by Ned Rorem
Lévesque lent me Le sabbat, and spoke about its author, Maurice Sachs, the self-destructive protégé of Cocteau, whose autobiography was shatteringly alluring but necessarily unfinished because, like other queer French thinkers, he disappeared beyond the Rhine during the war and was never heard from again. I sang Poulenc’s setting of Robert Desnos’s “Le disparu,” which begins:
Je n’aime plus la rue Saint Martin
depuis qu’André Platard l’a quittée,
Je n’aime plus la rue Saint Martin,
je n’aime rien, pas même le vin …
for Desnos too, like his fictional Platard, vanished one morning without a trace. Lévesque also gifted us with his red leather copy—still in my shelves—of Stendhal’s Promenades dans Rome, because Guy and I planned a train trip next month in Italy, where he had never been. Had a year passed since we first met on his last holiday?
Other evenings were passed with the Royers, or at the movies. Recent films of Wyler or De Sica seemed all the more trenchant dubbed into French. L’héritière, with the Jewish Copland’s music depicting Bostonian frustration now spilling from the theater onto the Arabian sidewalk, had a poignance all its own, as did Le voleur de bicyclettes whose Roman urchins emoted in the tongue of Voltaire. We swam often in the sacred pond of Sidi-Hrasem (where one dawn parts of a woman’s dead body were found), and made nocturnal tours of the Médina with Guy’s medical colleagues, drinking almond milk at the “bar” of the quartier réservé. One afternoon, on the terrace of the Jamai, I ran into Louise Holdsworth, of all people, for whom I had once composed a dance score. First-class French films: Le corbeau and Rendez-vous de juillet, the latter starring Daniel Gélin, whose poems, believe it or not, I would set to music in 1953.
Up in Paris on 2 June, Shirley finally gives her recital in Gaveau, and sends the program. She will return to America in August. (Years pass before we meet again, when she will have divorced Seymour Barab, then married and divorced a Chicago dentist … named Guy!) Leon Fleisher takes over the apartment in rue de la Harpe. On the same night as Shirley’s concert we, across the Mediterranean, see Esther Williams in Señorita Toreador (Fiesta in English), also with Copland’s music, El Salón México, stupidly incorporated. Haircut. More swimming. On 8 June we dine at the Royers, then leave for Oran on a late train which had bedbugs.
Bedbugs were everywhere in those days.
29. 1950: Italy • Morocco • France • Morocco
Among the pleasantest memories of this second trip into Italy is a picnic near the Leaning Tower, on our final Sunday, with Arthur Gold and Bobby Fizdale who could plot and execute a meal as gracefully as a program of two-piano selections. Bobby and Arthur had been our hosts a fortnight earlier during a stop in Florence, and had planned for us—like a meal, like a program—the rest of our trip meticulously. Now, on our way back north, they were curious to learn how we may have veered from their itinerary.
Two weeks earlier our crossing from Oran to Marseilles—a habit by now—was aboard the Ville d’Alger. In Marseilles we saw a revival of François Ier with Fernandel who, as that city’s most cherished native son, with his long droll melancholy features like Adolph Green’s, had his movies continuously recycled to SRO audiences. Afterward we went to a huge gay bar, Les Trois Cloches, near the Corniche, filled to the brim on this sweaty Sunday midnight with queens in feathers screeching in meridional accents at the butch sailors, short and muscular, posing in their tight culottes and little pompon caps, very Genet. Sometimes the matelots and the folles danced together to a bouncy accordion-accompanied Java. If you’ve never been to a gay bar, start with this one, though you may be forty years too late.
From Cannes (again at the Westminster Hotel) to Pisa by train the route is not scenic because of the tunnels, but I read the whole way, mostly Graham Greene in French, La puissance et la gloire, without pleasure, and the Stendhal travel guide. What in my mind’s eye do I first conjure up from Florence? I conjure the actual statue of Lorenzo, whose image had graced the green history book of U-High when I pondered how a mortal could be so beautiful and yet so great. Now here in “real life” sits his marble replica, brooding in profile through the ages in the Medici Chapel, with those well-formed calves ’neath a metallic armor whence the equivocal smell of musk clots the atmosphere. Are such thoughts allowed with Guy present, seeking facts in the little guidebook borrowed for a moment from a female tourist from France? It filled me with sadness that Lorenzo was so unavailable; I am sad today knowing that four hundred years hence other men’s eyes will still fall upon Lorenzo, as they did four hundred years ago, and he will never return their gaze. The sadness is not wholly unpleasant.
