Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  That early spring of 1951 Julien showed me Paris through his eyes. For one who virtually never writes about food, he had a passion for little sandwiches and cakes, English style, and we visited the hundred teahouses of Paris, the libraries and gardens, zoos and byways of the third arrondissement. His handsome stoical eyes could ferret out madness through a sunlit pane, yet much of what he found naughty was so innocent! For example, at his local bookstore he bought me an under-the-counter Fanny Hill. The clerk said: “I’ll put it down as Jane Eyre”… Vicarious, he enjoyed my accounts of drunkenness and orgies (exaggerated), hoping nevertheless that I read the Bible each night. Each night in fact I would meet Jean Leuvrais at the Théâtre Hébertot.

  I meanwhile forced him occasionally into my Paris despite his contention that anyone seen with me was automatically compromised: a musicale at Marie-Blanche’s, a lunch with Marie-Louise Bousquet on Île Saint-Louis, the recital of Julius Katchen (Paris-Match pictured me in my silver necktie seated between Julien and Robert de Saint-Jean like proud parents), or my shoddy hotel room where he now saw Chopin’s hand, broken, upright against the mirror with a cigarette between two fingers. I remember an afternoon chez Henri-Louis de la Grange with Menotti and Julien as sole audience to a concert of my songs by Nell Tangeman. And on another Tuesday (20 February), shaken from seeing Gide lying in state. And yet again the next afternoon. Indeed, my agenda indicates a meeting every few days until 10 March, a Saturday, when my involvement with Marie-Laure began.

  In April I spent my first fortnight at Marie-Laure’s little castle, Saint-Bernard in Hyères, which became the scene of my most productive years. Julien, in Monaco to receive an honor from Rainier, drove over with Charles de Noailles to pass a weekend with us. But we did not then, nor ever again, resume the unset pattern of our first rainy day. A cooling off began. Which is when I returned to Morocco until September.

  In June he thanked me for the translation of Another Sleep, adding: “I think it might be easier to sing the words if a few changes were made; perhaps we can go over it together. Of course I am dying to hear the music, which, I am sure, is very pretty. Has it occurred to you that we might leave the words in French? It seems to me that, had I written the book in English, I would have said something else, totally different perhaps.”

  The set of songs, Another Sleep, has been performed only twice: by Bernard Lefort in Salle Gaveau in 1954, and by Donald Gramm in Town Hall in 1956. The music is perhaps too “sensitive,” but I remain fond of it. However, my translations are not good, nor are they really Green, nor yet me. The effect is bastardly. Still, I’d have liked to publish the cycle if I had received permission to use the words. What words? Correspondence about them was resolved by silence, and my hunch is that Julien did not want to be identified with the texts of my songs.

  As to his suggestion that “we might leave the words in French,” I can only reply that in French I would have composed “something else, totally different perhaps.”

  (In an essay, “The Poetry of Music,” I have discussed the problem of multilingual composers. Frustration awaits the American impelled to write songs in French, for those songs will seldom be heard. The rare French recitalist who programs an American song will make an effort to learn one in English. Meanwhile, American singers find it more “legitimate” for their French group to be by Frenchmen. I am not the first to suffer from this irony. Yet the suffering is mild. Since few vocal concerts are given in any language by anyone anywhere anymore, little loss comes from indulging the unsalable challenges this precious medium provides. So I continue to write to whatever texts appeal to me.)

  On the bus he sits across from a young redhead (“hair the same gold as the edge of his Bible”). When the boy gets off, he follows. When the boy walks faster, he likewise. When the boy finally stops in a doorway, he asks: Why do you let strangers chase you?

  Cemeteries, which Julien finds unbearable, are for me always cheerfully tranquil. I feel protected, not by the past but by the casualness of the present. No effort is made there, not even by the gardener mowing the lawns, the gardener more beautiful than his roses. I, who so fear death, find nothing fatal about those lawns, just peace, while Julien quotes Maeterlinck: The dead would not exist if it weren’t for cemeteries.

  • • •

  He is concerned and cultured. Strangers who write him usually seem concerned and cultured. Strangers who write me are madmen. Disconcerting: the possibility that not opposites but similarities attract.

