by Helen Dewitt
As-tu déjeuné?
As-tu déjeuné, Jacquo?
Eh de quoi?
Eh de quoi?
Ah!
He was asked later whether he found it difficult to take on a pupil who had been trained by someone whom he had regarded with undisguised contempt.
— Contempt?
— You spoke of the pianism of the Machine Age —
— I said that?
— Yes.
— You play the violin?
— No?
— The violoncelle?
— Unfortunately not.
— The piano is quite a clumsy instrument by comparison and yet if I had to play a little phrase of three or four notes it would be easy to play it fifty or sixty different ways, words are much more clumsy still. I don’t say that I did not say what you said I said a minute ago, or even that it wasn’t my opinion years ago, but words bother me. I think that’s why when I talk I often say stupid or banal or offensive things, & then people quote you and say Well why did you say this or But you said that or But don’t you think this — & I want to say, well I had to say some words. I don’t go around with a lot of words in my head, most of the time there is something going on my head but it’s a piece of music, the minute I wake up I might lie in bed for an hour or two just listening to something in my head and if I think of different ways it might be played I don’t even have the words What if I played it like this? in my head, I just hear it one way and then another and then another — if someone asks me a question I want to play some little phrase, I want to say, the way I played that piece, that’s what I really mean —
— What about the Affaire Jacquo?
— What about it?
— Were you surprised by the outrage?
— Oh, surprised —
The Gorilla said there was nothing much to say, but then he said
What you must understand is that I was bitterest about Koslowski before the truth about the camps was known, once that was known —
What I mean is that Koslowski was a stupid old man, he existed in a world bounded by the solfège and prizes and three or four posts to which he might rise, a ribbon that might be put on his chest. He considered Jewishness in a pupil an obstacle to advancement. What I mean is that I spent two years as a waiter in Marseille as a result of that blockhead, but once the truth was known I could not accuse the Fossil of anti-Semitism without hyperbole —
The thing you have to remember is that immediately after the War people didn’t know about the camps. It was only later on that the facts started to come out. The thing you have to remember is that I never read the papers, so at first I just heard chance comments here and there, and then I did buy a paper and read an article which described some of those things for the first time —
Anyway I read this article and — You know that little C minor prelude of Chopin, you know DUM. DUM. DUM. de DUM, it’s like a little funeral march, it establishes the minor key in the first chord and sometimes it’s fortissimo and sometimes pianissimo and it comes and goes, it’s a little funeral march — Anyway the article presented certain details and all of a sudden this little funeral march presented itself with its minor key and its fortissimo and its pianissimo as if to say, Well, here I am, something suitable to mark the occasion — well the whole idea of major and minor keys loud and soft fast and slow comprising suitability seemed fatuous — other grand sombre pieces came to my mind as if to say Of course that little prelude won’t do you want something bigger you want some more dissonances you want something very simple you want something tragic and it was stupid.
It was the same when I went to practice, no matter what I did everything seemed stupid, I mean the things one tries to bring out in a passage seemed stupid, the trajectory of a piece seemed stupid, it’s one thing to work on technical difficulties everyone does that from time to time but sooner or later you’ve got to bring the piece to life & now they were just wooden puppets with wooden arms gesturing on a string —
I thought, That’s it, I’ll never be able to play again, & I was trying to think of some job, & meanwhile if you can believe it my parents were urging me to get married —
Anyway I really didn’t know what to do with myself. Before, I would go to the gymnasium for a couple of hours to improve my upper body strength and then I would go and practice for about eight hours or maybe more if it was going really well or if there was some problem, all of a sudden there was this big hole in the day. I was still going to the gymnasium just to have something to do, but the rest of the time there was just nothing. Then suddenly I had an idea. I thought, I know, I’ll read a book.
When I was at school my teachers used to get mad at me because I never did any work, & later the Fossil used to throw up his hands in horror because I’d never read Racine or Balzac or anyone like that, he’d start talking about the musician as homme cultivé — I used to say to him, If you would like me to compose an opera based on the Phèdre of M. Racine I shall be happy to examine the work in question, otherwise I have not the slightest desire to read this, I have no doubt, excellent play. This used to drive the Fossil insane. He would trot out some remark about oeuvre séminale de la littérature française, frankly it was amusing to see him boil up, well there was an element of truth in it but it was also the fact that I simply could not read more than a page — no, a sentence — without some piece of music coming into my head. I really did try to read Phèdre once & I got as far as Depuis plus de six mois éloigné de mon père, j’ignore le destin d’une tête si chère, & then all of a sudden this string quintet of Mozart’s that I had heard the night before came into my head & half an hour later it finished & I was still looking at Depuis plus de six mois éloigné de mon père, j’ignore le destin d’une tête si chère. This always happened whenever I tried to read something so I never read anything, but now it was pretty quiet in my head.
