by Ned Rorem
Indeed, so intimidated was I by both presences that for twenty years I felt guilty at loving tonality while retaining a built-in revulsion for serial music, was threatened by the very fact of it—and so by Boulez—as though I’d been forever missing the point of something which finally had no point.
George Bemberg suggested I look up his cousin, Philippe. As it happened, Shirley knew him already, so we went together to his big house in the rue de Grenelle. Philippe was a gaunt version of George (they both resembled the Hollywood villain Henry Daniell), and we liked each other right off. The rooms were vast and lavish and, like all the rooms of the continental rich, slightly crumbly. Philippe gifted me with an illustrated edition of Les enfants terribles which I treasure still. A true romantic, he committed suicide a few years later, in Holland, for a story of love. Or was it because, having refused to receive Eva Peron when she passed through Paris (the Bembergs were Argentinean), he was unaccountably taxed to the tune of two hundred million dollars?
Philippe’s nearest friend was an Italian composer incongruously named Raffaello de Banfield (his father was Austrian, his mother Triestina), every bit as rich as Philippe but with a rather more purposeful routine. With a thick but fluent accent, wavy blond hair, and a constant feline grin, Raffaello could charm the birds off the trees. A sometime pupil of Boulanger’s, he had a ballet, Le combat, currently in the Roland Petit repertory. I saw it. Amateurish but appealing music, overwrought choreography, with costumes by Marie-Laure de Noailles, made out of Ping-Pong balls because, she would later explain, Ping-Pong balls are buoyant and propel dancers. Raffaello was close to this woman of whom I had heard. Indeed, he was mondain in the extreme, knew everybody, went everywhere, and had enough money (despite a mother who doled it out) not to have to work with any regularity on his chosen craft. Wealthy artists are no better or worse than poor ones, but they don’t need to listen, and that dearth of need is discernible in their work. During the years I knew Raffaello, sometimes even living in close proximity with him, I never saw him take pen to paper. Leonor Fini once claimed that Raffaello’s music was written by a little man in Trieste. Well, that little man hadn’t much discipline.
Anyhow, Raffaello in those days had a darling robin’s-egg-blue Maserati which was his signature. He invited me to Versailles, perhaps just for the ride. But when he picked me up on Harp Street, Shirley’s mother, Rae Gabis, visiting in France for the first time, appeared with me. Raffaello’s face fell. He rallied, and Rae never forgot. He lived at 21 rue Casimir-Périer, two steps from the Bains Deligny, a huge pool on a public barge docked in the Seine. Raffaello took me there. I had already acquired crabs, that is, pubic lice, which the French call morpions though they look just like the North American species. Because my new swimming trunks were the minimal slip de bain, the crabs were visible. Raffaello plucked them, one by one, in view of everyone. This was Paris, après tout.
I mention him at such length because he adored my music, because he had the effervescence of his country which I’d never previously experienced, and because he will return peripherally through these pages. (Currently Raffaello is director of the opera in Trieste. We’ve not met in many years.)
From whence the crabs? During my exactly two months in Paris (I would leave on 30 July for Africa) I slept with perhaps a dozen people, some of them several times. These people were found mainly dans le quartier—the byways of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a classical crossroads, flanked by the medieval church (forever under scaffolding), between the rue Bonaparte and the rue des Saints-Pères. The Flore is where you sat from six until midnight, because Sartre had founded existentialism there during the war rather than in his apartment where there was no central heating. From midnight until 4 a.m. you went to the Reine Blanche, a strictly gay bar just across the boulevard, run by a fat harridan, Madame Alice, who never quit her seat at the cash register while shouting orders to the bartender and bouncer. When the Reine Blanche closed you moved down to the Pergola, open twenty-four hours and catering to all types. This triangular foray could be shifted imperceptibly by starting at the Deux Magots, thence to the Fiacre, and ending at the Bar-Tabac. There was also the Montana, a more discreet gay bar on the rue Saint-Benoît next to the Flore, or, for a daring change, the Boeuf sur le Toit, across the river on the rue du Colisée. This was my routine about thrice a week. Even on sober nights I never retired early at Harp Street because of the clatter of voices and drums downstairs at the Rose Rouge. Likewise I avoided returning there at 9 a.m. from the Pergola, because Shirley, who was preparing a debut recital at the Salle Gaveau, would be practicing. As a new face I did not lack for beds here and there.