  No denying that his oeuvre spills forth with obsessional folly, yet those who write to him identify with him, not with his characters, and he, though melancholy and visionary and godly, is not crazy.

  I wrote him from Marrakech and in February 1952 he answered. “Your letter touched me almost as much as it surprised me. Not for one minute did I ever suspect you cared for me as you seem to now. Perhaps I lack intuition, but never mind: what remains in my mind is what you wrote and you may be sure that I will always think of you.”

  I have not seen Julien Green since the mid-1950s. Between then and the mid-1960s I’ve had four or five letters, all of them replies to professional inquiries. Occasionally when in Paris I telephone and he says he’ll call back and doesn’t, or a female voice explains that he is away. Meanwhile I keep in touch through his novels, his autobiography, and through his journals telling me about deaths, ever more frequent, of old friends or forgotten acquaintances. Among those pages my name remains invisible as by a determination to efface an identity that was ever conjoined to his own.

  I had committed the unforgivable by nourishing his predecision of who and what I was, knowing the predecision to be untrue. For I was not always kind—though was the nourishment in fact so unkind? Yet even without nourishment, any predecision must become untrue, since the actual behavior of others cannot coincide with our fantasy about that behavior.

  There’s a distinction between the impression we think we give and the impression we do give, and neither relates necessarily to what we are. Julien writes continually of himself without revealing himself. The impression he would give, in words written and spoken, is of a magnanimity which strikes outsiders as old-maidish. If most people’s character is revealed through their eyes, Julien’s is revealed through his mouth which is thin, intelligent, withholding, and sly.

  At the MacDowell Colony I once composed a brief piece for strings, Pilgrims, on a notion which had long been floating in my brain: an impression that through music the strangeness of Julien’s first book, Le voyageur sur la terre, could be transmitted without words. The piece was later published with a cover of pale green on which, in deep green, the title, an epigraph, and appropriate credits are printed. For his seventieth birthday in 1970 I mailed a copy of this music to Julien Green. But he never answered.

  Though Green may be the most unusual author of our day, I’ve shown here not my reaction to his value, only his to mine, and none too well. I’ve not “seen” him but strived to show that he saw me. To acknowledge this in no way exonerates me, although the present sentence is a plea for indulgence.

  Every artist, to be identified as such, does his unique number. Julien’s number is honesty—an unflagging refusal to compromise. Now, every artist is honest, whether he tries or no, and for some the very act of compromise is artistry. (Julien might contend that compromise never tempted him, so why talk of “refusal”?)

  My number is faking the shallow. But admitting to superficiality doesn’t render one less superficial, only more self-serving. Can I prove I’m a fake? The admission, however, is far from my music, for there I’m too lazy for whoredom or gluttony; I compose only what I want to compose.

  A fan letter today compliments me on my “Memoirs.” Between diaries and memoirs lies the difference of years, the difference between now and then. I am incapable of the memoir as genre, as these diary pages on Julien Green precisely prove. Waste of retrospect. A retrogression. Failure. (Yet might not the seconds between these parentheses and that failure already place
the failure in the past?)

  31. 1951: The First Three Months

  That ambiguous nightmare, which rose and fell every few months since preadolescence, began to recur more frequently in 1951. The décor was the same—inert existence centered among gigantic enigmatic shapes revolving like sodden clouds—but the aftereffect was now more aural than tactile. Even as Messiaen’s music contains no counterpoint properly speaking, unless it be mass against mass as distinct from line against line, so the nightmare imposed ponderous meaningless sounds which rolled deeply toward and away from me, in abstract sarcasm, without any actual contact. Depression on awakening.

  Yet was there—is there (for the bad dream returns still, perhaps once a year)—an awakening, if what Pascal suggests is creditable: that our dreaming state is really our true life, from which we emerge into another sleep where we think we’re awake? My sessions with Dr. Kraft had taught me, if nothing else, that Freud’s interpretation of dreams was simply Freud’s fantasy. Dreams are dreams, with their own integrity, not symbols designed to keep us asleep. Like music, whose sense and strength and very reason-for-being can never be explained by mere intelligence, the meaning of dreams forever evades us, not because that meaning is too vague for words but because it is too precise for words.

