable figure that appears most prominently in "Your Feet's Too Big" (1936) by Ada Benson recorded by Fats Waller and many others.

4.  Cf. “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy” (1963) written by Willie Dixon and made famous by Howlin’ Wolf.

5.  Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, Hound Dog, p. 63.

6.  Richard Crouse, Who Wrote the Book of Love, p. 13

7.  Hound Dog, p. 94-5.

8.  p. 105.

9.  Songs of the same title or using some of the same lines were sung by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mance Lipscomb, but also by white singers as “Rye Whiskey” and “O Mollie, O Mollie, it is for your sake alone.”  Ruth Brown did an up-tempo version of Leiber’s song in 1959.

10.  Cf. “Shoppin’ for Clothes (Coasters 1960) or Carl Perkins “Blue Suede Shoes.” 

11.  See Hound Dog, 96, et al.

12.  The same year Chuck Berry released his “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” who, in a brilliant and concise line, protests that he was “arrested on charges of unemployment.”

13.  One indication of the song’s appeal is that is was also recorded by Edith Piaf as "L'Homme à la Moto."  Shortly after the song’s release James Dean died in an auto accident, helping to inspire the trend of teen tragedy car crash songs.

14.  Cf. Chuck Berry’s “School Days” (1957)

15.  Cf. the slang usage of “chicken hawk” for a gay man with a preference for much younger partners.

16.  The usage derives from the many blues songs in which the woman’s “big feet” in “Caldonia” or “Your Feets Too Big” sometimes suggest a comic disproportion and sometimes her outsized appeal, if not both at once. 

17.  Hound Dog, 141.

 18.  Hound Dog, 141.

19.  Similarly, “Along Came Jones” (Coasters, 1959) features an exaggerated and thus satirical account of a rescuer of ladies in distress with the characteristics of a Western  star.  He is “slow-talkin'” as well as “long, lean, lanky.”

20.  In “Run Red Run” (Coasters, 1959) a late incarnation of such a monkey is the principal actor.  Cf. m y essay “The Signifying Monkeys Talk Literature” (posted at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2010/04/signifying-monkey-talks-literature.html) as well as Prof. Gates’  The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.

Pearls

 

     The charm of the pearl is its combination of the sensuality of an iridescent nacreous surface with the abstract Platonic perfection of a perfectly spherical form.  The minute ridges on its surface, while discernible to the eye only as a subtle shimmer, suggest the myriad phenomena of the world of experience, marvelously compacted, far smaller than a crystal ball, until it is capable of representing everything that is, like the universe just before the Big Bang or Borges’ “The Aleph.” 

     The rarity and aesthetic appeal of pearls led to their use as a figure of speech for anything of high value, and, in particular, words that are wise and beautiful.  In the King James version a passage in Job (28:18) declares wisdom to be preferable even to pearls, but scholarship has decided that this is in fact a reference to crystal.  In the Greek Testament, though, the pearl is repeatedly used, most notably perhaps in the parable of the “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:46) signifying salvation or enlightenment, while non-metaphorical pearls are condemned as a sign of vicious luxury (as in I Timothy 2:9).  In a similar bipolar opposition, Revelation employs pearls first as adornments on the Whore of Babylon (17:4 18:12) and then as part of paradise’s décor, the well-known “pearly gates” (21:21).

     The “Hymn of the Pearl,” contained within the extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas describes a heroic quest for an Egyptian pearl signifying perfect wisdom that the seeker must snatch it from a threatening guardian serpent, the sort of dragon guarding treasure that appears in stories like those of Hercules, Jason, Beowulf, and Fafnir.  In Chinese lore the Fuzanglong watches over riches but particularly prizes a certain pearl as the most precious of things.  The hero of the “Hymn” succeeds in charming tfhe monster into sleep by “Chanting o’er him the Name of my Father, The Name of our Second, [my Brother], And [Name] of my Mother, the East-Queen”  (in the translation by G.R.S. Mead from The Hymn of the Robe of Glory: Echoes from the Gnosis).

