Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  The day was full of domestic activity. I cleaned closets, cedar chest, etcetera. Cleaning the cedar chest consists of reading old letters and burning half of them. The difficult task is to decide which half to burn—which would make the best memoirs.

  In that cedar chest, now at my sister’s in Philadelphia, I found Mother’s little diary. Have I quoted overlong? Overlong means self-indulgently. But I’m indulging Mother. True, nothing is said in three hours that can’t be said more clearly in two. Any Mahler symphony is prolix to a francophile. Even Proust, had he survived another year, would have tailored that book of his, I am convinced. The recent TV five-day documentary on the Civil War—I am writing in the summer of 1991—by being granted maximum time, grew repetitious where it should have been concise. (This paragraph needs pruning.)

  Yet Mother means all to me, and she never published her Letter to the World. Without her few frail pages here her voice is as hushed as a Sumerian slave’s. Of course, nothing lasts, everything fades: our children, our parents, our statues, our pyramids, our dinosaurs, the sun itself. I cling to her words. Printed here they grow perhaps less perishable, stalling the dust. Like a work of art, like a life preserver for the dead.

  5. Interlude

  Room after room,

  I hunt the house through

  We inhabit together.

  Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her,

  Next time, herself! not the trouble behind her.…

  —“Love in a Life”: Robert Browning

  Rooms. They contain our lives. Wards, cradles, nurseries, parlors, boudoir and bathtub, kitchen and sacristy, even the halls of open fields bordered by leafy wall and blue-gold ceiling. Even the coffin. Throughout life and death we cannot escape our rooms. We are the fingers within their glove, corridors of either velvet or iron: the hand inside moves according.

  According to our environment we choose our environment—our glove, our room. As hands we react tactilely. But as persons attached to those hands we react with heart and mind, and with the five senses which interact with heart and mind and sometimes with themselves, especially in artists who say they can see sound, sniff green, hear marble, taste terror, and fondle F major. Still, the arts are specialized and are all, without exception, visual or auditory. Yet they have been said to derive from that most painful of pleasures, which is nostalgia.

  Paradoxically, nostalgia arises through those two senses with which no art primarily deals: taste and smell. They can’t be channeled, intellectualized, communicated, as can sight and sound and sometimes touch. Tongue and nose single-mindedly burrow through diamondhard culture barriers to instinct.

  • • •

  That effusion stems from finally being given my own room, the tiny one down the hall, formerly the “maid’s room,” with its own bath. It became an empire.

  In newfound privacy I created my own rules, confounding the senses in the best Rimbaudian style. Amid stolen incense I played at full volume on the old phonograph Milhaud’s La création du monde (which ended on a tonic seventh chord, as did Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, which Margaret Bonds was to play so gleamingly, Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” plus everything of mine), and Stravinsky’s Les noces in the composer’s English-language recording with its coarse close, when four pianos crash together in the straightforward mystery of fucking—the fucking of adolescents, what’s more. (The first music to represent the thrust of a screw as distinct from a standard Wagnerian swoon.) This is the room where I eventually learned to masturbate, while reading the scene of seduction by Lyceaneum of Daphnis, in the Longus pastoral. Where, as the weeks flowed by, I discovered I couldn’t see clearly for more than two yards—that I harbored a galloping myopia, the symptom of one who seeks to shut out the world.

  In this room after midnight I consumed leftover meringues while strutting about in Mother’s high heels and declaiming Ibsen to get rid of a speech defect. My sweet tooth—worse, my vicious compulsion toward sugar, retained to this day—was the alcoholic’s quick fix before the fact. Mother’s clothes were more disguise than drag—I have never wanted to be a woman, though I have wanted “female privileges.” The speech defect was—is—an inability to say ess.

