Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Guy was my Great Love, this was understood. With tears welling in his oriental eyes, he made me vow that on next Tuesday afternoon, 7 February, in the early afternoon I would take the Superga funiculaire to the mountaintop church in the outskirts of Torino. He had been there during the war, and would think of me. He admonished me not to drink too much once back in civilization. Guy was, for a French Protestant, quite sentimental. (Was he a Protestant?) I promised to come back soon. (It would be four months.)

  What today would be a two-hour hop by plane, was then, by land and sea, an Event. Bleak train trek through the cactus-laden plains of Morocco to the Algerian border. Customs. Change Moroccan francs into Algerian. More mournful scenery to Oran where, at 6 Boulevard Charlemagne, spent the night at Hôtel Royale. Ten a.m., embarked from Oran, on the Sidi-bel-Abbès, for twenty-four-hour crossing to Marseilles. Boat eighteen hours late. More customs. Change Algerian francs into French. On the Cannabière had croissants at a café where a youngish man in a fedora at next table summoned waiter with a “Garçon,” mellifluous and nasal, then, without so much as a glance my way, pocketed his change and walked away forever. Have thought of him daily since. Train to Lyon, Hôtel Bristol near the station. Secret city of bridges, large, where the Black Mass was rumored to be still celebrated. In hotel café, man in black stands at the bar. I look again, and he is gone. Have thought about him daily since. Telegraph Nell about delay. Ten-hour train ride, Lyon to Torino, more customs at border, and changing francs into lire.

  Nell greeted the train, ensconced me in the tiny Albergo Genio under the arcades (like Lévesque’s hotel in Fez), after which we repaired to her pensione on the fourth floor of 23 Via Pomba and, in her ordinary bedroom, downed a quart of cognac.

  First impressions were disconcerting. An oversized industrial agglomeration on the Po, Torino was even less romantic than Casablanca, surely nobody’s notion of sunny Italy during this ugly time of year. Add to this, Nell. The personal coarseness and gnawingly misguided ambition were the most visible dark side of this otherwise unique mezzo, who as an interpreter of Mahler and Milhaud and English-language repertory was second to none. She resided, boarding-house style, with five other students, all Italian, who had meals (which I shared during my week there) at a round table, governed by a self-consciously maternal Magnani-type harridan that everyone loved and told their troubles to, and whom I loathed. Like many “lovable” people, like Nell herself, she was lovable on her own terms, and could turn in a trice if countered. Nell was the life of the party, drinking too much wine, singing at the old upright in the parlor. She was also sleeping, so she said, with Uberto, who wasn’t too attractive but apparently possessed “iron thighs.” How Nell, as a Fulbright recipient and already a well-known soloist, landed in Torino is anyone’s guess. Rome and Milano were doubtless overbooked. She seemed to have some connection with the reputable conservatory there, and was also using the city as a jumping-off place for singing dates south and north.

  The second evening we dined with the vice consul, a Mr. Shenfield, and wife, who fed us martinis and showed home movies, then served (it was Sunday, and we were Americans) waffles. When Nell asked for another drink, perhaps a tiny glass of wine, they apologized, they were all out. “What about that over there?” said Nell, pointing to a decorative little flask. Reluctantly they uncorked this, but didn’t share the contents.

  On the plus side: Nell had been engaged to sing with a sinfonietta in Florence on the 15th, and asked me to orchestrate a couple of my songs to include. This I did, finding manuscript paper and india ink at a local magazzino, and in the course of two afternoons instrumentalized “Little Elegy” and “The Lordly Hudson,” then copied the parts. These were duly photostated, with the aid of Gianni, one of the pensionnaires, who served as interpreter at the photography store. We also gave, for a fee, a private concert at the home of a Signore Lessano for the Turinese elite. And yes, I did scale the Superga on Tuesday, and thought of Guy.

