by Ned Rorem
“How old is your mother?” she asked. “Is she one’s age?”
English to the roots in her profundities, Nancy was French in her superficialities. She loved, for example, being up-to-date—being, as the French put it, à la page.
“How can you still be composing tonally,” she would ask (who knew nothing of music), “when everyone else composes serially?” But to be up-to-date is to be quickly dated, since tomorrow is not today. And to be à la page for a fast reader is to turn the page so rapidly as to lose your place.
“I am of my time,” said I, “by virtue of inhabiting that time. Thus whatever I do stems from my time.”
Elsewhere her innocence was ever more pronounced.
“I fail to understand the nature of homosexuality,” she wrote to her American counterpart, historian Robert Halsband, while struggling over a book on Frederick the Great. “I am excessively normal myself & have never had the slightest leaning in that direction even as a child.” Was she unaware that Halsband was queer as a nine-dollar bill, as were most of her male friends?
On the other hand, Nancy was refreshingly level-headed. She realized that Marie-Laure was one-third insane, that in fact most of our friends, stupid and smart, are insane, but that we accommodate them as they accommodate us, until they cross the fatal border. She admired the Vicomtesse but wearied of her endless complications strewn in the paths of all and sundry. The level-headedness apparently prevailed through Nancy’s final pain-filled days. We corresponded till the end, she writing either from stylish points on the Adriatic, or from her beautiful ground-floor apartment in Paris. She loved to bathe (in her old-maidish “swim-frock”), and to recall the gossip at our appropriately named beach at Hyères, La Potinière, where all the upper crust of the village united at noon, sans Marie-Laure who hated the sun but loved to hear about it at lunchtime.
Luna Hotel, Venice 26 June 57
Dearest Ned
Oh alas I’m here. I would have loved to lend my benighted ear to your melodies. I did lend it the other day—I was staying with Eddy Sackville West in Ireland & he put on a record saying this is by a very gifted American called Rorem. I was intensely gratified.
The beach here is like a rather cleaner Potinière. The fact is all beaches are alike. But oh I miss the Docteur, the Local Beauty, M. de Suez & You.
Give my love to Mary Laura
Love and Success from
Nancy
“M. de Suez” refers to Nora and her rapport with Guy de Lesseps, whose grandfather dug the canal into the Red Sea. Nancy refers to her own grandfather in another letter, this one to Salt Lake City where during 1966 I professed at the university. My first book, The Paris Diary, had just appeared.
7 Rue Monsieur VII 24 Ap 66
Dear Ned
Yes funnily enough I have heard of Utah—my grandfather went there, in a stove pipe no doubt, about 100 years ago. (But didn’t join in the orgies—I spring from lawful wedlock on that side.)
Awfully pleased to have your news—the Diary will be fascinating & I long for it. I shall be in Ireland and England in May so I might be a little late in acknowledging it.
I saw Louise de V[ilmorin] yesterday—she is to sit on a film jury in Hyères. The organiser asked which hotel she would like—she said she would stay with M.-L.—the organiser said please don’t “elle nous fait tant d’ennuis.” So Louise is going to Tony instead. I thought this rather pointless tale would show you that things jog along here as per.
Yrs ever
Nancy
Back to that first day in Hyères.
On the calendar for Sunday is marked only: “The terrifying book of Dr. Magnus Hirshfield.” … Even then it seemed dated.
Monday: “Walk with Nora at 5:00. Drunken arrival of Boris K.”… Nora Auric was ever a ready companion for seaside or strolling. Marie-Laure disliked her but could not for my sake dismiss her, though did once consider refurbishing the swimming pool so I wouldn’t need to leave each morning for the shore with Nora. Nora it was who introduced me to the books of Georges Simenon, Europe’s greatest novelist of this mid-century, who was plotting a libretto for Auric. (Curtain rises on bridge spanning Canal Saint-Martin. Woman on bridge sings aria, then falls in water and drowns. The opera never got beyond this point because of the two men’s schedules.) Since then I have read eighty books of Simenon, which miss the dimension of Proust or Zola only because they never touch on homosexuality. Boris Kochno’s drinking would have been a bore were it not so grandiose, with a constant keening for his lost Bébé, the slurred insults for those around him followed by bear hugs à la russe, then brandy snifters smashed against the fireplace. His room was directly over mine in the little tower overlooking the front lawn. Boris paced all night, but never came down, as I vaguely hoped. Everyone talks of Boris’s dissipation. Demurely I lower my eyes, a nearsighted nun, in hypocritical approval of their disapproval. Hadn’t I, all last week, been too drunk to stand up?
