by Ned Rorem
Learning that Menotti had used his score of My Heart’s in the Highlands as an example of how to use the clarinet’s chalumeau register, Paul said: “That’s flattering of Gian Carlo. But there is no clarinet. The score is for only trumpet and fiddle, with a Hammond organ doing most of the dirty work.”… He spoke of his 4-F army status. The induction psychiatrist, dumbfounded that anyone could be a composer, inscribed on the sheet of findings: “Paul Bowles. Writes symphonies. Rejection recommended.” (Elsewhere he had been labeled a “premature anti-Fascist.”)
Three a.m. I had no place to stay. Paul offered hospitality at the Chelsea. Arthur’s elevator being out of order we descended twenty gloomy stories on foot to the basement. “Good place for a murder,” said Paul in the taxi—or was it the subway?—to Twenty-third Street. It was impressive when, on our arriving at his little room at the Chelsea, he immediately phoned his wife, Jane, in her little room at the Chelsea, and chatted for twenty minutes as though it were day. The room reeked of patchouli. He brewed mint tea on an electric hotplate, then played a record—by now it was after four—of Jean Cocteau declaiming his own “Anna la bonne,” a singsong harangue by a hotel maid addressed to the corpse of the woman she has just killed. (Forty-six years later I set these verses to music.) When finally we retired I was limp and passed out, or pretended to. Paul was not thrilled. At noon he brought over cereal and corned beef from the deli across the street. Wasn’t that a mundane repast for one so special?
Paul was never less than bewitching with that cold compassion, those cruel anecdotes, and bizarre tastes, stances he eventually nurtured into cult status. The stances were honest, however (no mere whim led to a half century of self-exile from his loathed America in the comparative discomfort of Morocco), but also off-putting. His affably smart conversation was identical with everyone, from concierge to countess, serving as a neutral screen between him and you—not to mention the active screen of exotic perfume which always enveloped him. The allure of remoteness and of musk are sometimes used as bait by certain females; but just as dark Lenny turned me off sexually with his fame, so did blond Paul with his studied removal.
Eugene had graduated in June and decamped to New York with his parents, but not before shepherding Shirley through the formidable entrance auditions at Curtis, and settling her as a bona fide member of Serkin’s flock, to everyone’s delight. Shirley was therefore practicing like mad in anticipation of school’s reopening in September. And I, prior to the reopening, took a hiatus from Scalero and went back, via one of the always-packed wartime coaches, to Chicago for a month.
I hadn’t forgotten the “virginity” pact. But who in Chicago could I lose it with? Maggy was emotionally out of the question. Hatti would laugh in my face. Now, Hilda Mary might be ideal. She was a casual fag hag, and promiscuous, uninvolved, and flattered to act the role of Lycenium. She agreed, taking the ritual as a lark, the ritual which to me was a necessary evil.
Hilda Mary was nothing if not ample in form, powdery white in hue, dyed blond, uncomplicated, good natured, perfect. The procedure occurred, in his absence, chez George Garratt, who had moved back from Kenmore Avenue to Bellevue Place. Hilda Man,’ bought a bottle of champagne, then garbed herself in black chiffon, thinking that the more feminine she became the more intrigued I would become. “More masculine” would have been still worse: une femme est une femme. As I wrote earlier, I love women—their intellect, their privileges, their force, their rouge, their passivity—in all ways but sexual.
Yet I performed the act, perfunctorily, to completion. All sex is senseless, of course, even stupid, when viewed from without (the pinkish hairy murkiness, unlovely grunts, imbecilic thrusts, the barrels of sticky sperm and such slag spilling forth over the centuries), but this occurrence in its dearth of passion seemed maximally devoid of meaning. I felt no added affection for Hilda Mary. Contempt, rather, because she had usurped my rightful role.
Yet there it was. I’ve had sex with one female once, as distinct from hundreds of men! (Accumulation in itself is vain, but formidable with hindsight. Consider how much of our own bodies we devour in a lifetime—fingernails, snot, scabs, sweat, blood.)
