Maine Antiquarian Booksellers (MABA)

"The major premise of life is trouble; but the minor premise is not the function of life in general, but of a meaningful personality. "
Attributed to Runi

There is something about a flag...

A new flag for Massachusetts? Simple.
There are many mysteries in this life and one of them is how a state panel convened to design a new flag and seal for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can spend more than three years and $100,000 yet fail completely to accomplish its mission. An even more impenetrable mystery is why anyone would imagine that the best response to such a failure is to convene yet another government panel and give it another $100,000 to do the same thing.

The Globe’s Matt Stout has for years been covering Beacon Hill’s inability to complete a task as elementary as designing a new state flag. In 2021, he reported that the Special Commission Relative to the Seal and Motto of the Commonwealth had managed to meet exactly twice in the 46 weeks since it was created. Pretty much all it agreed on in those meetings was that it couldn’t be expected to get anything done without getting more time and a bunch of cash. So the Legislature extended its deadline — not once but three times — and endowed the panel with $100,000.

After all that time and all that dough, the new flag should by now be flying over every government building in Massachusetts, right?

As if.

“A state commission created nearly three years ago to recommend changes to Massachusetts’s controversial state seal and motto,” Stout reported last November, “is disbanding without offering specific substitutes for either, saying that a new body should be created to ‘carry forward’ its work.”

One member of the commission fumed that it was “the worst working group that I have ever dealt with in my career” and that because it spent so much time making sure “everybody got a say on everything,” nothing actually got done.

Now comes more of the same.

There's a simple fix. (Photo: David L. Ryan/Globe Staff)
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Stout reported on May 24 that the state Senate’s fiscal 2025 budget plan includes yet another 100 grand for yet another panel to take yet another crack at proposing a replacement for the state flag. The deadline to get the job done would be one year from the panel’s creation, and if you believe Massachusetts will have an updated flag by next summer, I admire the childlike purity of your faith.

The existing state flag comprises three basic elements: (1) a blue shield featuring a standing Algonquian Native American peacefully holding a bow and arrow; (2) a blue ribbon with the Latin state motto Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (“By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty”); and (3) above the shield, an arm holding a sword.

You need only glance at the flag to see that the sword, which is outside the blue shield, is distinct from everything below it and not meant to symbolize violence against Native Americans. According to Leonid Kondratiuk, a retired brigadier general who sat on the earlier flag commission and was a military historian for the National Guard and the US Army for 40 years, the sword represents “the arm of God protecting the Commonwealth” and is a symbol that has appeared on European seals and flags for centuries.

Nevertheless, there have been complaints for years about the subliminal message conveyed by the image of the raised sword above the Native American. “We’ve always referred to it as a sword of Damocles,” Cheryl Andrews-Maltais, chairwoman of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah, told the Globe in 2022.

Former state representative Byron Rushing of Boston first introduced legislation to change the design in the mid-1980s. Rushing is a serious and scholarly man, the former president of the Roxbury Historical Society and Boston’s Museum of African American History, not given to woke grievance-mongering. If he agreed with those who regarded the sword as unsuitable regardless of its heraldic antecedents, that clinches it for me: The sword should be removed.

The Latin motto should be removed too. What is the point of including a declaration that almost no one viewing the flag can understand? Even when translated into English, the motto is ungainly and baffling. Besides, words on flags almost always diminish their attractiveness.

On the other hand, when the most recent flag commission undertook a survey of public opinion, a majority of Native American respondents indicated a preference for retaining the figure of an indigenous person on the state’s seal and standard. That would be my preference too. The existing figure is stately, realistic, and manifestly relevant to Massachusetts history. Why not remove everything from the current flag except the likeness of the Native American with his bow? No ribbon, no motto, no sword, no blue shield — just the Indigenous man, all in gold, standing alone at the center of a field of white, the very embodiment of dignity. That would give Massachusetts one of the most striking and interesting of the 50 state flags. It would simultaneously maintain a connection to the traditional flag, while eliminating those aspects that many people find distressing, anachronistic, or perplexing.

Above all, it would be beautiful. The most visually arresting state flags are simple, unique, limited to two colors, and free of words. That is why the flags of Alaska, New Mexico, and South Carolina are such standouts, while those of Michigan, New Hampshire, and South Dakota are mediocre and forgettable. A Massachusetts flag depicting only a standing Algonquian would be memorable and appealing, and an admirable improvement over what the Commonwealth has now.

