Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Then she played Mozart, and on the piano, that same D-major Sonata I used to bang out for Belle Tannenbaum. This commenced with a grand rolled chord, and continued with freedom and chutzpah à la Chopin. Who is to say that Chopin himself might not have played Mozart thus? Landowska, after all, is closer to the ways of Chopin than to ours: she was born only thirty years after he died, and he was born only nineteen years after Mozart died. True, 129 years separate Bach’s death from Landowska’s birth; but styles of playing alternate between the pristine and grandiose from generation to generation, just as styles of composition shift between contrapuntal to harmonic (the latter being simple, the former complex) from era to era. There is no one right way to play a piece; there are as many right ways as there are true performers. There is no progress (or if there is, progress cannot be always equated with the Good), there is only the Eternal Return. Landowska is a true performer, her “act” stops when the play begins. Bach does inhabit her.

  • • •

  7 May. Tel jour! Telle nuit! Suicide doesn’t solve all problems, for this dawn I was rejected again from the arms of the nation. A release, like some clotted growth clipped from the soul. Tribulations are always approached alone. Each of my 3 sweetest loves—David & Maggy & Kubly (with whom last night I had a homemade meal conceived with heroic ingenuity)—failed completely to indulge my apprehensions about the ordeal of this morning; the one for his concern with other problems; the next for her former knowledge of my breastbeating; the third for a chronic fussy boredom of humor. Nor are they pacifists: they felt I should be in the army. After the homemade meal David and I went to Petrushka (conducted with inelegance and mimed atrociously, the magician especially; and the mob scenes quite lacking in that glistening coordination I remember from the good old days as mass psychology in miniature with that quick change-of-interest from diversion to diversion, jealousies, sweet jubilance and melting disdain) & then across the street with Zeller and Jerry Robbins (the former an angel and an ass, the latter possessor of a winning face and living proof that dancers aren’t all incorrigibly ignorant of the “musical line”). How I wish it were an inspiration to return home.…

  … Gauthier remarks that my songs are all concerned with coffins or religion and indeed that’s true. Consider King David, of whom I now read, who became not more elated but more pessimistically sterile with age. But those were the days when pogroms were a matter of course, as the unseen ankle was blessed by Victoria, and as inversion runs rampant today.…

  Kubly’s art is different from mine, and he defines it too minutely. But all who produce are alike. If loneliness is a prerequisite, it will present itself despite our looking for it. If to write a good book one must be always “observing people” (with the excuse that human nature is being absorbed into technique)—which I don’t believe, though for the playwright it may be more imperative than for the painter—then how can he leave them suspended to go off to his loneliness and discuss them, while they continue to resolve themselves more fantastically than he might conceive?…

  David’s been around overly much, disrupting my domesticity and pestering hell out of both of us. Seems drunk & under hypnosis (to a childish degree) to the point of hurling a wine glass (half full!) at me. But he came back 6 hours later to apologize, with Ed [Stringham]. I will not be pulled down by him, he’s killed too many already.

  • • •

  … a certain divineness fires the artist’s imagination [but] this is not discoverable in female writers. With Miss Dickenson [sic] as example of much high caliber talent, it’s seen that she conceives in miniature, like all women, dealing with small ideas that are part of great ones, but never great in themselves. Is it because she employs short verse—tetrameter—which is coy by definition & bad for music setting? When women venture (I was going to say intrude) into pentameter, or more sophisticated meters, they sound either like Miss Millay whose deplorable sentiments are only slightly disguised in the sonnet, or like Miss Moore whose commendable output is too foolproof (in device) and frigid for grandeur. Women may feel the godly life intensely, but are too subjective, hence cannot be great. Uncontrolled subjectivity is fatal to art. Feminine invention is generalized. Their path is unalterable. They cannot subject or object themselves. They also bear children.

