Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Easiest to follow was Margery Mazia, who conducted the third class. She didn’t talk, at least not about “meaning,” and never criticized my playing.

  Quickly I came to worship with the entourage. As regular worker, Martha became a model of Spartan self-denial, sometimes scheduling classes for Sunday mornings when normal people should be abed, hungover. As exceptional artist, she showed us how to wander from the beaten track, but only she found her way back. Then as now she was America’s first female, yet had to solicit subsidy despite the fame. The fame was such that all her girls wore their hair tight in abject adoration, their mouths slightly open, their thighs at odd angles—but only she brought it off. Then as now, or so I contended, Martha Graham was one of the four most significant influences of any sex, of any domain, of our century. (The others? Billie Holiday, Djuna Barnes, Mae West.) My dream was to compose for her.

  In April, Roosevelt died suddenly, leaving a perilous and jangled world in the hands of Truman, whom we had seen pictured playing a piano on which the young Lauren Bacall was seated. While Rome burned. Morris and I were crossing Eighth Street when the headlines of PM, exceptionally printed in white on black paper, announced the tragedy.

  A week later the Germans surrendered. You can’t imagine the released elation that spread across the city on V-E day. America had not, after all, been occupied, yet the ubiquitous jubilation, the dancing in the streets, the camaraderie celebrated a sympathy with Europe’s relief. Morris and Alvin Ross and Dougie and I strolled through the Village and the Lower East Side, not drinking, or hardly, but drowned in good will. From the upper floors in the Women’s Prison on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street came shouts of “What’s happening down there?” Cops relaxed their vigil. In Drossie’s a glow emanated. We all went to bed late, rosy and sober. A few weeks later came a revived exaltation as Eisenhower, looking like Paul Callaway, was whirled up Fifth Avenue (we caught him at Washington Square) in a ticker-tape parade.

  Nor can you imagine the talent that seemed to mushroom from the fertile ooze of war. After the opening night of The Glass Menagerie—heightened, or rather, delineated, by Paul Bowles’s background score, which came later to be known among musicians as “the Tennessee sound”—it was clear that something had happened, a hypodermic for American theater which could already be called postwar art. A queer goyische flavor was sprouting out of the war and would burst in a few years. For the moment the overall optimism, plus the specific acceptance—unimaginable today—of High Art, was the electric tone in that madly healthy air.

  True, with relaxation came bad realities. Within weeks the German concentration camps were reproduced on newsreels with odd reactions. I recall with distaste, as Morris and I sat in Loews Sheridan watching the ghastly scenes of Dachau and Buchenwald, how a girl behind us let out shrieks and sought protection in the strong arms of her boyfriend, as though the spectacle had been designed, like a Frankenstein movie, just to scare her. It struck me that absolute silence would have been more proper.

  In June I shuffled the Graham schedule for afternoons so as to attend two morning classes at NYU. In history I sat next to a fat boy whose smell gave me a headache. English lit. was taught with some panache by a stentorian virago, proud that Lauren Bacall—whom she called Betty—had once been in this very class.

  The first four days, beginning on a Monday, went swimmingly. Then Thursday night (for the call was stronger than my will) I got drunk at the Old Colony on Eighth Street, left the premises at 4 a.m. to head for the subway, was surrounded on MacDougal Street by a bunch of thugs in mufti and armed with broken bottles. Too bleary to realize quite what was occuring—“il n’y a de dieu que pour les ivrognes”—I did detect the voice of “dieu,” who spoke authoritatively: “Leave him be.” The voice came from a soldier—a knightly sergeant literally in armour—before whom the thugs recoiled, their intimidation by the military being stronger than their contempt for fruits. The soldier, whose name was Bill Smith and whom I saw off and on for years, returned with me to East Fifty-third and we spent the dawn, the morning, the afternoon and the evening in bed. Morris phoned me there: “Are you alive? Are you all right? People saw you downtown in trouble last night. What a hell of a way to begin your schooling. Are you a composer or a bum?”

  In August the war stopped. Again I was with Morris walking across Eighth Street and again the headlines on PM were printed in white on black stock. A new kind of bomb had razed Hiroshima.

