Weepin' & Wooin' With Rod McKuen

Once was a time,

in New York's jungle in a tree,

before I went into the world

in search of other kinds of love

nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.

Looking back

perhaps she's been

the only human thing

that ever gave back love to me.

Suppose you wrote these lines one night and instead of tearing them up the next morning took them to a publisher. What would happen? Surely, in the great, big, tough new world of black-and-blue humor, four-letter words, and agonizing alienation, the publisher would throw you out. But then again he might publish the stuff and help you and himself make a mint.

That is more or less what happened to the author of these lines, Rod McKuen, 34, a song lyricist, nightclub troubador, onetime disk jockey and movie juvenile. His two volumes, published by Random House, Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows (84 pages) and Listen to the Warm (113 pages) have sold more than 100,000 copies in two months, making him one of the bestselling poets in publishing history*--and all with sweet love, lonely rooms, silent rain, quiet snow, and lost cats.

Gentle Touch. McKuen's poetry is Edgar A. Guest with a twist of lemon--the sort of thing that lovesick teenagers used to keep locked away in their diaries. One typical lyric:

Be gentle with me, new love.

Treat me tenderly.

I need the gentle touch,

the soft voice,

the candlelight after nine.

There've been so many who didn't understand so give me all the love I see in your

timid eyes but give it gently.

Please.

Sometimes he gets sexy ("I want my thighs to speak your name"), but mostly his thoughts are cellophane-wrapped in a safe sort of melancholy:

The girl upstairs

is entertaining again,

I could set my clock

by the footfall on the stairs.

I see her sometimes,

coming and going on the stairs

or going to the market.

Sometimes I hear her late at night

playing sad music

or walking overhead.

She smiles in the daytime,

but not at me.

Purple Onion. McKuen comes by his melancholia naturally. Born in Oakland, Calif., he never knew his father, took to the road as an impoverished drifter at the age of eleven. At 15, he latched onto a job as a disk jockey with a radio station. One night, while spinning some ballads, he began sobbing over the air about his teen-age love problems. The listeners sobbed along with him, and soon the station set him up as a late-night lovelorn counselor.

After serving in the Korean War, he wept his way into the Purple Onion in San Francisco as a singer, began singing his own songs. In addition to his pair of books, he has made 33 recordings in a raspy but affecting folknik voice. His philosophy is about on a par with his poetry: "Maybe if we were a little more honest and did communicate a little better, there wouldn't be a need for late-night talk shows and atom bombs."

Why do people buy his product? As an exercise in camp? Almost certainly not. They seem charmed and disarmed by his sentimentality, his square hipness. What the McKuen phenomenon proves is that, no matter how sophisticated or cynical the times may seem, there is always a vast market for the banal.

* McKuen's books do not appear on bestseller lists because bookstores do not normally report poetry sales.

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