Woman recovered, then given away - We’ll always have Paris

Of course I need to delay completing my post on Before Sunrise / Sunset (after all, Linklater took 9 years to complete the romance between Jesse and Celine, so I have plenty of scope), which would take us to Paris. So I thought I’d ponder on a classic variation on this regret-renunciation-remembrance = romance thread: Casablanca.

Too obvious? Forgive me, but I’m just back from Morocco (albeit Essaouira), where I went to escape the horror of Christmas, and to restore the true meaning of the festival with a bit of sun worship. And while I was there I read Tahir Shah’s book The Caliph’s House, about his adventures living in the city where the film is supposedly set. He relates encountering a mad American who travels the world watching the film everywhere it is playing, and who declares it the greatest film ever made. Many would agree, as it still tops the favourite film ratings, suggesting it still has the power to stir us 65 years after it was made.

I think this is down to the way it combines the archetypal with the historical and topical. The classic love-triangle is as old as romance itself (as Lancelot and Guinevere at least), but is enriched by the war-time conflict between personal desire and patriotic duty. And as time goes by (sorry), that period itself, and certainly its setting in what was once the Art Deco jewel of French North Africa, have acquired their own Romantic veneer as an epoch to sigh after. Who wouldn’t wish to walk into that particular gin joint, swathed in stark film noir ambiance, and hear the tinkle of that piano, just about to play that song? Memory, melancholy, a certain melody, borders, crossroads, danger, the exotic orient - the film is a veritable tagine of Romance, spiced with all its essential ingredients. OK, on the ‘oriental’ side it may be, as Tahir Shah points out, a farrago of Hollywood fantasy of old Arabia, whereas ‘the Casablanca of the time was European from top to toe’. But I’m dealing with romance here, not reality, and exaggeration and fantasy are the life blood of this concept, and add to the film’s enduring appeal.

I’m not going to just witter on about the film, or about orientalism and Romance, as I’m qualified to do neither. I’m interested in that line, ‘We’ll always have Paris’ muttered while an engine roars in anticipation of departure. This brings us to the next leg of our journey started by faint-hearted Hardy not getting off that train. ‘We’ll always have Paris”. Always is a tricky concept in the Romance repertoire. This is what Wilde’s Lord Henry has to say about it In Dorian Gray: “Always!. That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever”. Yet we’re not talking about the happy-ever-after always of clinging anticipation, but of fond recollection. The past is redeemed by Ilsa walking into that gin joint and restoring their memories of Paris.

Here we are again, at the crossroads of Romance, and an engine is already running. Rick reasons that Ilsa should get on that plane along similar lines to Jesse suggesting Celine get off that train - the projected anticipation of regret. But with a difference here. “If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” Wise-cracking cynical Americans moulding the destinies of dreamy Europeans are evidently not all alike. There’s a war on, don’t you know, and so personal Romance is commandeered for a Greater Good. The Underground has its hero, Rick has his redemption, and they will Always have their memories. And not just of anywhere - of PARIS no less...

Woman found then lost...

Girls on trains, radiant strangers, the romance of regret? Of course, there are exceptions, and rules (like hearts) are there to be broken.

‘Happy ever after’ is the approved romance ending, but does it spell the end of romance? This is the paradox that delightful diptych ‘Before Sunrise / Sunset’ explores so beautifully and plausibly, making them such devastatingly ‘romantic’ films, when manipulative drivel like ‘Love Actually’, actually is not*

Before Sunrise (1995), Boy meets girl on a train. She (French, shy, dreamy) is continuing on to Paris; he (American, worldly-wise, confident) must get off at Vienna to catch a morning flight back home. They chat, they connect, and as the train pulls into Vienna, he moves into familiar territory: "If I don’t ask you this, it’ll haunt me for the rest of my life". Ah, he’s read the poems, heard the songs. No faint heart in a railway station he, he asks her to leave the train with him, and walk around Vienna for the evening. His reasoning and audacity are faultless:

“Jump ahead 10-20 years from now, you’re married, but it just doesn’t have the energy it once had. … and you start to think about all those guys you've met, and start to wonder what it would’ve been like if you’d picked up with any of them. Well. I’m one of those guys. Think of it as time travel… This could be doing a gigantic favour to you and your future husband, showing you you didn’t miss out on anything. I’m just as much a loser as he is, and you’re really happy”.

This is how it starts, and goes on, somehow managing to be both romantic – impetuous, dreamy, idealistic –; and realistic - cynical, wary and knowing – at the same time. The dialogue (and the film is mostly dialogue), threads a swaying tight rope across the chasm dividing romance and realism, and they walk it engagingly together.

Defying convention, defying genre, it earns the right to romanticism, by being so very honest. One meaning of ‘Romance’, after all, when used as a verb is to fib, or at least to exaggerate. ‘Romancing’ before it was used to rhyme with ‘dancing’ in throwaway pop, meant telling porkies. "Do you know anyone in a happy relationship?" Celine asks. ""yeah, but I think they lie a lot". But, there’s none of that here. Principally because they only have that one night together. Stolen from time – “officially we shouldn’t be here”. So happy every after (the biggest fib of romance), isn’t an option, and is summarily dismissed: “Why do people believe relationships are supposed to last for ever? Yeah it’s stupid”.

And so they fall into romance by resisting it through reason. We’re rational adults, they keep assuring each other, trying to convince themselves of the logic of not attempting to stay in touch. The more honest (ie unromantic) they are, the more they earn the right to what they resist. They rub reality against the debased coinage of romance, against all its clichés and conventions, they rub it so hard it eventually shines through.

But at their back they always hear Time’s winged Chariot (the 9.30 Austria Airlines flight to America) hurrying near. And so they make love, under the stars, and finally make a pact with their cold reasoning. They will not exchange numbers or addresses (not even surnames), so none of that happy-ever-after stuff is even considered. They refused to be hoodwinked by false hope. Instead they will meet in exactly six months. Time, cheated, travelled through, deferred, will have his due. “O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time”. TBC (of course).

*Oh, that ‘actually’, the smug, so-very English embarrassed understatement, qualifying the tawdry, vulgar passionate ‘Love’ and sanitising it into Home Counties idiom: ‘I did go to a public school, quite a famous one, Actually’; ‘Actually, I was hoping to get into TV/publishing/film, and was wondering if you knew of any openings, yes my father was x, I suppose the name gives it away’; ‘I don’t Actually know anything about it, but I’m sure I’ll do a splendid job’…Actually, I am bitter, and I haven’t actually seen Love Actually, but that snivelling caval of posh luvvies is sufficient demerit in my book.

Woman not yet found (Faintheart at a tube station)

Every time I pass by Holborn tube station I recall a (non-)incident from nearly 8 years ago. I was living in Notting Hill, and working just off High Holborn, and so took the Central Line each day. One morning I was stood next to a very cute young lady in the crowded carraige. She was stylish, quite quirky, and therefore astonishingly alluring. I tried hard to maintain the glassy composure of the commuter, focusing on a spot just past her cute ear as I spun my hopeless dreams the whole journey through.

We both got off at Holborn, and she spoke to me. This is unheard of both in London commuter etiquette, and doubly so in my experience of cute strangers. But she was an Australian, so can be forgiven such outrages. She usually took another tube line, which was down that day, and so didn't know how to get from Holborn to her work at Somerset House (the Tax Office, then). Did I know the way? There were two ways she could have got there. The first was to go down Kingsway to Aldwych, turn right onto the Strand and then cross over to Waterloo Bridge; the second was to go down Kingsway to Aldwych, turn right onto the Strand and then cross over to Waterloo Bridge, but with me walking with her to show her the way, as it’s really quite tricky, and it was a Friday, so being a little late wouldn’t hurt, especially if I got to find out more about the charming, and very cute green eyed, red (dyed) haired young lady who also lived in Notting Hill (now, there's a thing), and was on a sabbatical to the Inland Revenue. But, of course, I gave her the WRONG directions. Ie. The first version.

The second version didn’t occur to me until after she had thanked me, given me, I swear, a rather quizzical look, and set off alone down Kingsway. That look still haunts me, and is conjured up whenever I pass Holborn Tube Station. I sometimes glance to see if she is still standing there, with that look, so she can say: what took you, it’s only been 8 years? Her name I didn’t get. Can I confess, I googled Somerset + House + Australian + Sabbatical + accountant, in various combinations? I even considered phoning, if I could think up a plausible lie for needing to talk to a girl, who I could only describe as ‘cute’, with ‘lovely green eyes’. I even hung around Somerset House once or twice in my lunch hours that summer, but to no avail. She was gone.

I think I knew Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘Faintheart in a Railway Train’ (1922) then; but

it came to me fittingly late.

At nine in the morning there passed a church,

At ten there passed me by the sea,

At twelve a town of smoke and smirch,

At two a forest of oak and birch,

And then, on a platform, she:

A radiant stranger, who saw not me.

I queried, "Get out to her do I dare?"

But I kept my seat in my search for a plea,

And the wheels moved on.

O could it but be

That I had alighted there!

Yes, Thomas. You, me and no doubt countless others before and since. The Divine Comedy's 'Commuter Love' answers the plea from 1998.