“Here comes Bu Faulkner,” said I without surprise, as we awaited our pasta that evening in Nandina’s Kitchen. Guy recognized him immediately from my description (melted face of a humorous Newfoundland, guilty from a drunken night on his knees beneath the San Nicole bridge), and from the tone of his letters. “Hold onto your cloche hats,” whined Bu as he approached our table and sat down, instantly regaling us with local gossip. We invited him to join us next evening for the dress rehearsal of Gluck’s Iphigenie in Aulide with Edwin Denby in the Boboli Gardens. Afterward we would sup at the Caffè Arno, the Flore of Florence, with Bobby Fizdale and Arthur Gold, whom Bu called the Fizgolds. He knew them all of course—was more than tolerated as mascot by his betters, a court jester, like John Latouche without the talent. Denby, skinny and witty, deep-eyed and sad, was now a guest of “the Fizgolds” in their suburban villa. He was your typical destitute artist, much loved, living for decades in other folks’ nests, or alone in his Twenty-first Street walk-up where, in his seventies, he killed himself to forestall the pain of incurable cancer. Edwin had retired as dance critic of the Herald-Tribune where Virgil attested—others concurred—that he was America’s only dance critic.
Guy and I too became, for a night, guests in the villa. Probably Arthur and Bobby felt they owed me this, in exchange for the big Suite for Two Pianos which they would never play. Also Bobby got a sort of crush on Guy, who was on his best behavior as leveler between dissipated America and extrovert Italy. We told them of our plan to reach Rome slowly, by bus and by train, and they, who knew the terrain, proudly drew up a schedule.
In Siena, thanks to their recommendation, we stayed at the Palazzo Ravizza, an intimate pensione run by the ancient Contessa Grottanelli, right off the main square and two blocks from the children’s fair where we rode around in little bumpy cars. Even as the sensation I most remember from Chartres is the apricot sherbet, and from Florence is the Lorenzo marble, the one sensation from Siena is the children’s fair. Yes, there were medieval walls, the Gothic Baptistry, verdant backgrounds, the unrecuperable scenes of war, but when you’re in love you remember games and bedrooms more than history. You also quarrel a lot and worry about money.
Rome. Depending on your first view you bless or damn a town. Emerging from the Stazione Termini I breathed a stifling dusty air and the stink of Cinzano, sulked for a day in our pensione, the Fogetti in Via Marche, while Guy sightsaw. Steady hot rain. Then we visited Alexei Haieff and the weather changed. He resided with the Igor-Aaron klatch, still serene in their crisply well-made neoclassicism before the ignorant armies of integral serialism clashed over their careers and turned them into school teachers. On 22 June I wrote in the diary:
“Yesterday we went out to the American Academy to visit Alexei. A lovely site as sites here go, and far from the center of the world’s noisiest city, but overly tranquil and almost sad. It seems too bad to be stuck in the suburbs with nothing but creative people for companions: there’s no real conversation, no social energy, not even any real competition (though these people are now grown-ups) such as we used to get at Tanglewood. Alexei, whom I hadn’t seen in five years, has gotten fat. He seems cheery and naïve as ever, and as much in love with Stravinsky. His French is the oddest ever spoken, so we talked English all afternoon and Guy was bored … After an outdoor lunch in an expensive trat
toria (Alexei paid) we visited the composers’ studios which are ideal. Ulysses Kay and Jack Beeson, both on Prix de Rome, showed us around; both seem blissful, both married.… Leo Smit played Stravinsky wonderfully for us (‘Ragtime,’ the piece with the marvelous Picasso cover); then he and Alexei played a two-piano version of the latter’s new concerto, dedicated to the former—a most charming work, but so à-la-russe as to be nothing else. Finally Leo played Harold Shapero’s C-Minor Variations (dedicated to Igor Stravinsky) which is long and wants very much to be Op. 111.… It’s all a closed little successful clique living off the various American foundations to which letters of recommendation have been written by older members of the same successful clique. (Alexei’s music is dedicated to Arthur Berger, whose music is dedicated to H. Shapero, whose music is dedicated to Stravinsky, whose Symphony of Psalms is ‘dedicated to the glory of God and to the Boston Symphony.’) I have nothing against someone’s music sounding like someone else’s, but none of these people is as good as Aaron or Stravinsky’, whereas they ought either to be better or different.… As for Jack Beeson, the poor dear has finally finished a very thick and gorgeously copied opera (Paul Goodman’s Jonah), and it makes my heart bleed to behold that patience dissipated on an effort that will never see production. Reminded of Boulez (for whom my heart doesn’t bleed) whose manuscript literally requires a microscope to decipher. At no cost does he want to be understood.… Alexei & Mrs. Kay (Barbara, quite pretty, friend of Margaret Bonds) walked us to the bus, and we came down into illuminated Rome to drink coffee on the Excelsior sidewalk (around the corner from our pensione, 14,000 a day for two) and watch the disarming Italian population trot by.”
