Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Nevertheless, in 1972, he performed me again. In my diary for 2 March I noted: “With a mild sense of guilt I went alone last night to A Clockwork Orange at precisely the moment when Leopold Stokowski, in Town Hall, was conducting my Pilgrims for Strings. Now Stokowski is a great man, an idol of my childhood,… but I don’t like Pilgrims anymore. My contention: the worse a piece is the worse it will sound the better it’s played, like a wart in a well-focused photo. Apparently the maestro gestured for me to rise, but I was invisible, so he shrugged and went on to the next work. (I know about this from the newspaper. No one invited me either to a rehearsal or to the program.)”

  A month later I sent to Leopold Stokowski a ninetieth-birthday homage in the guise of a heartfelt and handwrought salute. He never acknowledged it.

  Back in the 1930s I was less désinvolte. On Fifty-fifth next to the Frolic where we had seen Madame Butterfly and the scarifying Before Dawn with Warner Oland (I longed to flee but was restrained by braver cohorts) was a shop where you could buy sheet music, not just the latest hits from Flying Down to Rio or Going Hollywood, but classical scores. I still have the iron-blue copy of Rhapsody in Blue with my childish fingerings noted, and Gershwin’s own recording, neurotic and true. And I still have the aria (what was an aria?) for which I composed the text that starts: “Poor Boris lives in an attic, We love him though he lives in an attic,” to the rifled tune from Carmen’s duet which Father used to sing all by himself: “Tout cela, n’est-ce pas, mignonne, de ma part, tu le lui diras.”

  (An aria—if not by definition, at least by tradition—is designed for applause and is a part of a larger issue. A song, by its nature of miniature, is … )

  Earlier in these pages I hinted that as a child I felt the cosmos to be my own invention, and that I still to some extent believe this. I did not magnanimously add, Don’t we all?, because the “we” was also, by definition, my fabrication. Do I then feel alone in the universe? Yes, except that the universe does not exist except in my conditioned imagination. (Conditioned by whom?) Life is merely one minor possible result of the Big Bang. Reality’s dreary, art’s dreary. Those quadrillion lifeless galaxies out there are surely as curious, as potential, as Earth, which we perceive with only our five miserable senses. Yet I alone created and imagine it. Did I too create my own limited perceptions, an inability to grasp the nuances of philosophy, government systems, mathematical formulas? Did I create them so as not to understand them?

  Maybe that’s all guff, but it’s me, my paragraph. Still the paragraph can’t explain, since I myself can’t, a lingering remoteness from other people and their concerns. It does explain my ease at aping Mallarmé’s faun, French par excellence. But if France means cool, or at least objective, why can I, who am distant, be so moved by that country’s art, while finding the universe—be it God’s or mine—so second rate? Am I the author of my own auto-da-fé, should it arrive? Or of the various expensive and painful physical woes that beset me this past winter? Is it odd that Thomas Mann a century ago invented a German protagonist, in his Disillusionment, with whom I feel the most … not empathy exactly, but identity? (“Yes, death is awful and love is wonderful, but not that wonderful and awful”—the source, Jerry Leiber once told me, of his lyric for Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is?”)

  Yes, I am an atheist. There is no God, nor will I be cajoled by smarmy shots at metaphor—“Oh, Mr. Rorem, your music is so beautiful! Surely music is your God”—unless they make me, myself, God—a God I can’t believe in. No, I don’t believe in Him, but I do believe in Belief, and in the sincerity of such Belief, which has long inspired both great and wretched works of art. Some of these works have been sources for my musical impulses. Among my earliest real songs were Psalm settings. It was not my belief in God but my belief in King David’s belief in God that caused these settings to be. My musical catalogue is vast (although listed on paper it looks vaster than it lasts since hundreds of titles are simply two-minute songs). Half of that large oeuvre is choral, and half of that in turn is what the trade calls “sacred”—a musicalizing of texts suitable for church. Why do I set these texts? Because I am commissioned. (Brahms, to a fan who asks why his slow movements are so beautiful: “Because the publishers order them that way.”) If such sacred choral works are my sideline—my pornography, as Gore Vidal once termed his pseudonymous novels—they may nonetheless be seen (heard) by posterity, if there is such a thing (but of course there is, since I alone proclaim it), as my best works. A poet’s personal convictions have nothing to do with his quality; and what, anyway, is a sideline: I have not composed an uncommissioned piece in decades.

