by Ned Rorem
In 1946, I met a physically charismatic psychotherapy grad student at the Astor Bar, one Fabian X. Schupper. We had a stormy romance for about six weeks until the center could not hold. I cried and cried. This resulted in a little song, just four measures long, but perfect in its wedding of text to tune.
Love’s stricken “Why”
Is all that love can speak—
Built of but just a syllable
The hugest hearts that break.
Which tells it all. I’ve run across Fabian in later years; unless they die, old lovers always cross one’s path again. I may yet in these pages describe my sexual acts, fantasies, preferences, habits, for I think this important to any portrait. Then again I may not. The image I choose to present might be dispelled by specifics. There’s nothing like an unexpected detail to demolish the best-laid plans of newlyweds. (The little song, incidentally, was incorporated sixteen years later into a cycle named Poems of Love and the Rain.)
In April 1946, at Drossie’s, I met the author Herbert Kubly, and we too had a stormy affiliation for about fifteen months. With his play, Men to the Sea, running on Broadway (Frank Etherton had a ranking role), Kubly was also music critic for Time magazine. Conceited, handsome (the William Holden type), and blustery, he was equally insecure and defensive, having little technical knowledge of music, and a dramatic gift dwarfed by that of Tennessee Williams, whose spectacular (and permanent) star, like Bernstein’s three years before, had just risen. Kubly (everyone called him that, though he preferred Nic), eight years my senior, lived on a floor-through at 247 West Thirteenth, got up late and worked all afternoon with the kind of zeal he felt necessary to The Artist. (The Artist must Live to the Hilt so as to have Material.) Evenings he went to concerts or operas, maybe taking me along to explicate some nuance—not that Time’s then-unsigned articles, all in the same amorphous voice, dug very deep. I would have liked to attend, but wasn’t invited to, the after-theater parties given by people who might find me “suspect”; for Kubly’s image of himself was that of Ladies’ Man, an image which, along with his pose as adroitly polyglot when in fact he had slight talent for languages, undermined his credibility, at least for one observer. When his prizewinning, well-researched travelogues on Italy came out in the fifties, with himself portrayed as a multilingual bounder, it seemed clear to me that The Artist, to be The Artist, can be a hypocrite in everything but his work. Of course I was jealous. Not jealous of his other “affiliations” (as Time critic, his cachet provided access to such catches as Whittemore & Lowe and to my old professor, Gian Carlo Menotti, whose flashy new fame as composer of the “Broadway opera,” The Medium, was comparable to Tennessee’s, and whom I was, in my inexperience, now shocked to see buttering up Kubly) but of his female intimates—notably Lotte Lehmann and Maria Jeritza—that in my madness I felt might be “useful” to me as a songwriter. I was mostly kept under wraps.
And yet, do these caustic sentences appear excessive, in contrast to the palliative file marked HK which now I draw forth? Here’s a penciled scrawl on his notebook paper slipped under the door and still stained with a footprint when I stumbled home one snowy dawn: “The pain in my heart is too great and the hours are sleepless so I wander the dark streets searching but all I find is a dismall [sic] hell of loneliness and I wonder why life must end like this.” Ah, the expense of spirit is indeed a waste of shame when such effusions (I myself would pen a book full of them a decade after) seep over into middle age. Energy spent on the horrors of love is better spent on writing about the horrors of love. “Si vieillesse savait!” as Beckett quaintly put it.
It was my pleasure to unite Herbert Kubly with Janet Fairbank, Wisconsinites both. Janet lived on the then uniquely tree-lined, almost rural, block of Fifty-fifth between Lex and Park. The tone of that street is as vanished today as the viewpoint evinced in the soprano’s apartment. Janet Fairbank, a plain but stylish well-off “bachelor girl” (her term), chose to inhabit a two-room walk-up with a hot plate and an upright, and to spend all her allowance on “modern music.” If her voice, though firm, was neither agile nor very pleasing, it did possess a more infecting drama than many another nonvoiced specialist since. Unlike the others, she neither deluded herself about her voice nor thought of herself as granting a service to American music literature. Without sanctimony, she performed from sheer affection, mildly astonished at the small but solid public she drew to her annual concert of always new songs. Also, she had no competition. Oh, there was a host of terrific professionals around—Povla Frijsh, Mack Harrell, Nell Tangeman, Jennie Tourel—but theirs was a generalized vocabulary of the unhackneyed, whereas Fairbank had a specific monopoly on Americana. From floor to ceiling her rooms burst with manuscripts begged from or bestowed by live composers. For twelve months, replacing her regular accompanist, Henry Jackson, I served as her rehearsal pianist, daily sorting through this morass.
