by Ned Rorem
—Her menu twice a day is what other people serve once a year. Overabundant, fit for nobility. By 1970 how many thousand meals of lobster and Greek leaves and figues à la creme will I have enjoyed at her table? Still, after each meal I say thankyou.
She keeps a diary. (Because of that, I’ve resumed my own.) Drunk or sober she writes in it nightly, disappearing from a midnight fray in the parlor to tell the diary in the bedroom about the midnight fray in the parlor. Then, after a neat shot of fine, she returns.
—She has bought a donkey. Every year a roving theater group spreads its wares in the square in the front of the little cathedral of Hyères. The whole town shows up. Last summer it was André Gide’s Saül. This year it is Alphonse Daudet’s L’arlesiènne which could have unfolded in this very town a century ago. The noble Valentine Tessier, deaf now and missing lines, makes her entrance in a donkey-drawn cart.
“What becomes of that animal after tonight,” asks Marie-Laure.
“To the abbatoir, Madame la Vicomtesse,” answers the director.
“Let me buy him.”
The animal is duly delivered. Named Alphonse, the donkey lives in the shed of the gardener who brings him every morning to graze on the lawn in front of the chateau. The gardener also brings a pair of sheep who wear bells, recalling Zeus and Hera in Vermont so long ago. The tinkling is my cue to get out of bed. The incongruous menagerie returns to the shed at sunset.
There is now an aviary too, with dozens of domesticated wrens and finches of those varieties I cultivated once, cobalt and tangerine, leading their own lives.
—She ignores her music library’s value. It contains, among other treasures, scores Satie inscribed to Valentine Hugo, which Valentine was forced to sell. I still have two of these, Parade and Socrate, nor will I return them to Valentine.
—Regular guests from Nîmes include Jean Hugo (Victor’s grandson), long divorced from Valentine, now married to a vigorous English woman, Loretta, as imposingly tall as himself. His oils, though, are cameo size. On a postage stamp—or almost—Jean Hugo (like Brion Gysin across the sea) paints Provençal landscapes replete with huts and humans and horses, expressive and characteristic as Van Gogh’s.
Also from Nîmes, lured by a lunch of brindade de morue garnished with acid wit, comes Jean Godebski, now in his fifties and tall as Jean Hugo. It was for Godebski and his big sister, Mimi, that Ravel in 1908 composed the four-hand suite Ma mère l’oye. “We never really learned it, or cared about the piano, which is why Ravel eventually orchestrated it,” explains Godebski, without much interest. It was his Aunt Misia who had set the deal in motion.
Young Jean Lafont too, a virile rustic with smiling eyes and hay-colored hair smelling faintly of the bull pens of the Camargue. For he is a manadier, a breeder of the great black mammals who fight to the death in the corridas of Aries. Lafont is charm-filled and canny. He has a boyfriend in the shape of a young apprentice at the manade, and sometimes too he goes to Nice for the anonymity of the random pickup or the rowdy bar. But he is also interested in the Noailles’s finances. Years from now, after I have quit France for good, he will take over my rooms both here and in the place des Etats-Unis. Marie-Laure will fall in love with him, run weeping through the streets at the age of sixty-three, tearing her hair, as she runs now through the streets at forty-nine and tears her hair for me, and did likewise for Raffaello sometime back while he would pray to the Holy Madonna of Trieste that the Vicomtesse would stay out of his bed. But Lafont is a decent chap. He will negotiate a sizable personal subsidy from Charles de Noailles. He speaks with a pronounced accent du Midi, irresistibly, intelligently.
French is the tongue of homophones, not just for single words (j’envias janvier) but for entire alexandrines, the most famous being Victor Hugo’s:
Gall, amant de la reine, alla, tour magnanime
Gallament, de l’arène à la Tour Magne, à Nîme.
Thus railway agents sigh each time they hear the awful pun on the town of Sète: “Six billets pour Sète.” (“Six tickets for seven.”) And thus, to the Gallic ear, Hyères is interchangeable with hier—or yesterday. “Demain je rentre à Hyères.”