Hilda Mary went on to set up housekeeping with a woman named Audrey, twice her size, with whom in the 1950s she was killed in a car crash.
Less flashy but more lasting, during this stay in Chicago, was a meeting with Ben Weber.
Once I quipped that some of my best friends were twelve-tone composers. That quip sounds senseless today, the Tower of Babel having melted into a pillar of magnanimity, and nobody minds what dialect you sing so long as you articulate. Two generations ago, however, our land was a diatonic prairie staked out by Copland where offspring of Schoenberg, not to mention the master himself, were unfashionable. One didn’t have friends in both camps.
Who were the youngish musicians still hoeing the tone row? George Perle (at least in his prose works), Lou Harrison part-time, and Milton Babbitt. Anyone else? Only Ben Weber. I, a tonalist born, would soon know them all in New York; I wanted to learn how the world turns and didn’t yet know that to be American was to be a specialist. Meanwhile, here was Ben Weber.
Ben and I had never run into each other in Chicago in former days, but Shirley and Seymour urged me to call him when I returned there. We met in a bistro on Adams Street and chatted for an uncomfortable hour. Uncomfortable because no one had warned me that Ben’s sole subject matter was himself (anything else and his eyes glazed over), and that self was a fantasy of fatal beauty. The reality was such that at twenty-six Ben seemed middle-aged, pudgy, balding with a patchy roan fuzz replaced by psoriasis and an ivorine countenance dominated by shapeless over-red lips. But I already admired his music so was prepared to be patient.
That music remains always beautiful, and that’s its flaw. Beautiful at any given moment—but the moments don’t cohere, don’t contrast, don’t aim toward a target. The music was all conceived according to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, yet one might suspect Ben of tweaking his row so that the acrid sevenths and mellow ninths of Impressionism would fall logically upon his staff; or inversely, he restricted himself to the method so as to legalize his alien corn. Ben’s art seems compromised, as though inside that unsmiling Germanitude lurked a Frenchman itching to get out. His heart was tonal even as his society was humorous. Still, one cannot fairly criticize a language, only the use of a language. Had Ben written diatonic music, he would not have been Ben. Had Ben Weber been heterosexual, all other things being equal, his music would have been different.
• • •
Bill Strickland’s commission was a hypodermic. Within a week after our meeting I composed a biblical work for male chorus and a few winds and mailed it to Washington. Before it arrived, I made another biblical setting (“Let them be turned away who say to me ‘Aha! Aha!’”) for two-part men’s chorus with oboe, clarinet, and two horns.
Bill responded enthusiastically to both, opted for the second, wrote that the parts would be copied by student soldiers, that he would program it in August and hoped that I’d come down for it. Rosemary joined me in Washington, we stayed at the Mayflower, heard a rehearsal and accordingly attended the world premiere of my Opus 1, under the title of The Seventieth Psalm.
How does it stand up today? I won’t disown the craft which gleams with beginner’s luck, nor the content which boasts a freshness of one who by definition is not repeating himself. But The Seventieth Psalm is a small work without much staying power. Back then, however, despite the watery acoustic at the National Gallery, the sound of years of work suddenly made sense, like a rose unfolding on speeded-up film; it affected me electrically. Those thousand flyspecks in the manuscript now quivered with a life of their own, brought to the fore through the lips of strangers. I could have been dead or in Timbuktu and the music would still be decipherable, communicative, existing in a continuous present tense. How pale were the rewards of a painter, whose work in its final shape existed alone in the studio, as compared to those of a compo
ser, whose work is “realized” only when interpreted by middlemen—but then with such a controlled madness that listeners are literally (as opposed to figuratively, like painting) made to dance! This comparatively humble hearing became the standard against which I judge all other performances of my career. For here was what it meant to be a composer—to stand naked before an audience without the physical presence of one’s own body!
Thus I lost my virginity a second time.
Around this time, before the fall term at Curtis, again in New York, I had two encounters that would soon alter both my mode and geography.
