by Ned Rorem
Kurt Seligmann designed a startling cover for my “Alleluia”—an armored angel, gaudy and embryonic, seen from behind, trumpeting toward the heavens. I did not know Seligmann well (though I warmed to his smile, his atelier overlooking Bryant Park, and his wife, Arlette, whose naughty eyes were weighted in blue kohl), perhaps because, like all surrealists in principle, he was heterosexual—homosexuality, like music, being taboo. (Charles-Henri had been granted, he claims, “special dispensation” by Breton, while Lorca and Dali were simply banished.)
Pavel Tchelitcheff was alluring. I met the artist at the puppet performance but had seen pictures of him long before. Also he had been the lover of Belle Tannenbaum’s “dangerous” friend, the Chicago pianist Alan Tanner, who spoke of his genius. And I had been spellbound by Tchelitcheff’s décors for Hindemith’s ballet Noblissima Visione, all in dark red and dark blue illustrating the world of Saint Francis. Who in New York was not closely acquainted with his works at the Museum of Modern Art—the freaks and acrobats, the basket of edible strawberries, the portrait of a sexy Lincoln Kirstein, the exhilarating and painful universe in that magical tree called Hide and Seek? Parker arranged a meeting with me and Pavlik (as he was called) at a time when Charles-Henri was away. A dîner à quatre, with the three of us plus a rich parasite named Perry Embiricos at the Russian Tea Room. Pavlik had an electric charm, plus a bracelet of red yarn to ward off evil spirits, which I never saw him without. If no sparks resulted from this electricity, the fault was, according to Parker, mine. Parker reproached me always for frittering my youth away, not by drink and not by sex, but by combining sex and drink. Maybe he was right. I did ultimately dally with Perry Embiricos during an initial visit to the Everard Baths, after which we attended The Respectful Prostitute, Sartre’s political play then running on Broadway. Did I mention that Charles-Henri’s sister, Ruth Ford, starred in Paul Bowles’s translation of Sartre’s previous play, Huis clos (rendered as No Exit by Paul, who took the title from a subway stile), which ran on Broadway the previous season? Ruth, tough, gorgeous, mannered, was somehow too intelligent for an actress.
Footnote. After living for sixteen years on Sixteenth Street in one room smaller than mine, Parker and Charles Boultenhouse moved to 15 Charles Street, the same building my parents would eventually inhabit for twenty years before moving to Cadbury. They all became neighborly, and after Parker died, Mother and Father and Charles and Charles’s mother grew close.
• • •
Lenny now lived on West Tenth in the same bank of houses as Oliver Smith’s, into which Paul and Jane Bowles had moved. One cold spring dawn after closing time, Lenny, standing in a doorway on Eighth Street, hailed me as I passed by with giddy Frank Etherton smoking what was then called a reefer. What was then called hep (now still referred to as hip) describes Lenny at all times, so he, too, took a puff. Frank, intimidated by the Great Man, vanished. Lenny guided me chez lui, where I vomited. “Is that all you ever do?” Next morning, when Helen Coates arrived, Lenny unapologetically reintroduced me (we had met often through Muriel Smith) then invited me back that evening to dine. Served by a black female cook we had meat loaf and salad and homemade cherry ice cream, which I bolted down but which Lenny didn’t touch, nursing a fever but hating to slow down. We strolled around the Village, tense and sober, stopped at my pad, where he glanced disapprovingly at some new songs on the piano (“Town Hall encores,” he called them), then went back to his place. The intensity with which he empathized! “I am all that exists for him”—we all believed. He had just returned from Paris, where Poulenc (O brave new world!) had gifted him with the score of the Les mamelles de Tirésias. At the piano he sang for me the wondrous choral scene, bluesy and languorous, “Comme il perdait à Zanzibar,” and we both burst into tears. Whereupon Lenny placed both hands on my shoulders, studied my features in that way of his, and said: “The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to love us. And that’s impossible—you just don’t meet everyone in the world.”
