by Ned Rorem
24 July: Hotel Victoria, Stavanger, Norge. The reason I didn’t write about yesterday, last night, was because I was terribly seasick for 28 hours on the North Sea from Newcastle to Norway.… (25 July)… Then the whole family went to Peter Ibbetson with Gary Cooper and Ann Harding. It’s the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen. The acting was just wonderful and they played “Debussy music” all through it.… (29 July) We were invited to Mr. Bryne’s “private” island today. We took Ragner Husebo (3rd cousin) and “Grandfather” Tendines with us. I like Ragner very much although he can’t speak any English. While we were on the island we went around together picking blueberries, climbing steep hills, swimming, rowing, etc. We had a nice meal. Then came home.
5 August: Grand Hotel, Oslo; 11:00 p.m. This is the most wonderful hotel I’ve ever been in. Oslo isn’t what I thought it’d be like at all. It reminds me of America. I miss America like everything. Well anyway—instead of having a bus when we left the hotel this morning we had a private car all to ourselves for three hours. We drove on the edge and down in the valleys of the steepest “cliffiest” mountains. Mother and Father said they were even more magnificent than the Grand Canyon.… Father said we’d never see anything like it again so that we should look at it all as much as we could.… (6 August)… Tonight the whole family went to Show Boat. Pa and Ma thought it was swell. I sure love Helen Morgan. I’m going to write her a fan letter.…
10 August: Grand Hotel, Copenhagen; 10:45 p.m. Yesterday I bought a mistery by Edgar Wallace called The Green Archer. I am already halfway through it as I’ve been doing nothing else all morning but reading it.… Went to the Tivoli, the amusement park we visited yesterday. We went on the same roller-coaster 11 times.…
15 August: Hôtel de Famille, Geneva, Switzerland…. The Alps are rather disappointing.… (24 August)… Tonight Father and I took a walk in what is called the Old Town. We went down the spookiest, most interesting and old narrow side streets, that it is very hard to explain it.… (25 August) … This morning Father and I went bike riding and I bought a real beautiful big cross (crucifix) made of wood. In case the reader doesn’t know it, I am a very ardent collector of such things.… Tonight we went to the orchestra but when we got there we found that they weren’t playing tonight, we had peaches and ice cream instead. Tommorow morning we are leaving for Paris on the 9:42.
26 August: Hôtel Perey, Paris, France; 11:03 p.m. We have been on a hot, sticky, stuffy train, all day for nine hours, and I never was so tired and uncomfortable in all my life. Well finally we came to Paris and were we glad! There are more bird stores and markets in this town. We counted 20 bird shops on one street on the way to our hotel.
28 August: 37 rue Cambon, Hôtel de Castille; 9:30 p.m. We are now in a much nicer hotel than the other one and nearer the American Express and the center of town.… Tommorow I am going on a bus tour by myself of the left bank of Paris, where all the artists (etc.) live.…
30 August: Hôtel de Castille; 10:33 ½ p.m. This morning Mother and I got up early, and went to the services in Notre Dame, but the organ playing was over when we got there. So while Mother sat in the tower behind the church I paid a france (6¢ [at present]) to climb 567 steps to the two towers on the top of the church. I never had more strenuous excersise than going up those dark, winding stairs. People were fainting all over the place and most of them didn’t actually come up as far as I did. Then Mother and I discovered a huge bird market right there on the island, but we won’t buy any for 8 days though.… (2 September) … Tonight Father and I went on the subway to the outer walls of Paris. (There was a drunk man on the train that had a horrible gash on his forehead and was so sleepy he was always falling on the floor. He was terribly dirty and red eyed and spooky looking and I know I’m going to dream about him tonight.) Father and I then went to the hill that St. Denis walked up with his head… just wonderful, “Paris by night.” … (4 September)… We have made two very good friends at this hotel. One is a real pretty jewish woman Mrs. Shearer and the other is an interesting Catholic woman Mrs. Pope who buys cloth by the bolt from Schiaparelli. We have very long talks with them about religion & various other subjects. Mrs. Pope thinks its funny that when I get married I want to have fat blond baby girl twins.…
6 September: Hôtel de Castille, 10:11 p.m. Well, this morning, while Mother, Rose and the quaker were at Versailles, Father and I went to the bird market and got 16 birds.
