by Ned Rorem
1945
29 September, Saturday afternoon. Had an orgasm last night which coincided with a splitting in the head where the whole world seemed shattered into ten thousand lavender leaves. Afterwards I went to sleep and dreamt a dream: At home in Chicago there were many many people collected in the front and dining rooms, all with sad faces and all waiting to be hanged on a gallows in the elevator hall (which I never saw during the course of the dream). Hard to believe so many could get into the apartment. I too was waiting to be hanged for some unspecified mistake (I vaguely recall Bruce Phemister negotiating some of the sinister proceedings). At first it seemed to be a joke, but soon, sure enough, we could hear the hazy but sharp sound of a neck cracking in the next room, followed by a sort of dull cheering and a groan. I thought of escaping through the side windows but the streets all around were filled with people guarding the house. I was sweating and terribly frightened, and a person from the hanging room would come in every 5 minutes and say “Your turn” to one of the assembly, and then we could see in silhouette the horrible act through shadows moving on the wall. In the dream I had a vision of a soldier in an endless field. He was about to be hanged (perhaps he was German). He was very alive, with tears in his eyes, and then very dead—and there was a close-up of the tears which I seemed to go into like in a mirror and then I awoke.
I had to weep a bit on the bus along Riverside Drive coming from school yesterday. The river was covered with hot mist which led to the ocean & to Europe. And felt I wanted someone to be nice to me. I want a house with Negro servants.… Stopped by David [Diamond]’s to pick up my table, and he was depressed, having come from Bartók’s funeral. He said of course that that was the end utterly, but said some pleasant things too, and cheered me up somewhat. I delight in him.… I got drunk with Remo and E. (the latter had arrived in N.Y. unannounced).… A letter with a 10 dollar mail-order from Bill Smith who’s seriously wounded in a plane crash (8 months surgery). Letter from Paul Callaway—also in an Okinawa hospital. Homesick messages. These soldiers—how can they be reasonable now, or even trust in anything? Oi!
Tears came to my eyes again after a few drinks in the Belmar bar where I sat alone to do my “fantasizing” of the past & future. Last night I was a white prince in the Belgian Congo, but other times I’m married to Maggy & a success or not a success, wondering what the people around do in or out of bed. Death’s been around a lot and I think I’m afraid of it. Virgil writes of Olivier Messiaen in Paris. Glory to Jesus & the war-torn “grand pathétique” composers. But here comes the ice man.
David said it’s immature of me to allow myself to be so upset by the atrocities of Irma Greise (the mistress of one of the concentration camps) who tied the legs of pregnant women together so that they couldn’t give birth and died in agony. For adjustment and a striving toward a certain happiness is reconciliation to loneliness which is universal, and which is present at all times in all things no matter what one seeks to do or think or feel. So says David.
I don’t like Chinese art for the same reason I don’t like high school girls: little tiny wristwatches, microscopic handwriting, inaudible stupid voices in class (though occasional hysterical shrieks in the lounge). But while oriental water-colors do have some imagination, the girls are not to be considered. I want a vigorous slash, some energy in the wilted stance, some violence in the delicate, bright or dull, but no pastels.
3 October.… discovered crabs again last night and have exterminated the place with DDT to take care of the scorpions too.…
The whole war and its aftereffect seem to be smacking us in the face for the first time. Now that it’s over we can look back clearly and feel afraid. In photos the Japanese faces burned by the atom bomb are impassive.… The war and the world seem on a scope too big for me.
… more settled if only I could stop drinking, & stay home, forgetting about romance en ménage, & try to get my goddamn schoolwork done.
Last night had my yearly before-sleep dream which would be like the DTs except I’ve been having it for at least 12 years. A sensation of heaviness and distance, unpleasant, not airy as a dream should be. With eyes open in the dark I know that I could touch the chair, yet it’s miles away, the room is enormous, the curtains are monoliths on the horizon. With all that space there’s still pressure. Then it goes away and I finally sleep.