Other nights, if I returned home alone from the bars, in my wooziness I might phone Madame Povla Frijsh, the Danish soprano, to whose art Morris had introduced me. Of a breed that no longer exists, Frijsh, without much of a voice, could do anything. She sang in—could think in—eleven languages, starting with that from her native Denmark, where she was born in 1881, and wrenching your heart in each one. Stageworthy to the core, she was a cult, bigger than life, and for encores accompanied herself in Grieg and Stephen Foster. Her forte was the comprehensible projection of texts (if she forgot a word, she would substitute that word’s parallel in any tongue—a practice maybe less spontaneous than she, an actress, might admit); her main mannerism was the swoop, whether it was needed or not; and her pride was in finding the mot juste for her program notes. (“The only words in English for the untranslatable ‘O ma délaissée,’” she once explained about Aragon’s poem C, “is ‘Oh my hapless one’” a solution—not bad—that no one born to the English language would probably have found.) Because she launched, hot off the griddle, the songs of Barber and Bowles and Virgil and all, I wanted to know her before I knew her, and in impotent rage would call her in the early hours. I said nothing—just listened to her accented anguish as she repeated: “Who is this?” I confessed the ruse to a young tenor student who found it wonderful. Then I myself began to receive late-night phone calls with a scary silence at the other end of the line. (The calls were from the tenor, I later learned.) Meanwhile I mutely phoned Kubly a couple of times. One day I told him I was getting late-night calls from silent callers. “I’ve been getting them too,” said Kubly. “I thought it was you. Now I know it’s not.”
Before he moved to Tenth Street, Paul Bowles lived in the notorious Middagh Street pensione in Brooklyn, where Auden played mother hen to various renters: Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, George Davis and Gypsy Rose Lee, Golo Mann and Carson McCullers, Richard Wright and Oliver Smith. It seemed only proper when the beauteous Teru Osato came to the city with her new husband, Vince, that I should ask Paul to find lodgings for them there. Frances Osato had for some time been working as a seamstress in the East Fifties; her chief mannequin was Sono, now a star in On the Town, who was pictured in Vogue modeling Frances’s pearl-covered skull caps. Frances was a surrogate parent not only to dozens of Japanese girls loose in the city but to myself needing a meal and loving to play as she sang. She took me to plays and to concerts too. Teru, she said, had cancer. The least I could do was to find her a home.
Some time later I was sitting, exhausted, in the lobby of Juilliard when one of Frances’s Japanese girls, a violinist, came up to say that Teru had only four months to live. Under my arm was a book of American poems. I whispered to myself, Why not write a song while waiting? Composing as a craft can be a permanent release—but not emotionally, only technically—it keeps you busy. Still, a few of my songs came as temporary emotional release, for instance “On a Singing Girl.” Elinor Wylie had made a rhymed transliteration from Greek of an epitaph for a musical slave girl who had died young. I plotted out the vocal line right there on my lap, overtailoring the prosody as was then my obsession. So the voice was complete in itself, though I had no idea of how the accompaniment would go until I reached home that evening. I’d learned that if a vocal line is conceived alone it will take on the rambling curves of nature rather than the artificial curves—square curves, you might say—of folk song: for coherence, a systematized accompaniment is indicated. (Contrariwise, sometimes in our piano improvisations we hit upon a figuration so pretty that any silly tune can be successfully superimposed.) I needed square curves. Having just come to know Paul Bowles’s song “David,” I decided to disguise some of the piano part of that into a background fabric. Such conscious plagiarism is safe, remorse leads us to sabotage innovators, we sign our name. Who is the wiser? Certainly not Paul. Artists, by definition innocent, don’t steal. But they do borrow without giving back. By the same token, after the fact, they may follow a singer’s suggestion.
The closing words, “dust be light,” were originally an octave higher. Povla Frijsh, whom now I knew, lowered them to their now inevitable position.
This song, like most of mine, was made in a couple of hours. To be exact, my diary (from which the above facts are culled) indicates it was finished at 9 p.m. on 29 April 1946. Four months later Teru, aged twenty-five, died.
The passionate angles of the Kubly affair dissolved into the way of all flesh. After the requisite years of spiteful mourning we became true friends, nontactile, bizarre, wary.
