Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  After Jimmy became famous he remained as always a good listener, indulgent of white friends’ folly, or so he pretended. But he was also busy, and his days were spent mainly in the humdrum marketplace of art and politics. His problem then became how to fit drinking into the professional schedule. During the late 1950s we renewed our acquaintance as neighbors, he on Horatio Street, I on West Thirteenth. I introduced him to Marc Bucci, composer and expert jazz pianist, with whom he had an affair. There remains a vision of Marc accompanying on my battered upright, as Jimmy sang spirituals with a small and beautiful voice, tears streaming down his cheeks. We visited my then-agent Audrey Wood: he hoped she would obtain Marlon Brando for the movie of Giovanni’s Room. Instead, she presented us to another client, Dorothy Heyward, who with her husband had written the book for Porgy and Bess. Mrs. Heyward had also written the play Mamba’s Daughters, in which Ethel Waters had so majestically created the role of Hagar. Audrey felt this could make an ideal opera, if Jimmy wrote the libretto and I the music, and she procured the rights from Mrs. Heyward. Jimmy was enthusiastic, the story was his to the core, he took me to Harlem to hear gospel singing, he throbbed with lyrics. (I still have one, scribbled on an envelope—“There is a scorpion in my heart”—alive with anxiety about insoluble injustice.) But gradually I saw that the project was not me. Would it not be hypocritical—condescending—to presume to write a work around a suffering I had never endured? I withdrew from the project. Surely I erred. Gershwin, after all, hadn’t done badly with Porgy and Bess. Where was my imagination? It was a mistake not to have persevered. (But there are no mistakes.)

  Summer lingered. The sky glowed with diaphanous yellows, and the Paris oxygen contained no hint of autumn frost—the sort of weather that makes students nervous at having to return to class. I too felt nervous at having decided to stay indefinitely abroad. There were the parents to placate; I had subsisted thus far on their largesse, on the remnants of the Gershwin award, and, in Morocco, on Guy’s benevolence. Nadia Boulanger now proposed me for the Lili Boulanger Award, five hundred dollars granted in the name of her late beloved sister, which I duly received. This impressed my parents, as did the possibility of a Fulbright. They were proud of me (especially Father; Mother sometimes felt I was “no better than Rosemary” and shouldn’t get special dispensation), but knew no precedent about the care and feeding of a composer in the family. I explained that they had spawned an exceptional child whose treatment must therefore be exceptional. Father agreed to send me a monthly allowance of one hundred dollars for a year.

  In this ambiance of silken weather and semisecurity, Shirley and I one afternoon took a walk along the quais where we bought two green balloons, and brandished them conspicuously around the quarter, as behooves proper bohemians, while I sang Apollinaire’s refrain: “Tes yeux ressemblent tant/A ces deux grands ballons/Qui se tournent dans l’air pur/De l’aventure.” Settling in the Montana bar, we had lemonade, and released the balloons which floated to the ceiling where we abandoned them. Passing in front of the Flore we heard a shrill voice cry Ned. It was Truman Capote, who recognized me from our so-brief meeting six weeks before. He was seated with his American agent, they were staying at the Hôtel de Nice. We made a date to dine that evening, and would meet in the Pont Royale bar.

  A liquory evening, during which I took at face value everything Truman related, and so did he, since he invented his own truth which he announced always as fact. He asked what I thought Paul Bowles did for sex “with all those Arabs.” My silent reaction was that he should know better than I: didn’t “they” all know about each other? I hadn’t yet learned that famous people are as mystified by each other as we mortals are by them; nor do they have more powerful inklings, only the power to illustrate communicatively such inklings as they do have. Around midnight we lurched into La Librarie, an existentialist bar across from the Montana, rue Saint-Benoît. Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  It was Bernard Saby, the cute sandy-haired painter who had been with Boulez a few days before. Bidding goodnight to Truman, I went off to Bernard’s, somewhere in Passy, where we smoked some pot, as we Americans called it then. We sort of made love all night, passed out, awoke in the afternoon dehydrated and conversational. Bernard at my request phoned Shirley, care of the Rose Rouge, to say he’d found me ivre noir the night before, that I was in safe hands, and that we’d all meet that evening at the Petit Marigny to see Le procès, Gide’s dramatization of Kafka’s The Trial for which Boulez would conduct the incidental music by, I think, Honegger. Boulez was the protégé of Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renault, the Lunt & Fontaine of the French stage, to whom the government had lent the Théâtre du Petit Marigny for their experimental whims.

