Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  The red is genetically in the green tomato, it’s only a question of waiting. Were my so-called talent, sexual bent, love of candy and alcohol, latently in me as I lay there smiling? Was the oratorio, Good-bye My Fancy, which I would be composing when the phone rang sixty-four years later to say that Mother was dead—was it already in the blood?

  Life has no meaning. We’ve concocted the universe as we’ve concocted God. (Anna de Noailles: “If God existed, I’d be the first to know.”) Our sense of the past and our sense of encroaching death are aberrations unshared by the more perfect “lower” animals. On some level everyone concurs—pedants, poets, politicians, and priests. The days of wine and roses are not long, but neither are they short; they simply aren’t. Hardly a new notion, but with me the meaninglessness was clear from the start. Our family stressed neither God nor the devil, so the indoctrination of meaning was no more crammed down our craws than was, say, the idée reçue that Beethoven had genius. When I first saw photos of the Gazelle Boy, raised by wild creatures and captured too late for the grace of civilization to take effect, I was enthralled to apprehend that if one is not conditioned to “learning” during the first three years, one will never read or even speak. Similarly the Roman church knows that a true Catholic cannot be sculpted from an unbeliever after age seven. (In Catherine Was Great Mae West, as the lusty empress, requests that the handsome man who has lived in the dungeon since birth and never seen a woman, be brought before her. We are not shown the outcome.)

  To contend that life has no meaning is not to say that life is not worth living. For if life is not worth living, is it then worth dying? Calderón said life’s a dream. Isn’t it rather a game? The charade of self-expression, so urgent in childhood, and the rat race not only of moneymakers but of Great Artists, is a not-so-complex competition to kill time before time kills us.

  Yes, the red waits in the green tomato; but no, the artistic tendency is not there from the start, it’s socially induced, in Debussy as in Palestrina—Debussy inhabiting an era like ours where art is socially superfluous, and Palestrina in an era where art was an unquestioned angle of routine. What is there from the start is the gene of quality. I’ve often claimed that I can teach anyone to compose a perfect song, according to the laws of prosody, melodic arch, and so forth. But I cannot guarantee that the song (even my own song) will bleed and breathe, that it will be true music, worth heeding. Only God can guarantee that—the God I don’t believe in.

  What do I believe? For years I believed (still do, sort of) that you, them, it, all of us, exist only in my fancy. All will stop when I stop. Then do I still ache for a more decent world? Sure. But at the age to which I’ve come, seeing new men in high places still stumbling into the old cruelties, there seems no hope until we evolve, or perhaps dissolve, from Homo sapiens into another species.

  How I came to such belief will not be a basis for this book of memories, except insofar as such belief, being pure sense, is the basis of all culture. My life—my meaningless life—has, after all, been not unfair. Everything connects.

  No one is more different from oneself than oneself at another time. Standing back to focus on other Neds at various heights and shapes cavorting, I will surely experience more than a twist of envy, of astonishment, of embarrassment, of ho-hum. If the vantage were from tomorrow or yesterday the recipe would surely vary, with anecdotes added or removed. But today is the day I’ve planned—since a year ago—to begin the trial, and I’m an organized creature. Organization keeps me from suicide.

  Otherwise stated: If indeed the universe is divided into French and German, then Mother was German and Father was French, or mad and sane; and if indeed I’m a combination of the two of them, my whole existence—though I am seldom conscious of it—has been passed in crawling from the wild contrasts of folly into the dreary safety of routine without which work is implausible, then falling back, then crawling forth again, continually.

  2. Looking Forward to the Past (1924–29)

  In June 1924, aged eight months, I moved to Chicago, taking with me my sister and Mother, and of course Father, now a professor of economics at the university. For a year we lived at 5464 Woodlawn, then until May of 1927 at 5537 Kimbark, neither of which I remember. In 1928 the very young Robert Maynard Hutchins would impose his enlightened presidency on the university (“No faculty member can ever be fired except for rape or murder committed in broad daylight before three witnesses”), but the so-called Lab School, still active today, already functioned as a continuing flow of experimental curriculum, from nursery through graduate college. Progressive education, it was called. I was enrolled immediately in the nursery, Rosemary, too, and a cluster of other faculty brats, including three who would become “best friends”: Jean, child of Davis Edwards of the speech department; Bruce, child of surgeon Dallas Phemister; Hatti, whose father, Frank Heiner, who had been born blind, was a sometime lover of Emma Goldman’s.

