by Ned Rorem
Gilberte and Magda announced that we would be joined by the composer Paul Bowles and his wife. The name rang a bell. Dick Jacob the previous winter had seen the touring company of Helen Hayes’s Twelfth Night, which he found dreary except for the music, which he raved about, by someone named Paul Bowles. Except for Sowerby, I had never met a recognized composer, nor anyone whose reputation preceded him. But since I didn’t know his music I was not intimidated. Bowles did not, any more than Sowerby, look like a composer, i.e., a somber, thoughtful, bearded nineteenth-century German. His direct Americanness, the blond thirty-year-old good looks, and informality despite the necktie in July, made him seem accessible in the extreme, at least on that day in that climate. An ivory cigarette holder was his sole exotic accoutrement. With passing years I would discover that Paul was accessible to no one; whether involuntary or by design his oxymoronic stance was one of aloof friendliness, beckoning unapproachability, the artist as voyeur, more concerned with the hopeless sensuality of all men than with the eager sexuality of one man. Here, however, he seemed to want to give the impression (I’ve observed this often in married homosexuals) that he wasn’t all that “involved” with Jane. “Such intimacy!” quoth he, to my astonishment, as Jane, seated next to him on the Indian leather love seat, gigglingly ran her fingers down his spine. That their identities, separately or together, were other than heterosexual never occurred to me. Jane was neither hot nor cold à mon égard, but I found her immensely beguiling with that ski-jump nose and frowsy hair, like a boy in a skirt, sexless but vital. Three languages were in session (for Magda was a Spanish marquesa, Gilberte a French countess), and this impressed me enough to want to go home and study, especially when Paul described a giant scorpion in his bathtub, and the countess cried, “Quelle horreur!” which sounded so much stronger than “How horrible!” Paul invited me to his studio next afternoon, as one musician to another.
For one so worldly—been everywhere, known everyone—Paul coveted aloneness, still does. The studio, if I recall, was off in the wilds and contained a serape-covered mattress, upright piano, phonograph, records, and a thousand books. I had dutifully brought along a manuscript: a set of piano variations on the French noel “Il n’y avait ni chandelle ni feu,” puerile, overly ornate, with a penultimate movement grandly titled Cadenza. Paul glanced at it. “I’ll bet you can play the cadenza,” said he, rather patronizingly as though to a kid. He put on a recording of Copland’s Music for the Theater which bowled me over. The zany opening trumpet resolving into the stern, sweet strings! The nervy, brash Scherzo! The lean but telling language of a land I knew well but had never heard spoken! American music! Paul then played a piece of his own, the score for a documentary film, I think, and I tactfully said, “It sounds like Music for the Theater” He drew forth Modern Music magazine and quoted an essay apropos of himself and Copland: “The master has been more influenced by the student than vice versa.”
Did Paul Bowles run his fingers down my spine? I don’t remember seeing him again that trip, though Jane was ever in view, coming and going through the byways, usually in the station wagon of an odd-looking “older woman” named Helvetia Perkins, and at Paco’s.
Paco’s was the café, a tiny restaurant with a balcony overlooking the central xocalo where everyone hung out during the afternoon and early evening before going to parties. It was there one languorous Sunday that two young male Americans—as people from the States are called—approached Father and me and invited us to a gathering later at the Major’s. The Major turned out to be a middle-aged retiree; his gathering featured effete tequila-laden lads of various backgrounds and a few sociable dowagers to whom Father talked. I talked to Robert Faulkner, known to the world as Bu, a sometime employee at The New Yorker, with somnolent eyes, a blobby mouth, and the reputation, despite drunken incoherence half the time, for being hysterically funny. Within five minutes he uttered this cosmopolitan limerick:
There was a young lady from Spain
who had a peculiar pain.
She opened her cunt
and found Alfred Lunt,
Noël Coward, and Lynn Fontanne.
It was rumored that Bu was paid by his family (as Norris Embry was paid by his) to stay away. During the following decades I ran into his always pleasant but idle company wherever in the globe I wandered—Florence, Paris, Tangier—except Keene, New Hampshire, his hometown, where I passed two summers at the MacDowell Colony. While Bu rattled on I eyed a short, swarthy American with intelligent eyes who was soberly holding up an inebriated Indian called Aldo. The American eyed me back.
