Books in Brief: Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle

Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle, (Pantheon, 159 pp.; paperback, $8.95). Throughout the Eisenhower Era —and for quite a few years afterward —Tom Lehrer was, so to speak, the Dave Brubeck of the literary set. His mordant songs, the work of a Harvard math major with a good ear for rhyme and a first-rate satirical bent, dealt impishly with every thing from nuclear holocaust (“We Will All Go Together When We Go”) to sexual aberration (“The Masochism Tango”); and, though Lehrer has been inactive as a topical songster for over a decade, his efforts from the Fifties and Sixties are still fondly remembered whenever old liberals and tolerant conservatives get together. Pantheon Books, spurred on by the success of a 1980 British revue devoted to Lehrer’s old classics called Tomfoolery, has just brought out a folio of 34 tunes called Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle, which offers a systematic survey of Lehrer’s output. In addition to such familiar standbys as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Vatican Rag,” Lehrer has thrown in three unpublished efforts: two newer songs written for the PBS children’s show “The Electric Company” and a cheerful look at venereal disease on the march called “I Got It from Agnes.” Lehrer’s freshly-penned alternative lyrics for Tomfoolery -two of which, interestingly, add a homosexual angle to the original songs—are also included. Incidentally, half of the title is right; there really ought to be a Searle drawing for each song. Outside of that, all is splendidly ideal and long overdue.