Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Frazier Rippy, overweight with his cardigan sweater and coy curls, looked like the child singer Bobby Breen and got good grades. He was mannered, even precious, but could, when called upon, become persuasively imperious: he played Creon to Maggy’s Antigone in the Playfesters’ production, and they both meant business. When I graduated to Northwestern in 1940, he and Maggy stayed on at the University of Chicago. After we had all migrated to New York, he was the first to move on to Europe, choosing Rome over Paris, dubbing Italian movies for a living, even acting a little: in Fellini’s 8½ he played the cardinal’s secretary. In the late 1970s he committed suicide, perhaps for reasons of the heart.

  Hatti Heiner reappeared now at ballet intermissions, ripe, purse-lipped, hay-colored, opinionated, and we became close again—one could only be near or far with Hatti. Though she had “taken” dance, as I took piano, with local modern-dance luminaries like Kurt & Grace Graff and Bertha Ochsner, she now turned up her nose at “self-expression,” preferring the colder Russian mode of style-before-content.

  Other balletomanes not connected with U-High were Don Dalton and Dick Jacob, two years older than us, roommates on Ellis Avenue. They already had jobs in the Loop, and were pals of David Fox upstairs. Dick was effete, smart, a touch nasty, with a shock of bright hair and too full lips. Don was more direct, clever but less smart. A first remembrance of them was on coming home late with Maggy, when the parents were still out, and finding our parlor rearranged: the naked statuette of the Venus de Milo turned to the wall, the firescreen upsidedown, books neatly refiled. Dick and Don, not finding David in, had knocked on our door and cousin Olga, enchanted, had let them in. Dick aspired to dramaturgy, and for a while was a BMOC at the university as author of a wildly popular review called Those Who Are Fools. As with Perry O’Neil, he eventually surveyed his artistic past without bitterness but with disinterest. As for Don, what would he have become, had not the war killed him in 1944?

  Géorg Redlich we—Rosemary and I—met as follows. One of our parents’ hard-drinking Bâteau-Lavoir chums, Roff Beman, felt that his pair of beautiful daughters should mingle a bit in a genteel ambiance. They came to dine, all dressed up, they smoked, dabbed at their plates, conversation faltered, until we asked them to introduce us to their bohemia. Géorg, who spelled his name German style but with the accent aigu and pronounced it Gay-org, was the nicest person in my life. Short, plain, a limp from polio, Jewish, with ulotrichous hair, a smile that lit the sky and a gift for listening as well as for imparting, he was a painter—Modigliani merged with Van Gogh, not bad. Very poor, as were his parents and siblings, all living at the Century Hotel on Fifty-fifth, supported by the WPA. Géorg was twenty-three, the officially sanctioned “fairy” in the militant left wing of our local artist colony. That colony did and did not approve of nonpolitical “capitalists” like the Rorems. We were doubtless more borderline between the haves and the have-nots than other university families. Everyone loved Géorg. His studio was a meeting place, a ground of truce when not of amicability, with our host setting the tone and sitting on the floor.

  He declared himself in love with me. But what did I know of love, especially with one so physically uninviting? He settled for instructing me, like the madam of a whorehouse, in what he felt were the ruses of seduction, and preened when drones approached, in bars or parties or parks, not admitting that the approach was not toward an experienced geisha but toward an available boy. Géorg was the first to instill in me a notion of myself as more than a baby brother. His life would be short, but during what remained of it he was a unique friend, good without being wishy-washy.

