Home and Hearth

THE STING IN THE TAIL OF 2023 BEGAN ON October 7 with a massacre. So many Jews had not been murdered, and worse, in so few hours since the Holocaust. Thus began another war, with more death and destruction, to add to the one already raging elsewhere wherein a fairly big country, but tiny in comparison to the murderous giant next door, has been struggling to keep itself on the map.

With the world in such agony, where does the individual figure? How do two more deaths matter?

And yet, many of my generation and from before and after were saddened by two deaths in ol’ showbiz. Matthew Perry, since said to have died of an accident caused by a ketamine overdose aided by drowning, took away quite a bit of whatever would have remained of Yuletide cheer this year. The brilliant Perry had never been well but his death was avoidable. The second death, a month later, was inevitable because the individual in question had been seriously ill for a long time and once, in the late 1980s, had been given only weeks to live, his survival becoming a tale of medical and mental defiance. As much of his life was.

Shane MacGowan (1957-2023). One of the most literary singer-songwriters of all time, the story of whose drinking life always eclipsed the fact that he was very well-read, reminding us of Irish poet Brendan Behan, the “drinker with a writing problem” as he had described himself, and to whom MacGowan and The Pogues dedicated ‘Streams of Whiskey’: “There’s nothing ever gained/ By a wet thing called a tear/ When the world is too dark/And I need the light inside of me/ I’ll walk into a bar/ And drink fifteen pints of beer”. Could there be a more fitting verdict on the year now ending?

MacGowan, in this season, cannot be mourned. He must be celebrated for ‘Fairytale of New York’ (1987), one of the catchiest and yet most cerebral of Christmas songs. MacGowan, above all, was born on Christmas Day.

Irish-American author JP Donleavy’s 1973 novel A Fairytale of New York, based on an older play of his, somehow always comes to mind listening to or watching the video of MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, not merely because of the tragi-comic picaresque but for what Yiddishkeit would have called the link of memory and fate. And because, as Thomas Wolfe would have warned: You can’t go home again.

Irving Berlin (1888-1989), born Israel Beilin, couldn’t go home again. Home was a lost country. Memory and desire may mix to produce nostalgia but when you are condemned to exile from the tangibility of the past, make the best of where you land. It’s not a coincidence or quirk of history that the best-known Christmas songs of the last century written in English, on either side of the Atlantic but especially in America, happen to have the immigrant, or expat—visible as in ‘Fairytale of New York’, or invisible as in Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’—as their fulcrum. ‘White Christmas’ is, of course, the ‘hit of hits’, the most recorded song of all time. But it’s also not an accident that at least half of the most popular Christmas songs are written by Jews. And some of the best of the rest by and of the Irish.

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

‘White Christmas’ and ‘Fairytale of New York’, in a way, frame the secularisation of the Christmas song although that process didn’t begin with one nor end with the other. Before ‘White Christmas’, written for the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, there were, most notably, ‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town’ (Coots and Gillespie, 1934), ‘Winter Wonderland’ (Felix Bernard and RB Smith, 1934), and ‘Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ (Johnny Marks, original 1939), which had moved the Christmas song far from the celebration of Nativity in the carol standards. Still earlier, there was the distinctly English ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ from the late-18th century which wasn’t set to music till the early 20th. In America, ‘Jingle Bells’ (James Pierpont), ‘Up on the House Top’ (Benjamin Hanby) and ‘Jolly Old Saint Nicholas’ (Emily Huntington Miller) had all appeared in the middle decades of the 19th century. These early secular Christmas songs capitalised on the new icon of the holiday season—Santa Claus or Father Christmas in his secular and modern avatar, also a 19th-century invention. The fact that ‘Jingle Bells’ is far better known and more often played than most other American songs across the world and is reduced to supermarket and elevator music come the season owes to the fact that there’s nothing ‘Christian’ (that is, religious) about it. It’s universal. It’s everybody’s song. So much so that we can’t bear to hear any strain of it in any voice anywhere.

