Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  It smells like Vermont today.…

  Alarming that it’s felt Billie Holiday must go to prison.…

  8 June, Sunday, 1 a.m. Benzedrine! What a night! Went to bed at 10 this morning with a girl named Winnie who’s black as the ace of spades and 6 feet tall, with buttery breasts and a perverse psychology, but a bizarre charm and an air of culture. So it has been a short day.… Dreamed elaborately that I was pregnant. Also of death by falling from a high trapeze, unnoticed by the audience. Erection visions! Exhilarating if melancholy.

  When I play through Cain and Abel I can weep with myself. But I am in no ways an experimenter.

  It has become a roadhouse evening. Summer smells are the only sentimental ones. It’s so beautiful out that shopkeepers’ wives have set chairs on the sidewalk while they knit, and after midnite Fifth Avenue is still full of strollers & lemonade-drinkers at the Brevoort café.

  I love my family, though they are not my type …

  Tonite I returned from a strenuous week in Martha’s Vineyard where yesterday I took a Rorschach test. A long strain, and at the conclusion I all but fell apart. What pictures! I couldn’t find a pleasant one: human distortion, vaginal chaos, lonely bugs, underwater societies with heaven & hell, demented mammals. Perhaps Tanglewood again will be a diverting solace. I look beautiful now from a week of abstinence and sun. But I am transiently back into city ways & here I sit with a glass of bourbon.…

  2 July, Wednesday nite (Tanglewood). Although I haven’t had a drink since Sunday and have been living in a pastorale climate, I still think in alcoholic terms, and tonite at the quartet recital a parallel struck me. When I get drunk, it lasts a long time but never long enough (neither the binge—3 to 5 days—nor the individual night). Should I begin at 3 in the afternoon, I’m still unsatisfied by 4 the next morning when the bars close, and must continue, if possible, until 8 or 10, with or without friends. The day is too long, but not long enough. Even so I fear will be the hours of my whole life.…

  The sky and poetry are French, the earth and prose are German. German is literal, French figurative.

  Don’t judge others by yourself.

  Then by whom shall I judge them?

  Driving yesterday (15 January 1993) through the sleet from Hyannis to Manhattan, JH at the wheel, I observe: “It’s weird when you think that Charpentier died in 1956. Because he—psychologically and actually—is a nineteenth-century composer.” This morning JH observes: “No offense meant [none taken], but that remark dates you. Charpentier’s only ‘recent’ from your older perspective.” Still, Charpentier was born in 1860, two years before Debussy, and I was thirty-three when he died in Paris. I could have known him—technically we were colleagues. I could not have known Debussy, who died five years before my birth but who was, actually and psychologically, a twentieth-century composer.

  This afternoon I ask my students (David Horne, Eric Sessler, Jonathan Holland, who came for lunch): “Am I a twentieth-century composer in your eyes?” Silence. Then tentatively from David: “That depends on how active you remain. We are twenty-first-century composers.” “Not,” I am quick to append, “if you die in the next six years.”

  22. Bill, Howard, Kraft, Nell, and Others in the Theater

  Bill Flanagan, whose name has already perfumed these pages in passing, was the one composer among hundreds who would become a close friend (platonic), though that didn’t happen suddenly. True, during our first hour we—what’s the word?—understood each other, he sizing me up warily like the Cat Lady who stage-whispers across the café to Simone Simone, “Moya sestra,” I gazing in disbelief at his incongruous bleached hair, tanned cheeks, china-blue eyes, weak chin, all set off by a lavender crew-neck sweater. Yes, we eventually became “sisters,” but during the beginning years I liked and disliked Bill, he disliked and liked me.

  It was Grace Cohen who brought Bill round to West Twelfth one noon in early 1947. We were the same age (he actually two months older), though he later lopped off three years when his bio began appearing in books because, like Tennessee Williams who did likewise, he felt those three years had been lost in a mist of mediocre jobs and boozy immobility. We thought alike, talked alike, were built alike (though I was handsomer), and composed alike. Grace had known Bill at Eastman, and both had recently immigrated to Manhattan along with a nucleus of several classmates: Charles Strouse (known as Buddy), Noel Farrand, Larry Rosenthal. They all spoke adoringly of their shy former mentor, Bernard Rogers, and disparagingly of director Howard Hanson, who had fostered homosexual purges.

  I would visit Eastman myself for a weekend the following winter, on a consortium whereby undergraduate composers from all over would have their wares displayed in that illustrious Rochester conservatory. A bunch of us from Juilliard bunked in one hotel bedroom, reading Hamlet aloud and huffily criticizing the other schools—all good, clean, postadolescent fun. My new Mourning Scene, for voice and string quartet, was performed glowingly by the able baritone Warren Galjour, though the Flanagan contingent had warned me that the “gay” text (young David bewailing to Jonathan: “Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women”) would outrage the faculty. I never met Hanson, then or later, though on three occasions he conducted my music with the school orchestra. I did, though, have lunch with Rogers, a radio performance of whose opera I had recently been dazzled by (The Warrior, based on the story from Judges, contains one memorable line, when Delilah, pungently sung by Regina Resnik, puts out her lover’s eyes with a poker: “How do things look now, Samson?”), and was pleased to tell him so. How I, a student, came to be sitting tête-à-tête with this eminent creator, aged fifty-five, I don’t recall, though I do recall his endearing lisp, possibly because of my own speech defect. Seven years later his little opera The Nightingale would be premiered on a double bill with my first opera, A Childhood Miracle, in New York while I was in Paris.

  Meanwhile, Bill Flanagan and his clan, plus George Garratt, followed in my footsteps with David Diamond, studying in his Hudson Street loft, privately and en masse. I attended some of the classes. David was a stickler for analysis, and not a bit lazy about assigning—and thus being obliged to correct—basic counterpoint and harmony conundrums, as well as the rigorous “deconstruction” of Beethoven symphonies and original composition according to prearranged forms. Bill was technically sloppy. Raised in Detroit, the only son of lower-middle AT&T employees, he had had a solid Jesuit education which I always envied since it enabled him to verbalize a subject and to speak of various philosophies where I flailed affectedly. But where I did not flail (I’d had counterpoint till it flowed from my ears), Bill was at loose ends; his training at Eastman and earlier had been slapdash. Nor was he prolific. He would balk at dotting the blank page with notes (the Jesuit logician?) for fear they might not come out right. Rather than err and be rueful, he would refrain and be frustrated. His overriding—and to an extent paradoxical—problem was this: the kind of tonal language he wished to speak was the stripped, lean, diatonic dialect of Copland whom he worshiped. Of course, it’s hard to be simple—to commit to paper only that which needs to be committed. Still, the “simple” composers (Schubert, Poulenc) are generally generous; their music, after all, isn’t challenging technically; they’ve either got it or they don’t, and “it” is quickly apparent. Bill’s contradiction was that he somehow mastered the rules backward. Like a dog who learns housetraining in reverse (who can’t wait to come in from outside so as to shit on the carpet), Bill had got it into his head that the inner voices of four-part harmony periods should be kept moving disjunctly while the soprano and bass remain static. He was stymied where I was free, and I found his musical utterances, despite their sometime beauty, always amateurish.

  Bill resented my ease, on paper and in the world. I envied his cultural balance (he knew all about music except how to write it, and could discuss it more persuasively than I could). He likened us to Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance, the hardworkingly serious authoress versus the giddy
maker of potboiling bestsellers. I called him Blanche, because like the heroine of Streetcar he played the manipulating victim, and he called me Scarlett, because I played the manipulating vamp. We retained these cognomens even in solemn converse, sometimes veering to Belinda and Dorothy. The nomenclature was according to Malcolm Cowley’s “Convolution” game of freshmen. (Man comes in from the storm and says the obvious: “Gee, it’s raining out.” First convolution: Man comes in from the storm and says with irony: “What a lovely day.” Second convolution: Man comes in from the storm and, eschewing the irony as itself obvious, says: “It’s raining.”) Bill and I were not exactly birdbrained drag queens; thus our quaint ways were not meant to be campy, except that they were; not meant to be serious, except that they were. Our correspondence when apart was forever in the style of eighteenth-century pornography (“Ah, sage Belinda, I tremble to state …” “Most precious Scarlett, prepare for a shock …”), with no foul language but much data about our respective careers, carnal and musical.

  Was I actually at ease in the world? Hindsight is blinding. Was Ned a suave sophisticate who got what he wanted? Is that what people now believe? Just last week a lackey from ASCAP (an elderly lackey, I assume) phoned me about some technical inquiry, then added: “By the way, I used to know you—at least from afar—at Tanglewood in 1946. You know what most struck me then?—it was how removed and shy you seemed.” And just this morning a letter from someone at the BBC, about some technical inquiry, closes: “By the way, we were both at the same time in Paris (1950–53). I was a rather shy and bewildered German student, standing sometimes in the last corner of Marie-Laure de Noailles’s salon without uttering a sound.… No one ever talked to me; you did once. You were deliciously rude and wore a black polo-neck sweater.”