  David Sachs, maverick from a normal North Side fatherless Jewish family, phoned me after Rosemary, who’d met him at a party, said she had a brother “who wrote poetry.” In fact I had even written a book. It was titled (gulp!) The Door to Sorrow’s Chamber, combining the styles of Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, and James T. Farrell in a loose tale of Chicago behavior among the very young and bright and drunk. But I had never encountered a scholarly intellectual of my generation. David Sachs, impudent, of roan pigmentation, and resembling already at sixteen the famous bust of Socrates, was so far beyond me in literary repertory and organized thought that while praising my body he belittled my taste (except in music, which, like most intellectuals, he knew nothing about), giving me the inferiority complex which to some extent is retained still. David was self-assured, bad-mannered, disavowing of his sires, terribly likable, and, like Géorg, something of a pet of my parents, who dubbed him “the redheaded poet.” Though not joined to the university as either student or teacher, he had connections there and took me to weekly gatherings of a poetry club, which convened in the Harriet Monroe Library. In the shadow of McKeon’s protégés—Paul Goodman, Tom Stauffer, Edouard Roditi, Bill Earls, glib philosophers already in their late twenties—I learned to keep mum about my crush on Amy Lowell (“Christ! What are patterns for?” said the weary seamstress) when Ezra Pound was talked about. Paul Goodman, years afterward when he had become the poet to whom, as a composer, I most often petitioned for usable texts, recalled his most Proustian souvenir. In 1934, scarcely knowing me, he and Roditi had stopped by our Dorchester Avenue apartment as a lark, to pay an impromptu visit. Mother said, “Sit down, young men, Ned will be right out.” To prepare an entrance, I washed my hair. By the time I emerged they had left.

  Was there nothing David did not expound upon in his incongruous upper-class voice and above-it-all stance (“Don’t be dismayed, dear Ned, just because my vocabulary consists of a few hundred more words than yours”)? He would even be granted a cameo, as Miss Flora Sachs, in Goodman’s first novel, The Grand Piano. But David did not develop as an inventor, nor, after a few years, did he persist. He went to Saint John’s College in Annapolis, then to England for a while, then became a star in the philosophy department at Johns Hopkins. His habitual loftiness merging with teacherliness when we were kids was occasionally shattered by susceptibility. Look at this note—the only one I ever had from him—penned in red ink, with its echoing, mannered tone and final twist of Conrad Aiken so in vogue back then. It is honest, hence touching. And isn’t the reference to art as “that formal sigh” as apt this evening as it was when David Sachs slipped these words under my door fifty-five years ago?

  Ned—This is the only water to write with in the house. Now, after this time, let me say this: I think your self, or what is you, is beautiful. That your person can still image as uncorrupt a landscape as any. That within you there is possible that formal sigh given to a handful. I doubt that I have it.…

  Believe me your physical presence has little for me. It is that which is not stuff of touch. Which is always wanting to bathe in pure waters. To wash what has been, and what is. Be alone, you will learn yourself. For those waters in your eye, are more than your eye.

  David

  Another friend appearing extracurricularly in the late thirties was the Evanston painter Norris Embry. What was one to make of that body, so Christ-like and proto-Giacomettian, that troubled and lovely face resembling the young Cocteau’s, the breathless speech, part world weary and part juvenile, which never uttered banalities, the sadness, the craziness? He went to a different school, never quite fit in, but hung around, knowing everyone and everything but remaining forever an anchorite. He too went on to Saint John’s College, site of neurotic male Wasp geniuses, was expelled from there, then from other schools, for being, so far as I can judge in retrospect, not so much drunk as overly fanciful. He would fall out of windows, break bones, get beat up by rough trade, send poems and poseys to impossible recipients (movie stars, prizefighters), and end up for long stays in loony bins. During one such stay, exasperated and done in by the academic specialists’ Freudian prying, he finally, out of sheer boredom, rushed to the door, pointed down the hall, and screamed: “RABBITS! Here they come!” For that he was given an A.

  Norris set up house eventually in Mykonos, where the locals found him apparently no weirder than most Americans, and
where he could dispense his meager but regular allowance (the family paid him to stay away) on wine, men, and song. For all of us over the years, wherever and whenever Norris appeared, he was as welcome for his adaptability (he could just curl up over there in the corner) as for his huge talent. For he worked as hard as he played. He never sent a letter (and he sent thousands) without enclosing an inked comic strip à la Dubuffet of what he was up to. During none of these “appearances” was he without a suggestion for a poem I might set to music. This poem he would immediately write out from memory on the back of a menu, and yes, I would set it to music. My dearest songs are those that would not have existed but for Norris. (I have no taste in poetry, but infallible taste in those who do.) I saw him last in Baltimore in 1979, with David Sachs, at his filthy flat. He was an outpatient at Johns Hopkins. I bought three powerful paintings. They hang in my front hall. He died two years later, aged fifty-nine.

