Saturday, September 24, 2011

RIP: Francoise Sagan - 21 June 1935 – 24 September 2004

I graduated from high school when I was seventeen years and five months old; it was hard to get a good job unless you were eighteen. I even went to Dalton Foundry, a place where the jobs were so horrible that it was said that they'd hire anyone, but a man in an office there told me, "Come back when you're not so green behind the ears."

I wanted to join the Army. You could join at seventeen if a parent signed his/her permission. I asked my mother if she'd sign for me. She said no. "I didn't do it for any of the other boys and I won't do it for you ... if anything happened to you I wouldn't want to have to think it might not have if I hadn't signed for you."

Finally I got a job at Western Union Telegraph Company as a teletype operator in Fort Wayne but they wouldn't let me start until I was eighteen. I already had plans to join the Army on January 2nd, the day after my eighteenth birthday, but thought I'd give Western Union a try ... for one thing, an employer was, in those days, obliged to give you your job back once you'd completed your service, and, having had such a tough time landing a job, this "security" seemed like a deal.

Francoise Sagan
I rented a room on Washington Street for $7.00 a week from a Mrs. White. I ate glazed doughnuts for breakfast at a tiny dinner; the waitress, Lois, was very sweet to me. I usually went out the back door of Western Union to have my lunch at a hamburger joint that was across the alley and down on the corner of Jefferson Street. For supper I usually went to a Walgreen's Drugstore, sitting at the counter. One evening there I stopped to look at a rack of paperbacks. I spent 35-cents for a novel called Bonjour Tristesse by one Francoise Sagan. I'd read an article about her in Life magazine a few years back. Not that I was much of a reader; prior to Bonjour Tristesse I had read just one novel -- I think it was Penrod by Booth Tarkington; it had painfully bored me.  Back in my room I read the first sentences of my new purchase:

          A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate
     to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow.  The idea
     of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am 
     almost ashamed of its complete egoism.  I have known
     boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never
     sorrow.  Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervat-
     ing and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.


Somehow the phrases 'strange melancholy' and 'grave and beautiful name of sorrow' and 'the idea of sorry has always appealed to me' made a great impression on me. Thus a French girl who'd had a novel published at eighteen, a slim novel which had sold over half a million copies in its first year, became my first literary crush.  (Some fifty years later, walking with my dear friend Ellen on St. Mark's Place in the East Village, there was a perfect vintage paperback copy of Bonjour Tristesse on a street vendor's table; I had Ellen open it and I recited that opening paragraph from memory; I made one mistake, inserting the word 'today' after 'pervades me' which, of course, comes alarmingly close to splitting an infinitive.)

My love for Francoise Sagan has not faded in the least.


One of my most treasured possessions is a 1965 gift from my friend Richard English, an 8-1/2 X 11 edition of a diary, illustrated by Bernard Buffet, which Sagan kept while institutionalized to de-toxify herself from morphine, to which she had  become addicted while recuperating from an accident in her glamourous Aston Martin convertible:


Age never slowed her fast living. She indulged in whiskey, cigarettes, drugs, and affairs. In her sixties she was asked by a journalist if she still used cocaine. "If it comes along, yes," she answered. Her health was poor; still, she had no regrets.



She died at sixty-nine and is buried in the town of her birth, Cajarc, in southwestern France


Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Anton Webern - December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945 - Part V

A couple more photos I found relating to Anton von Webern. The stunningly designed marker above seems to commemorate a meeting near Mittersill, Austria, of Webern and Cesar Bresgen; the latter was one of Hitler's favorite composers, making him seem an unlikely friend of Webern.


I guess the words are in a Viennese dialect; I remember a hundred words of the German language at most, and even with the help of Babelfish (an online translation service) the best version I can come up with is: "In the sunny mountain the more that is known - the more that is loved." I'm sure it is more beautifully expressed than I've managed; perhaps a German or an Austrian will read this and correct and improve my effort.




Below is the rear of Webern's tombstone.  A stab, again, at translation: "Through your eyes the light goes to your heart and comes gently back as joy."


Thursday, September 15, 2011

Anton Webern - December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945 - Part IV

On last December 3rd I blogged a piece about the Austrian composer Anton von Webern, and wished that I could find a picture of his gravestone.  On January 12 a man in the Philippines sent me the following picture, which I took to be of Webern's grave marker.





A subsequent Google search by another reader led to a picture of what was much more certainly Webern's grave in Mittersill, Austria; a post with the picture mentioned it being a group of students visiting Webern's grave in Mittersill.


Webern, a disciple of Schoenberg, usually composed short works. Schoenberg said of his disciple's work: "Think of the concision which expression in such brief form demands.  Every glance is a poem, every sigh a novel." Stravinsky wrote of Webern: "Doomed to a total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had such a perfect knowledge."

Webern lived in Vienna. Though Catholic he was suspected of being Jewish and was required to prove that his blood was pure Aryan. Still, though he was certainly not an anti-Semite, he supported the Nazi party, hoping probably that this would keep him and his family safe. Then, because his compositions were avante garde, Webern was deemed degenerate; this led to his being sacked from his conducting job. His one son, a soldier, was killed on the Eastern front. Some seven months later, the war now over, Anton Webern, despite a curfew, stepped outside his home to smoke a cigar. In a careless situation of mistaken identity, Webern was shot dead by an American soldier whose unit was investigating a case of black marketing.


It's been reported that the soldier who shot Webern lived with deep remorse. Tragedy begot tragedy; that soldier died some ten years later from the effects of alcoholism.


***

I was left to wonder then what the original picture was, the five-way palindrome, sent to me from the man in the Phillipine, whose words SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS can be read top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, and right-to-left. I have a brother who is very good with languages but he was unsuccessful in translating those five words in any way that made complete sense.


I wrote to the Burgermeister of Mittersill. He kindly responded, saying that this is a plaque attached to the house in Mittersill in which Webern lived, and that it was a gift of Anna Mahler, the daughter of the another famous Viennese composer Gustav Mahler.


***


The palindrome, I learn, is renowned; it is called Sator Square, and its earliest known appearance was found in the ruins of Pompeii. There are numerous legends as to the meaning of the words, including one which claims that the words are "mystical names" for the nails pulled from Christ's body. Others have deemed the Sator Square to be magical ... it was believed by some that the devil would become confused by the repetition of the letters; keeping a palindrome near you, so it went, kept the devil away. Further claims: the Sator Square will put out fires; the Sator Square will remove jinxes; the Sator Square will remove fevers; the Sator Square will protect against witchcraft. If you bring a Sator Square along while traveling it will help prevent fatigue. I think I'll tuck one into my wallet. 


Otherwise, I'll leave it at that ... and let's hope Dan Brown never comes across the very idea lest it inspire him to write another novel as dreadful as The Da Vinci Code.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Day of Remembrance


This is one of my favorite views in Cape Cod National Seashore, looking across Salt Pond and Nauset Marsh to the Atlantic from behind the Salt Pond Visitor Center.  Each year beginning in 2002 a certain man has come at about 9AM on 9/11 and, looking out upon this view, played taps on his bagpipes.  I don't know that he ever identified himself; there was a rumor that he was a retired NYC policeman.


I wanted to see him.  I went there this morning and sat on a bench waiting.  He did not show.  That was okay; it was nice to ponder 9/11 there on the bench.  Then two great people I know showed up and it turned out to be a time of great chatting fun.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Happy Birthday (Hallmark-style) to Gerald

Today’s the day
I wish to herald
a beloved brother
whose name is Gerald!

308 West Jackson; Mentone, Indiana; April 1953