  V-J memory seems less exhilarating than V-E. Domestic events dominated. By now I was living alone unsupervised.

  The composer Noel Sokoloff, denizen of Drossie’s and member of the Sokoloff clan (his father, the conductor Nicolai, in 1955 would commission and premiere my Second Symphony with the La Jolla Symphony; his cousin, the pianist Vladimir, was Zimbalist’s accompanist and on the Curtis staff, where he today remains as my colleague), had inherited from Norman Dello Joio, and now ceded to me, a tiny apartment at 285 West Twelfth Street. This space, three steps up from the street and directly over a basement restaurant called the Beatrice Inn, involved one unfurnished 12- by 18-foot room, a bath, a closet, a nonfunctioning fireplace. Rent: twenty dollars monthly. This would be home for the next four years.

  From the Salvation Army I purchased a single bed, a bookshelf, a red armchair. Literally for a song I bought Muriel Smith’s Mason & Hamlin upright. (The song was a setting of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Appeal”: “And wilt thou leave me thus?/Say nay, say nay, for shame!”) On the floor were bamboo mats soaked in Paul Bowles’s patchouli, a mere phial full, which gave off an acrid, oriental, dizzying, spermy stench for the full four years. There was an old enamel table, a hot plate in the closet, a radio, a phonograph that worked when it wanted to, and a filthy tub and toilet which, after a month or two, Maggy Magerstadt scoured thoroughly on the same day that, for a fee, she painted the walls and ceiling lemon yellow. For Maggy now lived in town, at 88 Horatio, as did Hatti Heiner Martin, with her infant son, David, at 105 Greenwich Avenue.

  Somewhere along the line I got rid of Muriel’s piano in exchange for another upright belonging to Virgil. This was a European import, garish, with two copper candlesticks protruding from the music board. Since Virgil had his own Baldwin grand chez lui (courtesy the makers), he boarded this one out with friends. The piano was good but cumbersome and lacked the low E below that staff. This note was simply not there. With the result that nothing I composed the next four years contained that low E.

  Like most self-respecting musicians I do compose at the piano; means are less vital than ends. To the layman, nevertheless, music is the intangible art because it is heard and not seen; he is more intrigued by a musician’s workshop than by that of other artists. He accepts without question the poet’s rhyming dictionary, the painter’s prefabricated brush, but has a notion that there’s something amiss in a composer who writes at the piano, even if the composition is for piano. The notion stems from the Hollywood portrait of composers strolling with the muse down a country lane and notating their inspirations on the spot as full-blown symphonies. Of course, music used to be simpler, harmonies could be heard by the inner ear without need to confirm them at the keyboard. But today’s more complicated sonorities can’t rely on imagination alone. Stravinsky maintained that it is unmusical to write away from the piano, for since music deals with sound, a composer must always have access to la matière sonore. Well, musical composition, though it does always deal with sound, does not primarily deal with sound but with the organization of ideas eventually expressed through the direct language of sound. Ideas today can occur on country lanes as they did yesterday, but as they seldom occur fully realized, their final utility might not be ascertained until they are remolded at the keys.

  The books on the new shelves were by Kierkegaard, Calder Willingham, Isak Dinesen, Proust, and Melville. The only wall decorations were the wonderful large cork mask from Mexico, and Alvin Ross’s unframed portrait of me, done two years before in Philadelphia, plus a large wood crucifix, for even at
this late date I affected the Catholic paraphernalia of yore.

  One morning, returning from the NYU class led by the stentorian virago, I bought a black-and-white hardcover notebook and began to keep a diary, a practice maintained ever since. Why? The virago had uttered the phrase “Happiness is an answering to the heart,” and suddenly I felt that if I did not verify my ruminations in ink, nothing would remain. With a blush I confess that the first entry, dated 6 September 1945, 1 p.m., begins: “Happiness, then, is an answering to the heart (pity the poet at the stock exchange), and those many who say ‘is there a ham sandwich in the writing of music, or 2¢ out of the dreamer and Shelley-reader’ are hideously true.” I concur with neither the grammar, the sentiment, nor the style: What is “true” in what “those many say”? Isn’t happiness a state for idiots? How many poets do you know who are languishing at the stock exchange? And isn’t Melville a mortifying influence?

