by Louisa Young
‘No, no, don’t help,’ he said. ‘You’re ill. It’s a treat for you.’ He set it up by my sickbed, with a candle on the one side and his glass of whatever it was on the other, and he played for me: Ravel’s ‘Pavane for a Dead Infanta’, La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, a nocturne or two, and other pieces appropriate to a sick blonde, including excerpts from the Fauré requiem, and a small lecture on why Mozart is crap: ‘It’s these highly symmetrical structures which appeal to people who like their lives to be very ordered – he puts his mannered and predictable material into a preconceived structure – first movement sonata form, relying far too much on the tonic/dominant axis – you know, C to G – structurally and harmonically – it’s all SQUARE – there’s an announcement of what’s coming up, and a pompous phrase saying something’s finished – he never allows his material to grow organically because the sheer SQUARENESS cannot accommodate organic growth. Inflexibility appeals to a certain type of person, class even. OK he wrote some truly great music – Don Giovanni, the Requiem – the late concerti slow movements, that intimate interplay between the piano and the orchestra – listen to Murray Perahia – and the clarinet development in the slow movement of the quintet – but why is every boring note of every boring piece adored by these boring people? I’ll tell you – Fear. Security and predictability gets those smiles of approval because it makes them feel comfortable and secure, i.e. fuckin’ smug …’
The next day he brought the Dulcitone into the garden, and taught me a bit of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, a duet for ten-year-olds which I could just manage, sitting in the sun on the lawn. In the evening we were in front of the fire: his tormented genius, his broken heart and me, him telling me how Brahms was raised in a brothel, what he’d cook me for lunch the next day (scallop salad with coriander and ginger, or salmon with sorrel sauce, or lamb and black-eyed peas) and watching me fix the fire, which I’m rather good at. ‘Fuckin’ hellfire,’ he said, getting enthusiastic. He took the bellows from me and held them nose into the fire, and let the top drop very slowly down, a slow breath to the embers. And again. And again, not quite so slowly. A tiny flame rose, and he slowed down, then sped up, and a little more, making faces at me while performing a tumultuous and deep-rooted fake orgasm, on the bellows. The fire blazed like merry hell. Then he honoured me with his Schubertian theory of the death of genius: ‘So, has there been any uncontested genius in any field since 1945? No there hasn’t – and not just because genius needs to be proven by time – no, it’s because, listen, since penicillin, nobody has syphilis any more. Well, they do, but not tertiary syphilis, which is when the angels start serenading you, or if you’re Schumann stood in a river it’s Schubert, and then your wife puts you in the loony bin and runs off with fuckin’ Brahms – so, putting the interests of art above the interests of health, and bearing in mind that it’s not just Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Scriabin, Donizetti, Delius, Smetana, Scott Joplin, Wolf, Ivor Gurney and Henry the Eighth but also Toulouse Lautrec, Van Gogh, Maupassant, Flaubert, Rochester, Monet, Oscar Wilde … and probably a few others … is the loss of syphilis actually a benefit to civilisation? Or does the truly dedicated artiste in fact have a creative fuckin’ responsibility to acquire the poxy disease, so as to honour his muse? What d’you think?’
Then he burnt our socks, because they were wet, before getting hold of my foot so as to demonstrate his ideal blowjob on it.
I was very afraid of the effect he had on me. I could never remember, when he was kissing me, what I knew fifteen minutes before, and the following morning: i.e., why I didn’t want to sleep with him. I told him this; he stroked my head. I burst into tears and wouldn’t have him. Looking at him, I saw my enemy. I saw what I could lose myself in; what could take me from myself, enthrall and imprison me, keep me from my own free life. I feared it, and I desired it.
The following morning I went and curled up with my book on the end of his single spare-room bed, and that was that really. Sex to oblivion, and that night he dragged me out barefooted on to the frosty lawn, and there was a shooting star.
