Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  On the night of her arrival we took her, with Lévesque, to Gabriel Marcel’s play, L’homme de dieu. Next night, her performance, during which I could hardly sit still with my piles. When she went away to continue her tour, she gave me Cocteau’s Maalesh, the diary of a touring theatrical group in North Africa.

  Days passed. Guy spent a weekend in Marrakech, to where he would soon be transferred permanently. “Clattering piles,” I noted in the calendar on 5 December. “A dust storm, gloomy and interminable. Rain.” On the 6th, Mother had her fifty-fourth birthday back in Philadelphia. Then on the 7th, at the little Lux theater, during a lecture by one Yves Tarlet on French humor which I attended with Lévesque, I was stricken with an attack of trembling. Next morning I was examined by Dr. Fauque of the Hôpital Cocard who scheduled me for an operation on the 9th at 6 a.m.

  Have you ever had surgery for hemorrhoids in Morocco? It was an experience from which I’ve yet to recover. “Count backwards slowly from one hundred, in English if you prefer,” advised Dr. Fauque, the procedure for showing, through an increasingly slurred voice, how rapidly the anesthetic was taking effect Apparently I reached “nine” before the cutting could begin. Hours later, I came to, as though swimming up to the surface of a dark lagoon. The face of a young dark-skinned orderly smiled down at me, but when I reached out to stroke his cheek, I shrieked. Nurses arrived, and finally Guy, to whom I moaned simply, “Je veux mourir,” words which Guy, in his impotence, said were the most hopeless he’d ever heard. The wise cannot imagine stupidity, the rich cannot imagine poverty, and the well cannot imagine sickness, despite Docteur Knock’s hilarious observation: “Les bien-portants sont les malades qui s’ignorent.”

  A white-hot poker was in my rectum, but unlike the poker for King Edward II, it did not blessedly kill me. I remained in the hospital eight days. Regular visits from Guy. And from Lévesque who brought books—appropriately La nausée and La peste—and who flirted shamelessly in sign language with the orderly, named Abdullah, who spoke no French. I had a room to myself; the nurses called me grand-père, for the duffer who had died there last week. After five days I was given an emetic and told to move my bowels. The toilet was elsewhere. Thus I left the room for the first time, and was astonished to see the floor lined with silent Arab men and women and children, waiting, waiting for appointments, gazing unsmiling as I moved through them in the scarlet monk’s robe toward the commode at the end of the hall. I closed the door, seated myself elaborately, pushed down, and fainted.

  On 17 December I quit the clinic to convalesce chez Guy, reading the Camus and Sartre récits (“recitation” is not quite the translation for this uniquely French form), Cocteau’s Maalesh, and swallowing doses of liquid paraffin to soften the stool. Constant rain.

  It’s hard to know to what extent I dramatized. Even as one cannot relive certain mental pangs (love affairs, for example, when we endow foolish mortals with godly gifts and feel that life had no meaning beyond them), so physical pain, once gone, cannot be reimagined.

  Three days before Christmas I remained abed when Guy rose early to meet Julius’s 5:30 plane at Casablanca. Which one of them told me later that, on the way back to Fez, they turned off into a field and, as the saying goes, “had sex”? The idea disgusted me. How could the two people who in this world most professed to love me, behave thus on such short notice? Indeed, how could anyone on earth, knowing I existed, be interested in anyone else?

  I do remember, quite objectively, the sensation of the first ejaculation, induced masturbatorially I think, after the hemorrhoidectomy: violent anal contractions inciting simultaneous horror and ecstasy.

  Young Docteur François Rémy and his wife, Hélène, very pregnant, were, along with Julius, now staying with us. François would inherit Guy’s job when Guy moved to Marrakech, and would also occupy the house thereafter. Hélène was already stacking her artifacts in corners, ready to pounce when we decamped. We would have felt like squatters were not the Rémys so affable, cultivated, and handsome: she, a painter, would eventually design a cover for my little opera, A Childhood Miracle; he, a specialist in yellow fever of which, along with Guy, he would rid the land. (The Rémys eventually divorced amicably, and Hélène moved to New York where she maintains a modest but solid career.) In this makeshift household I was the ailing child ministered to by two specialists with more important tasks on their mind, and by Julius and Hélène who practiced and painted all day long while I orchestrated sitting on a pillow.

  Rain. We went to one movie, Dieu a besoin des hommes, with my nether regions diapered. Julius explored the médina with a blasé fascination (“I have, after all, been around the world”) and read Wilde and Gide for the first time. On the calendar for 27 December I wrote: “Oh, will there be a war?… Continual depression.” On the 28th the one word Cafard! which means blues—literally “cockroach.”

  On the 29th Julius gave his recital whereon my piece, listed as Sonate N°2 (dédiée à Guv Fetrand), Composée à Fes en 1949—Ière audition au Maroc, was nestled among Schumann, Chopin, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn. I mailed the program, plus the hospital bill, to Father. Next day we piled into the Buick, me, Guy, Julius, Lévesque, and a mournful Islamic poet named Azéma, plus the mangy dog Xénia, and drove to Marrakech.

