JACQUES BREL: A LIFE, A SONG

By Matthew Burns

Born in Brussels in 1929, Jacques Brel was of the generation that saw "things falling apart." The son of a well-to-do entrepreneur, Brel's life seemed about to offer "what every good boy deserves." Yet his sudden decision in his early twenties to give up security and comfort for the uncertainty of a life on stage illustrates his instinctual need for contradiction. "Every good boy deserves," Brel would have said, "to live his own song."

Hence Brel chose to live his songs and sing his life, and began by performing some of his compositions in third-rate cabarets. As he rose in the ranks to become one of the most distinguished singers of the century in Francophonic Europe, Brel was confirming the validity of his founding axiom, namely that unwise decisions are best.

A modern version of a troubadour, Jacques Brel spread his tales and melodies across French-speaking halls for over two decades. One cannot deny the poesie in Brel's words, but it is obvious that his art reached the status it did because he sang with the conviction of an enlightened soul. The few singers that attempted to revive Brel's world since his death twenty years ago have all failed miserably, thus reinforcing the suspicion that his success came not just from his voice and words, but also from his inimitable sincerity.

Brel's charisma was, as for most artists worthy of this title, of paramount importance to his performances. His subtle use of sounds and their effects synergized with carefully chosen instrumentation to make a complete and inalterable whole. Brel's engaged performances unavoidably led his listeners to conclude that every word as Brel sang it was le mot juste, that no sound, no tone of voice could better fit his colorful descriptions. In "Au suivant!," Brel's most famous attack on the inherent rigor of the military mind, he sang in a debilitating tone accompanied by a jerky orchestra:

To Brel, if an army symbolizes war, it is most dangerous as it threatens and degrades individuality.

Much of Brel's art, not unlike most artists', reacts against the values which have led to his social alienation. The individual, Brel tried to tell his audience, acts, as opposed to groups, which merely react and should only exist for the sake of the individual. Brel believes that the bourgeois, content to hold on to set traditional, life-preserving values, epitomized this passivity:

The ludicrous portrait of wealthy "Grandma" caricatures an older generation-in Brel's time, those who lived through two world wars-whose obsession with survival (survie) has distracted them from a desire to live (vie).

At the risk of making quite a few enemies, Brel opted for his satires never to be ambiguous. Much of his success comes from singing about "those things" (ces choses-la) which most people are proud to think but seldom bold enough to mention. Though Brel was much criticized for his disrespect of tradition, most of his detractors still listened with one ear and great attention to his wonderful performances of "those things" of which it is never appropriate to talk during cocktail parties.

If Brel hoped his listeners would realize how comic they really were, he was also aware of our unconscious unwillingness to face up to the fact that in parodying "ces gens-la" ("those people") he was most surely aiming at us! Why deny, Brel seems to be asking, the inherently comic nature of the role which our parents, by shoving us into this world, have forced us to play?

In a Nietzschean vein, Brel concludes that our inability to accept our condition leads to a repression and eventual inversion of values. In "Le tango funebre" ("The Funeral Tango"), Brel decried the social man's profane lack of conscience caused by the emergence of his social consciousness. Imagining himself in his coffin, observing society one last time, he sang in a sarcastic tone of our indecent disregard of decency:

By mocking those whom he thought held dull aspirations, Brel hoped to trigger our thinking about "those people." Although his satirizing functioned self-therapeutically, his was also an attempt to convince us of of our duty to live more fully than the narrow-minded bigot, the hypocritical bourgeois, or, more generally, the prudent person.

Imprudence, Brel sings, is our ally against the passing of indifferent Time. Man is to play, to act out his ideals whatever its costs. Brel the atheist came to conclude that life could be summed up as a series of attempts to avoid the inevitable. How comic does this plot sound? Since the package of life never comes without despair, losses, and, ultimately, death, why not, Brel asks, live life as if it were a game which, because it is rigged, cannot be played seriously? Brel's lingering notoriety throughout French-speaking Europe rests on his unique playfulness, his ability to act his ideals on stage, to sing to the playful child in us.

Brel considered laughter-even if it be temporary-a most effective remedy against the thought of these inevitable dead-end streets. He never missed an opportunity to ridicule himself on stage and in his songs, constantly strengthening the truthfulness of his idea of man as stuck on a spherical stage whose vastness reinforces his feeling of nothingness before the All. Upon hearing the poignancy of Brel's performances, the listener senses that Brel is one of the few fortunate enough to recognize that life permanently oscillates between tragedy and comedy, as well as one of the still fewer to accept the thinness of the dividing line:

Brel's schizophrenic character, as reflected in the bipolarity of his repertoire, is reminiscent of Heinrich Böll's clown who spends his days amusing children and his nights crying under his make-up. However much Brel affected wearing the mask of the troubled soul, the clown in him always took over.

To Brel the romantic, love symbolizes life's double-edged nature. Most of his love poems, while successfully transmitting the magic of love, are burdened with despair. Brel was too aware of love's ephemeral nature, which he often sets against the eternity of a loss. In "Orly," backed only by the heartbeat of a guitar, Brel, barely audible, described this emptiness:

Life's unfairness, Brel is telling us, is that the only eternal thing is death, non-being. Yet he insists that the necessary acknowledgment of our vulnerability should not entail our passivity. Rather one's only duty in life is to live fully while one can, which entails trying, despite our knowledge that any success is doomed to end. Thus, in his most famous song, "Ne me quitte pas," Brel pled with his departed lover to give him another chance:

Echoing the words of Marguerite Duras who once wrote that "Vulnerable people are the only ones truly alive," Brel makes passion his friend and enemy. Thus, and here lies the unsolvable paradox: only by accepting life's injustices can one free oneself to live more completely, although this mental steps-which amounts to affirming one's vulnerability-sets the stage for more failure.

It should surprise none to learn that Brel's best defining trait was doubtless his wholehearted passion for life. The nonconformist that he was sang as passionately as he lived, often contradicting common sense, proud to live unwisely. Always on the move, adept at flying planes to far-away islands alone, Brel lived a Hemingway-like lifestyle-although he would doubtlessly frown at this description, for society's heroes remain easy targets for ridicule.

Brel found most of his inspiration in his awareness of life's inherent tensions and people's readiness to overlook them. Throughout his repertoire Brel combines impressions of a life too unfair to keep him silent with images of his love of a world too comic to be left alone. Despite his early lung cancer Brel chose never to become wise-which stands as just another proof of his belief that the only life worth living is the life of passion, the life one lives "quand on a vingt ans" (when one is twenty). Brel recorded his last album-considered his best-with one lung, stoically singing his life-affirming ideals in the face of nearing death:

His imagery constantly reflects the profound malaise of the disillusioned idealist who gradually comes to accept the existence of the never-to-be-had in his life. While most French-speakers of our parents' generation remember Brel as "the Belgian who dared sing about love to the French," I like to think of him as the man who sang as beautifully as he lived, who lived as sincerely as he sang. In the midst of our college experiences, he reminds us of the importance of taking life with a grain of salt. In "L'age idiot," most of his themes intertwine to lay out his vision of human life:

Furthermore, alluding to his tragi-comic portrayal of man, Brel is promising us an ever growing need for comedy if we are to fight off the most dangerous of attitudes, namely, indifference:

As Brel's voice has told many over the past decades, the sooner one realizes there is nothing to be had, the more likely one is to be. Those who have internalized his voice have accepted that nothing is more imprudent than a prudent search for a definitive self. Who wants to belong to an "aged youth"? Yet few of us dare go against the flow, for little unsettles us more than uncertainty. Is this not one of these contradictions which affects "those people," these tensions of which only some of us speak silently? Desire for "life insurance" is a trap, Brel suggests, which makes our greatest challenge attempting to remain young as long as life lasts:

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