  But other entries have more solidity, and certainly the information will be helpful for this book. A few pages later I noted: “Good dancers are rarer than good pianists, for the same reason that great performers should never be called ‘genius’ (if anyone is still called such a thing)—that being reserved for inventors alone. The more of himself the executant exhibits the vulgarer his resolution. But the dancer, choreographer or no, Ah!…

  “Having just come from Graham’s where I watched the heavenly Mae O’Donnell especially, it was again revealed how personal, how out-and-inwardly primal the medium is, even if only to raise an elbow with anguish or laughter behind the shower curtain. Dance is the individual’s ultimate expression—a dangerous quality for the instrumentalist. However, it is more difficult tastefully to control one’s own mode of expression (the peak of divine creation) than diligently to adjust the renderings of someone else’s bright ideas. Everyone could dance with a certain beauty if impossible barriers were smashed, but not everyone could play someone else’s music with beauty under the same conditions. So Dance, being more universal, produces necessarily less of the Great. But anyone who dances creates, no matter the formal impediments to his style. Motions of the very young are often overwhelming lovely, but their piano playing is never pleasant. When Mae moves she has no instinctive sense of rhythm, no motive of musical line, but on or off beat she’s exciting all the same for her body’s an electric wave with no brain. Were the same true of an instrumentalist we’d squirm in our seats. And there is only one Martha, but a plethora of flawless pianists.…

  “It is amusing to see the kids during class, their lips half-parted in ecstasy, their contractions and releases propelled by desire to rid themselves of what they feel to be ‘ancestral frustrations.’ But after class a too-close awareness of their sweet sweat provokes self-consciously coy joking, mindful of scenes in stations when men-friends greet after long absence with a heartfelt embrace, then start to spar and punch good-naturedly, embarrassed by the previous demonstration unbecoming to the American male.”

  Was this a pastiche of Martha-speak, or was it my mode of writing then? Her most apt and oft-repeated mot was: “The body never lies.” Which is why, after many a month, she fired me. Oh, quite nicely, because, as she rightly explained, improvisation is clumsy discipline for young composers. Her unspoken reason was my lack of the pianistic thrust needed to impel collective contractions and releases. Dance accompanists, to be good, must take classes themselves.

  I have always loved bad weather, the snug feeling of being inside while outside the elements rage, myself an anonymous island in a flood of people. It snowed continually that fall. The room had two windows, casements of four panes each, opening onto the street. One pane had been shattered by an insane pickup, and replaced permanently by a square of cardboard scotchtaped to the frame which never quite kept out the cold. Next to this frame were stored quarts of beer, butter, and perishable groceries. I had no refrigerator. Nor was there a telephone until late in 1947, so friends left notes or knocked on the window—the habitat was vulnerable. The permanent snow magnified the permanent va-et-vient of demilitarizing freedom. In one of her lesser films, Rita Hayworth states: “Armies have passed over me.” Of the uncountable numbers of servicemen with whom I dallied indiscriminately (inevitably as the “bottom”) and through a haze of alcohol and sleet, I still harbor every lock of hair.

  During a blizzard I gave a party. Virgil was there, and Muriel Smith with a photographer from Ebony (I still have the pictures), and Cecil Smith, who was now running Musical America, two marines, and Frank Etherton, Paul Goodman, plus a dozen others. We decided to light a fire. Noel Sokoloff had warned me that the grate was sealed off, yet it functioned admirably. How could we know that the neighbors upstairs were gone for the weekend? Next day I lit another fire. Down came the neighbors black with soot. My flue ejected straight into their room. “Our baby is dying,” they said.

  A week after Martha summarily fired me, Erick Hawkins knocked on the window. In he came, stomping the snow from his boots, and made himself at home. They hadn’t found a workable substitute pianist, he explained, and now the holidays were upon us with dozens of new students enrolled. Would I consider coming back, at least until January? I would have said no, salving my wounded pride, if Rosemary weren’t due for a long Christmas in New York with a former classmate from Beloit. They planned to take a course from Martha Graham.