  Experiments began. At two I was isolated for a fortnight with a group of male peers, our sole diet: canned apricots. Coming home, none the worse for wear, my first request was for canned apricots. Moral: Familiarity does not breed contempt, it just breeds more familiarity, a truism I sometimes stress when lecturing on what is still called “modern music.” If familiarity bred contempt, people would long always for less food or less sex after a good meal or a good screw.

  Chicago is the root, the home stable, the site of all first times, the losing of so many virginities. To think back is to be dominated by the smell of Lake Michigan. Everything—classrooms, bed sheets, Rush Street pubs, furtive matings in Jackson Park—remains awash in the permanent freshwater fragrance unique to the Windy City, just as the Mediterranean and the Atlantic would influence whatever I did or thought during my twenties and thirties in Morocco and Provence with their stifling salty scent. Even those huge seas were substitutes; still today, in whatever new environment, the initial instinct is to turn east where some protective lake should be. More even than music, odor excites nostalgia.

  Earliest memories.

  Strangling a baby duck on Grandfather Rorem’s farm in Iowa. Why this, I who then knew naught of death, just of toys? Was it what others told me later?

  Wondering why, when Grandfather Rorem “gave” me a 500-pound Guernsey heifer, we couldn’t bring it back to our Chicago apartment.

  Sitting on the kitchen radiator and asking Mother, “When will I be four?”

  A face appearing at the screen door, a hobo wanting food, Mother turning him away, then having second thoughts. Grabbing me by the hand she rushed after the man striding south on Kimbark. Mother unsmiling, dramatic, hair in the wind. We brought him back, sat him on the back porch, gave him dishes of this and that which he devoured. I stared unembarrassed. How was anyone so hungry? What had changed Mother’s mind? Why did she not allow the tramp into the kitchen? (Three decades later that scene revived when a female beggar came to my door in Rome, requesting “qualcosa da mangiare.” I gave her two croissants and two oranges, then, hiding behind the window, I followed her with my gaze as she retreated, retching as she stuffed the food into her mouth. I felt … complacent. A good deed.)

  Yelling Nigra or Niggero in the presence of blacks, to see if they’d react. We’d been taught always to say Negro.

  Making ice cream in the wooden churn with a metal cartridge, surrounded by smoking dry ice and rock salt, and containing eggs, sugar, vanilla beans, and heavy country cream, plus a quart of fresh peaches, whole. We children, one at a time, sat on the lid, giggling while Father turned the crank. Delirium of licking the dasher.

  Treating Rosemary’s gashed knee with perfume (because there was no iodine) which she’d rammed on a spike in her race to see, from the upstairs window, the approach of Uncle Al, Aunt Mildred, and Cousin John.

  Had Mother once been an actress, we longed to know? She was so good at directing plays. Were we adopted, we hoped to learn? Cousin Jan, Silas’s daughter, was adopted. And where did our parents dig up our names? “There’s Ro
semary, that’s for remembrance,” sang the fair Ophelia, “—pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.” The name Ned, too, is Shakespearean, the contraction of Mine Edward. But if with the years we came to resemble our given titles as people resemble their dogs, we did play with alternatives. Rosemary wanted the same initials as Father, C. R. R., so for a while she decided that her given name was Catherine. I wanted the same initials as Mother, G. M. R., so decided that my given name was Geraint. But the birth certificate says Ned—not even Edward.

