For Proust's Marcel, just the taste of madeleine brought back his youth. For me, less intensely and literately, spotting the name "Edith Piaf" on the first page of "Goings on About Town" in this week's New Yorker did the same.
My first two years of college. The coffee shop of the old student union -- before the modern food court came into being -- was a smoky room in the basement. Crowded, noisy, with wall murals of post-war kids riding around in jalopies -- they seemed incredibly anachronistic, although painted only about a decade earlier -- and music. Recorded music, the popular tunes of the day.
I hung out there between classes, studying for the next class or maybe -- it was next to the post office -- reading my mail. I would add "and drinking espresso," which now would seem a natural activity Except no one drank espresso then. And I hadn't yet learned to tolerate even Folger's. I wonder what I did drink in that smoky den? If anything.
The music was just background noise, like any jukebox in a restaurant. Until the day I heard a woman with a nasal, smoky, tired voice singing in French. French! In an American eatery! I had no idea what she was singing, but the song moved along in waves, rhythmically, with frequent repetition at the end of a phrase of the word "Milord." And, of course, that was the name of the song: "Milord." One of the biggest hits of Édith Piaf's career.
A song by a prostitute who invites an upper class English boy or young man (she calls him Milord) to sit at her table, tells him he's beautiful, learns his heart is broken, tries to cheer him up, and finally succeeds. The French meant nothing to me, but the music -- and Piaf's voice -- cheered me as well.
The next year or so, my roommate bought an LP of her songs, and a few years later I bought my own, which I have here in front of me as I type .
"Milord" was a popular song, but the Piaf song that sticks most in my mind -- that best expresses my reaction to her work in general -- was a song (also to be heard in the student union) not of cheer but of quiet resignation -- "Je ne regrette rien" (No, I regret nothing).
Doesn't sound like a song for young people? Not exactly Bob Dylan lyrics? Well, if you thought that you'd be wrong. For young people around 1959 and 1960, life -- although not excluding the usual joys of youth -- had underpinnings that were somewhat morose and resigned. In one sense, we were a generation of introverts. We were the silent generation. And as Joan Didion wrote, years later:
We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.
But if Piaf's songs conveyed -- in their melodies and in the timbre of her voice, as much as in their lyrics -- a certain world-weariness, and if they did not provide the anthems of a youth movement that rock music did a few years later, they nevertheless gave us a sense of maturity, of adulthood, of appreciation for the sadness of life itself.
Believing ourselves jaded adults -- perhaps avoiding mass movements, imagining ourselves smoking French cigarettes and drinking absinthe in a tiny French café, discussing existentialism -- provided us the same satisfaction as imagining themselves social revolutionaries provided our younger siblings a few years later.
We would survive outside history, in a kind of idée fixe referred to always, during the years I spent at Berkeley, as "some little town with a decent beach."
Joan Didion again, of course.
Édith Piaf knew nothing of a little town with a decent beach. She grew up in poverty, and lived what was probably a somewhat sad and lonely life, despite her many fans, dying at the age of 47, in 1963. But she enriched, in some small way, my life and that of others in my generation.
And now I think I'll replay her album. If you aren't familiar with her music, pull up one of her songs on YouTube.
No comments:
Post a Comment