Gross' Parodies

At 75, it was too soon to lose John Gross, one of the great AngloAmerican literary critics of our era. Happily his latest book will keep us laughing for another generation. His Introduction opens with a useful definition: ”A parody is an imitation which exaggerates the characteristics of a work or style for comic effect.” (p.xi.)
Take his spoof of Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”:

You’re the top!
You’re Miss Pinkham’s tonic.
You’re the top!
You’re a high colonic.
You’re the burning heat of a bridal suite in use.
You’re the breasts of Venus,
You’re King Kong’s penis,
You’re self abuse.
You’re an arch in the Rome collection.
You’re the starch
In a groom’s erection.
I’m a eunuch who
Has just been through an op.
But if, Baby, I’m the bottom
You’re the top.
Anon. (p.138.)

(Gossip has it Cole was the reviser. But his close pal Irving Berlin was a contender.)

The prose entries far outspace the poetry, but the poems should motivate you to get the volume, sooner the better.

To add to the gay wit of Cole, we have the famous cranky sexuality of librarian Philip Larkin.

A Response to Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’:
(“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. . .)

Not everybody’s
Childhood sucked.
There are some kiddies
Not up-fucked.
They moan and shout,
Won’t take advice.
But—hang about—
Most turn out nice—
If not better
Than us, no worse.
Sad non-begetter,
That bean’t the verse. Carol Rumens. (p.250.)

More than a continent away, our picky Amherst gal sent her idiosyncratic letters to the world. Can you imagine her loose on a California beach?

From “Emily Dickinson in Southern California”

I called one day –on Eden’s strand
But did not find her-Home-
Surfboarders triumphed in—in Waves
Archangels of the Foam-

I walked a pace—I tripped across
Browned couples—in cahoots—
No more than tides need shells to fill
Did they need—bathing suits—

From low boughs—that the Sun kist—hung
A Fruit to taste—at will—
October rustled but—Mankind
Seemed elsewhere gone—to Fall-- X.J.Kennedy (p.80.)

(Ah, so that’s what my grad school pal’s been up to all these years of verses! Nice “work” ,if you can’t get it.)

And of course we must nod to the “Howler” Allen Ginsberg, even if it’s a sneer from “mainline” poet Louis Simpson. (pp.180-81.)

SQUEAL
(inspired or provoked by HOWL)
I saw the best minds of my generation
Destroyed --Marvin
Who spat out poems: Potrziebe
Who coagulated a new bop literature In fifteen
Novels; Alvin

Who in his yet unwritten autobiography
Gave Brooklyn an original “lex loci”.
They came from all over, from the pool room,
New Mexico, but mostly
They came from colleges, ejected
For drawing obscene diagrams of the Future,
They came here to L.A.,
Flexing their members, growing hair,
Planning immense unlimited poems,
More novels, more poems, more autobiographies.
It’s love I’m talking about, you dirty bastards!
Love in the bushes, love in the freight car!
I saw the fornicating and being fornicated,
Saying to Hell with you!

What was it Walt said? Go West!
But the important thing is the return ticket.
The road to publicity runs by Monterey.
I saw the best minds of my generation
Reading their poems to Vassar girls,
Having their publicity handled by professionals.
When can I go into an editorial office
And have my stuff published because I’m weitd?
I could go on writing like this forever. . .
(Not if Louis Simpson has his way!pp.180-181.)
But now that you think of Walt, listen to what 19th Century travel writer Bayard Taylor (who never made the cut to serious writer) said about Whitman:

CAMERADOS
Everywhere, everywhere, following me;
Taking me by the buttonhole,pulling off my boots, hustling me
With the elbows.
Sitting down with me to clams and the chowder kettle;
Plunging naked at my side into the sleek, irascible surges;
Soothing me with the strain that I neither permit nor prohibit;
Flocking this way and that,reverent,eager,orotund,
Irrepressible;
Denser than sycamore leaves when the north winds are
Scouting Paumonok.
What can I do to restrain them?Nothing, verily nothing.
Everywhere, everywhere, crying aloud for me;
Crying, I hear;and I satisfy them out of my nature;
And he that comes at the end of the feast shall find
Something over.
Whatever they want I give; though it be something else,
They shall have it.
Drunkard,leper, Tammanyite, small pox and cholera patient,
Shoddy and codfish millionaire,
And the beautiful young men, and the beautiful young
women.all the same,
Crowding, hundreds of thousands, cosmical multitudes,
Buss me and hang on my hips and lean up to my shoulders,
Everywhere listening to my yawp and glad whenever they
hear it;
Everywhere saying ,say it, Walt, we believe:
Everywhere, everywhere.

(Now, everywhere traveler, see how hard it is to mock freshly. Everywhere. Heh, Bayard, you tried your hardest, Camerado! Strike three!)

I want to close this harangue, with a salute to my four year old son Danny, to whom I’ve lately been playing Morpheus with A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh”. In German, where I sometimes lose control of the plot line!

CHRISTOPHER ROBIN GOES COUGHETY COUGH.
Christopher Robin is drawing his pension;
He lives in a villa in Spain,
He suffers from chronic bronchitis and tension,
And never goes out in the rain.

He never wears willies; he has to eat jellies,
He peers through a pair of bifocals:
He talks quite a lot to a bear that he’s got
Who is known as El Pu to the locals.

Christopher Robin goes coughety coughety
Coughety coughety cough;
All sorts and conditions of Spanish physicians
Have seen and written him off.
But drowsily still in his house in Seville
He dreams of the Forest, and Anne;
Who waits in the buttercups—deep in the buttercups—
Down by the stream—for her man

(To A.A.Milne with love from Paul Griffin. Pp.125-126.)

Goodbye, John Jacob Gross (1935-2011), son of a doctor from Eastern Europe who served the same poor neighborhood in London as Harold Pinter, who dug his criticism.