Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  You, Jew, can be the life of the party,

  You, Jew, can be the hit of the show.

  You can learn to stamp

  In a concentration camp,

  Leading by a nose and a toe.

  I supposed it was witty but didn’t know what a concentration camp was.

  Chino knew. Indeed, there was a question of his family’s being interned right here in the USA. And Rosemary took the aims of the YCL, and of Chino, to heart for years. She marched with them—with him. In front of the Piccadilly, where the film Blockade was showing, they held high their placards shouting WHERE IS THE CONSCIENCE OF THE WORLD. These were the final lines of the movie about the Spanish Civil War, a war in which Géorg had served, volunteering with other American Loyalists. Despite this valor, Chino never took Géorg seriously, homosexuality being frowned upon even by the highbrow Communists.

  I meanwhile was having an affair with Thomas Stauffer, a university graduate in philosophy, proud of having hosted Bertrand Russell and fixing him up with a very blond matron. Athletic, Stauffer was tall, with a brush cut, superciliously sadistic with me, physically exciting, but a boor and musically reactionary. (Ravel, who had died at Christmas in 1937, leaving me brokenhearted, was, according to Stauffer, a zero compared to Mozart. Mozart remains the undisputably safe idol for musical know-nothings.) Whether Rosemary went farther with Chino than I with Stauffer, I cannot guess. I would go to his room in the family house on Kimbark after midnight. We kissed a lot, then I would sleep. How can I forget his observation that “anyone who’s as pretty asleep as awake is inherently stupid”? Should not philosophy teach people to be nice to each other? Yet he wrote me a note about the lingering taste of tobacco on his lips (he didn’t smoke, I did) and how that distracted him from his work. Mother read the note, then asked me about the hickey on my neck (how did she know the word? I didn’t). I protested weakly that it must have been Marilyn Joselit who gave it to me. Marilyn was president of the Blue Mirror, U-High’s poetry group.

  It was then that Mother sat me and my sister down for a talk. We were at a perilous crossroads, she said, but she had once been our age. She was profoundly anxious that Rosemary might get pregnant, profoundly anxious that I might be cruel. Miriam Carey had already at sixteen become pregnant. To her credit she married the culprit, and, as Mrs. Sam Norwood, lived happily ever after in Atlanta until her suicide forty years later. “I won’t mind what you do,” Mother told me, “as long as you don’t make others unhappy. Try to be happy yourself. It may not be easy.”

  And it was then that she told us that she and Father had had their ups and downs. Could we think back to when she used to cry so much? When Father was gone so much? Well, he was having an affair with Miss Ring, his secretary. And Mother herself was having an affair with Davis Edwards, Jean’s father.

  I was stunned. Not because I couldn’t imagine my parents in such a posture: Father, after all, though not an homme moyen sensuel, was certainly an homme exceptionnel sensuel, while Mother loved perfumed soap and Carl Sandburg and highballs. It’s that Miss Ring and Mr. Edwards were … such bizarre choices: she a cripple, he walleyed. Never, so far as I know, were there other infidelities, and these had caused more anguish than joy.

  Did Rosemary and I learn more from this lesson than that our parents were just like us? Well, she eventually had six children in wedlock, and I may have made somebody unhappy. But it wasn’t our fault.

  Let me catch my breath.

  Have I been heading uphill or down? Have I practiced what I preach about knowing when to stop? Are many people really interested in other people’s Sensitive Childhood? Don’t readers prefer, even from Einstein, gossip? Is gossip ever interesting—or even applicable—before there is adult interaction with others?

  Now, interaction with others precludes, for an artist, getting his work done, yet it is because of his work that he qualifies as a memoirist, even if he can’t write. Even if he can write, an artist doesn’t know the secret of his art, much less how to impart the secret except through the art itself. If he could define the secret, he could bottle it and make a killing. So when all he has to mull over is his Sensitive Childhood, it’s hard to know what to leave out.

  I’ve been cohering these pages from hundreds of scattered notes, which Father used to claim is the wrong way to go about anything. Make notes, yes, then throw them out and plow on chronologically. Shall I speed things up for the next few years?

  Rosemary at seventeen, Ned at fifteen, in Twig, Minnesota, summer 1939.