Tomorrow I’ll return to yesterday.
Today I’ll go back to Morocco.
Guy lived now in Marrakech. The new lodging, less “agreeable” than the one in Fez, was a three-room flat, premier étage, on a nondescript European street leading to the red-light district. By day the arcaded thoroughfare hummed with life: shops and hawkers vending non-Arabic goods—sewing machines, French weeklies, canned goods, gin. By night the silence was torn intermittently by légionnaires reeling half-drunk, hands cupping their crotches, toward the quartier réservé where ornamental whores of every age, overly made up in red chiffon and shaming the laws of purdah, waved the boys into a little enceinte from which came an aroma of spearmint tea.
On the plus side: the famed place Djemaa-el-Fnaâ, that twenty-four-hour ten-ring circus just two blocks away. Nothing there has altered since the Bible. Flanked by the green-tile Koutoubia minaret, Djemaa-el-Fnaâ is a gigantic market with fire-and-sword swallowers, cobra charmers, open-air barbers complete with their little tubs of leeches for healthy bloodletting, the ubiquitous smells of mint and cedar, unleavened bread and beef brochettes, storytellers, one veiled female to every fifty muscular-calfed men, and pile after pile of red and yellow peppers, raw camel meat, silver amulets shaped like scorpions, smoke everywhere, and the constant drone of prayer. Beyond was the Médina, merrier and brighter than Fez’s, with, among the shops, cafés, liquorless nightclubs where overweight Phaedras do belly dances amid the fumes of kif.
In other words, an ideal ambiance on which to pull the shade and compose American music.
During the twenty-four-day stay I began and finished:
Another Sleep for voice and piano, the three melancholy recitations from Julien Green’s book, with a hopeful dedication to Gérard Souzay who never sang them.
To a Young Girl, a cycle of six songs on poems of Yeats, which was already well underway in Hyères. These were dedicated to Doda Conrad who performed them at a League of Composers concert at the Museum of Modern Art the following year. Like Another Sleep, the cycle remains unpublished, except for the title song, printed two decades later, and dedicated to Sylvia Goldstein. And another movement, “O Do Not Love Too Long,” I absorbed into an instrumental sextet in 1984 by eliminating the words, assigning the vocal part to a single line on the piano, and the accompaniment to a string quartet (rather than, as typecasting would have it, giving the vocal line to oboe or violin).
“Sweet Dancer,” another Yeats song, about a girl in an asylum. Also unpublished and unsung (in fact, have I ever shown it to a singer?), it’s one of many songs which must have struck me as, well, perfect, but without theatricality. For a song is no less a dramatic event than a miniature opera. Of the hundreds of true singers that I (used to) know, not one has admitted that, given the choice, he would rather perform opera than recitals. In a recital he is able—as they say—to communicate directly, without mask or costume, and to adopt twenty different egos, all in a row, moving from one three-minute impersonation to the next.
Mélos—the orchestration, which has also never been heard.
• • •
Were Guy and I still sleeping together? Did I, during this visit, have a brief fling with one of his colleagues, Jean La Forge, who taught French at the lycée? Yes. This took place during one of Guy’s many excursions into the bled. When I told Guy, he entreated me not to tutoyer La Forge in front of him, else he’d be obliged to show anger, when in fact he liked La Forge. The brief fling ceased abruptly when the test records of my symphony arrived from Vienna. Together we listened to this fine performance of a piece I’d never heard, during which La Forge wanted to make love. Which seemed obtuse.
I also made love (if you called three minutes beneath the stairwell “love”) with a young Arab who had followed me one night from Djemaa-el-Fnaâ into the front hall.
These were the only extramarital erotic episodes—almost—I ever had in Africa, until I returned a decade later.