  Bernard was vaguely insane and clearly endearing in the informal blur as we lounged naked, inhaling the still lurking fumes of yesternight. On every wall of this rented room were his paintings, what passed as abstractions to Parisians of that time, benign pale colors, ungeometrically wavy, nonthreatening. We talked, I in still-faltering French, he with his appealing stammer.

  “French music means everything to me,” said I. “Honegger, Poulenc, Milhaud—I was raised with all that.”

  “C’est du petit pipi,” was his reaction. “Small potatoes. That stuff is passé, nobody does it anymore.”

  These convictions sounded secondhand. It grew clear that he was under Boulez’s thumb—Boulez, who had the week before referred to Stravinsky as merde on the radio. Bernard reiterated the tired canard of Rimbaud, “Il faut être absolument moderne,” as though it were new—as though each one of us were not absolument moderne simply by virtue of being alive today, and whatever derivative art we produce is still, by definition, the art of today. Weren’t the French, if not conservative, at least conservateurs, naming their parks and squares after Balzac and Greuze? Why, your very concierge will proudly drop the name of Proust though she’s never read him. Imagine that in America.

  “Oh, America,” said Bernard. The French didn’t think about America. Boulez didn’t think about America. (Decades later he became our Philharmonic’s chief, with his no-nonsense interpretations of the artists he now decried, including the beloved Debussy whose La mer, I reluctantly admit, has never sounded more properly fearsome, and gelid than under Boulez’s baton—if, in fact, Boulez uses a baton.) For the moment I felt despondent that this chic and predictable disavowal of the past, as urged by strong personalities, would lead us into a new dark age where hidden masterpieces would need to be preserved by monks over the centuries. At least these “strong personalities” knew the masterpieces they were repudiating. Europeans were not, like us, oblivious to culture. (I type these sentences in May of 1993, the day after the terrorist bombing of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.)

  Bernard and I pulled ourselves together, met Jean-Claude and Shirley for a cup of soup at the Rond Point, then proceeded to Le procès, starring Barrault as Joseph K., arch and un-Kafkian. I saw Bernard Saby again a week later, but the blush was fading. In the middle fifties Pierre Souvchinsky, ghostwriter of Stravinsky’s Harvard lectures and now a promoter of the avant-garde, brought Saby to lunch at Marie-Laure’s where he seemed drugged, extinguished, out of place, full of smiles but unequal to Souvchinsky’s sales pitch. Eventually he died ambiguously, still young, broiled by the icy light of a one-track-minded captor.

  I saw quite a bit of Truman, who used me as decoration and as translator. He came to Harp Street to entertain Shirley and Norris Embry, after which we went to the Deux Magots for him to be interviewed for Paris-Match. The interviewer was Yves Salgues, star reporter on that weekly, whom I’d met at the Boeuf sur le Toit a few nights earlier. Yves, tall and blond, unstable and handsome, was also an author, a fine one, influenced by Giraudoux. I will bring him up later.

  I will also bring up James Lord, whom I came to know well, and with whom I now note a lunch date Aux Ministères, familiarly called Madame Garde’s, where everyone ate, good and cheap, in the quarter in those days. (Virgil: “I deci
ded that if I was going to starve to death, I’d rather do it in Paris where the food is good.”) I don’t recall how we met, probably through José, and of this meal I remember only that we discussed a character in his novel-in-the-making.

  “The character is very beautiful,” James explained, “and could walk into any bar with the aplomb of the very beautiful, knowing that heads would turn.”

  “But beautiful people don’t have aplomb,” said I. “I’m terrified when I walk into a bar.”