  9. U-High—Part II

  Summer of 1938 in Canada is recalled mainly through our photo album: no peaks, no shallows, no rifts, no movies, no music, and certainly no sex.

  Movies from the previous winters had mainly been seen at the Art Cinema on Michigan Avenue: Club des femmes, in which pretty Josette Day, after being defiled by a rich American, showers with a huge sponge (could I find a huge sponge in Chicago?); Princess Tam-Tam, in which beloved Josephine Baker danced savagely in sequins before the Parisian gratin (might I find sequins?); La grande illusion, in which Von Stroheim is bemused to hear of prisoners escaping dressed as women (men dressed as women?). But American movies too. Today, with memory jogged by TV reruns, I seem to have seen every film ever made. Not just grade-A vehicles of our sacred monsters—Mae West, Dietrich, Garbo, Crawford, swathed in the pelts and plumes of slain ermines and egrets, with their short bodies, strong shoulders, and large heads (Bill Flanagan used to call them the Rat Ladies, while Parker Tyler named them “impersonators of female impersonators”)—but all the middle-class comedies and dramas of Gail Patrick, Fay Ray, Joan Blondell, Dorothy Jordan. Do I mention only actresses? Actors were appendages.

  Music consisted of heavy doses of the Chicago Symphony under Frederick Stock, plus season tickets to a piano series sponsored by the Adult Education Council. How many times did we hear Artur Schnabel and his definitive renditions of the Austrian giants. Born in 1882, a mere fifty-five years after the death of Beethoven, Schnabel seemed the current embodiment of that composer with his authoritative freedom, sloppy accuracy, unfrightened rinforzati, and trancelike colorations, not to mention the audible snorts that accompanied every phrase, making us unsure of what to listen for through this static, beclouding a presumed authenticity.

  Then there were heavy doses of the so-called popular: Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, the mother and father of a generation, with their Gershwin and Porter songs equal in vocal arch and harmonic ingenuity to the songs of Monteverdi and Schumann. And the rarefied divas. Bruce showed up with still another album of Dietrich singing “Ja so bin Ich,” “Allein in einer grossen Stadt,” and “Wo ist der Mann” with a baritone growl never heard before on land or sea, pitched only vaguely, but licentious and involved, permitting one who didn’t understand German to understand German. (Does that define good lieder singing?) Norris showed up with an album of Mae West, “Easy Rider,” “Frankie and Johnny,” and “A Guy What Takes His Time.” At the start of the last named we hear a thrice-uttered “Oh,” the lewdest lone syllable ever recorded. Mother thought Mae West was cheap (well I guess so) and irresistible.

  Stirring this recipe of films into the good and bad plays we regularly saw (Helen Menken in The Old Maid, Eugenie Leontavich in Romance), stirring the Ballets Russes and modern dance recitals (Ted Shawn, for instance, and Ruth Page, who was a local star) into the touching antics of Rogers and Astaire, stirring the programs of grand opera (which I couldn’t take to, except for Madama Butterfly) and Gilbert and Sullivan into the indiscriminate fare of pre-Broadway tryouts like You Never Know with the shocking Libby Holman, or WPA shows like Meet the People, I realize now that without batting an eye we mixed high and low art, giving them always equal billing.

  • • •

  On the return from Canada that fall of ’38 it was thought I should seek supplemental formal training. As a university man, Father took a dim view of conservatories like the Chicago Musical College, where Perry had his weekly lessons with Ganz. But after c
onferring with Belle, who knew a thing or two about the local scene, my parents allowed me to enroll in a harmony course at the rival school, called the American Conservatory, on Wabash Avenue.

  Leo Sowerby was, with John Alden Carpenter, the most distinguished composer of the Middle West. It was he, somewhat to my surprise, who would teach the humble class to which I repaired each Wednesday after school for the next two years. Of my parents’ generation, a bachelor, reddish complexioned like David Sachs and milky skinned, chain smoker of Fatima cigarettes, unglamorous and nonmysterious, likable with a perpetual worried frown, overweight, and wearing rimless glasses, earthy, practical, interested in others even when they were talentless, a stickler for basic training. Sowerby was the first composer I ever knew, and the last thing a composer was supposed to resemble. He was a friendly pedagogue.

