Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

Jane Bowles was in Paris for the winter, staying at the Hôtel de l’Université, an amiable center for profligate Americans. Although an ideal drinking buddy, having, in deed if not in word, no sense of responsibility, I recall her in the sawdust oily odor of restaurants more than in the anisette zinc smell of bars. Jane loved to eat, or at least to talk about eating, and could spend hours in an inexpensive café, sampling this and that dish, sending it back to the kitchen, ordering white wine, no we should have red instead, or perhaps rosé. Perusing the menu, her adorable retroussé nose en l’air, her ever-still leg (from infantile paralysis) stretched on an adjoining chair, she would run her cute pink tongue over her pretty lips, frown, then grin, and never get to the point.

  What did I think of her?

  Before we came to know each other well, people had said I reminded them of Jane, because apparently we both labored to be contrary and out of focus. Naturally I didn’t see it this way. Jane was (reticently) Jewish to my Wasp, anti-intellectual (she talked about things, not ideas) to my literary ostentatious, insecure to the point of shortchanging her gifts to my conceit about being the only songwriter after Poulenc. True, she had at this point, except for the one not-at-all-ordinary novel, published only a few stories, and agonized over her silent typewriter (the sound of Paul’s machine forever clicking down the hall of El Farhar had driven her from Araby—as she called Tangier—and brought her now to France), so she had cause to downplay the cultural world. Yet she was already swathed in myth. I persuaded myself that I was indispensable to her milieu. We both did look younger than our years (she was already thirty-three), as heavy drinkers will, at least at the beginning. We both did bounce back fairly quickly. We both did doubtless appear to function as non sequiturs in speech and in act. And we both did share a taste for love objects that were large nonverbal creatures who perhaps babied us in the boudoir but whom we dominated in the parlor. There was, however, a crucial difference, though we could not know it then: Jane was a victim, I a survivor.

  Sober, I found her annoying, her rhythm obstinate, not slow but willfully counter to yours—whoever you were. Perhaps her bum leg was the source of this. Though Jane never left the sixth arrondissement, she took taxis everywhere, even to the dress shop one block away. Yet she could be the soul of generosity. If at 8 a.m., after a night out, I dreaded going back to Harp Street where Shirley would be pounding out scales, she would let me pass out in her silent room while she limped around the quarter, glad for an excuse not to work. Or she would come back with a friend—Wendell Wilcox, Stanley Bate—and sit silently by the bed, watching, lest I kill myself, for I had been crying so uncontrollably an hour before. (Wendell was a South Carolinian professor; Stanley, an English composer, still at this time married to Peggy Glanville-Hicks, an Australian-born composer living in New York and in love with Paul Bowles. Stanley Bate, back in London eight years later, was arrested in a public rest room. The night before his case came to trial, he committed suicide.)

  Like her personality, Jane’s oeuvre is one of a kind. Other writers are greater—whatever that signifies—if only because of their wider scope. Her own husband, or Gore Vidal, or even Faulkner are, as prosifiers, wiser but less special. Still, they are vast where Jane is narrow: her complete works fit into a single volume of 476 pages, including the preface by Truman Capote, who calls her “that modern legend.” Every decade I reread the odd three-acter In the Summer House, with the notion of turning it into an opera. And every decade I again realize that there’s something indefinable there that doesn’t click. A case could be made that all masterpieces are graced with a tragic flaw. Something is “wrong” in the torsos of Michelangelo’s David or the Nike of Samothrace, in the physiognomies of Greta Garbo and Marlon Brando, that renders them grander than the more perfectly featured lesser stars. But the flaw in Jane’s play was not tragic, merely an ambiguous unworkability.

  (One morning in Hyères I slashed my foot on a stone. That evening, as I moved ever so slowly down the stairs, Georges Auric said, “La beauté boite,” comparing this scene to the one in Sang d’un poète—for which, of course, he had composed the score—where Benga, the Black Angel, falters on the courtyard steps. “La beauté boite.” Beauty limps. Those words became a motto.)

  Jane herself was somehow unworkably ambiguous. Like Frank O’Hara, who would rise up in a year or two, Jane Bowles is a person I might not have taken to had not a cult proclaimed her as special. Jane and Frank were narcissists, like me, and their inadvertent insistence on being-the-center at first alienated rather than propelled me. They were always great company, but on their terms; I grew to love them through conditioning—it was the thing to do—but the love stayed always tense.

