by Ned Rorem
Today I had 5 orgasms. 3 in conjunction with the author of a fan letter received a week ago from a sailor, yes a sailor, who’d seen the picture in the Times.… These last days in New York have been a cycle of unreality: a great deal of sex and booze, fear about depression and as always about war. Though (also as always) I rationalize that I work more than any other composer, so am happy. Then Alfonso points out: one’s character cannot be segmented, we are the sum of our parts, and art can result from an unhappy drive.
Well, on Wednesday I’m off to the ocean and will leave the unhappy drive on dry land. Europe will transform the illnesses into blessings.
24. Envoi
In their published memoirs, various acquaintances have evoked the Ned of this period as either a drunk, a narcissist, an unstable musician, or a mix of all three:
Harold Norse: There I met the nineteen-year-old composer—Ned Rorem—whose luminous beauty and heavenly music were irresistible. But he was intoxicated on more than music: he drank too much. Dreamy and self-absorbed, he would smile his crooked little smile and in a languid foghorn voice remark on how “delicious” I looked, as if he could order me for dessert.… During the five years we had known each other I felt an affinity with Ned’s music. I wanted a Lordly Hudson success (he had won his first prize for a song he set to a Goodman poem).… Coaxed into existence by Ned’s urgent demands (he had specified the subject, Penny Arcade), the six hastily dashedoff lyrics were with equal haste set and a performance given—by mezzo-soprano Nell Tangeman, with Ned at the piano—at the MacMillan Theater on May 19, 1949. Virgil Thomson, who sat in front of me, never turned his head. Onstage Ned handled questions smoothly (I admired his poise) and called out “Harold, are you in the audience?” when they referred to the poems.… When sober, he had a sardonic wit, but too often he was a falling-down drunk.
Virgil Thomson (1948):… full of talent and spontaneity, but lacking, like much of this composer’s youthful music, a hard, plain, expressive core. (1970): Ned Rorem … has aspired to produce in English a vocal repertory comparable to that of Francis Poulenc.… Certainly it is in solo songs, of which there are literally hundreds, that Rorem makes his bid for consideration beside the creators of German and French lieder. Consideration in this company one can grant him for his taste in the choice of poems and for grace in the melodic line. But no such intensity is present as in the German masters from Schubert through Wolf and Mahler or in the French from Duparc and Fauré and Poulenc. In fact no such intensity exists anywhere in English song.… Consequently Rorem’s effort, no less than that of Barber, of Douglas Moore, of Ernest Bacon, David Diamond, William Flanagan, the great Copland himself, and of Ives in concert songs, remains nobler for its persistently setting out on what may well be a hopeless errand than for any world’s record achieved. When Poulenc, as a friend, discouraged his vocal efforts and praised the orchestral, Rorem sincerely believed him to be jealous. What can one say of so impregnable a stance? Nothing except that the English art-song is not yet a major form, and that even Benjamin Britten, with all his great gifts, has come no nearer.
Paul Bowles: I remember Ned Rorem rushing here and there, always in a mist of alcohol.
Judith Malina: I liked his perverse attractiveness. He listens to music holding a yellow rose with his head thrown back in a pose as effective as he believes it to be. He is almost entirely turned inward; but if someone more his type had not been determined to possess him, I might have found a way.
Anaïs Nin (1966): The Ned Rorem diary had brilliant moments and he could have written a fascinating one, but remained on the surface … and also in spite of appearances, indiscreet but not open, not really. Some parts are striking. He never went fully into anything. He falls apart. Certainly his life is in shreds, and willfully superficial. Scattered. No courage and no core. A shame. I don’t know his music. I am sure there was more there than he gave.
Larry Rivers: Swimming down Eighth Street one afternoon with Frank [O’Hara], I was introduced to the good-looking, all-smiles Ned Rorem, the composer. (Good-looking? Ned was considered one of the beauties of New York and had the pick of all the lesser beauties!) I was also introduced to the ever-critical pipe-smoking lay analyst Paul Goodman, who told me I must be sick for refusing to go to bed with him.
