by Ned Rorem
I had come abroad ostensibly for three months, and stayed eight years. To the question, “Did all that time in France influence you and your music?” the answer is: I went to France because I was already French, not the other way around. It is not the going home (though we may never have been “home” before) that makes homebodies of us; we are homebodies, so we go home.
Of course, none of these glib—these French—truisms yet shaped my perspective as the cab moved through the city that June morning of 1949. Shirley’s voice was telling me, as I gazed at the passing awnings and pigeons (French pigeons, French awnings), that the apartment we would be sharing was already shared with her lover, Jean-Claude Maurice. She hadn’t written me this for fear I’d blab; she was, after all, still nominally wed to Seymour Barab, and her mother would have a fit, etcetera. Jean-Claude, she assured me, would be my perfect teacher, since he spoke no word of English and was the greatest poet since Baudelaire.
The building at 53 rue de la Harpe was five stories of white stucco and huge slanting windows à la Cézanne. The ground floor, or rez-dechaussée, was a jazz club called the Rose Rouge run by a middle-aged Senegalese who was also our landlord—none other than Benga, onetime actor who played the silent role of the Black Angel in Cocteau’s Sang d’un poète nineteen years before. We had the front flat on the third floor (second floor to Europeans) which consisted of a piano-filled parlor overlooking the street, a back bedroom (mine), a claustrophobic entrance hall, and a bathroom-kitchen containing a bidet (I’d never seen one) in which carrots were presently soaking. No bath, no shower.
The sight of Jean-Claude was a surprise. Willowy without being exactly effeminate, he resembled Fantin-Latour’s portrait of Rimbaud. Shirley vouched for his genius (her swains were always geniuses), for his heterosexuality (not my type in any case), and for his affability (certainly true). The rent was 20,000 francs, roughly sixty dollars, most of which I paid in cash to Benga during the months I lived there, off and on. Rue de la Harpe runs one crooked block (mostly North African in those days) parallel to boulevard Saint-Michel, and debouching onto boulevard Saint-Germain across from the Cluny Museum which, during all those years, I never once entered. Thus we were at the heart of the student quarter, and a twelve-minute hike to the vices of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Everything—a park bench, a filet of horsemeat, a public urinal—seemed a valued relic to be absorbed and retained.
From my first day, as with any first encounter with another person, I began testing my effect on the city—on “her”—as much as her effect on me: flexing my intellect, looks, speech, shyness. Was it then, or five years—or thirty-five years—later that I discovered shyness won’t get you far? It came to be clear that those loudmouths across the room were no smarter than I, and if I didn’t say my say, nobody would say it for me. Quakers are taught not to interrupt, nor are they known for their repartee. The French don’t interrupt either, but even the humblest concierge has a way with words, speaks in complete sentences, and if she doesn’t always mean what she says (unlike we earnest Americans), she always says what she means.
The Huguenot tourist’s notion about the French and wine (every Frenchman is slightly drunk all his life because of the obligatory coup de rouge with each meal, but no Frenchman is a binge drinker like Americans who, between weekly bouts, abstain utterly) troubled me. When I was good I was very very good: sobriety was a state to be coveted like a clean shirt while it lasted, just as drinking was for the purpose of getting drunk. Would I be able to order Badoit water instead of vin blanc with the noonday meal, without being thought a hick or—more likely—a sufferer of chronic liver trouble?
And what about sex? Having always functioned on the principle that Beauty is its own calling card, I was not used to being rejected, and knew the ropes in the States. But was I a type for French tastes? Certainly they were different from us, not just conversationally but physically: shorter, swarthier, less obsessed with antiseptics than with home remedies, and, in intercourse, less obsessed with fellatio than with buggery. I managed. Shirley, the wise old European ensconced with her true love, felt such preoccupations were frivolous for one new to the Louvre, the Opéra-Comique, the Jardin des Plantes. “Oh, you boys!” she expostulates, when I ask Norris, who’s lived abroad for ages, how and where one gets laid in the city, where are the gay bars, how are the men in Pisa, in Greece. “Aren’t there more important things than sex?” asks Shirley. The answer is No. The best way to learn a foreign language is in bed.
