Georges Brassens, the singing poet
I have already told how Yves taught me to sing Le petit cheval blanc and Au bois de mon coeur in Spain while we waited by the roadside for cars to pick us up, which did so much to improve my pronunciation. But it wasn’t possible then to live very long in France without realizing that he was the country’s troubadour, its spiritual conscience and the symbol of everything that was finest, and funniest about it.
The tunes were charming and you couldn’t help humming them, but they were basically intended by Brassens, who thought of himself as a poet rather than a musician, to be a simple vehicle for the words. Sadly, the words are so difficult to translate effectively that people who aren’t fluent in French can’t enjoy their wit and whimsy, which is why I want to explain the pleasure they give the cultivated mind to those who have one but, through no fault of their own, suffer from French non-fluency.
Every time he brought out a new humorously off-colour and at the same time intriguingly erudite song, the whole country began picking it apart like a puzzle. For me, who knew only standard French and very little slang, the lyrics were an obstacle course of tongue-in-cheek double entendre, even though he sang them, while he earnestly plucked his guitar, as if they were as simple as Sous le pont d’Avignon.
Brassens had something aristocratic about him, with his love of the sort of classical culture which most Frenchmen at least brushed up against in school books, but he was born into a poor family in the seaport of Sète, a place largely peopled by Italians from the Bay of Naples who worked as stevedores unloading oranges and lemons from Algeria. His father loved music and with an Italian mother the home was always full of singing. After a run-in with the police for some minor larceny, Georges went to Paris where he found work the Renault automobile factory, until the war broke out and the Germans bombed the Billancourt plant.
Out of work, under the new Vichy government he was forcibly recruited into the notorious STO, service de travail obligatoire. He spent the rest of the war at the BMW plant in Germany, manufacturing planes for the Luftwaffe, where as well as learning some German he made several lifelong friends among the other French “slaves”. Brassens passionately believed in the sacred nature of friendship, which he sang about often.
Back in Paris, he returned to the quarter where his aunt lived in Montparnasse, and where he would stay for so many years. As a starving poet, he was taken under the wing of his aunt’s eccentric neighbour, the seamstress Jeanne, and was helped through some hard winters by the old man from Auvergne who lived downstairs, the one for whom he wrote his most beautiful and human song.
He never married, but when he was still a young man he fell in love with a fair-haired Estonian ten years his senior whom he curiously called Püppchen (doll) in German, and to whom he was faithful for the rest of his life, even though they never lived together. He wrote several songs to her, one declaring his firm opposition to the institution of wedlock, entitled “I have the honour of not asking for your hand”, and another which was his only straightforwardly unanarchistic love song. The title, too idiomatic to translate precisely, means “I was bowled over, belittled, I cringed like a child”.
Je me suis fait tout petit
I was proud and never took off my hat for anyone, but now I bow and scrape and come smiling when she calls my name. I was a fierce dog, and she made me eat from her little hand. I had wolf’s fangs, and she turned them into baby’s teeth and made me cringe like a child. I was conquered by a doll, by a pretty doll who says Mummy when you touch her, by a doll who closes her eyes when you tuck her into bed. I submit to her law and do what I’m told without complaining. All my friends tell me that I will end up nailed to the crucifix of her outspread arms. But if you have to be hanged anyway, what’s the difference if it happens in one place or the other?
He had a volume of his poems printed with Jeanne’s money but no one was interested, so he decided that they might be more successful if he set them to music. Once he had picked them out on his aunt’s piano, he played them for the famous Patachou, who ran her own nightclub, in the hope that she would sing them on stage.
But she was so intrigued by his plodding, unassuming style – if it could be called a style – and his mellow southern accent that she insisted he sing them himself. A colleague suggested he accompany himself on the guitar instead of the rather old-fashioned piano, and once he had learned to strum a few chords Brassens was off. It must have been his only concession ever to modernity.
At his first concert at Patachou’s in Montmartre, her bass player began plucking his strings to reinforce the steady beat of Brassens’ songs, and for the next thirty years the same crumpled musician with his long greasy hair and sideburns followed him everywhere. When I saw them they seemed like a pair of inseparable hermits who had been forced out of their lair into the light. Brassens was subject to stage fright all his life, and would shuffle onto the stage, take one anxious glance at the audience and start singing with the perspiration streaming down his face.
All attempts to categorize him as a son of the people and anti-establishment hero have failed, because Brassens felt no special allegiance to any class or group, apart from the helpless and suffering. His manner was that of a surly proletarian, but he was as fussy about aesthetics and stylistic perfection as an 18th century philosophe. He loved archaic expressions and historical allusion, as well of course as the intricacies of the French language, both medieval and modern. He hated professional soldiers and priests, as well as authority figures in general, but he refused to join any political movement, as a result of which he was a constant source of disappointment to the leftists.
He had the courage, for example, to sneer at the self-righteous and totally useless inanities of the 1968 student revolution which did so much to tear down the temple of French culture which he among others had lovingly built up. When someone asked him once what he had done during the upheaval, he answered with a snigger, Je faisais des calculs, which is a play on the word for kidney stone – from which he suffered most of his life – and its homonym which means “calculations”. His answer could be therefore be understood as meaning either “I was doing arithmetic” or, if you knew about his health, “I was making kidney stones”.
What was most French about him was his difficulty in taking anything seriously, which for politicians is anathema. He had a caustic, mischievous way of peering over his thick black moustache which made even the sad songs, and there was sadness in all of them, seem funny.
The best way to savour Brassens is to listen to his songs, but that isn’t always easy, even for people who speak conversational French. There are too many turns of speech and literary references, the phrasing is too subtle and complex for most of us – even for me, unless I read the lyrics on paper with the help of a friend or a dictionary. So I have paraphrased several of his songs, stripping them of the lush linguistic charm which graces these priceless works of art but which also makes them so difficult to understand.
In “La Marine”, or The Navy, Brassens claims that the fleeting encounters between sailors and whores can be as tender and romantic as many sanctified marriages, which says as much about what he thought of marriage as sex with whores! He certainly knew nothing of the former, and cannot have tried much of the latter either, but his point is that love, like all real happiness, has nothing to do with institutions or duration but can be caught on the fly, and between strangers.
The Navy
La Marine
A sailor’s loves only last a day, but they have the same joys and sorrows you find in lifelong marriages, but they happen all at once. Such is the fate of the sailors and all their dear little sweethearts. As soon as the boat reaches port, they get straight to work, first with a kiss and then the whole body a moment later. It happens all at once, but it’s all there, the giggles and the pouting, the quarrels and next morning the cries of “come back soon!”, in these one-day romances, just like in the great loves that last forever. There’s a smell in the room of tender love and tar, and even though the sailor and his girl know there’s no time to waste with chit-chat, they can’t help thinking about love. They laugh, they kiss, they fight and make up – and all that in a single day! And they try not to think that soon the dawn will come and it will all be over…
The sweethearts on the city benches
Les amoureux des bancs publics
Respectable folks indignantly claim that the green benches you see on the sidewalks are just there for passers-by to rest on, either because they’re lame or their bellies are too big. But that’s nonsense, because as everyone well knows, they’re for young sweethearts to cuddle up on when they have nowhere else to go. They squeeze and smooch and don’t give a damn about the stern looks they get, they just go on murmuring “I love you” with their fingers intertwined. They talk about their future and about the pretty blue wallpaper they’ll stick on the walls of their future bedroom. They imagine how safe and cozy it will be, with her sewing, him smoking, while they choose the name of their first baby. But later, when the years have passed, when their bright new dreams have lost their luster and dark clouds have floated across their sky, they will realize with a pang of dismay that the best part of it all was when the only place they could call home were the empty benches they found as they wandered through the streets.
