Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  En route to Hyères Bacchat filled me in. Madame Keogh was past history. At Hyères I would find Madame la Vicomtesse with Monsieur Veyron-Lacroix and Monsieur Labisse. Monsieur Kochno was expected tomorrow. Chez les Aurics was a young American, a Monsieur Wilder Burnap. Bacchat himself would be dropping me at the front gate, since he must return to town immediately. His duties, in Hyères as in Paris, were to shop daily at the predawn market, wait nightly for his employer no matter how late, and to stay on call all through the day. In Hyères as in Paris the household personnel was comprised of fifteen souls, including the so-faithful Lithuanian maid, Emma, and a separate pastry cook on the kitchen staff in each city. For Marie-Laure, like me, had a sweet tooth (the quick fix of incipient dipsomaniacs) and served florid desserts—never cheese—thrice a day.

  I was unprepared for the expansiveness of her property. Somehow I had pictured a house like anyone else’s, comfortable yes, but not splendiferous. Hyères itself is a village on the southernmost tip of Provence, midway between Marseilles and Fréjus, five kilometers inland. Those five kilometers have kept this otherwise adorable enclave from becoming an overcrowded tourist trap, although in the 1890s and up until World War I it was a watering place for middle-class English. The population was perhaps seven thousand, of whom half lived in the vieille ville, a walled medieval labyrinth ascending a huge hill which was the start of the ever-larger mountain chain of Var which extends indefinitely northward.

  At the top of the hill, approached by a twisting private winding road outside the wall, loomed Saint-Bernard, the chateau constructed in the 1920s by the young Noailles. Their architect, one Robert Mallet-Stevens, heretofore an interior decorator, had improvised according to fantasy like a child with blocks. The pleasant result, in the streamlined style of the period, sprawled every which way, with cellars and pools and fountains, corridors and porches and alcoves, ateliers and kitchenettes and cutting rooms, a separate servants’ residence and a dozen guest rooms, each with its personal garden. The estate had in the thirties been a site for the Happy Few. Many a musical fete was heard, Sauguet and Koechlin and all of Les Six being recipients of Marie-Laure’s and Charles’s commissions, realized in their little theater or on the lawn by hired orchestras under the baton of, among others, Markevich or Desormière or the composers themselves. The scrapbook burst with snapshots of other voices, other rooms, a Dada costume ball, choreographed by Man Ray in that easier era, and occurring in the empty swimming pool where the guests donned horses heads and Roman togas. During the Second War the Germans had appropriated Saint-Bernard, as well as the paradisiacal knoll behind the chateau. Now the frivolously solid doings of yore were melancholy echoes, the swimming pool swathed in cobwebs, the cracked concrete of the dozen guest rooms home for crickets, and the paradisiacal knoll still strangled in barbed wire. That part of the house that had been re-reconverted was nonetheless vast, and fitted out in terms of convenient luxury—that is, while the walls featured Juan Gris and Giacometti and Fugita, while the waving drapes that discouraged insects at nightfall between terrace and parlor were of peach-hued chiffon, and while the remaining decor of the twenty-odd habitable rooms large and small was of that most aristocratic of furnishings—books by the thousands—the marbleized floor was yet unencumbered by rugs, barefoot living being the mode.

  The house was surrounded by acres of walled gardens, one of which contained a lion’s cage with two large lions—made of plaster. The walls were twelve feet high, pierced at intervals by ten-foot-square openings like animate paintings depicting scenes of Provence from various perspectives. Later that year Oscar Dominguez would construct, at the local blacksmith’s, four huge steel designs which he arranged to have soldered to the top of the main wall (a dangerous proceeding above a sheer drop of sixty feet), and which he called “sky sculptures” because, between the metal filaments, the sunny-white ether successfully filtered down to us. The gardens in this season teemed with crocuses, their wee faces of violet and gold mirroring the rows of miniature blue pansies, each like an elf’s plate with a poached hummingbird egg in the center.

