Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Colette, to my ignorant ken, seemed nonetheless a sort of Gallic Beatrix Potter, a woman-writer and thus superficial; she remained so until I sat down and read her, inspired by the details of her death in 1954. On 3 August, at about 8:30 in the evening, she died in her bed (“after a small sip of champagne”—Janet Flanner), overlooking the Palais Royal gardens. Immensely famous, and given a state funeral, she was scandalously denied burial at the Eglise Saint-Roche by the archbishop of Paris, because of her divorce and wicked ways. Although I had seen her picture almost daily in French papers, I did not discover until too late that the all-knowing Colette was our century’s greatest stylist—too late, that is, to have sat at the foot of her bed. In the mid-sixties I set to music, for chorus and small orchestra, Janet Flanner’s telling depiction of Colette’s funeral, thereby posthumously allying myself to that grand woman with the same gorgeously specious sycophancy that even a Schubert or a Strauss or a Debussy allied himself to Heine and Hofmannstahl and Verlaine.

  David Diamond was the first of us to acquire the full score of L’enfant et les sortilèges, and Bill the first (no, I am not a leader, etcetera) to acquire the piano reduction with the English translation mawkishly made by Catherine Wolff, so we all memorized each measure and Freudianized each Oedipal scene, and have used the memory and the Freud ever since.

  Speaking of Freud—which everyone did every day back then—it was thought by “everyone” (mainly Shirley, Eugene, and especially Paul Goodman) that my profligacy made me ripe for analysis. Indeed, friends wouldn’t answer for their friendship if I didn’t submit. Through his brother, architect Percival Goodman, Paul (who himself would become a lay analyst in the 1950s) recommended Dr. Erich Kraft, a refugee who resembled Dr. Nolte, my so-called composition professor back at Northwestern: thick German accent, dwarfish, frail, ugly, old (probably fifty but looked seventy), and rigorously hard line. He practiced, along with other Freudians, in a beautiful old whitestone across from the Frick Museum. While waiting in the lobby before our first interview, who should be seated across from me, waiting for her doctor, but Martha Graham. We greeted each other, then attended in stony silence (she’s good at that) for a full quarter hour. Whereupon Kraft’s door opened and out walked Ed Stringham, patient and poet. Was one supposed to see one’s acquaintances at one’s analyst’s? Neither Martha nor Ed nor any familiar face was ever again in evidence during the semiweekly sessions of the next eighteen months.

  Father and Mother came up from Philly to check the scene, staying at the Marlton on Eighth Street. I did not formally begin with Kraft until after Father met with him. Father harbored mixed feelings, thought of the process as maybe chic and unnecessary, but grew convinced, halfway, by my pleas. This was a switch on the ridiculous single session with that female Freudian long ago, when my plea to the parents was to spare me. The evening after his visit to Kraft, Father and I beheld the unstable Elizabeth Bergner in Cup of Trembling, a Broadway potboiler about a woman who unwittingly drinks too much too often and ends up on many a morning not knowing where she is. Father was impressed that I admitted to the same experiences.

  Mother over the past year had been, off and on, in a Pennsylvania hospital for three series of electroshock treatments. The bedraggled spectacle of her in pale blue robe, hair unkempt, confused aspect, and pathetic confidence in a certain doctor so-and-so, like Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit, caused Father and me to fall into each other’s arms and bawl. Every few years Mother would repeat the process—of being strapped to a table, of crying No, of losing her memory, and of emerging eventually optimistic if childlike—which on the whole seemed to turn the trick, the trick of going on. (By 1965 when she underwent her final series, the technique was improved: instead of six weeks in the loony bin, it was six days of hour-long visits to an office where the treatment was brief and painless. In these six days she passed from inert dejection to a purposeful worker for civil rights, and the cure lasted ten years.) My purpose for psychoanalysis was to be cured of uncontrolled drinking and maybe of homosexuality, abetted by Father, who would pay the agreed-upon fee of ten bucks a session. He didn’t wish me to follow in Mother’s path.