It never occurred to me that an obligatory rapport existed between sex and love, that these two experiences could not thrive independently. Though impelled sometimes at the idiotic instant of climax to utter Thanks, or Yes, or Go to it, the moment after brought an equally strong impulsion to utter Get out. I was not owed, nor did I owe, any commitment to another person for the act of sex. Swans and geese will die of broken hearts, but not mammals. Of course, such notions sometimes backfire.
Rum-soaked hours spiraled to such a force that, between 1940 and 1968, there were perhaps a thousand blackouts—days so blurred as to be scraped from memory. Although, quaintly, sometimes what I blocked out during one spree might be recalled, not during periods of recuperation, but only during the next spree. Those periods of recuperation, meanwhile, especially with hangovers, were usually spent in the tingling anonymity of Turkish baths and urinals—“looking for love where it can’t be found,” but where, in fact, love, lasting love, could be found.
Well, what should I have been doing? Sitting forever at the desk, pen poised? Listening to Beethoven until the cows came home? It is good to be a recovering alcoholic if only because of the adjustment and clarity this implies. At least he knows what he is, if not quite who, and can act accordingly.
The unthinkable horniness of a hangover when reason is stifled as the body reawakens from last night’s lacerations! The whole town seems erect as you walk—blinded by an equinoxal sun—through it, and any male passerby becomes a possibility. A new city, mapped by its pissotières.
Meanwhile, as a one-night stand in one of the dozens of dark hotels in the quarter, nothing had changed. Except that now it was French knees knocking at your rump, French teeth tearing at your nape, French verbs entering your ears as hoarse nothings in these dangerous hours of early morning. What would happen if you suddenly lost the need for equilibrium despite the unending maelstrom all around?
Yet the resilience! An ash can in Paris was no longer an ash can but the Holy Grail. If bad things happened, they became good, because they were French, thus instructive, for this was the land of Jean Gabin, northern too, where the summer sun rose at 3 a.m. I never found (as the anguished Foucault did) that the French were intolerant of homosexuality, or Americans either for that matter. Admittedly, the only people I’ve ever known have not been the stone-throwing bourgeoisie, but artists, the idle rich, and similar misfits.
Bobby Fizdale and Arthur Gold somehow already knew everyone in Paris. Even Jean Cocteau. Indeed, they had been hired to record the backgrounds for the film being made on Les enfants terribles. Cocteau hoped they would improvise around “The Japanese Sandman,” the song he had listened to, over and over and over again, while writing the novel in seventeen days during his 1928 disintoxication at the Saint-Cloud clinic. “But we don’t know ‘The Japanese Sandman,’” they told him, “and besides we can’t improvise.” “Mais comment ça!” He seemed startled. “Vous êtes des américains!” (The director, Jean-Pierre Melville, eventually used, to haunting effect, Bach’s Concerto for Four Pianos, played anonymously.)
Meanwhile Bobby and Arthur were planning a two-piano recital at the Salle Gaveau on 24 June, including Paul Bowles’s clangorously delicious Concerto, with a small orchestra that Gary Samuel would conduct. Paul came from Tangier for the occasion, though he claimed to hate France where he’d not been since befor
e the war (nor would he return for another thirty-five years). The instrumentalists were not quite up to the rhythmic complexities of Paul’s piece, though when I examined the score the fault seemed as much Paul’s as theirs. I remembered from my days as a copyist how Paul’s music, so forthright to the ear, looked devious to the eye, as only the music by someone unversed in proper notation could look. But Fizdale & Gold played nobly as always, and “everyone” was there. A postconcert party was given in the rue des Saints-Pères, chez Edmonde Charles-Roux, who was editor of Vogue’s European offices. And there, late in the night, I met Henri H.