  Jane was fond of a dreary eatery in the rue Mabillon where at any time of day one saw seated among the wooden tables a gentleman, always alone, said to have been Apollinaire’s valet. One night the waiter brought to our table, where I was seated with Jane and Nikita Waterbury, a carafe of Beaujolais on behalf of Apollinaire’s valet. What were we to do with it? We’d had enough. Jane called out a thankyou to Apollinaire’s valet, adding: “J’ai déjà drôlement bu de vin rouge, cher Monsieur.” “Comrae vous parlez bien le français,” he called back. (They always said “You speak French well,” never simply “You speak well.”) I made a note of Jane’s phrase.

  Nikita Waterbury, a Junoesque American blond, lived down the hall at the Hôtel de l’Universite. Jane was in love with her, had her often in tow. Nikita garbed herself in black satin and struck poses, but her conversation belied her exterior charisma. She was no more intriguing than a high school gym teacher—was, in fact, a lugubrious appendage.

  More sparkling was Sonia Orwell, an offering of Barbara Howes and William Smith, all of whom resided at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères where on 10 March they asked me to dine. Sonia, née Brownell, resembled Nikita Waterbury to a T, except that she was stimulating, and sang for her supper in a loud English accent. Her claim to fame was in having married George Orwell on his deathbed, but she had also for years been the peripatetic backbone of the recently defunct Horizon magazine, and now acted as free-lance editor out of her native London. Sonia was vivacious, grand, grossly pretty, zaftig, with long fair hair coiffed all in a swirl over her left ear, leaving her right ear free for a bangle. She was smart without depth, cultured without creativity, heterosexual but with mostly gay friends, and was, within limits, respected not only because she proved ever-useful as a literary go-between but was awfully good company. She drank too much and was bitchy, knew everyone and went everywhere. Her ubiquity mirrored Bu Faulkner’s: you could leave one or the other of them slumped over a table at the Reine Blanche, go to your hotel, pack, catch a train to Rome, unpack at your hotel, go over to Greco’s Café where Bu or Sonia would already be slumped over a table.

  In America I had never been aware of intellectual females who were also chic. (Mary McCarthy would become the first exception that by the sixties established a rule; Sonia ultimately became an intimate of Mary’s.) Sonia, with her left hand running nervously through her sumptuous hair while her right hand rapidly effaced and inserted words on a manuscript, biting her lip and furrowing her beautiful brow, was something to behold. Yet she was not agreeably beholdable at all times: she veered toward fatness, was insulting, narrow, and biased in her boozy pronouncements, a Difficult Woman, as David Plante has expertly portrayed her, in his Difficult Women.

  Why do I go on about her, whose conversation, like Jane’s, revolved not around idea but anecdote, and who was colorfully peripheral where others I’ve not mentioned were more quietly crucial? Because she had that rare gift of, when you were with her, making you feel there’s only you. And because, like Jane, when I was destitute or, more calculatingly, in need of a presentable escort, Sonia was there.

  Some winters later she showed up in New York for the first time and immediately had an affair with the cartoonist Al Capp, which seemed as inevitable for an English lady as Simone de Beauvoir’s affair with Algren. I ran into her, i
ncongruously, at Virgil’s (like most literary people she knew nothing of music), where John Latouche adopted her. She wore her hair, said Latouche, like Valerie Bettis; and Valerie, when I came to compose a ballet with her in 1960, reminded me so much of Sonia with her unrestrained extrovertism that I often didn’t know to whom I was talking. Still, it could only have been Valerie; by then Sonia was an out-of-control eccentric, grading erstwhile acquaintances with total plusses or unappealable minuses. I was a minus. Because by this time Sonia had married—commendably perhaps—a Mr. Pitt-Rivers who, like Stanley Bate, had been arrested in flagrante, and served a prison term, England’s laws being no less virulent than those for Oscar Wilde. During one of my infrequent mid-fifties visits to London I had attended a party at Sonia’s, and given her details of our mutual friend Ellen Adler’s marriage to David Oppenheim. For no especial reason I said: “And David’s absolutely straight.” Sonia never spoke to me again.

