Over the top, then further

A refugee of the highest order: David Blake, Al-Ahram Weekly's music critic, died last week. He is remembered by his colleagues
David Blake was one of the last, and certainly the most public, of Frank Brown's creations. It was the name under which he chose to write music criticism on these pages for more than a decade, the name of a character endowed by its inventor with a kind of history, though one that would remain infinitely flexible. Asked once, in the office, where he was born, David Blake replied, with barely a pause, that he was born on the Shanghai Express.
Frank Brown was himself born in Sydney, Australia, in 1916. He had been a regular visitor to Egypt for several decades before returning to Cairo, in 1989, for the last time. It was shortly after this date that he began the association with Al-Ahram Weekly, contributing a regular column of music criticism and occasional miscellaneous pieces. Thus began, at the age of 75, Frank Brown's first stint at what might be considered regular employ, though, somewhat irregularly, if typically, this would be conducted under a pseudonym.
There were, inevitably, discrepancies between Mr Brown and Mr Blake, gaps that could, in the early stages of friendship, prove disconcerting. On a later occasion, and in company, the same colleague who had been told by Mr Blake of his birth on the train began to relate the story, doubtless hoping to score some conversational points. She was met with a blank stare by the supposed protagonist of the tale who was obviously wearing his Brown hat that particular evening. Such episodes, and there were many, might prove infuriating, or endearing, or curiously touching -- which would depend entirely on the attitudes of the other people involved.
One learned early to respect Frank's privacy, for it was jealously guarded. Any attempts to pry, to ask questions of him that he could never, if only for the sake of good manners, ask of you, would be repulsed, more often than not with a fantastic anecdote. Naturally, this led to a deal of idle speculation, speculation that, when it came to Frank's attention, as it occasionally did, would be met with a fit of prolonged giggles. All of which makes of any attempt to compose a conventional obituary of Frank Brown something of a redundant exercise.
He left Australia as a teenager, initially for school in England and returned, in the intervening 60 years, just once, as far as anyone is certain, and then for his mother's funeral. In the meantime, and by his own account, he travelled widely, in India -- source of the abiding interest in eastern mysticism that would inform his appreciation of Schoenberg -- in the Middle East, particularly Egypt, and Europe, where he frequented the continent's great opera houses and concert rooms.
It had been a migratory existence, and in the last ten years of his life, the time during which I was privileged to know him, Mr Blake would often compare himself to a bird: at his happiest it would be a cormorant, less happily, a pterodactyl. There was, too, more than a little of the magpie about Frank Brown, for he was an insatiable collector of scraps, of small, shiny things, of images, phrases, words, compiled in countless volumes, all carefully bound, the volumes themselves becoming a portable cabinet of curiosities. Lines from Virgil, juxtaposed with a photograph of Colonel Gadaffi in self-conscious, matinée idol pose, next to an image of Judy Garland, between extracts from the Aeneid, a head of Gertrude Stein pasted on to an Apollonian torso, sections of Buddhist texts, reproductions of Bernini designs for fountains, botanical notes, film stills. An inveterate wielder of scissors, the cuttings would be reassembled into texts dense and opaque.
The same technique of assemblage was frequently evident in the reviews written for these pages, and the results could be equally startling. Musicians might well struggle with their appearances in print, but there is at least one pianist of my acquaintance who still relishes his description as "a shooting Fabergé star lighting up the Cairo skies." Jewels were one among many things Frank Brown collected, scissors in hand, as often as not around the necks of beautiful women. They, he adds, by way of explanation beneath a cutting, "look their best on large yachts."
By the time he made his final return to Cairo Frank Brown had divested himself of the accessories that are generally considered essential for a comfortable life, a process that had taken the best part of his life. If he could have managed without a bed -- "beds are for dying in, it's best to sleep on a table" -- he would have done so, but the renters of furnished flats do not look favourably upon such requests. After 80 years of life he had whittled his belongings down to the barest minimum: manuscripts, stationary items -- he wrote always in long hand -- scrap books and index cards, filled with jottings, some Gnostic, others less so, and carefully filed in cellophane envelopes.
The last nine months were spent in the Italian hospital in Abbasiya: after a long battle with cancer the stage had been reached when he required almost constant care. For several years Frank had approached terminal illness with all guns blazing, which for him involved a customary evasiveness which appears, with hindsight, as nothing more (or less) than the necessary courage. Until only a few weeks ago, when he was finally confined to his room, he would, whenever possible, return to Cairo Opera House, a place that was always, he wrote more than once, deserving of our love.
They are few who love music as dearly as Frank and if there were moments when it failed him he would have been too concerned with our own equanimity to ever confide that loss. He died, as he reviewed, as he divested himself of what a bourgeois world calls fortune, without rancour and with protean humour -- wry, mischievous, ribald, wicked, heartfelt, good.
Among his papers, on an index card filed among hundreds of index cards, are written these lines:
Effort and more effort/ Perpetual struggle/ All that we are is the result of what we have thought/ The visible world is relatively true, falsely imagined/ Do not bother about poetry, it must come of its own accord.
However roundabout that coming the poetry arrived.
Nigel Ryan
An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/ Soul clap its hand and sing, and louder sing/ For every tatter in its mortal dress,/ Nor is there singing school but studying/ Monuments of its own magnificence. -- WB Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" --
Clap its hand David Blake's energetic, curious soul did, and when, from the summer of 1998, the realists read "death" in Frank Brown's medical reports, Mr Blake did not despair, did not turn his back on the splendid things that being-here has to offer.
Mr Blake preferred noble, magical realms of gold to rusty, jaded ones. He led one to see how the Beautiful and True can figure forth in "the meanest flower that blows," how they can suddenly shatter out of the heart of the mundane. He would have appreciated the dignity of the five Egyptian men who, earning their daily bread quietly, leaned rhythmically in to shovel in the earth to which we return: an early cubist painting, an image as ancient as the first human burial rite. Hardly the stuff of which tears, idle tears are made.
Mr Blake loved Egypt, the Sa'idi silhouette, Nubian colours. He was at home in Cairo, did not want to spend the last days of his life anywhere else, trusted in those whom he called "the angels" and whose working-class hands ushered him week after week safely across Galaa St, helping him to levitate up on to public buses.
Mr Blake wrote with an artist's eye. Expressionist experiments in colour were embedded in his music reviews. Short stories lay in gestation, waiting to be born. He had a fecund imagination, mixing fact and fiction, memory and desire. Fearlessly he went over the top (of mediocrity, of conformity) with what he wrote. He respected and stood in awe before the power of the word.
Mr Blake, from whom I took dictation for many years and with whom I had the honour of time- travelling in grand style, had seen much, indulged much, squandered much, spoken much, suffered and caused to suffer much. But blessed man that he was, he lived to learn and grow through loss and dispossession: from partying with the rich, chic cultured crowd of London Paris Berlin New York Athens Rome, to a furnished one-bedroom flat in downtown Cairo, to a room under the charitable, gentle wing of Sisters of Mercy.
Salvation or Bust: Mr Blake's was no common rags-to-riches story. For the wise, the path leads the other way around. And around he went. From the leads to the music reviews he wrote, we learn that:
David Blake waltzed with the Mamelukes, survived a featherless flight, escaped into comparative space, cantered across Hungarian planes, watched the bright little, tight little show, star gazed and leaped upwards into the abyss, gave thanks by the lake of no return, climbed into the time capsule and was transported.
David Blake dipped, syncopated, gathered roses on thin ice, followed forest footprints, listened as the thaw set in, meditated on a drum, twinkled with the best.
David Blake swanned around among the colours, found Cleopatra dancing all the way to the apse, drank from the horn of plenty, waded through the waterlilies, travelled the soundwaves with uncle, took a quick night look at the Verona zoo, encountered Medicis and other important folk, watched butterflies skimming the water, listened to the dark, watched a world burn, went to heaven on a trumpet.
David Blake followed the spirit nymph, conversed with the birds, bridged some old inexorable gaps, was thrice dragged to the altar, saw through a crack into the future, ruminated on the Palace of Invisibilities, found himself stranded on the Venetian lido, spent his day in the country and the night in old Russia, was carried away by Liszt, visited beauties and beasties, came to rest before the temple of Hatshepsut, came home with goodies galore.
David Blake dined with gods and others, was thrilled as brightness fell from the air, watched as love went wrong, prepared for the dance of doomsday, lamented the melting of the snowflake, strolled through the Book of the Dead, flew with the free birds and bees, struck a pose, squeezed through the time warps, sea-hopped across the islands, weathered the glory, joined Marie Antoinette for a not too extravagant feast, scooped up star dust, negotiated the near perfect geometry of Stravinsky's fractured hopes, lamented a minotaur, took in the fresh air with Mozart and Mendelssohn, saw dark angels in a blue train, watched a priestess fly over the rainbow on a magic flute, tripped here, there and everywhere, saw marvels in the sky.
David Blake preferred more than a twist of lemon, met the man without a shadow, cultivated a taste for high spirits, learned faith, hope and charity, found time for dancing, tangled with flying apparitions, saw what is left and heard what is coming...
Dead men naked they shall be one/ With the man in the wind and the west moon;/ When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,/ They shall have stars at elbow and foot;/ Though they go mad they shall be sane,/ Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;/ Though lovers be lost love shall not;/ And death shall have no dominion. -- Dylan Thomas, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" --
Nur Elmessiri
I first met Frank, David Blake to readers of Al-Ahram Weekly for over a decade, in late 1990 when I lived in Cairo, and worked for Al-Ahram Weekly -- then at its inception. The impressions that I have of him from that time -- his slight figure negotiating the fearsome Cairene traffic outside the Al-Ahram building in Al-Galaa Street, the famously inaccessible flat in Bab Al-Louk, the frequent trips to the Cairo Opera House on Gezira, to be followed every Saturday morning by a visit to Al-Ahram to submit his article -- were renewed each time I visited the city in the years that followed, first from New York and then from Paris.
He never seemed to change, and for well over a decade he delighted readers of the newspaper with his always interesting, often sly, reviews of concerts and recitals from the city's varied musical life. He was prepared to go some distance to experience new musical events, deserting his beloved Opera House for the Muqattam Hills and the summer music performances that used to be held at the Citadel, and maybe still are, or for the odd blockbuster opera at the Pyramids. I remember him telling me, in the course of a discussion on music reviewing for a general audience, that he read the work of Edward Greenfield, veteran writer on music in the English press, because he was "always fair."
Frank was also always fair, even about some not entirely convincing performances, and he always seemed to find something fresh to say about works that have lost some of their sheen from too-frequent outings, or that have been burnished up for corporate performance, wilting under layers of varnish in the process. His knowledge of the European repertoire was as extensive as it was profound, though he seldom showed it, preferring instead to hear the responses of others. He knew a great deal too about rarely performed styles of music, whether extra-European or vernacular, and he was one of the least constricted by the Germanic tradition of all writers on music for a general audience, having something interesting to say about British, French, Italian or American music. Perhaps this was because, being antipodean, he had come to music from without, while occupying it from within with a rare kind of intensity.
Some years ago, I discovered that Frank was also a writer, having written many works in prose of an experimental kind that he kept in boxes under the bed. It is to be hoped that some of these at least can now be published. But of course one should have known that Frank also had ambitions of this sort, given the writerly attributes of his prose.
Mildly protesting against the transformation of Verdi, that most honest and direct composer who never composed a bar that wasn't as workmanlike as a good Italian pizza, into a writer of "blue-chip status," a sort of proto-Lloyd-Webber "capable of pulling a profitable deal out of the unlikeliest looking hats," Frank remarked that a kind of permanent "fame has settled around Verdi's creation like dust on the furniture. You can sweep it away, but only in the sure knowledge that it will return, thicker than ever."
Commenting on a 1998 Arabic-language performance of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro at the Al-Goumhouriya Theatre in Cairo -- and Frank was always a fierce proponent of opera in Arabic, believing that Arabic was an overlooked operatic language -- he said that the experience had been "a sort of mad treasure-box of the times, a mobile phone sparklingly created out of some new metal." Conductor Sherif Mohieddin had performed a "wonderful, light- fingered release of the score from its century-old encrustations", he wrote, while Cairo Opera Company director Abdullah Saad had "made the look of it, the sound of it and the pace of it into a sort of Bavarian-Rococo trip through the forests of Nymphenberg."
