{"id":156175,"date":"2021-11-30T15:14:50","date_gmt":"2021-11-30T20:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156175"},"modified":"2021-11-30T15:16:54","modified_gmt":"2021-11-30T20:16:54","slug":"the-fourth-rhyme-on-stephen-sondheim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/11\/30\/the-fourth-rhyme-on-stephen-sondheim\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fourth Rhyme: On Stephen Sondheim"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
 <\/p>\n

 
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In the late fifties, Stephen Sondheim, who died last week aged ninety-one, performed a song from the not-yet-finished musical Gypsy<\/em> for Cole Porter, on the piano at the older composer\u2019s apartment. As Sondheim recalls in Finishing the Hat<\/em>, his mesmerizing and microscopically annotated first collection of lyrics, Porter had recently had both legs amputated, and Ethel Merman, the star of Gypsy<\/em>\u2014in which Sondheim\u2019s words accompanied music by Jule Styne\u2014had brought the young lyricist along as part of an entourage to cheer him up. Sondheim played the clever trio \u201cTogether.\u201d \u201cIt may well have been the high point of my lyric-writing life,\u201d he writes, to witness Porter\u2019s \u201cgasp of delight\u201d on hearing a surprise fourth rhyme in a foreign language: \u201cWherever I go, I know he goes \/ Wherever I go, I know she goes \/ No fits, no fights, no feuds, and no egos \/ Amigos \/ Together!\u201d<\/p>\n

That fourth rhyme\u2013it astonishes every single time\u2013exemplifies everything I revere in Sondheim. He is, of course, a musical-theater god: from West Side Story<\/em> through Company<\/em>, Follies<\/em>, Sunday in the Park with George<\/em>, and Assassins<\/em>, his influence trounces superlatives. Even his flops were often revelatory. Merrily We Roll Along<\/em> proceeds backwards, anticipating by decades the experiments with time in shows like Jason Robert Brown\u2019s The Last Five Years<\/em>; The Frogs<\/em>, a reimagining of Aristophanes first performed in Yale University\u2019s swimming pool, must surely have been among the inspirations for Mary Zimmerman\u2019s water-based stage adaptation of Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Wordplay is never just a pyrotechnic aftereffect in Sondheim\u2019s shows\u2014it\u2019s foundational, crucial to the plot and the characters\u2019 emotional development. And his work continually reminds you that playfulness (in poetry, in music, in lyrics, in visual art) can be most essential when the subject is deadly serious. Sondheim includes a multiple-choice quiz in a love song\u2014\u201cNow\/Later\/Soon\u201d from A Little Night Music<\/em>: \u201c(A) I could ravish her \/ (B) I could nap\u201d\u2014and likewise in a paean to the uses of a gun, sung from the rotating points of view of the actual and would-be assassins of U.S. presidents: \u201cRemove a scoundrel \/ Unite a party \/ Preserve the Union \/ Promote the sales of my book.”<\/p>\n

The Sondheim lyrics I love are too abundant to list, but there\u2019s one in his fairytale extravaganza Into the Woods<\/em> that gets my personal gasp of delight. In the prologue to that show, Sondheim introduces the lyrical and musical motifs of each of the main characters. Full disclosure: I played Rapunzel in my high school\u2019s production; don\u2019t ask me to attempt her high B-flats anymore. Jack\u2019s mother, trying to coax milk from their aging cow, Milky-White, grumbles to Jack that \u201cWe\u2019ve no time to sit and dither \/ While her withers wither with her.\u201d That triple homonym\u2014”withers wither with her”\u2014delights the ear, develops the mother\u2019s character, and moves the plot forward, all at once. (Sondheim\u2019s repetitions are always ingenious: \u201cThen you career from career to career,\u201d he writes in \u201cI\u2019m Still Here,\u201d Carlotta\u2019s torch song from Follies<\/em>, which my grandmother memorably rewrote to celebrate leaving her job as a middle-school principal\u2014rather an awkward choice for one\u2019s own retirement party, perhaps, but I like to think Sondheim would have understood.) When Jack goes to market and trades the cow, whose meager supply of milk will no longer support them, \u201cfor beans\u201d\u2014an idiom that usually means \u201cfor nothing\u201d\u2014his mother, a literalist, gets furious again. Jack tells her that these are magic beans, worth far more than their beast, which it turns out they are.<\/p>\n

The high point of my own writing life was receiving a typewritten note from Stephen Sondheim. My weakness for that fourth-rhyme effect may be what first drew me to crossword puzzles, so it didn\u2019t surprise me to find out that Sondheim liked them too, but while researching a book on the subject, I learned that he was also a brilliant composer of the cryptic crossword. Crossword lovers tend to remember their first eureka moment with a puzzle: that time they got stumped on a clue, only to realize they\u2019d been seeing it the wrong way. \u201cStrips in a club?\u201d for example, indicates not dancing on a stage but BACON in a sandwich.<\/p>\n

Unlike those in American-style crosswords, cryptic clues involve an extra layer of wordplay. In 1968, Sondheim began publishing cryptic crosswords in New York <\/em>magazine, and wrote about them with reverence: \u201cA good clue can give you all the pleasures of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.\u201d He scorned the simpler American variety with equal relish: \u201cThe kind familiar to most New Yorkers is a mechanical test of tirelessly esoteric knowledge: ‘Brazilian potter\u2019s wheel,’ ‘East Indian betel nut’ and the like are typical definitions, sending you either to\u00a0Webster\u2019s New International<\/em>\u00a0or to sleep.\u201d I wrote to Sondheim\u2019s agent, asking far too many questions; I edited and re-edited my letter and, after mailing it, spent the night in a cold sweat that I\u2019d used the wrong grammatical tense. When Sondheim, to my astonishment, wrote back, he said that although he no longer had a regular solving practice, he counted introducing American readers to cryptic crosswords among the great achievements of his life. He\u2019d given them a source of delight, a new way of seeing the world.<\/p>\n

Crosswords initially appealed to me as a diversion, and I got hooked on them through that gasp of delight, but eventually I realized that they have special resonance in times of crisis. The crossword was invented in 1913, on the eve of World War I, when people craved something comforting in the newspaper. The New York Times<\/em> first published its crossword during World War II, just after Pearl Harbor, to offer readers a distraction from the bleak headlines. Crosswords also leaped in popularity during the pandemic\u2014I wrote<\/a> two<\/a> for The<\/em> Paris Review<\/em> in spring 2020\u2014and not only because so many of us needed something to do in isolation. Crosswords provide an experience of immersion, yet they don\u2019t completely shut out the world around you. Wordplay, whether in the best puzzles or in Sondheim musicals, can estrange your surroundings and the language through which you interpret them, allowing your life to catch you by surprise again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adrienne Raphel is the author of <\/em>Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures With Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can\u2019t Live Without Them, <\/em>What Was It For, and the forthcoming book of poetry <\/em>Our Dark Academia.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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