  Since childhood I’ve had a recurring nightmare. All is normal: in the sunlit parlor Mother is doing what she always does, Father is doing what he always does, Rosemary and the collie, Simba, are doing what they always do, while the vase, the oriental rug, the oak table are pristinely where they always are. Yet nothing is normal: Mother and Father and Rosemary and Simba are … not dead, exactly, but inanimate, robotic, prefilmed, while the vase, the oriental rug, the oak table harbor propensities of malice, of suffocation. Now the parlor grows huge as the heavens, its contents proportionately huge (yet how can I know, since, with no point of comparison, a two-foot-high vase and a quadrillion-foot-high vase are the same?). But I am not dreaming the dream, nor even aware of being there to experience the dream. On awakening in a sweat I see that all is normal: Mother is doing what she always does, Father…

  The game Rosemary played with Father is identical to the game I played with him, only she named it Happerso and I named it Dimpy. Father lay on his back and we jumped over him, back and forth. That’s all. Except that in so doing we shrieked with joy. Were I to read these words in somebody’s autobiography would I yawn? Yet the scene—the rusty blue of that Chicago carpet, the parent’s long male taboo body, Rosemary’s silky hair, the clang outside of garbage cans—remains more etched in the mind than “more important” things. What’s more important: the first tintinnabulation of a Griffes keyboard poem or the texture of Mother’s powder puff in its tortoiseshell étui? What’s living? Is the resurrection of ancient scenes the end of living? Experience does not mean to have, but to have had. Except for food, music, sex, and waiting for the subway, nothing is: everything was, or will be. To live in the present is impossible.

  Tolstoy got it wrong. Unhappy families are all unhappy in the same way, while happy families are happy in different ways. Unhappiness renders virtually anyone undifferentiated and flat, and is the norm. Happiness is rare, and should be; to be happy is to be unaware, a negative target in an unjust world. Happiness is blindness. Paradoxically most people are blind, yet most people are miserable. I say people, not families, since even in America families are made up of divergent, unmelded parts.

  Our family was educationally upper class, financially lower middle, bohemian in the safe style of university denizens, and engagée out of earned conviction (pacifism was a golden rule—there is no alternative to peace) rather than out of chic. In those days a social stance may have evolved from political belief, but the left wing was seldom monied. So of course we were unhappy, and of course we were happy, in our unselfconscious solidarity.

  As a family of four we went naked, literally. As a Wasp enclave we were not tactile like Jews and Italians—seldom kissing, seldom hugging—but we nonetheless paraded nude among ourselves. The manner was utterly unsensual, even businesslike, hardly worth mentioning were it not for the shock in learning that other families did not so behave, that indeed they in turn were shocked by “the Rorems’ suspect behavior.” Mother, Father, and Rosemary continued this shameful practice forever, while at adolescence I desisted when the serpent beguiled me to eat of the fruit. Thus the female body was never a mystery; the female body pleases but does not divert. I savored the fragrance of starched skirts, pencil shavings, carnation soap, sugar and spice and all that is nice exuding from schoolgirls, but prepubescent eroticism lay in the tang of fishing tackle, lank hair, clean sweat, the very words “man,” “male,” “masculine.” From the beginning such fancies welled within one part of the brain, growing guiltlessly as physicality grew, while another part of the brain, like Wilde’s beautiful sphinx, watched me without comment from a dim corner of the room.

  The last two years of the decade were lived at 5519 University Avenue, whose long-dead sumac shrubs begin to quiver again and whose brick walls and dingy fire escape acquire a dim but true form as I type this sentence. Images still tend to be isolated, non-narrational, the mundane juxtaposed indiscriminately upon the grotesque, with no chronology.

  More memories:

  Mother crying at the kitchen table. “Why are you crying, Mother?” “I don’t know. That’s just how I am.”

  Lost at the beach, age four (the same beach I’d be cruising ten years hence), when a strange woman picked me up, held me high, until Mother, frantic, came to the rescue.

  Older female relatives declaring, “Look at those big brown eyes. He’ll be a real heartbreaker when he grows up.” Could physical attributes or the fact of Love be used painfully? Apprehending the power of sexuality, I later wrote: If I can cause one heart to break I shall not have loved in vain. (This, well before reading of Forster’s longing to be able to hurt an innocent manly man.)

  Rosemary’s ear being accidentally nicked by the scissors of a country barber who, when she shrieked, gave her a Baby Ruth, free. He didn’t nick my ear, so no Baby Ruth.

  Benign rivalry twixt she, who loved Father, and me, who loved Mother. She liked wholewheat bread with butter, so I liked plain white bread, preferably Bond’s, with holes through which grape jelly leaked. She and Father liked Beatrix Potter, Mother and I favored A. A. Milne. In the 1930s as we edged into more “sophisticated” prose, she pushed Wilder’s The Woman of Andros and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, which I never read but nonetheless pooh-poohed in favor of Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite, which mesmerized me for years, as did the Ibsen plays. She was a populist, I an aristocrat, yet our love-hate spats contained no hate. I cannot forget how once, in early adolescence, she announced to a room full of people, “I like to look at Ned, because then I realize how beautiful I am.”

  Beautiful she was, with flawless (by Hollywood standards) traits beneath a helmet of gold curls. But beautiful I was not, at least as a child in his smug baby fat. Meanwhile we were both raised on Mother Goose, of course, and later Cranford, Mother’s favorite novel, which I never caught the hang of. The above-mentioned Scandinavian masterpiece, of course, was Father’s influence; ever proud of his Norwegian forebears, in the last years he planted and cultivated a family tree branching back to the fifteenth century. I have kept a colored picture book of Norse mythology which I used to pore over: Syf, goddess of beauty (who resembled my sister), shielding her golden apples from Thor; Loki and his mischief-making with laurel-crowned Balder, the pure; Freya, Odin, and the mystical others whose names Richard Wagner purloined and teutonized.

  We had no hymns on Sunday. Indeed, no music. Quakers have no music.

  “Look, Grace, look. See the little bird, Grace? See the little bird?” These sappy phrases learned by rote and seared onto the brain by dint of a thousand repetitions, appeared on page 1 of a primer from which, to impress listeners, I pretended to read. One day I turned the page and, magically, continued reading beyond the memorized portions. Dizzy, I couldn’t stop. Next day I began another book, and the practice grew into a compulsive salubrious illness from which I’ve never recovered.

  Today it seems clear that repetition and association, rather than sentimentality, jog memory even beyond Alzheimerian borders. Consider: Oliver Sachs, the Dershowitz of psychiatry, is a publicity-doting specialist who gets things skewered. Last night PBS showed him benignly lording it over a clutch of patients who have lost their memories. Now the Power of Music, claims Sachs, has helped some of them, at least for a time, to regain the past. The Music turns out to be arch-familiar pop tunes badly played. Still, it was clearly not the power of this art, as Sachs would sanctimoniously have it, that revitalized the memory, but one thing leading to another.
The smell of patchouli or of a roasting capon might turn the same trick as the playing of Our Song. The mad Nijinsky, more intrinsically musical than these filmed inmates, was nonreactive when confronted with the sound of masterpieces he had once danced to. But the elderly Aaron Copland, who drew blanks from one five-minute period to the next, was nonetheless able to conduct his half-hour Appalachian Spring from start to finish—though on leaving the stage he could not recall what he had just performed; he had been wafted by the rote, by the inertia, by the programmed kinetics of his own creation. We do not forget our language. But Force of Art, alas, cannot save lives. (It’s said that Garbo used to watch her own films while talking of herself in the third person: “Now she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that.” But of course she was not talking of herself but of the role, implicitly declaring: “Now Anna will do this, Marguerite will do that.”)

  Was my vocabulary formed in the kitchen, that word associations remain almost strictly culinary? Associations of musical keys are not for me, as they were for Scriabin and Messiaen, symbolized in color combinations. But to this day I recall the geographical circumstances of every word, among thousands, I ever learned.

  How did I pronounce these words? People used to point out my lisp (they don’t anymore), though in fact my problem with esses is the contrary of a lisp: I have no sibilant. I do still speak from the side of my mouth, judging from the few TV playbacks I’ve seen, and dislike.