Book as Object: A Copy of the Taishang Ganying Pian

 

This essay is not really a study of this popular Daoist text as much as an appreciation of the artifact of one copy of the book itself and a bit of a glance up a few of the innumerable paths it, like all other objets d’art, opens to view.  In the last paragraph I venture a few rhetorical firecrackers that might seem out of place in a soberer article. 

 

     My copy of the Daoist text titled Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution, the T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien, today transliterated as the Taishang Ganying Pian (太上感應篇), was printed in 1906 [1].  How such a book came to be published -- not only in America, but in LaSalle, Illinois, which might by some standards be regarded as the middle of nowhere – is, unsurprisingly, a story of a few nonconformists.  I grew up near Chicago and LaSalle to me was simply the town by Starved Rock State Park.  In college I had a housemate from LaSalle and I noted his pronunciation of his hometown – “Láy-sal” – with the stress on the first syllable (just as its sister city Peru was called by the natives “Peé-roo”).  [2]

     My book, in excellent condition apart from severe browning of its acidic pages, is a fruit of the business success of a German immigrant, Edward Carl Hegeler.  During the nineteenth century coal and zinc mines were developed in the LaSalle area, in part by this university-educated free-thinker.  Hegeler was a man of philosophic bent who appreciated spirituality yet could not accept orthodox religion.  Once he had become prosperous through his business activities, Hegeler sought to spread his notion of a new sublime vision based in science and uncorrupted by superstition.  In support of his opinions, he became active in the Free Religious Association, a group advocating a rational universal religion [3] and eventually assumed the editorship of the Association’s journal, formerly The Index, as the Open Court magazine, after he had founded the Open Court Publishing Company, which published books as well as another periodical, The Monist. 

     Under the editorship of Hegeler’s son-in-law Paul Carus the company became a significant source of information about Asian philosophy and religion in the West as well as publishing work by Charles Sanders Peirce.  Carus himself had a doctorate from Tübingen and a mind that, like that of the young Augustine, kept inquiring.  Once a Spinozist, he next decided that Buddhism most closely approached his own beliefs and wrote The Gospel of Buddha, modeled on the Christian gospel, in an effort to make Asian spirituality more approachable for Americans.  He eventually adapted Ernst Haeckel’s brand of hylozoism, called panpsychism, terming his own refinement panbiotism, which he described as a variety of monism that holds all nature “is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live” [4].

     In association with the World Columbian Exposition, the world’s fair in Chicago celebrating the quatercentenary of Columbus’ arrival in  the Western hemisphere,  a Parliament of the World’s Religions was held in 1893.  There Ramakrishna’s disciple, Swami Vivekananda, fascinated the audience with his universalist Hinduism (which was to form the basis for the Vedanta Society).  Among the other representatives of major traditions who appeared at the Parliament was  Soyen Shaku, the first Zen master to teach in the United States.  Carus met Shaku and asked if he would be willing to translate Asian texts for Open Court. Though Shaku declined, he suggested his student D. T. Suzuki, who was to become the most important exponent of Zen in America. 

     Among the projects Carus and Suzuki undertook was the T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien (as they called it is the old Wade-Giles transliteration).  They produced a curious volume neither wholly popular nor scholarly, spiritual in its final aspirations, but offering a number of rewards short of enlightenment.  The book is designed with care and taste.  The decorative cover, reproduced above, is only the first of its visual charms.  A frontispiece features a magisterial portrait of a grandly bearded Lao Dz looking utterly satisfied by Keichyu Yamada whom Carus then hired to illustrate Open Court’s edition of Scenes from  the Life of Buddha (1898).  Scattered throughout are  curious anonymous line illustrations from late editions of the book. 

     The annotated translation by D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus follows the Chinese text each page of which is accompanied en face by a grid indicating the meaning of every individual character, in this way giving the reader without knowledge of Chinese some insight into the language while providing Sinologists with the original. 