Next afternoon while Father was taking his nap I sat in the xocalo. (Father’s naps from time immemorial were sacred in the family, they kept him young, and the rest of us were admonished to silence during the ritual. At Cadbury, the retirement home, the nap times had expanded. “I take a nap before each meal,” said Father, “including before breakfast.”) The swarthy American with the intelligent eyes walked by, spotted me, and sat down on the bench. This was Maurice R., about thirty, an instructor of romance languages in California. Within an hour we had decided to visit Acapulco together, if I could persuade my father to let me go. Which I did, but without saying that I was taking the trip with another person.
I have never gone back to Taxco. But early in 1968 I did see Acapulco again and found it unrecognizable. The town had become a city with stucco hotels, terraced lawns, menacing somehow, with its brothels and discos and money. La Playa Caleta is a country club today. In 1941 it was a wild near-empty beach of incandescent splendor miles from the center. It was here that Maurice and I settled after a five-hour bus ride, dangerous and affectionate, in a French pension on the south end, fifty yards up the hill. On another hill at the north end a mile away was a similar pension, and in between on the expanse of snowy sand that sloped into the emerald Pacific was a large cabaña with several tables and a jukebox that continually played the two sultry hits of that summer, “Esta noche” and “Amor,” plus the standard frisky airs named for local cities, “Guadalajara” and “Tampico.”
By day we swam and drank cerveza and made love in a hammock on the private deck, and by night we made love and swam and drank cerveza against a sonic blend of wind and chirping insects and the jukebox far down on the beach. The “making love” was not complex. I may have been promiscuous but was certainly no callous roué nor even very adventurous; it was almost sufficient to know I was desired: the knowledge replaced the act. Then, too, Maurice may have not wanted to damage the goods, knowing they would eventually be delivered back to Father. He would speak about Ravel’s String Quartet, about his teaching curriculum, and then about my body “gleaming with a golden adolescent fuzz like the marble dust on a just-finished statue” (does one forget such words?), which gave me a feeling of power, as did my Gentile versus his Jewish aura. Once he said, “You know, in Taxco nobody believes your father is your father.” I was surprised and offended.
When I told Father, he was not amused. He meanwhile had remained in Taxco, befriending Bu and a dozen others sitting around at Paco’s, including Magda and Gilberte. They said to him, on hearing he was from Chicago, “A young composer from Chicago recently came to tea, but he didn’t want to bring his father, imagine!” During this fortnight separation I don’t remember how, or if, we kept in touch. I do know that when Maurice and I left the Pacific we hired a third-rate automobile with two chauffeurs and went straight to Mexico City, stopping in Taxco only for a quick tequila while the drivers refueled. So it must have been somehow understood that Father and I would rejoin each other in the capital. When night fell and an icy breeze wheezed through the car windows, Maurice and I covered ourselves in the back seat and made love unbeknown to the drivers, or so we thought.
Of the second stopover in Mexico City I remember only that Father and I returned to El Salón México, this time with Maurice R., whom Father was meeting for the first time and liked (I explained that we had met in Acapulco), and that Jose Paredes and Carlos were also there
. I got drunk on cerveza, said nothing but lowered my head on my arms, face to the table, and listened to the drone of chatter and to the irritating mariachis. Father had never before seen me under the influence. We were staying now at the Hotel Montejo—more intimate and presentable than the Reforma to our new friends—where I passed out, to his dismay. And I don’t remember bidding good-bye to Maurice after this, my first honeymoon, nor how I felt then about it. A year or so later he passed through Chicago. I met his train (many hours late) at Union Station, and we sat in his berth and kissed. Then in 1944 he visited me briefly in New York chez Morris Golde. In anticipation of this visit I made a piano arrangement of the Ravel quartet to play for him. We never saw each other again. But in 1991 he wrote me care of my music publisher. Did I remember those tropical weeks a half century ago? he wanted to know.
