The Times - UK (2022-04-09)

16 saturday review Saturday April 9 2022 | the times

John Lewis advertisement — shows us

that we are not alone in our feelings, even

though we live in a world that often tries to

deny or medicalise sadness.

There has been a fair amount written

lately about the notion of toxic positivity,

but Cain takes her discussion beyond the

sphere of mental health. She weaves

together a range of references from neuro-

science, music, religion, history and

business management with ease. She lives

in a somewhat rarefied world, speaking to

friends who are academics, psychologists

and award-winning violinists, but her

voice is sincere and clear as she tries to

understand the value of the bittersweet.

The book is broken into three parts. The

first asks how we can transform pain into

creativity and love. The second part talks

about the importance of acknowledging

sorrow in the workplace and explains how

being sad makes good business sense. Cain

shares the example of a hospital in Michi-

gan where their approach of caring for dis-

tressed or bereaved employees resulted in

Why we can’t stop listening to sad songs

S

usan Cain’s first book, Quiet: The

Power of Introverts in a World That

Can’t Stop Talking, published in

2013, had a big effect on me. It was

the first time I understood that

being introvert didn’t mean you didn’t like

people — as I had thought — it simply

meant you needed to be alone to recharge,

while extroverts recharged their batteries

by being in company. This simple concept

made sense of so much: why the music fes-

tivals my friends loved were my idea of hell

and why a weekend of socialising, even

with people I liked, was exhausting.

It gave people like me permission to be

themselves — namely, in a bath with the

phone off and the door locked.

Cain’s second book, Bittersweet, is an

attempt to do a similar PR job on difficult

feelings such as sadness, longing and grief;

making the case that these much maligned

melancholic states are vital parts of being

human, leading to great creativity, beauty,

love and feelings of transcendence.

Her definition of “bitter-

sweet” is broad and can

sometimes feel a bit

hazy: “A tendency to

states of longing,

poignancy, and

sorrow; an acute

awareness of

passing time;

and a curiously

piercing joy at

the beauty of the

world.” She adds:

“The bittersweet

is also about the

recognition that

light and dark, birth

and death — bitter and

sweet — are forever paired.”

The book opens with an anec-

dote about being a law student and listen-

ing to hours of Leonard Cohen, only for

a friend to ask why she was listening to

funeral music. The comment stayed with

her. Why did she like sad songs? Why did

she find them uplifting? And why do many

of us love them? According to the book, we

listen to the happy music on our play-

lists 175 times on average,

while we listen to our sad

songs 800 times. My

maudlin playlist can

attest to that, but

that’s because,

according to the

quiz in her book,

I score high on a

bittersweet ap-

proach to life.

Or as she puts it,

I am “a true con-

noisseur of the

place where light

and dark meets”.

Thanks, Susan.

Cain, left, explains that

the reason we love sad songs

is because they turn the pain

that we all suffer — whether through

heartbreak, longing or loneliness — into

something beautiful. What’s more, the sad

song — or poem, or painting, or film, or

Marianne Power

finds consolation in

this elegant defence

of melancholy

Bittersweet

How Sorrow and

Longing Make

Us Whole

by Susan Cain

Viking, 352pp; £20

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We listen to happy

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book is an encyclopaedic celebration

of French intellectuals refusing to give up

on universal principles, rooted in the

Enlightenment and French Revolution,

while remaining slim, bringing up well-

behaved children and falling in love at

every opportunity.

Watson argues that since the end of the

Seven Years’ War in 1763, when France

ceased to be the world’s greatest power, the

country has been periodically defeated,

and each humiliation has led to cultural

renaissance. France, President de Gaulle

claimed, has a “genius for renewal”. Wat-

son tells a very feminine story, tracing the

trajectory of renewal through “the great

chain of salons”, a continuous succession

of intellectual and literary associations,

sometimes passed from mother to daugh-

ter down the centuries. The word “salon”

was not used until 1794 in the midst of the

revolutionary Terror, but the phenome-

non can be backdated to the 17th century.