  There were five in the class which was “noncreative”: we harmonized in the abstract, using given soprano lines or figured basses, we did not harmonize in the concrete, nor did we analyze preexisting works. We weren’t composers: all was theory, rigorous, nonevolving. Sowerby could absorb at a glance any veering in our exercises from the narrow paths of each eight-measure period we “realized.” In those twenty-four months, how many thousands of eight-measure periods did I grind out? What had this to do with inspiration? Would it in some way steer me to becoming an expressive artist? I didn’t think so, though I did feel that in industry as in romance it is better to act and have remorse than not to act and have regret. If I had a regret it’s that I did not take a simultaneous course in counterpoint (the word rang with the fright of adulthood), but how could I have known? I do believe now that those studies bore a direct relation to the canny voice-leading on my every page today, to my conviction that every note must be accounted for in rapport with every note preceding, and that in music as in life one thing leads to another.

  From this cool dryness how did I, a teenager, become so socially warm with Leo Sowerby, aged forty-four? Did he, who lived in a third-floor apartment a few blocks north of us ever visit us on Dorchester as I visited him on Blackstone? In the family we all referred to him as Leo, but did they ever see him? If one thing leads to another in life as in music, who took the initiative? At any rate, on various occasions I was Leo’s weekend guest at Palisades Park in his native Michigan. His summer house there, modest to a fault, was really a screened-in cabin, one of dozens on a steep, gloomy hill overlooking the lake. Leo always had another guest, a colleague perhaps, or a former pupil. Meals, preceded by martinis, were cooked (without my help; what did I know? I was supposed to be scribbling harmony in the next room) on a kerosene stove, like those we once used in Vermont, served with quarts of red wine, and consumed in the glow of oil lamps. I will not forget the episode (even now I shudder) of growing rapidly tipsy one evening, rising from table and, with what I may have thought of as a Brontëan sweep, rushing pell-mell out of the house and down toward the beach, unaware of a thick wire en route, breast-high in the underbrush, that could snap a body in two. Leo yelled through the darkness while his other guest (Dick Cornelius, a graduate student) rushed after and tackled me. That night Leo put me to bed shakily, bending over to kiss me full on the lips, tears in his eyes. What was I to think? It hadn’t occurred to me that mature men from the world of thought could harbor affectionate, much less sensual, feelings for someone as insignificant as myself.

  It was at this time I showed Leo my notes for “Song of Songs” (again I shudder), feeling a surge of pride as he showed the opening bars to Delamarter. “Look at the curve of that alto line. Isn’t it beautiful?” But Leo was not a composition professor. He looked kindly at my unshaped assays but didn’t make suggestions. Nor was he an intellect—what we called sophisticated—despite his quick intelligence and specialized prolificity. I advised him to read Pierre Louÿs and Knut Hamsun, of which he found Aphrodite “precious,” but Growth of the Soil “the real thing.” (Would these favored novels ring true today, or pall, on the one hand with rehearsed decadence and on the other with proto-Nazism?)

  As to Leo’s own music, I was shy of it. That he served as organist and choirmaster at Saint James’s Church on Rush Street (between two gay bars, though he wouldn’t have known), and excelled in sacred music, was stuffy and off-putting. Not until 1943, when I heard Paul Callaway in Washington play the haunting and sinuous Arioso for organ solo, and a few years later heard Hugh Ross in New York conduct the premiere of the cantata on texts of Saint Francis, did I realize there was more to Sowerby than academic facility.

  Paul Callaway was another passing guest in Palisades. A wiry pixie with a constant smile, fourteen years my senior, he was a charmer with a major job—music director of Washington Cathedral. He asked me to phone him in a week, at the Palmer House, when he’d be back in Chicago. Leo later, in private, said that I should.

  I had not before associated drinking with eating. Getting drunk with peers on Saturday nights was postprandial behavior (the prandial behavior itself having been with our families), though we might at 3 a.m. have a hamburger at some White Tower. The ceremony, robust as it was, of including wine with meals chez Leo Sowerby was an odd though easy pleasure. Surely it loosened my tongue—enough to repeat the now-tired joke, “Who are the three Bs of music? Answer: Bach, Beethoven, and Sowerby.” Leo proffered a lame smile. To atone I composed for him an Ave Maria. He also prodded me into writing an (unfinished) organ sonata.