  So here she was, in her meridional shelter. Like the pet cat who is one thing in the city and another in the country, Marie-Laure became quite a novel person at Saint-Bernard. She shed her obligatory mondanités and, while remaining a hostess, disappeared into her own works for hours at a time. Since nothing is more contagious than work, her concentrated energy rubbed off on me. She was an organized artist. As a poet she was ornate, ladylike, macabre. As a prosifier her attraction was too close for comfort to the surrealists whose influence melted into watery affectation (and, being rich, she was unused to criticism). But as a painter she had to be taken seriously. Her language, in both style and substance, stemmed from that of Bérard.

  I had known the work of Christian Bérard—referred to always as Bébé by those hundreds who adored him—from his many pictures on Virgil’s walls at the Chelsea, and from Virgil’s tales about this most talented of mortals. “I have witnessed,” Virgil used to say, “the creative spirit at work only rarely. This spirit was most vitally active in Bébé.” I never met the man. He died just months before I came to Paris, collapsing on stage during a rehearsal of Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin for which he had provided the decor. Even as the French referred always to the “Occupation,” never to the “War,” which they evoked less with horror than with nostalgia for the solidarity it had created among themselves, so they evoked Bérard, le cher Bébé, as something wondrous and lost. Bearded in a time of no beards, and physically fat and filthy in a milieu of slim cleanliness, he was nonetheless quite swishy, living with Boris Kochno in the rue Casimir-Delavigne where the two smoked opium until the Occupation banned it, then switched to cognac which they imbibed during every waking hour. Bérard was the darling of society, partly because he played as hard as he worked, and partly because the work—portraits, stage sets, murals, interior decoration, wardrobe—was, all of it, flattering as well as first rate. Cocteau’s palette owed its identity to Bérard’s, and Marie-Laure’s palette blended both. When Gertrude Stein died in July of 1946, Grace Cohen says that I said: “So she’s dead. And she never knew me.” Marie-Laure in 1951 repeatedly said: “To think that Bébé never knew you.” Thus did my narcissism echo in the mouths of babes although Bérard’s recent death was not “recent” to me, because it occurred before I was aware of his reality.

  And thus did Marie-Laure in her studio concoct her luxuriantly sensual Bérards throughout the years while in my nearby studio where she had moved one of her two pianos—the green one—I composed my sensually luxuriant French music, which sounded French to everyone but them. More than anything, she respected work. Since I never stopped working, she never stopped respecting, though she might show the door to other vacationers who lolled too much around Saint-Bernard, eating her guinea hen and soiling her sheets. Admittedly, sometimes I worked beyond my energies precisely to keep her from “respecting” me too physically.

  Of the three houseguests enumerated by the chauffeur, only Robert Veyron-Lacroix was known to me; we had met chez Marie-Blanche. Roro, as he was nicknamed, had become, already at twenty-seven, his country’s preeminent player of the harpsichord, an instrument which he taught at the Conservatoire, which he recorded extensively (just out were the complete works of Rameau in a four-disc album boxed in gray satin), and which he made arrangements for. But it was as accompanist for flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal that he earned enough to buy a house in Majorca, and to pay the medical bills for fruitless tracings of a blood clot that roamed through his body, lodging intermittently in his brain, causing him to pass out unexpectedly on stage or at the table, and eventually killing him fairly young. He was an intimate of both Marie-Blanche and Marie-Laure, the latter being more fun if less musical. (Interestingly, though Marie-Laure’s two main lovers hitherto, Markevich and Maurice Gendron, had both been great interpretive musicians, she herself was not musical. Indeed, her circle consisted mostly of visual artists, good ones, and she
liked to think of herself as “one of them”—difficult, since she was rich, and the rich can never quite be “one of them.” To her credit, quite literally, whenever in Paris we’d go out en masse to some restaurant, she always footed the bill, never demanding proof, like the American rich, that she was loved for herself alone. She knew that there is no “self alone,” that money was part of what made her her.) Roro through the years became a platonic brother whom I admired no less for his performing ability—his rhythmic precision and digital accuracy were computer perfect, a trait inbred in the French—than for his Samaritan dependability when I was insufferably self-pitying.