  Today, of course, we know there is no cure for the malady of alcoholism, though one can recover permanently through abstinence; the abstinence may be a torment if a question of will, a pleasure (as now for me) if a question of tenets and logic and desire. It is wrong to be constantly drunk, but psychoanalysis (the possible investigation of why you drink) is of no help, none. It is not wrong to be gay, nor did I ever truly believe it was, so this did not figure much in the sessions with Kraft.

  At the first of these, on 19 November 1947, at 3:15, lying on the couch, with Kraft and his scratch pad out of sight behind my head, I began to transfer right off the bat. He was a mean little parrot, stunted and smart, trying to rape me. Could I translate that into flattering terms? What was the routine? Would he never squawk a word? be insulted? succumb to my wiles? allow that I was his favorite pupil? With the months, so as not to waste Father’s money, I invented situations, perversions, dreams (such invention was the same as reality—it was, after all, my invention, hence my concern). That first session over, I emerged onto East Seventieth and headed west toward the setting sun. Elmyr Hory, a Hungarian painter I’d met recently at Stewart Chaney’s, was giving a cocktail party nearby. I immediately got drunk; it seemed the proper thing, since I was now under an analyst’s care to stop drinking, and it would provide conversation with the other guests, none of whom I knew: jazz pianist Joe Bushkin and his wife, who were intrigued, or said they were, by Dr. Kraft; actor George Sanders with an expensive blond who spoke Hungarian with the host, was garbed in a brown taffeta sample of Dior’s just-launched New Look, and who called herself Zsa Zsa Gabor (Eugene would be thrilled to hear about Sanders, his ideal); Anita Loos; and other Europeans crammed into a basement flat with a stairway leading nowhere. (Years later Hory gained notoriety as the world’s slyest criminal in exile, for his Van Gogh forgeries.)

  That’s what I feel that I felt at the start of analysis, forty-six years after the fact. (What I felt during the fact is in the next chapter.) Did the ongoing procedure have its effect? Can one know? I was six seasons older when it stopped, and age brings its own rules, with or without Freud. I learned to like Dr. Kraft’s gentle obduracy, his parental force, though he never expressed an opinion until I announced a projected long trip to France. (He said, You’ll be taking yourself with you, and I said, No I won’t. And I didn’t.) I learned to dissect dreams, even to create dreams designed for dissection, to sleep on the surface where dreams most vibrate, and to describe their madness in order to hide firmer madnesses which were none of Kraft’s business. I learned to believe in the poetry of Freud without ever really giving credence to its efficacy.

  When Nell Tangeman was found dead in her Washington, D.C., apartment on 15 February 1965, she had lain there friendless for some time. Nor was there an obit next morning, nor in the weeklies, nor in the many musical monthlies which were then prevalent. She sank without a trace. I heard of Nell’s death from Newell Jenkins on the phone three days after, but it wasn’t until several years later that I was saddened if not surprised to learn from Oliver Daniel that Nell’s body was broken, that she had brought home a stranger who left her for dead. (Bill Flanagan seventeen seasons later would expire likewise—not from assault but from an overdose—and lie putrefying for a week before police broke down the door.) Nell was forty-six. Who besides a few old acquaintances remembered her as the most interesting mezzo-soprano of our mid-century?

  Before we met I had often heard Nell Tangeman in song. During 1946 she introduced America to Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi, then sang Jocasta in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex under Lenny Bernstein. In 1947 she performed the hard solo role against an unaccompanied chorus in the premiere of Copland’s In the Beginning. Her handsome appearance, her violent eyes, her aggressively passive delivery and opal-colored décolleté dresses (gowns, as singers call them) were balanced
by a brand of vocalism that no longer exists: a true contralto that passes from a velvet growl to a clarion purr, or descends from a heady altitude to a golden chest-tone, all in the space of a breath. But only if the music asks for it, for instance, in Milhaud’s Chants populaires hébraïques or Bernstein’s Afterthought or the Monteverdi madrigals mastered under Nadia Boulanger. So I was pleased when she phoned out of the blue to say she was looking for an accompanist.