I had brought, duty free, six quarts of Gordon’s gin and a dozen cartons of American cigarettes which were ingested over the next weeks, by all of us, not least by Jean-Claude, a penniless voluptuary thrilled by the ways of the world. “Us” consisted of a Franco-American nucleus that had formed, long before, around the little apartment: Norris Embry (who had come clear from Crete, he said, just to see the revival of The Blue Angel), Gary Samuel, Arthur Weinstein, Fizdale & Gold, and a raft of Jean-Claude’s pals who, when they spent the night, spent it in my bed.
Atop the heap of mail waiting at American Express was the first of 150 letters from Nell Tangeman.
May 26, 1949
38 W. 69th
Darling Ned:
By now you will be well on your way, riding in fine freudian frenzy on the ocean waves, and my thoughts and heart are with you. I would not have it otherwise than to see you off and watch with a mixture of agony and pride as you stood at the ship’s rail and waved until I couldn’t see you anymore—but it was with a sinking heart and dribbling eyes-nose that I turned away. Maggie [Margaret Hillis, choir director, Nell’s roommate] and I, after terrible difficulty in getting the car extricated from the mess of parked trucks, went wandering down 8th Avenue for a place to eat and I remembered the Sevilla; it was with wonder and nostalgia that we realized, when we got out of the car, that we had parked exactly in front of 285 W. 12th and I wept anew at the forlorn looking window pane.…
Nine days later:
Your letter this morning was so unexpected, and sounded so free and happy that it has added the necessary wine to this already miraculously beautiful June day … My heart did honestly sink at the sight of your boat & and the people on it. I can tell you now that you are safely across. It looked so crowded and so incredibly dull. I hope you can come back on something more exciting, altho the Irish lad undoubtedly made life a joy in the moments available.…
(Irish lad? And did I come back on something more exciting?)
These are samples of communication from another era, the necessary leisure, the sole means. Today I have forty-five filing cabinets of correspondence received mainly from the 1950s. My longhand responses to this correspondence are dispersed throughout the world in other cabinets, or in ashes long since consigned to fertilizer. I wrote to everyone—mainly to my family, but also to Dr. Kraft and Dr. Kinsey, to cousins and lovers, to performers I’d never met—and relied as we all did on this slow form of love and duty. I still write letters, a habit which even old friends find quaint.
The yellowing agenda. That June was five hundred months ago. The interim can sometimes show France as an inactive absence. But if I close my eyes, a single hour can evoke a presence so acute that reality—indeed, Being itself—becomes “that which was.”
The second day we saw the French version, L’opéra de quat’sous, of Pabst’s film on Kurt Weill’s opera, with Margot Lyon (an acquaintance of Shirley’s) in the Lenya role. Whereupon we bought the sheet music at one of the well-stocked kiosks along the quais, and learned, in French, every one of those so-German songs, singing them in unison at the Steinway to all the permanent guests. I also played and bellowed solo lush arrangements of “Stormy Weather,” or of “Lover Man” and “Good Morning Heartache” and other Billie Holiday favorites, filling the pad with American nostalgia. We saw Le chevalier à la rose at the Palais Garnier with a now-forgotten cast, and Franju’s new Le sang des bêtes, an unbearably sad film about a Paris slaughterhouse where the panicked sheep are shown anthropomorphically an
d the cows are killed with crowbars, while the background music—le fond sonore, as the French call it—is the happy voice of a little girl intoning Trenet’s “La mer” to an accordion accompaniment.