Henri H., known to all as José, was music critic for the monthly La table ronde, an employee at the music division of UNESCO on the avenue Kléber, and most significantly, the amanuensis and official biographer of Francis Poulenc. Would I, he asked, like to have a drink later at his place, he lived just down the block? I would. It was a Friday night, no need for him to rise early next day, so we stopped by the Reine Blanche on the way. It was 2 a.m., we were both a bit tipsy, and there ensconced at the bar in all his fat glory sat Georges Auric, to whom José introduced me. It goes without saying that a fifty-two-year-old French composer, distinguished member of the Groupe des Six, would not have heard of any American composer, much less me, but when I whistled to him through my rosy lips the key themes from various movies he’d scored—the Black Angel’s tune from Sang d’un poète, the morose waltz from Les jeux sont faits, the swooning love song from Le diable aux corps—it must have been a heady dose for him, from this nocturnal barbarian with bleached hair. (I had just learned the term for peroxide: eau oxygénée.)
José H. rented a floor in a hôtel particulier at 66 rue des Saints-Pères which belonged to the Comte Anne de Biéville, a supercilious fop who modeled himself on Montesquiou—that is, Proust’s Charlus—and whose sole claim to fame, besides money, was having done the argument for one of Diaghilev’s ballets, Errante. I spent the first of many nights with José, of whom I became very fond, and in due course he became the dedicatee of the new song, “Rain in Spring.” At thirty-three José was slight of build, biblical in aspect with tight curly hair, and a paradoxical demeanor that was laid back but concerned, literal-minded but poetic. A pied noir raised in Algeria, José soft-pedaled his Jewishness and was sometimes unearnedly imperious (as when berating his cook, Susanne, in front of guests), a trait learned, I assumed, in imitation of his classy friends like Marie-Laure de Noailles. He owned a lovely looking clankety-sounding Pleyel piano which he played with a certain skill but no “feeling,” and he knew French repertory like the back of his hand, especially Poulenc, for whom I shared his abject adoration. José grew, he said, to be in love with me, but was more protective than jealous of my amoral wanderings. I used his place as an occasional crash pad, once even showing up at five in the morning of the same day I was scheduled to come to lunch with Norris and Shirley and Jean-Claude, all of whom then arrived to find me still in bed with their host. Other times he forced me to eat, when he found me staggering around the quarter looking for drinking pals. His only serious anxiety was when I went off with Guy Ferrand. He wept then on Shirley’s shoulder, as even, years later, on Marie-Laure’s shoulder, for what he felt were my dangerous indiscretions. I cured him, he claimed, of love.
More important, at least for me, was José’s entrée into musical circles. He considered me a protégé, a “find,” was intrigued by my music, especially by Penny Arcade which, in its skewed Frenchified sonic language, depicted the arch-American milieu of Forty-second Street where he had never been. He showed me off to everyone.
The night after the Fizdale & Gold concert we gave a party on Harp Street for Paul Bowles. I seem to remember Bill Flanagan (passing through Paris with an effete companion en route to Italy), Shirley, of course, and a bunch of Jean-Claude’s companions. The crux of the evening, however, did not rely on people but on a hideous nutrient.
Paul had brought a wad of majoun from Tangier, a figlike pudding, gummy and nutty, but tasteless, derived from kif, Africa’s marijuana. As a drinker, I’d never cared for drugs; they’re not legally social in the same way, and you need to wait too long for the effect. With liquor, of course, comes puritan remorse (“… they have beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.” Proverbs 23:35), while with hallucinogenics there seem to be no aftereffects. Still, was it quite proper of Paul to pass his vice around to us children?
How could I know that you don’t mix hash with alcohol—business with pleasure? So I swilled wine while skeptically ingesting the more nuanced and leisurely gift. Suddenly everything in the room froze. Each person became a statue, mouths puckered or opened on a word never finished, total stillness. Except for me. On a different time-wave, I walked among these Pompeian statues for whom time had stopped.