  Does one stop living in order to write about having lived? Is autobiography different in kind from symphonic composition? Symphonies do not demonstrably deal with facts of the past, nor even facts as they are currently perceived.

  Autobiography meanwhile is not, as GBS would have it, the ultimate lie. We are who we pretend to be. We are our own invention, which distinguishes us from animals. (Doesn’t it?)

  Recurring dream: I sit at a Steinway in front of seven judges. They say: Sight-read, up to tempo, this twenty-minute Etude in Sevenths by Schoenberg. If you succeed you will be given the kingdom of heaven; if you miss one note your hands will be chopped off.

  People I meet in foreign towns today are generally concert managers, conductors, and affable hostesses to whom I send thank-you notes and never see again. When I revisit Hyde Park, as a side excursion during infrequent visits in the line of duty to Chicago, not one old friend remains in the city that was once my world. (Virgil Thomson in later life: “When I go to Rome now, I don’t know a soul except the American ambassador and the pope.”) The weird thing is how little has changed; a new cast of actors in the same old décor. Or almost the same. Nothing, nothing is left of the brief block of one-story artist studios just east of the IC tracks on Fifty-seventh Street. That was once our neighborhood’s Bâteau-Lavoir. Roff Beman, Géorg Redlich, Gertrude Abercrombie, how many vanished painters, brought to the fore by the WPA and its local director, Norman MacLeish (Archibald’s brother), were toiling and giggling and drinking and dying within a bohemia that casually bisected the university milieu of my parents! Musicians too. There were the young George Perle and Laura Slobe with their fierce intelligence and bodies like Lembrecht sculptures, and John Cage passing through with his crew cut and idiosyncratic gamelans. Charlie Biesel was the crosspoint, elderly with rheumy eyes and a conventional easel style. At one of his parties somewhere in 1937 Mother and Father met and liked Belle Tannenbaum, who became my next piano teacher.

  Belle was a big-time local virtuoso and free-lance professor, bitter competitor of Molly Margolies’s, who was Ganz’s tenured assistant and scapegoat. Belle immediately tried to straighten my Impressionist bent by pushing the more “honorable” repertoire of Haydn. She was maybe fifty, four feet eleven, plump, with spindly calves, platinum hair, a huge bosom and tight black dresses, a coarsely amicable social style, and the keyboard technique of Horowitz. I adored her. Pianistically she was capable of anything. Her fingers glittered like—as she herself put it—greased lightning, in such bonbons as Ernst Toch’s Juggler or the delicious bagatelles of the young Tcherepnin. But she played lentissimo too. Any Chopin nocturne was as satisfying as it will ever need to be, with its proper waits and weights.

  Thanks to Belle we cashed in the old Stark and invested in a newish Steinway B. I can still see us that afternoon in Lyon & Healy’s wide storeroom crowded with the winged horses, Belle testing the mahogany lids with her tiny fists, kicking at the brittle wooden legs which she likened to her own “piano legs” (though aren’t true piano legs those foot-thick cylinders found on earlier models?), sitting now at this keyboard, now at that, each time easily playing—as though opening a faucet of nectar—the infinitely ruminative Prelude in G by Rachmaninoff. She sculpted my life as a pianist.

  My life as a composer remained unsupervised. Was there formal training for teenage composers in Chicago? Is there indeed
such a beast today, other than through imitation? I continued writing pieces “in the style of,” not knowing then, as I still don’t know, that Art must be Original, though I’d already heard Rimbaud’s much misused dictum, and thought it snazzy: “Il faut être absolument moderne.”

  Without ever having met another composer, something already told me that Originality is at best a minor virtue. Anyone can build a better mousetrap, but it still snares the same old mice. Poulenc, Britten, never set down an underivative measure, yet their every measure is stamped with their personality, involuntarily. In the thirties aesthetes shrieked their awe at Stravinsky’s newness, while I, in my inadvertently proper education (that of learning my own century first and foremost), took Stravinsky as a donnée, not knowing, as I would years later, that all his devices were stolen goods.