  … Tomorrow, off to Tanglewood, thence to Wellesley to hear Bill [Strickland] conduct my Prayer of David. Will the summer provide sentiment unerasable in loveliness? I shall miss K. for affinity rises, but I must close green eyes and try to adjust and grow older. For despite the evil wished upon me by all, there is also a wonderful warmth upon …

  Instrumentation is the one craft in which practical experience is dangerous. A composer who spends each semester learning to play badly, one by one, all the instruments of the orchestra, will compose according to his own limitations, not according to his theoretic fancy. Even if he learns to play the instruments well, it goes without saying he can’t play them all at once. So what use is his knowledge when he comes to orchestrate?

  In destroying Nazis, were we attempting to kill what we suffered as our own evils?

  … Repentance has the longevity of a hangover.

  Now Teru and Allela are both dead. (I remember a year & ½ ago introducing these two), and Kubly passed a straight-jacketed night in Bellevue. A moody universe, and a violent mother.

  “… for so hard I think on man/the thought crumbles into absolute un-Nature …”

  I don’t like Peter Grimes anymore, nor Messiaen either. Flash in the pan stuff, G. Perle calls it.

  11 November. Early this afternoon Paul Goodman stopped by to see me for the first time in a year, and we went for some coffee while I told him my 2 dreams of last night, one about copulation with a police dog, a new baby brother!—the other about a 3rd degree trick of firing a rifle into the rectum of the victim, instilling ferocious pain but leaving the period-till-death uncertain—not telling him (lying) that the 2nd one’s subject was he himself—after which he left, but promised (tho not shyly) to return tomorrow nite at 10.

  The Penal Colony petrified me. Temporarily … am convinced that should I ever approach a significant penetration (no reference to Paul’s advice for alienation of infantilism) it will be alone in vocal setting.… The Cembalo Concertino in form, and in negotiation of the instrument’s virtues.… Ralph [Kirkpatrick] is indeed surprised and pleased, reading it for me stylishly, but does not pretend to other than intellectual comment. But then, since my shallow profundity shall never be realized except through the voice, I shall confine my soul’s commitments (like all Frenchmen) to a tiny sequence (allowing the poet to worry before me on the ultimate forms of my larger endeavors), and should I succeed, thru enterprise, to an even slightly enviable technique, my prolific output will none-the-less (in other than programmatic music) be constructed on folk tunes or some such (which they say is valid) to amuse the passerby. Having thus rationalized my misgivings, social and inspiration, I shall go out.

  The Pauls, Callaway and Goodman, are eminently lovable. The second could have my whole heart. As we said tonite no inhibitions can occur for me where respect’s absent (i.e., for the brainy! i.e., my smug lack of chagrin at the $7 whore-payment) but where the playmate is a lettered person the liaison may be regarded—& during the act—literally, no matter how heart-felt the passion. Accordingly I can’t but feel, enigmatically, that the sexual—true—intellectual is making fun of me (tho not Paul who’s an angel utterly—“destroyed utterly,” as he declared after twice emitting, & with what pleasant scent). Hence the writer has the better Out: for can a Reminiscence (the most cherished of all sensations) be reported accurately in a piece of music, or on a canvas?

  I compose what I need to hear because nobody else is doing it. Yet I feel guilty about what I do best—setting words to music. Because it comes easily, meaning naturally, I feel I’m cheating.

  • • •

  Thanksgiving. Back from Philadelphia the 2nd time this week. The Long Home [at Washington Cathedral] was bea
utiful and moving even if the Theater Inc. people and Ballet Society don’t like my music. Mother went too, bustling about like Jenny Petherbridge. In myself I find a disarming similarity to Prince Mishkin—though my questionable qualities are indistinguishable from Natashya Fillipovna’s.

  [17 December, after playing a recital with violist Enrico (?)] Except for the ceaseless languid snow, Stamford, and the bus trip to it, was unbearable. Each little town identical to the next and recalls the anonymity of the one in The Killers. The Empire City becomes an isthmus of coherence. My conduct fractious as it unfortunately always is with hicks who hold no physicality for me. But my stage comportment exemplary & I’m 50 bucks to the better. And love sprang eternal from glances at the daily unknowns in the small hotel dining rooms.

