Lord, make me a friend.
Grant that I may inspire confidence
in the person who suffers in anguish,
in the one who is searching for light a long way from you,
in the one who would like to begin again but doesn’t know how,
in the one who would like to open his heart but doesn’t feel able.
Lord, help me not to pass by anyone with indifferent face,
with closed heart, or hastened step.
Help me to attend at once to those who are near me.
Make me see those who are worried and bewildered,
those who suffer and don’t show it,
those who feel isolated and long for friendship,
and give me the sensitivity which makes me meet their hearts.
Lord, free me from myself
to be able to serve you,
to be able to love you,
to succeed in listening to you
in every brother or sister you make me meet.
G. Volpi
Great Greens IV: Julien in the kitchen
I knew I was gay from the age of about five, indeed before I knew what it was. It was certainly unchosen. But when I chose to become a Catholic in 1980 I set in place a conflict that would occupy me for years to come (and is likely to continue to do so from the writing of these words until the last words I write). Then a friend told me of the French novelist Julien Green (1900–1997), considered one of the greatest men of letters of the twentieth century, and someone who had lived with and written about issues of homosexuality and faith throughout his life. Green has not been served well by his English translators on the whole, but I bought a number of his books and became fascinated with the voice behind them.
Of the three Greens he is by far the one I knew least. Indeed, apart from his books, my only contact with him was one phone call and one lunch at his Paris apartment in 1996. Our meeting made a huge impression on me though and I wrote a lengthy diary entry about it at the time, which follows.
* * *
I was in Paris to play a recital and I had invited Julien Green and his adopted son (long story) Jean-Eric Jourdan to attend. They weren’t free that evening but invited me instead to their home for lunch the following day. My taxi arrived at rue Vaneau intentionally early by 15 minutes and so I was able to walk about the quiet, elegant streets in the 7th arrondissement gathering my thoughts and courage. I arrived at the building, punched in the security code Jean-Eric had faxed to me, then pushed open the thick black doors into a subdued courtyard with a vibrantly green garden at the end. There was another set of doors at the bottom on the right with another code. These opened to the scent of a thousand flowers and a stunning, museum-quality elevator, which I decided not to use. I bounded up the stone stairs and arrived at the first floor. Jean-Eric had said they were on the second floor but I wasn’t sure whether France uses the British or American system of numbering so I rang the bell. Eventually a woman’s voice called out. I knew instantly that it was the wrong flat but I replied, ‘Monsieur Green?’ Some mumbled words were spoken within, which I knew meant one floor higher. Up the second flight of stairs, a second bell and a warm welcome from Jean-Eric Green.
I entered the opulent, book-crowded hallway and immediately to the right was a study/sitting room. Eric called into it for Julien and an old man with a black cane walked very slowly out to meet me. He wore a dark brown, three-piece suit with a blue shirt and tie. The shirt had a white collar and the tie was broad, in silk, with polka dots in the same blue but a different weave. This legendary figure seemed so vulnerable that my nervousness instantly disappeared – as if I were meeting a child. Once he spoke, though, I could tell he was perfectly clear of mind. He had a kind, rather shy manner and was exactly as I imagined him from the book of correspondence I’d read between him and the philosopher Jacques Maritain. Eric was extremely talkative throughout my visit, which at first made it easier – there were no awkward gaps – but eventually rather spoiled things because Julien was slow and thoughtful and Eric would jump in and answer a question or change the subject or recall an anecdote.
We went immediately to the kitchen for lunch, a lovely old space with vert anglais tiles and paint. Eric was full of ideas and opinions: ‘Chopin – all right hand. I think Field was greater.’ ‘We don’t like Mozart very much.’ Any topic provoked an instant judgement. Much slightly camp amusement, but from the few things Julien said in his serious, gentle way, I wished I’d had more time to talk to him. We ate cantaloupe melon, smoked salmon, cassoulet with no meat, the best brie I’ve ever had, and mixed strawberries and raspberries, finishing with (astonishingly, in Paris) Nescafé instant coffee.
I asked Julien if he read his own books. ‘Only Moira. I think it’s good, non?’ he said doubtfully to Eric. He said he felt he could write no more novels, only his diary. He mentioned at least four times how much he loved my Schumann CD, especially the pieces from Album for the Young which he wanted to hear when he was dying. He was extremely effusive, making a special emphasis that I should understand his enthusiasm. He told me he had listened a number of evenings earlier and was profoundly moved, waking up during the night with the music in his thoughts. He commented on his love for Schumann and the music’s extreme simplicity.