Father and I returned to Chicago gradually by way of Louisiana, where again he had consultations with hospital supervisors, and where again I left the hotel to cruise the Vieux Carré, and again got tight. What was I after—there, or in the thousand bars during the thousand years to come? Father was always an attractive combination of optimism and cynicism. The world could be a better place, yes, especially if it followed his advice about group medical insurance. He also believed that, yes, rich people are evil, but so is everyone else. (He liked to say that someone was born “of poor but dishonest parents.”) He was naïve, too, and certainly not lubricious.
Five years after that Mexican summer Paul Bowles wrote a story called “Pages from Cold Point.” It presents a widowed American father and his sixteen-year-old son, Racky, who take an extended vacation on a Caribbean island. Racky gets into serious trouble, which the father at first refuses to recognize, by seducing every male native in the area, threatening their exposure (he is a minor) if they don’t put out. The father ultimately forbids the son’s sorties, has an incestuous affair with him, then sends him off to Havana, where Racky will continue his free style. The tale, in the first-person voice of the father, flows with such smooth grace and fierce heat—the double face of goodness—that one wonders whence sprang the polished technique in so short a time. In 1941 no one thought of Bowles as a writer.
Back in Chicago my first actions were to buy the record of Copland’s Music for the Theater, and to begin composing another piano suite, La playa Caleta. To Maggy and Hatti I gave cruciform earrings from Bill Spratling’s silver shop in Taxco, and to Rosemary and Mother, silver brooches and silver eggcups to contrast with the brass-and-wooden ones from Stavanger. For Géorg and Jo Redlich, to tickle their nostalgia, went discs of “Amor” and “Esta noche.” These were received quietly.
One Saturday night Maggy and Géorg and I went to a small all-boy party where Géorg, in his cups, wept out his woes. Jo, he said, disliked him, had married him only to go to Mexico, laughed at him, while delivering the final zinger—their daughter, Carla, was sired by Carlos. I drove Maggy home, leaving Géorg in the arms of a brown-haired stranger. Next morning Mother, annoyed by my indolent liquid sleep habits, forced me to go with the family to Sunday Meeting. When we returned shaky in the sunlight, the phone rang. It was Jo, saying cheerfully that Géorg was in the morgue, and could Father go down and identify him? There’d been a car wreck, the brown-haired stranger had been lacerated (both ears sliced off), and Géorg killed outright. Father said Géorg’s head had swollen to twice its normal size.
This was my first death, from which I have yet to recover. It had no meaning, art was no substitute, death was for grandparents, not for peers, and life, at least for survivors, goes on forever, shifting. Ars brevis, vita longa. Music’s no good in time of sorrow. Music accentuates the emotions it seeks to appease. Unless, of course, it gets the listener’s mind off the emotion, or the composer’s mind away from the mundane.
But does music, for its composer, mirror his feelings of the moment? Probably not in the way that a poet’s feelings are mirrored. A composer writes tragic music out of what he knows about tragedy, from experience or hearsay, but not during the heat of the tragedy. Tears in the eyes drip down and smudge the ink, where clarity should be all that matters.
13. Northwestern 1941–42
That fall I moved off campus to a timely address, 1942 Orrington, the house of a Mrs. Klingen who lived on the ground floor. I had a front room on the second floor, sharing a bath with two journalism majors with whom I was on a nodding acquaintance. The top floor was a quaint garret occupied by a Speech School graduate who resembled a shaggy Wasp version of Maurice R. and who played classical records. One evening I sat on the stairs in his garret, pretending to listen to the music, hoping he’d invite me up. This was Milton Lomask, mature, attentive without sentimentality, a protégé of actor Whitford Kane’s, a star in character roles on the English-speaking stage. We had a fiery friendship until Milton was called into the army, at which point I moved to the garret and rejoiced for once in privacy. On weekends, I went out with old friends from the South Side—these now included my cousin Lois Nash, Kathryn’s older sister, who was staying with the Rorems while attending nursing school—who would inevitably drive me back on Sunday nights, and we’d have drinking parties in the little attic room. By mid-autumn the closet floor was so strewn with empty bottles that Mrs. Klingen threatened eviction unless I got rid of them. A weak threat, to be sure; tension was rife, and with it a special tolerance, particularly of draftage men.