John Myers (Late June 1946): … I opened at Spivy’s room … [and] the room was jammed with friends.… When I went out to the terrace for some fresh air, a friend beckoned me to a table, where I met Ned Rorem and his companion Maggie [sic] von Magerstadt. Ned said he too would like to compose some songs for puppets if I ever did another show. I felt flattered, since I hear Ned is talented.… (1948): … Boultenhouse who wrote three lyrics; and Ned Rorem who set the lyrics to music for voice and tympani.… During the winter [Herbert Machiz and I] would give several Sunday afternoon musicales, always organized by my old friend Ned Rorem. Baked Virginia ham, pumpernickel, and white wine, Mozart, Schoenberg, Ben Weber, and Ned Rorem were the bill of fare on a few such occasions.
Tennessee Williams [To Maria St. Just]: Will you please ask Jean Stein to send me the Paris address of that young composer, Ned Rorem, that I promised to send a short work or libretto? I think it is ready for him, and perhaps I may go up there a week or two this summer. Please send me this address right away as I’m not sure I can stand Rome much longer. [To Dotson Rader]: I remember Ned Rorem once invited me back to his room. He lived in one room then. Oh, Ned was very drunk. Now he doesn’t drink anymore and so isn’t as interesting anymore. Some people are very interesting when they are drunk, and total bores when they’re sober. Ned Rorem was so beautiful when he was young. I stared at him all night long. So when he invited me to his room I thought I’d hit the jackpot! He pulled off his clothes and lay down on the bed and pretended to pass out. I just caressed him for a few minutes, and then I went home.
Postscript. Virgil Thomson again (1974): Ned Rorem’s reprint of formal pieces from The New Republic, along with bits of more improvisatory material, is frankly titled Pure Contraption. The essays themselves, less penetrating musically than [Robert] Craft’s and less learned than [Andrew] Porter’s, are nonetheless better made for easy reading. They are more gracefully written, for one thing; their English is meaningful, picturesque, idiomatic, in every way alive. And their malice is far less seriously intended. He pays off a few scores—against Copland and myself, for example—without bothering to make any musical point at all. And he pokes equally harmless fun at Elliott Carter’s tendency toward “the big statement,” a sort of music-writing that we used to mock in French as “le style chef-d’oeuvre.”… Actually Rorem is not a dependable critic, in spite of a good mind and a pretty good ear, his egocentricity gets in the way. It prevents his seriously liking or hating anything. He is scarcely involved anymore even with his private life, which for some years furnished him with literary materials as well as a devoted public. In a recent interview published jointly in [Boston and] San Francisco, his burden is how little he cares about his prose and how devotedly he indites his music. Actually it is his lack of literary ambition, I think, that gives to his writing so much charm, along with the eight years’ residence in France that firmed up his mind and his manners. His music has no such ease. But the writing reads, as our black friends say, right on.
On rereading the preceding chapter, and the other three diary chapters, I must blush, if not apologize, for the perceptions that elude the mind as they are drawn through the eye back to the navel, the humorless scope of A to B, the generalities on lower-case “jews,” the moaning vanity. All this, believe it or not, in only one fifth of the extant journal of the 1940s! The diary reads like Howard Moss’s parody of my diary. Why not omit it? For two reasons:
First, since those entries by definition lack perspective, it seems literarily useful to juxtapose them upon what I remember (by definition with perspective) of the period; I was curious to verify how near to or far from the fact my memory landed. Second, the journal served as an anchor which I could either occasionally d
raw up, dripping with scum, or let lie in the depths, secure in the knowledge that it served its own invisible purpose. Finally, although I’ve kept a journal up to the present day, I must now nervously bid it farewell as a reference for this book. My Diaries, in four separate volumes from 1951 through 1985, have been published. True, they are all currently unavailable, except in libraries. Still, as a writer of songs who has always felt queasy about obliging poets to say twice what they have already succinctly said once, I don’t wish to feed on myself anymore—at least not with the same menu. From here on these pages are on their own.
Before sailing for France, a few loose ends:
Because I am convinced that one’s esthetic taste, like one’s religious stance, is fixed before the age of reason, I’m bemused to read that I hate cats (I love them), and that I granted such short shrift to Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote. Surely my taste embraced them, so it must have been friends who squelched that taste. The boiling fertility of all the creative arts in the United States between 1945 and 1950—in theater, in novels, in music—was perhaps not as apparent then as with hindsight. It was also, if not in music at least in literature (as with the three authors named), suddenly Gentile, nonheterosexual, non–Partisan Review, nonpolitical.