The songs sound liltingly innocent and harmless but have a dark, defiant underside which expresses the poet’s irreverence and hatred of hypocrisy and pettiness. Having suffered the opprobrium of the God-fearing folk in his home town of Sète, he hated provincial complacency and self-satisfaction, which he took frequent jabs at in his songs. Les sètois, for their part, had always thought he was a rowdy no-good and saw no reason to find qualities in him once he became famous, which is why Brassens seldom set foot there after “going up to Paris” to try his luck.
The happy jerks who were born in some place or other
Les imbéciles heureux qui sont nés quelque partI can’t deny that all those villages out there are charming, all those hamlets and ancient towns, with their castles, their fine churches and sparkling beaches. The only thing wrong with them is that they’re inhabited by people who wear badges on their breasts and sneer down on everyone else from the top of their ramparts. You have to be an idiot to feel proud just because you happened to be born in some damned old place!
One of his most eloquent and complex songs, though, is his “Entreaty to be buried on the beach of Sète”, a work which defies translation (in spite of which many Spaniards and Italians have hacked their way through it). He starts right out addressing the medieval Death figure, la Camarde – “the noseless one” – who wants to take revenge on him for having “sown flowers in the holes of his nose”. He asks for his last testament to be written with the blue ink of the Mediterranean, with his instructions for what to do with his body “when it and my soul amicably decide to part ways”. He asks for it to be given one last ride on the Paris-Mediterranée sleeping car as far as the terminus of Sète. No question of being buried in the family vault, because it’s full to bursting and no one is likely to give up his place, and neither can be reasonably ask the inhabitants to squeeze over to make room for the younger generation. Therefore, a grave must be dug by the sea and the blue waves, a nice soft little hole close to his friends, the dolphins, on the fine sands of the beach of La Corniche. That was where, when he was just fifteen, he had his first love affair, with a mermaid, a fish-woman who gave him his first lesson and made him swallow his first fish-bone too. And now, lovely girls will come to change into their swim suits behind the mound of his sandy tomb… He ends by addressing all the great men of history, “poor old Napoleon, poor Great Men lying in the Pantheon, poor prestigious ashes, you will envy me, the eternal beach boy, who spends his death as if he were always on holiday.”
The French say that Brassens was the reincarnation of Villon, because so many of his songs were threaded through with the great medieval theme of death, which he treated with the same mixture of melancholy and merriment. When a friend asked him if he minded having to die, Brassens flatly answered “No, because it means that I won’t ever again get a toothache”.
No one ever made a simple song say so much, in a language that turned from gross to proverbial to philosophical in a single breath. Looking back at Brassens, almost thirty years after La Camarde came to get him, he seems like a popular saint as well as a singer, a 20th century “John” of Arc divinely sent to save France from the invasion of American and British vulgarity. When he appeared he was an unfashionable oddity no one knew what to make of, and when he disappeared before his 60th birthday, he left the French wondering how they could ever have lived without him.
But he was a fragile phenomenon who may well not be understood in the future, even if he is heard. His lyrics aren’t really poetry, they need to be sung. And no one has succeeded in doing that nearly as well as Brassens, not only in French but in forcibly lame translations as well. Other voices can only capture one of the various facets which make his own singing so expressive and hard-to-pin-down. The words, the music and the man are inseparable, which means that even as we speak the songs are fading, because all we have to ephemerally remind us of them are recordings of Brassens.
The French may think they owe Brassens a great deal, but he also owed them his very success. The French fascination with their own culture, and their readiness to embrace any new manifestation of it, made it possible for him to be immediately recognized and hailed for what he was. Poets start writing in solitude, and then if they are lucky they get read by a small circle of friends and connoisseurs, after which if they are exceptionally fortunate they become famous. If Brassens had not written his songs in the world’s most beautiful language for the world’s most civilized people, he would never have gotten beyond the first stage. Neither would he have hit the national nerve he did if he had been born a few generations later, when the French themselves had become more fascinated with the simpler messages of American culture, and less inclined to decipher his nuances and ambiguities.