This issue has been kicking around Beacon Hill for 40 years without being resolved — another example of the feckless absurdity of the Massachusetts Legislature. How much longer must the charade be perpetuated? Alaska’s lovely flag — eight gold stars forming the Big Dipper and the North Star — was designed by Benny Benson, a 14-year-old Alaska Native. It was the winning entry in a design contest held in 1927, when Alaska was still a territory. For his achievement Benson was awarded $1,000, an engraved watch, and a trip to Washington, D.C.

Alaska didn’t need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or convene talky do-nothing commissions to end up with an elegant and distinguished state flag. Massachusetts doesn’t either. I am happy to offer my proposed design as a public service. I’m quite sure it will do the trick, while saving the Commonwealth a lot of money. Still, if the Legislature feels the need to run it past a committee, it can always round up a group of 14-year-olds and make sure they approve.

“Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.”
Beryl Markham

🗣️ ADVICE FROM JEWISH DADS 🗣️

Don't get sucked into other people's craziness.

The best things in life are love, money and streusel topping.

Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired.

Pay your credit card in full every month.

If they offer lox for a bagel, take more because you never know when shul will have lox next.

Stay busy.

Get your head out of your ass!

Always stand up for yourself.

Stay in the right lane and mind your own business.

"Don't cut the bagel toward your neck, Robert!"

Be with the man who makes you laugh.

Listen to your inner voice. It's always right.

Do what makes you happy as long as that doesn't hurt anyone.

Never drink Mad Dog!

If you never ask the question, the answer will always be no.

Always choose to be kind.

Never give up. If they try to knock you down, pick yourself up by the bootstraps and keep going.

Don't worry about As in school, get an A in life.

Never be the drunkest person in the room.

Drink more water!

The best thing about advice is you don't have to take it.

https://www.pressherald.com/2024/06/13/opinion-welcome-to-the-jane-austen-election/

Opinion: Welcome to the Jane Austen election
Compare and contrast! For me, the choice in November is clear as day.

John HendersonSpecial to the Press HeraldYesterday at 4:00 AM
I would offer that the 2024 presidential election will be a Jane Austen election, with “Pride and Prejudice” represented by former President Donald Trump, and “Sense and Sensibility” represented by President Joe Biden.

Trump does not like America. He doesn’t believe in our elections. If he wins, he is OK with it, but if (when) he loses, it is because the election was “rigged.” Trump doesn’t believe in our justice system, either. If he wins the case, he is OK with it, but if (indeed, when) he loses, the system is somehow stacked against him. Why should he be president when he doesn’t believe in the country’s fundamental institutions? Trump isn’t qualified to oversee a Little League game, never mind to preside over the nation.

Trump’s problem is that – despite the mounting evidence – he doesn’t see himself as a loser. He lost the case that E. Jean Carroll brought against him for sexual abuse, to the tune of $88 million. He lost the 2020 presidential election and more than 60 of his allegations of election fraud were dismissed. Trump lost on all 34 counts of the falsification of business records case in New York City. As each day and court case passes, Trump looks more and more like a loser to me.

Trump is all mouth and little substance. He is concerned with ruling, not with governing. Governing in America requires compromise, and compromise is not in Trump’s vocabulary. As such, he is not a respected leader. Trump turned over 14 cabinet officers during his tenure as president, more than the three previous presidents combined. The Trump approach is the very essence of “Pride and Prejudice.” His attitude toward America’s NATO allies, the folks with whom we rebuilt the world after WWII, displays the same arrogance. Trump is not good for America.

Against this is the “Sense and Sensibility” of President Biden. Biden successfully deployed COVID-19 vaccines. He also facilitated the unsnarling of our logistics chains due to the pandemic. All around, it was a stellar performance of public service in the interest of the nation.

Biden has successfully championed democracy by defending Ukraine from Russian aggression, without triggering World War III. Despite Russian provocations and spectacularly tempting opportunities to attack the Russian aggressors directly, the Biden administration has executed disciplined restraint and avoided direct confrontation with the Russians. This restraint, and the effective support we have provided Ukraine are the marks of strong, effective leadership. Ukraine did not capitulate, and is in fact holding its own. And due largely to Biden’s leadership, NATO has strengthened itself by adding Sweden and Finland to its ranks, and closing those ranks against Russian aggression.

Biden believes in America; he has served the nation as a public servant for more than 40 years. He is willing to exercise compromise to move the nation forward. While the southern border situation is not his top priority, he did succeed in putting together a bipartisan compromise to address it. It was a loss for the country that both Trump’s pride and prejudice sank the deal. Biden effectively governed, addressing his adversaries’ priorities, while Trump was motivated purely by power considerations.

