by Ned Rorem
Almost daily we visited the Royers, Guy’s substitute family consisting of mediocre and trusting colonial parents coincidentally named Fernand and Fernande, and their two children, a homely homosexual extrovert son and a chinless unmarried daughter who had a crush on Guy. Madame Royer—Fernande—made fudge and smiled. Monsieur Royer was retired, Michel was eligible for the draft and sometimes dressed in drag, and Jeannine was studying English. Guy always made me play and sing whatever I happened to be working on. Since I can’t perform my own piano music unless I practice it as I’d practice any other composer’s music, and since I can’t sing except for imitations of Billie Holiday which only other Americans of that period might appreciate, there wasn’t much to offer. I had, however, along with the two big sonatas, written three new songs. One was a three-page rendering of Apollinaire’s “L’automne” which, except for the little Cocteau poem of years before, was the only French setting I’d done; another, “The Call,” was a ten-measure vignette on anonymous fifteenth-century verses (“My blood so red/For thee was shed …”). “L’automne” has never been heard and hides somewhere in a trunk. “The Call,” an echo of Frances Osasto singing Basque airs, was later arranged for unaccompanied chorus and woven into a suite called From an Unknown Past (1951). Both versions are printed, and the solo version was movingly recorded in 1962 by the incomparable Donald Gramm who, with his bass-baritone beauty, turned this forty-second bonbon into a heartbreaking masterpiece. The third song, “The Sleeping Palace,” on an enigmatic stanza of Tennyson sent on a picture postcard from John Edmunds, was, fourteen years later, incorporated into a suite of Tennyson settings for Ellen Faull to sing.
The weekend after that Sunday picnic with Mademoiselle Bursier we finally went up to Tangier, taking the train. Our compartment contained an officious trilingual female who kept up a nonstop monologue in Spanish, French, and Arabic for 200 kilometers, a distance of five hours, with three separate customs formalities at the border. My first impression is less intense than the conglomerate impressions from various visits over the years. Tangier, after the instant red panache of Marrakech, the green of Fez, and the blue glittering coastal capital of Rabat, seemed white and seedy and ominous. In 1949 this was still the International Zone, and would remain so until the revolution of 1956. To converse quietly in English at a café in the Xoco Chico meant that some denizen at a nearby table, looking like Henry Armetta, would cock his ear and take notes. A nest of tenth-rate spies.
Saturday night we wandered the town, assailed by boyish beauties peddling unlimited wares. Sunday Paul Bowles picked us up at our quaint English hotel on the waterfront—the Mimosa, I think—to guide us back to his pensione, El Farhar, on a hilltop for lunch. His entourage was somnolent and disorganized, having been last night to a masked ball thrown by Cecil Beaton; hung-over hangers-on came and went around our table, mainly reliving the party. These were Jane Bowles, Truman Capote, Themistocles Hoetis, Brion Gysin, plus lesser lights at other tables.
Jane, toujours égale à elle-même with her ski-jump nose and her stiff game leg propped up on a chair beside her, was not eating, but sipping pink gins which she reordered every twenty minutes by yelling to the bartender in the corner, “Encore un pink gin, je vous prie.” I found her, as always, endearing and scary with her imperious vulnerability, her complaining, her giggle, her indifference.
“Do you know a girl named Mugsy Phyllis?” she asked, referring to the lesbian who had married my sister’s Japanese boyfriend, Chino, a decade before. “She was here last week and asked if I knew you. She called you Neddo.” She went on at length about how lesbianism was the one worthwhile route to follow on this troubled globe, then called for another pink gin, this time in Spanish. Paul, a proud audience for Jane’s prattle, had the patience of a parent. His literary career, except for the stories in the specialized View, was for the present nil to the general public, but in another month would dazzle the world with the advent of The Sheltering Sky. Jane for the nonce was the Family Author, still resting on the laurels of her six-year-old novel, Two Serious Ladies, which I’d read and admired.