Love is impossible. If it were possible it wouldn’t be love. The égoïsme à deux sung by our poets since the start of time depicts what the Greeks called a sickness—the time-warp fantasy still believed (I think) by the young. Consider the Gershwins’ pentametrical couplet with its internal rhymes:
It’s very clear our love is here to stay,
Not for a year, but ever and a day.
But ever and a day equals, in the real world, no more than those three years of Tristan and Isolde. Still, those three years can contain pleasures and tortures like no others. While they last.
Love is a recent invention. Not love of mankind, better defined as mutual respect (loving thy neighbor as thyself is hardly one of the lesser commandments), but Romantic Love, so possessive, so dramatically selfish, so short-lived.
I set to music a little poem of Kubly’s called “The Anniversary” about the death of romance. For the record, in these drawn-out months of 1945–46, I finished several other songs, including two psalms, called “A Psalm of Praise” and “A Song of David.” The fact that everyone was reading Gladys Schmidt’s “historic” novel David the King accounts for the biblical settings, as well as for another song called “Absalom” on Paul Goodman’s sad verses. A piano piece called Prayer and Paraphrase, influenced by Lou’s obsession with Carl Ruggles (who leaves me cold), was premiered at an ISCM concert. There was also a setting of Whitman’s “Reconciliation” about the poet’s love for a dead soldier. And another setting, “Spring and Fall,” on the Hopkins poem Norris had read into the machine at the Chicago museum so many years before, may be the most touching song I ever penned. Built on the descending ground base of Monteverdi’s “Amor,” it spins a tune of an adolescent girl’s first menstruation and the pangs thereof, mounting gently ever higher as the bass line reiterates its four notes ever lower.
More astonishingly, during this same era of cruising and liquor, school and dance classes, vocal accompaniment and lovers’ quarrels, I also completed the following works:
Five Portraits for Oboe and Piano, “pictures” of composer friends, performed by Josef Marx and Betty Crawford at an ISCM concert, and then on the radio.
A big affair called The Long Home for chorus and orchestra, on the final chapter of Ecclesiastes, which Paul Callaway conducted at the Washington Cathedral. (Ben Weber, now living in the Village, a stone’s throw from me and from Shirley, was, like me, eking out a living as copyist. I still retain in a treasure chest Ben’s beautiful autograph of this work.)
A bigger affair called Cain and Abel, a musicalization of Paul Goodman’s operatic play wherein Cain is represented as loving his younger brother and sacrificing that brother as his most precious thing unto God. (Only the penciled first draft exists, never orchestrated, never performed.)
A still bigger affair, That We May Live, a three-hour pageant on a script by Milton Robertson celebrating the new state of Israel. A huge cast of actors, dancers (choreography by Lillian Shapiro, one of Martha Graham’s troupe), speakers, and an orchestra (conducted by Isaac Van Grove) interpreting my evocative set pieces, including a hora and other sung pastiches based on Hebrew tunes, and an apotheosistic march invented for the dance classes—all this combined to perform in Madison Square Garden. I, the only goy in the enterprise, was paid five hundred dollars, with an extra hundred for a later Philadelphia performance. For the glossy program Kubly wrote up my bio in Time style, very snazzy, recalling the white boy in short pants with his Negro piano teacher in Chicago. During the months of preparation a good deal of camaraderie fomented, and Robertson’s wife, handsome Marie Marchowsky (also a Graham dancer), commissioned a piano score for her already choreographed solo titled Lost in Fear (twenty-five dollars).
None of this music was later incorporated into other works. But what I learned in terms of practical instrumentation was inestimable. The pageant brought in the first money I ever earned as a composer.
It was David Diamond who, having turned down the job, recommended me.
David Diamond had become a friend during the summer of 1944.
One dull August Sunday, as Morris and I drifted through Washington Square during the undistinguished annual outdoor art show, we were suddenly dazzled by a display of portraits as remarkable as the sight of their author, who was standing beside them. This was Allela Cornell, tall, gangling, and grandly ugly (like Mrs. Roosevelt), who, in charcoal, limned your likeness as you sat there, gaped at by passersby. We chatted. Learning that I was a musician, Allela invited us to her studio, a vast flat above Ruby’s Garage at 544 Hudson which she shared with the composer David Diamond.