Tuesday: “Saint-Tropez. Played Mélos for Boris. Evening of poetry reading.”… Saint-Tropez was not yet—and certainly never in early April—the playground of movie stars. An hour’s drive east from Hyères, it was the prettiest port on the Azure Coast with its little ships and little bistros and little rocky shoals. We had a lemonade at the Bateau Ivre, me and Roro and Burnap and Marie-Laure, then bought yellow shirts chez Vachon, and returned to Hyères via Cogolin where the ex-follies star Mistinguett owned a public farm from the front lawn of which she waved at us. (She made a comeback a few years later. Janet Flanner: “Mistinguett is an amazing sight; she still has her lovely, white, sharp-looking teeth, her handsome blue eyes are still empty of thought, and her voice still tintinnabulates on pitch, like a nice, weathered sheep bell”—a sentence which in 1965 I set to music for male unison chorus, saxophone, harmonium, percussion, and strings.) In playing for Boris the ballet score of Mélos based on Marie-Laure’s scenario, I gratified the scenarist’s anxiety as to whether I had a “sense of theater,” a conclusion she hesitated to make for herself. But Boris, after all, should know a thing or two about such matters, or what’s a Diaghilev for? “Dis-nous, Boris, est-ce qu’il a le sens du théâtre,” she pleaded, as I plowed through the as-yet-unorchestrated score. Boris said he guessed I did. But if I did—or do—Mélos is no example. Of the poetry reading, I can not easily forget Kochno’s keening of these sweeping strophes:
Un soir de demi-brume à Londres
Un voyou qui ressemblait à
Mon Amour …
then Marie-Laure echoing from another part of the parlor
… allez-y voir vous-même,
si vous ne voulez pas me croire
from the Lautréamont who foreshadowed the Apollinaire her surrealist mob so venerated. Apollinaire I knew already from Poulenc’s songs, and from the jolly Sade-istic récit called Les onze-mille verges, but the larger poems were new territory. Lautréamont (b. 1809), Rimbaud’s precursor, was so honestly shocking for his or any time, that my own attempts to shock in those high school verses were just that, attempts. Any attempt, by nature, fails.
Wednesday: “Roro’s trial and departure. L’héritage de la chair with M-L.” … Roro had come south, interrupting his busy schedule at the Conservatoire, to stand trial in the department of Draguinan for the crime of having, the previous summer, bathed naked (and quite alone) on the beach of Saint-Tropez. This, in the land of logic! Auric, whose name carried clout, wrote a letter vouching for Roro’s respectability. (A year later, Saint-Tropez became the first of many towns to legalize, in certain sections, nude bathing.) “L’héritage de la chair turned out to be Pinky, dubbed.”
Thursday: “Bath. Read The Cocktail Party (T.S. Eliot).”
Friday: “Crisis of the dog Diego. Cannes with Burnap 2:00. En panne—un cauchemar.”… Diego, a bichon frisé, was old enough, Marie-Laure liked to point out, to have seen the rise and fall of Hitler. I never cared for him, but was undone this morning at seeing the animal writhe and stagger, fall limp and dead, then rise and leav
e the room unsteadily. He survived another year. Cannes, where we made no hotel reservations on the grounds that, as Charles Trenet used to sing, “There’s always a crust of bread for a good-looking boy,” turned out a fiasco. To be sure, there was the crust of bread, but Burnap and I lost sight of each other in our drunkenness, then the car broke down, then we called Saint-Bernard (2.91 à Hyères) to announce our return on Saturday, whereupon Labisse came to the phone, reporting that a Madame Morel from the Hôtel du Bon La Fontaine had called from Paris to say that my belongings had been stolen from room 14. This was not news to soothe a hangover. When Madame Morel tried to pass the buck to Jean Leuvrais, she being aware that I nurtured an unholy alliance with him, I was livid. She agreed to grant three months free rent, which I accepted. Though I was in no mood to return soon to Paris, and planned instead to return to Morocco for a month.