  Nell had brought Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky from America where it had just come out with enormous critical and public success. Alone in the little albergo I read it in one swoop. Paul’s stories in View had always struck me as willfully cold, but readable and satisfying to the cruel streak in us all. The Sheltering Sky was quickly interesting, not least because of its Saharan setting which I had quit only days before. But I found it unsettling too, in the wrong way; a touch vulgar, as though catering to a slick-magazine audience, and also a touch facile. I neither believed it, nor in it. I’ve since come to respect, without adoring, Paul’s other fiction, but have never reread this novel. Twenty-two years later I had occasion to write: “If he is not a human portraitist, he has, like some filmmakers, created character from scenery. Deserts, jungles, city streets are personages in his book as in his life, and he causes them to breathe and suffer and threaten us as only a god can do. But when discussing real people the effect is desperate, touching, even sad, sometimes humorous, though only secondarily the effect he intended, that is, a pose of noninvolvement. That effect, which fills the novels, no longer seems viable for our troubled world—perhaps precisely because the world has turned into a Paul Bowles novel.”

  More immediately, Nell lent me another book. She was as continually guided through life by a sense of her tragically bawdy Irish forebears as I by the Norwegian stillness that preceded Father’s fathers. She carried everywhere a thick volume called Irish Poetry. This contained many texts which spoke to my condition, and which would be set to music during the next months.

  The train from Torino was a pagan deliverance out of Piedmontese gloom into Tuscan sparkle two hundred miles nearer the equator, each hill and dale of which was a background for a Botticelli portrait. Suddenly here was the Italy one had bargained for.

  Detraining in Florence on Saturday, 11 February, we were met by our host, Newell Jenkins, his friend Jack Murphy, an interviewer, and a photographer. Whether my presence was expected, or even that my songs were meant for inclusion on next Wednesday’s program, seemed moot; clearly I was an unknown quantity—one they would have to be nice to, for Nell’s sake. During the unloading and picture taking I noticed a uniformed guard, exaggeratedly macho with a dashing casquette, staring undisguisedly at me. “Why is that guard staring undisguisedly at me?” I asked Newell. “Because,” said Newell, “he thinks you’re pretty.” Yes, the Italy one had bargained for.

  Newell Jenkins was then, and remains today, a specialist in forgotten Italian musical masters, but he veers on occasion, from duty if not love, to modern composers. He lived in a villa with his mother and with Jack, an impresario, in nearby Fiesole where we accordingly repaired and began to drink. There was talk of the huge hit Menotti had just struck, back in New York, with The Consul, the Kafkian opera which had made of Pat Neway an overnight star. There was talk, too, of the local fauna we would be meeting, and of the public concert coming up. We dined then, with more liquor. Newell seemed an adoring amateur.

  The evening developed badly, with Jack driving me into town around midnight to show me the bars, then back to Fiesole where he and Newell quarreled, and where I was coldly assigned a room next to Nell’s. At 4 a.m. she appeared at the door, said she couldn’t sleep, got in my bed and pressed her body against mine from top to toe. I was repelled. Repelled by the unfamiliar softness, still more by her silent implication that if she, the female, took the dominant role I would be seduced. The fog of Chianti was no help. Nor did Nell seem more appetizing through a blazing headache next morning, when I registered at a hotel.

  The Albergo Berchielli is a congenial inn at the tip of the Ponte Vecchio on the right bank, convenient to the Teatro Communale where rehearsals took place. The concert itself, on the 15th, was neither here nor there. Nell confided later that when she appeared on stage in the turquoise satin gown she’d worn in Town Hall, faced the audience, and struck her singery pose in preparation for the start of “The Lordly Hudson,” Newell, his back to the public and baton raised, leaned imperceptibly toward her a
nd whispered: “How fast?”

  The most indelible impression from the postconcert dinner, served in Nandina’s Kitchen near the Santa Trinita, was when my table companion, a lean, humorless woman with a flapper’s bob and a man’s necktie, turned to me and announced in medias res: “… so then John said, ‘Darling, we’re broke. We’ll have to sell your jewels. We’ll have to sell everything, and go on the dole.’” John turned out to be none other than Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, the book which Mother, so long ago, had said was about thesbians.

  “I was married to John,” continued my dinner partner, Lady Una Truebridge, “and am the feminine protagonist of that great novel. When John died, I changed my wardrobe forever and became a man.”