  On the first of the year we lunched, the five of us, in nearby Asmi. Snow all about, laced with sunlight, and peacocks strutting amongst the tables. Conversation was lively. These faces and sounds of vital friends, all of them long dead, are retained in my still-living brain. Is it sentimental to ask if their voices have wafted or sped into the cosmos where they still fadingly resound, along with the voices of Maurice Ravel, Augustus Caesar, Moses, the sirens of the Mediterranean five millenniums ago, and the wails of a baby dinosaur sixty million years before that?

  In the evening Guy took Julius to the notorious sauna of Marrakech where Julius found his element. Indeed, he would return on his own to this city in future years solely to patronize the lusty Turkish bath. I had been there once, strictly for medicinal purposes, suspecting little about the sexual bonuses of such establishments, and was startled to behold Michel Royer being systematically sodomized in the humid shadows by a series of Arab workmen. Despite my own promiscuity, I held to the prudish notion that there’s a time and place for everything, and was annoyed (more probably envious) that the French Catholic and American Jew had no scruples about dispassionate semipublic demonstrations with paragons to whom I, in their place, would have wished to whisper, if only for the moment, “I love you.”

  It was agreed that I would now return to France with Julius, thence to accompany him on a brief tour of Holland where he would play my music, then two weeks later to London. On the calendar for 3 January 1951 is noted: “Dîner à Casa with family of Serge [who was Serge?]. Arrive in Paris.”

  The sadness cast over these weeks was no doubt partly accountable to my weakened physical condition which beclouded an ability to face the already fearsome world situation. Yet sadness has always lurked—still lurks—no matter how cheerful the weather and healthy the body. Like everyone, I am the sum of my contrasts. If, as an artist, I am a radical to conservatives by being a gay atheistic alcoholic pacifist, and a conservative to radicals by being an aristocratic believer that tonality is the core of all art, as a social creature I am a combination of my mother who was illogical, instinctive, emotionally unstable, a pessimist who all through life petitioned for equal rights, and who would die, as we all do, of a broken heart—and of my father who was logical, intelligent, emotionally stable, an optimist, who would also die of a broken heart.

  30. Remembering Green

  In September of 1972 I penned the following reminiscence of Julien Green in my journal. It seems as remote now as Green seemed in 1972, yet I still live where I lived then (on West Seventieth Street), and Julien continues to thrive across the ocean.

  At Rizzoli’s while searching for quite another book my hand fell upon Julien Green’s latest Journal (1966–72) which I bought on the spo
t. Spent the whole afternoon reading it. Or rereading. The emphases, identical to those of past volumes, could have been composed in 1926.

  Those perpetual obsessions with sin and the true way, with prayer and dream, with shop talk (Jesus talk) among clerical friends! If in this Journal Julien Green continues, through his specific belief in God, to miss more general points at every corner, in his fiction this very “miss” provides the Julienesque tonality, the singular Greenery. Surely if one-track-mindedness empties the spirit of humor, it does fill the mind with an explosive physicality which remains the sine qua non of virtually all large souls. (Humor is not physical but intellectual, and multiple-track-minded.)

  Green’s is a stance which no resident American, even a learned Italo-American Catholic, can comprehend; there is no room for comprehension, only for blind belief ripened for this convert who feels himself a nineteenth-century poet mislaid as a prosifier in the twentieth. Famous French dramas like Gide’s Saül or Sartre’s Le diable et le bon Dieu, Green’s own plays or Mauriac’s novels are bizarre for us because we are not involved with redemption, much less with going to hell. Emancipated Frenchmen (the surrealists, for instance) always deny God, whereas for even the most retarded of American literati God is not there to be denied. (Should one of them convert, he usually leaves the States.) That God is the same to all is as demonstrable a fallacy as that music is a universal language.

  (Sincerity versus artistry. If you can locate a copy, read the Cocteau-Maritain correspondence of circa 1924. The poet’s grief at Radiguet’s death renders him vulnerable to the theologian who “leads him back to the sacraments.” Maritain sees squarely ahead, Cocteau’s glance veers skyward; Maritain labors for his trust in the Lord; Cocteau takes trust on faith and garnishes it with gargoyles. For Maritain religion is salvation, for Cocteau it is subject of rhapsodies. Maritain may plod toward heaven, yet Cocteau now dancing in hell wins hands down, for his imagination erupts from within while Maritain’s appears superimposed from without—a label stamped by the Red Cross. The church never “took” for the inspired Jean; not for a minute do we Believe his Belief, but we believe it, since it is poetry. Still, the myth is ingrown in the French who take it for granted and are less stifled by Christ than we by Freud. The Vatican for centuries supplied a nest for a poetry grander than our Baptists and Mormons could dream of.)

  I do believe in the belief in God when expressed believably by plebeian practitioners or revolutionaries, or fantastically by saints and artists. So here I sit absorbing fatuities that occasionally, when they pass the buck to God, seem unfeeling. Reiteration of faith is suspect to infidels: it never seems to go beyond itself, but proves itself only through the self-hypnosis of that very reiteration, not through good acts. A believer is narrow, an artist is wide. Julien Green, being both, becomes a magnet between, attracting the unwary.