  Landowska phones out of the blue. Christopher [Lazare] gave her my number.… I visit her with the Concertino da camera under my arm. She is the mesmerizing witch we’ve seen so often on Town Hall’s stage. To Danny Pinkham her first words had been:

  “Jeune homme, vous avez l’air bien sympathique. Est-ce que vous êtes pédéraste?”

  “Oui, madame.”

  “Très bien. Maintenant, quant à la musique.”

  To me: “Grab my hair and pull.” I do. “Now don’t go telling people I wear a wig.” This quite affably. Like a strikingly ugly cat who has swallowed an indigestible canary, but won’t admit it, she speaks gutturally of various things which I can’t understand, staring at me fixedly all the while. Then sitting in an armchair next to the piano, feet propped on an adjacent stool, score in her lap, she commands: “Play.” So I play, messily, the long harpsichord piece on the piano. She says my French accent sounds good, and that my sensitivities are French, which, coupled with my phenomenal memory, paves a way.

  There are those who sleep not for the tactile, but as a social function to promote hesitant egocentricity.

  1947

  2 January—The New Year. Three days of suicidal chaos, verbal demands for death. Paul always does wonders for me with his saintly element, and his new little pamphlet of poems. Eating offends me. Our bodies are smashed easily. Paralyzing sensation to lift the receiver of a ringing phone and say hello to silence, but to know an ear is listening out there.

  I fear sleeping for nightmares.

  Prefer the Russian idiot to Camus’, though he’s no nihilist.

  Those few of whose conversation I cannot get enough see me mostly as “a friendly sort.” How is it? I want 3 dear friends. But I feel good, am writing. My publications [two psalms, Associated Music Publishers] look nice enough, though there was no thrill involved. And it’s pleasant to fix my own meals (a momentary but complete and blissful loss of connection with the world) in my own room, which is warm.

  Later. HK now says he loathes me with “the profoundest of human hate” (which is obvious). I dislike the word enemy. Incessant proximity is dangerous.… His destruction is only partly my blame. I’m not of Wagner’s magnitude.

  Got robbed again last night: this time by an Italian baseball player with shoulders like the golden bull of Egypt, who took my new sweater & all my change—promising to return everything. The latins and the jews between them are draining me dry.…

  … drinking over-much lately so that I can’t even hear an approximation of what I play on hungover-Janet-mornings. For reasons of suicide prevention, it’s imperative to retain my pretty features or become psychotic—the opposite from what I am—without the O-so-superficial insistence of Italian praise.

  Picking my nose this morning was like applying a small sharp shovel to a shredded velvet carpet, the dehydration. E. didn’t mind, even gave me a dollar. He’s a longshoreman from Jersey and not articulate. David says my tastes are masochistic but I feel even the crudest people need loving. I have half a bottle of Calverts left, but as usual spent all my money again. I’ll stop drinking now for a few days to finish the organ piece for Paul [Callaway]. Everyone comes around but Tony.

  Monday night, 4 a.m. Yes yes yes I have come to that state I feared most. Nothing, sex, nothing is so important as alcohol. And yet coming back here alone I don’t drink. How I envy. And overcome the hideous shyness drinking, drinking.

  Thurs.… when I contemplate suicide as I do daily there’s an element of I’ll show them. I don’t know why I want to do it. I’ve been drunk every night for a week. All I want is to cry. I’m jealous and dishonest. If I don’t get screwed soon I’ll collapse. Yet I won’t allow it. I don’t like people, really. When I go out tonight I don’t care if I come back dead.

  Tues. Was interrupted (at 3 a.m.) in the above by Eddie’s arrival directly after the soldier left. As far as returning dead, of course I didn’t, but we all went to see Billie Holiday & I practically went down on her in front of everyone because of that extravagant beauty, but I only played with her legs for in her shallow grandeur is an austere intimacy. I find Alfonso [Ossorio] quite charming.

  So of course I hinted my troubles to Mother & she is worried. Having been raging drunk for over ⅔ of the time for the past 3 weeks, I’ve almost completely lost my looks. To stabilize the family I say that I’ll discipline myself without the aid of an analyst …

  Amongst those we know, suicide is more frequent than insanity—neuroses vs. psychosis. 2 cases for freedom: Jude the Obscure and The Function of the Orgasm.