I’d read and admired Other Voices, Other Rooms too, but had never met Truman who was less puckish than his pictures, mainly because of his glasses. He had a way of sizing you up through those glasses, bestowing a quick plus or minus, without appeal. He took more to Guy than to me, I believe, but his French was nonexistent, and Guy was perhaps baffled by this supposedly famous gnome. “You’re a musician,” whined the gnome, “just like Paul. Well, then you must know Jennie Tourel. Jennie Tourel came to Yaddo once when I was there and I was told to show her around. She was wearing a green gown and high heels, right in the middle of the afternoon, and I was supposed to be working, but we went for a walk in the woods, and she wouldn’t take off those shoes, so she got stuck in the mud.” End of story. This, I surmised, was the Wit of the Great. Jane and Truman made a pair, cuddly and snotty, playing their insulated game inside a time capsule—they could as well have been in Omaha. Writers, I guessed, didn’t have to be profound except when they were writing.
Themistocles Hoetis, an American who spoke no Arabic, sat swathed in a burnoose and on his haunches despite many available chairs. He was silent, sexy, surly, not up to the banter or not interested. His claim to fame was as editor-founder of a pretty good literary review called Zero published right there in Tangier.
Brion Gysin: I had awakened one morning in his arms after a boozy night the previous summer in Provincetown. Then he had said he was writing a treatise on slavery in eighteenth-century Canada. Now here in Tangier, tall and Anglo-Saxon, suave and open and educated, an informed dabbler, he had become a painter. Brion’s pictures, all on foot-square canvases, represented the entire Sahara rather the way Jean Hugo painted Côte d’Azure landscapes on postage-stamp-sized enamels. “You cannot,” said Brion, “find a canvas even half the size of the Sahara. You have to stop somewhere, so I stop here.”
Whereupon we all quit the dining room to see Jane’s sick kitten. Jane had an apartment separate from Paul’s in the pensione. A veterinarian was to visit her pet at three o’clock. I retain, after forty-four years, a vivid picture of the huge Spanish doctor hovering over the curled-up kitten, and shaking his head.
Paul took me and Guy, along with Themistocles, for dessert in town, at Madame Porte’s. (Brion and Jane and Truman remained, to nurse their hangovers and kittens. All three planned to live in Paris next winter.) I had come, after all, to Tangier to see Paul, but he typically pretended I’d come to change money, the exchange rate for the dollar, even on the “white market,” being higher than anywhere in Europe. Nor am I sure what he thought of Guy. They both had a proprietary interest in me, but since Guy was there to show me around, what good was Paul? As for Guy, he never took to Paul—found him precious and vicarious about this strong land, whereas he (Guy) was doing something practical to improve the lot of the indigènes. Paul, in fact, funded by the Library of Congress, had spent months in the bled, recording every shred of still extant folk music before it perished forever.
For the moment, there we sat, sated on pastry and Turkish coffee, smoking our cigarettes: Paul with his ivory holder and British Sweet Caporals, Guy with his three-pack-a-day Gauloises bleues, and I with my Moroccan brand Koutoubias, named for the minaret at Marrakech, which were almost as good and twice as cheap as American cigarettes.
Our host had recently returned from a stay in Ceylon, where he had quite simply bought an island. A hilarious mimic, Paul spoke to us in the skittering high-pitched monotone of the colonialized natives of India where male whores use the verb “to enjoy,” without a modifier, to mean “have sex” (rather like the French “jouir”). Example: “Shall we enjoy on the beach?”
I never heard Paul say anything “important,” though as with Jane and Truman, I supposed he put his important thoughts into writing. Still, I was young enough to find Things more superficial than Ideas, not yet realizing that gossip—high gossip, to be sure—was more nourishing than philos
ophy after a certain age.
Next morning we changed money, and returned to Fez.