  Our ensuing close relationship lasted until her death. She was the most formative singer of my life: everything vocal that I composed over the next six years (until I began to be commissioned by other singers of other sexes and other timbres) was composed for her specific capabilities, for I knew no other capabilities. Her example determined not only how I wrote for the voice but that I wrote for the voice at all. (It was never the voice per se that drew me to song, but the naked words that would be clothed by my notes.) Which is why, when I wrote my first high coloratura song, “The Silver Swan,” it was actually a mezzo piece transposed up a fifth; and why even today sopranos and basses say that my inclinations seem to swerve around the mezzo tessitura.

  Nell was the recently divorced mate of Robert Tangeman, my current musicology professor at Juilliard and as stuffily academic as Nell was a free soul. They had forged careers together at Indiana University and were now wending their separate ways. Nell’s way was one of devotion to today’s music; she had by far the best vocal métier from among the “modern music specialists,” who mostly attracted an audience through novelty rather than beauty.

  On 24 October 1948 Nell made her Town Hall debut and got a rave from Virgil in the Tribune (“an artist right off the top shelf … with brains, beauty and skill”). With flutist Carleton Sprague Smith and violinist Maurice Wilk, I accompanied her in the disinterred In Piazzas Palladio, retitled Three Pieces for Voice and Instruments, and wore a tuxedo for the first time since high school. (Eugene: “You looked and sounded divine,” but no word about the music itself.) The postconcert reception included both my parents as well as Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the latter a friend of Nell’s from Bloomington.

  Kinsey, Father’s age exactly, was persuasive, even seductive, which may account for his successful question-and-answer sessions. Would I, he asked, consent to an interview (he was planning a book on the sexuality of artists, which was why he was in New York visiting Juilliard and other sacred conclaves)?, and could my parents consent, since they were so conveniently in town as well? (“To record a whole family makes for useful crisscrossing,” said he.) I would and they could. So he quickly assigned Mother and Father to his assistant, Dr. Pomeroy, and made a date with me himself.

  He was staying at one of those sordid Times Square hotels, it could have been the Royalton, where we got straight down to business, a business that would last, he announced, exactly forty-seven minutes. His questions, as read from a clipboard on his lap where he also made notes, were designed to forestall inadvertent fibs and hesitations.

  (“When did you first masturbate?” “I never masturbated in my life.” “How did you have your first ejaculation?” “Er …” “Are you heterosexual?” “Er …”) Though shy, I was not devious, so we proceeded according to Interview I, as opposed to II or III, which were for different categories of victim. More than the interview, which remains vague in the memory, I recall our later off-the-cuff talk. Since I knew more than Kinsey about who “was” and “wasn’t” among musicians, I generalized as follows:

  Harpists (of whom, like hairdressers and cooks, most are women though the best are men) are all homosexual—the males, that is. Male string players are all Jewish and all heterosexual. Male brass players, wind players, and percussionists, though not necessarily Jewish, are also all heterosexual, at least those in orchestras; among soloists the percentage wavers. Of male pianists, also mostly Jewish, half are gay. (“Gay” was not standard usage then, at least among straights.) Male organists, all gay. Of classical singers no tenors are gay, most baritones are, but few females. In jazz the reverse obtains: the woman are lesbian, the men are macho—but alcoholic. Choir directors, all gay. Among composers, who until the war had been mainly Gentile and defiantly effete (Thomson, Griffes) or defiantly virile (Ives, Sessions), the ratio was fifty-fifty. The ratio remained fifty-fifty. Stravinsky’s flock of Americans, which overlapped with Aaron Copland’s, was straight and Jewish, Virgil’s was mixed. (Rumors still abound that Aaron championed mainly his gay entourage. What entourage? Leo Smit, Irving Fine, Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero? For a gay goy like me he never lifted a finger.)