That weekend became the mainstay of the opening (or the middle, or the end) of the novel I tried to write about him. ‘He’s much gentler out of town,’ I wrote. ‘He points out fieldfares. His mother has died. Lisette has left him. He’s given up performing, and won’t compose except for money. I believe he thinks that because geniuses are tormented, and because he is not as much a genius as Debussy, he must therefore torment himself. We his all-knowing friends think he should take his talent back to his heart and face its responsibilities. We believe that he is frightened to do so. We think this is the root of his sadness, the demon which he seems to be trying to drown. He wonders why everybody is always doing down his fucking work, which we are not, we respect his hard work and success, but we know that he wants and needs something else. He knows this too. We all find this hard to talk about. It is easy to be simplistic.’
None of us blamed Lisette for leaving him. We all knew that he drank twice his share in half the time. She said, he didn’t know why he loved her; that it was just because she was pretty, and there. That wasn’t enough for her. And every now and then some other girl was pretty, and there. He provoked emotion: envy, lust, admiration, resentment – many people felt seduced by him. But how enviable is it to live constantly surrounded by those emotions? How could he possibly satisfy them all? They were there and often the easiest way out was just to give people what they so wanted. How was he to know what they meant by wanting that? It wasn’t just girls. If there was food he’d eat it; if there was drink he’d drink it. Everything existed to be flirted with or consumed. His considerable self-discipline was occupied elsewhere.
Lisette also said, ‘It’s amazing how boring he is when you’re not in love with him.’ I flinched at the truth in this: drunk, he could be boring.
On the Monday night I gave him a lift back to London and said, not for the first time, that I didn’t think we should. But I did think we would. He and Lisette having broken up, that line of defence was gone, and I was stuck with my own dichotomy: I wanted what I did not want. And he said things like, ‘You don’t want a boyfriend who drinks and smokes all the time and keeps you up all night.’ Not unless he loves me, I thought. I didn’t say it.
*
A few days after we came back, I went to the US to write some articles: Washington, Williamsburg Virginia, Nashville, San Diego to a Swingers’ Convention – a repellent episode full of repellent men trailing their surrendered wives round arid ballrooms full of stands selling fluffy handcuffs and writing-paper with pictures of sex positions on it in mauve. Crossing the parking lot, I was invited to an orgy; in the spirit of journalistic integrity I thought I ought to go, but the sight, among the many bodies writhing on nylon sheets in an executive suite, of a fungus-coloured middle-aged dentist patting the hair of a woman with pink plastic beads dangling on a clip from her clitoris who was sucking him off while being unconvincingly fucked from behind by what could have been his twin – this tad of humanity so revolted me that for the first and last time in my life as a journalist I made my excuses and left. My old school-friend Boots (male – from the boys’ school I went to after I deserted the horrid girls’ school) came down from LA and we went to Tijuana together and decided, in a jokey and merry mood of exasperation with the world, that to get married would be a splendid idea, but fortunately we couldn’t find the wedding chapel. And then I went north! To Alaska, to interview single men who advertised themselves for love in a special magazine, full-page shots of them in their plaid shirts with their dogs and pick-up trucks and hopeful expressions, and sometimes a bit of pipeline or a chainsaw. I slept in a log cabin with antlers above the door; I had blueberry pancakes for breakfast and spent a day on a horse in the wilderness, and it really was wild – there were no fences and the sky was huge and the air was sweet. I sang ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, and have never had a happier day. Back at the hotel in Washington I picked up one of the foot-long dark and white chocolate
grand pianos with the lid up full of chocolate-dipped strawberries that they used as the little chocolate on the pillow. They packed it for me beautifully, and I brought it as hand baggage home across the Atlantic to Robert. He was not nearly appreciative enough, and left it at my flat.
We were not boyfriend and girlfriend – as I told everybody who asked, or assumed. I had seen enough of him as a boyfriend to accept the truth of what he said: ‘You don’t want a boyfriend like me. You just want a shag. That’s all right, it’s a common mistake. But I’m very easy, you can have me without, you know, signing up.’ However, we were talking, all the time; making each other laugh, a lot; sleeping together, kind of regularly; he worried and annoyed me, much of the time. But we weren’t going out together, oh no.