The first occurred at the Old Colony, where, long after midnight when I was feeling no pain, a brash, short, swarthy muscular presence invited me to his place on West Eleventh Street. Morris Golde was twenty-five, fourth child of immigrant Romanians, successfully self-employed (with his brother he founded a direct-mail advertising business), lover of the arts and friend of artists, with whom, as a consumer, he was not competitive. Morris had grown up in the (to me exotic) Bronx with actor Jules—later John—Garfield, whose toughish manner he shared, two-thirds natural and one-third pose. Which I suppose is the same with us all: unlike animals we invent our most useful role and play that role forever. I was attracted to Morris’s East Coast accent with its dropped Rs and incoherent elisions—“A-hunt-fiff Street” for 105th Street. He reminded me of Hollywood mafia.
I in turn reminded Morris of Jane Bowles, apparently because of a use of non sequiturs and a knack for changing the subject when cornered. (My role depends on those I’m with, and on the age I first knew them. With old friends individually, I revert to a behavior of yore; with several people at once, known at different periods, I adopt the “several-at-once” role. The sexual role, however, remains stationary.)
Morris and I fit like hand in glove (I was the glove), contrasting in temperament, like-minded in artistic tastes. His near-manic but genuine concern with the political left echoed that of my Chicago bohemia, reanimating my never very vigorous sense of justice. Morris came down to Philadelphia often that autumn, and I now had an honest excuse for more frequent excursions up to New York, plus a place to stay. On one such excursion I encountered Virgil Thomson.
Learning that Thomson needed a copyist, and being proud of my own calligraphy, I called on him in his ninth-floor apartment at the Chelsea, where he had lived since his return to America in 1939, and where he would remain for the next fifty years. His first words, once we were settled on the sofa beneath the huge Stettheimer portrait, were: “So what’s your sad story?”
I was prepared for the swishy voice because of the lively round table in Chicago a year or two back, but not for the patronizing friendliness and icy impatience, a mixture I later found to be native to uppercrust French females. His eyes were quick, his head balding, his cravat a hand-tied butterfly bow, his cigarette holder a nonfilter, his stomach already paunchy (he was forty-seven, a year younger than Father), his housecoat maroon, his slippers plush, and his manner sardonic and adult. I was intimidated. Not because he was a famous composer (I didn’t know a note of his music), nor because he was a redoubtable critic of the Herald-Tribune (I never read newspapers, but The New York Times’s Olin Downes was more nationally known). I was intimidated because I’d never met anyone like him, so brusquely precise, so businesslike about music—and hence didn’t know how to behave. The intimidation would never entirely go away and proved to be a good thing.
My “sad story” was that with Scalero I was unfulfilled and longed to spread my wings. Virgil sympathized. He gave me a few things to transcribe from manuscript to autograph which I was to return in a fortnight. If he liked the copy, we would continue the process by correspondence through the fall term at Curtis; then on the first of the year I would move to New York as his employee.
I was shocked by Thomson’s music. Contemporary music then meant Prokofiev or Schoenberg, Stravinsky or Chávez, Milhaud and even Poulenc, maybe Copland, certainly Antheil, men with guts, sensuality, rhapsody, violence. But this: Here was a Sonata for Flute Alone and a couple of early songs on the French verse of Georges Hugnet. The script, in faded pencil on yellowing paper, was tentative and super-tiny like the work of an inexperienced child. The music itself—was it a joke? It sounded sappy and charmless yet pretentious in its false naïveté, above all untalented. Oh, well. I copied it dutifully, Virgil was happy, our deal was made.
Father was distressed. To abandon the security of a classy scholarship for the vagaries of Manhattan was folly. I may well have prospects for a definitive job and a place to live, he was against it. If I quit Curtis, he would stop financial aid. This was the only ultimatum Father ever made to me, and he held to it. For a while.
