Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (6 page)

So Vian was necessarily for later. In 1966–7 it was Jacques Brel who spoke most directly, publicly, and intimately to the twenty-year-old I then was. While British rockers strutted their pit-bull masculinity, Brel sang of sexual hurt and romantic humiliation; while Distel smarmed on about
luuurv,
Brel exalted
la tendresse.
In other moods he gleefully spanked the bourgeoisie, lobbed grenades at the military, wrangled doggedly with God, and sang about death with a vibrant terror which seemed to replicate my own. Yet even when he agreed with you, he saw further. You think “Les Bourgeois” is just a rousing war-cry—
“C'est comme les cochons / Plus ça devient vieux, plus ça devient bête”
(“They're like pigs / The older they get, the stupider”)—but it turns out in its final verse to be a sager comment on the whole inevitable process of
embourgeoisement,
with youthful mockers transformed into middle-aged mockees. It was Brel's mixture of satire, wisdom, and heart that did for me: alongside the snarl and the lush contempt was a bursting emotionalism, a celebration of love as
la tendre guerre,
an aching sympathy for the weak, the lost, the
amputés de coeur.
This Belgian came out of a cold, flat, wet country, yet sang with such heat; he hurled himself with dangerous directness at his audience, not caring whose toes he stepped on, acting and clowning, playing drunks and simpletons, even doing sheep-noises, but bundling you up in that rich gargly tonsilly voice and whirling you round in his thrilling taunts and joyous dreams.

Today he is dead—buried at Altuona a few metres away from Gauguin—and his musical remains sit on the shelf in a cube of ten CDs: smaller than the box you'd get someone's ashes in. Playing through this whole
oeuvre
again, I am struck by how long it took him (compared to Brassens, say) to find his true musical identity.

His early songs are weakened by sentimentality and preachiness: not for nothing was he teased as “l'Abbé Brel.” (He had had a late-adolescent brush with muscular Christianity, and we should always beware the lapsed evangelist.) He strains for poeticality, has a taste for moody townscapes, and offers a routine view of girls and love which often has a drab tang of misogyny (it's hard to think of a more charm-free description of an ex-lover than the phrase
“matériel déclassé”
from “La Haine”). The moral thumpiness is heightened by the use of organ and backing choir, not to mention the spoken
ex cathedra
pronouncement. A typical song of this early period is “Prière païenne,” a pious attempt to convince the Virgin Mary that carnal love is pretty much a metaphorical equivalent of spiritual love. Mary, if listening, might have given a sceptical pout.

Once Brel has wriggled free of these beginnings and sorted out his orchestration (high whiney strings like the complaining
vent du nord,
snarly brass, whizzy accordion), he drove his way to a short yet wonderfully rich creative peak, lasting from about 1961 to 1967. He sang of the north, of getting drunk (in the north), of sexual betrayal (and getting drunk, as a result, in the north), of being widowed (and discovering, on the day of the funeral, that you have been sexually betrayed, and therefore getting drunk—probably in the north—as a result). He sang exactly of childhood's yearnings, of the pursuit and loss of
le Far-West.
He sang what must be the only song in general currency inspired by the queue for a military brothel. He sang ragingly of “adult” foolishness—
“Il nous fallut bien du talent / Pour être vieux sans être adultes”
(“It really took a deal of skill / To get to be old without getting to be adult”)— and mockingly of the old man's death he was never to know. He sang funeral laments for his friends (“Jojo,” “Fernand”) which now have to double in our listening as elegies for him too. In his maturity he could still be merely contrary (as in the puckishly anti-ruralist “Les Moutons”); but it is his understanding of the complication and weak starting-point of most human dealings that gives his work its strength and continuing life.
“On se croit mèche, on n 'est que suif”
(We think we are the wick, but we are only the tallow). We dream of going to sea—and end up as captain of a breakwater. Logically, the source of all this imperfection must be imperfect Himself:

Moi, si j'étais le bon Dieu

Je crois que je serais pas fier

Je sais, on fait ce qu'on peut,

Mais y a la manière.
*

“Lacking both interest
and
morality,” Père Daumer would doubtless have said, doffing his black cap.