Some admire Brassens as a champion of justice and tolerance, but for me he was first of all a champion of individualism, of the need to have only loose ties with those around us and do things according to our own desires and principles. One of his songs contains a phrase which has since become a one-line manifesto of personal independence, quand on est plus de trois on est une bande de cons.
It translates roughly as “when more than three people get together, they’re just a bunch of jerks” or, less literally, “any group of more than three people is bound to be stupid”. What he meant was that individuals who are faithful to themselves never fit into groups, because it is impossible to speak honestly and clearly to more than one or two friends at a time. As the conversation grows to include more people, the discourse has to be simplified and softened to be acceptable to the common denominator.
Brassens shunned groups, no matter how well-intentioned they were, because groups require consensus which he knew always ended up as nonsensus. Fortunately for us, he also knew that only the poet, speaking the language of poetry, can speak to everyone as if they were the only one, because poetry alone lifts men’s minds above their petty interests.
It is appropriate to end my tribute to Georges Brassens with an exhaustive, but I hope not exhausting analysis of the origins and meaning of that con-troversial three-letter word that he used so freely.
The word con is not slang, because like “cunt” it descends directly from the Latin cunnus. But in modern French it is used figuratively, rather than for the female genital organ. Someone who is con is an idiot or a jerk, and if that someone is a woman she is called a conne, sometimes to her face. There is also a noun, connerie, meaning nonsense or a waste of time. For example, a husband might accuse his wife of spending his hard-earned money on a connerie such as a hat she will never wear. Polite people express regret with C’est dommage!, but the rank-and-file are more likely to mutter C’est con! when someone beats them to a parking space, for example.
From overuse, therefore, con has virtually lost its original anatomical sense, although since everyone knows what the word means it is still considered to be mildly obscene. Nevertheless, in informal situations it can be used freely, whereas the English cunt and, to a lesser degree, the Spanish coño, primarily refer to the vagina (which, incidentally, means sheath in Latin and was not given its current meaning until modern times).
So denatured has con become that when French-speakers want to say just plain “cunt” they have to choose from several rather bland generalities, such as sexe. The ambiguous result is that J’ai touché son sexe could be a man touching a woman’s or a woman touching a man’s. A “sexier” term is chat, because it is thought to refer to the softness and silkiness of feline fur, whereas originally it had nothing to do with cat at all. It started out, even more evocatively, as chas, the “eye” of a needle which is often so difficult to thread. But, used out of its normal context, chas ended up being mistaken for its less esoteric homonym chat, and getting spelled accordingly, as a French version of pussy.
Con today seems innocuous, but the aversion to it was once so great that another word was abandoned and replaced to avoid an unseemly misunderstanding. The story of how the French rabbit was renamed five centuries ago is as good an example as any of the vicissitudes of language.
Romance languages derive their words for rabbit from the Latin cuniculus, as with the Italian coniglio and the Spanish conejo. The medieval word for rabbit in French was, in like manner, conil. But during the Renaissance, when the spoken language (French) took the place of Latin and had to be written down for the first time, conil and its variation conin were thought to be too similar to con to be tolerated on the printed page. It was common then to Latinize or re-Latinize old French words, so conil was replaced with an adaptation of the Latin word for hare, lepus. Thus, rabbit in modern French is lapin while hare is lièvre, although they share the same root.
What is most ironic is that in spite of French attempts to separate rabbit and cunt, in Latin the two words are closely related. Cuniculus means not only rabbit but the burrow in which it snuggles down for the night, and it seems that cunnus was coined by the Romans with this similarity between the two warm orifices in mind.
Cunt-phobia was once rife in England too, where in 1066 it was feared that the Norman title of Count, when pronounced with some local accents, might turn its noble owners to ridicule. The solution found was to replace it with an Anglo-Saxon title of roughly the same rank, yarl. That is why, in England, a Count is an Earl, although his wife remains a Countess.
xxx