David was as unusual-looking as Allela, aged twenty-nine, with his flat, sad, ashen face, like Petrushka’s, his balding red hair, his slightly puckered lips. Incapable of small talk, even of medium talk, he plunged immediately into the large meanings with anyone—Einstein, Garbo, the plumber—and tant pis if you weren’t on his wavelength. But mostly you were on his wavelength—he had a way of making his interlocutor feel worthy (especially the plumber), a way of leveling distinctions between castes and types. He beguiled not through beauty (which he lacked) but through equanimity, talent, and a certain charisma. He was also a little crazy.
My role in David’s life, and his in mine, will swerve and crumble and rise and flex as the decades mount up. For now our rapport as sometime drinking buddies was governed by a Socratic discipline. I was impressed by David’s fame. Of those in Copland’s milieu, David was surely the most successfully prolific, having since eighteen been a creator of symphonies performed regularly by Koussevitzky, Mitropoulos, Reiner, and Rodzinski. But he was also known to be a problem, chiding his guiltless seniors with righteous indignation at parties, proffering deep love to those who by their very nature cannot reciprocate (rough trade), and withdrawing his own works from execution because of an imagined slight. There was a quasi-suicidal disorder to his comportment which I found glamorous, all the more that it was balanced by a rigid, almost religious, discipline regarding his work. His intimates shared his predilections. Allela, for one, was possibly a great painter, but final proofs never grew manifest. For in the fall of 1946, out of unrequited love for a beautiful drunken rich woman, she swallowed strychnine and died a slow death in the gloom of Saint Vincent’s hospital. (The rich woman, out of remorse, gave David her Steinway grand and joined AA.) Despite his connections, his pull, he, like most composers, earned a scattered living. Currently he played violin nightly in the pit orchestra of On the Town, thanks to Lenny Bernstein.
David meanwhile was impressed by my eagerness and naïveté, and by the fact that I was copyist for Virgil, whom he dismissed as “a phony.” It was agreed that I do some copy work for David too. During the next months I would transcribe his Third Symphony, his Fourth Symphony (score and parts), his Second Quartet, and various smaller works, mostly songs.
Again, as with Virgil and Paul, I felt a jolt when actually seeing this music—the bareness. Is this what sophisticated New Yorkers were up to? The Modernity we Chicagoans were weaned on was complex—not the brainy, decarnalized complexity of the Austrians (who were out of vogue then to all except the milieu of George Perle) but the corporal complexity of the naturalized French: that is, of Stravinsky and Bartók. I’d not yet heard of the lean, dépouillé mode of the eastern seaborders, of the dominating Copland, who spent a life slicing off extra fat. True, their scores were sprinkled with “wrong notes,” but these were mere maquillage, a cross-hatching over C major.
Nobody composing in America then had more technique than David Diamond. By technique I mean know-how, métier, ability to cope solidly and persuasively with whatever dictates classical French-style, Boulanger-imparted craft. But craft can be damaging, too; it sometimes caught David up short. Too much expertise per se, too much working out, ends up treading water in undifferentiated color. The worst of his later songs are dull by being too correct, the prosody too careful, too talky.
David’s early songs were stuffed with appeal and melancholy of the highest order, meaning that these qualities are transferable (we bask in them) rather than static, like Narcissus’ charming sadness, which we merely admire coolly. The later songs retain the melancholy, but the appeal is edged out by a portentous, declamatory dead-seriousness which is at best dramatic (though not theatrical: they have motion but no action—they don’t lead anywhere, as theater must), at worst pompous. Of sobriety there is plenty, of humor little.
But where is humor among composers? Can one prove that this essentially verbal virtue even exists in the “abstract” art of music? Humor is demonstrable only in vocal music, that is, in sung texts, in song, the bastard which in its multiple guises accounts for four-fifths of music history.