I'd been meaning to read The Munkey Diaries for something like a year. It was one of those books that haunts you a bit, in that I remember the day I found it, last spring, in Foyles, just on the boardwalk there. And I took a photo of it and thought ah leave it, I have enough books to schlep back. Meant to look for it at home, then forgot. Then @ladyrebecca tried to get it for me for Christmas, but somehow, the courier ran away to Mexico or something, and I ended up sans book. Finally, I circled all the way back to that little Foyles and found it on my first morning in London, and I figured okay then.
I genuinely think you read some books when you're supposed to.
Basically, they're the diaries of singer/actress (and fashion icon) Jane Birkin from 1957 all the way to 1982. Personally, I wanted to read them because I love her fashion sense and some of her music, but I wasn't really all that invested in it. Maybe why I left it behind the first time. The diaries, however, turned out to be something much more insightful than the traditional name-dropping, pill-popping frolicking madness that many of these autobiographies turn into.
Quite the contrary, I was stunned by what an insightful, nuanced and inventive writer Birkin was. The book was filled with entries of great tenderness and understanding of the human psyche, even when Birkin herself was quite young (the diaries end when she was 34, so much of it takes place in her 20s).
They chronicle her disastrous marriage to composer John Barry, a figure several years older than her who married Birkin when she was only 19. I remember reading somewhere how awed she was that this great man would bother looking at her. Remember thinking on the one hand "dude, you're Jane fucking Birkin", but on the other, recognizing that thinking. It got me curious before I'd even read the book.
But then, from the car-crash that is her marriage, Birkin segways into her relationship (and musical collaboration) with French icon Serge Gainsbourg. Already a big someone on the artistic scene, and twenty years older than her, Birkin addresses her relationship with Serge on a slightly different level than the one she had with Barry. Though she admires him terribly (she was still so young when they got together), it's clearly a less uneven, healthier relationship.
Time and again, it struck me with how much love she wrote about Serge. Several of the earlier entries, of course, are about how she's never loved anyone more in her entire world, but that's to be expected in the early stages of most relationships. It's not that. It's not saying "oh but how I love him", but the million sweet moments that pass between them in their 12 years together.
There's one scene where one night, feeling ill, Gainsbourg is advised to call an ambulance and while waiting for paramedics, he gets in a terrible fret about washing his feet so that they won't smell, so that people won't think him undignified. It's such a real, human moment, and Birkin of course helps him wash and remains unwavering like an atlantid. Or there are moments when Jane's father is in turn in hospital, being operated on, descriptions of Serge being there, not moving from the hospital, or wracked with pain for all the odds and ends of her big, loving family. How he took in her baby daughter by Barry and suffered silently when she told everyone at school he wasn't her real dad.
There's in the very introduction a story that explains the name of the book, "Munkey" being the name of Birkin's childhood toy to whom she used to address her diaries as a little girl, a habit she continued throughout her life.
Serge kept Munkey's jeans in his attache case until the day he died. Faced with my children's grief, I put Munkey beside Serge in his coffin, where he lay like a pharaoh. My monkey was there to protect him in the afterlife."
I cried when I read that. I'm very childish, still. Perhaps always. Very prone to anthropomorphism and loving little stuffed characters. It's not a weightless gesture.
Naturally, critics were quick to lambast their relationship as toxic, due to his alcoholism and controlling nature. But there was also, undeniably, such great love between these two.
And yet, despite all that, she fell in love with somebody else. I kept thinking, how? It seems naive, I know, but reading just the day before how much they loved one another, it was so strange, seeing her go off with somebody else. In the end, Birkin left Gainsbourg for Jacques Doillon.
How do you love someone, live with them, but then also fall in love with somebody else? How do you know to choose when to stay and when to go? Why is there such fertile ground for pluralism inside the human heart that can hold also one person, but quite well also this new, exciting other?
We think it's silly to question because of how often it happens, except that's not a proper answer as to why it happens or how. Or what you're supposed to do when it does.
Of course, Birkin talks openly of how hurt Serge was, how she told Jacques if something ever happened to Serge, their relationship would end because she wouldn't be able to cope. And it did. Gainsbourg died about a decade later, and soon enough, so did Birkin's relationship with Doillon. I wonder what happened, I wonder if she found a way to cope with the absence of him, her closest confidante. She mentions in a sort of afterword how they were able to have a good, close relationship still, thanks in part to the benevolence of Doillon and Gainsbourg's partner.
So much I still don't understand about our human nature. And is it a miracle, great shame,or perhaps both, this ability we have of loving at the same time multiple people? How do we make choices? And perhaps most of all, how do we live with them, ever after?
It's #threetunetuesday, says @ablaze. And I am pensive, but also need my music. How can I talk of love without speaking also of music? I was going to link their classic collaboration, Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus, except I don't like that one. I don't think it does her any justice, so instead I'll go for this.
I think it's sexier and more nuanced. Like her.
Because I'm still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Comme dit si bien Verlaine...
It's a strangely comforting song, I find. Sometimes, il va mauvais. Sometimes, things and people mismatch or come together at ill-fitting times. Besides, I'm a big crier. I cry at everything, so I find this song represents me quite well.
If you listen to one song today, listen to this:
And then, thinking of the two of them and of love, I stumbled across this gorgeous, gorgeous duet and have been listening to it on loop as I write.
Rivivo i giorni scordati
Ma amati sì
Sempre la vita risale
Volendo restare con te
<3 Why does Italian make everything sound so tragic and beautiful? Wanting to stay with you - except maybe that's tragic and beautiful, too.
As a bonus, I wanted to add this one by Charlotte, Serge and Jane's daughter. Of the three of them, I love Charlotte's voice best of all, somehow. I love her style as well, she's girly but also punk, sexy but also mannish in a way. Very interesting woman.
Anyway, how do you love? What are you listening to? How's Tuesday?