  Next morning I left the too-costly Berchielli for the Pensione Bartolini, right across the river, at 1 Lungarno Guiciardino, where rent was 350 lire, or fifty cents, a day. My first thought was of the railway guard. I walked back to the station, and there he was. Later that day when he came off duty we met at the pensione. The language barrier was no problem, but the occasion was not earth-stopping, merely a one-afternoon stand.

  Three and a half years later, when I fell in love with Pino, I vanquished the Italian language in a two-week crash course. For now, it was easy to get along in French, although the more opportunistic ragazzi had a smattering of either German or English, depending on which way they thought the war would be turning when they were kids in school.

  Nell returned north. She would be going to France in a few weeks, to work with Boulanger, and needed to prepare in silence. I stayed on in Florence for another fortnight. The casual love was inebriating, as was the off-the-wagon reaction against the luxuriant prison of Morocco. Then, too, there was a nucleus of agreeable Americans, most of them, like Nell, Fulbright honorees in their early thirties, or Norman Douglas-type driftwood with funds and wit and no pretense at talent. The agenda as usual contains many a male Christian name—Gianni, Hugh, Franco, Walter—evoking an ebony curl or swarthy visage if not a conversation. But it contains, as well, the names of Milton and Evelyn Gendel, of Jean Purcell, of a Miss Suzy Hare and someone named Countess Valeva, bohemians all, whom I would run across repeatedly during the coming years in “the American corner” of various hangouts around Europe—Greco’s in Rome, the Saint-Germain in Paris, the Club in London—and always be greeted with an intimate whoop. There was David Kimball, who had been one of Scalero’s stars at Curtis, now here, a Jamesian fixture. And Barbara Howes with her then-husband, William Jay Smith, eager, intelligent, gifted, original. (In 1987 I would finally set one of Smith’s poems—“A Nursery Pavane” for treble chorus—and shall do so again when the occasion demands.) These people, like the Little Gang of Madame Verdurin, were daily and useful, with whom I’d visit the Uffizi or the Bargello or stroll with along the Arno and through the parks, exercises which seem now de rigueur but which were then so exhilaratingly new. Movies, concerts, parties, plus the “gay” milieu, also American, which did not overlap with the Little Gang.

  Accepted everywhere because I was good-looking and not stupid, I still felt at the edge, warmly tolerated. There was a political shimmer around the Little Gang which I could not transcend, partly, I suppose, because I didn’t choose to. Why, at this time in history when the planet appeared less troubled than at any hour since 1914, intellectual bull sessions should center on politics as, during adolescence, they centered on art, was a depressing speculation. I was bored by politics and felt guilty about it. Guilty, in the same way as about loving rich desserts, passive buggery, and Impressionist music, as if these loves, and hence my own talent, were unmanly, not “important.” The same inadequacy that had rottenly flourished in Chicago circles a decade earlier reemerged, which is why I drank too much. Nor was I center stage, as in Morocco. Not to be political—right or wrong—was not to be alive. But wasn’t politics general, where art was specific? Hadn’t I yet reasoned that the strongest political propagandists among artists, from Richard Wagner to Mary McCarthy, had never been more significant, as creators, because of their shrill beliefs, and that some of the biggest statesmen had never been artists at all? Hadn’t I yet heard Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen”?

  Propped in bed one noon, reading The Prancing Nigger, who should enter without knocking but Bob Faulkner, everybody’s favorite hanger-on, an unpleasantly pleasant surprise. Bu. When had we last met? Here he now was, flouncing around Europe on a frugal allowance. Hang-dog expression, upper-crust accent, the palest pose of being a writer, funny company. So that afternoon at five we went together to hear Le martyre de Saint Sébastien which Inghelbrecht was conducting at the Communale.

  If the most fundamental musical expression is the pitched voice on prearranged tones, the least legitimate is melodrama, that is, the spoken voice against a through-composed sonic background, unless, as in the Sitwell-Walton Façade, speech is rhythmicized, in which case the piece becomes rap, a formal mode, unvarying. Otherwise the spoken voice gets in the way. When Ida Rubinstein, Russian and rich and ravishing but not a great ballerina, commissioned Le martyre for herself to intone for the first time as an actress, not as a dancer, Debussy, late in his life, wrote his most opulent music. But the text, in archly archaic French by D’Annunzio, though stunning, obtrudes: who wants France upstaged by Italy? Yet on this Sunday afternoon, with Alain Cuny as speaker, I was so moved by the sound of the French language again after three weeks in Italy, and of the familiar-since-childhood French score, that I felt I was back home.

