by Ned Rorem
April 29th. Sarah Cunningham at 12:45, c/o Doll, 90 rue de Varenne. Janet at 2:00. Radio interview, M. Blesdoe, at 4:30, 118 Champs-Elysées. Brion Gysin and Peggy Fears, 7:45 at Pont Royale bar.… 30th, Rohini Coomara. Barman at the Hôtel Metropole, rue François-Ier. (Miss Rohini Coomara was a cellist friend of Sam Barber.… The bartender was someone José recommended, but I waited there shyly for an hour without seeing anyone who fit the description.) José at 5. Marie-Blanche de Polignac. Robert Kanters, 6:15 au Montana, then Maugham’s movie, Quartet.
Sarah Cunningham was a prim Boston composer who had shared the Barrington dorm that first summer in Tanglewood. Our main point in common was that we had both rendered the same Hopkins poem into song, “Margaret, are you grieving.” On this Sunday we had a brief lunch, blue cheese and peaches, in a corner bistro of the rue de La Planche where a svelte black-haired waiter with a filthy apron winked at us.… Brion Gysin, like Jane Bowles, was away from Tangier for the season, and had incongruously latched onto Peggy Fears, an ex Follies beauty now thickened with a husky voice who, a generation later, would inaugurate the successful Boatel at Fire Island Pines.…
Marie-Blanche de Polignac, née Lanvin (her mother founded the still-famous house of dressmaking and perfume; her father made a fortune in champagne), had a childless but loving marriage to the Comte Jean de Polignac. How this marriage evolved I do not know; the comte did have affairs with many another female, notably Denise Bourdet, but died before I came on the scene. Marie-Blanche was made of a successful sugar-&-spice mélange I’d never sampled before: wealth and beauty did not weaken, through laziness and vanity, a considerable love for music; and the considerable love for music was demonstrated through a sweet soprano of unequaled expressivity and through an educated comprehension (rare for sopranos in any era) of the art. The education was enhanced by her dinner parties for an international array of musicians every Sunday of the winter for thirty years, at her hôtel particulier, 16 rue Barbet-de-Jouy. The dinner, always at a table for twelve in a circular dining room with ceiling and walls decorated by Bérard and generally offering pheasant with the house champagne, was followed by a musicale upstairs where other guests would arrive to a room full of Vuillards, some to play at the two Pleyels, or sing, or present a new violin sonata—Les Six (except Honegger, who found the ambiance too rarefied), Menhuin, Lenny Bernstein, the nucleus being Jacques Février, Henri Sauguet with Jacques Dupont, Denise Bourdet. Or sometimes everyone would join in charades, or truth-or-consequences, or simply chat, as Marie-Blanche, always in a new création de chez Lanvin of chiffon as pinkly secret as the inside of a seashell through which her shapely legs were outlined, would move among the guests, a bit vague (she too smoked opium in the late afternoon), trailing a faint breeze of expensive perfume, and uttering the understated effusions in which only the French excel without blushing—“Comme c’est beau! Comme vous avez raison.” On more auspicious nights we would adjourn to the concert hall in Marie-Blanche’s garden pavilion where, while listening, we could look at the Renoirs—a process which always struck me as unmusical, if typical of the visual French who would pay Chagall a fortune for his murals on the ceiling of the Opéra.
Do not confound her with the much older hatchet-faced Princesse de Polignac, née Winaretta Singer of the American sewing machines, lesbian spouse of Marie-Blanche’s husband’s uncle, and the greatest musical patron of the twentieth century who caused to exist Satie’s Socrate, and many a Diaghilev ballet plus slighter works of Stravinsky, Poulenc, Fauré, and Falla. The comtesse did not commission works, but she did participate in their realization. She had been Boulanger’s chief supporter in the 1930s, and chief soprano too. To see those two together now was to see the eternal feminine and masculine, Marie-Blanche all passive, curved and spoiled, Nadia all business, square and rigid. (In 1935 Nadia ordered a no-nonsense gown from Lanvin for her conducting dates. Twenty years later Marie-Blanche suggested Nadia order a new dress. The new one was identical to the old.) Doda it was who brought me to Marie-Blanche’s on this Sunday night. She made me welcome ever after, until she died so ignominiously—for even the rich die ignominiously—after an unconscious year in an iron lung in 1958.
