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Tristan Sard and Robert Sevré - A Recollection ‘Never
write the biography of a wit’. From whose moist lips did these
wise words slip? In the absence of an answer, we swing like ardent
gibbons into the forest of implications. At the heart of the
hornet’s nest of this question, a prickly pear of an issue: how
does one square the brilliant spontaneity of a giggle-inducing gag with
the long drawn-out tragedy of human existence? Comedy is a career: no
one lives a truly funny life. Call me cynical, christen me the captain
of gloom, but life is a tragedy, through and through.
Wit, of course, is rarely as spontaneous as it seems. It takes practice to assume an air of casualness: the off cuff mot juste is not only rehearsed, but also repeated. There’s nothing wrong with this, especially since most of us will never be aware of the repetitions. Only the dearest fans will hear the same joke a hundred times - and they’re anesthetised by their ardour. As for the rest of us, we will quite happily rest in the vale of illusion. That is, unless we’re reading a biography written by someone who thinks it their duty to squeeze the laughs out of a comedian’s life. For it is, you may have noted, quite the fashion at present to take comedians seriously. Was anyone ever idiot enough to truly believe that the source of laughter could not be sullied by tragedy? I doubt it - but then here we are, being constantly reminded that, yes, witty people can cry. They can feel pain. They don’t tell jokes all day long. Perhaps the wits themselves have instigated this obsession. There is a fear, I might imagine, that when one is in the comic line of business, one might never be taken seriously. People (bless them) are simple and don’t cope well with change. They cannot wrap their delicate heads around the concept of a two-sided personality. If you don’t explain it to them carefully, they may never grasp it at all. The fear is thus understandable. There are, however, significant drawbacks. Pulling down the veil between the creation and the creator reveals an array of intriguing, enlightening and potentially demeaning scenarios. Revealing that there were tears behind the laughter might coat a shivering skeleton with the soft rounded flesh of humanity. In some cases, it could be said to enhance the laughter. But in most, I fear, it sullies it. People rarely remember anyone for anything; if one is already remembered for one thing, it might seem greedy to ask for two. Which is to say, not everybody benefits from being seen in the full light of day. But who am I to complain? After all, am I not myself a professional veil-puller? I certainly am - and if I have never dealt with obviously witty subjects, it is not through any particular choice. Johannes Speyer had a certain charm, I would say - but wit? In my book, maybe, but then my book is a rare first edition, whose soft and velvety cover few other fingers have pressed. Speyer is a useful case in point, all the same, for he was ever guilty of that light crime I mentioned earlier: repetition. Anyone who has read Wolfgang Heizler’s moderately serviceable biography will recall that Speyer was apt to repeat himself. In fact, he did little else. This was not, however, a fundamental fault. Indeed, the very foundations of his philosophy lay in the idea of repetition. Re-reading was his big thing - and he was justified in retaining the right to re-mention that fact, over and over again. Was it tiresome? It surely was - but that does not mean it wasn’t true. If we ever do discover the truth, whatever it may be, we will undoubtedly realise that it is a most tiresome thing. And well it should be (we deserve nothing better). And yet, as I say, Speyer was not, as it goes, a wit. His repetitions were, as I have argued, part and parcel of his philosophy. I have no qualms in the face of his immeasurable reiterations. Not at all. So why do I shiver and shake when confronted by those of Tristan Sard? I suppose I ought to toss a few more facts in your directions. I have been reading - or to be perfectly honest, perusing - a biography of said wit Mr Tristan Sard. It was published some while ago, but has only recently crept, like an intrepid sherpa, to the summit of my ever-expanding mountain of books-to-read. The author (Anne Lozinger) is unknown to me; doubtless some young academic, fresh from university, keen as mustard, ham and eggs (and on the whole, none the worse for it). It is not a groundbreaking study, needless to say, but it does its subject justice. Sard is, one imagines, lucky to have a biographer at all. Ever since his untimely demise in the mid 80s, it seems to me that England’s best ‘intellectual comedian’ has been tobogganing with speedy and gleeful abandon down the snowy slopes of neglect. And so what? Was he ever going to last? Probably not. Subtle jokes about Simone de Beauvoir will only go on so long. Of course, he has his disciples. Some of you may be familiar with Professor A P T Watson, a contemporary comic who has seized Sard’s chalice with both hands. He is, unless I am much mistaken, due to bring his particular brand of literary humour to the Crippled Bee sometime soon. I saw him first back at the Straunhoe festival, where he was, I must confess, rather disappointing. Unworthy to stand in Sard’s shadow. Still... one has one’s preferences when it comes to comedy, and it takes a mighty fine joke to shift them. I look forward to seeing whether Mr Watson will rise to the occasion. My fondness for Sard, of course, is in some senses a sentimental one. And sentimental fixations will always be shaken when seen in the light of good sense. Unfortunately, this biography has far too much good sense. Usually I will cheer a biographer for refusing to hold back. Just this once, I demur. It seems too personal not to. You see, I have been fond of Sard for a while. Since I was a schoolboy, in fact, when once I carved his most famous comment on the smart lid of a brand new school desk. Did I win favour from my friends? Not exactly - they knew little English (it isn’t a joke that translates well) and were certainly unfamiliar with Sard. Still, I was personally proud of the act (I hasten to add that anything English was, in my mind, very much in fashion at that time. I myself was, alas, very much not in fashion). You are keen, I imagine, to know which comment it was? Ah, but I almost fear to repeat it here. For this is my problem with the biography. It has revealed to me, once and for all, the utterly un-spontaneous nature of my beloved Sardian witticism. Oh, I knew he said it more than once. But I had at least hoped that the time I heard it was, perhaps, the first. At least it had seemed like the first. The way he said it! It seemed as fresh as a new lettuce; as it had just slipped off the tongue, born that very second, unrehearsed, unprompted, spur-of-the-moment stuff. Alas, it was not to be. Not only did he say it over and over again, but he rarely said anything else. This was almost all his sad life boiled down to. One small gag that thrilled a German schoolchild. How very unfortunate. But why not say it again? Once more, for Sard’s sake. I’m not certain that any context is needed, but here’s a smidgen all the same. Sard’s persona was very much one of the wistful intellectual: a sort of scruffy dandy (if you can have such a thing). He was, they used to say, gracefully detached, superbly impersonal. One word sums it up well. Aloof. And yet, when presented one day with this five-letter précis of his personality, he seemed, for once, a little taken aback. It was brief, but discernible - he was momentarily stunned. Soon, however, he regained his composure. Then came the riposte: ‘I’m not just aloof,’ said he: 'I’m the loof!’ If I could fully explain to you the enthusiasm with which this poor witticism was received by a young German schoolchild I should call myself a genius. As it is, I don’t (except on Sundays, but that’s not me talking, it’s the wine). Now it has been said - Sard’s gag, that is - I advise that we make a swift retreat from the whole subject. That we nip, like a deceptively swift child escaping from a gang of artistically-challenged youths, down some back alley. As fate would have it, if fate only existed, there is such an alley waiting for us. Of course, I knew it was there, because I wrote this essay. I wouldn’t have done so if I didn’t know it was there. Which is not to say that’s it’s all contrived. By no means. It just so happened that there were two things concealed within this biography of Tristan Sard that I thought worth writing about; things which, on their own, might not have given cause to write an essay but, when put together, seemed to offer enough to divert a reader’s attention. You have already witnessed the first. Here is the second. Tristan Sard is a name that many people have forgotten. Not I. Neglected artists are, as you will know, my forte. I lap them up, as kittens do milk, or bears do honey. I dine in the vale of forgotten artists almost every day. Nevertheless, one man cannot remember everybody (though I sometimes like to think that, between D H Laven and I, we’ve got most people covered). Yet, as sap oozes out of a tree, so the odd name oozes out of my precious head. The next segment of this article deals with one such name. A name that oozed back into my head (if you can imagine that) after reading it in Lozinger's biography. It so happened that this person - who shall be named shortly - once met Sard in a hotel lobby in Southampton, back in the late 1970s, or thereabouts. What they talked about I do not know; suffice it to say the meeting was considered by Ann Lozinger to be worthy of a mention in her sometimes over-detailed account of Sard’s somewhat simple life. I suspect that it was nothing more than a quick shaking of hands; nevertheless, it happened. Two disparate minds met: two stars collided, briefly, discreetly and quite insignificantly. Sard probably repeated his well-worn witticism. Who knows? I have promised myself never to dwell on that again. And so I won’t. Enough of what Sard did or didn’t say (or say again). Here's a better question. What might Robert Sevré have said in return? For yes, it is he. The once famous French writer who, I am ashamed to say, has not been a part of my thought processes for a decade or so. How could I have forgotten him? The fact that no one reads him these days is not an excuse. No one reads most of the stuff I read. On this basis, I must see this as a lapse on my part. Sevré ought not to have fallen from my sight. Unfortunately, he did. What he might have said to Tristan Sard is intriguing, but irrelevant. Allow me to push it, like a dish of over-ripe olives, to one side. In its place I position the main course. Robert Sevré had a lot of that most unfashionable thing: faith. He believed in what he was doing, whatever it was, to the extent that many thought him a wily satirist. Who could be so earnest? He must be having us on. But he wasn’t. ‘God doesn’t smile on me as such,’ he once explained - ‘but he grins and winks a lot. We’re symbiotic, see’. But of course, no one ever did see. They never understood why it was that Robert Sevré should think himself so closely related to the Almighty. The problem lay, I suspect, with his parents. They listened to him. How very dreadful. They gave him the benefit of the doubt. Simply disastrous. They knew no better. They had a child who seemed more intelligent than they were and they had no idea how to react to him. They idly presumed that he was brilliant, whereas the truth was that they were stupid. Lovely people, though. And so Robert Sevré grew up thinking that he knew what was what. As rain falls on the English, so the truth fell on him, in showers. What we know to be wild thoughts, he thought to be beams of enlightened notions, thrown from beyond the deific clouds. Luckily he could write, so no one cared. They were drawn, like lemmings, into the seemingly safe harbour of his syntax, surfing over the rolling waves of his over-eager solemnity and painful abstractions, suffused with what he supposed to be life-changing statements, but which were, in reality, no more than interesting ideas, like those of any ordinary writer. Why didn’t anyone tell him? They tried, of course, but he slipped from their grasps, like the greasiest eel. Following his parents departure (or death, as I like to call it) he found the near impossible: a wife and family who also believed in him. Fools. Where does one find such people? Can a man really scramble through a century of cynicism without a speck of scepticism to be found on his over-sanctimonious garments? If any man could, Robert Sevré looked like he was going to be that man. He was, as they used to say, most dreadfully pi. Then, one day, it all came tumbling down. Can it all be blamed on this one event? I don’t think so - things rarely come down to one thing. Still, I think it can be safely said that this was a turning point in Robert Sevré’s career. Or, to put it another way, it represented the end of Robert Sevré’s career. Not that he wasn’t coming to the end of it anyway: he was in his seventies when it happened. Nevertheless, it was an unexpectedly sorry close to an amusing deluded literary life. Let me set the scene. We’re back in Germany. I’m eleven or twelve, maybe even thirteen. No, it must have been twelve, I think, since Bettina was still living with us. Tristan Sard is making me laugh. Kafka is making me melancholy. I am untouched by the revolution in popular music. I am what they call an ‘insufferable child’ - and Bartok is my thing. I’ve heard of Robert Sevré, but I probably haven’t read him. Or maybe I have. I own a tattered library card and read faster than I can digest. I eat words. I would be lying if I said that I grew up in a literary household. Having said that, my father (bless him) did have a curious faith (that word again) in literary prizes. He read only three new novels a year; the winners, always, of the three annual German literary prizes. Two of them celebrated native literature, the third was dedicated to foreign work in translation. Whoever won, he read them. What he thought of them, I never really knew. He never said anything about them. His habit when finishing a book was to wrap it in a plastic bag and take it straight down to the second-hand bookshop at the bottom of our road. He never kept a novel and I never had the confidence to ask whether I could keep them instead - though I bought a fair few of father’s books back from the store. A strange arrangement this seems in retrospect. Still, it kept both of us relatively happy. One evening, I recall, the two of us sat in the living room (or ‘wohnzimmer’ as we were wont to call it) listening to the radio coverage of the latest literary prize. It was the one for foreign literature, usually won by Paavo Laami, who was much praised in Germany at that time. Laami, however, hadn’t written anything new that year, leaving the competition open to other writers, one of which was Robert Sevré, an early frontrunner. The novel in question was The Emerald Suitcase, a stodgy and sober analysis of contemporary French politics, covered in the icing of his moderately delightful style. Politics was, it happens, Sevré’s main concern at this time - especially the theme of corruption in politics (being French, it would be fair to say that he had his hands full). It was time, he had decided, to take some action. It was time to take a stand. If only he had planned his stand. Sevré, however, wasn’t one for planning. When ideas came to them, he treated them like holy objects. There was no need to check facts. He could not be wrong. He didn’t do wrong. He was an oracle. He’d been so for seventy odd years and things were not about to change now. Except that they were. The actual details are less dramatic than I may have made out, but the implications were huge. Sevré won the award, needless to say, and stepped up onto the podium to make the customary acceptance speech. Here was his moment to expose corruption. Fair enough. But he really ought to have done a little bit more research before making such accusations against the man who presented him with the award. There are plenty of corrupt people against whom a self-righteous prize-winner can use his few moments of exposure before a large public to rail. There are also quite a few people who share the same name as corrupt people. And on reflection, one ought to be sure that one is criticising the right person before one gets that personal. But like I said, Sevré wasn’t one for checking facts. He went at it hammer and tongs. He was a pack of hounds ripping apart a fox. He was Zeus with a thunderbolt. He was a young critic reviewing the late work of a ‘national treasure’. He was all wrong.
Sometimes, on a damp Tuesday morning, stuck on a broken bus in North
Finchley with fifty foul-mouthed schoolchildren, I wonder at
mankind’s honourable perseverance. What has always struck me
about suicide is its remarkable rarity. Perhaps it’s the
practical bother than puts everyone off. Perhaps it’s the blossom
on the trees in spring. It might even be the people. Take your pick. On
the whole, most of us seem to get through. Incredible, no?
What brings me to this slightly morbid conclusion is my memory of Robert Sevré’s face, shortly after stepping down from that podium. Aha, you say - wasn’t I listening to the ceremony on the radio? You are supreme in your correctness, my dear friend. But allow me to introduce you to the wonder that is the newspaper. A well-placed photographer seemed to have captured the very moment when Robert Sevré realised that he was not infallible. Oh, no one could act that face. Below this, a wily journalist gave a considered report under the headline: ‘Wrong person, wrong facts: Sevré’s mistaken rant’. No, we didn’t see that expression on the radio. That telling expression. But we did get the silence. That highly charged silence. Then a quiet cough - was it Sevré’s? Was he choking on his own faith? I don’t know. But I was moved by that silence. It reached out of the radio and smothered me with its evident awfulness. I felt it brush over the skin on my throat. I understood the heaviness of failure: the greatness of a simple mistake. And at night, sometimes, in the space between dreams, Sevré’s face would appear, like a slide in a slide projector, for a few seconds or so. Downcast, dejected, disconsolate. What sweet thoughts these are! Lucky I had forgotten about Sevré until last week. He is barely worth remembering, now I think about it, except as a cautionary tale. One might reassess his literary skills, but it hardly seems worth it. He had some style, sure, but he wasn’t the first to spin a charming web out of words. Nor was he, all things considered, a real master in this regard. No, one could certainly do better things with one’s time than attempt a full-scale re-evaluation of Robert Sevré’s life and works. The same goes for Tristan Sard. Which isn’t to say that either of them aren’t, in their way, interesting or instructive figures. Instructive? Having said it, it is only right that I should try to back it up. Stories with morals are a little dull, perhaps, which is why I offer the following advice with a kilo and a half of salt. Are you sitting comfortably? Here we are then, children, a few maxims with which to end this essay: Don’t believe in yourself too much. Don’t take on people until you know all the facts (and make sure you’re taking on the right person). And think twice before you write the biography of a wit. Georgy Riecke
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