     The book itself, as its English title Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution indicates, concerns karma, the cause and effect of people’s actions, with the intention of inculcating a simple morality based on retributive justice.  Job’s counsellors would have agreed with the author of this little book that every good deed unfailingly brings good fortune whereas every sinful or ignorant act brings an inevitable punishment.  Surely Lao Dz himself, like Job, would reject this mechanism as woefully reductive if not outright untrue.  Indeed, everyone can see in lived experience that it is every bit as common for the good to suffer while the wicked prosper.  Though in practical terms too inaccurate to be the governing principle of many people’s actions, the idea of immediate and perfect divine justice is so tempting  it has received wide currency.  This “myth” in the Platonic sense of a “royal lie,” a “needful falsehood” [6] is useful in shaping people’s behavior, influencing them toward selflessness, even if they know in a way that it is a fiction..

     Though attributed to Lao Dz himself (the “Tai-shang” or “grandly high one” of the title, the main text has been dated to  1164 C. E.  From the first, the book enjoyed state patronage and large editions were distributed as an act of virtue by the sponsors and to elicit good behavior from the masses.  In spite of its association with Lao Dz, the book shows little affinity with the Dàodé Jīng.  It is rather a product of the Chinese syncretic tradition that mingles elements of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism with local folk belief, one product of which is the Lushan school of Daoism [7].  So great was the book’s appeal as a simple way of performing a moral act by distributing a book which encourages virtue among its readers that countless copies were manufactured and given out by religious laypeople and governmental agencies.  In their “Introduction” Carus and Suzuki suggest that perhaps no book has attracted greater devotion or has enjoyed more readers.

     The proliferation of this particular text in numerous editions over the years was enabled by the rise of inexpensive printing but was motivated in the first place by the treatise’s own promises.  Rather like the Gideons (who continue to distribute millions of Bibles annually), pious Daoists sought to accumulate merit by disseminating the Treatise which was classed as a “morality book” (shanshu 善書), a prescriptive guide to righteous behavior. The Open Court volume follows the model of numerous Chinese editions which append narrations of anecdotes that provide particulars of people’s well-deserved benefits and punishments in the present life with occasional recourse to heaven and hell.  The very first tells of a man who always revered the Treatise and, as a result, ascends with his family bodily into heaven, just as tradition says Enoch and Elijah did.  In the second story a poor but devout scholar pawns his clothes to support a printing of the Taishang Ganying Pian and shortly thereafter receives prestigious appointments from the emperor. 

     The main body of the text is a simple catalogue of ethical mandates, the great majority of which would be acceptable in most times and places.  The author illustrates such general rules as “do not proceed in an evil path” with specific positive advice such as advocating aid for the needy  while denouncing evildoers who lie and oppress others.  Some injunctions warn against improper ritual observance or violation of taboos (such as by needlessly killing a snake or a tortoise, by performing an execution on a holiday, or by exposing one’s nakedness at night).  The book thus constitutes a convenient epitome of moral teaching, a little law-book like the Albanian Kanun by which the individual might guide daily behavior.

     Anyone partial to the radical mysticism of Daoist or Advaita or Chan masters is likely to be taken a bit aback when, mingling with robed monks for the first time on a trip abroad, the traveler sees a pious supplicant genuflecting and reverently placing a package of Mallomars on the altar before a figure of the Buddha, while praying for a new baby, good grades, healing, or a promotion.  A certain suggestive potency does linger over such a scene.  It is, if nothing else, a spectacle of need, a touching glimpse into the abyss of human desire.  And the people, one guesses (or hopes) may be perhaps just a bit gentler than their more secular neighbors, for all organized religions teach ethics, laws, and moral rules their leaders say are ordained by higher powers. 

     Yet surely such petitioners have been as often disappointed in their hopes as often as they have been gratified.  Still they return the next time with the same belief in the efficacy of offerings.  Just as a  disappointed practitioner of juju will conclude that someone else must have had a stronger charm, these ordinary laypeople retain their faith in retributive justice in spite of seeing injustice daily. 