     Connotations both of preciousness and of wicked arrogant wealth operate in a story told by Pliny the Elder around the same time as the “Hymn.”  In his Natural History (9.58) he says that Cleopatra wagered Antony that she could expend the fabulous sum of ten million sesterces in a single meal.   She succeeds by dissolving one of the two largest pearls in the world in vinegar and downing it, though the second is saved by Lucius Plancus, who declares Antony “defeated” (victus) in the bet, according to Pliny, an ill omen prefiguring his defeat by Octavianus.  The reader is aware, too, of Cleopatra’s suicide a short time after such sumptuous entertainments.  Pliny goes on to describe Romans who imitated Cleopatra’s grandly wasteful act.  In Caligula the gesture reached its epigone, when the emperor bedecked his horse Incitatus (the one he meant to make a consul) with pearls.  Here such ornaments are the extreme of luxury and conspicuous consumption. 

     In the lovely medieval poem called Pearl (Perle) the speaker laments his loss of a pearl, apparently identified with a deceased daughter, though the image’s associations remain fluid.  Through the polysemous subtleties of allegory, often mistaken for a reductive code, this pearl is at once a gem, a two-year-old, a grown woman, and anyone’s soul, and the perfection of paradise.  The exquisite charm of the pearl itself is detailed in one of the most well-structured and elaborately crafted poems of the late Middle Ages.  Every line of Pearl sings with rhymes, concatenations, and other more or less irregular forms of verbal music.

     This pearl, in female form but trailing associations with the highest human and spiritual values,  appears in a dream.  He plunges into the river that separates him from his “privy perle wythouten spot” only to be awakened by the “prince” of the other world, whereupon he can only praise God and accept for the present his loss with the consolation of an ultimately just divine order.  The poem’s tightly developed and subtle formulation presents the pearl as the lovely lost daughter and thus all the losses inevitable in all the ephemeral joys of the sublunary world while at the same time dialectically suggesting the eternal joys of things as they are, a perfect world order guaranteed by a loving creator. 

     A poem of disputed authorship in The Passionate Pilgrim uses very much the same comparison, calling a lady who died young a “bright orient pearl, alack, too timely shaded!” (132)  More certainly Shakespearean usage forms a semiotic pattern with considerably less focus and less assurance, though in the end the same bipolar opposition is implied.  The primary association of pearls with wealth and luxury appears a good many times, including the suggestion of the pomp and power of kingship in Henry V which mentions after crown and scepter “the intertissued robe of gold and pearl” (IV, 1, l. 271).  Pearls in Shakespeare are often a figure of human beauty as in the claim “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes.” “But pearls are fair, and the old saying is,/Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies’ eyes.” (Two Gentlemen of Verona V, 2, 2062-3)

     Surely there is a sinister omen in the description of “pearly sweat, resembling dew of night” (Rape of Lucrece, 463) on Lucrece’s hands as she is admired, yet unknowing, by her attacker.  Pearls are often linked to the dead, as in Ariel’s song “Full fathom five thy father lies” in which bones are of coral and “Those are pearls that were his eyes” (Tempest I, 2, 562).  A similar vision informs Clarence’s frightening premonitory dream of “a thousand men that fishes gnawed upon” along with gold, jewels, and pearls of which “some lay in dead men's skulls”, (Richard III I, 4, ll. 26, 30)

     This ambiguity is everywhere in Shakespeare.  Cordelia’s tears are likened to pearls in Lear (IV, 3) as are Arthur’s in King John (II, 1).  In Two Gentlemen of Verona (V, 2) Proteus says that “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes,” provoking Julia to say aside “'Tis true; such pearls as put out ladies' eyes,” which ostensibly refers to her closing her eyes to avoid the sight, though the undertones are more sinister.  And, of course, to his immense and instant regret Othello “threw a pearl away/ richer than all his tribe” (V, 2).

     The symbolism of pearls can appear in unlikely places.  Joe Hill’s song “The White Slave” employs the association with female beauty to lament the downfall of “one little girl, fair as a pearl” whose poverty leads her to a miserable and unhealthy life of prostitution.  “Same little girl, no more a pearl.”  Perhaps a similar sense of vulnerable beauty led to Janis Joplin’s being called Pearl. 