  When did we ever take baths? Except for Guy’s house in Fez, none of my lodgings since the previous May had a tub or shower. Room-&-bath was not a standard requirement for young visitors in those days. Even on Harp Street, even in José’s apartment, all we had was the sink and bidet. Not until January of 1953, when I moved into Marie-Laure’s, do I recall taking a full bath in Paris.

  • • •

  José more than once brought me to a bourgeois meal at the Azevedos’. The beauteous Violetta announced that Jeanne Gauthier would be performing my Violin Sonata on her upcoming tour. I was pleased, for Gauthier was France’s leading female string player after Ginette Neveu, who had recently died in an air crash. (Aside to José, with her alluring Portuguese accent: “Ned was a young Apollo when he arrived in Paris. Now look at him. What can we do?”)

  Noted are other dates with American composer Irving Fine; with Casablancan composer Maurice Ohana; with Robert Olsen; with Jean Bertrand and with Paul Demarest; with Jean Téchoueyres; with Paul Tertian “whose sky-blue eyes seem untroubled by thought.” I remember little of this.

  I do remember returning often to see Henri Sauguet. An emblem of generosity à mon égard, he was patient with my still-hesitant French, and with the raft of new music I thrust on him. He treated me as a colleague, asked my opinion of his own new pieces. The best of those pieces, as it happens, had for me the flaw of greatness, the “limp of beauty,” with its personal aching poignance. Never a presence in America, as were Les Six, even though Virgil pulled considerable strings, Henri Sauguet was nevertheless a big shot in France. Like all French composers he was, unlike Americans, a nonspecialist; for financial reasons they adapt to all aspects of their métier, from string quartet to popular song. He had just rearranged the little waltz from Les forains as a “complainte” for Edith Piaf who, with her gigantic larynx in a ninety-pound body, bellowed it beautifully like one who had lost her greatest love. (That love was prizefighter Marcel Cerdan, who had died in the same plane as Ginette Neveu.) As such, the song remained high on Paris charts, simultaneous with Sauguet’s new ballet, La rencontre, on the sensational choreography of David Lichine. Can one forget the equally sensational angoras, Parsifal and Miriflore (later killed by a fox near Sauguet’s farm in Coutras) and the Comtesse Patapoufna, who sat upon the dinner table with their own plates among ours? Will I forget Jacques Dupont, his dashing smile? his painting in which all that is curved becomes square, square clouds in pink and gray? and my gray and pink portrait with square cheekbones? And after the portrait the carousing of artist with model? Jacques was the Frenchest of persons, meaning that his interests were utterly contained within the frontiers of his country and language; and his joy-of-living, which was maximal, revolved around the economical esprit of visualizing all things violently as they are, only more so, rather than whimsically as they are not. We made love twice, once in his studio, then many months later at the Hôtel du Bon La Fontaine in the early dusk. But Sauguet never learned about it. Even today nobody knows except you.

  On 23 March, visit to Madame Jane Bathori, 7 rue de Lanneau. Why has this faded to nothing? Bathori had created in 1907 Ravel’s Histoires naturelles on the prose texts of Jules Renard who, like Maeterlinck at the premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas, fell asleep on hearing the music. (Renard it was, author of Poil de carotte, who said to his diary: “My fortieth birthday. Can no longer die young.”)

  Clearer remains the wild sight of Madeleine Grey in the rue Blanche, she who had premiered in the mid-1920s Ravel’s Chansons madécasses. The visit was remindful of the one to Landowska, when Madame Grey partially lowered her bodice to expose her left shoulder whereon gleamed a scar. “That,” said she, “is where D’Annunzio bit me.”

  Clearest of all shines the company of the old violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, for whom Ravel composed the Violin Sonata. Frizzily hennaed and coiffed a la Colette, she talked (as did Poulenc) with an outmoded Parisian inflection, drawling the nasal vowels in such locutions as “un vrai beau gosse”—“a real cute kid”—as deliciously outmoded as “twenty-three skidoo.” More than once was I invited to tea, when she brought forth a manuscript of the sonata, stashed in a file with Ravel’s letters which asked in detail whether the violin was capable of this glissando or that triple-stop, accompanied by diagrams. She gifted me with an inscribed edition of her useful, if harmless, biography, Ravel et nous, and we met innumerable times at entr’actes here and there.

