Mysterious, ambiguous, sensational, ridiculous

[sovay]

The fantasy-prone heroine of Elmer Rice's Dream Girl (1945) is an aspiring novelist and not very successful proprietor of a small bookshop which is lately out of copies of the best-selling bodice-ripper Always Opal, an obvious riff on Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber: "I was appreciating Opal's hot affair with Monseigneur de Montrouget and you interrupted me just as they were about to—" Alternatives proposed to a disappointed customer do not meet with success. The new Russian novel The Dniepier Goes Rolling Along is equally kidding Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don/The Don Flows Home to the Sea, but I have no idea what My Heart Is Like a Trumpet is riffing on. "Mary Myrtle Miven's latest . . . a sort of idyllic love story about two horses. Very tender and poetic." I feel I should be able to detect the joke from the available information, but I got nothing. When the love interest entered the scene with an armload of unwanted ARCs, I was faintly surprised I had never encountered a copy of Fun with a Chafing Dish at a library sale myself.

Comments

[ethelmay]

My first thought was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers (1940). Not a great match, but Hunter is an assonance with Trumpet, sort of. ("Don't ask him what an assy-thingummy is. He's only longing to be asked.")

[sovay]

My first thought was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers (1940).

It was mine, too, but I couldn't make the horses fit.

(My second was E.B. White, but not in 1945.)

[ethelmay]

Well, there's a hunter as in a horse used for hunting, and the horse in - Job, is it? - whose neck is clothed with thunder and who saith Ha, ha, among (amid?) the trumpets. But all those seem too vague. I am just Dowager-Duchessing at it.

[rushthatspeaks]

No, I think you're right, my initial thought was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and therefore the romance of two horses being a literalization joke on the pun meaning of the phrase.

[rushthatspeaks]

Which is to say, these hunters are not lonely.

[sovay]

the romance of two horses being a literalization joke on the pun meaning of the phrase.

I admire the distance of this joke.

[selkie]

"Don't ask him what an assy-thingummy is. He's only longing to be asked."

This line lives in my head rent-free and is 100% responsible for my not ranting about rhyme scheme much of the time, thus sparing the general population. Rhyme scheme is definitely one of my "Who put a quarter in THAT jukebox" special interests.