No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [3]
When I thought about Piaf’s repertoire years later, it became clear to me that, unlike the tunes I had danced to as a teenager in the 1950s, la chanson réaliste treated songs as slices of life from the lower depths. These gritty stories dwell on the magnetic but often disappointing outcome of sensual experience, on the conflict between dreams of perfect love and their undoing, and, often, on resilience as the only response to life’s woes. Because chanson lyrics were usually penned before their music, Piaf’s tradition was closer to poetry—allowing the singer to depict an entire destiny, from promising start to tragic dénouement. Since the resurgence of interest in the art of cabaret in the United States and elsewhere, she is now seen as its foremost interpreter.
Starting work on this biography, I was pleased to learn that Piaf’s melodies were again being sung by scores of interpreters in France and around the world: in Australia, where I spend part of the year; in Japan, where her acceptance of the ephemeral is embraced by a culture that values intimations of feelings; and in the many countries where each new singer with raw emotional power is compared with Piaf, the tradition’s gold standard.
In 2006, I contacted L’Association des Amis d’Edith Piaf, a group of her admirers based in Paris, who introduced me to the scattered, often contradictory, sources available there and to their repository of Piafiana. My idea was to place her short, passionate life in its artistic and social contexts, while also exploring the myths that have grown up around it—an approach that will, I trust, reintroduce the singer to English-speakers for whom French culture seems ungraspably alluring, yet who find themselves moved by Piaf without knowing why.
I have been fortunate in having unparalleled access to sources that illuminate the multiple facets of her life, beginning with the recently released correspondence between the star and Jacques Bourgeat, her mentor, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where I also consulted their extensive clipping files on her early years. While I was writing this book, more of Piaf’s correspondence came to light: her letters to four of her lovers—Norbert Glanzberg, Takis Horn, Tony Frank, and Toto Gérardin—which help to situate her amours in the context of her career rather than the other way around. (Nonetheless, it has, at times, been a dizzying task to keep track of her many lovers.) In France I was also introduced to collectors whose archives allowed me to see rare Piaf material, including home movies and recordings unavailable elsewhere, and to discuss with them our fascination with the singer whose identification with their country means that she remains very much alive there.
Synchronistic encounters with people who shared their memories and introduced me to others who had known Piaf or heard her sing made it seem that I was being drawn into her life—as in 2007, when I visited the former brothel in Bernay, the Norman town where she lived as a child, and attended a memorial to her in Père-Lachaise, her burial place, on the anniversary of her death. During the mass, which included Piaf’s renditions of “Mon Dieu” and “Hymne à l’amour,” I sensed that her songs often wed earthly to spiritual aspirations, that the religion of love espoused in them still reverberates for all who are touched by her credo. (At the next year’s memorial, the priest referred to me as “l’australienne, celle qui est venue de loin”—the Australian, the one who came from far away—for the occasion.)
Over the course of the three years I spent completing this biography,