When I mentioned Jacques Maritain it provoked an affectionate memory. ‘I saw him every day … he was my best friend really.’ He was happy to praise Eric’s novels. ‘As good as mine … at least!’ Then the telephone rang and Eric left us alone. I could hear his voice rising and falling with gossip and intrigue and the room seemed calmer without him. I asked Julien how he had returned to the Church. He seemed puzzled and began to describe how he found a Catholic book among his father’s shirts just after the death of his mother. And then he told me how a priest, a Jesuit, had steered him towards becoming a monk. When I asked again what brought him back to the faith, he said he didn’t understand my question, but then, understanding something, he told me that he had received a particular grace in the early 1950s. God had spoken to him: ‘That’s enough, Julien. No more, no more.’ Or words to that effect. At that point his sexual desires left him for good. He then said to me, ‘I wasn’t expecting to say this to you.’
He spoke too about the differences between hetero- and homosexuality, and asked if I’d read about recent studies suggesting that these preferences were already fixed in the womb. ‘So where’s the sin? Oh, I don’t know…’ He suddenly seemed distressed. I wanted to bring him some comfort so I said something about there being little difference if these preferences happened before birth or in early infancy. At neither stage were they chosen. I then suggested that this particular cross might be a special vocation and that God was especially close to those who suffer in this way. [My own views on this matter were in a state of flux at this time.] Then Eric returned and the conversation became light again. Visits to England, the decision (reversed) to move to Italy, problems with publishers and translators, etc., etc. We went briefly after lunch into the drawing room – dark maroon-red walls with golden moulding along the ceiling. Heavy Victorian furniture from the family’s American home sat along each wall and huge velvet curtains covered most of the windows. In fact the room was very dark, but rich and relaxing. A modern hi-fi system jarred alongside the bookshelf of first editions. On the way to the drawing room we passed many interesting things on the walls, including a Confederate flag and a signed photo of André Gide: ‘He wasn’t as bad as they say now. He was a good man, a good friend.’ After a few more anecdotes by Eric about their rainforest experience with alligators and other things, it was time to leave. It was now 3.30 p.m. and I had arrived at one. I suggested calling a cab but Julien touchingly protested that the cab would take only five minutes as if he wanted me to stay. But I needed to catch my train to Rouen and didn’t want to outstay my welcome. We took our leave warmly and I left. Ah, I forgot. I asked him about the changes in the liturgy. No hesitation: ‘I want to hear Mass in Latin. I don’t want to hea
r Mass in French.’ It seemed so obvious to him. He spoke with love of God, his closeness and how he had always answered his prayers. ‘I want now to die well … I have no fear of death at all.’
I cannot convey here the warmth and serenity of the man, his face always smiling and encouraging with anything I said to him, his gentle voice introverted but confident, and with that purity, that truth which Maritain mentions in his letters to Green. I told him of my love for the first volume of his autobiography, The Green Paradise. ‘I don’t know what I wrote really. It was a confession. I can say that it is totally honest.’
After his death two years later there was the publication of the final volume of his diaries (En avant par-dessus les tombes). I looked curiously, anxiously for the date of our lunch:
3 May. Yesterday Stephen Hough came to lunch. The previous evening we’d been listening to him on a record playing a Schumann sonata,* which had made an unforgettable impression on me. I’m sure I had never heard this sonata played like that before, that’s to say with the combination of the composer’s twofold genius: his passion, his frightening unleashing of strength, then the Schumannesque gentleness and charm. I realised yet again that there is a power in music that puts the spoken word in the shade. It is universal and irreplaceable. The pianist himself is charming, open, a convert from Protestantism; he talked to me about his faith and I told him about the way in which I had been converted. Immediately this strong bond brought us closer. I observed in Stephen’s speaking voice a very slight singing quality; the voice of a musician.
… AND MORE
What is your motto?
I don’t have a motto as such, some phrase I carry around in my mental pocket like a talisman, but if there is a precept shadowing my life it would probably be this: Everything matters; nothing matters.
Strictly speaking, it is a contradictory statement: if one half is correct then the other half is false, and even more strictly speaking neither phrase is true in an absolute sense. But I think it holds a strange, creative tension in its paradox. Its juxtaposition of extremes is a springboard both to calm contemplation and to intense action.
Everything matters
What we do has implications – whether we consciously act with this knowledge, realise it later, or merely let actions wash into and over our lives with an absent mind. There is a potential for good or harm in almost every word we speak to another person, indeed in every facial gesture. A smile rightly timed can turn a person’s life around.