  I did not differentiate then as now I do between high and low art. The movie of Madame Butterfly starring Sylvia Sidney, which I saw time after time, may have led my parents to take me to my first opera, Madama Butterfly, as well as to The Mikado, but it also led me to see many another Sylvia Sidney movie over the years. Queen Christina was an opera in itself, so was Christopher Strong, and these led me to lie on my back and eat grapes like Garbo, garbed in gold lamé like Hepburn. When Bruce took me down the block to hear Daphnis et Chloé (that “leafy study,” he dubbed it) on the Robertstons’ Capeheart, we came home and with the same set of ears listened to Mildred Baily moaning “More Than You Know.” If Bruce induced me to read Night-wood, he also pushed me to ask the university’s football (or was it baseball) champion, Jay Berwanger, for his autograph, and to buy the records of Josephine Baker. Movies were more cogent than plays, simply because there were more of them. The “fine” films from Europe, like Les misérables or M, were shown at International House, while the trashy movies (as Mother called them), like Of Human Bondage or Forty-second Street, came mainly to the Frolic or the Piccadilly. Since I saw two films a week, and sat through them each a half-dozen times, how did I get my schoolwork done, much less my piano practicing? I didn’t. Father feigned sarcastic surprise at my C-minus average when I should be receiving straight Fs. The piano was a means to an end (repertory) rather than an end in itself (virtuosity). It also, when the lid was up, resembled a winged horse, and the Pegasus myth was a favorite mystery.

  During the summer of 1934 in Yellowstone Park we ran into the Carey family and rode horseback with them among the geysers. There I discovered, after skinning my shin on a stirrup, a violent allergy to horses. I bled, swelled like a fat hen, sneezed unstoppably. This made me love horses more, not only for their eldritch beauty but for their power, and later—after reading Swift’s Voyage to the Houyhnhnms—for their rationalism. I still carry in my wallet a warning against horse serum, which, in case of accident, might be fatal.

  I remember nothing learned in school that fall, but I did see Naughty Marietta and Klondike Annie. In the former Jeanette MacDonald, a rich French princess in the eighteenth century, before running off to the American wilderness, “liberates” the domesticated parakeets in her huge aviary into the wintry streets of Paris, where of course they will perish in a day. (She also wears a wristwatch.) In the latter Mae West kills her Chinese lover-jailor (stabbing him during a kiss in a graphic close-up permanently excised by censors the following year) and flees to Nome. During recent reruns of both films I am bemused at how accurately I recall each frame, the pacing, the songs, the food, the single hair out of place, as though I were again a preteenager. Everything is indelibly the same except the essential—the plots are full of holes and the naughtiness is puerile. The genius and horror of the VCR is that, by making forgotten films available again, we can, like Emily and her poignant excruciation in Our Town, literally reexperience our youth down to the last dumb mistake.

  The summer of 1935 we visited Yankton again, stopping in Minneapolis to see the Millers: Mother’s brother, the jovial Uncle Al; his wife, Aunt Mildred; and their one son, John, who is today a cellist and composer. With John we dressed up in fur hats and overshoes during the worst heat wave of the century and went to see Baby Take a Bow, our first exposure to Shirley Temple, whose rise in the world I followed with awe, and who now seems an empty, self-important little snot.

  We also returned to Vermont, this time with a fellow traveler, one of Rosemary’s swains, Eddie, a good-looking athletic redhead who rode with us as far as Brattleboro, then hitch-hiked on to Maine, where his parents were. Was he thirteen? Fourteen? In the stopover tourist cabin Eddie and I shared a bed. In the early hours he approached me from behind, put an arm around me, and remained in this post
ure for an hour during which I held my uncomprehending breath. Then he rolled away with a snore. Next morning I spoke of this, in front of Eddie and Rosemary, to unresponsive parents who changed the subject. En route, in Amherst, we bought another dog, a rusty cocker spaniel puppy named Geoffrey. I don’t remember what became of Simba. And we saw Flying Down to Rio, or was that a few summers earlier? Chronology fumbles. I do know that this Astaire/Rogers movie was the first seen by me in New England, and that I purchased the sheet music of “The Carioca,” which Jean Edwards and I then choreographed.

  We visited the Hendrickses again, in Marlboro. They had an old-fashioned harmonium, my first contact with a “sustaining” instrument, one which, unlike the piano, can hold a chord without the sound decaying. Pumping away at the wheezy pedal I improvised on The Afternoon of a Faun.

  Flashbacks:

  —I was raised not to say “I.” Or to begin a sentence with “I.”

  —Billy Stickney died of mononucleosis caught in the school pool. Bruce and I went to the funeral, though we really hadn’t known him that well. Interlopers in melancholy. Funerals are for grown-ups. Grown-up audience, grown-up corpse.

  —What befalls those fluffy day-old chicks acquired at Easter by city kids who live in small apartments? Mostly they die of neglect and are thrown out with the garbage. One of ours grew into a rooster that crowed. We had to give it to James, the janitor, and ask him not to tell us its fate. Another, while still a baby with blameless black eyes, became a screeching cripple when I accidentally dropped a rock on it. Father then killed it with a whack of his tennis racket. As for an Easter bunny named Harriett, who never died but who gnawed at the piano legs, leaving sawdust on the oriental rug, she too was entrusted to James. I then wrote a story about a rabbit that cried real tears.

  —Father on one of his trips East was to appear on a lecture platform with Eleanor Roosevelt. I gave him my little green plush autograph book, hoping he’d ask her then and there for her signature. He didn’t.

  —Along with Mozart’s Turkish March, Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin (which Virgil Thomson always called The Girl with the Linen Hair), and Carpenter’s An American Tango, I learned to play, from the sheet music, “Dizzy Fingers” by Zez Confrey, and “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home.” I also improvised a piece called The Fountain and the Stars, recorded it for a dollar at Lyon & Healy’s, and sent the disc to John Alden Carpenter, Chicago’s chief musical glory who lived on Lake Shore Drive. Margaret Bonds was abashed when Carpenter, gently, advised me to learn how to put my ideas on paper. It was then that Margaret, from my dictation at the piano, notated The Glass Cloud, influenced by her other star pupil, Gerald Cook, a year or two older than I, and taught me from that to notate. I have a dozen notebooks from that period brimming with Impressionist studies.

  —Hatti Heiner, who with the advent of first grade went off to a public school, would come back into my life in the late 1930s. Meanwhile her blind father, Frank, estranged from her mother but still married, radical left-winger, was a charming raconteur and good acquaintance of my parents’. Mother told Frank Heiner about her childhood friend, Glenys Rivola, an overripe unmarried blond who lived with her mother, Flora, in Yankton, a few houses down from Gran-daddy on Pine Street. (Flora, an English teacher, had encouraged my poetry writing.) Frank began a correspondence with Glenys, which ended when he boarded a train with his beautiful female German shepherd guide dog, arrived in Yankton 600 miles later, brought Glenys back to Chicago, divorced his wife, and got rid of the dog. “One bitch in the family is plenty,” said Glenys, who married him. Hatti, sensing I was at the bottom of her parents’ divorce, never forgave me.

  —Do you remember Sarnat’s drugstore, dear Hatti, on Blackstone and Fifty-seventh, where for a nickel you got a cone of orange ice double-dipped in chocolate sprinklings? It was across from the Christian Science Church which we used to stare at. Our rabbit, Harriett, was named after you.

  —Margaret Bonds wore open-toe high heels. I’d never seen such things. Was it because she couldn’t afford whole shoes?

  —The thirteen-year scope, like a ridged fan, or like the hills and dales of a landscape which when flown over can be topographically grasped at a glance but which when traversed on foot become comprehensible only with time, was dominated by the benevolent despot, Franklin Roosevelt, a Big Brother, a fixture, taken for granted by my generation. Hoover was within memory, but Truman would arrive only after our basic training (thrills of music, first love and other sorrows, menstruation and change of voice) had stamped us forever. But during what Auden termed this “low dishonest decade” (what decade isn’t?), from one season to the next, the rich and poor alike were uncertain. Roosevelt, the ruler, did good things (the WPA Arts Project) and bad (getting us into the war), but I couldn’t see it because I was seeing it: nothing except eating and sex can be perceived in medias res. Today I remain as dumb about politics, the details of government, as I then was. I realize only that merely to want to be president means you’re already corrupt—the role is by definition capitulative.

  So what I would be I already was, a practicing musician. The professionality (ability to notate) was there, though I’d never heard a note of mine played by someone else. The sense of music, of course, was absent, since music, as distinct from painting and poetry, has no sense. Despite my garrulous innocence, I inhabited an inviolable niche: my world versus the world—the physical drama of Then and Now. Despite future pleasures and wistful perils of sex and love and friendship, of travel and art and whisky, life and the universe seemed already veiled in a perpetual sadness without meaning.

  6. Ned’s Diary (I)

  In 1936 we went to Europe. It was a grand tour, eleven weeks, including two on the water. After a fortnight in London we went to Stratford and saw Shakespeare. Then Newcastle to search in vain for Mother’s forebears, and from where we sailed to Stavanger. In Stavanger we found Father’s forebears, and proceeded up the fjord to Oslo, then Copenhagen, then Geneva, finally Paris.

  A dark cloud had already settled over Europe, but there is no hint of my awareness in the 140-page journal scrawled during the trip. The Ned reflected therein is an unneurotic overweight Little Brother playing the role of Little Brother (as I always would with Rosemary’s beaux), and a relentless optimist. He expresses reactions, but no judgments, and often refers to this or that as indescribable. Of course, any writer who called something indescribable is not a writer.

  8 July 1936: Coburg Court Hotel. I won’t tell much about the boat except that Rose made a very good friend while she was on the boat whom she likes even better than Miriam Carey. Her name is Doris Garner and she lives in Canada. I, myself, didn’t find anyone whom I should wish to know personally. We were seasick the first few days. We also saw four movies while on board.

  The reason I’m so brief about everything so far is that I’m catching up on what has happened in the past month, but soon I’ll come to what has happened in the past week and then I shall write daily.

  … We landed in Southampton on the 5th of July. I must say our first sight of land for eight days was certainly wonderful. It really looked beautiful and green although I don’t think it’s any nicer than America.…

  [Mother had another slant:

  On Tour with the Family June 27 to September 15, 1936

  Rufus had to go to Europe on business so he asked the children and me to join him and combine business with pleasure. We were not sure which was business and which was pleasure by the time the tour was finished.

  The children are Rosemary who is fourteen and Ned who is twelve. I am Gladys their mother. Rufus is their father.

  The children and I had never before been on a great liner and the excitement at leaving was intense.

  Being very much a part of land and provincial and peaceful in my disposition the voyage over was rather an ordeal for me. I thought the boat would sink any minute. Even now it seems amazing that we arrived at Southampton without disaster at sea.

  Not long after ga
zing at the Statue of Liberty as it faded from view we sought our cabins. Down many flights of stairs we went brushing by other American tourists who also seemed in confused states. Rufus and Ned had a stateroom together and it seemed very far away indeed from the one occupied by Rosemary and me.

  Many times my thoughts turned to my mother who crossed the ocean when she was an infant with her young parents. Her mother bravely left with her father, much against the wishes of her parents and was thereby disinherited. I thought also of my father and two brothers who crossed over during the world war, one of them never to return. He was my younger brother whose grave I would visit in France.

  Tho I became accustomed to the sea in a way, still, I felt on landing that I would have to seek a new home in England or Europe so that I would not have to cross back again to the states.]

  8 July. Tuesday we went to see Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. It was very funny. Mother just laughed and laughed. I like to see Mother laugh because she so seldom has a real good laugh.…

  9 July: 9:55 a.m. Last night we went to Pride and Prejudice. It was just swell. The English actors are very good. We saw it at the St. James theatre.…

  12 July: Sherington Hotel, Stratford-on-Avon, Rather Street, England. This is a very nice hotel.… Tonight we saw Romeo and Juliet. It was swell. It was so sad I nearly cried. The acting was very good.… (13 July) We have just come home from Troilus and Cressida. It was very sad. The same girl that played Juliet last night played the lead in this tonight.… This morning we went bisycling to Ann Hathaway’s cottage. We didn’t go in as we had no money and we probably wouldn’t have anyway.…