In November 2024, America does not need the pride or prejudice of Trump; it needs the sense and sensibility, indeed the sagacity, of Biden.

Does what I write anger you? Perhaps you should ask why. It is often the inconvenient truths that raise our ire. If you identify as Republican, I would offer that there is room in America for differences in policy priorities, but that the politics of loyalty to a personality went out with the American Revolution. Donald Trump does not respect the rule of law that made America.

Opinion: Welcome to the Jane Austen election Compare and contrast! For me, the choice in November is clear as day.

Somehow, I haven't heard this one before!

https://youtu.be/BzLOTHciIKI?t=23

"Lindbergh" by Woody Guthrie

Mr. Charlie Lindbergh, he flew to old Berlin
Got him a big Iron Cross, and he flew right back again
To Washington, Washington

Mrs. Charlie Lindbergh, she come dressed in red
Said, "I'd like to sleep in that pretty White House bed
In Washington, Washington"

Lindy said to Annie: "We'll get there by and by
But we'll have to split the bed up with Wheeler, Clark, and Nye
In Washington, Washington"

Hi**er wrote to Lindy, said "Do your very worst"
Lindy started an outfit that he called America First
In Washington, Washington

All around the country, Lindbergh he did fly
Gasoline was paid for by Hoover, Clark, and Nye
In Washington, Washington

Lindy said to Hoover: "We'll do the same as France
Make a deal with Hi**er, and then we'll get our chance
In Washington, Washington

Then they had a meetin', and all the Firsters come
Come on the walk and they come on the run
In Washington, Washington

Yonder comes Father Coughlin, wearin' the silver chain
Cash on his stomach and Hi**er on the brain
In Washington, Washington

Mister John L. Lewis would sit and straddle the fence
His daughter signed with Lindbergh, and we ain't seen her since
In Washington, Washington

Hi**er said to Lindy: "Stall 'em all you can
Gonna bomb Pearl Harbor with the help of old Japan"
In Washington, Washington

Then on a December mornin', the bombs come from Japan
Wake Island and Pearl Harbor, kill fifteen hundred men
Washington, Washington

Now Lindy tried to join the army, but they wouldn't let 'im in
'Fraid he'd sell to Hi**er a few more million men
In Washington, Washington

So I'm gonna tell you people, if Hi**er's gonna be beat
The common working people have got to take the seat
In Washington, Washington

And I'm gonna tell you workers, 'fore you cash in your checks
They say America First, but they mean America Next
In Washington, Washington

Lindbergh Provided to YouTube by Smithsonian Folkways RecordingsLindbergh · Woody GuthrieThis Land is Your Land: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1℗ 1997 Smithsonian Folkways...

A Beautiful Morning in Fairfield!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/22/my-songs-spread-like-herpes-why-did-satirical-genius-tom-lehrer-swap-worldwide-fame-for-obscurity?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0MDnizQDDSxQM5b2UQFv_uAPvHF1Dk_f_GlmZISORLJ35_Cty5Zp5p2as_aem_AVT2Vc4BjVpHrOWDx0MTjwbr-8vG7kUc0Me761oncQGOyPx__kXtEe2H9g3cM8dkIbptwqiIzpaI4NdqEPU8-r9s

‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?
Francis Beckett
Tom Lehrer peers over a copy of his debut LP.
In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral. Days there began with mass, and ended with an uplifting homily in the chapel from an elderly and skeletal priest, generally about death. “Your best friends will desert you leaving you nothing but a winding sheet,” was one of his more cheerful messages. Between the two there was catechism, rugby, occasional bullying and fairly frequent beatings.

But we had the “playroom”, where we could relax and listen to records, and one day an American boy called Ed Monaghan turned up clutching a Lehrer LP. It was a medicinal dose of the irreverence, nihilism and rebellion that I craved. To this day, I am word perfect in many of the songs I first heard then. There was Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, all about the joys of spring, and as darkly funny as its title suggests. There was the American football song Fight Fiercely, Harvard, which seemed to make cruel mock of those cold, dreary afternoons I was forced to spend watching my school play rugby. It was all done with such bouncing musicality that I doubt whether the Jesuits ever realised the subversive nature of what we were listening to.

Lehrer made my life bearable. I have never been able to tell him so, and it might not please him, for he has been quoted as saying: “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worthwhile.”