  I mention these women for the sole purpose of mentioning them. They had known Ravel, and that knowledge rubbed off on me. (Howard Moss, on a visit to Lamb House, picked up the hand mirror on the master’s dresser, and gazed and gazed and gazed into it.) To have kissed each one on both cheeks was equivalent to a draught from the Holy Grail.

  On the morning of the 24th I picked up Nell at the Gare de Lyon, waited while she unpacked at the Hôtel Bisson, then brought her to nearby Harp Street where we drank and sang from noon till midnight. Jean-Claude and Shirley were mesmerized by Nell’s vocal stamina and precision as we performed for them, hour after drunken hour. But my energy flagged, and I saw Nell as a disheveled sot with smeared lipstick and a vanished voice.

  Next day, fresh as a daisy, she brought me along to Nadia Boulanger’s initial choral rehearsal in the rue de Londres. Nell had come to Paris—her first visit—to work up a program with Mademoiselle on the occasion of Prince Rainier’s coronation. Nadia had been named official musician to the throne, and would bring her whole cortege to Monaco next month to perform on the palace steps. Or something.

  The cortege contained the elderly tenors Hugues Cuénod and Paul Derenne and the bass, Doda Conrad, three of the great madrigalists featured on that treasured Monteverdi disc of yore. Also Gérard Souzay who, at thirty-one, with his vital diction, was Europe’s premier baritone (Fischer-Diskau had yet to impose himself). Doda and Gérard and I immediately became friends, although they took a dim view of la Tangeman whom Souzay, who did not then know English, always called “la Tante Germaine.” Doda, who never had a lovely voice and now sounded like a foghorn, though he got by from devotion and chutzpah, may have been jealous of Nell’s natural métier, and of Nadia’s all-out endorsement. Nadia and Nell had met in Bloomington during the war when the former had publicly called the latter “America’s Kathleen Ferrier.” As for Gérard, who was handsome and self-assured—but not that handsome and really quite vulnerable—he thought la Tante Germaine was, where I was concerned, overbearingly possessive.

  When the singing began, with these soloists against a choir of sixteen, the mystery of perfection reigned. They practiced Debussy’s Trois chansons, sections from Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ, and the new Stravinsky Mass about which Mademoiselle seemed unnecessarily proprietary. She had been Stravinsky’s principal pal in France since before World War I, but now, with the advent of Robert Craft as chief advisor, and of Stravinsky’s gradual defection to the enemy camp of atonality, she seemed edgy, defensive.

  I didn’t especially care for the Mass, found it willfully dry, yet felt a need to say something, if only because Nadia h
ad granted me the Lili Boulanger Award.

  “A well-wrought piece,” I ventured. “How much do you suppose he got for it?”

  “With Stravinsky one does not conjecture in dollars and cents,” said Mademoiselle stiffly. (Her image of Stravinsky as he-who-can-do-no-wrong endured to the end. In 1964, when I visited Mademoiselle on her return from Berlin where she had heard the master’s latest excursion into twelvetoniana, Abraham and Isaac, and asked how long the piece lasted, she replied: “Can one speak of temporal data where Stravinsky is concerned?” I later understood: the piece, thirteen minutes by the clock, seemed like a numbing hour.)

  Still, with Stravinsky one must conjecture in dollars and cents, to counter the know-nothingness of our age. Serious music in its evanescence is nil, as distinct from painting which is a commodity any rich Texan can display on his wall. When Stravinsky and Picasso, the last of our sacred monsters, both died at near ninety in the early 1970s, the composer’s estate was rated at four million dollars, the painter’s at four billion.

  Misapprehension of the faraway. Once during a trip back to the States I was asked by Marc Blitzstein if I knew Sartre, since sooner or later all queers meet each other. I had never heard, before or after, that Sartre was queer, despite his fraternal alliance with both Cocteau and Genet (the kind of alliance which only a heterosexual might see as revealing), and wondered how Marc could hold to such a touristy notion. All I could say was that Sartre was straight, the proof being that, no, we had never met.

  As Charles Ives, when in the 1930s his rugged music finally began to be recognized, predated some of his manuscripts to make them seem even more “advanced,” so Jean Genet exaggerated the relatively benign criminality of his youth, to increase the moral—or immoral—force of his self-referring fiction. (Have these two names ever before appeared in the same sentence?)

  The present book is a biography by myself about the youth of someone who bears my name. It does not fantasize but seeks solely to retrieve facts, so the excitement of art is absent.