  Which leaves one with the conundrum of the two opposing dream states, the waking and the sleeping that become finally interchangeable and from which we can never escape but are tossed continually between one and the other, until we enter a third state which, I suppose, is Death. Death just may be a new awareness; more likely there is no “life after death,” which will infuriate those who think otherwise, after they kick the bucket.

  These notions persisted until I reached menopause. If hangovers italicized morbidity, country air relieved it; and certainly while I was working—which was most of the time—I was neither down nor up, but out. Socially, though, the narcissism of gloom remained until my mid-forties when I threw in the sponge of self-indulgence and, not uncoincidentally, stopped drinking utterly, to become a good boy. Anyone can destroy himself, but only I can write my music.

  We returned, Julius and I, from a cheerfully fructuous week in Amsterdam and the Hague on 11 January, and the rest of the month was passed in Paris. After a few nights at the sinister Hôtel Saint-Yves, I removed to the Hôtel du Bon La Fontaine, at 66 rue des Saints-Peres right next to José’s, which would be home for the next many months. Room 14, directly above the entrance, looked across the street to a low building whereon shined a plaque commemorating Rémy de Gourmont. The premises were managed by Madame Morel, latterly of the Hôtel de l’Université now requisitioned by the American army. An overweight imperious peasant, Madame Morel had a clarinet-playing son with glasses and broad hands who tended the front desk from midnight to 8 a.m., and who witnessed my comings and goings with a benevolent eye. Room 14 could have been duplicated in any European hotel of the period: big brass bed, a table and chair, portable bidet, floor-to-ceiling windows protected outside by a lattice and inside by dusty drapes the drab hue of ox-blood. A blocked-off grate surmounted by a faux-marble mantle beneath a huge gold-framed mirror. Used rug, hall phone, hall toilet, no bath, in short, a student pad with little space to turn about, the corners being heaped with empty brandy bottles. And with books too: Genet’s Quérelle de Brest illustrated by Cocteau. Cocteau’s Les parents terribles, the movie version of which was now revived. Miss Lady Lou, the French text for Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong. Le grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier (donated earnestly by Jean-Pierre Marty), and the novels of Giraudoux (donated ecstatically by Yves Salgues), neither author of whom I ever quite got the point, destined as they were for those of uniquely Gallic childhoods (Ravel had pondered making an opera of the Fournier), Cocteau’s little mauve volume called Théâtre de poche (donated lovingly by Jean Leuvrais) containing a series of monologues for Arletty, Piaf, etc., all of which I memorized, and one of which, “Anna la bonne,” designed for the Alsatian diseuse Marianne Oswald (whose spooky recording of it Paul Bowles had played for me at 4 a.m. in 1943), I would set to music in 1989. (Marianne Oswald, incidentally, was a noonday regular at the Ministères restaurant, rue du Bac, where she sat always alone, and where Kenneth Anger and I one day approached her to star in a segment of the film he planned, with my music, on the Chants de Maldoror. She agreed. Kenneth wrote the script, but backing was never forthcoming.) All of these books, like the brandy bottles, were procured for a song. There were then—there remain today—at least one first-rate bookstore and liquor store on every block in Paris.

  In this room of the Hôtel du Bon La Fontaine I began and solidified a French life among the French, as distinct from a French life among Americans.

  In this room Jean Leuvrais spent nearly every night for months. We had met late on 11 January in the Montana bar, where I for once was sober, he high, and hit it off. Jean Leuvrais, who, one year earlier, had graduated with honors as an actor from the Conservatoire, already had the lead in François Mauriac’s problematic and semireligious new play Le feu sur la terre, which was something of a success at the Théâtre Hébertot where Jean appeared nightly, twice on Sundays. Rumor had it that Mauriac himself—an immense force in French intelligentsia with his well-plotted but painfully straitlaced novels, his daily column called “Bloc Notes” (a sort of diary on Catholic matters wherein he expressed dismay at the moral woes of his country and conducted friendly feuds with his literary equals), and his son Claude who also had a daily column, as movie critic, and who was vaguely homophobic, albeit married to Proust’s grand-niece, but who later recanted when Cocteau died—was, at nearly seventy, in love with Jean Leuvrais, a rumor that Jean pooh-poohed, though proudly. Jean resembled a bourgeois boxer, broken nose, brutal hands, slightly bowed legs. Like all unmarried sons in France he lived at home, though independently, with his parents and his sister Colette, the latter a perhaps Sapphic lass with a sweet soprano voice who studied with Noémie Perugia. Though as of now, since he spent the nights with me, he returned home in the late mornings to change clothes. I saw the play, found it didactic, and Jean a stiff interpreter. He was too intelligent to be a good actor, but knew his country’s theater (and furniture and cooking and history and dress design and music) with the obsessive accuracy of an historian. If I have been married eleven times but never divorced, Jean must count as the fourth, though there was never the anguish or elation, much less the longevity, of his predecessors and replacements. He later told me, when I was involved with Number Six—or was it Seven?—that I was what he decided I was, his marionette, and that whatever my maneuver this was his choreography, I was locked in forever.… He came every night, after the show, to Saint-Germain-des-Prés where we would rendezvous in one of the cafés (“Je ne sais jamais dans quel état je vais te trouver,” he once allowed without too much worry), finding me usually with a gang of friends. On Sundays I always went to Marie-Blanche de Polignac’s who regularly arranged for tryouts of my works-in-progress. (On 21 January I showed up uninvited with Julien Green, to whom everyone was obsequious—he hadn’t been seen in le monde for years.) Jean would meet me after these events, and we would, eventually, go back to the hotel.

  In this room Henri Cartier-Bresson took his picture of me. I had been frequenting the “Thursdays” of Marie-Louise Bousquet, the French representative of Harper’s Bazaar, who received weekly in her cramped sunny flat overlooking the place du Palais-Bourbon, and served diluted daiquiris to dozens of eminent visitors, mostly foreigners. On my first Thursday, on the arm of José who was launching me, Madame Bousquet took the bait. Unlike the English, who seldom introduce guests at parties, and never divulge the guest’s profession for fear of invading their privacy, the French explain the raison d’être of everyone to everyone to put everyone at ease. Thus José to Madame Bousquet: “I bring you Ned Rorem, America’s greatest young composer.” Madame Bousquet, squat and stunted like an affable witch (or, in her own words, “like a vile old Semite”), had a canny flair along with her broad cultivation,
as was the case back then with trendsetters in the French fashion world. She sized me up and answered: “Justement, we’re planning an issue on ‘Young Artists in Paris.’ Would you,” she squinted at me, “like to have your picture taken?”

  I had never heard of Cartier-Bresson, but José assured me he was “Somebody.”

  When the great photographer phoned, a day or two later, we made a date for 4 February, the afternoon I would be returning from London. I was again in my green sweater—the one worn to Cocteau’s—when he showed up at the dreary room with an American assistant, one Gail Vincent, and immediately set to rearranging the furniture, climbing onto the mantle and aiming his cameras down at me in trial poses, while Miss Vincent played with cords and sockets and promptly blew a fuse. Madame Morel and her clarinet-playing son accepted the inconvenience with comparative good humor (their hotel was to be immortalized) as they tended to the fuse box in the basement. Minutes later the hotel was again plunged in darkness. Madame Morel, irate now, would have evicted us all had not Cartier-Bresson, resorting to the politesse with which aristocrats calm their minions, offered her cash (duly accepted) for this dire incursion.

  I never saw Cartier-Bresson again. But the portrait appeared, alongside portraits of Marcel Aymé, Roger Nimier, and Danielle Délorme, in the “Young Artists in Paris” issue of Harper’s Bazaar, where I could not recognize myself. My traits look more generous, remote, gaunt, intelligent, and serious than I imagine myself. Exceptionally, I am not gazing into the lens—that is, at my alter ego—but focusing toward the floor. It grows clear that we are only what the photographer perceives; were there four photographers in that room, there would be four Neds. We cannot exist except in the eyes of others; sometimes those eyes freeze us for a time into an image on a page; we come to construe that image as us. Cartier-Bresson’s image of Ned has been often reprinted. But that image was Ned for just a split second. Not even a split second, for even then Ned was his. And his, to be quickly forgotten.