Death and Rembrandt

Watching the excellent BBC 4 documentary on the life of Rembrandt over the last few weeks got me thinking about our relationship with death. The artist’s life was presented as being dogged by personal and financial difficulties. As well as being a genius, Rembrandt was improvident with money, a spendthrift whose profligacy and poor management led to chronic debts. But his life was also touched by tragedy with the deaths of three infant children, his wife Saskia, and then Hendrickje, the woman who succeeded her as his live-in lover.  Modern viewers would of course view this as tremendously unlucky but while death and illness are of course still central to our lives they tend to jump out at us like proverbial bogeymen. In the 17^th century, they were part of the fabric of everyday existence.

 Death is something most of us wish to avoid contemplating until it becomes unavoidable. I sometimes wonder if people lived more intensely in the past.  In my lifetime, I have had little exposure to illness and death. I don’t know anyone who has died giving birth, or anyone who had a stillborn child or whose infant died from illness or complications. Cancer has cast its shadow over my life as it has done over the lives of most people in the western world but it tends to creep around in the dark corners rather than stride through the main thoroughfares of existence. Modern medicine has made pain quieter; thicker walls and greater privacy have made it quieter still.

                How different were the lives of Rembrandt and the people of his time. Life was a toss-up. Pregnancy was a hugely dramatic, and much more painful, event and the death of mother, child or both parties was commonplace. How must that have made women feel? How much stress must they have experienced over the course of their child-bearing years? Imagine being continually pregnant and constantly unsure if you or the child would make it out alive? If you were lucky enough to survive the rocky passage into existence or giving birth to a baby, you then had to contend with various pre-penicillin ailments and diseases – plagues and poxes, infections caused by the tiniest of cuts. Making it to forty must have felt like something of a victory. Sixty must have been considered positively ancient.

                I wonder how the pervasive fact of death affected people?  These days, most of us are insulated from death – it’s tucked away behind the walls of hospitals, hospices, and houses populated by small numbers of people. When we do see it, it’s a rare and haunting occasion featuring a family member or an accident. We are considered very unlucky if it touches us during our childhood or young adult years and we call the death of a young person a tragic event. We can plan for our retirement years, confident that we will be thriving at seventy and still relatively healthy ten and twenty years later.

In Rembrandt’s times, the opposite was the case.   I wonder if the greater fragility of existence had a profound effect on how people saw the world and other people, how they experienced life. 

Scott Walker

                The first time that the name ‘Scott Walker’ properly impinged on my consciousness was when the NME published in successive issues, their critics’ choices of best albums of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and of all time. This was simultaneously a celebration of the rich legacy of thirty years of proper pop lps and a submission to a wave of nostalgia and ‘look back’-it is. It marked the beginning of an era when many acts began to wave their influences about like gaudy flags. But for people like me, it was also an education and from those lists I found out about many, many great works of art. Before those lists, I had never heard of ‘What’s Going on’, ‘Exile on Main Street’, ‘Blue’, ‘Trout Mask Replica’, ‘Innervisions’, ‘Spirit of Eden’ and host of other brain-bending records. Somewhere on the 1960s list, there were the curiously titled Scott 3 and Scott 4.

A couple of years later, I was in a workmate’s flat.  He rolled a joint and put Scott 4 on stereo.  It was a surprising listening experience: some of the songs had MOR show-tuney arrangements but others were startling, sparse and strange. There were glacial harp sounds on the breathtaking ‘Boy Child’, distorted narcoticized keyboards on ‘The World’s Strongest Man’. And on top of everything was the almost comically velvet voice of the intense young man staring disconsolately from the cover.  My next encounter was through a compilation which included jaunty Brel-influenced songs of seedy glamour ‘The Girls on the Streets’ and ‘The Amorous Humphry Plugg’, and those wonderful immersions in pure melancholy ‘The Bridge’ and ‘Big Louise’. Like a lot of the best pop music (and other artforms too, I imagine) the songs teetered on the brink of the farcical, and were perhaps too daft for a lot of modern listeners, but I loved them.

Later on, I was amazed to learn that his first three solo albums had been huge sellers, no doubt partly to do with the phenomenal success of his previous band, The Walker Brothers, and his status as a gloomy pin-up. The fourth of the ‘Scott’ series had been the first to feature all original material but he made the apparently fatal error of crediting the record to his real name (Scott Engel) and without brand recognition, it disappeared and Scott entered the wilderness.

What followed was one of the most curious journeys in the history of recorded music. Walker retreated into MOR covers albums, heavy drinking and drug use and then, in the mid-seventies reconvened The Walker Brothers to produce the hit ‘No Regrets’, two straight albums and then one leftfield leap into art rock with their final lp, Nite Flights. From there on, Walker slid into wilful obscurity, re-emerging once a decade for the next thirty years with a group of increasingly dissonant and confrontational albums that sounded next to nothing like the glorious quartet of ‘Scott’ albums.  I’ve only attempted to listen to one of the later albums but couldn’t get to the end of it.  Watching him being interviewed in the 30 Century Man documentary, he is down-to-earth, plain-speaking, bright-eyed; he seems utterly uninterested in image or in the kind of reminiscing that is the staple of this kind of film. The work he is doing right then is all that matters to him and his past is of no importance. In a more recent BBC interview now on youtube, he is asked about his reputation as a recluse and how he feels about people wondering why they haven’t heard from, or seen, him. ‘I’m not a recluse; I’m low-key,’ he says smiling. ‘Generally, if I’ve got nothing to say or do, it’s pointless to be around.’ Spoken like true artist. Scott Walker R.I.P.