  Minor artists borrow, great ones steal. All art is clever theft. Conscious that he is stealing, the artist seeks to cover his traces. In so doing he expresses himself despite himself. The act of covering one’s traces is the act of creation.

  Art is a misquotation of something already heard. Thus, it becomes a quotation of something never heard.

  When I noted that all happy families are happy in their own way, I meant that there is a banality to sorrow, while communal respect seems rare. Not that happiness should be life’s goal; can one be happy when half the world’s burning as the other half fiddles? But happiness that is a wise pooling of resources, a healthy eccentricity sparked by the conjoining of disparate gifts, was a part of the Rorem family’s unconscious pact.

  Oh, we did have misunderstandings, even violent quarrels despite Quakerism. Concerning their early apprehension of my homosexuality, for example, my parents, who simply didn’t know about such things (maybe just vaguely through Bourdet’s The Captive, that radioactive coal on the shelf) felt it was “wrong.” At least Mother did. Father tried, but just couldn’t fathom the male torso as an erotic reference. They both, I think, considered gayety a phase, a touch of glamour to garb my passing artiness. Still, they trundled me off to a psychoanalyst, female. I just sat there. Refused to speak. Unlike most analysts, who themselves are mute, inciting patients to jabber madly, this woman prodded me. Silence. She told my parents they had “nothing to worry about,” that I was assuredly normal. And so I was: normally queer. That was the law, set down then and there, no further discussion. Rosemary and Mother and Father and I were maybe a bit uneasy, but we were “happy” with it.

  Not that they weren’t aware of The Other. Even snide at times, to my insincere surprise, for I too was snide, and cruelty comes natural to children. True, they’d joined the Society of Friends as counteraction to the human trait of collective hate. Yet Father was capable of saying at the theater, “If I leave my seat during intermission, I might come back and find it occupied by a Jewess.” And he liked the rabbi’s quip about the synagogue defecting to Quakerism: “Some of my best Jews are Friends.” If they were easier on Negroes, was it that Negroes were more vulnerable in those prewar years? In later years Mother, always suspicious of foreign languages, could refer to the influx of skinny Puerto Rican females as “jabbering birds.” She believed in equality for all, but shunned physical inconvenience (as I do) more than did Father, maybe because she was raised poor. Like Marc Blitzstein, who forever championed the working class but avoided rubbing elbows with them unless they were rough trade (which wasn’t quite elbows). Were the poor, when you got to know them, more worthy, more interesting, than the well off?

  Quakerism did explain my fascination for Catholicism, my eventual alcoholism, my preemptively edgy conversation, the need to be dominant in the parlor and submissive in the bedroom, and grossly shy, like Baudelaire’s self-tormenter.

  Je suis la plaie et le couteau!

  Je suis le soufflet et la joue!

  Je suis les membres et la roue

  Et la victime et le bourreau.

  Trying to revive the origins of these conclusions I think back. But everything fades. The smells, the bodies, the woods at night, all music, all anxiety. Nothing remains. The wind remains.

  Chicago 1940—Clockwise from front: Hatti Heiner (with bottle), cousin Lois Nash, Mother, Father, Rosemary, with NR in center.

  8. U-High—Part I

  Summer of 1937 I went to Camp Highlands in upstate Wisconsin, while Rosemary went to Camp Osoha, allowing our parents, for the first time ever, a month to themselves. Mother afterward felt guilty. Camp wasn’t going to toughen me, and why should one be toughened anyway; group living proved nothing except that it wasn’t for me. I was less lonely than bored: songfests, ball games, competition, blurring of singularity into common fun seemed aimless. Perry had been there for a month before me and was the life of the party. During recreation he played the piano in the dining room—early Debussy, Mompou’s Scènes d’enfants, as well as Mozart and Scarlatti—and managed with his panache to hold the attention in a manner inconceivable with such an age group today.

  We were less close now—he, reveling in popularity, I, a lone wolf —but we did manage to swipe together a mass of provisions from shop (brushes, chisels, canvases; why I don’t know) and to hide them beneath our beds in separate dorms. When the loot was found during a general search, I pleaded innocent—it had been “planted.” (I continued to steal longer than most kids. Not only discs from Lyon & Healy’s but in college, a score of Delius’s Summer Night on the River and of Ravel’s Trois chansons from the Northwestern library—I have them still and they’ve served me well. I always denied everything, smiling inscrutably when confronted, wondering why nobody saw through me.)