     Ethics are only meaningful within human communities, and Ultimate Reality can have little to do with such moral judgements.  Even far short of that last conceptual horizon (when all bets are off), moral concepts would vanish altogether should humankind become extinct.  On the other hand, in all societies religions have flourished, insisting on a patterns of behavior in part rational and functional and in part ritual and magical.  The Taishang Ganying Pian,  by attributing a systematic account of people’s moral obligations and expectations to a recognized sage, provided a guide to conduct that proved useful for centuries in China.   

     Practical it may be, but the book is warm with the glow of faith and scintillating with the peculiar Chinese fancy which seems never to take itself entirely seriously.  One reason a sinner cannot escape judgement, the reader learns, is that when he falls asleep on Kûng Shên Day his misdeeds will be reported to the Director of Destinies (siming 司命), a bureaucrat of the Jade Emperor Yù Huáng.  The informers are what Carus and Suzuki call “three body-spirits.”  In popular Daoism these are more precisely called the Three Corpses or Three Worms, hostile spirits dwelling within the human body, parasites that sometimes seek to bring disease, but always record their host’s moral failings.  From this belief arose the practice of staying up through the night of Kûng Shên in order that the hostile spirits would not then be able to fill out the proper reports in heaven.

     This sort of thing deems to us altogether fanciful.  Did the Chinese actually believe it, or did they merely welcome the opportunity to socialize through a long night?  Did Carus and Suzuki believe that they would bring enlightenment a bit closer with their republishing amid the flatlands of northern Illinois?  Or did they simply enjoy each other’s company and relish intellectual labor as an end in itself?  Did I believe my mind might catch sight of a bright spark from perusing this book? Or was I, too, only  passing the time, just as another might do with a popular novel or a situation comedy?  And you, dear reader, what brings you here?  There may in the end be little distinction between a search for truth and bliss and just getting through the day.  Both bring one at last after all to evening.  But I find that I am dreaming over this odd little volume, the most excellent characteristic of which is perhaps to stimulate dreaming.   

 

  

1.  My copy was printed in 1944 but purchased perhaps twenty years later.  Like the old Dover company and others in the days prior to the 1979 Supreme Court decision that made large inventories impractical, Open Court used to support their backlist forever.  Today Open Court offers a wide range of titles including a series on philosophy and popular culture that includes studies of the philosophical implications of Mr. Rogers, RuPaul, and the Simpsons.

2.  There seems to be a principle of this rural American displacement of accent to the first syllable.  Another Illinois town is Pekin, pronounced “Peé-kin” and named, like Pekin and Canton in Ohio, because its founders thought they were on the exact opposite side of the globe.  Until 1981 the Pekin school’s athletic teams were called the Pekin Chinks. 

3.  In particular on evolution.  Darwin was a regular donor and a subscriber to The Index. 

4.  Paul Carus, “Panpsychism and Panbiotism,” The Monist, Vol. 3, No. 2 (January, 1893).

5.  Among the titles used by other translators are Tai Shang's Treatise on Action and Response, the Treatise on the Response of the Tao, and the Treatise of the Most High on Action and Retribution.  The text was included in volume forty of the Sacred Books of the East series under the title Tractate of Actions and their Retributions in a translation by james Legge, the first Oxford professor of Chinese.

6.  Republic, Bk. III.

7.  In Chinese this is called the sanjiao yiguan (三教一貫) or sanjiao heyi ( 三教合一).  The Lushan sect continues today, including the use of shamans called  "masters of rites" or fashi (法師).

 

 

 

 

The Idea of Nature in Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”

  

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in  parentheses refer either to lines in the “Essay on Criticism” or the “Essay on Man” or to Canto and stanza in Dryden’s translation of Boileau’s “L'Art poétique.” I use the text of the “Essay on Criticism” available online at https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o3675-w0010.shtml.