I left the party, made it to Saint-Germain, ran into Charles-Henri Ford at the Reine Blanche. He had just come from seeing Arletty in Cocteau’s adaptation of Un tramway nommé désir, but Charles-Henri’s French was so weird I couldn’t comprehend. Wasn’t Arletty an ostracized collabo? I wondered. But just as the French were currently sleeping with American tourists (it was an alluring convenience), so they had slept with Germans, at least until the last year of the occupation when things turned menacing. But sex with the enemy was not collaboration, merely a venal sin, and Arletty was apparently now back in the business of acting. Anyway, Charles-Henri and I had a few beers. Then I returned to Harp Street. Nothing had moved. All were still posed as I’d left them, like George Segal plaster figures. Then the majoun hit me too. I collapsed into a dream, had sex with Jacques (one of Jean-Claude’s straight friends), succumbed to a deep sleep, and woke into a stream of afternoon sunshine, none the worse for wear.
Ralph Kirkpatrick was around, with his likable intelligence. “You must see Ondine,” said he, as we sat on the terrace of the Deux Magots, munching grape tarts and sipping our café filtres thick as slush and sweet as Cointreau. We were observing with amusement the ratés parading back and forth. The ratés (failures) were unapologetic spinoffs of the public existentialists who disported themselves in a manner they felt that Sartre (whom they’d never read) would approve of. They had the accoutrements of sophisticated despair but no talent to choreograph it. “Ondine is Giraudoux’s greatest play,” said Ralph, “and remote from this display.”
Next evening with José we saw Ondine, which contains the most touching curtain line in all theater. “Comme il est beau, comme je l’aurais aimé” (“How handsome he is, how I would have loved him”), sighs the water spright at the final sight of her mortal lover whom she has been obliged to forget, a lovely sample of the conditional tense for me to try out here and there. Louis Jouvet and Dominique Blanchar inhabited a transfixing décor of Tchelitcheff, in as many shades of blue as the ocean had depths, and an incidental score of Sauguet, lilting and eerie.
The following night I saw Raffaello’s ballet, Le combat, and Roland Petit’s vulgar Carmen, then went to a sleazy hotel in Clichy with C. (another friend of Jean-Claude’s) and fooled around. The weekend of 2 July was spent in Fontainebleau with José. We stayed at an inn on the edge of a park filled with moss-covered statues, and didn’t drink. We walked and talked, and José, who knew all about English except how to speak it, was a literate and patient teacher of the French which I had vowed to vanquish. We all speak our own dialect within our mother tongue; I was anxious to master French sufficiently to speak a Ned-French as I speak a Ned-English. Marie-Laure would later say my French was a mélange of the princesse de Clèves and Jean Genet, as I, chattering with the duchesse of so-&-so, conjugated enculer in the imperfect of the subjunctive.
The calendar shows me, the following Monday, having cocktails at the American embassy, then meeting Roger, a movie director, at the Flore at ten o’clock. On Tuesday, Tom Stauffer, blustery and crass, on leave from Germany. And on Wednesday: Francis Poulenc.
• • •
Over the years I have written five essays on Francis Poul
enc, the twentieth-century composer to whose work I feel most akin. These essays, at least in theory, are still available; they deal mainly with the music, and the man shines through only by implication. So as not to repeat myself, here I’ll talk mostly of the man.
Scrubbed and shined, thrilled and expectant at this prearranged tea party, satchel beneath my arm and escorted by José, I appeared on Wednesday, 6 July, at his door on the fifth floor of 5 rue de Médicis, overlooking the Luxembourg. Poulenc, garbed in a peignoir, opened the door halfway, peered at us from the shadows and spoke: “I implore you to forgive me, my dearest Henri [he was the sole person to address José as Henri], but I can’t receive you now. Please come back instead on Friday. Please.” And he closed the door without explanation. Thus ended my first meeting with the master.
José assured me this was proper conduct, that Poulenc was a gentleman. Still a bit taken aback, we repaired to an outdoor bar on nearby rue Corneille, to decide, over a glass of Cinzano, how to spend the next hours. We talked of Poulenc, how he was the only queer member of Les Six, that group so-named by Cocteau, who were too young for the First War and too old for the Second, and who were knit together in name only. In later years, when people asked if I knew any of The Six, I always answered yes, all five of them. The sixth, Louis Durey, abandoned the clan two years before I was born and was the least psychologically glued to the effete anti-Wagnerian clarity of the others. His name is not listed in these alexandrines of Cocteau: