Death untimely
A week ago Monday, a 23-year old French singer, Grégory Lemarchal, died after a two-day illness. The event went unnoticed, apparently, outside the Francophone world, as there were no news articles in English listed by Google news, but it had bousculé at least parts of the Francophone population of Europe. Since the singer was known to suffer from mucoviscidose, or cystic fibrosis, early illness and death could not be regarded as completely unexpected, but his sudden death was manifestly traumatic to many. A syrupy telethon the day before his funeral raised millions of euros to fight mucoviscidose.
Who was Grégory Lemarchal? He won Star Academy 4, the French Equivalent of American Idol, in 2004. With a pretty face, the slight frame of an anorectic, a ready smile, and a barely adequate voice, he received eighty percent of the final vote. One need not be uncharitable to imagine that his illness contributed to his popularity.
He was often credited with having la voix d'un ange. His face surely was angelic, but the vocal acrobatics that he pushed himself to also pushed his voice to the limits of his vocal range and beyond, and no one would have described his voice as rich. He was young, and pretty, and a sentimental favorite because of his courage to attempt such a career with the genes he carried, so the fact that his singing was barely adequate hardly mattered.
Housman, the poet laureate for the untimely death of young men, had it right:
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It whithers quicker than the rose.
How long was the treacly story of a sickly, but attractive and courageous young man going to hold up his career? Fortunately, he was unlikely to live long enough to find out, and he didn't. He was eager to please, apparently happy for the attention, and the perfect object for a kind of sexless romantic attraction. He was someone onto whom unmet needs could be projected without risk or cost. He could be loved the way that one might love someone else's pretty child, or a puppy dog, or a stuffed animal.
It's too easy to be cynical. No matter how foreseeable such an eventuality might have been, it catches us up short—we are as teased out of thought as was Keats pondering his Grecian urn. Here one day is this likable, attractive, and sweet young man, and in the space of a week he is in a coffin being carried aloft. He died weeks short of his twenty-fourth birthday, but still he seemed so much a child that John Crowe Ransom's "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" seem even more appropriate than Housman's eulogy for a young athlete:
There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.
The young singer produced only one album. He will be hardly a footnote in the history of popular music in France. How much more exploitable material must there be, though: books, television specials, movies. It's the kind of script that Hollywood would have loved in decades past. The story is probably too sweet for anything more than a made-for-television movie—unless someone has the courage to tease out the dark underside of the tale: all those who profited as the pretty young man gasped his last, his adoring public drowning in sentimental tears, blissfully unaware of how difficult it would have been for him to have had any life that in any way resembled the love songs he sang. When he presented two girls at once as his simultaneous girlfriends, no one examined too closely what the underlying reality might have been, or what kind of loneliness he might have endured.
If Grégory's terminal illness lasted only two days, I am happy for him. I hope he didn't suffer to the extent that I am imagining. I hope that those who were close to him never realize that he might have been better off leading a more normal, if short, life. I hope that those who aren't close to him and have taken his career and his death as an opportunity for the outpouring of emotion will find something a little more real and less of a fantasy to attach themselves to.
Who was Grégory Lemarchal? He won Star Academy 4, the French Equivalent of American Idol, in 2004. With a pretty face, the slight frame of an anorectic, a ready smile, and a barely adequate voice, he received eighty percent of the final vote. One need not be uncharitable to imagine that his illness contributed to his popularity.
He was often credited with having la voix d'un ange. His face surely was angelic, but the vocal acrobatics that he pushed himself to also pushed his voice to the limits of his vocal range and beyond, and no one would have described his voice as rich. He was young, and pretty, and a sentimental favorite because of his courage to attempt such a career with the genes he carried, so the fact that his singing was barely adequate hardly mattered.
Housman, the poet laureate for the untimely death of young men, had it right:
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It whithers quicker than the rose.
How long was the treacly story of a sickly, but attractive and courageous young man going to hold up his career? Fortunately, he was unlikely to live long enough to find out, and he didn't. He was eager to please, apparently happy for the attention, and the perfect object for a kind of sexless romantic attraction. He was someone onto whom unmet needs could be projected without risk or cost. He could be loved the way that one might love someone else's pretty child, or a puppy dog, or a stuffed animal.
It's too easy to be cynical. No matter how foreseeable such an eventuality might have been, it catches us up short—we are as teased out of thought as was Keats pondering his Grecian urn. Here one day is this likable, attractive, and sweet young man, and in the space of a week he is in a coffin being carried aloft. He died weeks short of his twenty-fourth birthday, but still he seemed so much a child that John Crowe Ransom's "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" seem even more appropriate than Housman's eulogy for a young athlete:
There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.
The young singer produced only one album. He will be hardly a footnote in the history of popular music in France. How much more exploitable material must there be, though: books, television specials, movies. It's the kind of script that Hollywood would have loved in decades past. The story is probably too sweet for anything more than a made-for-television movie—unless someone has the courage to tease out the dark underside of the tale: all those who profited as the pretty young man gasped his last, his adoring public drowning in sentimental tears, blissfully unaware of how difficult it would have been for him to have had any life that in any way resembled the love songs he sang. When he presented two girls at once as his simultaneous girlfriends, no one examined too closely what the underlying reality might have been, or what kind of loneliness he might have endured.
If Grégory's terminal illness lasted only two days, I am happy for him. I hope he didn't suffer to the extent that I am imagining. I hope that those who were close to him never realize that he might have been better off leading a more normal, if short, life. I hope that those who aren't close to him and have taken his career and his death as an opportunity for the outpouring of emotion will find something a little more real and less of a fantasy to attach themselves to.
posted by Robert Myers at 1:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home