Saturday: “Reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”
Sunday: “Reading Sartre’s new play.” (This must have been Le diable et le bon Dieu, for which Félix Labisse was designing the set.)
Monday: “Marie-Laure begins another portrait. I play Socrate for her, which she titles the portrait. 7:00 Tony Gandarillas.”
Tuesday: “Reading The Flower Beneath the Foot, The Marble Faun. Lunch Tony Gandarillas, the Chilean, drunk.”
Wednesday: “Gogol’s Le nez.” The borders of each entry are cluttered with names of correspondents.
Thursday: “Pouchkine [Pushkin] Un coup de pistolet. Bath.”
Friday: “Arrival of Charles de Noailles and of Julien Green.” Knowing that Julien would be in Monte Carlo to receive a prize bestowed by Prince Rainier, and that Marie-Laure’s venerable spouse, the Vicomte, whom I’d never met, would be coming from his estate in Grasse to pass the weekend at Saint-Bernard, I wondered if perhaps the Vicomte might not bring Julien along, knowing that Marie-Laure would consider this a feather in her cap. The Vicomte—“Appelez-moi done Charles”—as always the essence of tact, of breeding, of old-world charm, passed most of his time discussing finances with Henri, the maître d’hôtel, and discussing the dreary floral output with the gardener. For Charles knew something about cultivation—spent most of his years commuting between the famous gardens of the Continent, and had a rose named for him. As for Julien, he seemed intimidated by Marie-Laure, inadvertently calling her Marie-Blanche (she: “Vous me blanchissez, cher ami”), and telling me in private that he’d come only for me, that wasn’t I wasting precious time with these people? He was put in the room across from mine, and pleaded with me to visit that room during the night. I did not. (Do I sound like Harold Norse’s memoir, Bastard Angel, which could be subtitled “Famous Men I Wouldn’t Put Out For”?)
Saturday: “Départ Julien.”
Sunday: “Fly from Marseilles to Casablanca.”
So after my first two weeks in Hyères I returned to Guy Ferrand.
Enough is too much. But a little too much is just enough for me.
Notes on Her.
—Never apologize, never explain. That is her motto. Yet like a good little girl she tries to do better next time.
She is twenty-one years older than I, obviously her French is superior, and she has passed her life with the best conversationalists. When in an argument I might one-up her, she calls me Miss Sly. She pronounces it Meeze-Lye.
—She never stops reading, except while at the easel or asleep. The invaluable so-called New York Edition of Henry James, fifty volumes in discreet green leather on their own shelf at the entrance of the little bibliothèque, is not for show. She wends her way through these systematically, is already into The Ambassadors, nudges me constantly to follow suit.
At the moment she is devouring Ivy Compton-Burnett at Tom Keogh’s say-so. And, because she loathes her body and face, allows herself to be photographed only from behind, like Henry Green.
A dozen signed books arrive on her doorstep each week. In Paris her daily sortie, other than to the coiffeur or to various vernissages (all squeezed into two hours), is to Galigniani’s bookstore, rue de Rivoli, into which she shuffles in her espadrilles, rudely elbowing unsuspecting customers as her nose leads straight to the volume which she snatches from the shelf, calling out, “Je prends celui-ci. Mettez ça sur le compte du Vicomte,” and leaves with her booty before the salesman can ring up the bill. Maurice Gendron’s cruelly accurate imitation of this near-daily episode occasions my reluctantly uncontrolled laughter, and M-L’s too. Reluctant, because I hate humor. I hate the sound of pseudo joy emerging from mediocre larynxes who have no other reaction. Even organized high-level drollery leaves me cold, like the black fairy at the gay party.