• • •
Ramadan fell in September that year, which meant the faithful must fast from dawn to dusk through the lunar month. Also a suffocating heat wave had set in, so that if you wrapped your naked self in a cold wet sheet, the sheet would be dry as a dead leaf in minutes. Everyone drank twenty Cokes a day—or rather Pepsi-Cola. The Pepsi-Cola manufacturers had created a monopoly in North Africa by advertising their product as not being brewed, like Coca-Cola, from pig’s blood. (Arabs, like Jews, are not pork eaters.) Guy felt it would be cruel for Messaoud—who, as a Moslem, fasted from dawn to dusk during Ramadan—to have to fix our midday meal, and that we should lunch out as much as possible. I felt this to be inconvenient—which Guy in turn felt was petulant and American of me. Summer intensified. The sky turned bone white. Tempers flared.
Guy asked if I’d help toward buying a goat so that Messaoud could sacrifice it, according to custom, by slitting its throat. This I did for the unsmiling but grateful servant who, with all his virility, was nonetheless repelled by the slaughter. His reaction, in its protected haze, disturbed me: Messaoud was an Arab, after all, thus indifferent to cruelty. I note this with embarrassment. Am I being quite honest? Certainly I was impatient, used to getting my way as pretty people are. Could I also have felt, beneath the uncivilized patina of Morocco, a certain ennui in what Paul Bowles found so urgent? An annoyance that the Arabs couldn’t behave as Arabs, leaving me more time for work—a work which, by its nature as Art, would be paradoxically indulgent of the Arabs as Arabs? Was I tired of the astonishment of Morocco? I am no traveler.
Raised to believe in equality, Rosemary and I never questioned the difference between white and black. But the difference of Arabs was a novelty which I greeted with frustration. I was tempted by, hence resentful of, the Arab male’s swarthiness. Opposites attract. Yet I am not attracted by the Balinese, so where is the moral?
Back in Fez, the agenda reports more movies attended, more meals in and out of the Médina, more books read (Anouilh, Sartre), and a feast prepared for the Royers featuring roast rabbit and a poire belle Hélène made from poached pears, homemade vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, poire liqueur, and homemade chocolate sauce. More trips, notably to Marrakech again, to the Roman ruins at Volubilis, and to the festival at Moulay Idriss of horsemen shooting into the sky at full gallop. I noted too, on 28 September, that “Monsieur Vachet, the restaurateur, went insane today, leaving his wife free to carouse.”
(On 6 October my First Piano Sonata was premiered in New York’s Town Hall by David Stimer, he who five years earlier had initiated the ongoing series on WNYC of American music. The final Toccata was eventually published separately by Peters in 1961 with a dedication to William Masselos, and the whole three-movement work came out ten years later.)
There are notations about tailors, haircuts, banks (scrupulosity of small sums changed), and frequent references to Cooks. I must have cashed in my return boat ticket and used the money, $185, to spend instead in Paris. For yes, I went back to France, after nine weeks in Morocco, flying from Tangier on 12 October. Guy said he was ethically constrained to let me go back into the fray, that he had no right to force me to blush unseen, all because he loved me. What I did not note in the daily agenda was that, above all, Morocco had meant being alone, hour after hour, day after day, hatching eggs in a cocoon without time, without tears, without much sex, but with the intense focus on chiseled self-expression that only the young have the energy for.
Did I plan to stay away indefinitely? Was it a mistake to leave and break the spell? (There are no mistakes.) I didn’t know it then, but I would return to Fez in less than three weeks.
My first act in Paris was to gather the precious new manuscripts and, before they could be burned alive, deliver them to the Néocopie-Musicale. This was accomplished with the same juvenile enthusiasm as in 1936, when returning to Chicago after the long vacation in Europe, I rushed to the grandfather clock to see if the cache of robins’ eggs still lay within. The Néocopie-Musicale was an establishment existing solely for reproducing in multiplicate the results of labor on a craft; nothing therein pertained to other than music printing. I liked this room whose very ugliness was functional: the presses, the flickering blue lights, the reams of transparent onionskin paper of every size printed with from eight to thirty staves, some with clefs and some without, the stacks of envelopes, india inks of various hues, pen nibs of various thicknesses, rulers long and short and made of cedar or glass. The address was 9 rue Foyatier, near the upper exit of the funiculaire leading to Sacré-Coeur. The owlish Monsieur Vadot, who for decades plied the now-obsolete trade of blue-printing music manuscripts incised upon his special stock, made several copies—and bound them—of the new Violin Sonata and the new Second Piano Sonata. I remained his client until the business folded.