9 September: On board RMS Aquitania.
10 September: 11:00 p.m. This morning the firefinch I bought for Jimmie died. We had an elaborate funeral at sea with flowers and other stuff.
—THE END—
• • •
While reading those pages by the preadolescent Ned, I am tempted to belittle him, to put him down, to show impatience at that other Ned’s inability to see, like any logician, two sides of the same coin (or, like any artist, three sides). Tempted to sneer at how, for him, history seemed less alluring than a need to wash his hair at every stop; at his obsession with movies which he nevertheless reviewed as simply “interesting” or “swell”; at his inability to impart his feeling for “modern music” other than by saying he had a feeling; at his concern with dieting or aviculture in the light of the ever-shifting continental masterpiece. I am tempted to explain, to edit, to forgive that young Ned’s shallow outlook. But I shall not—lest another say that my present guile is more pernicious, less winsome, and just as dull as the 1936 Diary.
Still, that young Ned is me. I can evoke this very morning what would never have occurred to me to notate twenty thousand mornings ago: How Rosemary and I yelled Heil Hitler! in the Hamburg street, just to be quaint, and were shushed by our elders; how the bearded mouth of the lithe metro conductor might feel caressing my own red mouth; indeed, how an incipient but quite unacknowledged carnality lurked beneath every quotidian political banality—how good and evil are sister and brother.
I couldn’t know then (though such crisscrossed paths are common food for thought), as I “gazed” onto Kensington Gardens, that sooner or later I’d be cruising those gardens without family surveillance; or rambling through Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens with more on my mind than roller-coasters; or that three blocks from those Champs-Elysées cinemas loomed Marie-Laure de Noailles’s mansion, which one day I would call home; or that a poet named Cocteau inhabited the Hotel de Castille when we did, and was evicted for smoking opium—Cocteau, whom a more Rastignacian Ned would befriend fourteen years and one World War later.
Our apartment at 5617 Dorchester, lodging as it did four souls—sometimes five, when cousins were in town—was not huge. A living room, a dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms with one bath, a smaller bedroom with a smaller bath, back porch, railroad hallway with a door to the service stairway, and another door to the front elevator entrance. In this entrance was a grandfather clock, an heirloom which, without its ever driving me crazy, chimed each quarter hour to the tune of Big Ben in C major (though every sixty minutes when the hours struck, the strokes were in A-flat—that is, a C which to my ears sounded not like a tonic but a third). Within this clock, before leaving for Europe, I cached my collection of finch eggs. These were sky blue, the size of jellybeans, wrapped individually in cotton and stored in one of Mother’s black-and-orange Coty face-powder boxes. My first act on returning from Europe, even before checking on the live birds, was to rush toward the clock and check on the eggs.
The live birds, meanwhile, had been tended by Minnie, our one white maid in a succession of “colored” maids, who was elderly, fat, not pretty, bossy, and semiliterate. (Mother’s diary lists “Minnie’s sayings”: shrubbery = scrubery, aluminum = alumitum, crêpe de chine = crepe machine, waiter = waitress—“He was a waitress.”) She also had a mustache, and armpits with warts used for mashing potatoes, or so I supposed. Minnie told us that the two canaries, Archibald and Miriam, had produced one egg; it hatched a cripple which they proceeded to peck to death.
As for that clanging clock, I wonder. With the dawn of p
uberty I fell prey to the madness of insomnia, which has never ceased. Anything awakens me—a faucet dripping miles away, a spider sighing, a neighbor’s sweaty dreams—and once awake I circle the possibility of sleep for hour after hour, like the astronaut seeking that invisible slit through which he will reenter the “envelope” of atmosphere. It would be nice to say that these periods are fruitful; in truth all half-waking thought becomes banality, just as the inspiration of dreams turns to trash in the morning. Today any noise not my own is terror, like the threat not of a tinkling piano in the next apartment but of a rock band on a subway neighbor’s earphones. Because my profession deals with my choice of sound, all other sound is painful.