  I did phone Paul Callaway and accepted his dinner invitation, telling my parents the truth—that he was an important middle-aged associate of Leo’s. “Why is he so interested in you?” they wondered. At the Palmer House we dined on room service, downing split after split of sparkling burgundy, the ultimate luxury. Then we went out to some dreary bars in the Loop. We returned to the hotel and had more burgundy, which tasted now less thrilling. When Paul kissed me in the ear my first response was: “What would Leo say?” “He would approve, I assure you.” One thing led to another, which was a luxury too. I told Hatti about it next day, and she was thrilled—sex with a bona fide grown-up!

  I have kept the radiant letters Paul Callaway mailed over the next months. I dwell on him now because he would become one of the crucial figures in my professional life, and the first of My Three Pauls. (The others were Goodman and Bowles.)

  Word associations:

  Billie = white bread in stewed tomatoes

  Holiday = Waldorf salad (apples, nuts, celery, mayonnaise)

  But the two words together evoke a near-morbid enchantment, wrenching the spirit from the body and letting it rise to heaven, which turns out to be hell.

  Somewhere in 1938 Dick Jacob—or was it Don Dalton?—brought over the new Commodore record of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” paving the way by playing the reverse side first, “Fine and Mellow” (“so you can get used to her strange style”). The process was slower than with The Rite of Spring, but the effect of her performance would be as singular on my notion of what music was all about. “Fine and Mellow,” with Holiday whining her own iambic pentameter (“My man doesn’t love me, treats me all so mean/He’s the lowest man that I’ve ever seen”) was an ideal curtain-raiser to “Strange Fruit,” the portrait of a lynching. Had anything remotely like it been heard before (“Miss Otis Regrets” and “Suppertime” were mere teases)? Billie’s oxymoronic qualities—the studied freedom; the sorrowful pleasure; the tinny, velvet timbre—defined the music, even as they answered Yeats’s question: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Other than these two one-of-a-kind songs, we soon discovered that her repertory was largely mediocre Tin Pan Alley rejects. It wasn’t the tune but her way with the tune. She did sing classics of Gershwin and Porter, and lesser but solid ditties like “More Than You Know” or “My Man.” But these somehow were wrenched from their composers and, despite herself, appropriated by Billie Holiday. One definition of jazz as distinct from classical: a music wherein composer and performer are one, and where that “one” is different at each presentation. (A Schnabel may ev
oke, even become, Beethoven, but he doesn’t rewrite Beethoven.) In bending a phrase, stretching a melody, delaying the beat so as to “come in wrong” just right, she forever influenced my own approach to song writing.

  Billie Holiday appeared that winter at the Sherman Hotel’s Panther Room. We all went—as did, seemingly, every white liberal collegian in Illinois. We downed our Tom Collinses, then ordered more. And waited. (Drinking age in Chicago then was twenty-one; how did we get served, much less get drunk, as regularly as we did?) When finally she materialized, without fanfare but in purple, she sang something called “Jim,” a spin-off of Kern’s “Bill,” which hypnotized us despite the stunning banality of the lyrics (“Jim doesn’t ever bring me pretty flowers, Jim doesn’t try to fill my lonely hours”). We had no previous concept of how she’d look. Now there she stood, handsome and straight, magnetic and still, except for a slight circular motion of the left arm, snapping her fingers imperceptibly. Unlike the overwrought delivery of so many female pop singers who interpret, explaining the words with their bodies and who between stanzas play with their hair, but like her grand international peers, Piaf and Lenya, Holiday scarcely moved, saving until the climax the moment for closing her eyes, tilting back her head, as mountains crumbled. When the room darkened, except for a blue spotlight on her head, and she began “Strange Fruit,” a unison “Ah!” sounded from the assembly, a sound I have always loathed, but of course I uttered it too.

  We didn’t try to speak with her. I do remember jitterbugging on the parquet, appropriately enough to “ ’Taint what you do, it’s the way how you do it,” falling flat on my face, trying to drag Hatti down with me, and gazing up at the indifferent, well-off, left-wing dancers as I rubbed my sprained ankle.