Maugham’s film, Quartet, contained a scene wherein a young man dreams of becoming a great pianist until the day his teacher, imperiously played by Françoise Rosay, decides he doesn’t have the stuff. He asks her, during their final lesson, to play for him. She does, somewhat cruelly choosing the most difficult of Schubert’s Moments musicaux (glitteringly dubbed by Rubinstein). After which he goes home and commits suicide.
Leon Fleisher would not commit suicide. His performance of my two pieces was the perfection by which I judged all ensuing performances, and his eventual recording for Columbia of the Barcarolles remains a collector’s item. The embassy program of 4 May launched Leon in Europe, not least because Doda, bedazzled, nabbed him on the spot as accompanist, and then persuaded him to enter the Brussels Queen Elizabeth competition the next year. Leon won first prize (a million francs and solo dates throughout the Continent), to emerge as one of America’s four leading virtuosos, with Eugene, Gary Graffman, and Julius Katchen. His glory would be grotesquely restricted in 1964, as would Gary’s some years after, by a neurological affliction of the right hand.
After the concert we threw a large party in the two small rooms on Harp Street. The whole audience showed up, including José with Marie-Laure de Noailles. For a year José had been trying to bring us together. Most of the guests inadvertently entered the building through the Rose Rouge. When Benga caught sight of Marie-Laure, whom he’d not seen since Sang d’un poète in 1930, our cachet as his lessees soared. Marie-Laure had, of course, with her spouse, the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, subsidized this first film of Cocteau. The pair had even been filmed as part of the world-weary audience applauding the suicide of the young poet as he lies in the snow under the card table. But when, because of this blasphemy, Charles was threatened with excommunication not only from the Holy Church but—far worse!—the Jockey Club, the scene was reshot with Barbette and Arturo Lopez.
Marie-Laure ignored me utterly, but made eyes at Jean-Claude, even stroked his cheek and, in an effort to beguile him, danced a hula while Leon and Eugene played their four-hand arrangement of Falla’s Dance of the Miller’s Wife which set the crowd afire with its throbbing swirls. I was embarrassed that this famous forty-nine-year-old Vicomtesse, the most powerful intellectual in France, would sink to such sophomoric ruses. She gave Jean-Claude her phone number, but he never called.
I dawdled on in Paris when I should have returned to work in Morocco. This pious reflection now sounds facile, as I turn the calendar leaves of which each is a barricade between a mass of tomorrows, all simultaneously visible as I gaze down, like Marcel, from mile-high crutches treading gingerly between one field of corpses and the next. But to the young Ned, the future lay in the moment. The next fortnight would be a blur except for what is noted in the diary. I do not remember experiences as well as what I have written about experiences.
Paris then was the Paris upon which I most frequently reflect: Lutèce, the sixth arrondissement, from the rue Saint-Jacques to the rue de Sèvres, bordered by the boulevard Montparnasse on the south, and on the north by the Seine. This precious township contained the only friends, bakeries, bars, and cinemas needed to make the world turn. The coincidental but never mutual tonalities of the serious Sorbonne and the frivolous Saint-Germain, plus the sinister intimacy of the sinuous ruelles with their dozens of student hotels which I learned like the back of my hand, seemed unchanged since Villon, since Balzac and Proust (though did the great Simenon ever write of the area?). Later, during the years I lived with Marie-Laure in the sixteenth arrondissement, I would return here mostly, to fall in love and otherwise get into trouble.
Far more than New York, Paris is an outdoor city, even in winter. Not just the sidewalk cafés and tobacco stores but the art-nouveau urinals, one to a block. The quartier reeks of sex. Behind this doorway
, down these alleys, up in that room of the now-vanished Hôtel Saint-Yves, over in the little Square du Vert Gallant at sunrise, I left parts of my body—sweat and sperm and suntan peelings—in the fugitive arms of green-eyed strangers, sometimes with eternal loves, all of them dead, and that village weighs like a tombstone, as does this book.
On 5 May, Doda and I dined at La Régence, saw Fric Frac au français, then strolled through the Palais Royale where Doda, while pointing out landmarks, invited me to write a cycle for him. During the next days I seem to have had rendezvous at the Flore, or at movie theaters. How many times a week did I repeat the traversée from rue de la Harpe to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, holding my nose in passing the Café Odéon which forever smelled as foul as its counterpart in Manhattan’s Forty-second Street shuttle! The weather turned seraphic. José had a new boyfriend, Richard Négroux, a Romanian with a thrilling accent and a vigorous stride, with whom I made love in the rue Cujas during the early evening of 8 May, my sister’s birthday.