  On 23 October I turned twenty-six, the age at which male citizens of the USA are no longer eligible for military conscription. On the terrace of the Flore that evening, with José and Jimmy Baldwin, surrounded by other tables of Franco-Americans, I drew forth my draft card and ostentatiously burned it. The gesture, like the throwing of that pearl rosary into the murk, had no point beyond theatricality. The draft card had long served as proof to bartenders that I, with my perennially juvenile features, was old enough to drink. To have burned it in the old days, on American soil, would have been a jailable offense, and admirable, if you will, that a pacifist was announcing his convictions and willing to pay the price. Now it was perhaps merely an inconvenience. Yet until I was forty, the age at which one no longer needed to register, I was hounded by the notion that sooner or later I’d be asked to show the card under some legal circumstance. I never was. But Father still carried his draft card.

  Whenever Norris, always in a cloud, would start to cross the street against the light, or tell us about last night’s dangerous adventure with some workman in Les Halles, Shirley would say, “Dear Mrs. Embry,” a shorthand reprimand for the letter she would have to write announcing his death. She now took to reprimanding me as well. “Dear Mrs. Rorem,” she would sigh when I shakily returned to the fold ever later.

  Shirley did have a knack—exasperating and final—for letting us know that her liaison with Jean-Claude was rare as Francesca and Paolo, while our one-night stands were bagatelles. Her French was thorough and colloquial, incorporating the broad slow Parisian twang of Arletty’s. I adored her. But the apartment was not large, three’s a crowd, I had no routine, and was getting on her nerves.

  One morning she confessed she’d come across a letter from Guy on my bed and couldn’t help reading it. Her heart bled for his lonely words, and for the closing phrase, “Tu es ma vie tout entière”—you are my whole life—in which I had noted only that the two adjectives did not agree with one another, although the first one, tout, because it was followed by a vowel, would, although incorrectly masculine, sound like the feminine modifier of vie.

  “I think you should go back to Fez,” said Shirley, taking a puff of her Gauloise, “and get some work done.”

  On 2 November, when I boarded the night train for Marseilles, I had been back in Paris only eighteen days. Beyond the occurrences already mentioned, I note the following: There was a certain Pierre Pichon, bony, blue-collar, and fair (as a rule I prefer the somber), with whom, for the next year or two, I had harmless amourettes before he disappeared completely, no doubt returning to prison somewhere. We saw twice Clouzot’s movie of Manon Lescaut, updated, a quasi masterpiece, with the disturbing Serge Reggiani and Cécile Aubrey, the latter a persuasive pre-Bardot slut who would eventually give it all up to become the mistress, it’s said, of the Glaoui of Marrakech. We dined, with José, at Philippe Bemberg’s, rue de Grenelle. David Diamond passed by for lunch; then, it being Wednesday, we went together to Boulanger’s about whom he was acidic, and a few days later we took him to dine chez José. Yves Salgues’s name appears in the agenda repeatedly, as do the names of others I can’t now place. Janet Hayes, the soprano who had sung in A Sermon on Miracles in Cambridge, was now in France, married to choral director Charles Walker; we talked of giving concerts. With infinite pleasure I met, through José, Monsieur et Madame Heitor de Azevedo, a Brazilian couple of whom he was José’s superior at UNESCO, and she—Violetta—was among the most beautiful women in the city, with her imperious posture and carmine lips, her electric warmth and charcoal eyebrows.

  But I did miss Guy, his stability, his touching traits such as not knowing how to swim, his un-French devotion to the straightforward, his innocent trust in the power of music, and his sexiness, which was, so to speak, free.

  On the train to Marseilles I slept not a wink, caught the boat at ten on Thursday morning, and arrived at Oran on the 4th barely missing the train to Fez. But I got there on Saturday and collapsed, as though I’d been gone a year.

  Everyone has experienced the sometimes unpleasant surprise of seeing a new lover nude for the first time. The reverse obtains too. More than once, in a public sauna, I have swooned in the ideal grip of some stark-naked grimy Apollo, to discover twenty minutes later, when we meet at the exit to go home together, that now, clothed, he is all wrong.

  Things were the same with Guy, and then again they weren’t. Fez itself had altered, as any place alters with the seasons; the heat modified, the daily storms, and the intellect of the town—the Ville Nouvelle—revived after the fallow holidays. Yet life in the house remained stationary. If the itchy carnality that had joined me to Guy was fading—not least because he was less an object, more a person, and as a person had foibles, gentlenesses, even a wisdom that did not turn me on—love and habit were taking its place. Habit and love—but especially habit—are the vitamins of art.