I wrote: ‘He professes “virtue”. Climbs into bed with me long after I’m asleep, and I murmur “Is it six o’clock then?” because it had been the night before, and he says “No, one thirty. I’m learning. Civilised.” I love the way he says “civilised” – you can almost see what he calls mono-lateral northern erectile nostril – but I don’t know if he really thinks civilised has anything to do with it. It. The big business of letting Robert live, opening the shutters on Robert’s soul and flooding him with sunlight. Emptying out the ashtrays of his heart. It’s all starting to look wrong but he remains our designated roué.’
He said he had tried not drinking.
‘How long?’ I said.
‘Three days,’ he said, ‘Staring at a bottle of Poire William and drinking only beer.’ He believed that counted. He thought it proved he had a balanced attitude. Robert wouldn’t know a balanced attitude if it kicked him.
He said he didn’t feel well. I said, ‘Do your nails no longer fit your fingers and does your flesh feel like over-ripe fruit?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘It’s a hangover,’ I said. ‘You coming to the pub?’ he said.
He read things I was writing, and picked up on aspects that nobody else did. I wrote: ‘He is wrapped in a veil of misconception, a curious blindness rent with insight but cut off from us and his true self. Anyway, he’s gone off to Wigan with his drink and his fags and his weldschmerz, if that’s what I mean, and if that’s how you spell it.’
What an utter fool I was. But everyone knows the romantic hero has to be flawed – how else can the heroine save him? And even if you are quite convinced that’s not what you’re doing, you probably are. Even knowing you are can’t protect you. My rational history-graduate self says knowledge should protect you. My hindsight, meanwhile, quotes from O Brother Where Art Thou?: ‘It’s a fool looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart’.
*
Robert made a recording with Steve Parr, his mate/recording engineer/producer, of the Dmitri Tiomkin song ‘Wild Is the Wind’, famous for versions by Nina Simone and David Bowie. On it, Robert sings like Tom Waits, plays the piano like Red Garland, and undermines the whole thing with fart noises and stupid bleeps. It opens with the sound of a match striking and a cigarette being lit, ice cubes clinking into a glass, and closes with the sound of two hands clapping. It is a precise portrait of him: musically sublime, funny, seductive, naughty, self-sabotaging, vulgar, beautiful, ridiculous.
My memory is that Robert sent a cassette of it to a girl he was flirting with who took it as a love declaration; it caused some confusion. My memory is, I was sad he hadn’t sent it to me. But you know, we weren’t going out together. It would have been during one of our off periods. Steve’s memory is that late one evening, after they had finished recording Robert’s piano overdubs for a film soundtrack, they were about to drop into the Lily Langtry when Robert asked if he could run in to the studio and record something extra. The piano was still set up and Steve had some sound effects running live in the S1000 sampler. He popped in a tape and hit record; Robert started to play and sing. It was all very ad hoc and they only did one take. ‘And then,’ Steve told me, ‘if I remember correctly he asked me to run off a cassette so that he could give it to you.’
I like this incorrect memory very much. I could have this one for myself – look, I have a witness that says it wasn’t for her, it was for me. Perhaps I remembered incorrectly! Perhaps it was for me! Certainly, it is for me now: the tenderness with which he sings; the slight echo of laughter as you-hoo-hoo kiss me, the fart noises bubbling up when he hears the sound of mandolins; the clink of the ice cubes as he wonders whether we know we’re life itself.
Tiomkin was second only to Bernard Hermann in Robert’s pantheon of film composers. He revelled in tales of the great Russians and Germans who went to Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s; Schoenberg writing his Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene without there actually being any film; and on being complimented on his ‘lovely music’ snarling ‘I don’t write lovely music’. And Stravinsky – or was it Shostakovich? Or Schoenberg again? – could be all of them – who when invited to write a score wrote it and sent it in, and when told no, he needed to see the film and write the music to go with it, suggested that the director cut the film to go with the music.
Steve emailed ‘Wild Is the Wind’ to me in 2012, with the message ‘I know he wanted you to have this. No one who didn’t know him can understand what we have lost.’
