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

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