I didn’t know then that Lehrer had started out, six years earlier, by paying to have his own record cut because the record companies were shocked by his songs, and selling the LP to fellow students at Harvard. This early samizdat recording was the underground success of the decade with almost no publicity effort from Lehrer – “My songs spread slowly, like herpes, rather than Ebola,” he later recalled.

At that time, Lehrer’s principal accomplishment was that he was a mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard aged 15, in 1943, taken a first class degree aged 18 and a master’s a year later. Born into a New York Jewish family in 1928, Lehrer had, he has said, every advantage: piano lessons, an expensive school that could get him into Harvard, and “the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter”.

In the next year or two, Ed Monaghan introduced me to other comedians who were turning the complacent world of American comedy on its head: Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce. “What these so-called ‘sickniks’ dispense,” wrote Time magazine in July 1959, “is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world.”

But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic hymn set in ragtime: “There the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original.” Although I was by then a confirmed atheist, I probably still thought that making fun of the Catholic church would release a thunderbolt from heaven, and The Vatican Rag cured me.

Tom Lehrer in 2000.
Tom Lehrer in 2000. Photograph: Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns
The album also included three songs condemning nuclear weapons. “There’ll be no more pain and misery / When the world is our rotisserie …” They were so much better than those whiny folk songs of the era, which Lehrer rather despised. “You had to admire these folk singers,” he says on the live LP. “It takes courage to get up in a coffee house or a student auditorium and come out in favour of the things everyone else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood, and so on.”

In this far more political new record, he satirised the Americans teaming up with West Germany against the USSR (“Once all the Germans were warlike and mean / But that couldn’t happen again / We taught them a lesson in 1918 / And they’ve hardly bothered us since then”), and was horrified that Hi**er’s chief rocket scientist was now working for Washington, singing: “‘When the rockets go up who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

And then he gave it up again, and he has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer. He lives in the house he has occupied for decades, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was 96 last month.

Years passed. I looked for Lehrer’s take on George W Bush and Tony Blair and Iraq, but had to be satisfied with a quote about how he said he didn’t want to satirise Bush; he wanted to pulverise him. Occasionally I would meet someone who loved Lehrer’s work as much as I did. Drink would be taken, a few favourites sung tunelessly but noisily.

The only one we never attempted was Lehrer’s masterpiece and his most famous song: The Elements. It’s simply a list of all the elements in the periodic table, sung to the tune of the Major General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance – “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium / And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium” – and it’s virtually impossible for anyone without Lehrer’s gifts to sing it, although Daniel Radcliffe made a pretty good effort on a chatshow a few years ago. Science teachers have benefited from the many versions now available on YouTube.

Ed got back in touch towards the end of the last century, hearing that I had written a radio play about our school. I had just realised that I wanted to be a playwright when I grew up; Ed was transitioning from acting to publishing, and his last stage performance would be in a play of mine in 2012.

Then, in 2020, Lehrer put out a statement saying that he had placed everything he ever wrote in the public domain. His lyrics and sheet music are now available for anyone to use or perform without paying royalties. The statement ended: “Don’t send me any money.” This is unheard-of. Famous performers usually maximise their royalties income. In my book about the 60s, I quoted the odd line from songs by the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and my horrified publishers took the lot out. The royalties would bankrupt them, they said.

In high excitement, I went to the artistic directors at Upstairs at the Gatehouse – the north London fringe theatre that has been a home for my last two plays – and suggested I write them a show about Lehrer, weaving as many of his greatest songs into the narrative as we could. The show would ask the question that has mystified Lehrer fans for decades: what possessed him to give it all up when he was not yet 40 and at the top of his game?

Was it because, as a child mathematics prodigy, he wanted to fulfil his real vocation and become a great mathematician? Apparently not. He taught the subject, first at MIT and then at the University of California Santa Cruz – but not to mathematics majors. Instead he taught the course that humanities and social science majors have to take in the US university system. “Math for tenors,” he calls it. At Santa Cruz he also taught a course on the history of the American musical, which is one of his passions.

Was it because, as he once said, “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”? No. Kissinger did not get the prize until 1973, by which time Lehrer had already retreated into as much obscurity as his fans allowed. But we do know that he believed satire changed nothing. He quoted approvingly Peter Cook’s sarcastic remark about the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much to prevent the rise of Hi**er and the second world war.

Was it because, as he once said, he never wanted success in music? The life he wanted, he said, was that of a graduate student, and his songs were merely a way of helping to finance that. That could be part of the story, but it’s surely not the whole of it.