So, the Christmas song, which in the vernacular owes its existence to none other than the founder of the Franciscan order, Francis of Assisi, was already secularised by the time a Russian-Jewish immigrant, who once went by his Tin Pan Alley name Izzy Baline, ended up giving America its holiday anthem. Bing Crosby lent his voice and became the definitive recording that everybody would know even when they didn’t know who wrote the song. “With ‘White Christmas’, Berlin created an anthem that spoke eloquently to its historical moment, offering a comforting Christmastime vision to a nation frightened and bewildered by the Second World War. But it also resonated with some of the deepest strains in American culture: yearning for an idealized New England past, belief in the ecumenical magic of the ‘merry and bright’ Christmas season, pining for the sanctuaries of home and hearth. Its dreamy scenery belongs to the same tradition as Currier and Ives’s landscapes and Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ The song’s images of sleigh rides and falling snow and eager children capture the mythic essence of the American Christmas. ‘White Christmas’ seems to have always existed, lurking, as one Berlin biographer has written, ‘just beneath the surface of national conscious­ness,’” wrote Jody Rosen in White Christmas: The Story of an American Song (origi­nally published in 2002 with the subtitle ‘The Story of a Song’).

The song certainly had nothing to do with Nativity, which Christmas is about. Nor had it anything to do with World War II, which it ended up con­textualised with. The song as a “blank slate”, on which Americans projected whatever they wanted to, does explain its success and longevity (“People read a lot of things into that song that I didn’t put there,” said Berlin). It explains the why but not the how. In Irving Berlin: New York Genius (2019), James Kaplan offered a simplified version of a complex reason: “…Tin Pan Alley had large­ly failed to capitalize on the holiday [where the element of nostalgia comes in]—perhaps because so many of its songwriters and publishers were Jews. Irving Berlin clearly planned to redress this omission with ‘the best song any­body ever wrote.’ And since it wouldn’t have been authentic for him as a Jew to write about Christ, he chose to universalize his lyric. And herein lies a first clue to the deep strangeness of ‘White Christmas.’ For what could be stranger than a Jew out of the shtetl and the Lower East Side creating what is arguably the most influential Christmas song of all time?”

No biographer of Berlin or his song can, however, do without the satirical and cynical take of Philip Roth, voiced by his characters ‘Philip Roth’ and Moishe Pipik in Operation Shylock (1993): “The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ [Berlin’s contribution to Easter a la Christmas] and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Command­ments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’

The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow… He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it. Everybody loves it… If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!”

Elsewhere, Roth would call ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Easter Parade’ kitsch. But in our time of the new anti-Semitism, it would do everybody good to remember where it all came from. Israel Beilin was born in Siberia. And even as a kid, he would have been no stranger to the ritual outpouring of hatred against Jews in the Pale and beyond, especially at Christmastime and Easter. There’s no irony in the fact that Jews and their descendants who had fled those Eastern European pogroms to the New World and happened to work in Tin Pan Alley would create a good Christmas, a happy Christmas without the goyim beating down their doors. Having lost home, they were building their new home by writing their America—and by claiming every corner of the national consciousness as their heritage too. Berlin’s own life, of course, was the American Dream to a T. In 1954, he told an interviewer how he, “a member of the Jewish faith”, could write the song: “I wrote it as an American.”

That answer might not mean much but his own version about the origins of the song, quoted in Kaplan’s biography, harked back to a founding portrait of immigrant America: “‘I was a little Russian-born kid, son of an Orthodox rabbi, living on the lower East Side of New York City. I did not have a Christmas. But I bounded across the street to my friendly neighbors, the O’Haras, and shared their goodies. Not only that, this was my first sight of a Christmas tree. The O’Haras were very poor and later, as I grew used to their annual tree, I realized they had to buy one with broken branches and small height, but to me that first tree seemed to tower to heaven.’” And there lay the Irish connection to an in­stance of Jewish inspiration that remoulded the tradition of popular Christmas music, which in the 1930s and 1940s still meant, mostly, ‘Silent Night’, ‘Away in a Manger’, or ‘Adeste Fidele (O Come, All Ye Faithful)’.

THE DARK SIDE

Once a hit among both white and Black audiences, African Americans have come to view “Berlin’s anthem with increasing ambivalence, detecting in Crosby’s placid ‘white-bread’ crooning a coded message excluding blacks from the national Christmas celebration,” wrote Rosen in 2002. In the last 20-odd years the song has fallen in the popularity charts further, but from Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerlad, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole or Elvis Presley to Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Bob Marley, the Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin or U2, all have performed and/or recorded ‘White Christmas’. Berlin, infamously, tried to ban Elvis from recording the song, aghast at its ‘desecration’ by rock ‘n’ roll. But that in itself was the story of a battle lost, and not necessarily for the worse. By the time rock ‘n’ roll declared its revolt against Tin Pan Alley and the song standards, the Golden Age of American Song of the interwar years was already over.