While I was in France Brel made his sole appearance in Britain (Brassens visited us just once as well); and in 1967 came the announcement—far more catastrophic than any Beatles breakup—that he was retiring, or at least abandoning his
tours de chant.
Unlike those indefatigable retirees whose valedictory appearances are an annual event on several continents, Brel said he would give up, and then just did. His energy went instead into films and musicals, travel, and his new Polynesian life. Though he was to record a final album a decade later, his public recitals were over. But first he came to Rennes.

I knew nothing about him except that he was Belgian, slim, dark, and horse-toothed; that he smoked like a Frenchman and knew how to pilot light aircraft. Most of this information was drawn from the sumptuous folding album covers of Disques Barclay. I didn't want to know more either. The songs were the man; any biography was unimportant, reductive. Who cared if there was a real Marieke or Mathilde or Madeleine behind “Marieke” and “Mathilde” and “Madeleine”? When Olivier Todd's posthumous
Jacques Brel: Une Vie
came out, I duly read it, and was duly disappointed: not by the discovery that Brel was a good bit more imperfect than his songs, but by a biographer who had begun in sympathy and ended in nagging disapproval, his enthusiasm for the work diminished by his knowledge of the man. It was little compensation to make the occasional
trouvaille:
for instance, that “La Valse à mille temps” had its moment of origin when Brel was driving towards Tangier from the mountains, and discovered in the rhythm of the road's innumerable bends the surging acceleration of a waltz.

It was a hot evening, even hotter up in the gallery. The show began at about ten with Brel's regular warm-up act, a black American group called the Delta Rhythm Boys, who were doubtless very good but seemed to me interminable. I was sleepy and hungry by the time—nearing midnight—that Brel came on stage, yet all was instantly forgiven. A minimal band (piano, drums, bass, accordion) and no fancy lighting or presentation. After the first song, he took off his jacket
(“ça chauffe, hein?”).
The audience never once clapped in self-applauding recognition at the start of a song; even the intros had become precious. Of course, I knew most of the songs already from disc, so the words came from within me as well as from the stage, in that haunting stereo of memory and the real moment. Down there, on that familiar equine face, the sweat famously poured: Brel was said to lose 8oog during a recital. He hurtled straight from one song into the next, without a pause, without any colluding chat, for an hour, then brusquely stopped. And that was it—no encores, no showbiz, no lachrymose farewell. He left us without ceremony.

Brel had the romantic presence, the newsworthy life, the concentrated burst of albums. Brassens had a bearish reputation, was publicly reticent, and assembled his work slowly but persistently over thirty years, with a quiet tenacity appropriate to the son and grandson of stonemasons. He was more classical in style than Brel, and more literary (he had even tried to write fiction). He looked and sounded like a sage from a hill-village, but in fact had never lived in the country and said he would be a naturalized Parisian if such a thing were possible. He sang with a growling, chestnut voice, with a rolling Provençal
r,
with a crisp, humorous delivery. For all the jollity and disruptiveness of his texts, his sound always remained austere. His maximum orchestration consisted of a second guitar and a double bass, both as discreet as the confessional. There is a moment in “La Non-demande en mariage” when the bass—after fifteen years of chuntering away quietly in the background—comes loping in with a loud and insistently held contribution. It registers seismically with the listener.

The Brassens canon, as it struck successive generations from the Fifties onwards, was warming and freeing. He was an anarchist: not so much a political one (though he had been a member of the Fédération d'Anarchistes at the end of the war), still less a hip-pified one, but a genuine and unpretentious free spirit. He was a man of the people, though not a man of the crowd, and his songs display an even-handed disdain for all organizers of society regardless of political persuasion. He mistrusted the group, believing that as soon as there are more than four of you, you become a
bande de cons
(“Le Pluriel”); he detested all uniforms “except that of the postman”; and seems to have had a sociopathic hatred for station-masters. Like Vian and Brel he wrote anti-militaristic songs, but his hatred of war did not find predictable expression: see, for instance, his jaunty consumers' report on the subject—
“Moi, mon colon, cell' que j'préfère / C'est la guerr'de quatorz'-dix-huit!”
(“My real favourite, Colonel / Is Nineteen Fourteen-Eighteen.”) His unpolite mockery of most sensible preconceptions about life was the more bracing—if initially puzzling—for being allied to a code of charity, pleasure, and humour.