Well, I had a lot of books left over from school, & at first I thought I would read Phèdre by Racine, anyway I looked at my little bookshelf & I had a little Greek text of Thucydide which like all my books had been cut on the first two pages. It was still pretty quiet in my head so I started to read, & there was a preface by Raymond Levecque, maybe you know this, this author had two ways of writing, one quite plain and the other barbarous & scarcely grammatical, there’s a section of Book 3 about a civil war at Cercyre, & apparently it’s quite famous though I’d never heard of it, it’s about how all the words change when people do something atrocious, so they would call a bad thing by a good name and a good thing by a bad name, & in trying to express this he writes this very contorted Greek.
I thought, This sounds interesting, I’ll look at that. But it was very bizarre, you know, it had a translation on the facing page and they had put it into civilized grammatical French. You could see what it was supposed to mean right away. But in the Greek most of the time you couldn’t really see, you had to try to make it mean something because the words crammed so much in or left so much out or maybe just barely touched what the dictionary said they meant and just barely touched the grammar and just. I thought that this author had tried to let unspeakable things do something to the language and then M. Levecque had tidied it up again. I looked at this polite little sentence & sat crying on the bed —
— All the same, the Funeral March for a Dead Parrot
— No, not at all, that’s precisely
— But many people
— Exactly
— But surely
— On the contrary
For the next thirty years Morhange was one of the most celebrated pianists in the world.
In 1975 he retired to Japan, & by coincidence took a house on the very island, in the very town where Mlle Matsumoto lived.
— Why Japan?
— Japan had fascinated me for a long time — the prints of Utamaro and Hokusai and Hiroshige — those remarkable litt
le poems, the haiku — it is an art of subtraction, an art with a horror of the extraneous, but it’s not so much that it has a horror of the extraneous as that it avoids histrionics, Western art gives the impression by contrast of being saturated with sincerity —
It was pointed out that his greatest triumphs had been with Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky —
— Yes, exactly, it’s precisely for that reason that Japanese art really struck me. As a young man I had nothing but contempt for the Fossil, an old man who in the first place understood nothing of the works he pretended to teach, who was flattered by the deference he received from Mlle Matsumoto, something which a Japanese — and a young girl at that — accords so readily to a teacher. What I did not see at the time was that there was something genuine in her performance —
What happened you see was that, when I had spent many years in America, someone happened to play me a recording of Mlle Matsumoto playing Chopin’s fourth Ballade. This was the very piece with which I had won the Prix d’Orphée. I was astonished by a performance which seemed to anticipate so much of the last twenty years, & in justice to myself I listened to the recording I myself had made at that time. I was filled with contempt. If Delacroix could have played the piano, this theatrical display is precisely what he would have produced —
Hearing Mlle Matsumoto’s recording I now saw the quality I had been unable to see before, that she had escaped the fatal plunge into egotism which the idiocy of the Fossil forced upon all his pupils of any talent, & had extracted something better from within herself —
I finished my tour — I went to Tokyo — c’était affreux — I thought that the true Japan was elsewhere — I crossed the sea to Shikoku, an island with 88 Buddhist shrines — I had my Steinway brought from Paris, as well as an old pedalier which I had managed to pick up —
I discovered that it was here that Mlle Matsumoto still lived. I remembered my behavior & could not approach her.
For eight years I lived in this town without meeting her. I knew where she lived, for once walking I heard the fourth Ballade & there could not have been two to play it in such a place. Thereafter I avoided the street.
One day after walking in the country I came back & walked down her street — I heard the opening bars of Chopin’s fourth Ballade in F minor. More than ever was I conscious that I had wronged her — I felt that I must apologize — in agony I walked up and down outside the door, waiting for her to finish — double octaves in the bass melted into the air in a legato of the most perfect unhurried simplicity — I saw suddenly an insuperable difficulty. It is regarded in Japan as a common politeness to take off the shoes on entering a house — but I have always been careless of clothes, I remembered suddenly that that morning I had not been able to find any socks, that I had put on a blue and a red, each with a large hole at the big toe — I could not appear to Mlle Matsumoto like this. Like a madman I ran through the streets of Tokushima, I found a shop, I bought a pair of socks, in my mind I heard the Ballade approaching the arpeggiated chords before the end, I flung down a few yen & ran off, I darted into the precincts of a nearby shrine — no one in sight — I took off my shoes & the old socks, bundled the latter into a pocket, put on the new, put on my shoes, dashed to the house of Mlle Matsumoto. She had come to the moment of stillness before the final explosion. It came to an end — gathering my courage I knocked — she came to the door — I must speak to you, I said, you must allow me to apologize — she gestured for me to enter — I removed my shoes & followed her — we entered the room with the piano — I stood before her, every word of Japanese left my head, I poured forth my reflections of a decade & when I paused she said
Vous êtes très aimable, M. Morhange, mais ce n’est point à moi que vous devez addresser vos louanges,
& she gestured toward the piano.
C’est mon élève que vous venez d’entendre,
& she introduced me to a twelve-year-old boy who bowed without speaking.
I stammered something, bowed & left — just after me the boy burst from the house & ran down the street — & now Chopin’s fourth Ballade came again from the house — but I could not go back.
The following week I received a note from Mlle Matsumoto asking me to take on Murakami as a pupil.