  Ourselves as others see us …

  For the record, Grace Cohen’s daughter, Nina, owes her existence to me. One midnight in the Astor Bar a likable boor named Leo Rost picked me up, and with the passing weeks purported interest in my music, my “mind,” my friends. Did I, he asked, know any girls as cute as me, to introduce to his straight friend Marc Jaffe? So Grace and Marc got married, Marc became a redoubtable publisher, and today they’re divorced, but Nina remains.

  What was I composing so copiously that Bill felt wistful about? In 1947, besides the three blues tunes with Paul Goodman, I also wrote (on his poetry) “The Lordly Hudson,” which won the Music Libraries citation as “best published song of the year,” and which, except for “Alleluia,” was my most-sung song for decades; “Catullus: On the Burial of His Brother” (Aubrey Beardsley translation) designed specifically for David Lloyd’s tenor voice; two more songs on Goodman poems about Janet Fairbank; “Mongolian Idiot” (Karl Shapiro); a prayer from T.S. Eliot’s The Dry Salvages; a loathsome setting of a loathsome patriotic poem by Paul Engel, “The Freedom Song,” commissioned for a never-produced “Sports Spectacle”; settings of Hopkins (“Spring” and “Spring and Fall”), of Frost (“Stopping by Woods” for my father’s voice, unaware that several hundred other settings already existed); my first song cycle, Seven Little Prayers, again on Paul’s words, never published but used in part much later in an oratorio. Besides these works for voice and piano, there were also the Four Madrigals; the Concertino da camera for harpsichord and seven instruments—the piece I showed to Kirkpatrick and Landowska, and then put in a trunk and forgot (until a few months ago, when one of the few copies surfaced in Minneapolis, where it has been scheduled for a world premiere, forty-five years after the fact); the Mourning Scene; the Sermon on Miracles; the unfinished String Quartet; another work for chorus and strings called Out of the Depths, which Bill Strickland conducted at Wellesley and which has since vanished; and a ballet for piano called Egress commissioned (twenty-five dollars) by a lanky modern dancer named Louise Holdsworth. In 1947 I also made sketches for songs on words of Melville. And of Howard Moss.

  Howard and I met at a Village party and woke up next day in the same bed. The affair, if you can call it that, lasted three days, but the friendship lasted until he died in 1987. At twenty-four he looked forty, at sixty he looked forty; he was never young, never old. Nor was he an erotic object to my taste, possibly because, frozen in Freudian analysis as he had been and would remain forever, he emitted that flavor of worried superiority of one who has all the answers while knowing there are no answers—a desexed anesthetic intellectuality. But he also was intellectual, a true poet to boot, with the added queasy stigma of being, all his life, the sole poetry editor at The New Yorker. Howard wore a constant concerned smile, like Noël Coward’s, brow furrowed above steel-rimmed specs, lips tight, incapable of being parted except to utter clever repartee. He had become his magazine. He could not speak without being memorable. Sometimes he was memorable. So were his poems, each one, even the less good ones, being unflawed in their facets if often self-conscious. The only thing wrong with Howard Moss’s poetry is that nothing’s wrong with it. At its best it soars. He was also the only poet I ever knew who could write about poetry in a manner that made a difference, that explained, without pedantry. A rhyming metricalist, he had little use for—nor they for him—the surrealist, lewd, heart-on-sleeve vagaries of View, or of Paul Goodman, or, in their early years, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, though he later came round, even published Ashbery and Kenneth Koch too.

  So I used one of his poems, “Tourist’s Song,” from which to make an accompanied tune. With the years I used a dozen more.

  Early in 1956, when I returned to America briefly and performed in Town Hall with Mattiwilda Dobbs, who included, in a large group of my ditties, the new “See How They Love Me” on Moss’s spacious lyric, he wrote:

  I did enjoy enormously the songs of yours sung that evening, and it made me want you to have more poems of mine set by you.… We might spend an evening or afternoon together, going over poems to see if there’s anything that interests you.… I was particularly impressed with the Browning, and hoped she would sing it as an encore. But I loved the encore, too, the gondola song, which she sang better, it seemed to me, than anything else on the program. You sounded good, too; in fact, an accompanist I was with said you were a fine accompanist, and so you are, as you probably don’t need to be told. Also, for what it’s worth, I thought you looked fine: humble, dangerous, and dashing.

  (For what it’s worth?) What poet today is concerned any longer with serious collaboration as Howard was then? What composer today can afford to think about voice-and-piano ventures when there is no longer an outlet?

  Soon after, Bill Flanagan too made a setting of “See How They Love Me,” very beautiful, and from then on Howard preferred Bill’s various musicalizings to mine, tacitly. When, four years later, I wanted to use Howard’s King Midas cycle—ten poems in all—Howard wrote:

  About Midas: it’s Bill’s and I just called him to make sure. He says he’s set two or three and has sketched out some of the others.… What I wish you’d do, Midas being unavailable, is a cycle made of other poems.

  In fact, Bill never wrote a note, and the Midas poems eventually fell to me.

  How is Yaddo and who’s there? Do you have enough citronella? And, dear boy, the two months need not be either sexless or silent. Take a long look around, and plan accordingly. There is no desert without its trickle. (Great thoughts division.) And, if worse comes to worse, I’ll fly up. Love, Howard

  My taste in live poets during the 1950s veered from the grayish formality of Moss toward the redder freedom of Frank O’Hara, and so did my circle of friends, if I had a circle. Paths crossed less with Howard, then finally hardly at all. Yet in 1975, after my so-called Final Diary was published, Howard wrote a parody of it for The New Yorker, called “The Ultimate Diary,” which I found unfunny, though everyone else roared. (I’ve just reread it, and I, who never laugh, laughed.) Howard did have a mean wit, and satire is, they say, the truest compliment. But his spoof now makes it hard to continue these navel-gazing memoirs.

  My friendship with Bill was cemented o
n my definitive return to the United States in 1958 after a decade in Europe. We also became professional partners, organizing concerts—as Copland and Sessions had organized them in the twenties—of contemporary music, songs specifically, before the art of song perished forever. Bill now lived with Edward Albee, as yet unknown, but whose sudden sparkling ascent would lead to a firm change in all of our lives, and to Bill’s downfall. More on that later; for now, just this: Bill Flanagan was the smartest person (beside Father and Paul Goodman) I’ve ever known. But his intelligence—the ability to analyze his art avant coup—stifled his gift and led to a form of blackmail—sweet blackmail, to be sure, and flattering and victimized and hopeless, but blackmail all the same. He told me once that he had based his life—at least his professional life—on mine. He decided systematically to look as I looked, eat what I ate, say what I said, write the same sorts of letters to conductors and prima donnas that I wrote to conductors and prima donnas, phone whom I phoned, dye his hair the same hue as my dyed hair, all this so as to attain the identical goals that he assumed I was attaining. Yet since he was smarter than I, and plainer than I, how could my goals be his? Nor were his sexual yearnings like mine, nor his sense of France, nor his childhood. There is only one category of behavior that cannot be correctly generalized: the care and feeding of the creator. No sooner do you claim that all great artists are thus and so, than along comes a great artist to stand that claim on its head.

  I am not responsible for Bill’s death.

  Howard was the first of us to acquire the complete recording of L’enfant et les sortilèges, which came out that spring of 1947. What intoxication! The “Five O’clock Fox-trot” had long been familiar, but its very frivolity precluded imagining that the context from which it drew breath was Ravel’s chef d’oeuvre. Here now, blooming like a fiery orchid out of Howard Moss’s phonograph, was the whole piece, a mere half hour, but which has throbbed through every minute of my life since then. One couldn’t do better than to quote Colette about her first hearing of this little opera (is it an opera? a ballet with words? a visual cantata? probably the latter, for no staged production ever provides more than distraction from the music’s careful charisma) for which she had furnished the libretto five years before. “I had thoughtlessly titled it Divertissement pour ma fille until the day Ravel, with icy gravity, said to me: ‘But I have no daughter.’ How can I convey to you my emotion at the first shake of the tambourines accompanying the procession of shepherd boys, the moonlit dazzle of the garden, the flight of the dragonflies and the bats. ‘C’est amusant, vous ne trouvez pas?’ Ravel said. But my throat was knotted tight with tears: the animals, their swift whispering sounds scarcely distinguishable as syllables, were leaning down in reconciliation over the Child.… I had not foreseen that a wave of orchestrated sound, starred with nightingales and fireflies, would raise my modest work to such heights.”