Freezing Monday morning

She is waiting for her train to come

I brush past her, smell her perfume

Watch her hair move as she turns to go

She doesn't know I exist

I'm gonna keep it like this

I'm not gonna take any risks this time.

'This time', the most resonant phrase in the song, bespeaking painful experience. Between these two literary non-events are the innumerable brave hearted fools, who have rushed in, taken those ‘risks', and been rewarded with what they prayed for. Instead, I had my adventure, and like Hardy and Hannon, still have those dreams . Better to replay that green-eyed quizzical look, than the look of contempt she would no doubt have thrown me frequently later when life had intervened and frayed the fragile twine of my dream-spun desire*.

*It is an old story. As old as love itself. Petrarch, one of the inventors of poetic love, saw his beloved Laura on the steps of a church in Avignon on Good Friday, 1327. And that was it, she was married, he was smitten, and simply wrote her a lot of sonnets. Told Laura he loved her, and in so doing perfected the sonnet form. He never bedded or wedded her, but he was devastated by one look, and the love lyric would never be the same again.

This is a weeping song(s)

I'm launching rather prematurely into a topic I'm destined to obsess over in this blog. This will be the first of many postings on the pleasure of melancholy music, or weeping songs as the gentleman to my left calls them. I pre-empt a more planned rumination on this subject because I went to see Nick Cave live a few nights ago, and he is much on my mind. I thought I'd simply get off my chest something that's been bugging me for years about Cave. How to reconcile the two sides of Nick Cave's art - the tender lyricist of some of the most heart-rending reflections on lost love, and, a barn-storming, hell-raising, fire-and-brimstone, demonic preacher of twisted despair, damnation or redemption.

Nick Cave generally rocks. He came from rock - a cauldron of punk-goth-Cramps noise making in his earliest days as The Birthday Party from down under, and he seems determined to return to hell in his latest handcart, the rather noisy Grinderman venture. His latest studio albums, and also his live performances favour the rock side of things, and are very very noisy. He shouts, he struts (he even did a crowd dive the other night, something I had never seen him do before, and which a 50 year old should think twice about), and he and the band have a wail of a time kicking up an aural rumpus, and the fans love it too. Now, that might be stating the bleeding obvious to long-standing Cave fans, or serious musos, and simply describing what he has always been about, with a possible, and in their mind, rather regrettable period around 97-01, when he did a lot of ballads and took the tempo and noise right down. The thing is, that's when I got into him, and that's the Cave I know and love and need. I'm not a big rock or noisy rumpus fan (vide my Lexicon of Love posting), and so for me this middle period was at his best, albeit unhappiest.

The Nick Cave of The Boatman's Call, and No More Shall We Part, who was getting over a very messy break up with P J Harvey, and poured a lot of his grief - both general and specific - into his piano and typewriter. In 1999, the first time I went to see him at the Royal Festival Hall, he did nearly all ballads from The Boatman's Call (with a few of the old hell-raisers for the encore just to please the crowd and give his band of hardened rockers The Bad Seeds something to justify their bus fares), and I thought I had died and gone to hell - a happy hell of melodic misery. But this seems impossible now. When he throws the occasional ballad into his live shows now, it seems out of place, and the audience doesn't know what to do with it. I do, I stand there with wet eyes wishing it was all like this, that his heart was still broken, and he would carry on penning what he once called 'lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man'. He was describing what all love songs should be, and he was talking in 1999, when his certainly were back then.

But he's happily married, living by the seaside now with wife and kids, and no longer drowning but waving. I miss the misery. Songs like 'People they ain't no good' (the title says it all); 'Brompton Oratory', and 'Love Letter'. The last I've even written about in a chapter I wrote about love and love songs in a book I wrote about sunshine (about the weather imagery in the song), but I haven't exhausted it, and I haven't stopped playing it. And I didn't stop playing these slices of eloquent anguish through a very rocky emotional patch I went through just as I discovered Mr Cave. They are so entwined with my emotional memories of a messy break up of my own back then that they now have a near Pavlovian potency, inducing a second-hand heartache when the actual wounds have healed. These songs are aural gin for me. Best mixed with tears. And that's why I needed him then, and why I bitterly resent him now howling away and waving to me from the top deck of the happy bus of rock.*

*I confess I'm guilty of absurd simplification here, as any Nick Cave fan would testify. The man released an album called Murder Ballads after all, and so the 2 sides - the howling hell-raiser and the heart-break balladeer - are of the same highly original coin. It comes down to what I would like to call 'eloquent anguish', which Mr Cave, howling or weeping, has by the bucket load. I do enjoy many of his barn-stormers (The Mercy Seat, Papa Won't Leave you Henry, Yes, We Have No Bananas), when he serves them up, but I'm just making a rather sulky point that I wish he wasn't so happy now. His gain has been music's loss in my view, and I'm still standing here needing lifelines to the galaxies.