 

     The distinction between the natural and the artificial is among the bipolar oppositions most commonly invoked in the discussion of poetry.  The ancient “Asiatic” rhetorical style, Occitanian trobar clus, and Euphuism, for instance, revel in language that is pointedly artificial in contrast to the Attic style, trobar leu, and Philip Sidney who concluded sonnet 1 in Astrophel and Stella with the line: “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”  His pose, of course, is as much a convention as any. 

    There is nothing “natural” about even such direct and simple lyrics as those of A. E. Housman.  All poetry is simply sounds in the air or marks on a page, with no necessary correspondence to lived experience of the world.  Every work of art is oblique and conventional in signification, relying on sound, symbolism, and allusion.  Though no story is “realistic,” since every narration is “made-up,” some have “seeming reality,” while others strike readers as fantasy, and in poetry some writers seem to rely more heavily on nature and inspiration, while others seem more consciously craftsmanlike.  Each is a pretense, an equally manufactured impression created by the author. 

      Still, a poet’s expressed reaction to nature signifies a whole complex of accompanying attitudes.  Nature is a critical element in the contrast constructed by literary historians between Classical and Romantic ideals.  The Classical artist is associated with inspiration through imitation, achieving effects through mastery of rhetoric, and a general attachment to urbane sophistication, while the Romantic is stimulated by direct experience, expressed in a “spontaneous overflow” of words, responding with “natural” emotion to beauty.  

     While Pope is often considered the prime exponent of a neo-Classical poetics, and his “Essay on Criticism” is intended as an English counterpart of Boileau’s L'Art poétique (itself a revision of Horace), in fact both Pope’s poetic theory and practice are far from doctrinaire.  In numerous important ways, Pope contains the embryo of Romanticism in his own writing, though the meaning his gave to the word “nature” was quite different from later usage including our own. 

     The “Essay” does indeed prescribe rules, but also allows for their violation.  While he cautions “Discretion” (163) in violating traditional artistic practices, he recognizes that “Great Wits may sometimes gloriously offend” (153) and please readers with “lucky LICENCE” (149), constructing   “Nameless Graces, which no Methods teach” (145).  To Pope “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare,/ For there's a Happiness as well as Care” (142-3).  The aesthetic effects beyond those taught in the schools are not necessarily unknown only because of their novelty; according to Pope, they may be in fact beyond analysis.  “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare.” (142)

     A source of inspiration beyond the models of the ancients, beyond even their conscious understanding, was nature, though for Pope the word had a meaning rarely used today.  The most reductive formulations of the Classical-Romantic dualism would premise a Classical preference for civilization, typified, perhaps, by Samuel Johnson’s comment (according to Boswell) “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." [1]  The Romantic answer would be a reverence for nature as equivalent to “the fair and open face of heaven” as  Keats put it in “To one who has been long in city pent.”

     The word nature to a modern suggests trees and streams, a landscape unshaped by people, but Johnson’s dictionary, which offers eleven definitions, never quite includes this one.  Johnson begins with Nature as a mythological personification and ends with “physics.”  This last comes close to what Pope had in mind when he declared “First follow NATURE” (68).  The “Essay on Criticism” could hardly be more emphatic about the value of nature in the composition of poetry.  To him “That Art is best which most resembles Her” (74) as nature is “At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art” (73). 

     The character of Pope’s concept of nature emerges in his justification for literary convention which insists that  “Rules are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d” (88).   The next line insists “Those RULES of old [are] discover’d not devis’d” (89), though, of course, in fact, works of art are always culturally constructed. 

     Nature impresses Pope’s sensibility not as the picturesque but as a beautifully functioning system.  He loves not the nighttime stars, but the patterns of their movements, not the lily but the annual death and rebirth of vegetation as a whole.  Thus to him nature is the spectacle of the system, miraculous in complexity, that animates the universe.  The analogy with literary “rules” or conventions is natural, reinforced by the veneration for the ancients in which it seems that “Nature and Homer were, he found, the same” (136).