On the 10th with Robert Kanters, a reception for Thomas Mann. Shaking hands with the great Mann, I wondered: Did he remember me from the front row at his Northwestern lecture in 1940? That night, informal dinner at M. et Mme. Laidley’s, from UNESCO, whose guest of honor was Louis Beydts, composer of operettas and current director of the Opéra-Comique. Offered a glass of bubbly by my hostess, I demurred, echoing Jane Bowles’s phrase to Apollinaire’s valet, “J’ai déjâ beaucoup bu de champagne, Madame,” which Beydts praised as a flawless alexandrine, inviting me to his office next afternoon to show him my wares. I never made it. Leaving the party drunk, I passed a chaotic, even dangerous, evening, crashed at Jane’s, and slept through the appointment.
George Bemberg was around. Also the Azevedos. And Jean E., a cute French boy Shirley had found in Tangier, with whom I visited the Assyrian room at the Louvre, had a duck dinner, and went to bed. Milhaud’s grand opera, Bolivar, on the 15th, starred the slick soprano Janine Micheau intoning with accuracy the stratospheric lines. On the 16th, lunch chez Jean Bertrand, avenue Hoche; then Doda’s concert at the Cercle Interallié; later José at Café Weber at 7:30, and a postprandial visit to pianist Nadia Tagrine. On the 17th, Sauguet had a concert at the Ecole Normale featuring his many settings of the surrealist Max Jacob. There were seven of us in the audience.
Thursday, 18 May, lunch with Henri-Louis de la Grange, an upper-crust bourgeois pal of Sam Barber now writing a biography of Mahler, in his mansion at 208 boulevard Saint-Germain. At five, picked up laundry, packed a huge suitcase (enclosing, as a gift for Guy, several of Norris Embry’s extraordinary brown and black lithographs), caught a 9 p.m. bus at the Gare des Invalides which headed toward Orly, then boarded an old-fashioned plane for Casablanca.
• • •
For a composer of songs the problem lies not in finding a sonic impulse (if he did not feel the impulse hourly he wouldn’t be a composer), but in finding a text which somehow asks to be musicalized just by him; if he plans a connected series of songs, he must find a group of texts, sometimes by various authors from different centuries, which can be joined in an inevitable-seeming sequence.
Leon Fleisher suggested Herrick as a sensitive source for Doda’s cycle. Already on the airplane I was making notes in the margins of a Herrick reader, bought last week at Brentano’s on the avenue de l’Opéra, and by the time we landed in Africa had even, in the little notebook on my lap, set one of the poems to music (“Comfort to a Youth That Had Lost His Love”). Before the month was out the cycle was done, nine songs and a piano interlude, titled Flight for Heaven after the last line of the first poem, “To Music, to Becalm His Fever.” The words seem born for singing, every line plotted with Doda’s booming bass in mind. The manuscript was duly sent to Monsieur Vadot at the Néocopie-Musicale, who then forwarded two copies to its only begetter. Doda, with Leon Fleisher as pianist, accordingly tried out the piece during the coming autumn in various salons, and on a European tour. As early as 19 November he gave the USA premiere at a League of Composers concert in the Museum of Modern Art, David Garvey as accompanist.
Flight for Heaven, lasting fifteen minutes, is my first cycle, one I am not ashamed of. Through Doda’s connections, the work was published by Mercury Music Press, founded by Leonard Feist and his brother, Milton. (Milton Feist, the Stephen Hawking of music, was a withered tiny creature who lived in a wheelchair, had an astronomical IQ, and could expound, without making you blush, on all matters cultural. His love life, if he had one, was discreet, though he had a seemingly tough constitution. I once at midnight wheeled him into the San Remo where he was the belle of the ball, then wheeled him home at 4 a.m. During his short life he welcomed my works into his firm, which was eventually transferred to Theodore Presser.) When the cycle was in proof during early 1952 I naturally dedicated it to Doda, although, since by then I was living with Marie-Laure, I inserted a dedication to her too, above the last song, “To Anthea, Who May Command Him Anything.” In 1963 Donald Gramm recorded two of the songs on Columbia Records.
It seems astonishing now: during this same period I completed not only a sizable Suite for Two Pianos for Fizdale & Gold—which they never played, nor has anyone else (although I orchestrated the overture years later for my Third Symphony)—but the Six Irish Poems for Nell Tangeman. True, I had made sketches during odd moments, ever since leaving Italy; still, the fomenting period exploded when I reached Fez again, and it was merely a question of getting the notes down on paper. These songs, on stark northern texts, were sculpted around Nell’s strong points, and were the first pieces I wrote for voice with orchestra.