In two hundred months I’ve scarcely had one so-called good night’s rest. Even drunk, when too often I’d pass out or black out, awakening came soon. Through a splitting head thoughts raced and never stopped, while from behind closed eyes, from malodorous bedsheets, I’d watch day turn into night again, then arise and go out drinking anew. These three sentences were scratched onto a notepad beside my bed at five this morning, after hours of wakefulness. They could as easily have been scratched yesterday at the same time, or the day before, or a year, or twelve years, ago.
While Sherwood was still in Paris, John the son was an awkward shy boy. The day after Sherwood left John showed up, sat easily on the arm of the sofa and was beautiful to look upon and he knew it. Nothing to the outward eye had changed but he had changed and he knew it.
—The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(If I do not further name the author of the above remarks—she who once remarked that “remarks are not literature”—it is that Toklas is the author. Gertrude Stein, according to Maurice Grosser, who knew, just signed her name for publicity purposes. Maurice it also was who took the loose paragraphs of Four Saints in Three Acts and shuffled them into a usable libretto for the opera.)
In that autumn of 1936, almost from the moment we stepped off the boat, everything to the outward eye had changed in me while nothing changed inside, but did I know that?
If, on returning to France in 1949 I had for a decade been aware of my body and of its effect on others, using that knowledge for good and bad, to a point where historian Philippe Erlanger, himself majestically ugly, proclaimed that I was everything a mother would not want her son to grow up to be, in early 1936 I was still unaware of myself-as-object, being overweight, on the verge, yet still ignorant, of impending adolescence, and something only a mother could love. Now the larval narcissism through which I saw the world evolved overnight to another kind of narcissism: how did the world see me? Body and voice changed, height soared, I was no longer a subject perceiving but an object receiving. Sex was everywhere, not just in locker room and jungle book but in doorknobs and sausages and clouds. That the sex was exclusively male-oriented, as it had been chez moi since the age of reason (about three years old), disturbed me not at all. It may have occurred to me wistfully that I would “outgrow” these leanings, but I did not suffer. I have never suffered from being queer, from not being a regular guy. My friends and I felt superior to the regulars (more subtle was the word), we felt they were missing something in not reading Knut Hamsun and Pierre Louÿs, in not basking in Ravel and Varèse, in not going to the ballet as we regularly did. A rationalization, maybe. Most minorities (Jews, artists, German tourists in Italy) defensively cast themselves as superior to the norm about them. Some, however, are at a loss, traumatized at the thought of “coming out,” and long to be part of the mob. Today, when the fact of homosexuality is so prevalent in the bourgeois air, all around one hears confessions of men born since World War II, how they hid their penchants from everyone, themselves included, remaining closet virgins until twenty-five, in an effort to be accepted by the gang, the gang being not just neighborhood roughs but intellectual undergraduates at Yale. No, my rejections have come far less from being involuntarily gay than from choosing to be a serious composer in our philistine world.
Priorities shifted.
Crushes were still on female teachers as they had been on Miss Richardson in third grade (though not the dreaded Miss Burris in fourth grade, with her wide rump and rimless specs, the only one I ever hated), and on Mrs. DePencier in fifth, with her lovely clothes and graphic descriptions of Hannibal crossing the Alps. (Is it risky to say that widows more than spinsters make caring instructors? Yes, in the light of Nadia Boulanger, l’éternelle mademoiselle, our century’s greatest pedagogue.) I was bewitched by Mrs. DePencier, who, at the present writing, is still, in her late nineties, active and always present when every few years I am in Chicago for concerts. But she was already a past presence when school began again after our summer in Europe.
The scholastic year 1936–37 brought Miss Lemon—young Miss Lemon, blond with jazzy checkered suits—who goaded me to memorize dozens of Edna Millay’s sonnets and to read, and read again, Quo Vadis. I was a freshman now in the University of Chicago High School, U-High to us, Jew-High to the denizens of nearby Hyde Park High, the much larger public school. That someone of my sweet age could be entering high school was not due to precocity—except for English and music my grades continued lousy, even in French, and remained so until graduation in 1940—but to Hutchins’s merging of seventh and eighth grades into what he called subfreshmen.