The great spiritual writers categorise such mindful living as seeing God in everything. Or as turning everything into prayer. From the austere St Alphonsus de Ligouri (Preparation for Death) to cuddly, groovy Matthew Fox (Whee! We, Wee) the idea that we can relish the smallest acts of our lives and make them sacred is a rich mine of spiritual treasure. Everything matters. Everything is gold … if we want it to be.
This has many implications in the world of a musician – studying the score, perfecting one’s craft at the instrument, cherishing every note, being attentive, daring to experiment, restless in pursuing ideals and goals.
Nothing matters
But there’s a danger with the ‘everything matters’ attitude. We can become fixated, neurotic, obsessive about things. We can see only trees, whereas ‘nothing matters’ is the wood. Realising that our lives last but a micro-second in the universe’s timeline can release tension, allowing us to relish better, to attend and to reverence more fully.
But ‘nothing matters’ by itself can leave us in the soapy suds of an endless rose-perfumed bathtub. We need ‘everything matters’ to see our ablutions in the context of a day to be lived. On a plane with a failing engine everything matters in the cockpit but nothing matters in the cabin.
From a musical perspective we can fuss so much with details that the architecture holding everything together can be lost. I remember coming across a teacher when I was a student who had brilliant insights into many things but whose students ended up paralysed. They needed to be reminded as they walked into that exam that ‘nothing matters’. Not only can such an insight enable us, ironically, to do our best but it’s related to the bigger question of success or failure as both being ultimately meaningless.
‘Everything matters’ is our telescope on the stars; ‘nothing matters’ is the night sky in which we see them.
Rilke, and poetry as the root of everything
Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinaus unter den großen Himmel treten. Ich möchte beten
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes I’m asked how the different arts I’m involved with interact with each other – music, words, painting. I think it all comes from a poetic impulse.
Poetry is a furnace. It’s the fire that drives all art. ‘I want to go out from my heart’ – or, in one word: ecstasy. To leave behind the mundane, the routine, the predictable. The prosaic. Every work of art seeks such an evacuation. Such longing is at the heart of every heart; it drives every (good) religious impulse; it drives every (good) sexual impulse. To shed the skin-deep, to cast away the superficial; or, as Rilke puts it, ‘to step out under the vast Heavens’.
Ich möchte … Ich möchte. Rilke’s initial desire to get outside himself leads to his second desire: to pray. To ask, to demand, to long for … something. ‘For I wish it so! What I wish I still don’t know’ was Marc Blitzstein’s take on that same inner hunger.
Those who writhe and thrust on dance floors, who inhale and inject, who gag on flesh in strange bedrooms … we can only say it’s fake, not that it’s evil. When we are able to leave ourselves (aus meinem Herzen hinaus) then we can we pray, then we are fully human.
A poem is polished prose, cut like a jewel. The words mean everything and then they mean more. Every poem, every note of music is a prayer. Ich möchte beten.
Beauty, beauty, beauty
Towards the end of Alain de Botton’s thought-provoking book The Art of Travel, he writes about ‘possessing beauty’ – how we hold on to things that have attracted us in our travels, and he refers to the writings of John Ruskin for some illuminating, provocative ideas.
‘The art of drawing … is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing,’ writes the great Victorian gentleman. Not because he wants everyone to become an artist, which he admits would be impossible, but because drawing teaches us to notice rather than merely to look. De Botton makes the observation that when we want to draw something we have to look at it for ten minutes at least. Point made: when did we last stand in front of something beautiful for that long and really examine it? I was sitting with a magnificent view of Prague’s old city when I read this book and I tried looking intensely at the elegant buildings outside the window. I just couldn’t manage it for more than about thirty seconds without my mind beginning to wander or lose focus. If I’d been sketching it with pencil and pad it would have been a different story.
I then went on to think about a musical equivalent of this, because music exists only in a passing of time, racing past us like the mid-nineteenth-century trains Ruskin so hated. It is utterly non-fixed, and to focus on one moment is to destroy the whole. It is a forest that we have to pass through, not a single tree that we can contemplate or capture. But if hearing and seeing beauty have different timetables they both require a sort of repetition in order to be fully appreciated: music needs to be heard many times, and the visual world needs multiple, if consecutive, seconds of looking. Only in such repetition perhaps can we grasp or hold on to beauty.
How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or
brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty,… from vanishing away?
Gerard Manley Hopkins hints at this repetition literally in the lines above from his ecstatic poem, ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’, but by the end he (the Jesuit priest) suggests a further step:
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, be
auty’s self and beauty’s giver.
[…]
Oh then weary then why
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.
The ‘art of travel’ looks as if it requires a lifelong journey.
Rough Ideas Page 27