The misanthrope's corner

National Review, Sept 28, 1998 by Florence King

OKAY, you win. I aim to please. I had another subject planned but I got a bundle of letters asking about the Gay Nineties songs in my Y2K column so it's back to the gilded cage.

First, the requests. I can't accept collect calls to sing over the phone so you can learn the tunes: my singing would not necessarily convey them. Appearing in concert on the next NR cruise is out, and I modestly decline to record a cassette with WFB accompanying me on the harpsichord. Not that I never sing; the third martini will do it but it has to be spontaneous.

How did I learn such old songs? From my grandmother; we used to sing while I held her knitting wool. There was also a radio show around 1940 called The Gay Nineties Hour with an Irish tenor named Frank Munn who sang all three verses to songs that are known today, if at all, only by their choruses.

''In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree'' has a happy chorus but a sad verse: ''Father, if you'll tell me where she's lying, if the grave be far just point it out to me. Dear boy, she said to us when she was dying, to bury her beneath the apple tree.'' By the same token, ''I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now?'' has a sentimental chorus and a cynical verse: ''You have kissed 'neath the moon while the world was in tune, then you left her to hunt a new game. Did it ever occur to you later, my boy, that she's probably doing the same?''

Granny's favorites were about fallen women, and some of them were harrowing. ''I stopped then to see what the object could be, and there in the gutter did lay, a woman in tears from the crowd's angry jeers, and then I heard somebody say . . .'' The reminder that ''She may have seen better days'' changes the jeers to tears in the second verse and leads to streetcorner group therapy in the third.

The understanding male is a fixture in fallen-women songs, a fact overlooked by feminists obsessed with the Victorian patriarchy's madonna - whore distinction. The most touching was composed by Paul Dresser, ne Dreiser, who, like his brother Theodore, was haunted by memories of their erring sister.

In the first verse a carefree young man in the big city is leaving work at the end of the day when suddenly -- and with perfect grammar -- ''I saw a girl who shrank from me in whom I recognized my schoolmate in a village far away.'' She tries to avoid him but he persists. ''Don't turn away, Madge, I am still your friend! Next week I'm going back to see the old folks and I thought, perhaps a message you would like to send.''

Her answer is a chorus of regret. ''Just tell them that you saw me, she said, they'll know the rest. Just tell them I was looking well, you know. Just whisper, if you get a chance, to Mother Dear and say I love her as I did long, long ago.''

Refusing to let her go, he takes her home with him in the second verse, and in the third reunites her with her dying mother. Theodore handled the material differently in Sister Carrie but it was the same story.

Most of these tunesmiths were uneducated men who had knocked around vaudeville but their lyrics were models of English. Take the little boy whose sister is dying of consumption. Overhearing the doctor's verdict that she will be dead when the leaves fall, he finds a ball of string and climbs a tree, telling the curious: ''I'm tying them on 'ere summer be gone so my dear little Nelly won't die.'' When did you last hear a subjunctive verb in a popular song?

The loving and protective brother was another fixture. Girls always seemed to have them, and were they ever handy. ''I've come to this great city to find a brother dear, and you wouldn't dare insult me, sir, if Jack were only here!'' In the second verse of ''My Mother Was a Lady,'' the harasser discovers that he knows Jack and offers to take her to him. ''He'll be so glad to see you, and if you'll only wed, I'll take you to him as my wife, for I've loved you since you said . . .''

Or try this one. In the first verse a little girl asks her bachelor uncle why he never married. He replies in the second verse with the story of the long-ago night when he took his beloved to a ball. During the evening she becomes thirsty and so he leaves her in an anteroom and goes to get her a glass of water, but when he returns he finds her in another man's arms. ''Down fell the water, broken was all, just as my heart broke after the ball.''

The third verse tells of her attempts to explain and his refusal to listen. They break up, she dies, and he nurses a grudge until: ''One day a letter came from that man, he was her brother, so the letter ran. That's why I'm lonely, no home at all, I believed her faithless after the ball.''

HOW did the songs influence me? In various ways, good and bad. They helped me break into the true-confessions magazines. The confessions formula of sin, suffer, repent and the Gay Nineties formula of first verse, second verse, third verse are essentially the same. I was fine as long as I stuck to pulp fiction, but my attempts at serious novels foundered on the long arm of coincidence, the nick of time, and the deathbed clarification.