Those first weeks back in Fez were industrious. Like a pet cat who when you take him to the country assumes another personality from that of the city, so my patterns in Fez and in Paris were in differentiated counterpoint. Promiscuous binges of France were balanced by the Protestant remorse of Africa, the cause and effect of an oeuvre, the Jekyll and Hyde, the rising and falling and rising again. In Fez, with its routine, regular sex, and no alcohol, that which had come to a head now burst. The emission is how you see it: spewed pus, a baby, art. I can’t relive it. (Just yesterday they were sitting on that yellow sofa. Today the sofa remains, but they aren’t there. Like the master’s face vanished from the Lamb House mirror.) I was playing roles in separate ongoing plays, plays without plots, but developing nonetheless.
By day Guy was overwhelmed in the line of duty. Beyond the rural tribes to which he ministered, he had private patients at the Hôpital Cocard. One of these was a woman who, having over the years crammed her apertures, front and back, not just with standard dildos but with carrots, hairpins, and lightbulbs, was now bleeding between death and life. Another was a Berber matron whose son had lately been attacked by a rabid dog; he had not been bitten, but his trousers were ripped. A month later his mother, mending his trousers, placed the darning needle in her mouth and was stricken with hydrophobia. Which demonstrates the demonic, that does not pall with time. Guy meanwhile had adopted a dog (nonrabid) of his own, a stray female mongrel which in homage to Shirley he named Xénia. This dog adored me but I despised her. (Why? Until puberty I lived only for animals. The overnight aversion stemmed, as I view it now, from pets monopolizing the attention I felt was my due, with their mute-cute demands encroaching on the work habits of their betters.) Animals were drawn to me inversely as I was repelled by them. Had I an unbeknown saintly side, like the evil Loeb—or was it Leopold?—to whom in his prison cell birds swarmed? More likely, since animals have no appreciation of human morality and “goodness,” the answer lies in something like pheromones. As James Hamilton-Patterson, England’s most articulate living fictioneer and amateur naturalist, puts it: “Animals flocked to Saint Francis not because he was a saint but because they happened to like the smell of his glands.”
I practiced a good deal, inventing, then perfecting, long programs of short works. Webern’s wispy piano pieces, some lasting only ten seconds, were used in this regard: a popular quip had it that if a projecte
d concert of new music seems too lengthy, just add something of Webern to make it seem shorter. But my ideal program consisted of thirty-six preludes, twelve by Bach, twelve by Debussy, twelve by Chopin, all intertwined. In relearning the forty-eight preludes and fugues from Das Wohltemperierte Klavier in a gorgeous new edition from chez Durand—I had cursorily grappled with them in the 1930s—it became clear that the preludes were superior to the fugues (preludes are French, fugues are German), if only by their sensually controlled freedom as distinct from the more predictably developing fugues. Also, the three composers meshed cozily, like prosciutto and melon with vin rosé.
In the evening when Guy came home exhausted, I would play for him either what I had composed or had practiced. After a brief nap together, we dined in the Ville Nouvelle at the Renaissance where a huge ceiling fan revolved casually, the wide blades better at dispersing flies than in creating a breeze, and I felt there was no one in the universe I’d rather be with than Guy, as we consumed our veau à la crème with watercress salad, habitual peach melba, then adjourned to the Légion for slow-filtering coffee. There was an incongruity to this portrait of a French doctor cohabiting with an American composer in the colonial milieu of darkest Africa, an incongruity which enhanced the bourgeois tinge of fidelity that stabilized our housekeeping.
Sometimes Lévesque joined us. As a patient professor of literature proud of his knowledge not only of classical French but of the purity of argot, he was the perfect mentor for me, who am relentless about linguistic parallels. How do you say “fairyland” or “armpit” or “they are disgusting” in French? What is the difference between être and se faire when conjugated with baiser? Why is there no direct equivalent of “shallow,” or no future of the subjunctive, as in Spanish? Multisyllabic adjectives that look the same in French and English are weaker in the former tongue. Sinistre, formidable, vicieux are best rendered as “dreary,” “terrific,” “horny.” “Il est mort de sa belle mort” does not mean “he died for his beautiful one,” as I once impotently heard the all-knowing Jennie Tourel explain to a class of sopranos apropos of Poulenc’s setting of Vilmorin’s poem “Dans l’herbe,” but “he died a natural death.” Well, any fool knows that. Yet some, less foolish than I, persist.