No desire for hearing music, none for the actuality of sex (on my mind constantly, it seems); would throw out every last bit of my music if it weren’t for the excess of shit around that is being played.… The Long Home appears a bit too ecstatic as far as I’ve gone (laziness); will have to wait and see, if ever, how it sounds … must stop announcing so vehemently how much I hate everyone & thing. E. said I was overcritical, & so does everybody else. Sick, maybe, of myself, and that’s a state. Should I go to bed now?
The bed is a foot beneath the sill, the sill is a yard from the sidewalk where passersby at noon do not suspect the writhings so very close. Conversely: the gibbering idiocy of good sex, three feet away from the banal sounds of the city.
• • •
… having an hour to kill between classes I took a ferry ride to Jersey at 125th. What a restful excursion for a nickel! and the chugging and the salt smell like the Brittanica to Southampton nine summers ago. Was piqued at turning around, at which time the view was of the huge stone rampart in an altar-like sunburst (the weather was unseasonably stifling), so naturally I thought of medieval pogroms in the broad afternoon. Like screwing by day—something that is traditionally nocturnal. Why is the river always so slow, so misty, so indefinably sunny?
Don’t know now what to begin composing having finally assembled most of my scraps & made them into pieces (the last is Prayer & Paraphrase, two inseparable piano studies for Virgil’s birthday next week). And how does one get one’s music played? That, I must say, is depressing.
Tomorrow—a little adventure. I’m to meet at 7:30 and dine with Pavlik Tchelitcheff—Parker’s conspiracy—so of course I’m anticipating in a hopeful & dubious manner about something, but I’m not sure what.
Sunday nite. A really lost weekend. Ill, vague, uncoordinated, with a poison stomach. Haven’t eaten in 2 days, since Friday with Mr. Tchelitcheff as a matter of fact: wonderful shaslik at the Russian Tea Room. Liked him better than I thought I would, charming and witty and vain. Alcohol—been mostly day and night steadily with strange physical people and my whole system seems burnt out. It’s hard to care that I didn’t go to Philly, and didn’t do any work, and didn’t clean the filth-encrusted bathroom, but only had my ego flattered by dumbbells and saw Lou somewhat thru a fog and all the talented fairy friends. My hand being still unsteady, I find it difficult to write, even to turn the page, or to think at all. Rainy, rainy day, dark moody river on which I speculated while retching this afternoon as I walked.
13 November. Nothing’s more leveling to a jangled mind than to discover finally by Tuesday that normal thinking, diet and demeanor are again in keeping.… For a long time, even in my soberest moments, I listen with incredulous envy to whoever says “I cleaned the house today,” or “I bought some dandruff remover,” or “I saw the Yiddish melodrama on Second Avenue,” or “I will attend such and such a lecture,” even “I read a book.” For I wonder how there’s time for such acts plus drinking too, both being extracurricular to the fundamental principle, writing music, which is an endless proposition, especially if time is taken out here & there to notate in a journal. Sunday I was really nauseated at bedtime, and lay thinking of the fatal dose, and how gray my face would look to friends after three days of death, during which no one worried much, assuming I wasn’t in after ringing the bell or trying the door.
It seems that personality differences are pure chance, like the cards that offer 4 million possibilities for a suit from a deck of 52. And if there’re billions of gene cells the results are unimaginable, so that which is personality—the moral gorgeous spirit of the mind, the glum or joyous heart—is only the result of a nervous
internal disturbance. If this is true then David has to be right when he says the grave is the very, very end (or is that simply Jewish?). Could some order be found in the genealogist’s fumblings, so that we aren’t forced to conclude that great works are the result perhaps of stomach ulcers?
Later. An acquaintance, a disarming one, having just dropped in, I’ve finished ¾ of a gift jug of wine, good wine too, on this my night for work, fugue-writing and history study. And it’s late and still Tuesday but I’m to go out—forever it seems—and have a drop or twelve of beer, though tomorrow’s my early day. But I didn’t fail for a moment to run through the sermon in Moby Dick, reminiscent of the one in Portrait of the Artist, or Hemingway’s “Today is Friday.” A line about the rock: “Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.”