     The same privilege Pope grants to generalities underlies his opening passage in which he maintains, somewhat counter-intuitively, that incompetent critics do more harm than bad writers.  By suggesting the wrong general principles, a misguided critic will deny the order that constitutes nature.  

     Among the notions that might seem to be Romantic, but which Pope affirms is the existence of the natural “true Genius” (11) among poets as well as critics.  To him the greatest writers are “Poets, a Race long unconfin'd and free” (652).  To such gifted artists the rules that govern most artistic practice appear as “vulgar Bounds” and the poet flouting them exhibits “brave Disorder,” enabling  by this violation “a Grace beyond the Reach of Art” (155-156).

     Yet in much of what Pope maintains, he is seconding the views of Boileau, the législateur du Parnasse, who, though he said  “A hundred times consider what you've said:/ Polish, repolish” (I, 11), also prescribed  “To study nature be your only care” (III, 49) and insisted the writer should “Strive to be natural in all you Write” (III, 50).  His treatise opens by  declaring that only those born under a “Poetic Influence” should attempt poetry and that “In all you Write, observe with Care and Art/ To move the Passions, and incline the Heart” (III, 30).

     Furthermore, both Boileau and Pope praise Longinus, the author of On the Sublime, who focuses on the reader’s reaction and allows for subjective intuitive judgements.  Boileau had himself translated Longinus, and Pope hails him enthusiastically. 

 

Thee bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire,

And bless their critic with a poet's fire.

An ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust,

With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just:

Whose own example strengthens all his laws;

And is himself that great sublime he draws.

                                                           (675-680) 

The language here emphasizes the reader’s emotional response to a text with word like “fire,”, “ardent,” and “warmth,” and justifies Longinus’ judgment, not through logical reasoning, but because his own writing is powerfully moving.  

     The view of nature that underlies Pope’s literary criticism is expressed as well in his more generally philosophical “An Essay on Man” where nature is divinely inspirited. 

All are but parts of one stupendous Whole,

Whose Body Nature is, and God the Soul

                                            (259-260)

 This holy universal nature is then identified with the aesthetic: “All nature is but art unknown to thee.” (281).  As the godhead is the supreme artist, the order of creation is the ultimate work of art, the model for all human poets.  To him the ancients were able to conform to the dictates of an all-but-deified nature that they borrowed from it some flames of “Coelestial Fire” (198). 

     This nearly numinous concept of nature underlies Pope’s literary theory, allowing him to contain in  embryo significant elements of what came to be Romantic assumptions about art.  His reliance on authority, on the “unities” attributed to Aristotle and other prescriptive rules, and his claim that "True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance" (362–363) are quite real, but they arise from the conviction that reliance on literary tradition and drawing from nature itself are similar processes.   For Pope the contemplation of the phenomenal world and the appreciation of earlier poetry both lead, not through rational processes but through a kind of spiritual apprehension, to an understanding of beauty.  Pope’s conflation of art and nature allows him simultaneously allegiance to the natural and the artificial; for him there is little difference since god is an artist like himself.  In the study of nature and of poetry (and of the divine as well) Pope finds an ineffable element, revelatory yet resistant to analysis, known only by the afflatus Longinus called the sublime.

 

 

1.  This is consistent with the Biblical attitude in which the wilderness is regularly opposed to the garden.

2.  For Boileau reason often stands in place of what Pope calls nature.  “Always let sense accompany your Rhyme” (I, 2).

Portraits from a Floating World: A Passage from Africa to Europe

 

From a 1971 journal – thus the reference to Rhodesia.  This is one of a series of monologues, here a small cluster of voices, heard during the chance encounters of travel.  For others, see “Portraits from a Floating World” in Travel (section 10 of the Index), found under the current month in the Blog Archive on the right of the page.

