Ravel

by Jean Echenoz

  The afternoon begins at the movie theater, with Napoléon, which along with Metropolis has just tolled the knell for silent films. Ravel watches Napoléon for the second time without displeasure, although a fondness for light humor and his penchant for laughing at trifles would have led him to prefer less serious recent works such as The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, which he’d found quite amusing last year, or even Patouillard and His Cow or indeed Bigorno the Roofer. Then, after a little lie-down in his suite, he prepares, donning tuxedo number one, to go have dinner, in the first-class dining room this time. He can’t get out of that, unavoidably at the captain’s table, the latter sporting his inevitable short white beard and dress whites. And during this dinner, no less inexorably, given the imminence of the tenth anniversary of the armistice, the conversation will turn to the Great War, with everyone contributing a modest memory. Since Ravel finds himself seated near the industrial couple noticed this morning out on deck, they are the ones who hear about his private war.

  In ’14 he had honestly tried to enlist, even though the authorities had exempted him from every kind of military obligation, explaining bluntly that he was too frail. Home again disappointed, then convinced he’d hit upon a persuasive idea (because he ardently wanted to become, go figure, a bombardier), he’d gone back to insist to the recruiters that it was precisely his light weight that fitted him for aviation. Although that seemed logical, his argument hadn’t swayed them, they’d wanted nothing to do with it. Too light, they kept saying, too light, you’re at least four and a half pounds underweight. Since he kept at them relentlessly, though, after eight months under siege they had finally accepted him, rolling their eyes heavenward with a shrug and finding nothing better to do than assign him with a straight face to the motor transport service as a driver, heavy-vehicle section, of course. That’s how an enormous military truck came to drive one day down the Champs-Élysées containing a small figure in a too-large blue greatcoat clinging to the too-big steering wheel for dear life, a wharf rat riding an elephant.

  He had been posted at first to the garage on the Rue de Vaugirard, then sent in March of ’16 to the front, not far from Verdun, still assigned to drive heavy vehicles. Now a full-fledged soldier, a gas-masked, helmeted, goatskin-clad poilu, he had driven several times through artillery barrages so fierce one would have thought that a faction of music-hating enemy gunners had singled him out, perhaps even had it in for him personally. It seems that no one in any motor service, even the ambulance corps, could have been more at risk than Ravel had been in the 75 section: 75mm guns, mind you, mounted on armored trucks. One day, his vehicle broke down and he found himself on his own out in open country, where he spent a week alone à la Crusoe. Taking advantage of the situation, he transcribed a few songs from the local birds, which, weary of the war, had finally decided to ignore it, to no longer interrupt their trills at the slightest blast or take offense at the constant rumbling of nearby explosions.

  This tale having met with much success at the dinner table, we may take a moment to consider the festive repast itself, a quite commonplace gala menu: caviar, lobster, quail from Egypt, plovers’ eggs, hothouse grapes, all sluiced down with everything imaginable. Once the meal has been dispatched and it’s time for liqueurs, the captain sends a subtle smile Ravel’s way while briefly waving two fingers, at which signal a couple of musicians suddenly appear in tails and boiled shirts: one carries a violin, and the other takes his seat at the piano, the cue for silence to fall throughout the dining room.

  After glancing and nodding at one another, they attack the first movement of the sonata Ravel completed that year, dedicated to Hélène, and premiered himself with Enesco on violin, Salle Érard again, in May. Ravel is embarrassed, to say the least; almost a little annoyed. At a concert, he usually steps out for a cigarette when one of his pieces is played. He doesn’t like to be there during the performance. But he can’t possibly slip away—they meant well by offering him this little surprise—and tries to smile while seething inside. Particularly since they’re not doing too well with it, his new sonata, he finds. And when after a good fifteen minutes they wind up the last movement, Perpetuum mobile, another problem arises: applaud or not? Because applauding one’s own work is as disagreeable as not applauding the performers. In his uncertainty he stands up, obviously reaching out toward the two hired musicians as he claps his hands, then he warmly shakes theirs, and joins them in acknowledging the cheers of the entire first class of the France.