• • •
Shirley said that John Cage was in town and wanted to bring Pierre Boulez (I wrote “Boulaise” in the calendar) over to play his newish sonata. Our apartment, rue de la Harpe, was the only place that John knew with a good piano.
There were eight of us—me, Shirley and Jean-Claude, Cage with Maro Ajemian, and Boulez with two cronies, a cute sandy-haired painter named Bernard Saby, and a less cute type whose name has vanished. Boulez himself intimidated me, though on the face of it he should not have. The face of it was that, being composers of the same age but from separate lands, we should have ideas to exchange. Yet beneath the face—which in his case was sexy (I am seldom intimidated except by persons I find sexy)—lay an imperious self-assurance that was all work and no play. If he was not yet the superstar he soon would internationally become, Boulez was nevertheless preceded by a reputation of enfant terrible buttressed by a huge intellect, a quick mind, and a vicious wit. Cage had already told us that the Frenchman was anything but French—that he had gone on where Webern left off, serializing not only the sequence of pitches but of every variable in music including rhythm and dynamics. Nothing was left to chance, to crass inspiration. All this Germanitude was Greek to me, as to most Americans who had been liberated, during the quarantine of war, from Europe and developed a language of their own. This language would all too soon be squelched by none other than Boulez, who would intimidate not only little me but Copland and Stravinsky and anyone who crossed his path. All this, as Antigone said, for a handful of dust.
Preliminary niceties dispensed with, Boulez sat down to play. I still picture Miss Ajemian, who, as America’s premier pianist of the avant-garde, knew a thing or two about these affairs, and now assigned herself as page-turner for the maestro. Wearing a scarlet Dior dress, she stood to the left of Boulez and, with an expert hand, pinkie crooked, plied her trade with the incomprehensible score. The music meant nothing. It simply wasn’t music—worse, it was painful. And endless. When Boulez finished we were at a loss for words.
“C’est très beau,” Maro allowed, breaking the silence. Whatever else it was, the sonata wasn’t beau. Nor surely was it meant to be. Boulez gathered up his music and his friends, bade us a perfunctory au revoir, and was gone.
Jośe was taken with the new Violin Sonata, particularly the penultimate movement which he loved. Not so Shirley. She found it inferior, but liked the new Piano Sonata which she thereupon decided to include on her upcoming recital in the redoubtable Salle Gaveau. This would be her debut into the professional realm of soloists and she practiced continually, while Jean-Claude lolled about scribbling verses, as I, if I had been out late the night before, groaned in time to her slow arpeggios.
The word “cuite” is inscribed many times in my datebook. Binge! Sobriety’s exquisite placenta had been rent; the discipline so carefully cultivated in mind and body over the productive North African summer had been ripped apart by my alter ego. One drink is too much, and never enough. Since the virus of a single martini is already polluting the system, why not have sixteen? (Drink and recover in order to … e
tcetera.)
One seldom entered the Reine Blanche at any time of day without bumping into James Baldwin, known to all as Jimmy. We had known each other back home in scenes of similar tonality on Bleecker Street: my leading him on at midnight, then changing my mind near closing time; him, drinking as though he had a hollow leg but never showing it, except by speaking high philosophy and looking hurt with his bulging wet eyes. Jimmy was intensely serious, at once credulous and canny. Like everyone else he talked of the novel he was writing, but unlike everyone else he actually coughed up that novel four years later to worldwide success. For now he was earnest, a good listener, nearly always with white Americans, though when he wasn’t at the Reine Blanche, who knows? Jimmy Baldwin’s problem, and also his springboard, was not that he was black and queer, but that he was black and queer and ugly. He had every right to behave like a beauty, and did, and it often got him farther than it got me. Patience is its own reward.