Simultaneous with Rosemary’s first menstruation came my myopia. Like Bruce, I now wore glasses, rarer then than now, and hated them. Nearsightedness meant that one could be seen without seeing; glasses meant that one could be masked while seeing. Emotionally I wished only to be seen. Rationally I longed to see without limit.
And to hear without limit.
That winter Stravinsky conducted his Rite of Spring with the New York Philharmonic, broadcast live across the country. Hearing it, I grew sick. And never recovered. This, finally, was what music’s all about! Its controlled insanity, straightforward barbarism, disturbingly simple tunes (disturbing, because they were Russian, not Kentuckian), continually irregular rhythms which did and did not seem sexual (sex always comes with a steady beat), and progressively mounting ecstasy culminating not in heaven but on earth! Surely every other thirteen-year-old across the country was equally bowled over? The subtitles included a Dance of the Adolescents, which reeked of smegma. Was the word adolescence allowed in polite society? Igor Markevich, the late Franco-Russian conductor, born in 1912, the year of The Rite’s premiere, claimed to have made that work popular throughout the globe but lamented never having heard it in the old days. He quotes composer Georges Auric, born in 1899, as telling him with melancholy: “Tu connais tout du Sacre sauf ce qu’il eut d’ahurissant la première fois.” (“You know everything about The Rite except what was so stunning the first time.”) (Was Auric, at age thirteen, at the premiere?) Markevich then comments: “Les oeuvres ont leur virginité que les conservatoires ignorent.” (“Musical works have their own virginity which the academy can’t know”—echoing Pascal’s “The heart has its reason which Reason ignores.”)
To know everything but the essential! Stravinsky’s broadcast was on a Sunday afternoon, and the essential was imparted to me, if for no other reason than that I had no previous experience with which to compare it. On Monday I put all my birds into one large wicker cage—finches, waxbills, parakeets, and canaries—took them on the IC to Vaughan’s Seed Store on Randolph Street, and sold the lot for seventeen dollars. From Randolph I walked to Lyon & Healy’s on Van Buren, and with the money from the sale bought the score and disc of The Rite of Spring. For the next forty years I paid no further attention to birds, nor indeed to nature, and grew more and more nearsighted.
Then, in the summer of 1973, my friend James Holmes brought home a large middle-aged Russian Blue cat named Wallace, and I reverted. This was the start of menopause, my eyes increasingly improved, and whether or not I practice what I preach, the rights of all animals, even roaches, seem sacred.
Meanwhile, back in 1937, with all my comparative suavity in matters artistic, I had not yet had an o
rgasm, nor even knew the word.
7. Dance of the Adolescents
Jackson Park in the thirties—maybe long before, maybe still today—was an irregular verdant expanse free of commerce, extending south from Fifty-sixth Street to around Sixty-seventh Street, bounded on the west by Stoney Island and on the east by Lake Michigan. Like an indelible squish of Prussian violet from Manet’s tube, Chicago’s noble lake has governed all mundane actions inviolably for centuries. The university’s sages, the floating corpses, are all as one to the water, the water. At the top of the park looms the Museum of Science and Industry erected in 1929 by Julius Rosenwald. Memory hints that the structure is two storied, the top half held up by giant caryatids of granite, themselves four yards above ground level on a ledge a foot deep. Upon this ledge Jean Edwards and I, for no other reason than that it was there, once walked sideways for the entire mile-long circumference. Into the museum proper, a year or two later, I ventured with Norris Embry, who headed straight toward a phonographic display which allowed you to hear your own voice. Into a hand-held microphone Norris intoned:
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
with such simple eloquence that even before he pressed the playback button, Hopkins’s rhythm, new to me, was incised on my psyche and would become the source of my first true song. Behind the museum began the lagoon, wending its shallow path, wide and narrow, the length of the park and emptying into the Great Lake. A quarter mile from home, this area with its thousand crannies and thickets had been familiar since perambulator days. It was there that I, age eleven, had directed my steps in order to commit suicide, like Hedda Gabler, when Father refused to let me buy a pair of cinnamon canaries from the pet department of Marshall Field’s (“We have enough birds in the house”), and where Father secretly trailed me in the new blue Buick.