The Lexicon of Love

Which might have been yet another name for this project. I reach for this particularly glittery star now partly out of a need to establish my contested credentials for writing about 'romance'. I may not have been a very romantic lover, Madame, but I've always been a lover of romance. I judge this by an awareness that the first songs to stir me as a child were highly sentimental ones. I remember weeping (and enjoying it), to Terry Jack's 'Seasons in the Sun', aged 7. Surely an age when the recent realisation of the reality of death should preclude any such indulgence in the sweet melancholy that song induces. At the very least, I should have found it irredeemably 'soppy'.

I would love to be able to claim that I had been a punk. It's a pre-requisite of cultural commentary these days. It appears every soundbitist wheeled on to give talking head on the countless TV histories of pop feels duty bound to claim they were there at the Roxy, back in the day, and how much they were inspired by punk (the most absurd claim on this score I saw made recently was by Pete I-am-responsible-for-more-aural-misery-than-any-other-source-in-the 80s-especially-Rick-Astley Waterman, showing just how bogus it is, and suggesting it's only a matter of time before The Krankees, Keith Harris and Orville, and Rene and Renata claim the same). I was too young to be a punk, being 9 in 1976, but then I was also too young for the music I was into. Far too young. I was into Buddy Holly, Neil Sedaka, and Phil Spector groups. Very uncool next to punk. I didn't want to destroy. I wanted to dream.

I mention all this because I want to understand the role played by pop music in forming my own sensibility and outlook, and specifically what so-called 'New Romanticism' has with the old sort. How can I save its best bits from being considered either punk's camper cousin, or Thatcherism in fancy dress? I intend to give my penny's worth on New Romanticism in quite a few installments over the months, but thought I'd just jump straight in here with my belief that ABC's Lexicon of Love was one the best albums of the 80s, and certainly the best to be tarred with the 'New Romantic' mascara.

For in it I had found the same sentimental heart-tug that I had experienced with Buddy Holly and the Shirelles. If 'New Romantic' has any meaning at all, then it resides in the suave symphony of sentiment that is The Lexicon of Love. Roxy by proxy, perhaps. But I wasn't really aware of Roxy Music back then, or if I was Ferry had grown a tad too pompous to interest me. Pomposity, alas, was endemic in the 80s. A decade that took itself far too seriously. Even the bands that are supposed to really 'own' New Romanticism - those Blitz Kids with record deals: Visage, Spandau Ballet and Ultravox - fall foul of this tendency. There aren't many laughs from that lot (from, not at, the ludicrousness of it all is quite another matter). ABC at least had a sense of humour. Gold lame suit against Spandau's highland drag. I rest my case.

It was partly Trevor Horn's obsession with opulence, with the album's production shimmering like Fry's suit caught in limelight. And it was partly the hommage they played with their styling to the matinee idol lovers of lyrical long ago. But mostly it was Martin Fry's lyrics, that make his New Romanticism, true Romanticism. Other bands dressed up, wore their art on their sleeves, and packaged their pretension from the dressing up box of cliches past. But ABC matched their style with real substance in their lyrics.

"If you gave me a pound for the moments I've missed,
And I got dancing lessons for the lips I should-a kissed,
I'd be a millionaire, I'd be a Fred Astaire".

Genius. Camp, tongue-in-cheek, and lavishly sentimental, yet still heartfelt. The absurd hyperbole of the extended conceit, and the fact that it only just scans gives it a certain sincerity that implies Mr Fry might just believe his own paper moon-shine. The 80s were obsessed with 'cool', and many pretended to like jazz, some bands even attempted to play it. Nina Simone was idolised, people actually wore berets, beards and stripped shirts without an eyebrow raised. Roxy Music had hymned Bogart. But Bogey is cool, he defined cool. Astaire was not cool. He was bald, and wore tails way beyond their sartorial date stamp. To evoke him in 1982, not so long after everyone had been in either donkey jackets and denim, or bin liners and bondage pants, to swathe your white-funk in sugary symphonic chiffon takes balls (albeit glitter ones). This was pop music evoking the past, its style and its sentiments without pretence to poetry, or taking itself seriously. And that's why I for one, wholly believe in it.