Janet and Kubly hit it off. Early that summer, before Mother and Father moved east, I took my first airplane ride ever, to visit them in Chicago. The plane was purposeful, exciting, and scary. (I still love being in a plane: the takeoff has an inexorable reason about it, like an erection, and the journey, no matter how crowded or tedious, represents a suspended animation during which one stops pondering suicide.) While on board I composed “Alleluia” for voice and piano, the title intoned forty-three times, fast, on a meter of 7/8, formed on a jagged nota cambiata which may or may not have been inspired by the untroubled view on this virgin air trip. After a few days in Chicago, I proceeded to Lake Geneva, where Janet had invited us both for a weekend at her family’s estate. I was given a guest room all in azure, with a mahogany night table on which reposed a fat book of photographs from the Belgian Congo, inscribed: “To the Fairbanks, remembering a frantic cocktail and a peaceful blue room. John Latouche.” How effortlessly chic! My own house gift was the new “Alleluia.”
Janet premiered over a hundred songs, mostly American, of which the manuscripts now lie in Chicago’s Newberry Library. More important, nearly all were printed, under her aegis, by a minor company named Music Press. Songs, being an even less marketable commodity than squid eggs or poetry, it is creditable that these publications, later sold to the major company of Presser, remain to this day in stock, many bearing an inscription to their Onlie Begetter. For Janet was American Song.
That December she opened her annual recital with “Alleluia.” To his credit, Kubly, who was not at the moment speaking to me, reviewed her in Time, stressing that she was not crazy (and mentioning me en passant as one of the unknowns on the program). Surely the pull of responsibility to her vocation acted as a revivifying serum. At forty-four, stricken with Hodgkin’s disease, she had already crossed the deadline set by doctors. Janet did not, however, survive to behold her certain mark of permanence, the lovely brown-and-green Music Press editions.
I recall the afternoon in October 1947. Doorbell and phone rang simultaneously: a messenger delivered the thrilling complimentary copies of my new published song, “The Lordly Hudson,” on Paul Goodman’s poem, dedicated to Janet, while on the wire Eva Gauthier was saying that Janet had died that morning.
Madame Eva Gauthier, she of the blue hair and endless supply of satin hats, inhabited a tiny flat in the now defunct Hotel Woodward on Fifty-third east of Sixth Avenue, with crates of scores and a yapping Pekingese. She was four feet ten inches of opinion, always precise, sometimes precisely wrong. Gauthier became the third of my three simultaneous female employers. Was she already seventy when I began playing for her coaching sessions, mainly for students on the GI Bill? Certainly she was from an era of inexpert sight-readers—from when prima donnas did not decipher. Debussy had taught her the role of Yniold by rote, she claimed. She also claimed intimacy with Ravel and Gershwin, showing us her song programs devoted exclusively to, and accompanied by, this pair. During those programs she changed garb with each group, involving vast swatches of stuff from Java, where for years she had lived with an importer husband. Her tendency to the graphi
c, or to getting things slightly off center, titillated those youngsters who came to her after the war. To a young tenor after singing Fauré’s “Prison”: “Keep in mind that this poem was conceived by Verlaine in jail where he was put for cutting off Van Gogh’s ear.” To another tenor excusing his high A’s because of a cold: “Be glad you don’t have to hit them during your period, with blood seeping onto the stage.” To me, about to accompany her in the demonstration of a scene from Pelléas: “Skip the rests, it’s mood that counts.”
But what a fantastic teacher, if teacher means one whose enthusiasm is transferable—who leads horses to pupils and makes them drink. Gauthier’s enthusiasm was for the intelligence of music, and though she couldn’t read music, she could talk it.
We couldn’t know it then, but that was an era of very delicate dinosaurs. Song ascended, thrived, then collapsed forever in a span of about thirty-five years, from 1920 to 1955. The quality of American song after World War I mellowed considerably, and by 1950 had turned to pure gold. We composers were not yet clearly aware that the normal display for such gold, the song recital, was already a losing proposition. Nor was pocket money any longer fair exchange. It would not occur to a singer, not even to Janet Fairbank, to pay for a song. Song was for love. So we continued to bring live nosegays to ghostly stars, courting a moribund breed. We were (to switch metaphors) young mothers lactating for their dead offspring.