Salons were typically organised by a

clever, often attractive, salonnière, who

gathered around herself interesting writ-

ers, artists, musicians and politicians.

An early example is the Marquise de

Rambouillet, daughter of the French

ambassador to Rome, who set up a salon in

Paris in 1618 as a rival, or at least comfort-

able and intimate alternative, to the court

of Louis XIII. The playwrights Molière and

Corneille were regular attenders. The

writer Guez de Balzac insisted that “one

day at the hôtel de Rambouillet is worth

more than several centuries elsewhere”.

Élisabeth du Plessis-Guénégaud is the

next example. Her salon in Paris near the

Pont-Neuf was frequented by the mathe-

matician and philosopher Pascal and the

playwright Racine among other luminar-

ies. After being exiled from Paris for a year

by the Sun King, Louis XIV, one ardent

member rushed to attend a Wednesday

afternoon gathering at Mme du Plessis-

Guénégaud’s without even changing his

travelling clothes.

These were elite circles, their concerns

overlapping with those of the newly

formed Académie Française, established

in 1634 to protect the “purity” of the

French language and “render it capable of

the highest eloquence”. Watson shows the

close association between salons and the

development of so-called high culture:

“Haute cuisine, haute couture, haute coif-

fure, all the fashionable ingredients of the

haute or high life.” Salons became show-

cases for sophistication, sociability and

civility. Unlike the German seminar, an

altogether more masculine and austere

affair, French salons blended intellect and

pleasure, representing “what France

thought it was good at”.

Watson draws on the long-established

salon practice of pen portraits to introduce

his salonnières and their clientele. He cred-

its Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, daugh-

ter of Louis XIII’s rebellious brother, Gas-

ton d’Orléans, with developing the writing

and exchange of literary portraits. These

were eventually collected as a book, Divers

portraits (1659), and 36 out of 50 subjects

were women. Watson’s portraits are less

focused on conversational prowess and

more on physical appearance. Of Marie-

Madeleine de Lafayette, for instance, he

writes: “She was not a great beauty, we are

told. Portraits show her as round-faced, on

the chubby side, with a too-large nose, a

too-small mouth and eyes that were too far

apart. But her wit and ready intelligence

counted for more.”

Men’s physical imperfections are more

forgivingly characterised. Of the writer

Chateaubriand, Watson writes: “Portraits

show a rather dashing figure, with wild,

even Byronesque dark hair flying in all

directions, large piercing eyes, a promi-

nent nose and sensuous lips.” Chateaubri-

A

re the French exceptional?

This is the unwieldy question

the veteran journalist Peter

Watson hopes to answer in

The French Mind. Watson’s

earlier book The German Genius (2010)

started from the premise that German

ideas and cultural contributions have been

undervalued because they had been over-

shadowed by Nazism. Few, however, have

ever suggested that French achievements

have been undervalued either inside or

outside France.

Watson’s spectrum of exceptionalism

runs from the frivolous to the deeply seri-

ous. At one end, the exceptionalism can be

seen in what Watson calls “cute” books

about French superiority: French Women

Don’t Get Fat, French Children Don’t Throw

Food, How the French Invented Love and so

on. At the other end, there is an inter-

national perception, sometimes annoy-

ance, that France presumes to speak on

behalf of humanity. During the Nazi occu-

pation of France, the German Institute

was charged with destroying the French

“cultural superiority complex”.

Watson is a Francophile and his baggy

France’s history is

told through the

chatter of salons and

the women who ran

them, says Ruth Scurr

books

some like it haute The salon of Madame Lemaire by Georges Jeanniot, 1891. Salons became showcases for sophistication

ALAMY

The French Mind

400 Years of Romance,

Revolution and Renewal

by Peter Watson

Simon & Schuster,

848pp; £30

President de Gaulle

once claimed that

France has a ‘genius

for renewal’

Are the French

exceptional?

Mais, oui