  Even the soap is dirty!

  Horrid smell of sausages 12 hours ago. Harlem! They stole my money.… If only my family would die so that I too could with a clear conscience … when sober all I can do is sleep.

  When Picasso comes to an impasse he does not borrow from friends but reverts to origins. Do I? Is the style a friendly one? Or is Monteverdi here with me, more than a friend?

  I am the only caricature. Why are you others so flippant? I take you seriously.

  I will not pass Bacchus. The other vices, though less harmful, are less sociable.…

  Quick photo vs. slow screen. My conflict.

  She (my dear friend S.G.) declares herself sans neuroses. Then where am I if in all the revels I cannot equal her in discontent knowing already even love is a task.

  Thunder, it’s snowing, and the sun is out. Is there a snowbow? an arc-en-neige? It’s 5 p.m. and I just got up. Why do I avoid eating even at starving times like this (Alfonso having demolished the cab driver)? [sic] Of course there’s nothing wrong that a good screw couldn’t fix. And I get too drunk for this and that’s the vicious circle. How my head aches!

  • • •

  To make music foremost, life secondary. To become my own slave …

  Yes, the composer does write for an audience. This doesn’t mean he necessarily writes what the audience wants.…

  Promiscuity of affection—where it is redeeming and where it is a question which pains me most when I am in love. Always I model my standards on my parents’ marriage and accordingly achieve a form of morality which rationally I don’t sanction, nor do my contemporaries.…

  Dreamed of a thing called a Reich-bomb, though we did not associate this name (nor did I until awake), which had to be loaded beneath the sea. It was huge, but not so much so that the sharks had assumed a minute proportion as they swerved amid the various fixtures and (we held our breath!) almost collided with the significant one. Yet we had no cause for fear, as this machine was entirely artificial and could not be exploded by animal contact. But soon a shapeless buglike device was attached to a slim protrusion which immediately began to work and for exactly an hour (“only an hour” impressed me when I realized the ultimate result) it whirled faster and faster until invisibility; and then the bomb went off from under water (space?) aimed at the earth which was the size of a parlor-globe in the perspective from which we beheld it. When it hit, a vast amount of white custardlike fluid slowly gushed into the side of the sphere. It was meant to destroy one-third of the world. And very soon it had actually decayed such a portion as to make the earth seem quite lopsided and distorted. The net impression was one of shock and depression.

 
; I can remember the day and time of day, especially the weather, even my apparel, what I said, during every episode, every fragmented occasion, of my life. This phenomenon is distracting (like the “gift” of perfect pitch when you just want to enjoy a piece rather than notate it while listening), when I observe some tantalizing face or figure on the momentary subway or passing barroom, for a week later (the week being the smallest cyclic segment of the average routine) to the hour—or two weeks, or 3, or 7—I’m sure to be there again & waiting. Sometimes they return. But if I’m not there, I must wonder.… Now I will find myself in a given public place subconsciously attracted, on the same day & hour, by the most incidental occurrence of perhaps years before. If this regularity of sympathies could be directed toward something more than Transient (melodrama of former faces), then maybe the shape of my etudes could be solider, more coherent, patience having been applied.

  • • •

  Nowadays technique may provide a beginning and an end, but the middle is where art is truly tried, the middle is where we bog down. I dream of a work with no start or stop, just a forever ongoing middle.…

  Phenomenally drunk last night. Results of a fall: a shattered jaw still shredded with blood; a tongue destroyed, purple & white with pus, dirty-gold from iodine. But if I seldom look the worse for wear, is it because I don’t think of myself as a dissipator? A sinner perhaps, but I can’t connect alcohol with ill health.

  The world is covered with snow. Wish I were dead.

  Had made a mental note for weeks to write a bit on Order, but have been kept from it by a frenetic Disorder, and now am too tired. Yesterday I organized finally a scrapbook of my accomplishments. This I can do, and keep diaries, though not clean the room or stop drinking. But there is a regularity to carousing, so that I live by formula if not by schedule.