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recalled the young doomed English poet whose death-
portrait by Henry Wallis became the defining image
of the live-fast die-young bohemian; a cursed painting
that romanticized what had been a messy pointless
death. In the song Gainsbourg would list the ominous
fates of predecessors (Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Hannibal,
Demosthenes) and empathize with them with comic
megalomania. Having name-checked Edgar Allen Poe in
 Ford Mustang as well as basing the lost spectre of love
in  Initials B.B. on Poe s avenging angel The Raven, he
would have known what happened to the master of the
macabre who disappeared and was found dishevelled,
wearing a stranger s clothes, before mysteriously dying
of a  brain congestion . He similarly referenced Jarry s
Ubu Roi in  Toi Mourir ( You Die ) knowing Jarry had
effectively drunk himself to death.
Gainsbourg had clearly set himself up as a poète
maudit for the modern age, declaring,  For me, provo-
cation is oxygen and indulging his hedonistic streak. Up
to and including Melody Nelson, he had kept the intricate
precarious balance just right, his lifestyle inspired and
informed his work and vice versa. He had learned vitally
" 89 "
HI S TOI RE DE MELODY NELS ON
from Rimbaud s exhortation,  The poet makes himself
a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of
all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness.
He searches himself. Crucially, Gainsbourg remem-
bered the most vital part of that maxim, which many
acolytes of Rimbaud forgot, a rational derangement
of the senses was required. There had to be a purpose
to it and a degree of articulated control. Even though
he would go on to create quality work, after Melody
Nelson Gainsbourg began to lose the balance. It soon
tipped out of control. The derangement was no longer
rational, no longer focused and he no longer in control
of it. Melody Nelson was a lament for heartbreak in the
midst of love and his inability to prevent where he was
heading.
If there is an artist whose paints seem to echo the
mood of Melody Nelson it would be Paul Delvaux. His
landscapes, piazzas crisscrossed by stationary trams or
long classical verandas, are always the hour before the
sun rises or the hour after it s set. There is a distinct
air of sorrow and conspiracy and sexuality in his work.
Although the tableaux are as frozen as any ancient Greek
relief, threat still seems close by. Who are these statu-
esque people who populate the scenes? Are they from
the past or a dream? Are they some augury of what might
be? It is fitting that when Jean-Christophe Averty came
to film Melody Nelson for transmission in the winter of
1971, he chose the paintings of Paul Delvaux, a master
of eroticism, death and dream, to act as a backdrop for
the  L hôtel particulier scenes (as well as Dalí, Ernst,
Rousseau, Labisse and Magritte). Gainsbourg had tried
a similar effect before when his protégé Dominique
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DA R R A N A NDE R S ON
Walter had performed his  Je Suis Capable De N importe
Quoi ( I Can Do Anything ) on television in 1967.
The set design had been based on a three-dimensional
rendering of the Martian/post-apocalyptic/Proterozoic
era landscape of the painter Yves Tanguy; specifically his
Indefinite Divisibility (1942). With a dance routine and
strident horn backing, the setting then seemed woefully
out of place but with  L hôtel particulier the music
corresponded perfectly.
While the poètes maudits were the literary wing
of the symbolists, the artistic side evolved into the
Surrealists. Paul Delvaux was one. So was Yves Tanguy.
And indeed Jacques Prévert. So too, it might be said, was
Gainsbourg at times. Although he had ceased painting
with his bonfire of the vanities, Gainsbourg never lost
his fascination with art. It s worth remembering he
began as a painter and he never lost the eye or the ideas,
even when he set fire to his canvases and vowed never
to paint again. He remained an artist with music as the
new canvas. He still collected art, specifically works by
Dali, Francis Bacon and his favourite, Paul Klee (his
second reggae album Mauvaises Nouvelles des Étoiles [Bad
News from the Stars] is named after a Klee work from
1913 which he d purchased). It was from the Surrealists,
however, that he pilfered ideas and to the Surrealist
afterlife he added some memorable iconography. The
Surrealists had descended from the Symbolists via the
paintings of Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau and
the wild imaginations and methods of Rimbaud and
Lautréamont. Surrealism had a theatricality and revolt
that never ceased to appeal to Gainsbourg. They were
given to absurd statements and acts, designed to startle.
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HI S TOI RE DE MELODY NELS ON
They were to be hated or adored. They would accept
nothing else. Anything else was mediocre, bourgeois,
chiming with Gainsbourg who d boasted,  I am incapable
of mediocrity .  Take note of the era to come! , Louis
Aragon declared,  Follow the rising plume of smoke, the
whiplash of the apparition in the midst of the bourgeois
universe. A lightning flash is smouldering beneath the
bowler hats. In his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, the
movement s patriarch Andre Breton defined  the simplest
surrealist act as  going into the street with revolvers in
your fist and shooting blindly into the crowd as much
as possible . Gainsbourg was learning the power of the
theatre of shock.
A deeper lesson he learned from the Surrealists was
the radicality of honesty and its rareness. The quasi-
Situationists of May 1968 are seen as radicals still partly
for such assertions as  Beneath the paving stones lies
the beach. Yet the prospect of golden sands seems
luxuriously tame compared to the squirming horrors
and celestial depths, the Surrealists found when they
lifted the concrete and looked underneath. One of the
Surrealists theories was that academia, the cults of reason
and faith, adulthood and respectability had dulled our [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]