  Then there were Rosemary’s beaux, in whose presence I for too long played precocious kid brother. Chief among these for a time was Donald—known as Didi (he was born in China)—Robertson, who lived down toward International House on Dorchester, with two brothers and parents, cultured to the gills. (It was on their Capeheart that we had first heard Daphnis melting out onto the pavement, though Robertson père thought it would be healthier for us to heed Mozart.) Didi was bright and infantile, cute, straight, big crush on my sister, a devotee of Aristotle as well as the then-in-vogue Saroyan, and a terrific pop pianist. He grew up to marry a pop singer, and to play in jazz bands, and to take very seriously Elvis Presley. His effervescence lacked mystery.

  This dramatis personae was not a gang. It included from time to time our cousins, Kathryn and Lois Nash, who came from Yankton for protracted stays, and who fit neatly into the rounds of bars. Many of the cast scarcely knew, or cared for, the others; the common bond was me. Nearly everyone had dallied with at least one other member. Did anyone say “I love you”?

  Love? Well, at least it shows you you’re alive. Can anything else positive be claimed for the asinine folly? (I speak here about being in love, not about loving tout court.) Unrequited, nothing productive comes from the anguish. Requited, it’s égoisme à deux. Either way there’s little to show for it, except scars without a battle. Being in love doesn’t take you out of yourself, the way, say, that “good works” or art are said to do; it takes you into yourself. Sex and love are mutually exclusive, and sex as an exercise is probably the healthier of the two.

  That said (I could not have thought so back then), did we pause to consider it? Love was a phenomenon in the air more than now, a “commitment.” But how could I so soon consider Love, in the light of Edouard Roditi at the poetry club intoning in his continental accent, Kay Boyle’s oh-so-sophisticated Defense of Homosexuality (“I speak of it as a thing with a future/As yet badly done by amateurs/Neglecting the opportunity to be discriminating.… a vocation as engrossing as bee raising/And as monotonous to the outsider”)?

  We all smoked a lot, as did our parents. In my case it was nontipped Chesterfields, even after king-sized filters arrived. A pack a day from 1937 to 1972, about a million and a half cigarettes.

  We all drank a lot, mostly draft beer, sometimes Tom Collinses when on a date, later dry martinis at any time of day or night. In retrospect, except for me and Norris, I don’t recognize it as a developing problem for anyone.

  We all drove around a lot in our families’ cars—those whose families had cars. This did not include Géorg or Dick Jacob or the Young Communist Leaguers, by definition poor. It was Rosemary who taught me to drive, one morning in an empty parking lot near Jackson Park, and Don Dalton, a week later, who threw me into the maelstrom of the Loop, where no one was allowed to sink. I was a skilled driver, drunk or sober, denting the fender no more than three or four times. I chalked up 100,000 miles before leaving the Midwest for good, end of 1942. I never drove again, though in 1961 when I tried for a license renewal in Provence, I failed. God no longer wanted me to drive.

  No sooner did I learn than Miriam Carey, who was “fast,” urged me to take her to that same empty parking lot and “neck.”

  Maggy Magerstadt was hardly so aggressive. Because we were in classes together daily and “went out” in the evenings, we were all inseparable. Indeed, when Maggy flunked algebra in Miss John’s junior class, I flunked too, on purpose, so as to stay with her the following year. We loved each other but without carnality. Here is the moment to say that, despite the until recently dispelled idée reçue, I am no descendant of Oedipus. I adore my father. And I adore women. I like to dance with them, comb their hair, listen to their logic, which, when educated, seems tighter than male logic. I like to read their books, see them act, feel their clothes. I like everything about women except sexual contact. That instantaneous Yes or No with which we silently size up everyone we meet, for me was never Yes with women. Even with men, I’m indifferent to perhaps 99 percent. Of course, the remaining 1 percent takes up a great deal of room.

  The sense of removal I spoke of springs consciously from this period, although possibly the sense was there from birth. We choose, after all, which specific moments to be influenced by; and if I have no moral instinct, at least I select the “right” people to emulate in a moral climax. An incident lingers. Autumn of 1937 we went en masse to Capra’s Lost Horizon. Its premise was strange and alluring, as was the scenery. But even then I saw through the sexist smarm, and the unexplained contradiction in the murder by the Shangri-la contingent of a Chinese pilot so as to kidnap the Caucasian passengers into a finer world. When the movie was over, Didi Robertson, moved to the quick, sat, head in hands, long after the lights came up and other filmgoers had filed out. I waited unenthralled like the Black Fairy, until we could escort Didi in tears from the theater. It struck me as vulgar that one might so publicly show one’s emotions, and as obscene that these emotions should spring from such a specious load of crap. Spontaneity, like overreaction, embarrassed me.