Two days later I wrote: “… Walked around some. I like the new buildings, the broad thoroughfares, the Mussolini architecture. But the city as a sentimental whole has been a big disappointment. I loathe the streetcar, despise the parks, detest the people in the streets, and convulse at the ‘averageness,’ the dearth of strangeness. There’s not even any heavy Catholicism. I want to leave.”
Back to Florence, a weekend with Bobby and Arthur and Edwin. They had the coarse unwitty Chester Kallman, plus an exotic woman named Toto, in tow, Bulgarian perhaps, handsome, multilingual, hard drinking. Everyone was reading Ivy Compton-Burnett. Fireworks at the San Giovanni festival, after which the Fizgolds played Epigraphes antiques, the pedaled sonorities wafting into the garden where nightingales gurgled. Next day, 25 June, Bobby drove us all to Pisa where we had the picnic, me and Arthur and Edwin and Guy and a young Italian, on the surrealist unornamented lawn flanking the Leaning Tower, one of the seven oddities of the modern world. The menu has faded. But Edwin gave me a very American poem, on a soiled yellow sheet, called “First Warm Days,” which ends:
We all are filled with an air like of loving
Going home quiet in the subway shoving
which I put to music. The song was mislaid, then surfaced in 1989 to be refashioned to fit a poem of Whitman’s called “Are You the New Person?”
At dusk our fellow picnickers brought us to the bus for Genoa where we spent the night, took a train into Marseilles, a plane to Oran, and arrived by train back in Fez in time to see, on 28 June, A Letter to Three Wives.
Edwin Denby at our picnic had said: “One comes to see the monuments of European towns. Next to these monuments the towns can look ridiculous, which in turn make the monuments ridiculous. But in Fez are no monuments: or rather, the city itself is one vast wonder, and so there is no call for impatience when one resides there.”
My immediate project, on retrieving this routine African peace, was to finish the String Quartet. Since it was to be dedicated “To the memory of Lili Boulanger,” these words from Elinor Wylie’s translation of a Greek octet called “On a Singing Girl” would serve as epigraph:
She, whose songs we loved the best,
is voiceless in a sudden night.
On your light limbs, O loveliest,
may the dust be light.
The last of the four movements was written first. (Have you noticed that composers always say to write for their action, never to compose?) Its slowly growing Lento aped both mood and device from David Diamond’s beautiful Third Quartet wherein the viola provides a ladderlike pedal over which the other strings climb to heaven and disappear. The second movement was written second, a Pastoral in , very Gallic. The first movement was written third, an Allegro Moderato preceded by an Introduction drawn from the last movement. And the third movement was written fourth, stolen like a whisper wrongly overheard (though if the goods are transformed, is it a steal?) from “The Voice of the Virgin Erigone” in Debussy’s Le martyre which still rang in my ears. All four movements were realized between the 10th and the 27th of July. The piece was quickly programmed in Paris, as well as in Philadelphia, thanks to my parents who lent it to a New Music group there.
To get the juices flowing for the quartet, I wrote a seven-page Sicilienne for two pianos on 29 June (“Thought up in Siena, written down in Fez”) which, since Fizdale & Gold never performed it any more than they performed my other two-piano music written for them, I dedicated “To Pino Fasani” when it was printed (as was the quartet) by Peer-Southern some years later. Whittemore & Lowe finally premiered the Sicilienne on the Dave Garroway morning radio show. The Lento movement of the quartet, swelled into a string orchestra like Barber’s Adagio, was eventually recorded on MGM label. The whole piece is titled String Quartet No. 2, which technically it is, though the first quartet has been, as the saying goes, withdrawn, and lies with the First Piano Concerto in a trunk whose whereabouts remain secret.