—She is as naïve as the suave Nancy Mitford on the subject of male homosexuality. Like many another normal female she feels that offering her rectum to be sodomized will solve the problem. But where does that leave the other half of the male population that wants to be sodomized, at least on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays?
She belittles my pacifism as American puritanism, yet contradicts herself (the richest woman in France) as a victim of male chauvinism.
“All women are slaves of men,” she contends. But I reply,
“All men, in turn, are slaves of the state. With no alternative but prison and ostracism, a billion boys are forced to serve their army, forced to fight for what they cannot believe, year after year. Forced to die. And in France they’re not even paid for military service, where women go free.”
“Miss Sly,” says Marie-Laure.
—Nancy gives me a beautiful notebook in which to write stories. The cover, of dark-blue marbleized student-smelling cardboard, is embossed with tiny golden moles.
“The female mole,” says Marie-Laure, “has a minuscule vagina and is penetrated only with great difficulty. Because Nancy is une femme barrée she gives people notebooks with moles on them. She waits on tiptoe for Palewski who never arrives, because he does not want une femme barrée. He wants a woman he can move around in. Like me.”
“But,” says Maurice Gendron, “no man wants a vagina he can move around in,” leaving Marie-Laure without the last word.
—Because she is in love with me, she assumes the world also is. At the dinner table sit Arturo Lopez, Alexei de Rédé, Ghislaine de Polignac, and Christian Mégret, not intellects exactly (except for Christian), but not fools either, and worldly to a fault. Arturo, his South American fortune in the magic hands of Alexei—Austrian and much younger—has the leisure to drink all day as the money rolls in. (He was also, twenty years earlier when Cocteau was looking for figurants for Blood of a Poet, one of those clapping in the loge, next to Barbette, when the poet kills himself.) Christian, a drama critic and mildly successful novelist, loves the idle and beauteous Ghislaine.
Everyone but Marie-Laure is full of wine—she doesn’t touch wine—and nicely groggy. She holds an esoteric monologue comparing the use of dialogue in Diderot’s novels with the same use in Henry James’s fifteen plays. Noting Arturo’s wealthy head drooping, she announces:
“Ned is America’s gift to France. We all want to bugger Ned. Even Henri.” She alludes to the maître d’hôtel who, pouring more blancdes-blancs, interpolates without changing expression:
“It’s an interesting notion, but I’m sure Monsieur Rorem would object. And I’m not made that way.”
Though I shudder with discomfort, none of the others reacts, although Ghislaine, to be cordial, inquires:
“Is it true, Ned?” How can I affirm or deny? But Marie-Laure replies:
“Alas, I’m not made that way either,” looking plaintively into her lap. Such an outburst at any time or place is not infrequent, and stems partly from the surrealist gang who still at this late date are out to shock, and partly from the need (still at this late date) to emancipate herself from the straitlaced Vicomte. Never in front of the Vicomte does she speak thus. When someone in front of the Vicomte refers to his wife’s obstreperousness, neither he nor she feigns to notice.
—The surrealists, all male chau
vinists, seem as naïve as she about homosexuality. Only two of them have been queer: Dali eventually withdrew, and Crevel committed suicide. If homosexuality is banned a priori, so too is music. But then, there is no surrealist music. Or rather: all music is surrealist.
—If, because she knows English, she has the edge on Auric, who is the other most literarily cultivated person on the hill, he obviously wins in musical culture. Her own musical culture is anecdotal only, and relies on quotes from Markevich or Gendron. But Markevich is history, and Gendron kids her. With Gendron, nevertheless, she shares another history: that of pining together in a concentration camp in northern Italy. This is hazy. Just as I have no idea how I would have behaved, or fared, during the Occupation, I’m always tentative about asking too many questions.
Am I, with all my ingrown Quaker magnanimity, at all anti-Semitic? I am a little bit anti-queer.