The Pogues recorded ‘Fairytale of New York’ with Kirsty MacColl in 1987, long after punk’s counter-Counter Culture revolt had ebbed, almost at the mid-point of the decade between Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ (1984) and Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ (1994), two songs that regularly feature at the top of the all-time Christmas charts in both the US and the UK, with Carey being the No 1 by average in a space populated by Ariana Grande (‘Santa Tell Me’), Justin Bieber (‘Mistletoe’), Michael Bublé (‘It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas’)… and let’s not forget Band Aid’s (Bob Geldof) ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ (1984).

In the UK, ‘Fairytale of New York’ has always done much better. And this year, it will undoubtedly return to No 1. The reason being the fact that it’s less a song about America and the Big Apple than about a young immigrant Irish couple who had come with high hopes and then descended into drug abuse, despair and indifference, but still had the sparks of defiance. Written by MacGowan with bandmate Jem Finer (his is the first name in the credits), the song epitomised the bridge that MacGowan and his ilk already were for the two constituents of their Anglo-Irish audience, the two halves of their own Anglo-Irish identity.

In his obituary of MacGowan, Irish author Joseph O’Connor wrote: “Shane understood the power of simple words placed in order carefully.

‘The boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay’ (Fairytale of New York)

It’s poignant, perfect, beautiful, touching. It’s punk grown up but still gritty.” He referenced the hauntingly poetic yet precise and simple line from the tradi­tional ballad ‘Carrickfergus’ which MacGowan admired, “The sea is wide, and I can’t swim over, and neither have I wings to fly”, to say: “A line such as this one… says more about state of mind than any sentence loaded with adjectives and adverbs.”

However, a line like “The boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay” also gives us the sociology of the NYPD without seeming to. That’s the history of a city, a nation, and its Irish. But MacGowan’s genius, and that of the song, is perhaps best captured by his gravelly opening line: “It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank.” The bathos is comparable to the ultimate anticlimax of 20th-century literary modernism, TS Eliot’s opening lines from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: “Let us go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherised upon a table”. Welcome to life as it happens to be.

But then, very soon MacGowan subverts the subversion of the opening: “I’ve got a feeling/ This year’s for me and you/ So happy Christmas/ I love you baby/ I can see a better time/ When all our dreams come true”. That’s the cue for Mac­Coll to join, as the song suddenly changes tem­po and becomes a dance number even as it gets darker. “They’ve got cars big as bars/ They’ve got rivers of gold”, countered by “But the wind goes right through you/ It’s no place for the old”. MacGowan’s family and friends, in a fitting tribute, danced to the song at his funeral.

With its cuss words and a homophobic slur (in MacCall’s lines), ‘Fairytale of New York’ has had its fair share of trouble with broadcast, performance and even as pub music in some places. The Pogues and MacCall were actually quite willing to modify some of the lyrics according to their audience but when BBC declared in 2020 that the trouble­some words would be removed on Radio 1, MacGowan’s friend Nick Cave, as reported by BBC, complained that a song “tampered with, compromised, tamed, and neutered… can no longer be called a great song”. MacGowan’s own benefit of clergy was the poet’s classic and correct defence: “Not all characters in songs and stories are angels or even decent and re­spectable.” Certainly not the two protagonists of ‘Fairytale of New York’ who have become drug addicts by the sixth verse (which has the most contentious lines) and ends with “Happy Christmas, your a**e, I pray God it’s our last.”

None of it has taken anything away from the popularity of this song about two people who could have been anyone and everyone. There’s no happy ending but when the wom­an’s complaint, “You took my dreams from me/ When I first found you”, is met with a half-honest “I kept them with me babe/ I put them with my own/ Can’t make it all alone/ I’ve built my dreams around you”, we are left with a redemption of sorts, and that’s all there is to it. MacGowan’s epitaph could have been the most famous lines from The Pogues’ ‘The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn’: “They’ll take you from this dump you’re in and stick you in a box./ Then they’ll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground./ But you’ll stick your head back out and shout, ‘We’ll have another round.’”

What did Berlin and MacGowan—born the greater part of a century apart, their careers dif­ferentiated by several revolutions in popular music, and working in separate continents— have in common that ended in their remaking the Christmas song more memorably than most? Chutzpah? Well, they both had oodles of it, although they didn’t talk the same in Yiddish and Anglo-Irish.

2024 New Year IssueBing CrosbyChristmasDanny KayeFairytale of New YorkRosemary ClooneysongVera-EllenWhite Christmas