  In three days, from 24 to 26 November, I composed, appositely during a watery surge from above, three Barcarolles for piano solo. These I copied on transparent paper, mailed off to Monsieur Vadot, and he in turn forwarded copies to Shirley and a few pianist friends. Shirley decided to include them, along with the sonata, on her upcoming Paris recital, and asked me if Guy could wangle a tryout on the concert series in Fez.

  The elite of Fez, like most intellectuals in colonial centers, are, by virtue of their isolation, more doggedly cultured than their more relaxed cousins back home. Avid for learning, they grab at every bone. My journal shows that in the six weeks before Christmas we went out perhaps twice a week to high-toned vocal and piano recitals, to plays from the road companies of various professional theaters in France and Brussels, all with first-rate artists, and to the “better” movies. Yvon le Marc’Hadour, who sang on the recording of L’enfant et les sortilèges, gave a concert; so did Vlado Perlemuter, after which Guy, as a board member of the concert series, gave a reception at which I was urged to play the new Barcarolles; so did the svelte baritone, Camille Maurain. On the stage we saw Cocteau’s Les parents terribles, which I remembered trying to read when Father was studying it, hoping it might be a sequel to Les enfants terribles, and finding even then, despite my having no experience beyond Chicago, that it convincingly extracted surrealism from that least surrealist of phenomena, the French middle class. Edouard Bourdet’s La prisonnière, with Pierre Blanchar, which had also burned bright on my parents’ shelves in translation as The Captive—daringly about lesbianism, gee whiz!—came daringly to Fez.

  We visited the Piscines des Malades at Moulay Yacoub on 16 November, and the Fête du Trône in a thunderstorm, during which the sheltered Europeans paid no attention to the “natives” seeking shelter.

  Among lesser films (the frightening Daisy Kenyon, Fabiola, and Key Largo dubbed in Arabic) were two French masterpieces. Vercors’s troubling Le silence de la mer concerns a provincial father and daughter obliged, during the Occupation, to house a German officer. This they do, while vowing never to speak to their guest. Thus, during each evening meal, the educated and sensitive officer speaks in monologue of his childhood, of his love for France, and of the tragic ironies of war. He then retires, saying, “I have the honor of bidding you a very good night.” (This remark, repeated as it is a dozen times, becomes a refrain which the audience of roughnecks echo in unison, making a joke of what they could not seize. Or so I assumed, poet that I am.) Daughter and father listen in silence. Only at the end, when the officer announces that he will be billeted elsewhere and will never see them again, does the yo
ung woman, depicted by the ineffable Nicole Stéphane, utter the word “Adieu.”

  The other masterpiece was Patte blanches by the director Jean Grémillon, starring Suzy Delair, with Claude Romain in a minor role as a rough gamin.

  Life is a spider web. During the next twenty-four months I would know intimately both Grémillon and Romain (the latter becoming a short-time swain and long-time friend), while, for what it’s worth, Nicole Stéphane would become the companion of Susan Sontag.

  I’ve always, like all Americans, ached to be a movie star, maybe even an actor. Or actress. Trouble is, I can’t act. Yes, I know our lives are our acts: unlike animals without an oral grammar we humans constantly reinvent our persona by choosing series of words never before uttered. Yet I cannot convincingly read aloud a line I haven’t written.

  Also in the six weeks before Christmas I made extensive sketches toward a Second String Quartet as a fitting thank-you to Boulanger for granting the award, and toward a Two-Piano Suite as a fitting vehicle for Fizdale & Gold. Both works were coldly plotted to get me out of the rut (if rut it was) of small-scale songs.

  Cecil Smith, now editor of Musical America and living in New York with Perry O’Neil, wrote to say that Perry had received the new Piano Sonata and had already scheduled it for a radio performance. Would I, by the way, like to write an essay on North Africa for his magazine? I did, calling the article “The Real Musics of Morocco,” and Cecil duly published it, along with a quaint photo of me in white shorts on the day of the picnic with Mademoiselle Bursier. I blush at the presumption: What did I know, or really care, about local folklore compared to the vast and loving research Paul Bowles had gathered for the Library of Congress?