Lily Panam. Copyright © Getty Images.
I read that Vera Lynn died this June (2020); she was 103. The notice tugged at me. I felt a mix of things: sorrow, longing, but joy, too – nothing that could be categorized easily as one of the basic six or eight emotions (depending on the scheme) outlined in most introductory psychology textbooks. I turned to my music collection, looking first, at the Smithsonian WWII album, We’ll Meet Again, before remembering that no, it was not Vera singing the famous song there, but rather, of all things, it was Peggy Lee and the Goodman orchestra. Fortunately I had The Very Best of Vera Lynn on my antique iPod and so played that, remembering not so much the picture I’d seen of Dame Lynn smiling on her one-hundredth birthday, but recalling more the lovely, toothsome, smiling gal with the red-painted cupid lips, and slightly pointed chin. She had one of those wonderful forties’ hairdos, with curly hair both falling down the sides and a quasi-pompadour-like construction on top – a “bumper,” I think it was called.
But that is only how she looked. More important was how she sang and how she sounded! I might as well have been a gangly Canuck farm boy, loading up with the rest in our British pattern Khakis, to roll out in our crowded transport ship, leaving for our sad fate at Dunkirk, full of longing, full of sadness, of desire, of excitement.
How could I, here in 2020, feel any of this? Was I just making it up? I was, after all, born in 1947. If I heard the song at all back then, I would have to be six or seven before it made any sense, 1954. Perhaps, though, the feelings were transmitted the way so many things are from generation to generation. The older generation passes along its hopes, its dreams and longings, its traumas and joys to those coming up. Although obviously not as real to me as to them, the fear and the romantic insecurities and solidarity of The Great Depression was passed along to me in a fashion, though unconscious and unnameable, as surely as my blue eyes and reddish tinge to my otherwise brown hair. And so, it is possible that this sentiment, this nostalgic longing and feeling of loss for Vera Lynn, was just conditioning, only something I had learned.
Possible: but I don’t think that is it.
In the month before, on May 24th, another singer had died, at the same age of 103. It was Lily Lian, aka “Lily Panam,” or “Paris Lily,” in English. The Economist magazine article described her as the “last chanteuse on the streets of Paris.” Although of course, there are still musicians on Paris streets today, the particular three-hundred-year-old traditional art of street singing, including the likes of Edith Piaf, died out in the early 1950’s. Lily Panam was the last of them.
Lily, like the rest, would make money by selling sheet music for the songs she sang. People would buy the sheets and then often sing along. Twelve hours a day she belted them out through an old-fashioned megaphone. She had to sell one hundred scores a day to survive. It was a living, not quite: many street singers lived in rooms with tattered curtains, stained walls, and musty carpets, and they had to supplement their living with other dodgy enterprises. Women had it particularly hard, having to fend off or seek the protection of thugs and pimps, sometimes posing for racy pictures as Lily once did, or living on the edges of prostitution, as Lily’s friend Edith Piaf – France’s most famous singer – did in her early years. Still, there was kindness, too and a love from the people for these singers: strangers would run out of cafés to proffer a glass of wine, or a cup of it mulled, if it were cold. As a street singer you had to take what you could get if nothing but singing would do and if you wanted to spread love like that. For love was what Lily gave to the people who would crowd around her on the cobblestones.
In August of 1944, during the Liberation, in what was probably her greatest moment, she sang La Marseillaise on the Champs-Elysées to a great, joyful crowd that included none other than Charles de Gaulle himself.
In the nineteen-fifties, street singing died out, Musical tastes were changing, and technology was changing. There were more and more records and players, and even television. People did not stop to listen anymore and did not buy the scores. Lily Lian, survived for a long time after that in the shadows, although I understand, not unhappily. Still, she was never able to break through in the recording industry or on television. She did make some appearances and some of her music is collected on an album called Chansons Des Rues. Perhaps one of the sweetest videos one would want to see is on the dreaded YouTube, where, older (I am unsure how old), she sings Le Bal Défendu on a show, and breaks your heart while doing it, while a stylish couple dance on a stage in the background. Her singing is simple and direct, without pretense. Perhaps this is why she did not translate well in the modern age; she sang without pretension, without an act. Rather, she sang directly to the heart.
I, of course, never knew her until I read the obituary. Indeed, unlike Vera Lynn, I had not even heard of her, had not heard her sing. And, yet, I felt some of the same feeling when I read of her death: a sadness and sense of loss, but also excitement and joy over what once had been. We could say it is nostalgia, sentimentality, perhaps; but if so, it is a nostalgia for someone I had never known and things that I had never experienced. It is a nostalgia for something that never happened to me.
How is such possible?
I have thought on this since reading these obituaries, and have concluded that this reflects an important and essential capability in the human being. It is the same ability that shows up in our art, in our kindness, our helping, and in our dreaming.
While dreaming, we can imagine places to which we have never been; we can interact with people whom we have never encountered. Indeed, we can imagine and act inside places that do not even exist, and we can interact with – love, hate, argue and fight, kiss or even have sex with – people who have never been. And when we wake from the dream, not only do we have the stories, but we have our feelings about this unlived experience: joy, dread, excitement, fear, sadness, and hope. We can imagine what we have not experienced and feel everything that is associated with that imagining.
I would call it the “empathetic imagination.”
We are fantasists perhaps, but it is this same ability that allows us to share another’s joy or pain. For the writer, it is what enables us to be able to write about another character’s happiness or suffering, whether the character is fictional or factual. The artist can paint a landscape that exists nowhere. It is also what causes us to blink, and turn our head downward, and put aside our food, at the sight of a starving Yemeni child on our television set – the one with the flies landing in her eyes. It is what enables us to see the watery eyes of a homeless stranger on the street, and to offer kindness and respect to that melancholic soul, and then turn out pockets out to see what we can proffer. It is what enables us to laugh along with a different, happy child, for whom the upturned tail of the diving duck in a pond is nothing short of hilarious. It is the same thing that makes our hearts sing upon hearing of a friend’s adventure or success.
Although admittedly less immediate, the empathetic imagination is what enables us to feel sorrow and yearning, even though we never knew them, when we hear that Vera Lynn or a Lily Panam are gone. We feel the loss. But we feel also joy in knowing that they landed, and that for a time they gave us themselves, they graced us with their glad lives on this lonely planet.
PSC
June 30, 2020
Note: Biographical information concerning Lily Lian in this piece comes mainly from The Economist, June 20, 2020: The lark of metro Barbès.