  After dinner, after the traditional collection on behalf of the Seafarers Charity, after Ravel has contributed as he always does, the party can begin. This considerable celebration unfolds throughout the ship’s upper decks until late at night or even into the morning for some souls, once the revelers have congratulated one another at length upon the stroke of midnight to salute the new year, greetings which—given the varied geographical origins of the passengers, the time lag, and the alcohol-fueled enthusiasm—ring out hourly in ever-jollier fashion until the first rays of dawn. Balloons, confetti, garlands, and streamers are everywhere you look in the lounges, smoking rooms, cafés, verandas, and passageways enlivened at every turn by different kinds of orchestras ready to satisfy any sort of taste. A chamber group plays soberly at a respectful distance from a dance band, while a French cabaret singer fraternizes with a Russian quartet, but Ravel, for his part, spends most of his night among the drunken Americans not far from a jazz combo, attentive to this new and perishable art.

  FOUR

  THE NEXT MORNING he arises late, having lain in bed so long that he misses the bouillon on deck. Then, clad in casual seersucker, he takes a stroll around the more or less deserted promenade deck, where two cabin boys with trays are collecting the bowls scattered among the feet of the canvas chairs. The sea is an almost-black green.

  Time, aboard ship, can very quickly hang heavily. What’s more, the days, one soon finds, not only seem longer than on land—they really are: thanks to the division of the time difference during the crossing, they easily last their twenty-five hours. However, the tameness of the entertainment on offer also helps stretch out these shipboard days. Because the truth is, in first class, passengers spend most of their time changing clothes thrice daily, it’s their chief recreation. Aside from that, the weaker sex lounges a great deal in deck chairs beneath a glass roof, while the stronger one plays quite a lot of cards—whist, bridge, poker—as well as checkers, chess, and dominoes. A few parlor games are also organized, including wooden-horse races that support a pari-mutuel, while hefty sums are also wagered each evening (save on Sunday, for propriety’s sake) on the precise position of the ship. But luckily for Ravel, who is a good swimmer, there is a pool, upon emerging from which he immerses himself every day, in the barber shop, in a complete reading of L’Atlantique, the ship’s daily paper printed up from news received by wireless from radio stations ashore.

  Exploring the vessel is another possibility. Although passengers in first class are kept separate from those in lower classes, where the atmosphere is more informal, the ship is vast enough for such a visit to take up an entire day. Ravel doesn’t pass up such an opportunity, striding around the decks, lingering on the bridge near the officers’ quarters, spending a moment in the wireless room and then the chart house, where he asks questions about all the equipment, and then it’s down to admire the turbines in the engine room, a monstrous stomach where the heat and din give a good idea of hell, but he has always liked machines and factories, foundries and red-hot steel—wheels are better than waves at suggesting rhythms to him. Afterward he can return to the comforts of the upper decks, continue his reading on the café terrace, loiter near the gymnasium or look in on the tennis court up on the sun deck. Just once, because he’s not very religious, he visits the chapel, which as we know is traditionally the first place fitted out when a steamship is built and the last to be used in case of misfortune.

  Fine, but all that only gets us so far, and since all the days are alike, why go on
about it, let’s skip over the next three. Two days before the France arrives in New York, Ravel gives a little concert that evening by popular demand. For this performance of short pieces, he has rejected the pianist’s uniform of black tails in favor of more relaxed, or even slightly facetious attire. It’s in striped shirt, checked suit, and red tie that he plays his Prélude, composed fifteen years ago now, and then, accompanied by a laboring hireling, his first sonata for piano and violin, from thirty years ago. With his knees barely tucked under the keyboard, which his hands do not dominate but hover above, palms flat as if approaching from a low angle, he runs his too-short, gnarled, somewhat squared-off fingers over the keys. While unsuited for octave reaches, his fingers feature exceptionally powerful thumbs, the thumbs of a strangler, easily dislocated and set high on the palm, quite far from the rest of the hand and almost as long as the indexes. His hands are not really those of a pianist and besides, he doesn’t have a great technique. It’s easy to see that he isn’t experienced: he plays stiffly, with lots of mistakes.

  That he’s so clumsy at the piano is also due to the laziness he has never shaken off since childhood; being so light, he has no desire to tire himself out on such a heavy instrument. He’s well aware that performing a piece, especially a slow one, demands a physical effort he’d rather not have to make. So breeziness is better, which he has recently pushed to the point of composing the accompaniment of Ronsard à son âme8 for the left hand alone, having planned on smoking with his right. In short he plays badly but, well, he plays. He is, he knows, the opposite of a virtuoso but, since no one understands anything about it, he pulls through perfectly.

  The day before their arrival, shortly before teatime, the captain knocks on the door of his suite. Wearing a smoking jacket with a floral pattern, Ravel opens the door to his visitor who, bowing slightly, carries under his left arm a thick, gilt-edged volume bound in dark-red leather. Ravel knows immediately what’s up: the ship’s visitors’ book, in which the captain asks him not without ceremony to inscribe a few words. He replies but of course.

  After placing the volume on a pedestal table, the captain opens it with care and respectfully leafs through it to the first available blank page, which he shows to Ravel. To give himself time to come up with something appropriate, the latter looks back through the preceding pages, which are well stocked, the France having been in active service since her delivery date in April 1912, with hundreds of tributes set above names that Ravel more or less recognizes from the most prominent ranks of French society: politics, industry, finance, the clergy, arts and letters, official circles. He examines the object with apparent curiosity but mostly, having no idea what to inscribe inside it, in order to search rapidly through the handwritten compliments for one that might inspire him.

  Thus employed, he is struck as always by the diversity of the signatures. Had he the time, Ravel would amuse himself by trying to deduce the personalities of the writers from their graphic styles, along the line originally laid down by Baldi and developed by the Abbé Michon, Crépieux-Jamin, and others. Thus, certain signers merely write their first and last names, simply and legibly, underlined or not, said underscoring being occasionally independent of the name, sometimes linked to it by an extension of its last letter. Through a scruple of modesty, an access of artlessness (unless an excess of pride), their initials may not even be written in capitals. Easily deciphered, such signatures are nevertheless in the minority. Most of the others are more or less complicated and successful stylizations of a surname, the authors having a grand old time as if they’d seen a chance at last, for once in their lives, to play the artist. Usually dissuasive of all hope of legibility, these signatures consist of interminable flourishes ornamented with loops, arabesques, spirals, up-and-down strokes, swooping off in all directions like dead-drunk ice-skaters, enhanced by mysterious dots and lines, so sophisticated that it’s impossible not only to puzzle out the names these signatures supposedly embody but sometimes even to determine in which direction they were inscribed, with which movement the author began this graphic undertaking. When the signature is just too difficult to decode, a respectful hand has penciled in beneath it the identity of its creator.

  Whatever the solution adopted for these signatures, what Ravel concludes above all is that the whole business must take an outlandish amount of time to draw. For his part he merely pens a rapid and temperate tribute in his tall, nervous handwriting, all in peaks, followed by his perfectly legible and not even underlined first and last names, barely ornamented with the prolonged vertical down-strokes of their capital letters.

  After the captain has left, Ravel takes advantage of the pen still in his hand to write some friends a few short, rather conventional letters, without taking too much trouble over them. In one, addressed to the Delages, he allows as how he hasn’t misused his deluxe suite much by working. In another, intended for Roland-Manuel,9 he supposes that no one has probably ever had a more pleasant crossing at this time of year. Another note for Hélène, one for Édouard, and there, that’s done. He changes clothes once more before sealing these messages into their envelopes to drop them off at the Information Desk, where mail is collected to be flown out by a seaplane catapulted from the ship’s after deck. Then, since the voyage is drawing to a close, it’s a good time to pack the luggage before filling out the customs declarations.

  And that evening, at dinner, everybody will behave as usual in such situations: addresses exchanged, plans to meet again, repeated toasts. After which everyone will go off to bed, except for those who will prefer to stay up as late as possible in the bar and go out on deck at dawn, to breathe in the first scents of the American mainland, and soon contemplate the embarkation of the harbor pilot at Ambrose Light before the Statue of Liberty is sighted and the ship begins moving up the Hudson. Meanwhile, reclaimed by insomnia, Ravel has just shut the translation of The Arrow of Gold after rereading the last line two or three times: But what else could he have done with it?