Quick flashbacks:
—What do I most covet among the vignettes with Kubly? Going to Uptown Café Society to hear his friend Susan Reed sing folk songs, and finding ourselves next to Lana Turner’s ringside table. Breathtaking in a tight black blouse, little black hat with black veiling, black chiffon scarf, black skirt with the below-the-knee New Look just launched by Dior, and black spike-heeled pumps. Sitting with a loutish gent (he turned out to be Greg Bautzer), she was sensationally arrogant, prettier than a rose, glancing neither to left nor right but only into his eyes, even when she signed an autograph. They got up noisily and left during one of Susan’s songs.
—Finding John Latouche at “The Beggar’s Bar.” The weird German actress Valeska Gert, who in 1925 destroyed Garbo in Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse, and in 1963 would portray a witch in Fellini’s 8½, was now proprietor of this dive on Bleecker Street where she entertained tiny audiences as cackling diseuse, and where Norris Embry in adoring masochism waited tables for no pay. Latouche sat there, looking for Negroes (“Où sont les nègres downtown”), and drinking with a friend. We had met over the phone one day when Virgil was out, and later at a party chez Bu Faulkner, where I said: “I’m a composer,” and Touche said: “I didn’t know that people who looked like you did anything.” Now here he was, moaning. “Sex has reared its ugly head for everyone but me.” He imbibed no less than did I, was maybe thirty, feistily stylish, as befit an uncontrollably gifted Broadway arriviste.
John Latouche and I became friends (to know him five minutes was to befriend him) and would remain so until his early death. He was one of a kind, not a chip off the old American assembly line, and, as Wilde said of himself, put his genius into his life and his talent into his art. The art as I saw it never quite jelled, or maybe it just wasn’t my sort, being a sort of preface to Sondheim (the way Marc Blitzstein was an afterword to Weill). The theater pieces with Jerry Moross had a jazzy panache, Ballad for Americans was patriotic to a turn, Cabin in the Sky still has original lyrics, and the libretto for Douglas Moore’s Baby Doe remains a model for today’s composers to lust for. But that’s not enough. I find myself sitting in an East Side boîte with silver walls watching John Latouche watching Mabel Mercer with the intensity of a crucifixion, as Mabel, seated in an armchair, sang “While We’re Young.” She did not, I felt, merit this devotion.
Touche (as everyone called him) mingled with the upper crust but catered to the middlebrow. That, plus hard living, sullied his craft—his point of view. Or did it? We can’t be other than we are, and what we are we do. Besides, if the tough little charmer seemed to die at thirty-nine, he was actually 117, since he lived three lives in one.
—Cerutti’s, a piss-elegant Madison Avenue clipjoint where Margaret Bonds and Gerald Cook, known now as Bonds & Cook, played two pianos while everyone sang, and where, now that I was free to roam, I picked up Lucius Beebe’s boyfriend and went back to their suite at the Madison Hotel, where we more or less coited à trois, which they took pictures of.
—Paul Bowles, when Gertrude Stein died in 1946, underwent, he claimed, a purge. Gertrude had long ago said, after scanning his poetry, “As a writer you’re a good composer,” and the words stuck in his craw. Now he began writing freely again as he had in the twenties, mainly for View magazine, stories that contrasted starkly to his light, exquisite, nostalgic, café music. The fiction was—is—unrelentingly cruel, humiliating, unbearable. (The nonfiction, as expressed in music reviews, as I recall it, was raw, a bit glib, inexpert, he didn’t really care. Or am I wrong? He did, after all, care about the huge research he pursued on North African folk song, subsidized by the Library of Congress.) As the prose grew in structure, his musical composition dwindled. Not that he stopped composing; in fact, his arguably best works were coming, to be destined always for Fizdale & Gold, the most important two-piano team that ever was, not only for their diamond-sure executions but for their causing major new works to exist for their odd medium. (Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale set up a web of interaction between the hitherto—at least in the USA—independent worlds of music and literature. Their commissioning over the years of Stravinsky, Cage, Boulez, Haieff, Auric, Poulenc, Thomson, Tailleferre, Milhaud, Barber, as well as Rorem and, of course, Bowles, plus, for the last two, poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler to provide singable texts, resulted in the repertory for two pianos, a mode of expression which has now, alas, gone the way of the dodo and the song recital.) And he did continue creating incidental music for plays, now also an extinct vocation. But mostly it was books that preoccupied him.