  Then I went abroad and, until his death in 1956, began a correspondence with Kinsey. His famous study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, needed “American” inserted between the last two words. The interests, obsessions, and embarrassments of French, German, and English males did not at all jibe with ours; and in Morocco, where virtually all males practice what we call homosexuality, virtually no males are homosexual. Autres lieux, autres moeurs. As for music milieux—possibly for reasons of Catholicism in France, where the organ is a manly instrument, or of no sissified implications in Scandinavia, where choral singing is part of the family—homosexuality is as rare among organists and organist-composers as among choral conductors, and the ratio with other instrumentalists, including harpists, is the reverse of ours. As for male orchestra conductors, they were and remain married worldwide, though most of them fool around: being absolute monarchs, anything is permitted them, provided they are protected with a wedding ring.

  Dr. Kraft was not impressed by my meeting with Kinsey, whom he found superficial. But he did go to Nell’s recital and found it “very lovely.”

  Nell Tangeman liked to give the impression of being bisexual (lesbianism had a certain naughty cachet in those days, while male inversion was simply a stigma). She could drink as much as I could and behaved worse at parties. The drunker she got, the hornier, making passes at everyone (even Ben Weber), while growing ever less comely. At a postconcert party in, say, Bowdoin College, where we gave a recital together that fall, she would swill the punch, gulp the shrimp, then, with crumbs on the edge of her smeared lips, begin pawing the president’s wife. Because someone had once told her she had an infectious Irish laugh, she cultivated this into a too-frequent guffaw, bursting forth unprepared, and no one knew which way to look. Her artistry on stage was rehearsed, more than tasteful, exquisitely controlled, in a word, anal (as we Freudians liked to say): her social comportment was cheap, messy, dangerous, oral quite literally. I never drank on tour, but because I was Nell’s escort at such times, I was perceived as being somehow responsible, and resented, rather than sympathized with, her behavior. In fact, though I loved Nell, I never really liked her.

  If Bill Flanagan modeled himself for a while on me, Nell did the same with her friend Martha Lipton, a pulchritudinous ebony-haired mezzo with good manners and a contract at the Met. She never drank. Nell envied Martha the Met, her worldly know-how and chocolate voice. On stage Martha had everything but temperament. Nell was more vocally compelling if less technically radiant than Martha, though neither woman was intrinsically an actress. Nell found Martha guilty of everything that she, Nell, was far guiltier of: overweening ambition, overriding jealousy, overdressed negligée. Martha in fact was the epitome of sobriety, planned her rather traditional career with common sense, was calmly garbed. Because we were soulmates, I perhaps recognized myself in Nell and found myself wanting. Her dumb pushiness embarrassed me. Would I have abandoned her had she not been what I deemed a great singer on the edge of a cliff, and, like me, a disreputably unfocused dissipator harboring a repentantly compulsive worker? That chemical balance produced unique results in both our cases, though with Nell the dissipator won out early. Our good years together were few but fertile, during which she premiered three of my spacious pieces shaped expressly to her gifts.

  The first of these was a cycle of six songs called Penny Arcade, based on evocative verses about Forty-second Street penned for the occasion by young Harold
Norse, a feisty little Brooklynite sexpot who claimed to be the simultaneous lover of Chester Kallman and Wystan Auden. These unpublished songs, assessed coolly today, remain exemplary in their economical trashiness: individually they are honed to display the female middle voice, collectively they cohere while contrasting, and their virtuosic color appeals to listeners. To have let them remain in manuscript is due maybe to my discomfort at their dated vulgarity, or maybe because I used elements from each one later and better. But they flourished for a while when Nell and I performed them at the drop of a hat, and one of them even entered the repertory of the luminous Mack Harrell.