  FIVE

  IN NEW YORK, on the morning of the fourth, a welcoming committee awaits Ravel on the pier. A frigid sun sits in the clear sky. There are various delegates from musical societies, presidents of associations, two municipal representatives, a swarm of press photographers brandishing huge flash cameras, editorial cartoonists, cameramen, and reporters with notebooks, press cards tucked into their hatbands. Up on the bridge, at first Ravel cannot identify anyone in that throng, but he soon catches sight of Schmitz,10 who played his Trio ten years ago (that was when he’d met Hélène), Schmitz who has graciously organized this entire American tour. And since he then recognizes Bolette Natanson,11 not far from Schmitz, Ravel smiles broadly at them, waves his hand, then leans out over the guardrail, unable to contain himself any longer: Wait till you see, he shouts to them, the splendid ties I brought with me!

  As soon as Ravel has disembarked from the France, people crowd around him, watched enviously by the other first-class passengers for whom only their families, at best, are waiting. He is greeted with handshakes he finds a bit too familiar and three short speeches of which he understands not a word, having no ear for any foreign language except Basque. While he is barely able to ask for directions in English, he never understands the replies in any case, but from now on that situation will not apply since he isn’t on his own: during the next four months he will never be on his own, in fact sometimes he will not be enough on his own. Now he is being escorted to a long black Pierce-Arrow convertible unlike anything he’s ever seen in the movies and is soon whisked off to the Langdon Hotel, to his reserved suite on the eighth floor.

  Flanked by his manager and the first violinist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who is acting as an interpreter, he spends this first day giving interviews and meeting various people while baskets of fruit and flowers stream into the Langdon, so many bouquets piling up that the hotel runs out of vases. Ravel spends much of the next four days in taxis speeding to all sorts of appointments, rehearsals, invitations, and receptions—
including one particularly grueling affair given by the wife of the inventor Edison, where three hundred strangers approach one after the other to speak English to him. The concert in New York is an apotheosis: three thousand five hundred people give him a standing ovation for half an hour, throwing him kisses and armfuls of new flowers, bringing the house down with shouting and whistling the way they do in this country when they’re really pleased, until he’s compelled to go onstage which as a rule he doesn’t much like. And quite late in the evenings, after the round of dance halls, giant movie houses, and Harlem revues, Ravel returns to the Langdon exhausted.

  Then it’s off across the United States. After the concert in Cambridge followed by a reception, still in his tuxedo he must dash to catch the train to Boston—he stays at the Copley Plaza—where he triumphs again in concert, another three hundred hands to shake, everyone assuring him constantly that they love him and sometimes that he seems English before dragging him off to nightclubs or shadow plays. Same thing back in New York, Carnegie Hall, and afterward always social events in his honor with Bartók, Varèse, Gershwin, in the Madison Avenue homes of chic people who persist in asking him, of course, to play something for us. So he plays; he will have to play constantly, in the concert halls and at private parties where not without some trepidation he will occasionally have to conduct as well—from now on it won’t ever stop.

  Same welcome in Chicago blanketed by snow, except that at the last moment Ravel refuses to play. Unable to find the suitcase containing his patent-leather shoes, he refuses to appear without them—street shoes with a conductor’s tails are out of the question—until a singer races in a taxi to the station to fetch his suitcase from the cloakroom. They begin thirty minutes late but no matter: a new ovation followed by fanfare served up by the orchestra’s brass section when he returns to bow at the end of the concert. Same welcome in Cleveland, new fanfare with three thousand five hundred new people on their feet, same excellent welcome everywhere, things look rather promising. Just one little problem: the food is bad. So bad that in Chicago, invited to dinner at a millionaire’s house, Ravel cuts the evening short to hurry to the hotel, in the harsh cold and proverbial wind, so that he can send down for a steak. Just one more little problem: it’s impossible to sleep. Given the life they’ve got him leading, only on the train can he get a little rest, if any.