  “Let’s go to Paris,” I said to Bu. “Yes, let’s,” he answered. So we, on Wednesday, went.

  Monday I bought the train ticket, wrote Shirley, had a mess of laundry done for 250 lire, visited the Palazzo Pitti, then met a person named Leo Feritti at nine o’clock at Lungarno Vespucci. Tuesday I tried to collect a debt from someone named Hal. That afternoon, in the bar of the Excelsior Hotel, Bu and I had eleven stingers, during which various friends sat down and stood up. Bu said, after the eleventh, “Now let’s go concentrate on wine,” as we wended our way to Nandina’s Kitchen. But we made it to the train next morning at 10:17. It was snowing. At the station, there stood my uniformed guard on duty. He grinned, came over and shook hands, then saluted and clicked his heels. “Who’s that?” said Bu, agog.

  All of a sudden it seemed morally wrong to leave this beautiful city in this beautiful country after exactly one month—one incomplete month in an impermanent world.

  The chief focus of the next seventy-eight days in Paris would be the joint concert of our music which Douglas Allanbrook and I would present at the embassy on 4 May. Douglas, a Boulanger product dwelling on nearby rue Monsieur le Prince, wrote pieces which in their comparative acidity were enough different from my own to provide a contrasting program. Between us we also knew enough first-rate American executants in situ who would donate their services. My half would consist of a song miscellany, myself accompanying soprano Janet Hayes; the Four Madrigals on Sappho lyrics which Janet’s new husband, Charles Walker, would conduct with an unaccompanied choir; and Shirley, still known locally as Xénia, playing the new sonata. The embassy’s cultural negotiator, one Simon Copans, and his associate, a Miss Herle Jervis, were capable of sponsoring and amply publicizing small recitals at a moment’s notice in their little hall at 41 faubourg Saint-Honoré.

  Meantime I was floundering for a place to stay. Bu and I had arrived at the Gare de Lyon three sheets to the wind, having swilled cheap wine for the entire eighteen-hour trip from Florence. Gordon Sager had booked us into the dumpy Hôtel Tarrenne, at 153 boulevard Saint-Germain, directly above the Reine Blanche. On the agenda leaf for that day, 2 March, I wrote just the one word “drunk.” On the following day, the words “déjeuner chez José,” then “Bu—champagne!” For the several days afterward, simply the indications “drunk” or “déjeuner et diner chez José,’ plus frequent jottings about borrowing cash from Inez Cavanaugh, a friend of Jimmy Baldwin, who was opening a restaurant in the fifth arrondissement,
or from Yves Salgues, the reporter-novelist from Paris-Match with whom I lay down with willing dissatisfaction every few days (we didn’t quite fit), and who had just published a troubling fiction titled Le jeune homme endormi with an enthralling inscription which I still covet. We were all continually owing each other money. Gordon Sager, also a novelist, American, who had preceded me in cohabitation with Morris Golde years before, took us to see Bill Lieberman, the art curator now staying at the Pont Royale. There was also Robin King, a Londonian literary critic, and how many others!, with whom, abstractedly, night after night after night we hung out, making the rounds in the quarter, going to bed at noon, getting up at eight in the evening, and being very witty, self-congratulatory, blurred. Except for Yves, the sex I half enjoyed was with Arabs, guileless and ever willing, who adorned the neighborhood, waited outside the bistros unsmiling, and led me to their shabby rooms where we were lost dogs together. Although in Morocco I had never slept with an Arab, or indeed with anyone but Guy, in Paris the habit grew tender and natural. Other than they, José was my benefactor and guardian angel.

  After eleven days of this plotless routine, I lurched back to Harp Street and asked Shirley to take me in. Which is when we began making plans for the embassy concert, which would serve as a tryout for her solo affair scheduled for June in the Salle Gaveau. Guy had also arranged for her to come to Fez for a fortnight in early April, and try out her program on the series there.