  News of George Gershwin’s early death that July reached even Camp Highlands, and I was shocked. I remember wandering off alone to the algae-covered frog pond that glowed in sad shafts of fragrant green sunshine, and jerking off (jacking off, as they say in the Middle West) into the water. I remember at 3 a.m. lifting the blanket of the boy in the bunk next to mine, to shine my flashlight on his extremely circumcised erection. And I remember a counselor, who ran the shop class, being investigated for having had some pupil jack him off. It somehow seemed so unimportant.

  I also took a couple of bassoon lessons supervised by fat Mr. Vail, the chorus master, who was also the music instructor back at U-High. Back at U-High that fall Mr. Vail, along with teaching everyone to sing college songs in unison, presented an “appreciation” course that included La mer and Boléro. Invited by my parents, Mr. Vail came chez nous to hear me play, so that I could gain special dispensation from gym in order to practice. Besides a Mozart rondo, I showed off with Cyril Scott’s Autumn Idyll, a seductive wisp of treacle (is that a proper metaphor?) which he thought the loveliest thing he’d ever heard.

  After Vail’s class, in that big room on the ground floor of Belfield Hall, Bruce and I used to play our own new records, notably Edgard Varèse’s dumbfounding Ionization for thirteen percussion instruments. This rasping etude with its moaning sirens and jangly drums, as conducted by Slonimsky, enraptured us. It was original, risky, kinetic, cultish, the true way. To a few stray students who had hung around, we explained that this was Bach. Late Bach.

  Autres temps, autres moeurs. How tame it sounds today! A new CD of Boulez conducting Varèse shows the breathtaking derivative-ness of a big work like Amériques. It could be from a notebook of rejects for The Rite of Spring in its tantrumlike tunes, rhythms, harmonies. Indeed, all of Varèse’s music is warmed-over Stravinsky, shapeless, charmless, irritating. Ionization itself, once so necessary, now comes off as merely decorative. Is there any Western music in which nonpitched battery behaves as more than maquillage?

  Most of us kids had grown up together from nursery school. Now the autumn brought new faces.

  Maggy Magerstadt. Impossible to underestimate her urgency in my life, all the more singular in that she wasn’t interested in music, that is, classical music. Apple-cheeked, blond as an apricot, quite good figure, brash. The brashness, in the shape of wisecracks backed by intelligence, blew fresh air into u
ptight U-High. She had the larynx of a man, and perfected a cruel imitation of Tom Nell, our class’s prize baritone, singing “The Road to Mandalay.” Her grades were even worse than mine; like many with low grades she grew up and is today more cultivated literarily and geographically than most of her grade-A money-making classmates. Maggy was an actress with brains, if that is not an oxymoron, more popular with girls than with boys, and the boys she knew were likely to be out of school and older. Except for me. She was, I believe, protective of if impatient with me, appreciating my less-than-callow (which in memory seems pure corn) contrast to the local mob. I was drawn to her extroversion, her catholicity. We dated, yes we did, for four years going to the school dances. There they stood, the girls in their peach taffeta formals with azure velvet trim; the boys, eyes to the ceiling, in their white summer tuxes, chic and silly. Me and Maggy, willfully contrary, in saddle shoes and daytime wardrobe, chewing gum. Never did I feel a part of anything, accepted, still don’t. Suppose I were? The confinement! But only now is that apparent. Then it was the frustration of youth, unable to explain itself to itself.… After the dances we’d go downtown to gay bars: Waldman’s in Michigan Avenue where the jukebox blared Ella Fitzgerald’s “Cootchie Coo” and where members of the all-male clientele would send glasses of champagne to our table, amused that these dewy juveniles couldn’t get otherwise served; the Rush Street bars, and two hangouts in far west borderline neighborhoods, one called Ganna Walska’s and another simply The Club Gay, whose plump owner, Babe, played piano. We were good jitterbuggers and could cut the Big Apple fine.