 

     Once, when the Libyans refused us entry into their country from Tunisia, we turned back toward Europe and booked deck passage to Palermo.  On the route it seemed we were virtually never out of sight of some little island, perhaps just a rock protruding from  the unruly surface of the Mediterranean.  Many of the people we met on board seemed as rootless and itinerant as ourselves which was, at that time, saying something.

     During boarding, before we were sorted into the proper shipboard neighborhood to which our tickets entitled us, we chatted with an older lady traveling alone who looked like something of a lost grande dame.  She told us she had just been on safaris in Kenya and Tanzania and had concluded that she much preferred Rhodesia, saying, “They know how to do things more or less properly there, though  I can’t imagine why.”  We thought we probably knew why she had that impression even if she did not.  She was going next to Russia, then the Balkans, then “the Holy Land,” with further destinations yet  to be settled.  “I read too many books, you see,” she said.  “You begin wanting to see everything, but soon nowhere seems quite right and you always want to move on.”    Every detail of the pre-embarkation formalities confounded her.  When we had to show our passports, she asked rather oddly, ”Do they make you carry one of those, too?”

     Once we had been segregated from the better-off, we encountered a rumpled old Oxonian who was more adrift than the lady.  He was accompanied by a couple of young Swedish travelers who had met him in Libya.  They told us we had been fortunate not to be allowed to enter the country because, apart from the suspicion of Gaddafi’s bureaucrats, the exchange rate was highly artificial, making everything very expensive for foreigners and, besides. the signs were in Arabic only and no one knew English.  They had conducted the British man out of that environment as something of an act of charity and were planning to split from him in Italy.  “We have been with him a week and somehow we don’t know a thing about him.”

     He seemed more communicative with us, saying that he was in the middle of a lifelong quest to learn music.  He had spent years in  Africa, he said, learning drums, then went to Spain for guitar, India for sitar, and so on.  He said that work was to him was ”a tremendously wasteful expenditure of energy . . .Money  is, after all, just pieces of paper,” he went on, “I don’t worry, sometimes I almost starve, but I get along, you know.  Anyway, the government owes me a large sum of money.  Some day that will turn up.  Maybe.”

     He asked Patricia is she would call herself “collegian” or “collegiate,” perhaps curious about some difference in American usage.  “Sometimes I play music,” he said, though he was traveling too lightly to carry an instrument.  He was familiar with Leadbelly and loved jazz.  “I haven’t any idea where I’m going,” he said pleasantly.  He did note that the one place he avoided was the United Kingdom.  “they put you in hospital there.”  He wandered about discussing philosophy with Patricia for half the night.

     One of his Swedish companions gallantly offered Patricia his bunk as we had only deck chairs for the night.  “I prefer the floor or not sleeping at all.  Often I don’t sleep when traveling and it may be two weeks before I get home.  I have had maybe no sleep at all.”  He worked on ships as a service employee.  “People take everything out on waiters.  I shall try to get a job in the engine room next time.”  He was heading back to Sweden to sign on for another voyage, since his purse was nearly empty.  “But people must let me cross no even without money, because I am on my way home.  That is the law, people going home must be allowed to pass whatever their circumstances.  I always travel the cheapest way, sometimes hitching, but I can tell you the only way out of Tripoli is to blow money on a cab.” 

     Two Nigerians whom we met were perhaps even poorer.  In pursuit of their plan to study in the United States, they had applied to American schools and they said they had been accepted by one.  From their home in the Sahel, they had set out to hitchhike across the Sahara.  They had had a rough time persuading the truck drivers who used the sand-covered tracks to take on two passengers, but said any among them who spoke Hausa as they did would be bound by ties of kinship however remote to give them a ride.  They said they still had spent days and nights on their own and had scars on  their hands since the desert, while scorching during the day, became very cold at night, and they had built campfires and burned their hands trying to keep warm.  They told us that their intention was to attend university in Oskaloosa, Oklahoma where they meant to study refrigeration science.  They asked whether Oklahoma was near the coast, and we had to tell them not only that it was in the middle of the country, but that Oskaloosa is in Iowa. 

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.