Stolen Luck
Keith was not the songwriter. Darren and Stewart wrote the songs. Keith hit things, some of which were drums. He came in one day with a song and nobody wanted to play it.
The song was the least of their problems. They had signed with a label, so their music was used in adverts and that, it brought in some dosh, they were shameless rock sluts because the fans downloaded the songs for free. Slutdom was not the issue. The issue was that the contract would not let them do independent gigs.
Keith had had an argument with them because the Arctic Monkeys, look at the fucking Arctic Monkeys, why the fuck can’t we do what the fucking Arctic Monkeys, this being the capacity for inarticulate rage which had made him a drummer in the first
And Darren and Stewart, being songwriters, had talked and talked and talked and talked to the point that there were signatures on the contract.
Then the inconceivable had happened which is that Thom Yorke sent an e-mail inviting them to do a gig. Keith said they should just do it, fuck the fucking contract but Darren and Stewart
So then Keith was very quiet.
Never a good sign.
Given Keith’s known propensity to hit things other than drums.
So Darren said they would record the song.
Keith tried to explain his concept and Darren and Stewart kept arsing about and then Sean the keyboardist sussed that it was an arsing about session and then Keith put down his sticks.
Darren, Stewart and Sean sussed that the beat was gone.
Keith, says Darren. What the fuck.
Keith disengaged from the scaffolding of things that could be hit that made noise. He stood up.
He walked across the floor while Darren, Stewart and Sean varied the theme of What the fuck. He took the mic from Darren.
In addition to not being a songwriter Keith was not a singer. He dragged the lyrics of the song over reluctant vocal cords and spat them into the mic.
Fucking great man said Darren who did not want another guitar percussioned to subatomic particles against wall, floor, chair, his head. Yeah fucking great said Stewart who had also lost 3 guitars and Sean hastened to protect his keyboard from berserk drummer syndrome, Fucking great, insane, totally fucking crazy man
Keith handed the mic back to Darren. He turned and walked out the door.
The studio was in Limehouse. He walked west. His legs would not let him get on a bus.
At Leicester Square the crowd, wasn’t there a director who gave every person in a crowd scene a thing to do? Sometimes the world is too convincing, as if someone spent too much time on it. Individualising the robots. He stopped at a corner.
On the pavement was this, like, guy with a sign beside him, CRAZY NICK AND HIS MUSICAL TRAFFIC CONES. There was an orange cone on the pavement beside him and he was holding another cone to his mouth, blowing into it. To the music of My Way.
pa PA, pa PA pa PA, pa PA pa PA, pa PA pa PA pa
pa PA, pa PA pa PA, pa PA pa PA, pa PA pa PA pa
People were dropping money in the cone. One woman, she put a ten pound note in the fucking cone.
PA PA PA pa PA
pa PA pa PA
PA PA PA PA PA
He stood on the pavement.
pa pa
pa pa pa pa
pa pa pa — — PAAAAAA PA
Like, fuck. A kid put 10p in the cone. The music was shite but here was this luckless tosser turning ostensibly irredeemable shite into gold with a simple traffic cone. Single-handedly handling his own PR and marketing and sales and distribution. Say Thom Yorke comes upon the scene, says Hey, Crazy Nick, great act, OK if I jo
in you, and Thom Yorke picks up the other traffic cone and does an impromptu gig with Crazy Nick —
Crazy Nick can say Yes, he can say Fuck off Radiohead wanker scum. Total artistic control.
He stood watching Crazy Nick for about 3 hours because
He walked east.
Marc was on the late shift at the News of the World. He wore a suit because hacks must dig for dirt in a suit. A call came in that a celeb was being a wanker in a pub, if swift action was taken photographic evidence might be shared with the British public, and Marc was the man for the job.
The celeb was Kyle Vaughan. He had a part in a soap. He stood by the bar with a rolled-up copy of the Big Issue, blowing My Way out of the orifice. Poop POOP poop POOP poop POOP poop POOP poop POOP poop POOP poop poop poop.
Not much value in it as a pic.
What I’m saying is, they’re not doing enough to TRAIN, expatiated the celeb. Like, show some initiative, mate. You see them selling the Big Toilet Tissue and you want to say look, I have enough problems without constipating my brain with this crap, do something funny for a change, add value to the product
Marc: So you’d, like,
Like today I saw this bloke at Leicester Square, Crazy Nick and His Musical Traffic Cones, he’s playing My Way on a traffic cone, I thought, you know, this just goes to show how fucking useless the Big Issue is, anyone with a little imagination can do more with a couple of fucking traffic cones
So you, did you give him some money, then? asked Marc.
Yeh. I gave him a quid. Which is what I’m saying.
Poop POOP poop POOP poop POOP poop POOP poop POOP poop POOP poop poop poop.
But maybe, maybe everyone can’t be that innovative, do you think there’s enough funny things that homeless people can do? Could you, like, do you have any ideas?
Yeh. Sure. Like. Like. Say you say to people, I am going to take my trousers off. If you pay me I will put them back on.
Yeh, maybe, said Marc, but see, maybe that’s quite embarrassing, taking off your trousers in front of a lot of strangers, I mean, you wouldn’t want to do it