I believe it when Martin Fry sighs when he contemplates the suggestions from friends that, Martin, one day you might find true love. 'I say, '"Maybe, but there must be a solution to / The one thing, the one thing we can't find"'. A search for the one thing we can't find? Arise Lord Fry of Sheffield, gold-suited seeker of the Impossible, and the truest, Newest Romantic of that absurd and really rather dreary decade.

Women Lost

A former lover, who stumbled across this, my new venture, questioned my credentials for pontificating on the subject of 'romance'. There was precious little of that when we were together, she wryly noted.

Maybe I need to set the record straight, and define more clearly what I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about 'love' in itself (whatever that might be), so much as those rarefied relics that beguile us into believing it might just be possible. Most of these things make little sense in the real world, and many of them are impossible. Hence their enduring potency and allure. I'm quite certain that she would have given me short shrift had I showered her in red roses and other cliches of commodified desire at the time. Chocolates maybe, but chocolate boxes are not her style. Yet I gave her something more enduringly romantic - I said goodbye.

Does imagination dwell the most on a woman won or woman lost?

Silly question Billy. By ending the relationship I bestowed upon it what she claims it lacked - romance. What Might Have Been and the Impossible are the cornerstones of this concept. And the so relationship, alchemised by regret and the passing years, now glows in the imagination. More enduringly than faded roses, or snuffed candlelight. We should not, when talsking of romance (to quote Billy Boy Yeats again), 'mistake the brightness of the moon for the prosaic light of day'.

I dedicated my last book - Sunshine - to 'lost love'. It had been dedicated 'to _______', but _______ and I finished the day before the book went to press. I feel the loss of the relationship terribly, but am rather pleased with the dedication. I once heard of an author dedicating a book 'To whoever I'm with now' (nicer than the other one I heard about, 'To Bitch', but formed from the same logic). 'To lost love' means mine is perennially dedicated to Whoever I'm no longer with now. Given I appear to have a season ticket on the whirligig of love, that was a shrewd investment on my part. I just hope it stays in print long enough...

These Foolish Things

Sigh. And for my first posting on his project I start with a song that is both exemplar and key to what I'm trying to capture here. Indeed, I very nearly named my project after it. For it is the foolish things that touch us, that I plan to catalogue and anatomise in this blog.

Doesn't the song do the same? A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces, an airline ticket to romantic places ... Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations? Foolish things. Why foolish? Because not necessarily bearing intrinsic meaning, but enriched with romance through association. And so the song compiles a potpourri of mournful recollection, redolent of romance because riddled with regret. And how the ghost of you clings.

And this, I think, helps us understand the link between what we term ‘romance’ and love. The romance of things, evoking lost love. As the song regrets a lost lover through the associative triggers of bitter-sweet recollection, so we regret the beauty that we imagine has somehow passed from the world. Imagination dwells the most on love that is lost. Romance is remembering forgotten beauty. Whether this resides in the peerless eyes of the beloved or in an epoch saturated in style, and tinged with sentimental regret.

But why things? Things, objects, are the stuff of romance. They absorb it. Look at these lines from Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes' (1820):

Stol’n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gaz’d upon her empty dress,
And listen’d to her breathing, if it chanced
To wake into a slumberous tenderness;
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
And breath’d himself: then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,
And over the hush’d carpet, silent, stept,
And ‘tween the curtains peep’d, where, lo!—how fast she slept.

Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguish’d, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:—
...

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

These delicates he heap’d with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.—
“And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache.”

How could she resist? Porphyro sure knows the way to a girl's heart, and goes to town with the delicacies as a seductive prelude to melting into Madeline's dream. It is a fetishistic tableau of aching desire. Not just for sex, but for the relics and rituals that are the handmaidens of what populates the planet.

Or Daisy Fey swooning over Gatsby's shirts. What lovely, lovely shirts. And so he breaks her heart with his impossible love (and fine tailoring) once more...

So, what are these things, these foolish things?

Welcome to the fair rag and bone shop of the heart

Announcing a new project, in which a sentimental cynic sifts through the rituals and relics of ‘romance’. The term (safely nested between inverted commas), might at first make us cringe, sneer or feel slightly queasy; and yet there is still a small place reserved in all our hearts for this ideal. Why? In a culture founded on cynicism and self-interest, without faith, political will or cohesive values, some foolish things - songs, films, books, poems, objects and experiences - still manage to beguile us. Still slip through the firewalls of our unbelief.

It is precisely because we are in the gutter that we need the stars. But what stars? What makes them still shine? And how do we know a real star from a Sarowoski bling bauble?

I propose to strip away the neon vulgarity and greetings card clichés to find an authentic, vital heart beating still. To identify, anatomise and preserve these romantic fragments against the ruins of our times....