And even later. To come home and find the ink bottle still open. And I’d wanted to say only shit shit shit & icicles [handwriting illegible]. The rain is horrible & there’s a consolation. The icicles are me goddamit, with a progressively bad complexion. O, O, O.
Wednesday.… I’m horrified when I read now what I wrote last night, and remember that withal I was crying when I put it down. [Etcetera …]
Virgil being back from France, Morris and I went up to the Chelsea (after hearing Landowska play less well than expected) to a little party he gave for the usual people, the most offensive one there being the vomitous Peter Lindamood (whose very name I shudder to inscribe lest it associate me with him), and the most delightful being Lincoln Kirstein although I didn’t talk to him (whose name sent a tremor through me, owing to the innocent crush I’ve had on him for years). Virgil is quite as brilliant as ever, more so in fact, a little louder, a little thinner, still too severe and always completely lovable. But the effect of such gatherings necessitates a purge, and that I take out on Morris, who, no matter what he thinks, is stubbornly wrapped in fadism, artifice. My whole body aches, I itch, and am cold. Scabies.
My dear parents are in Puerto Rico and my guilt at not writing them hurts. For Mother’s upset and Father’s famous, and both hence need consolation. Also love from their loving son.
• • •
Before I go out to get a haircut, a line or two concerning my love life, which is to say a thought on sex… Just wrote the parents asking forgiveness for the delay, but said I loved them utterly and no one else in the world; that I’m in a sort of neo-pubescent era of being pummeled by so many bright influences that it’s hard to know which to trust, or in which to stake a claim. Silver frosty autumn days! Also that I need a period of abstinence from composing, in which to consider my talent, the style and the proper method of approach toward creation. For the making of music is filled with personality pitfalls (at least for me).… [Etcetera]…—an omnipresent shyness (of which most people seem fortunately oblivious now that my social life is linked so much to drinking) obviously is directly relevant to my eccentric sex habits.… [Etcetera …]
24 November. Why not die! Last evening had a harrowing lecture from Morris on what a shit everyone thinks I am, and it came as a shock. I shall try to be nicer, but how? Then to come home and buy beer and wait three hours for Arthur with the house smelling like a church and me playing Ravel to myself. And if no one turns up …? So then I must go to commune at the Belmar. And did, sitting there in the lovely aloneness before going to solicit a partner for the chore of dubious sex.…
If I’m not nice to people, no one will come to my funeral.
Wednesday afternoon. Fuck my Id. Spent an extra hour alone with Giannini this aft, while he told me I showed promise, etc. (I’d just written an Agnus Dei in the shape of a fugue), and of course we agreed on superlative craftsmanship based on the prerequisite of at least an implied tonality.
And it’s true that just when the evening’s moral resolutions are of the most resolute, there’s an interruption. For last night I’d planned to finish the reading of the sea-novel, when over trotted Ben Weber with his thin cerise lips, bald head, eczema and flabby belly, and—it’s hard to believe—for 4 full hours we talked (⅓) about the proper Local 802 payment for professional musical calligraphy, and (⅔) about the gory details of his sex with “gorgeous numbers” who, if you ask me, vibrate with an ever-present nonexistence.
Why is it that lately—well, the past 6 months—I have such inclinations to weep, not real salt, but to be moved, if not deeply, at least once a day? Not over a bleeding drunk in the subway, but at the sight of a happy family; not over a Greek tragedy, but at a sweet line there in any book; over a sunset of course, but not at a dribbling moon when I must draw my coat up about my ears (though this recalls that surrealist warmth that used to invade me when outside alone on a winter day I would examine the furrows in a porous brick wall at point-blank range, and see there a microscopic world I could and could not enter, and want to swoon).
Money is as false a standard as a sailor suit. Mother and Father took the sum set aside to advance Géorg in his education, and used it for his funeral.
