Lightness & Light

LYRIC LAUGHTER -- Arthur Guiterman --Dutton ($2.50).

ON PILGRIMAGE -- Thomas Temple Hoyne -- Economic Feature Service, Chicago ($1.50).

Probably the best professional writer of light verse in the U. S. today is Vienna-born, 68-year-old, beaming Arthur Guiterman (rhymes with skitterman). For the past 43 years, his verselets have kept winking at readers from odd corners of magazines and newspapers, and from the formal pages of 14 books. Lyric Laughter, composed of some 159 of Guiterman's brightest winks, old and new, might be called his collected smile.

The Guiterman smile is teasing--the smile of a verbal sweetmeat-maker who knows how words can be tenderized, much like prunes, to please the palates of the literarily refined. Guiterman's tenderization process consists in rhyming and chiming big and little, tough and honeyed words together, and packing them into tight verse forms, that insure a close misfit.

You ask how I found me

The gems that surround me,

That Fortune so lavishly strews?

Their sole derivation Is versification;

This wealth is the gift of the Muse.

Our taxes inspired

The lyric required

To pay them. Your lunch, by the way,

Including the salad

Was part of a ballad;

We live on a stanza a day.

Moralistic puzzles and behavioristic pickles are the stock grist for Guiterman's mill, which reduces jangles into jingles quickly and, at best, easily. The more proverbial the jangles, the more compelling seem the jingles--since they at least do something effective about things about which it is conventionally taken for granted that nothing can be done. Some of Guiterman's lightest and best lyrics deal with predicaments met with on the Ark; but his most apposite are contemporary:

The railway car was full of germs and heat,

And so I left my much-upholstered seat

To stand awhile upon the platform, where

I hoped to catch a breath of wholesome air.

And thus I stood, with conscience free of blame,

Until the brassbound car conductor came

And said, "I do not like to interfere,

But you must go inside; you can't stand here."

Said I, with my insouciant abandon, "

What else are platforms made for but to stand on?"

He answered with a most sarcastic grin on, "

A platform is intended to get in on."

In Lyric Laughter, Guiterman occasionally takes his own pleasures and predicaments seriously, tries to write about them in fitting words. A solemn dingdong is the result:

It cannot soothe my griefs nor help me bear them

To bid a burdened world deplore my lot;

But joys are multiplied when others share them,

So take my joys and be my griefs forgot.

Luckily for his book, Guiterman doesn't make many such plunges. He writes almost exclusively to offer reassurance (and sometimes succeeds in conveying it) that in a world in which Romans rhymes with abdomens, there must be room for play.

Guiterman belongs with the kind of humorists who make things funny, Thomas Temple Hoyne with those who find them so. Hoyne's "things" are not a stack of private slants on life, but the common denominators of American living, about which he knows plenty. A fourth-generation Chicagoan, Hoyne has followed the ropes as sports editor, financial editor, city editor, showman, broker, lawyer, Kentucky colonel. On Pilgrimage, his crudely but aptly illustrated book of verses, is as amateurish in its format and some of its contents as a home-made dog house. Within it lives a spirit that has dignified the human race since Aesop and before: the spirit that says out what everybody knows is true for keeps.

On Pilgrimage is a running verse-commentary on the workaday stages of being an American, from the cradle to the grave. The start, as Hoyne sees it, is a weaning from "transcendental, ancient, Continental lies":

Brotherly love, a pleasing label

For ties explosively unstable,

Was introduced by Cain and Abel.

On the way, faithless friends, phony strangers and one's own ancestors are met with--and of course Sex:

It's sex that makes the whole world kin,

Righteously, or in secret sin.

That elevator, infatuation,

Takes low-life up to a higher station;

High-life down to degradation--

Equalizes by miscegenation.

Never does sex get any vacation,

Performing its racial obligation,

It suggests good morals for dissertation,

But goings-on for conversation.

Childhood is lived through, youth spent, sports, business and politics engaged in, art looked at. Then comes middle age, when:

Memory plays ruthless tricks,

Abruptly flashing on its screen

Pictures which, like mental kicks,

Emphasize what might have been.

On Pilgrimage winds up, as Hoyne loyally hopes America will not--with decrepitude. He knows the things that age nations as well as men:

A heritage of old rascality

Corrupts the weak spots in mankind--

Disintegrates its fine sodality.

Remodeled by the modern mind,

This old hangover, shaped and shined,

Is wined and dined with great formality,

And most unworthily defined

As Rugged Individuality.

As a provoker of unselfish laughter, On Pilgrimage is a good book and a national possession.

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