  Liquor would become a great leveler, a mode for, among other virtues, indulging silliness like Didi’s with a clear conscience. I drank intensely and often, though not yet to the point of losing consciousness and suffering blackouts. I worked intensely and often, already to the point of finding oblivion in a concentration that ignored the rights of others, or even the fact of others. A universal but unspoken conundrum had begun to swell like a boil inside me, continuing with the years but never bursting: How can an artist attain the discipline to create lasting beauty without simultaneously being seduced, even dissipated, by that beauty? (Beauty, of course, doesn’t mean just roses: a Greco crucifixion is as “beautiful” as a Boucher nude. Not content, but form: artists don’t primarily deal in subject matter—despite what Didi and other layfolk prate about “inspiration”—so much as in shape; The Rite of Spring in all its complexity is perfect, i.e., inevitable; you need only change one note to introduce a rotten apple.) I resolved the paradox, unlike Mann’s Aschenbach, by slicing the Gordian knot, having my cake and eating (drinking) it. Those who say, “If only Ned hadn’t been so self-indulgent, etcetera, what he could have produced!” aren’t talking of Ned but of some romantic hero who thinks Good Thoughts. Artists don’t think Good Thoughts, though they sometimes describe them. Only saints are good. Et encore!

  Arthur Danto, The Nation’s long-winded art critic, recently asked himself why he was never convinced by the paintings of Francis Bacon. Then he came upon an interview wherein Bacon claimed that the Screaming Pope series was not a trauma about, or a commentary on, life today, merely studies of a screaming pope. Danto, decreeing what should or should not preoccupy creators as they create, concluded that Bacon was superficial. I can’t read Danto anymore without giggling. (Kafka, according to Max Brod, who told Manuel Rosenthal, who told me, thought of his stories as studies: The Penal Colony to him was a great joke.) The artist is simply a conduit twixt the Great Unknown and the concertgoer, and need have no fixed notions of his own. He is god without a message. We consumers w
ill make the message.

  As I type this paragraph there is a drizzle over Nantucket the late morning of 27 July 1992. The sky is dark and cold, crows and gulls squawk out there, the lamp is on in here, while downstairs ensues a lulling, undecipherable conversation between Veronica and Danny, teenagers from the Dominican Republic whom, along with two others, JH has brought out for the week. Danny is ironing. In faraway Yugoslavia women and children and animals, men and churches and museums, are inanely slaughtered. Masses of bismuth-hued roses in the backyard (I perceive them over the top of my glasses as I write) are fading. The drizzle has stopped, at least momentarily. Who beyond myself is aware of this congruence of “messages”? What’s important and what’s not? By afternoon I, too, will have forgotten, or at least rejuggled the priorities of, these discrepancies. How much more imprecise are the distant episodes in a memoir, my viewpoint shifting day by day according to mood and sharpness of recall. All is mercury. There simply is no past. But neither is there a present.

  Rosemary was having an affair with an older boy. She had begun to frequent a branch of the YCL, or Young Communist League, which convened, at least on social occasions, in the minuscule one-story shack of a Morry Wessel, on Fifty-seventh across from Steinway’s drugstore. It was there we heard for the first time records of Milhaud’s gigantic Choéphores (did I already know his Création du monde?), Carillo’s Preludio al Cristóbal Colón (eerier even than Ionization), and, almost incongruously, “The Red Army Song,” while drinking wine from gallon jugs. And it was there that Rosemary met a Japanese-American named Bob Chino, known to all simply as Chino. He was sinewy, cocky, handsome (a male counterpart of Teru Osato), caramel colored, defensive, very political. Politics, then as now, was low on my list; to me the YCL crowd was appealing—unlike their later one-track-minded humorlessness—for their rowdy, liberated artiness and magnanimity rather than for their concern with world injustice. But the stinking winds of Nazism were blowing over our chaste Midwest. One afternoon in Scammons Gardens I overheard some kids improvising lyrics to the then-popular ditty “You, Too, Can Be the Life of the Party”: