THE PIANO SHOP ON THE LEFT BANK
Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier
By Thad Carhart
Random House. 271 pp. $23.95
Like innumerable other Americans before him, Thad Carhart found his way to Paris -- the Left Bank, in his case as in so many others -- fell in love with it, and could not resist the temptation to write about it. Unlike innumerable Americans before him, he did not succumb to the temptation to write about how cute the French are, to wax sentimental about their food and their wine and their quirky ways, to drone on and on about the beauties and wonders of Paris. Instead he has written, in The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, a book about self-rediscovery in a place that happens to be Paris and friendships with people who happen to be French.
To put it another way, Carhart is not a professional expatriate. He has spent a lot of time in France over the years and obviously loves it -- as well he should -- in part because he was the child of parents who lived much of their lives overseas and in part because his previous job, as communications director for the Apple Corporation's European division, took him there; but he obviously has not forsaken his roots across the Atlantic, and he declines to engage in the America-bashing that so delights so many expatriates.
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Carhart now lives with his wife and two young children in a modest (but no doubt immodestly expensive) flat on the Left Bank, where he does freelance consulting and writing and where, it develops, he noodles on the "real ivory" keys of his baby-grand piano, manufactured "in the mid-thirties . . . in Vienna by Stingl, a house that no longer existed," an instrument of comparatively "diminutive size" but sound that is "sweet and full, a strange and wonderful combination of the robust and the delicate."
Carhart is an amateur who always will struggle with (or against) his Bach and Schubert and Chopin and never will have the opportunity to display his prowess on a concert stage, but he has a "lifelong love of pianos" and has been drawn to, if not obsessed by, them since his boyhood in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. He let the instrument slide once he passed into adulthood, though he "hoped to play again after many vagabond years when owning a piano was as impractical as keeping a large dog or a collection of orchids."
How that hope was fulfilled is part of the story Carhart tells in this thoroughly engaging book, but scarcely all of it. The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is mainly about pianos and the people who love them, who play them and make them and repair them. Its real center is not Carhart himself but a Parisian whom he identifies only as Luc, "in his late thirties," with an "open and smiling" face "ringed by a slightly scruffy beard that gave him the look of a French architect." Carhart meets Luc upon entering a small store in his own Left Bank neighborhood with "a simple sign stenciled on the window: Desforges Pianos: outillage, fournitures." Soon thereafter Luc acquires the shop from the eponymous Desforges, but by then he and Carhart already have formed the friendship -- short on personal intimacy but long on their shared love of pianos -- that is at the heart of this book.
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In part it is a book about that most unpredictable and pleasurable of human experiences, serendipity. Carhart wandered into the piano shop out of sheer curiosity, hoping in a vague way that he might find there the piano that was beginning to take shape in his dreams, and he just as easily could have wandered right out. Not merely was Desforges something less than welcoming, but it turned out that the shop did not exactly go out and solicit customers. As a neighbor told him: "Well, they sell used pianos, of course. Lots and lots of them. They're very well known for that. But their main business is in parts and refurbishing, and the old man, Desforges, doesn't like to sell a used piano to someone who hasn't come recommended. He says it's more trouble than it's worth and he's got plenty of customers for the pianos that come his way." So the neighbor provides the obligatory introduction -- this is French to the core, needless to say, though Carhart does not dwell on the cuteness of it all -- and Carhart is on his way to the Stingl.
Share this articleShareIt was not the piano he expected or wanted to buy. His apartment is not large, and he assumed that only an upright could fit into it without completely taking over. But Luc quickly developed a second sense for Carhart's innermost piano needs, and when the Stingl came into the shop he said, simply and declaratively, "I think this would make a good piano for you." Once Carhart played it he knew he had to buy it, for 15,000 francs, delivery and tuning included. His account of the actual delivery -- on the back of "an older man of about my height but with fully twice my mass in his upper body" -- is amusing and a little breathtaking as well, for it was a "major life experience," the "single most extraordinary feat of human strength that I could imagine." Now, at last, he had his piano:
"In the first few weeks after the Stingl's arrival I was giddy with excitement each time I came home and laid eyes on this vision in the corner of our living room. I felt the combination of surprise, discovery, and delight that comes momentarily with a shiny new car, or a special birthday present, but this seemed both more substantial and more meaningful than just another new possession. I polished its lacquered surfaces thoroughly -- Luc told me what special product to use -- and I dusted the insides with a soft cloth so that they gleamed."
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Carhart does not make the pursuit of the Stingl the central narrative line of his book. Instead he gets it out of the way at the outset, so that he can move along to the larger matters that interest him: the nature of the piano itself and "how this instrument actually produces the extraordinary range of tones and contrasts that are its hallmark"; the people who build and restore pianos, who must be "part master carpenter and part structural engineer, fitting a mechanism as intricate as the finest timepiece into a wooden cabinet that is strengthened with a massive steel frame"; the people who tune pianos, "part scientist, part artist, and part psychologist," of whom Luc says with characteristic succinctness, "A good tuner is one the client doesn't call back right away."
The book is also about something more difficult to pin down, friendship and community. One need not wax idiotic about the French to acknowledge that they can be difficult to know, polite to foreigners and strangers but something less than welcoming. Carhart encountered a fair amount of such cordial resistance when he first crossed Desforges's threshold, and since he seems to be a self-effacing sort he probably would acknowledge even now that he is still something of an outsider. But when Luc let him into the back room of the shop where pianos are stored and repaired, it was "like being let in to the inner circle," a "coming together of people whose common points were Luc's approval and a love of pianos." In describing how that came to pass, Carhart tells us far more about Paris and the French than any number of vapid paeans by writers whose names shall go unmentioned. *
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardley@twp.com.
Photograph by Steven Rothfeld from "Entrez: Signs of France" (Artisan/Workman, $18.95)
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