I researched Lehrer’s life, interviewing as many of his friends and former students as would talk to me. The historian Peter Hennessy, now Lord Hennessy, turned out to be the only person I knew who had ever met Lehrer; he interviewed him in 1970. Lehrer told Hennessy he was not doing paid performances, but had done some benefits for his leftwing Democratic congressman, Robert Drinan. Lehrer’s public persona is brittle and ironical, but Hennessy found him to be kindly and charming. “He had grown a beard and looked a little rabbinical,” Hennessy told me.

Lehrer never replied to my letters, eventually passing me a message through a roundabout route to say that he did not intend to, but was comfortable with what I was doing. Ed suggested I should call the play Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You. So I did.

But did I find the answer I sought: why Lehrer gave it all up? I am not sure. What I can tell you is that Tom Lehrer is a prodigiously talented man who has no interest at all in money for its own sake, or in money to wield power. He wants enough to be comfortable and to do the few things he wants to do, and he has that. I suspect too that, despite his protestations to the contrary, there is a serious man underneath the caustic, cynical front. He once said that you cannot be funny if you are angry. He could just about stay detached enough to be funny about Eisenhower’s America. Trying to be funny about a nation that can elect a President Trump might tear him apart.

Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You will be at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village, London, from 28 May to 9 June

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

This article was amended on 24 May 2024 to correct a lyric from “Then the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original”, to “There the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original”.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/22/my-songs-spread-like-herpes-why-did-satirical-genius-tom-lehrer-swap-worldwide-fame-for-obscurity?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0MDnizQDDSxQM5b2UQFv_uAPvHF1Dk_f_GlmZISORLJ35_Cty5Zp5p2as_aem_AVT2Vc4BjVpHrOWDx0MTjwbr-8vG7kUc0Me761oncQGOyPx__kXtEe2H9g3cM8dkIbptwqiIzpaI4NdqEPU8-r9s

‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?
Francis Beckett
Tom Lehrer peers over a copy of his debut LP.
In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral. Days there began with mass, and ended with an uplifting homily in the chapel from an elderly and skeletal priest, generally about death. “Your best friends will desert you leaving you nothing but a winding sheet,” was one of his more cheerful messages. Between the two there was catechism, rugby, occasional bullying and fairly frequent beatings.

But we had the “playroom”, where we could relax and listen to records, and one day an American boy called Ed Monaghan turned up clutching a Lehrer LP. It was a medicinal dose of the irreverence, nihilism and rebellion that I craved. To this day, I am word perfect in many of the songs I first heard then. There was Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, all about the joys of spring, and as darkly funny as its title suggests. There was the American football song Fight Fiercely, Harvard, which seemed to make cruel mock of those cold, dreary afternoons I was forced to spend watching my school play rugby. It was all done with such bouncing musicality that I doubt whether the Jesuits ever realised the subversive nature of what we were listening to.

Lehrer made my life bearable. I have never been able to tell him so, and it might not please him, for he has been quoted as saying: “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worthwhile.”

I didn’t know then that Lehrer had started out, six years earlier, by paying to have his own record cut because the record companies were shocked by his songs, and selling the LP to fellow students at Harvard. This early samizdat recording was the underground success of the decade with almost no publicity effort from Lehrer – “My songs spread slowly, like herpes, rather than Ebola,” he later recalled.

At that time, Lehrer’s principal accomplishment was that he was a mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard aged 15, in 1943, taken a first class degree aged 18 and a master’s a year later. Born into a New York Jewish family in 1928, Lehrer had, he has said, every advantage: piano lessons, an expensive school that could get him into Harvard, and “the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter”.

In the next year or two, Ed Monaghan introduced me to other comedians who were turning the complacent world of American comedy on its head: Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce. “What these so-called ‘sickniks’ dispense,” wrote Time magazine in July 1959, “is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world.”

But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic hymn set in ragtime: “There the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original.” Although I was by then a confirmed atheist, I probably still thought that making fun of the Catholic church would release a thunderbolt from heaven, and The Vatican Rag cured me.

Tom Lehrer in 2000.
Tom Lehrer in 2000. Photograph: Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns
The album also included three songs condemning nuclear weapons. “There’ll be no more pain and misery / When the world is our rotisserie …” They were so much better than those whiny folk songs of the era, which Lehrer rather despised. “You had to admire these folk singers,” he says on the live LP. “It takes courage to get up in a coffee house or a student auditorium and come out in favour of the things everyone else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood, and so on.”