We walked, we walked. Not just to the upper Right Bank where the grown-ups lived, but to the black market ghetto of the rue Vieille-du-Temple to turn dollars into francs (the legal exchange of 345 became 400), thereby memorizing the twists and turns of the eerie Marais. Mostly we ferreted out our own fifth arrondissement, a town in itself, memorizing every ruelle between the oldest church, Saint-Julien-des-Pauvres, to the newest tobacco store, Le Mabillon, all squirming on the soil of the ancient Lutèce which, because two thousand years ago when it began to grow from a riverbank settlement into a center as beautiful as the vanished city of Ys—pareil à Ys—became known as Paris. On the afternoon of Tuesday, 7 June, loitering in the place Sainte-Geneviève where children used to throw rotten fruit at the drunken Verlaine (not really so long ago), we heard a choir rehearsing from the nearby church, repeating, repeating, a modal five-note refrain. The sky clouded over. We returned to Harp Street. Norris, looking as always like a hyperthyroid version of Picasso’s Blue Harlequin, thin and wistful, mixed gin and sodas. Then, leaning by the great window and gazing down into the darkening street where neon was beginning to reflect in the newly wet pavement, he pronounced these verses:
There fell a beautiful clear rain
with no admixture of fog or snow,
and this was and no other thing
the very sign of the start of spring.
Not the longing for a lover
nor the sentiment of starting over,
but this clear and refreshing rain
falling without haste or strain.
I felt, still feel, that no poet, certainly not our habitually perfervid Paul, had ever more prettily stated the absence of anxiety. That evening, using maybe that five-note refrain, I made a song out of the Goodman lyric, my first music written away from home.
The second or third reason for many of us to magnetize toward Paris—along with the need to stretch and molt after the quarantine of war; to slough off parents in order, ironically, to seek grandparents, our roots as we called them (though were Jimmy Baldwin’s roots really in Paris, or were mine, for that matter, rather than in Dakar or Oslo? Yes, artistically; although his beloved Gide was filtered through Harlem while my Gide grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park)—was to pay homage to Nadia Boulanger, arguably the greatest teacher since Socrates, certainly the greatest music teacher. Charles (Buddy) Strouse was idling in Paris that spring. We made a date to attend together one of Boulanger’s Wednesdays, on 8 June at five o’clock. We would give each other moral support.
A few years after her death at ninety-two in 1979, I ended a review of Nadia Boulanger’s biography thus: “If she did not change the planet’s shape, she shaped some who did. Was her emphasis on technique only one of many ‘techniques’? Do the French with their machine-gun-solfège accuracy necessarily produce better musicians than the more flaccidly reared Americans? At least Nadia knew that to be moved without métier is insufficient, while with métier inspiration falls into place. Her contagious enthusiasm was no tacit agreement for grooving, but a demonstration that structure, art’s sovereign ingredient, need not always be dull, and that to write down your dreams you must be wide awake.”
To arrive at rue Ballu, you walk due north from Trinité Church, either on rue Blanche or rue de Clichy. (If you take the latter you will find, at the halfway mark, the Cité Monthiers Cocteau describes in the opening words of Les enfants terribles, and which later was transformed into the snowball-throwing soundstage in Blood of a Poet. Do you remember? The scene where, during the card game, Lee Miller says: “If you don’t have the ace of hearts, my dear, you’re a goner.” And when the Poet seeks to retrieve the ace of hearts from the breastpocket of the dead youth—that is, himself—beneath the table, Benga, the Black Angel, has invisibly removed the card. Does the Cité Monthiers still exist, or has it too been quietly covered with snow forever?) At 36 rue Ballu you will find Nadia’s building—on what is now named place Lili Boulanger—where you must take a rickety elevator (which, as Cocteau says, dates from before the age of elevators) to the fifth floor where a male servant, Italian, will take your coat and show you into the grand salon.
The moment I saw Mademoiselle, as she was known to all, I was confirmed in what I would write so many years later: that musical composition is a no-nonsense deal—that inspiration is a matter of conscious control. The hostess was surrounded by supplicants from all over the globe, she in an armchair, they in straight-backs, or maybe on the organ bench, for yes, there was an organ in that room. Buddy and I had come up in the elevator with an American lady bearing a bouquet of white roses, duly offered to Mademoiselle who exclaimed: “What lovely marguérites!” Then to the Italian servant: “Would you take these marguérites and put them in a vase sur la table dans la salle à manger.” (Didn’t marguérite mean daisy? Buddy and I wondered later, or was it also a generic term, like posey?) Boulanger, despite a long stay in America during the war and her proliferation of English-speaking students, never quite learned English. An ear for music does not mean an ear for language, and vice versa. Nor does intelligence enter in. Many bores speak many languages expertly and without accent—and are just as boring in every one. To master another tongue (unless you are raised bi- or trilingually) means first of all to want to, and second to be blessed with a certain extrovert hamminess which perfectionist musicians, who hate making public mistakes, refuse to summon.