At a time when much writing on music has become either resolutely academic, all "analysis" and fearsome technicality, or distressingly "dumbed-down", Frank brought his marvelous verbal inventiveness and generosity to the rescue, often coining phrases that repay close investigation. He always paid his readers that compliment, knowing that analogies for his listening experience, whether of mad treasure-box, or of roosting in the forests of Nymphenberg, as Mozart's "grouplets and airborne combinations of notes" fly up and off the page could be counted on to combat the decay of listening in others and to renew their experience of the score.
I was greatly saddened to hear of Frank's final illness, though cheered by news of the excellent care he received at the hands of the nuns at Cairo's Italian Hospital. I think I speak for all his readers worldwide when I say that our grief for his loss is sincere.
David Tresilian
One of the amazing things about Mr Blake is that despite his age, despite his vastly different experience, despite his apparently unassuming, minding-my-own-business air, he created so many solid friendships at the Weekly. "Friendship", though, may not be the exact word; "conspiracy" comes closer to it. He had a knack for communicating to his interlocutor, through a slight lowering of voice, the shift of a chair, that he or she was Mr Blake's unique confidante, that the two of them had a certain angle on things that only they shared, in a sort of conspiracy of true minds. Such conspiracies would be woven around any nucleus that offered itself up -- hobbies, biases, pet projects, cardinal passions -- then cultivated into a private language. I collect jewellery, and together we would pore over pictures of designer pieces in glossy magazines: contriving an expedition to a shop Mr Blake had discovered where the display was last changed in the 1950s or thereabouts became part of the code.
Having once decided to invest in something more substantial than baubles, I asked Mr Blake to join me on a visit to the silversmiths of Khan El-Khalili. The shop owner, noting Mr Blake's penchant for things Nubian, produced ornament upon ornament that he pronounced "Nubian," though they all looked remarkably Yemeni. With Mr Blake's urging I was induced to buy a stunning Nubian necklace and a ring. It mattered little that they later turned out to be Yemeni ; they are still referred to as "Mr Blake's Nubian jewelry."
His gifts, too, were surprisingly thoughtful and inimitable. He often confided, when I was the one to take dictation for his occasional profiles for the Weekly that he was writing a profile of me and someday I would see it. There were many postponements, and much banter on the subject was exchanged. Eventually, about to go on a long trip, I asked to see the profile. It materialised, was dictated, edited by another colleague, designed like the Weekly's Profile page -- in a collective make-believe that the text was destined for print -- and now brings warmth to my flat in a foreign country.
Hala Halim
While we were paying Mr Blake our last respects I could not help but smile at first, the solemnity of the occasion notwithstanding. Every time I managed to block out other distractions and focus solely on him, I saw his dear face with the round inquisitive eyes, his hand resting on the desk at the office and him whispering in utter secrecy "Injy, I will ask you this because you would know," only to discover that the subject of all this shrouded mystery was where he could buy alfalfa, "that wonderful thing that donkeys eat."
Citing the wonders of things of this world was a regular habit of Mr Blake's, one of the many manifestations of his incredibly tenacious joie de vivre. Some of us were convinced that no old age, no illness would ever conquer him, that he would bury us all and live long after, easily winning the sympathy of our successors with his charming false modesty, his incredibly sharp wit and his ability to play just the right keys at the right time with proper decorum.
I fell in love with Mr Blake the day he told me I looked like an image from Titian. The simplicity and matter-of-factness with which he said it, proceeding to fiddle with his barely legible papers as if he had not spoken the most flattering words I ever heard, moved me beyond words. With the same matter-of-factness he once told me that as a baby he looked like a vampire, his canines having emerged before any other teeth.
Words he said once. One could do with them as one pleased; he would never bother to observe the impact of those words on those who may have heard them. He just spoke. And if he was amongst us while we recounted a tale in which he played the main role, and needed his confirmation about a certain detail, we would need to request his attention more than once, and eventually get an elegant "Pardon?".
As the funeral proceeded I realised that Mr Blake had really departed, incredible as it seemed, and the smile began to fade away and the regret of not having spent more hours at his side became hard to bear. Knowing there would be no more fun dictation sessions to enjoy with Mr Blake made my heart sink.
Injy El-Kashef
I was told that being the Al-Ahram Weekly music reviewer was the first job he ever got.
He was already old when I met him, a little paranoid about his importance to the paper, a reckless spender who lived simply and was often short of cash. You could always tell where he was: his tiny apartment off Hoda Sha'rawi Street, the Opera House in Gezira or the office, where he would position himself on the main corridor, among the farrasheen, until somebody came along to take the dictation. He wrote his reviews in an almost illegible hand on blank sheets of A4 paper: whatever you thought of them, they were deeply felt and belonged to a another age; very few of us could make the necessary adjustments to his text because the language, the tone and the references were beyond us. Typewriters and computers?: but I am a pterodactyl, he acted upset. He had a fascination with the implements of modern technology but it can't have bothered him much that he had no phone. Only he must have felt a little alienated in millennial Cairo.
He responded to classical music in a very personal way: it was an eclectic, melodramatic, intense spirit that informed his responses to concerts. Elsewhere there were tales of fortune. He spoke longingly of Upper Egypt and dreamt about going back to India and Yemen. Of his London days he had as much to say: Kenneth Tynan was horrible, he would scowl; and W. H. Auden -- wonderful, wonderful! He spoke of legendary singers and authors as if they were friends; and to listen to him some of them undoubtedly were.
There was a fluidity to everything he touched: the uniquely dainty gestures of his hands, the faces he made. His voice expressive, his cane and measured gait: he charmed his companions into doing whatever he needed them to do. You look well, he would say. It's lovely talking to you, but maybe you have other things to do? He was a refugee of the highest order, a member of the impoverished elite, a needy but never dependent soul.
At the Anglo-American Hospital he was still joking about blood transfusions, describing himself as a vampire; he imbued a painfully delirious episode with the adjective psychedelic. At the Vatican, which is how he referred to the Italian Hospital, he was constantly bickering with the sisters and crying out for dear life. Before his final disintegration, he clutched my hand passionately and urged me to be careful. A few weeks later, on the phone, he asked how people survive. Does everybody survive? For a while, I reassured him. And when I kissed his forehead, days before he was to finally succumb, he twitched convulsively in muted appreciation.
Youssef Rakha
Being the newcomer on the Culture pages was certainly a situation; one had to prove one's mettle and there were initiation rites. It was with trepidation that I approached my first "Mr Blake dictation"; he was older, much older, by far the oldest member of the Weekly staff and his writing was -- especially for a junior -- the stuff of haute culture. We were both rather shy, I remember, at first, and yet timidity soon evaporated as one realised that Mr Blake, too, needed reassurance about his writing. He would stop every other sentence, apologising profusely, asking if it was too boring, if it made sense at all. And it is during those stops that one learned even more, as he paused to fill in the blanks of the story; do I remember the rumours surrounding Tchaikovsky's death, for example. And he would go on to retell -- dramatically -- the lives of the great composers, great conductors, Greek gods, as if they were next door neighbours left that morning on his way to the office. The references were often just beyond one. And the metaphors!
There was a first (and only) incident, with Mr Blake, believe it or not. It involved a totally unsolicited comment on my favourite jeans, and resulted in the definite statement that women should wear skirts and show off their legs (as well as a hard to reproduce image of peasants wading in water like swans). Well-heeded advice, Mr Blake, thank you. Much later, on a winter morning at the Italian Hospital, he would comment out of the blue that I had "a pianist's hands." I reluctantly confessed that I hadn't kept up my piano lessons. We compared notes on childhood piano lessons; Mother didn't think he was good enough, he confessed in turn.
One remembers Mr Blake as being exceptionally witty and funny, oh the nicknames he thought of.
"You're laughing at me again," he jokingly whined the last time I saw him, on Christmas Day, at the Italian Hospital. "No, I'm laughing with you," I joked back, "you know that."
Amina Elbendary
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