  Félix Labisse, a Belgian surrealist, though less adept on canvas than his nationalist contemporaries, Magritte and Delbos, created marvelous sets and worked in continual tandem with Jean-Louis Barrault. Were I to list the four most successfully evocative stage designs of my experience, they would be: Balthus’s décor for Ugo Betti’s L’île des chèvres for its aptly claustrophobic mystery which does not pall after two hours; Noguchi’s pliably solid-gold Brancusi-like sculptures, in Martha Graham’s study of Saint Joan, for their ability to transport the audience along with the dancers into a shining cruel paradise; Bill Ritman’s huge room for Act II of Albee’s Tiny Alice featuring the maquette of a castle with lighted windows that make us see Big and see Small simultaneously; and Labisse’s portrayal, in Act I of Claudel’s Le portage de Midi, of the deck of a lavish ocean liner where Barrault and Edwige Feuillère talk and talk and talk beneath the constantly rippling all-encompassing sails of snow-white satin shot with mauve. Felix himself, gray-haired and mischievous, with a wife named Jony who led her own life, was a self-portrait of seduction combined with sensible education.

  Wilder Burnap, an American my age, bleached blond and highly excitable, had been a protégé of Roy Harris’s pianist wife, Johana, but now fancied himself a baritone, and was a valuable fly-by-night. Six years hence he would commission from me five songs for five hundred dollars. These turned out to be settings of Whitman, and were first performed by him, with his small but expressive voice, self-accompanied on a miniature virginal placed on his knees in the front seat of his third-hand convertible Rolls-Royce on the sandy beach of Hyères.

  Wilder was staying with the Aurics just down the hill from Saint-Bernard, in a house called Les Roches Fleuries which the Noailles had given them for a wedding present. Separated from Les Roches Fleuries by a sterile field of hydrangeas and lettuce (the soil of the Var is tragically dry) stood the house of the gardener, the one with the crippled son named Maxim who composed.

  On a level some yards higher than these houses, about ninety yards west of Saint-Bernard but still on the Noailles property rose yet another house, three stories of tan granite called the Villa Saint-Pierre, inhabited by Tony Gandarillas. A generation older than Marie-Laure, Tony was cultural ambassador from Chile to England, now retired in France. Mondain without being snooty, Tony knew everyone and went everywhere, smoking opium with the best of them, continually dredging souvenirs from a special kind of past which still seeped uneasily into the present: memories of prerevolutionary luxe in Saint Petersburg, of Cole Porter’s bagatelles with gondoliers, of George VI’s dalliance with—but dare I name this still-living beauty? Tony himself, according to my hostess (or, as Michel Girard later named her, my landlady), dallied with his cockney chauffeur. Indeed, one afternoon through the large telescope permanently placed on the well-tended lawn, we vicariously focused on a session of flagellation that made us fear for Tony’s old bones. With all Marie-Laure’s belittling of her neighbor, with all her paradoxical meanness juxtaposed with kindness, arrogance, generosity, and indifference, it was to Tony’s bedside that in 1970 she hied, sitting with him daily until he quit the world, and then, one week later, died herself, of emphysema aggravated by a four-pack-a-day dosage of Gauloises.

  Among Tony’s most valued guests was Nancy Mitford whose fortnightly visits every August I anticipated with salubrious glee. Nancy was somehow less neurotic than the others on our hill, as well as outdoorsy and anglophone. (Marie-Laure loathed the outdoors; she bought a swimsuit in our early days to impress me, but donned it only once. Bacchat later said he’d not seen her swim in twenty years.) Nora Auric was outdoorsy too; in fact it was with her that I made the regular trek to La Potinière for a vigorous swim each morning at ten. But Nora and Nancy were not close. Nora had painted a portrait called Man with Glove of the womanizing diplomat Gaston Palewski, with whom Nancy remained unrequitedly in love until her death. Nancy bought the portrait. But in order to make it fit the circular frame, she cut a foot off the canvas, including the glove of the title and Nora’s signature. Nancy sketched in the signature, misspelt, and when Nora learned of this she was not amused. (For her gesture, Nancy did have a precedent in Misia, that arbiter of taste—taste that only money can buy. Misia commissioned a set of murals from Bonnard, then took shears to them so that they would fit her walls. Reproached for lack of respect, she replied: “I don’t respect art, I love it.”)

  Nancy was good company, bitchy and keen, with complex stories of the current British upper class (was there any other?), and an occasional charitable corsage thrown toward the United States which she purported to disdain, except when I was around. We walked often together in the hills behind our hill, laced with untrodden paths extending indefinitely northward, with scarcely a sign of humanity except for a curl of purple smoke on the horizon twining toward the sky in early evening. This was a Garden of Eden, the Eden of Pagnol, with hardworking Eves and crusty-hot Adams descending into our village Saturday mornings to stock up and play pétanque. Their language—the langue d’Oc or Provençal—is, in inflection and accent and meter, the reverse of English as spoken in the southeastern United States. Our southern speech is somnolent, dropping final consonants while interpolating cooing vowels in an effort to beguile, in virtue as in vice, not only the Yankee philistine but the boy or girl next door. The speech of southern France is wide awake, takes its cue from northern Italy, is rapid, stressing the mute e, adding final vowels, eschewing the nasal Parisian twang, and grows incomprehensible to all but themselves.

  One memorable promenade resulted from the decision to explore the fourth, and last, of the properties on our special hill. This was the Villa Sainte-Claire, another eighty yards off, which once belonged to Edith Wharton, but had stood empty for years. From the summit of the divinely lovely little knoll, where the Germans had raised a still-standing gallows only seven years before, one could look down upon our various roofs and plot a course. Marie-Laure had told us that she and Igor and Cocteau used to visit Berenson at Sainte-Claire; that in fact Cocteau once “created” a faux-Picasso and passed it off to Berenson, who assessed it as bona fide and gave it to Wharton, who adored Cocteau; that these people, like old Proust, were made for the scorn of adolescents, but now it was too late to atone; and that as far as she knew the nearby estate lay in ruins.

  With the furtive insolence of foreigners Nancy and I gingerly tiptoed through the walled garden surrounding the mansion. The garden seemed the more hideous for having once been flawless, its concrete paths now cracked and slimy with snails, as were the leafless olive trees. (I remembered the India described by Jean Bertrand, where long-abandoned castles were inhabited by apes.) Here the snails were the sole remains of the day, animal or vegetable, to echo what may once have been laughter and greenery and strawberry shortcake. The house was easy of access: we simply stepped over the broken glass of a window sill. Like the phantom ship Marie-Thérèse, dozens of rooms retained signs of decrepit usefulness, wind blowing through tattered curtains and across unmade beds, as though no looter, no city inspector had set foot there since Mrs. Wharton vanished. In 1964, during a final stay in Hyères, I dined on the terrace of Sainte-Claire, now purchased by the township and become an expensive restaurant.

  Another promenade a few years later: Nancy had just created an international stir with her tongue-only-half-in-cheek essay Noblesse Oblige, in which she launched
the terms “U” (upper class) and “non-U,” defining these categories according to speech patterns. It became a chic pastime in the better U homes to classify virtually anything according to Nancy’s hilarious rules. (Non-U families, of course, didn’t play the game: they couldn’t, by definition, grasp the terms.) Except that Nancy didn’t set the rules: the terms “U” and “non-U” were formulated by one Professor Alan Ross, a sociologist from whom Nancy filched the notion. One stifling July afternoon when the mistral wind, arid and sterile and unstoppable, was funneling down the Rhone Valley and driving everyone mad, Nancy and I were as usual staggering about the back hills. She suddenly stopped and said, in her high-pitched schoolmarm British U-voice: “Why lookie here! Ants!” Sure enough, an army of red ants, millions of them, was filing for perhaps twenty meters in one direction, while parallel in the opposite direction moved an army of black ants, two ribbons of squirming caviar. I observed Nancy, now on her knees, examining the motion with all the objective concentration of a Formicidae expert, and said to myself: God, how unlike my mother! What could Mother, the tragic egalitarian pacifist, make of this comedic snobbish foreigner? What did I myself make of the witty creature, the eldest (b. 1904) of six sisters, two at least of whom were Royalist-Fascist warmongers? I never thrilled as others did, to Nancy’s famous wit, though in later years I came to admire Jessica Mitford’s pithy examinations of California. The heat. The mistral. The clouds like tumors ready to burst, burst now, after a week of retaining their vomit, and the ants scurried, but scurried slowly, toward their respective hills, miniature versions of our own. What indeed did Nancy make of herself, rushing home in the rain with this wistfully ambitious Illinois composer, here in the landscape of Giono?