Read Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture for Free Online Page B

like to remember that Boris Vian was one of the amplified voices with which I used to blast Père Fleury (who dodged behind trees when he saw a nun approaching, and who also rolled the fattest gaspers I have ever seen, each requiring two full cigarette papers). But this must be a false memory. Vian's fame as an interpreter didn't really begin until 1979, twenty years after his death, when Philips released a commemorative LP. In 1966–7 he was mainly known through the voices of others: Serge Reggiani had begun his career performing Vian's work; Peter, Paul and Mary made a transatlantic campus heart-plucker out of “The Deserter”; and Jean Ferrat had offered up his smokey-jazz homage “Boris.” Vian was remembered instead as everything except an interpreter: song-writer, poet, novelist, playwright, translator, actor, jazz trumpeter, pataphysician. He was the most cosmopolitan of my top three; his photo-biography begins with him standing, aged twelve, behind a chubby adolescent in long shorts and a crisscross sweater who turns out to be the fourteen-year-old Yehudi Menuhin; later we see him with his arm round Miles Davis, chatting to Ellington, meeting Erroll Garner at Orly airport in 1957; here he is on the beach at Antibes and Saint Tropez, behind the wheel of his Aston Martin, his Morgan, his 1911 Brazier; on film he lurks in the shadows with Jeanne Moreau in the Vadim version of Les Liaisons dangereuses. He wrote songs with Aznavourian profligacy: over 700 of them, some jazz-influenced, some in the style of rock humoristique that he pioneered with Henri Salvador. Despite “Le Déserteur,” he didn't write “protest songs” so much as songs of satirical provocation, anarchic moralities like “Le Petit com merce,” which laments the plight of an arms salesman so successful that all his clients kill one another off and reduce him to penury. In his lifetime Vian wasn't held to be a convincing interpreter of his own work, but the 1979 Philips disc gives the lie to this: his ironic, whippy-tongued delivery was the apt match for his sly and worldly songs.
    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