He celebrated the downtrodden: cowards, pimps, gravediggers, tarts with ordinary hearts, women with huge arses, traitors, shaven-headed collaborationists, and older women. As I get older myself I increasingly treasure his line from “Saturne”—
“Et la petite pisseuse d'en face / Peut bien aller se rhabiller”
(“And the little brat opposite / Can go and put her clothes back on”). He was on the side of the solitary pyromaniac against the combined forces of the
sapeurs pompiers;
he saluted the man who had burgled his house (arguing that since the burglar got what he wanted, and he, Brassens, had derived a song from the incident, then the two of them were quits). He praised cats, pipes, male comradeship, and the artichoke-hearted woman who gives everyone a leaf. He execrated judges, gendarmes, right-thinking people, and the callously principled. Yet his tenderness could be robust, and enemies were not always forgiven. In the mid-Sixties, Brassens visibly lost weight, shrinking from an ursine presence towards comparative gauntness. Journalists informed their readers that the great singer had cancer. Their speculations were true; but though true, none the less intrusive. Brassens responded with “Le Bulletin de santé,” in which he admits that he has indeed left the ranks of the obese, but not for the reasons some impute. No—
non, non, non, trois fois non
—what has caused him to lose so much weight is not illness but the fact that he has spent a vast amount of time and energy fucking journalists' wives. Not the most delicate riposte, perhaps, but the provocation was hardly delicate either. And just to emphasize the aggressive corporeality of the matter, Brassens filches Mallarmé's line
“Je suis hanté: l'Azur, l'Azur, l'Azur, l'Azur!”
and depoeticizes it into
“Je suis hanté: le rut, le rut, le rut, le rut!”
(haunted not by a blue sky, but by sex).

In “Le Mauvais sujet repenti,” one of his earliest songs (1953), Brassens takes on the voice of a pimp (or at least a semi-pro) to discuss the training-up of a débutante tart's sexual gift:

L'avait l'don, c'est vrai, j'en conviens,

L'avait le génie,

Mais, sans technique, un don n 'est rien

Qu'un' sal' manie …

Without technique, a gift—even one amounting to genius— is no more than a filthy habit.
*
Despite—or perhaps because of—his restricted range of possible sound, Brassens throughout his career was constantly elaborating his technique, inventing, tautening, broadening: across three decades his ballads get grander, his melodies denser, his repeat-schemes more intricate.

Thematically, his songs complicate too, as his understanding of the world complicates. In his early work, sex is a jolly and frequently satirical business, in which adultery is an act of cheerful revenge, escaped gorillas have their way with robed judges, and genial fetishists are obsessed with the bellybuttons of policemen's wives. In maturity, Brassens is more likely to hymn the Penelope who strays, the adulterer who can only perform if he really likes the husband he's cuckolding, and the poignant position (“Ma Maîtresse, La Traîtresse”) of the lover who feels betrayed when his mistress chooses to sleep with her husband. The singer is also quite happy to insult the Frenchman's self-image as a lover whose silky skills unfailingly provoke ecstasy: “Ninety-five per cent,” the song of that title maintains, is the percentage of women who are faking it. But then Brassens never pleased by seeking to please. Another statistic: in 1977 a survey found that 64.7 per cent of the nation would like to be in his skin because for them he represented The Happy Man. Asked to comment, he replied,
“Ah, les cons …”

The Collège Saint-Martin at Rennes was where I saw my first dead body: that of Père Roussel, a young priest who had succumbed in his twenties to some ungodly disease. He was laid out in a vestibule off the entrance hall to the main building, and boys were encouraged to visit him and pray for his soul. I drew the line at this, though I gazed through the windowed doors at the pallid, bespectacled figure lying on his back.