The routine at the Boulanger Wednesdays was to wait your turn. There was no general converse, and no food. Mademoiselle addressed, from left to right, the chairs surrounding her, while you, plus attendant celebrities, waited your turn. At my turn she claimed not to recognize me, wasn’t my hair blonder than in the photos I’d sent? The event seemed so unreal, so somehow unmusical, that I was at a loss. At the same time her voice, husky and low as Tallulah Bankhead’s, emanating from an ashen mouth surmounted by steel-rimmed spectacles, hair coiffed in an antique bun, severe suit and bow tie, sensible shoes, seemed theatrical yet true. That this vieille fille, who may still have been a virgin at sixty-four, could give off a sensuality to me no less than to a long-lived array of pupils was no more incongruous than the lightning that was said to have passed continually between Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. I came back the following Wednesday, whereupon we made a date to meet tête-à-tête and go over my wares.
Even as a painter will, at the last minute, add the “telling” little patch of scarlet that makes his landscape suddenly breathe, Boulanger will change one note—just one—in your song, that makes the hitherto leaden page suddenly flow with a fortunate breeze. She had the knack for nosing out the one rotten apple in the barrel, and for replacing it with one of gold.
Yet she didn’t want me to become her pupil: I was already twenty-five, she pointed out, not seventeen, and my character was formed, tant bien que mal—my nature bête, which her prodding could only sterilize.
But we loved one another. She arranged for me to receive the annual Lili Boulanger Award, and performed my works in public, which provided much needed prestige and finance to impress my parents and supplement their allowance. She also invited me as a peer to her table (I recall especially a lamb stew with Lennox Berkeley and Kathleen Ferrier whereat three languages—French, English, and American—were foils for discussion), and to her occasional rehearsals whereat she solicited, and followed, my suggestions. Later, when I lived chez Marie-Laure de Noailles, of whom she took a dim view, partly because both had loved Igor Markevich long ago, and partly because she tacitly found Marie-Laure superficial, Nadia nonetheless promoted me, wrote to me, worried about my gaudy self-destruction, nurtured me from near and far, until she died.
Why, then, was my attitude so righteously huffy? In 1965 when my Paris Diary (1950–1955) was being prepared for publication, a set of galleys was sent to Aaron Copland from whom a blu
rb was hoped for. He answered:
… I’ll be very curious to see how your Diary is received. I myself had 2 different reactions: reading it as if I didn’t know you or the parties concerned it definitely has fascination, but reading it as an “insider” I had complicated reactions—too complicated to go into here. I couldn’t supply your publishers with a blurb because of your plain nasty treatment of N.B. It isn’t that I consider her beyond “reproche” but I just don’t feel it’s my role to “O.K.” a book that belittles her.
Indeed, on rereading my two dense pages on Mademoiselle (“… Only a female, and uncreative, could have built within herself the most spectacular musical métier in the world today. Hers is the search for a true spark among those crackling in her synthetic electricity, a shimmer attacking others who fear to make love.…”), I blush for my unearned sarcasm. I was not being daring or original, but following a vogue for putting down Nadia. I was a pretentious coward.
Is it more than coincidental that the names of Boulez and Boulanger contain the same first four letters? These were the two foremost French musical powers of 1949, Boulez in ascent, Boulanger in decline, and both representative—though who could see it then?—of the decay, the blanche agonie, that was clutching French culture and that would bring it to what it’s become today. As recently as 1972 Boulez recalled with customary charity: “After the war, Messiaen and Leibowitz were the important figures and no one had any use for Boulanger.” Like Boulanger, Boulez in his early years was a prophet mainly in foreign lands. Unlike her, he returned in triumph to Paris where to this day, for better or worse, he reigns supreme.