     The association of pearls with excellence in verbal practice (“pearls of wisdom,” “pearls before swine”) can survive in unlikely surroundings.  When I worked as librarian in a prison, one of the most popular volumes in the collection, so attractive it had to be kept behind the counter, only to be brought out and lent by special request.  The book, Pearls of Love by Ara John Movsesian, subtitled How to Write Love Letters and Love Poems, was a collection of little lyrical bits for prisoners to include in their letters to wives and lovers. 

     A. E. Housman, whose poetry can be achingly emotional, connected pearls with art in an image he found to correspond to his own experience.

"I think that the production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involuntary process . . . I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I think that my own case, though I may not deal with the material so cleverly as the oyster does, is the latter; because I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting."

         A.  E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry,”

     Housman is insightful enough to see beyond his view of his own case and include the possibility that for some the poetic secretion may be more “natural.”  With becoming wit and modesty, he suggests that poetry (or at least its inspiration) just comes to him uninvited, and that its coming into being is to him more a trial than a pleasure.  He nicely exploits the feeling of serendipity or even of grace that accompanies creation, while implying that the point is to eliminate an irritation in the mind just as the oyster combats a particle of sand in the intimate realm of the shell.  Perhaps the often difficult lives of artists provide evidence for the “morbidity” of the artistic sensibility.  Perhaps people who feel no contradictions produce no art.  The work of art might be conceived as the relic of a frustration, neurosis, or anxiety overcome and integrated into the self, not eliminated but mysteriously transformed.  Some will, or must, feel irresistibly the drive to make something like a pearl, round and mysterious, and beautiful, and just imperfect enough to be real. 

Zola’s Nana and the Conundrum of Sex Work

 

Though it engages Zola and Xenophon, this piece is really more about the nature of sexual relations than aesthetics.

 

     Surely in Nana (1880) Zola meant to portray the sordid degradation of the sex workers of his time, even those who populated the more luxurious regions of the demimonde, where salons were occupied by genteel and titled aristocrats as well as by a once penniless girl of the streets.  In this he was contributing to a growing literature of prostitution that included most of the prominent writers among Romantics, Realists, and Naturalists alike.  Among the many who depicted streetwalkers and courtesans were de Vigny in his novel Cinq Mars (1826), Hugo in Marion Delorme (1828), Dumas père in Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (1843) and La Dame aux Camélias (1848), the Goncourt brothers in La Lorette (1853), Eugène Sue in “La Lorette” (1854), Augier in Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Huysmans in Marthe (1876), and de Maupassant in “Boule de Suif” (1880). [1]

     Though Zola’s approach was sociological rather than moral, tracing Nana’s ruin to her dreadful childhood, her story very nearly fits the form of a medieval exemplum, so horridly does her beauty dissolve in the end into suppurating lesions.  The chance event of her illness reveals to the reader, though not to the lady herself, the vanity and destructiveness of her career as a courtesan.  Yet Nana herself, despite her ups and downs, her short-sightedness and extravagance, had largely maintained a good humor, while her lovers fall into hopeless perdition one after another in what must amount to the greatest career of romantic destruction prior to Dorian Gray (whose conquests are far more obscurely suggested).  Philippe Hugon falls into crime, Georges stabs himself, and Fauchery, Vandeuvres, and Count Muffat suffer financial collapse in the attempt to support her profligate spending, while Nana herself never realizes what she is doing and is brought low only by the random calamity of infectious disease.

     There can be, of course, no question of the fundamental power structure of the patriarchy represented in the novel’s social relations.  The men hold the money and the power and Nana, as she periodically reflects, has nothing but her magnificent body.  Still, the misery and distress she brings her devotees and the disasters they suffer contrast with her generally self-satisfied moods.  She sacrifices true love, perhaps, by cynically using each man she cultivates, and can experience only a cruel caricature of selfless affection in her attachment to Fontan who beats her when he is not simply cold and thoughtless.  Love appears in the narrative only warped by either financial or physical exploitation or hopeless and one-sided obsession.  With fearful concision, Blake knew almost a hundred years earlier in London that “the youthful Harlots curse” “blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”  As the professional in Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” (1930) admits, she can offer “Every love, but true love.”