  • • •

  If I demurred nearly two years after coming abroad in 1949 before reading the famous writer, it was because he was somehow confused in my mind with Elliott Paul. Then during the fall of 1950, while I was convalescing from the primitive hemorrhoidectomy, Robert Lévesque brought me Moïra. What an experience! to meet my double in a trance. Narrated in the compact Gallic language, the subject matter treated of American disorder: sexual guilt of, and murder by, a horny inarticulate red-haired youth in a southern university. New World puritan frustration described via the mother tongue of Mallarmé. Green speaks American in French, the opposite of, say, Janet Flanner, who speaks French in American.

  A note received in November 1950 told me in effect:

  Very few letters have ever pleased me quite as much as yours and I do not want to wait to thank you for it. It is so direct, so friendly and so sincere. I think that only an American could write such a letter and I am only sorry that you did not write it sooner, but you had not read my book.…

  Now I shall look forward to seeing you in January. You have my address. I am always at home in the morning and at meal times. If I like your music as much as your letter you will have to count me as one of your fans! Many-thanks too for the picture which I like very much although I wish it had been larger. My greetings to Robert Lévesque. It was nice of him to remember me.

  (He signed Julian when writing in English, but I continue to call him Julien à la française.)

  (Am I sincere? Sincerity, as opposed to honesty, is a minor virtue, no more than meets the eye, black and white, a bit right wing.… He can only be disappointed. Or sad. The wounds of unrequited love lie less in the broken heart than in the fact that one’s judgment is contradicted.)

  On the third day of the new year 1951, rectal region still swathed in cotton like an imported peach, I flew from Casablanca to Amsterdam with Julius Katchen who was including my Second Piano Sonata on his Dutch tour and wanted me along to take bows. (Incidentally, my agenda notes a meeting with Klemperer, and two dates with Mengelberg to go over scores, on 6 January and again on 10 January. These dates were doubtless arranged by Julius, a powerful star then in Holland; but despite my well-known total recall, I have no recollection of these men.)

  Reestablished in Paris on the 12th, I made the acquaintance, in the Bar Montana, of the actor Jean Leuvrais who would for a while become my closest friend in France. He was then playing his first lead role, opposite Mademoiselle Jany Holt, in Mauriac’s Le feu sur la terre which I saw next evening, a Saturday. Sunday I moved to the Hôtel du Bon La Fontaine, then dined chez Marie-Blanche de Polignac for the first time. On Monday I met Julien Green.

  It rained viciously (like a pissing cow, as the French say) during the beautiful ten-minute walk at noon from rue des Saints-Pères to the three-story house in rue de Varenne which Julien Green occupied with his sister Anne (whom I never met during many a subsequent visit) and the debonair Robert de Saint-Jean. I recall the rain specifically as a blight to my appearance. Eyes looked down on me already as I crossed the courtyard like a wet rat, so there was no time to comb my hair before the front door opened.

  At fifty-one, the age of wild oats, Julien’s social pattern still centered, as it had for decades, round individual visitors received two or three afternoons weekly, one-shot interviews with thesis-writers or adapters of novels, or tête-à-têtes with regulars like the Père Couturier so in vogue then—and in Vogue—as official shepherd to recalcitrant celebrities, a sort of upper-class Billy Graham.

  We had Cinzano (Julien never drank), went to lunch on the upper floor of the Maintenon, boulevard Saint-Germain, finished a bottle of Bordeaux, returned to rue de Varenne where Julien watched me drink more Cinzano, switching then to Cointreau, all the time speaking of mutual literary infatuations, mostly of the Old Testament which he was pleased to know I knew. The rain stopped. With my last liqueur a shaft of sunshine like a finger of the Lord entered the library, whereupon my host asked if I would don a djellaba which he brought out, a vast velvet apparel with red stone ornaments and a hood. Berobed thus, glass in hand, I sat sainted in a circle of light, while Julien’s voice from the shadows, serene and nervous, questioned me. The sunshine gradually faded.

  Something happened.

  At five he canceled an appointment with Jouvet (Sud was being considered by l’Athénée), and we left instead to hear a run-through of my sonata five blocks away chez Julius Katchen. More apéritifs, rue Cognacq-Jay, where Jean Leuvrais also came to meet me before going to his theater. Instant mistrust of Jean by Julien. (“I can size up the French bourgeois perhaps more easily than you.” But a few seasons later Leuvrais was to star in Green’s play L’ombre. By such ironies do shadows lighten our small world!)… Next morning a gift was delivered to the desk of the Hôtel du Bon La Fontaine—“par un monsieur de bien en tenue sombre.” A plaster cast of Chopin’s hand.

  He sent me a little book, “the story of a shy boy,” with the admonition: “Don’t read it now. Wait until you have plenty of time,” adding that he had been thinking about me. “Will you remember your promise to call me up? I love and admire your music. There are many th
ings I want to tell you.”

  The little book was a new edition of his 1930 memoir, L’antre sommeil. I read it in the waiting room at Marignane before boarding a plane for Casablanca in April. En route, I translated three extracts, and during the following week in Marrakech composed a baritone cycle on this English prose, calling it Another Sleep.