Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online

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,