Six Irish Poems, the first of five works for solo voice and orchestra that I would write over the years, was pretty much sketched out in Paris; I now finished the orchestration and sent the whole to Nell Tangeman. The texts by George Darley (1795–1846) are bleak, and so are the songs.
I renounce none of this work, though maybe would exclude most of it in a two-hour retrospective concert.
Also during the summer I composed—I mean wrote—three other three-page songs: “Lullaby of the Woman of the Mountain,” culled from Nell’s Irish collection (words by Padriac Pearse); “Philomel” on Barnsefield’s poem; and a bawdy ballad called “Whiskey, Drink Divine.” And a Slow Piece for Cello and Piano. This last was described in my diary as “a string tune the note-lengths of which are twice as long as those of the piano, thereby making a deep blue design against a pale blue fabric. The two instruments never get together in their note denominations; the cello has no stopped chords; the tone is sad; it takes about 5 minutes. What do I call it?”
The diary, forsaken when I left America a year before, was now resumed with an overall title, Journal de mes mélodies, because Poulenc was keeping a similar journal. Written mainly in French, it purported to be a blow-by-blow account of my new music as it was being born. Soon I reverted to English, and dealt with more mundane matters, neatly inscribed in fountain pen with nothing crossed out or edited (unlike the present book, painfully typed and crosshatched with revision). The pith was incorporated into The Paris Diary. Some dross remains, which I’ll quote from time to time as an indication of the times. For example:
“Write a story about a parental suicide pact. They decide to kill themselves because of the guilt inspired by the vigorous accusations of their enlightened child, who happens to be undergoing psychoanalysis for which they have paid.”
Or:
“Write an article on the naïve art endeavor of the United States. Young Europeans are less good; they’re restrained by staleness. Still, America, after an initial impetus, is going nowhere. Call it A Child Is Dying.”
Or:
“What will happen today that I’ll dream about tonight? ‘And all those useless orgasms!’ says the dying pederast.” (Today I’m inclined to dream of what happens next day. Most orgasms by heterosexuals seem useless too.)
Or:
“A French musician of the 18th century … ‘left the theater only to go to the
tavern, for at that time musicians got drunk with the approval of the state, and perhaps were musicians only by that favor. A musician who did not drink was held in worse regard by his confréres than one who played out of tune or out of time. But customs are greatly changed.’ (from Adolphe Adam, Memoirs) … Remarked to me at Michel’s party last Saturday night: ‘I hear you won some sort of Gershwin prize. Do play us the Rhapsody in Blue, you must know it by heart, it’s my favorite.’ They also asked for Intermezzo. This has been going on for years, yet always makes me weak in the stomach, especially during this unspeakable heat wave when I have just had my first drinks in three months. What a teeny-weeny walled-up little métier I seem to have chosen myself: no wonder composers are bohemians, not to mention alcoholics & sometimes all kinds of other things.”
Or:
“… Raoul Dufy has been cured of his paralyzed hands. What is this? The same happened to Rembrandt. And Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms were deaf, blind, and dumb. What are they ashamed of? They should all play Mendelssohn’s ‘Song without Words’ in E-flat, Opus 67 number one.”
Or:
“The first and only time I ever saw Ned Rorem was in the marketplace of Marrakech. He wore a chocolate-brown shirt, filthy tan pants, and black shoes. But what a face—like an angel’s! Tall and artificially blond. He was shopping, Ned Rorem, and in his left hand was a bunch of many-colored roses, and under his left arm a pineapple wrapped in newspaper; in his right hand an unlit cigarette. He was before a kiosk of caged parrots which were shrieking at full speed. For a while he spoke quietly to the merchant, but then all of the sudden he grew agitated. Although I could not hear him because of the din of the birds, I knew he was quarreling at the top of his lungs, quite surprising in one with a demeanor so calm. Then he began to cry, and I turned away, not liking him anymore (though I’d felt a certain nonphysical attraction at the start). For I dislike tears to a point of loathing, especially tears of shyness which certainly these were. I therefore hope never to encounter him again.”