During the autumn quarter I no longer—I’ve forgotten why—roomed at the Gabises’, but shared an unfurnished railroad walk-up one block away on Twenty-third with Paul Erlich. A swain of Shirley’s, Paul was in turn a friend of my Chicago friends, David Sachs and Norris Embry, all graduates of Saint John’s College in Annapolis. He was an amateur violinist with a touching devotion to music and a keen mind. But I hardly knew him—we went to different schools together. Alvin Ross helped furnish the dreary place by painting orange crates and beds from the Salvation Army and designing extravagant dragons in charcoal directly onto the walls. There was also a little piano lent by Curtis.
In October Margaret Bonds and Gerald Cook, who had joined forces as a two-piano team, stopped in Philadelphia for a three-week gig at some nightclub. Margaret and her husband, Larry Richardson, stayed with friends in the suburbs. Gerald moved in with us. They all were moving permanently to New York.
Like Paul, Gerald was out of sight much of the time. He had had some recent lessons with Nadia Boulanger, who was billeted here and there in the States for the duration. Gerald persuaded me to contact her. Thus began a correspondence between the greatest living musical pedagogue and the only living American composer who—despite an entente that would form after I moved to France—never studied with her.
The greatest living organist was E. Power Biggs, and since Paul Callaway maintained that Biggs performed every new piece he ever received, I wrote a piece for him—which he never played. But, as with Boulanger, we struck up a correspondence, and one thing led to another.
Weekends, Morris came down and we drank beer at the Music Village and the Walnut Street bars, sometimes going to movies at the Avon on Spruce Street, or to the huge museum on the Schuylkill River.
Philadelphia postscripts:
—Because Eugene was Serkin’s undisguised favorite, it was a foregone conclusion that he would win the competition and debut that fall at the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Young People’s Concerts. Still, there was the formality of an audition. Eugene asked me to play second piano for the Brahms B-flat. So I practiced hard. On the morning of the audition he reneged and asked Eileen to play. I held firm. Attended only by Serkin and Ormandy, the audition took place in a studio at the Academy. After three minutes Ormandy agreed. Thus I played, and didn’t play, but it was my first meeting with the conductor—and my last for thirteen years.
Ormandy always entered the stage adjusting his cuffs. I always enter a stage adjusting my cuffs.
—I saw Father in Washington. He suggested we take a taxi to Chevy Chase to see his old secretary, Miss Ring, who had retired there, and did I remember Miss Ring? (Yes, but didn’t confess what Mother had told me and Rosemary years before.) We visited with Miss Ring on her front porch. She looked the same, plain, crippled, schoolmarmish, hair in a bun, like the woman with a smashed pince-nez in the famous still from Ten Days That Shook the World. I marveled once again that my handsome sire had had his “affair” with this reticent creature who resembled not at all Hollywood’s notion of The Secretary.
—I asked Lenny if Mongolian idiots have Mongolian idiots. He considers this. “No, they have Caucasian idiots.”
—The sole books I recall reading were Buddenbrooks and Henry James’s The American, both at the prodding of Euge
ne, who chose well. Not so with his vending of Schubert’s E-flat Trio. There are two sorts of Great Man I can’t abide—or, more gently put, don’t need: the ones whose Greatness I deny categorically (Bruckner, Berlioz, Elgar), and the ones whose Greatness I allow but can do without (Beethoven, Mahler, Schubert). With all his humble economy, Schubert seems, even in the songs, long-winded. The last movement of the Trio resembles a person who can’t stop talking.
—With Shirley at the Museum of Modern Art, I briefly place my schoolbooks on the counter to adjust my coat before we venture into the winter fog. On the bus we discover that, along with my books, I’d picked up an expensive volume of Pavel Tchelitcheff. I know his name because Belle Tannenbaum’s best friend in Chicago is the pianist Alan Tanner, Tchelitcheff’s once lover, and because the painter’s scenery—slate-blue and blood-red—for Hindemith’s Saint Francis ballet in 1938 had shown an intoxicating world. Now here were reproductions of paintings of such excellent sadness—the freaks, the strawberries, the trapezists, and especially the image of the dismayingly sexual Lincoln Kirstein (who was he?)—that I became intoxicated anew, returning to the museum to see his pictures in real life.