*
In London Robert’s regime was to work all night, sleep till 3 p.m., wake up and get a cab to his preferred curry house. It was beautiful to see him working. It remained unchanged all his life: manuscript paper, pencil, sharpener, rubber, pack of fags, lighter, ashtray. Seven items denoting concentration. Initial work could be done anywhere – in the margin of the newspaper often – the five lines of the stave sketched, the phrase or chord that struck him jotted down over a coffee (double/triple/quadruple espresso, lots of sugar, several cigarettes, a brandy or calvados or two) in the sun somewhere, on a paper napkin over lunch, in a pub. But for concentration he preferred an actual table, and silence. In his flat, this was regularly assaulted by his neighbours’ building work. Hence his frequent presence in my house, or in Wiltshire. I can see the curve of his back now. His terrible posture.
‘Don’t you need a piano?’ I asked. He was working on the soundtrack for Distant Voices, Still Lives: full orchestra, serried ranks of gorgeous strings, muted brass, moody woodwind, crashing percussion, the whole shebang. No, he didn’t need a piano. He needed to Sellotape leaf after leaf of music manuscript into a great accordion of folds, and to rule and label the staves and the bars and the keys and the time-signature for every part of the orchestra. Then he needed to write down all the music that was in his head, individual parts, a line for each instrument, twenty or thirty parts. Occasionally he’d go and check something on the Dulcitone – that least dulcet of instruments, its tuning forks well out of tune after seventy years in a Wiltshire cottage – but otherwise the orchestra flowed direct from his mind to the paper. When Daniel Barenboim was on Desert Island Discs, he said he’d rather take the scores than any recordings of music, because when he read the scores he could recall and enjoy every performance he’d ever heard.
I am a puddle of admiration for this kind of capacity. This admiration makes it difficult for me to talk about Robert’s music. I fall at the first hurdle: I love it. I loved things he said were crap; I was bedazzled by his skill, by the ease with which he created pure beauty, by the delicacy with which he could shift a mood, by his versatility. He’d produce a piece of cracking 1920s flapper jazz; a haunting scrap of electronica with chanting sopranos; a lush nineteenth-century orchestral waltz; a fair imitation of 1959 Miles Davis; a driving hard rock piece with electric guitars; a sprightly yet somehow corrupt carousel melody; something feral and Celtic that seemed to be made entirely of cloud and a girl’s voice, a hackneyed 1980s-style TV crime theme. ‘They want hackneyed,’ he said. ‘I give them what they want.’ De-composing, he’d call it. But even if he tried, he couldn’t write bad music. Everything had something in it which stopped you, or moved you. God knows he was articulate in English but music was his first language. It was a language I cou
ld understand but not myself speak, though I devoutly wished I could. It meant, to me, blood and love and beauty. It meant my father at home.
And then I was sent to interview Johnny Cash, at home in Tennessee. At that time, he was almost a has-been; his rebirth as Patriarch of Americana was many years in the future. We got talking about the evils of the world. I mentioned a song he recorded, ‘Here Comes that Rainbow Again’ by Kris Kristofferson. It’s a small drama, based on an intensely touching scene from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
‘You know that book?’ Johnny said, his face lighting up.
‘I love that book,’ I said. ‘And you know that book!’
‘I was that book.’ He smiled at me. It was like being smiled at by Monument Valley, or the Hoover Dam.
‘You like that song?’ he said, and pulled over his guitar. He tuned up, and played, and sang – all my favourites, all afternoon, in that shadowy room with the sun hot outside, and it was one of the finest afternoons I’ve ever spent, and definitely the worst interview I’ve ever done. We hardly talked, because this music was his way of communicating. He did say one thing I remember: ‘You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it.’
I came away realising that I didn’t want to be a journalist any more. Although it was journalism that had given me this extraordinary day, I didn’t want to be the person oohing and aahing on paper about Kris Kristofferson, John Steinbeck and Johnny Cash. I wanted to be the person writing and making the stuff that makes people ooh and ahh. Cash loving Kristofferson’s song; Kristofferson loving the way Cash sang it, both of them loving Steinbeck’s book. I wanted to be one of them. I might as well admit it.