  I never had sex with anyone from the studio, except Donald, the receptionist. Louis Horst, the queen bee’s mythic Svengali, roamed the premises aimlessly from time to time, like a lost elephant, vaguely sinister but impotent, spying on his mate’s possible indiscretions; beyond this there was no emanation of real eroticism in the classes, only the make-believe—the symbolic—which is never a turn-on. Martha herself could sometimes seem dull. An evanescent celebrity in daily contact soon grows solid, susceptible, clay-footed.

  Agnes De Mille, who in a recent 500-page document on the Great Lady, has not one word on how Martha used music, does advance an amusing stupidity: “… [Martha] came to prefer men who were not demanding, who were not wholly men but only part-time males, and who could make way in their own psyches… for the greater dominating infatuation: the work. Again and again and again, as time went on, she chose to fall in love with a homosexual man.” If a homosexual man is only a male when he’s screwing Martha, what is he the rest of the time—a female? That would make him a lesbian. (Genet: “Un homme qui en encule un autre est deux fois homme.”)

  Closing tight the eyes and thinking back on that faraway season I am less stimulated by sights and sounds than by smells intensified by the constant snow. Odors of dry sherry, of vetiver, of rye toast, of blond cedar, espresso, citrus, incense, male corduroy: upper-class taste (or aroma). Lower class: odor of ale, of semen, of snake, of salami, of locker rooms, lank blue hair, and pectorals. Have I confused the classes?

  People (interviewers) act surprised when I profess insecurity. They don’t see the perishability of it all. Satisfaction of increasing appreciation is paralleled by vulnerability of simply aging. As he grows more famous—or less famous—a person grows more frail, until he just disappears.

  A pupil gets most of what he will get during the very first lesson.

  To make an extra buck I asked Juilliard to send me a pupil: This turned out to be a sixty-five-year-old well-garbed German refugee who dabbled in tunes. He called me Doctor. What could I teach him, beyond the structure of a Beethoven quartet? I could teach him Song, since Song has a preexisting skeleton (the poem) upon which to hang our melodic flesh. I can teach literally anyone to write a “perfect” song, although the song may lack the blood of life which only God can provide—the God I don’t believe in. (Buñuel: “Thank God I’m still an atheist.”)

  Martha thought Rosemary was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen. “It doesn’t matter that she can’t dance—just to look at her is enough.” If Rosemary were taking a class I was accompanying, Martha never chided me for playing too slow or too fast or too loud or too soft. The mythical collective therapy of the rhe
toric, which I found sophomoric, struck a chord in Rosemary which she retains to this day, and which is retained too in Erick’s choreography with its Native American earth worship. Erick currently has a big enough fan club to withstand my doubts. Despite various confabs over the years, I simply cannot collaborate with Erick because I cannot believe in his nursery-school tactics of releasing the soul through group movement, etcetera. When I asked Edwin Denby, “Do you take Erick seriously?” he answered: “Mustn’t one?”—meaning, I guess, that Erick took himself too seriously to leave room for doubt.

  He made one theatrical misstep. Martha allowed Erick to introduce one of his own works into her programs. Now Martha, when she had used melodrama, i.e., the spoken word, in her dances (utterance of Dickinson’s verse in “Letter to the World,” for example), took care to keep her own mouth shut, preserving her aura while fellow cast members talked. But Erick, in Stephen Acrobat, not only spoke himself but did so right after executing a strenuous turn, breathless, panting, incomprehensible. Again he reflected Martha in a distorting mirror, and the already loathsome device of speech-with-music became, with him, merely à côté.

  In 1946 Father was transferred to Philadelphia. My parents for twenty thousand dollars bought a fine four-story house at 2213 Delancey Place, just half a block from Rae Gabis. In 1946 Shirley Gabis married the cellist Seymour Barab, and they settled into a ground-floor flat at 242 West Twelfth, just half a block from me. Rae and my parents became friends and remained so. Shirley and I recemented our friendship, which remains strong unto the moment.