A slight remark on a dream between the moment the clock rang and when I got up 10 minutes later. An intersection of streets in a none-too-crowded European city—the beggars’ corner. About 8 or 10 heads were moving about in the road, and were regarded as a phenomenon, yet were more or less casually accepted by the inhabitants. All the heads were of old men, bearded, and with hats, jewish (I think), and some even Rabbis. They would talk amongst each other, never smiling, but not especially sad-looking either. Certain of them were mounted on little boards with wheels—the easier to get about—but most sort of glided along, the bottoms of their heads apparently being like the suction tentacles of the octopus—no necks at all. They had all been in an accident at the train station, and had been miraculously saved by a certain hospital, eventually to be liberated in this form. One in particular, a gentleman about seventy, was pointed out to me as being an honored freak among freaks, having only ⅔ of his head left (and still lived). This one fainted frequently from lack of food, or from loss of temper if an automobile happened to run over the tips of his long hair. He was subsequently carried back to the hospital, though against his will, by a normal acquaintance.
I’ll finish merely by saying that this was first shown to me in a photograph: The Town with Living Heads in the Street. But during the course of the dream the scene became animated, and I was incorporated into the bizarre crossroads.
Liquor is a lovely thing.… Here I am unreal, but there I grow real and vibrate, thriving in misery. I fear work, for human life seems endless, an unrewarded climb. What’s there to reach for but love? how pacify the energies but dream? Constant dreaming.
1946
Mother writes dismayedly about her ever-present problem: feeling unessential, subordinate to the family talent, etc. Papa ends a note thus: “In some ways we live in a very sorry world, but of course it’s the only one we’ve got right now. Let’s hope it improves, & that we all help a little toward the change.”
Today is the first literature class. The instructor, Joseph Lane, is young and cute. I sit in the front row. Instead of taking notes I draw a picture of a hand pierced by a dagger, four weeping women, a nude floating from a huge incense pot, and Christ on the cross. The instructor sees this and makes a witty comment to the class. They laugh. I am embarrassed to my innermost fibers.
Standing on the perilous embankment at 122nd & Amsterdam, I realize again that I am in New York, the Empire city, the Chicagoan’s goal. The weather being warm and wet (though the January sun emerges for a minute over there in Jersey, aquamarine and sumptuous), I go into Riverside Church where the green & orange stained glass is more enigmatic than in a peacock’s fan.
The aim of life is nonexistent, or a sublimation to God. Platitude: True joy can come only through mysticism, not the past, it’s too dreary, but perhaps something of the utter future away from this earth. Earth is vile, the scope of man is all vile, this earth will always be vile so long as man is here, and even after we a
re destroyed and have disappeared. The water and the wind are all that will stay—unless the water explodes too when the world is broken in two. But the wind will be blowing over the unphysical remainder, and will be glad not to have a brow to fan. What can God be thinking?
Teru Osato is dying. The young and the beautiful. Her mother and I are going out to Brooklyn tonight.
4 June. Marie danced Lost in Fear last night & it was ghastly. Music unrecognizable, and the whole recital gave the impression of lovely married women playing at being lesbians in modern dance. Lacked the wholesomeness of the true neurotic.…
Most of the men in the Serious Music field are queer, while the women seem more on the straight and narrow. Conversely, the men of Jazz seem better-balanced than the women who go hog wild.
Wasted days, drinking half the day but only enough to impair work, not enough to get soused. Also the impending irony of perhaps being inducted into the army now that the war’s over nearly a year. Father writes: “The heart of man seems to be intent on evil, or to be guided by short-sightedness.” How it rains tonight.…
• • •
Maggy and Kubly offer a conflict: they don’t like each other, while I like them both.… Charles Mills’ wife tried to make me at a party Friday night. She was stinking drunk and unabashed in declaring that every artist in the room was full of invalid shit except her husband, the biggest genius of modern times.… Speaking of shit, Virgil remarked, apropros of my upbringing and with inconsistent silliness, that running around naked in front of other family members was straining the progressive idiom to the limit, & (contradictorily) would cause inhibitions in later life. This is an effect, but is it a cause?