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passionate consummation of the couple s love. The song
is all abrasive guitar: a hard-hitting propulsive clamour,
culminating in Jean Luc-Ponty s searing electric violin
solo. At the end, the orchestra will briefly return and
then the sound of wind along a desolate plain or perhaps
the jet stream high above. The narrator will lament
that Melody has left on an aeroplane for her hometown
Sunderland (the name containing suggestions of twilight
sun and under ). Her laughter on the track would
change with her absence. The narrator would find
himself lost again.
" 110 "
Cargo Culte
Sometime in the nineteenth century (the exact date is
unkown), the body of a young woman was dragged from
the River Seine at the Quai du Louvre, now the Quai
François Mitterrand. She was taken to the Paris morgue
where one of the morticians was struck by her enigmatic
smile. He took a plaster cast of her face before she was
buried. Her name and her story were never discovered,
although theories abound (the most prevalent being
she was a murdered Hungarian cabaret singer). In the
first decades of the twentieth century, replications of
her death mask began to proliferate among bohemians,
enraptured by her beauty and the mystery of who she
had been. Albert Camus kept a replica of this drowned
Mona Lisa , fascinated by her apparent frozen ecstasy
at the moment of death. Maurice Blanchot, Louis-
Ferdinand Céline, Alberto Giacometti, Rainer Maria
Rilke and, significantly, Vladimir Nabokov all wrote
about her. She seemed to know something that eluded
the living. Bohemian girls began to model their looks
on her. Al Alvarez suggested in The Savage God that she
was the icon, the Bardot of her day, in terms of looks to
aspire to. With her name a mystery, she was referred to
" 111 "
HI S TOI RE DE MELODY NELS ON
as l Inconnue de la Seine or La noyée de la Seine . The
unknown. The drowned.
Gainsbourg would write one of his finest songs La
noyée ( The Drowned ) for the film Le Roman d un
voleur de chevaux (Romance of a Horse Thief), although
it would remain unreleased on any album or single
(Carla Bruni does a commendable version of it on
Quelqu un m a dit [Someone Told Me]). He performed it
once on Samedi Loisirs (Saturday Leisure) accompanied
by Jean-Claude Vannier on the piano. It tells of a man
watching his loved one drift away on a river as he runs
along trying to keep up, shouting for her to come
back, wading into the waters to no avail. She is gone.
One night at Chez Castel, Gainsbourg was drunk and
humiliated Birkin by emptying her trademark wicker
basket. The French have a wonderful phrase, L esprit
de l escalier ( staircase wit ), meaning that frustrating
moment when you think of a perfect comeback but it s
already too late; time has moved on. The phenomena
happened to Birkin who made the mistake of retali-
ating to Gainsbourg s insult several days too late at
Castel s by ramming a custard pie into his face. It was
woefully out of context and a mortified Serge stormed
out. As often happens, the significant moments are
often the most ludicrous; consider the greatest couple
in French literature, Verlaine and Rimbaud, separating
after a fight that began with an off-hand remark: If
you looked how much of an idiot you look carrying
that fish. Jane ran after Serge along the boulevard and,
realizing she had lost the moral high ground, overtook
him and, in a moment of drink-fuelled logic, launched
herself into the Seine at the Quai Voltaire. Dragged by
" 112 "
DA R R A N A NDE R S ON
undercurrents, she was only barely rescued by Serge and
passing fire-fighters. They were momentarily blissfully
reunited through sheer relief and adrenaline. It sadly
could not last, chiefly due to Gainsbourg s discovery,
as hinted at in his song for Dominique Walter, La vie
est une belle tartine ( Life is a Beautiful Tart ), that
you didn t need a river to drown yourself the bottle
would suffice. With Gainsbourg, it was the man left
behind who was the drowning one, not the woman who
floats away. Self-destruction was self-absorption and
self-hatred actualized. In front of my mirror I drown
because I don t know how to swim , he admitted on
Variances. They re troubled waters, dangerous, with
swamps. Some see the reflection of heaven. I see the
miasma of the marshes.
Birkin would leave him for the director Jacques
Doillon whilst working on his film La fille prodigue (The
Prodigal Daughter), unable to witness his slow-motion
suicide (he was what Doillon called a suicidal optimist ,
unable to believe he would die but doing everything to
bring it about). She was not prepared to waste her life
watching Serge destroy his. He bought her a Porsche to
win her back, wrote her entire albums of songs (some of
her best work), had a bronze statue made of her to match
his own cabbage-headed one (Beauty and the Beast),
and kept her room La Chambre de Poupée ( the doll
room ) just as she had left it, in the suspended animation
and grief of heartbreak. If we take Bernini s majestically
seditious, orgasmic The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa as the
religious icon of blissful thought-free orgasm, in contrast
Gainsbourg, as he admitted in Ecce Homo ( Behold the
Man ), was St Sebastian shot to pieces by Cupid s arrows.
" 113 "
HI S TOI RE DE MELODY NELS ON
It was dangerous to believe in your own martyred image
so much.
Is it possible without hyperbole and in the age of
irony to consider the possibility of death as a muse, as
a motivation and inspiration? If Freud had maintained
that the death instinct was a force parallel to the erotic
instinct then surely it had an energy to it? And perhaps
its own art? Gainsbourg had travelled to the Orient in
1963 to film L inconnue de Hong Kong (The Unknown of
Hong Kong) alongside the equally much-troubled actress
Dalida. Although the film was memorable only for a brief
exquisite duet between the pair, neither knowing what
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