     If love vanishes when it finds itself in the marketplace, what remains in its place may not be the “trip to paradise” Porter’s lyrics promise, but something more nasty all around.  The world of the Théâtre des Variétés with its titled boxholders may be unknown to the contemporary reader, but comparable phenomena are commonplace today.  One may imagine, without ever having witnessed, the scene in a self-styled “gentleman’s club” next to a truck-stop at an interstate’s exit.  The parallels with Nana’s world are unescapable.  There, daily, groups of men, with more or less furtiveness, sit with overpriced drinks and drop hard-earned dollars in sacrifice to the sexual charms of the performers whose talents, as in Nana’s case, are irrelevant, their nudity (or semi-nudity) being the commodity the customers purchase. 

     This is only the grossest example and it carries the comforting convenience that many can without difficulty avoid that smoky and dim-lit crowd.  Self-interested love may as well be manifested  in the youthful wife of an aging celebrity (or rich man), in a young man’s proclivity for pornography, or the nude scene propelling an actress’ career.  The ordinary course of erotic experience includes moments at least of many sorts, ranging from possessiveness and aggression through mutual respect and responsiveness and on toward self-abnegation and masochism.  In Nana’s world, though, only the ultimately unsatisfying extremes are possible.

     Without questioning the fundamental power relations at play or the oppressive sexism of the dominant ideology, the observer might wonder whether the men or the women are more brutalized in this unequal substitute for love.  Clearly both are denied a satisfying erotic life.  The objectification forced upon the woman descends no less decisively on the man.  Films like The Blue Angel and Of Human Bondage caricature the degradation of an exploitative affair with the man as victim, though the daily newspaper indicates that the reverse is far more commonly the situation.

     Nana’s social position is not entirely unlike that of the ἑταίρα if ancient Greece.   In Xenophon’s account Socrates visits Theodote, a celebrated courtesan, after hearing of her fabulous beauty.  Arriving at her home, he finds her posing for a painter, but when they can converse, Socrates poses her a question.  “Ought we to be more grateful to Theodote for showing us her beauty or she to us for looking at it?  Does the obligation rest with her if she profits more by showing it, but with us if we profit more by looking?”  Eliding the issue of actual sexual contact by describing only her role as the object of visual attention, he observes that “we already long to touch what we’ve seen and we’ll go away aroused and will miss her when we’re gone.  The natural consequence is that we become her adorers, she the adored.”  As she is “sumptuously dressed” and attended by “many pretty maids” in a “lavishly furnished” house, her advantage seems self-evident, and she concedes to Socrates, “Of course I ought to be grateful to you for looking.” [2]  

     Theodote was, of course, quite prosperous.  Her work occurred like Nana’s in a genteel aristocratic atmosphere, just as some women with “sugar daddies” might today mix in moneyed circles.   The answer to Socrates’ question would have been different had he been interviewing a common prostitute, a πόρνη, a word derived from πέρνημι meaning “to sell” and  associated with exploitation and slavery.  Poor, often literally a slave, lacking agency over her own life, such prostitutes resemble today’s street sex workers who are often addicts or victims of trafficking.

     The question that Socrates poses to Theodote ignores a third possibility, that of mutual affection, but that can hardly occur when sexuality is commodified.  Every economic bargain involves a balance of interests, and, when people are buying and selling, a marketplace can assure a modicum of what looks to both parties like “fairness,” but when love is for sale, it is either not really love or not really for sale.  If one party is more powerful, a price must be paid for cynically using another; the possibility of love vanishes altogether.

 

  

1.  Though never prosecuted in France, Zola was the occasion for several major censorship trials in the United Kingdom that ultimately ruined Henry Vizetelly, his publisher.  For a survey of the theme in visual art, see Hollis Clayson’s Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era.  Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) developed an American Naturalism from the considerably more sordid circumstances of the Bowery.  The theme flourished in art movies after World War II in such features as Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (945), Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960), Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (1962), Pasolini’s Mama Roma (1962), Kurasawa’s Red Beard (1965), and Buñuel’s Belle du Jour (1967).

2.  Memorabilia (III, 11, 2-4) in the Loeb Library translation by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd, revised by Jeffrey Henderson.