After the hallucinatory attack of 7 December the war turned real. Sooner rather than later the Germans would descend upon New York, the Japanese upon Los Angeles, but was the Midwest safe for a while? When I’d come home to Dorchester Avenue on Fridays the Foxes’ radio upstairs hummed newscasts all day and all night. Was this indeed a Just War? The concept that all war was bad, that there is no alternative to peace, was implanted in the family psyche. The conflict now felt not so much endless as routine, bringing with it the gloomily urgent excitation of living on the verge. Art, the quintessential positive force on our planet, provokes at its best a collective erection, and so does war, the quintessential negative force.
Business as usual meanwhile on the Northwestern campus. I was now a part-time music critic on the school daily, which also printed my poems and stories. The bromidic criticism concerned local events like the Wa Mu show or the Sibelius Violin Concerto intoned by our students. The poems were sonnets about sailors in the style of Keats. The stories were self-conscious vignettes about misfits who strangle their pets.
More important, my piano repertory was fast expanding. I undertook to fathom the entire Wohltemperierte Klavier, all ninety-six pieces. One morning, while playing for Mr. Van Horne the B-flat-minor fugue from Book I, I paused. “Why do these six measures make my eyes well up?” I asked. “Why do Bach’s cross-relations break my heart?” He regarded me with pleasure, as though no student had ever made a similar reflection. Why, I wondered, and still wonder, do these lush acidic resolutions so satisfy, exactly as Debussy satisfies? The music hardly needs to be played, just pondered. (For the record, the measures are 56–61.) I invited Bob Trotter, the favorite pianist in school, to perform Milhaud’s two-piano suite Scaramouche with me and practiced like a fiend in anticipation. The night before our first reading I couldn’t sleep, intoxicated at the thought of working—playing—in tandem. I learned Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin while simultaneously studying Couperin’s Leçons de ténèbres (for Holy Wednesday), whose ecstatic first pages “open up the heavens and bring down the house,” as Virgil Thomson wrote of Messiaen. I mastered Beethoven’s Thirty-two Variations in C Minor and offered them to whoever would listen, mainly in the practice-hall corridors. Why this semisudden spurt of serious gymnastics? Because, like every other pianist at school, I was auditing the semifinals and finals of tryouts for the Adult Education Course series in Orchestra Hall. The winner would be given a recital on that same annual series, which included Schnabel et alia. Hearing these contestants, some of whom would eventually become friends, I discovered what small potatoes were my own pianistic pretens
ions—that talent meant nothing without systematic labor, that content was nil without style, and that style is one-tenth flair and nine-tenths push-ups. (The winner that first year was Alice Martz, with Jacobeth Kerr and Perry O’Neil as runners-up, all pupils of Ganz’s.) It would take a couple of years before I realized that the public virtuoso’s life, even at its most flamboyant, was intellectually not for me. “Intellectually” is stressed advisedly. What could be drearier than petrifying into the same endlessly repeated masterpieces, with nary a minute and seldom an urge to investigate new works. Casals’s pronouncement that no day goes by without his culling something new from Bach’s cello sonatas seems so somehow hopeless: no one work is inexhaustible to the exclusion of other works, especially those of today. Where does the living composer fit in?
More important still, my compositional output was also fast expanding. My first songs date from then, and perusing them now I am not ashamed. People often ask (at least they used to ask, before that fragile phenomenon called American Art Song and that staple of elegant concertizing called the Song Recital both got swept away by Big Management twenty years ago) whether I am a singer, since I so obviously love the human voice, as evidenced in my treatment of it. Well no, I’m not a singer, and neither are any of the hundreds of composers I’ve known (with the possible exception of Blitzstein and Barber), although, since song is the primal musical utterance of every society, it could be argued that inside every composer lurks a singer longing to get out. So yes, I am a singer, for all music is a sung expression, even a piano toccata or a timpani etude. I hope my music sings, but my own physical voice raised in song is nothing you want to hear. Do I love the human voice? Not especially. My first songs were composed (perhaps all my songs) not from love of the voice but from love of poetry, and from a need to conjoin my two loves, music and words, into a third entity of a greater, or at least a different, magnitude than its separate parts. Since we are what we speak, and since song precedes speech (the inflection and accent of any country’s language derive from the music—even the nonvocal music—of that country), we are what we sing. Music is not a universal tongue.