Truman, Gore, and Tennessee were as famous then as they ever would be because they were young, and to be young was an American thing—still is. Of the three, though I met him first, I knew Gore least: he was the least stunning (so far as “the madness of art” is concerned), but the least difficult to talk to—he could follow a subject to a conclusion that was generally illuminating (like Paul Goodman, he revealed the brightness of the obvious—of what was always under the eye but too close to see), and cared for human rights beyond his own needs. I never worked with him professionally so our paths crossed, and continue to cross every few years, strictly socially. With Truman I wrote a ballet. With Tennessee I composed incidental scores for two of his plays; but though I saw Tennessee daily for months we never had a coherent conversation. Later I’ll speak of his dramas, which have come to sag. For now—for then—I was enthralled by his artistic preoccupation with victims and their shattered hearts (he was in reality the selfishest man alive), and his preoccupation with how the bad turn good as the good turn bad. Summer and Smoke is a rewrite of Maugham’s Rain which is a rewrite of Anatole France’s Thaïs.
The 7 May premiere of Overture in C, led by Michel Piastro in an otherwise all-Gershwin program in Carnegie, was not an event. I attended with Nell Tangeman, who asked, when I joined her in the lobby, what I’d been doing all afternoon. (Writing a concerto for Eugene.) My agenda notes that the family was there, that Bill Flanagan threw a party afterwards, that I visited Lazare Saminsky and then took a sunlamp treatment the day before, that I sent Rosemary a note for her birthday the day after, that I paid bills (to Elkan Vogel, etcetera), made phone calls (to Donald Fuller, and to Irma of the travel agency), and that I made a date with Victor Kraft. Yet of the concert proper I recall nothing. My piece was neither flop nor success, nor can I recall today the sound of it. With astonishment I retrieve these reviews:
Noel Strauss in the Times: “The ‘Overture in C’ by Mr. Rorem, a special feature of the concert, had been judged by a committee consisting of Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland and William Schuman. It was richly and imaginatively scored, with novel and striking percussion effects, and possessed emotional intensity as well as strength and vitality. Tighter construction, however, would have kept it from making an impression of being somewhat fragmentary.” Francis Perkins in the Tribune: “Mr. Rorem, who is twenty-five years old, shows talent and inventiveness in this work, which runs for a little under ten minutes. The style is homogenous; some of the musical ideas had a slightly Gershwinesque turn and flavor, but not to a degree which obscured a sense of individuality which was also apparent in their treatment; their harmonic investiture and the orchestration were skillful and effective. Various pronounced rhythmic patterns are one feature of the overture, another is a series of short episodes both before and after a broad central theme; this gives a certain sense of discontinuity in music which gave a general impression of much ability and promise.… Mr. Rorem received the Prize from Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, just before the performance.” Irving Kolodin in the Sun: “This year’s honors and emoluments of the Gershwin memorial concert … went to Ned Rorem, who enjoyed, as well, the experience of hearing his prize-winning ‘Overture in C played by an orchestra under the direction of Michel Piastro. He might have wondered, however—along with such previous prize winners as Peter Mennin, Harold Shapero and Ulysses Kay—whether the pleasure was one wholly unalloyed. On either side of his earnest, skillful and not very vital work were [sic] one after another of the Gershwin favorites which, whatever they are not, are certainly vital. Rorem, of Juilliard and Tanglewood background, has a full complement of musical tricks at his disposal and might eventually organize them in a manner more distinctive than one heard in this ‘Overture in C.’ While pondering that possibility, he might also note well the freshness and spirit, the untricky components of the Gershwin music.”