In this far more political new record, he satirised the Americans teaming up with West Germany against the USSR (“Once all the Germans were warlike and mean / But that couldn’t happen again / We taught them a lesson in 1918 / And they’ve hardly bothered us since then”), and was horrified that Hi**er’s chief rocket scientist was now working for Washington, singing: “‘When the rockets go up who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

And then he gave it up again, and he has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer. He lives in the house he has occupied for decades, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was 96 last month.

Years passed. I looked for Lehrer’s take on George W Bush and Tony Blair and Iraq, but had to be satisfied with a quote about how he said he didn’t want to satirise Bush; he wanted to pulverise him. Occasionally I would meet someone who loved Lehrer’s work as much as I did. Drink would be taken, a few favourites sung tunelessly but noisily.

The only one we never attempted was Lehrer’s masterpiece and his most famous song: The Elements. It’s simply a list of all the elements in the periodic table, sung to the tune of the Major General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance – “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium / And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium” – and it’s virtually impossible for anyone without Lehrer’s gifts to sing it, although Daniel Radcliffe made a pretty good effort on a chatshow a few years ago. Science teachers have benefited from the many versions now available on YouTube.

Ed got back in touch towards the end of the last century, hearing that I had written a radio play about our school. I had just realised that I wanted to be a playwright when I grew up; Ed was transitioning from acting to publishing, and his last stage performance would be in a play of mine in 2012.

Then, in 2020, Lehrer put out a statement saying that he had placed everything he ever wrote in the public domain. His lyrics and sheet music are now available for anyone to use or perform without paying royalties. The statement ended: “Don’t send me any money.” This is unheard-of. Famous performers usually maximise their royalties income. In my book about the 60s, I quoted the odd line from songs by the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and my horrified publishers took the lot out. The royalties would bankrupt them, they said.

In high excitement, I went to the artistic directors at Upstairs at the Gatehouse – the north London fringe theatre that has been a home for my last two plays – and suggested I write them a show about Lehrer, weaving as many of his greatest songs into the narrative as we could. The show would ask the question that has mystified Lehrer fans for decades: what possessed him to give it all up when he was not yet 40 and at the top of his game?

Was it because, as a child mathematics prodigy, he wanted to fulfil his real vocation and become a great mathematician? Apparently not. He taught the subject, first at MIT and then at the University of California Santa Cruz – but not to mathematics majors. Instead he taught the course that humanities and social science majors have to take in the US university system. “Math for tenors,” he calls it. At Santa Cruz he also taught a course on the history of the American musical, which is one of his passions.

Was it because, as he once said, “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”? No. Kissinger did not get the prize until 1973, by which time Lehrer had already retreated into as much obscurity as his fans allowed. But we do know that he believed satire changed nothing. He quoted approvingly Peter Cook’s sarcastic remark about the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much to prevent the rise of Hi**er and the second world war.

Was it because, as he once said, he never wanted success in music? The life he wanted, he said, was that of a graduate student, and his songs were merely a way of helping to finance that. That could be part of the story, but it’s surely not the whole of it.

I researched Lehrer’s life, interviewing as many of his friends and former students as would talk to me. The historian Peter Hennessy, now Lord Hennessy, turned out to be the only person I knew who had ever met Lehrer; he interviewed him in 1970. Lehrer told Hennessy he was not doing paid performances, but had done some benefits for his leftwing Democratic congressman, Robert Drinan. Lehrer’s public persona is brittle and ironical, but Hennessy found him to be kindly and charming. “He had grown a beard and looked a little rabbinical,” Hennessy told me.

Lehrer never replied to my letters, eventually passing me a message through a roundabout route to say that he did not intend to, but was comfortable with what I was doing. Ed suggested I should call the play Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You. So I did.

But did I find the answer I sought: why Lehrer gave it all up? I am not sure. What I can tell you is that Tom Lehrer is a prodigiously talented man who has no interest at all in money for its own sake, or in money to wield power. He wants enough to be comfortable and to do the few things he wants to do, and he has that. I suspect too that, despite his protestations to the contrary, there is a serious man underneath the caustic, cynical front. He once said that you cannot be funny if you are angry. He could just about stay detached enough to be funny about Eisenhower’s America. Trying to be funny about a nation that can elect a President Trump might tear him apart.

Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You will be at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village, London, from 28 May to 9 June

This article was amended on 24 May 2024 to correct a lyric from “Then the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original”, to “There the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original”.

‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity? In the 1950s and 60s, his songs stunned and delighted listeners with their irreverence, wit and nihilism. Then he gave it all up to teach mathematics. Lehrer is still alive at 96 – so I went in search of answers