—View, a first-rate avant-garde bimonthly, rarefied and arty, stressing French surrealism in writing and painting (but not in music: music can’t by definition be surrealist; music was banned by Breton, founder of the surrealist party; and music is never, or almost never, one of the arts in so-called magazines of the arts—it stands apart, even as opera stands apart from music), ran for seven years during the war and just after. View’s directors were three giant graces with swishy voices, like those of Virgil and John Cage and Lou. Charles-Henri Ford, like his beautiful sister, actress Ruth Ford, was a southern belle, curt and bossy, out to conquer Manhattan in the shadow of his life’s partner, the great Pavel Tchelitcheff. Parker Tyler, also a southern belle, black haired and languorous, was a pretty good poet, as was Charles-Henri with whom he had written a “dirty novel,” The Young and Evil, in the late 1920s, as well as coediting a magazine called The Blues out of Mississippi. Their whipping boy, chain-smoking John Myers of Buffalo, was much too tall and plump to be so effeminate, not unlike George Sanders disguised as Watteau’s “Blue Boy” with an impish smile and perpetual drink in hand. The magazine contained raunchy experimental prose, poetry and art reviews by mostly Americans (Clement Greenberg, Paul Goodman, Edouard Roditi, Harold Rosenberg, Marius Bewley, Paul Bowles, Borges, Henry Miller, Camus, Durrell) and black-and-white reproductions of pictures by mostly Europeans (Max Ernst, Man Ray, Miró, Duchamp, Klee, Breton). John Myers was the one I came to know best. He fancied himself a sort of Diaghilev, and within ten years became, if not the most powerful, at least the most curious of American art dealers as well as a theater producer and matchmaker. For now, besides running View, he was a professional puppeteer.
Was it through Maggy Magerstadt that we met? Maggy was working with John’s puppet theater. In any event, John, without knowing a note of my music, without indeed knowing music, decided I was the greatest composer this side of Paul Bowles, and asked me to write—real quick, honey!—some songs for Fire Boy, a playlet by Parker’s boyfriend, Charles Boultenhouse. This I d
id, for voice and piano, although the songs were sung by John accompanied only by drum. John, who had a tiny nonvoice, learned the notes by rote and later intoned them most affectingly while manipulating the puppets. (They were published years later as Three Incantations for a Marionette Tale.)
During these weeks I also set to music a lush poem of Parker Tyler’s called “Dawn Angel.” Of the three or four hundred songs I’ve produced over the decades, this is the only one composed according to how the poet declaimed his own words. I invited Parker over to Twelfth Street precisely for this purpose. There he is still, seated in the red armchair, eyes closed, head thrown back, lisping softly, caressingly, affectedly, as I make notes. Each rise and fall, each loud and soft, each hesitation and accelerando will be incorporated into the manuscript. At the end
and the black bloomed with black that sings,
skying the distance with a twinkle of birds—
when the angel speaks now plumage garbs his words:
his light wears birds.
Parker bangs out “black bloomed,” swoops up to “skying,” pauses in the center of “twinkle” (which becomes “twink-kle”), sinks into “now,” and sighs on “his light wears birds.” It’s all there on the page: rather than setting the words, I set Parker’s voice. I’ve never heard “Dawn Angel” sung, and it remains in manuscript.
With John as go-between I collaborated with Charles-Henri Ford, providing incidental music for his strange little puppet drama, At Noon upon Two. Two vicarious persons take turns looking through a keyhole and asking one another about “What’s she doing now? What’s he doing now?,” while those being spied upon dance, copulate, writhe, burn and perhaps die. My background score was for flute and piano, plus two chopsticks hit against each other and against the echoing strings inside the piano. With flutist Ralph Freundlich playing for free, me at the piano (and chopsticks), John Myers’s squeaky voice as one of the watchers, and Lionel Stander’s gravelly voice as the other, we recorded the playlet in a studio, and the recording was used as soundtrack during the live performance. This took place as part of a fund-raising bash for View, at the Old Knickerbocker on lower Second Avenue. The puppets were manipulated by John, with costumes and sets of Kurt Seligmann, while the sound system boomed out the voices of these tiny creatures. I salvaged some of this music for my Violin Sonata.