Twelve days later I shared a Composers Forum at the MacMillan Theater with Leon Kirchner. Four years older than I, Kirchner, a Schoenberg protégé, had just arrived from California and was quickly paired with me as a foil, by the current powers, on this prestigious recital. Arthur Berger in the Tribune: “… both offered ample evidence of their musicianship in the compositions through which they were represented, but they also provided tangible confirmation of this by appearing as composer-pianists. Mr. Rorem’s participation was confined to the accompaniment of his song cycle, ‘Penny Arcade,’ to which he brought the needed fleetness, nimbleness and sensitivity. Mr. Kirchner, playing his massive and uncommonly impressive Piano Sonata, naturally had more occasion to reveal his performing talents.… Rorem, recent winner of the Gershwin prize, is far less a stranger. His many works have been appearing on programs with greater and greater frequency. His enormous facility is no news, and he has become, quite inevitably, a young composer to rely upon where a job must be completed neatly and elegantly for almost any musical occasion at hand. The Four-hand Sonata, composed at nineteen, indicated that this facility has been there for some time. Facility is a good thing to have, but it is also a good thing to struggle with, and last night’s music seemed to have done little of this … if Poulenc and Satie are admirable sources for any young composer, it seems important for Rorem now to elaborate on them more than he has, to find some dialectic for his undeniably charming and engagingly languorous vein. He is a very well endowed composer indeed, and it would be good to see him be more severe with himself, to do more to transform his rich sources of popular song.… Yesterday’s forum … had such excellent participants as Nell Tangeman, mezzo soprano [and] Eugene Istomin, pianist.” Carter Harman in the Times: “Mr. Rorem’s music is at once easier to take—it is pleasant-sounding—and harder to describe (it is also innocuous) than Mr. Kirchner’s. Mr. Rorem has a gift for spinning a sweet melody, but it is loaded with clichés and it sometimes simply stops instead of ending. ‘Penny Arcade,’ a ‘cyclical melodrama for voice and piano,’ had moments of charm and cleverness, a busy accompaniment of little variety and many words that were often so misaccented as to be unintelligible. It had also the benefit of Nell Tangeman’s lovely mezzo-soprano voice and Mr. Rorem’s own piano accompaniment.”
On Wednesday, 25 May 1949, the SS Washington, a single-class American liner, drifted from pier 61 on West Twenty-first Street toward Le Havre. Mother and Father saw me off. As they grew ever tinier on the receding wharf I sobbed quietly. I occupied berth 2 in room B-32 which otherwise contained seven elderly Czechoslovakian gentlemen, whose wives were in an adjoining barracks, and who snored and farted through the night—I, who cannot to this day, share a bedroom with even the nearest and dearest. Two smart girls on the boat, Betty and Judy—whose surnames unforgettably were Rubinstein and Horowitz—remained ideal companions
for all the wistful bingo-playing voyage. On 1 June, Shirley (now Xénia) met the boat-train at Gare Saint-Lazare, and with elated exhaustion we taxied through the orange-canopied metropolis—none of which resembled, try as it may, the Paris of 1936—to the rue de la Harpe, where another, utterly severed, life began.
25. 1949: Harp Street and Saint-Germain • Nadia and José • Poulenc and Guy
If one of us should die, I’ll go to Paris.
—Freud
It is just possible to imagine God speaking French. Christ never. His words do not function in a language so ill at ease in the naïve and with the sublime.
—Cioran
With a shock of nonrecognition one peruses the growing number of studies on “The Left Bank in the Fifties” by Yankee memoirists and vicarious sophomores, studies that seethe with anecdotes about Americans among themselves: Jim Jones told Plimpton to tell Styron about Herlihy who told Southern that Vidal had told Keogh about Baldwin who told Richler. Nary a whisper about local culture.
But there were French people in Paris then. I saw them.
Not that they were any more interested in the monolingual Paris Review than Americans were interested in the monolingual Les Temps Modernes. Indeed, the French ignored non-French culture in general, and American culture in particular; what they knew of us then was what they know of us now: Hemingway and Jerry Lewis. Major American intellectuals have resided in Paris for centuries without the French acknowledging so much as their names. Oh, an occasional sport might flicker in the Gallic ken—Truman Capote, Richard Wright—but it is their oddness, not their talent, which enthralls for fifteen minutes.
Musically the scene was similar when we, apple-cheeked and credulous, stepped off the boat. The witty French quip—“America is the only country in history to have gone from barbarism to decadence without an intervening civilization”—was, at least musically, based solely on their knowledge of Gershwin as strained through Milhaud, and on the frenetic Negro chic launched by Josephine Baker. The ascending warm popularity of actual postwar Americans now on French soil, with their guileless sexiness as military saviors, was means of entrée into any circle (at least until the backlash provoked by the Rosenbergs’ electrocution in 1953), but nobody wanted to hear what these children had on their minds. This said, France has never been an especially musical nation. She has produced great musicians, but no viable musical public. The French are nimble at talking about music, but at listening they are at best polite.