From Marie-Laure I have retained a voluminous correspondence in a box with her books and pictures and other mementoes. Because she was a pack rat, she probably retained the same from me. (Nobody seems to know what’s become of her writings, most importantly her diary which she coveted, but which Charles would have found a posthumous impropriety.) I do remember sending her a drawing from Morocco, on a sheet of 8½- by 11-inch paper, of a huge erect prick, surrounded with this message: Mon amour pour toi est aussi dur et inébranable que cette bitte est dure et branlable. Guy, peering over my shoulder, was aghast: “Are you really on such terms with the Vicomtesse?” It’s difficult today to retrieve my motive, beyond opportunistic titillation, but Marie-Laure doted on that sort of thing.
Messaoud remained in Fez, and was replaced by Laoucine, an impersonal forty-year-old. He fixed meals, did the ménage, and that was it. Norris Embry, visiting Guy once when I was away, apparently made a pass at Laoucine, on the grounds that “all Arabs are available.” The pass was unreciprocated, and Laoucine sulked at Guy for weeks.
Often we dined at the Mamounia Hotel, a venerable white elephant which Churchill had called home and which now was being edged out of the winter tourists’ favor by the new Menara, which served a memorable soufflé au Grand Marnier. (I could still in those days indulge in a liqueur-drenched comestible without going off on a tear.) Outings to Mogador, picnics, swimming pools, movies thrice weekly, a concert series like the one in Fez, rain, public dances, reading (Genet, Malraux), visits from Lévesque, and socializing with a somber local poet named Azema. Mostly I just worked.
When people exclaimed at how inspiring I must find this wealth of exotica, I would feel mute contempt. Musicians don’t compose scenery. Although I put total credence in the notion that a composer’s nationality can be divined through his ineffable output according to the “phonetics” of that output (we are what we speak), I challenge anyone to situate the precise geography on which Bach or Tchaikovsky or Albéniz stood when they wrote Saint Matthew or Francesca or Iberia. There is nothing in my Moroccan catalogue (beyond what I’ve told you, in words, was borrowed and then aberrated from wisps of tunes overheard on the radio) that could indicate my whereabouts.
Finances? I must have been living still on what Father sent—a hundred dollars a month?—knowing that by the end of summer there would be regular supplementary checks (a hundred dollars a month?) from the Fulbright Foundation. Meanwhile rent had been unnecessary in Hyères and in Morocco, and would continue to be in Paris for the next three months. Until January’ of 1953 when I moved into her house(s), Marie-Laure paid hotel bills, bought all my clothes, and provided hundreds of meals. Were it not for her, would I have persisted? Not, certainly, in the same manner. Virgil once wrote: “Every composer’s music reflects in its subject matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing that music. This applies to introspective as well as to objective music.” Well, Virgil might not still concur; nor might he ever have added that the quality was also dependent on the composer’s income source.
Yet even today, if I am not regularly shown that, without having made concessions, I am appreciated (through regular performances, printed reviews—good or bad—and interviews, or my name in the crossword puzzle), I begin to doubt the rat race and want to throw in the sponge.
On 13 May I flew from Casablanca to Paris, arriving in time to dine with Marie-Laure and Oscar Dominguez.
In a current TLS one finds this quote from John Sturrock’s just-published The Language of Autobiography: “Rousseau shows how facile it is to say, as we often hear it said, that an autobiographer ‘relives’ his past in the writing of it. The autobiographer alas knows differently: to narrate one’s past is to be driven through it without stopping.” To fall so fortuitously onto “without stopping,” the title of Paul Bowles’s autobiography and an echo of the book now in your hands, sounds like a warning.
“Rousseau presents two large and separate subjects to the reader: the self that was given to him by nature, and the self that he created for himself.” Though of course the self we create for ourselves is the self given us by nature.
“… when he felt his career as an author was at an end, he reverted to his old aimless, cheerfully idle, natural self.”
I’ve introduced a massive cast but haven’t made them do anything, much less interact. Well, life has no plot. Yes, but a book isn’t life. Still, I’m relieved at having made the decision to close these pages by the end of 1951. Meanwhile, like a horse which at evening, nearing the stable, gallops ever faster, I shall abridge increasingly.
Life is a book.
33. Marie-Laure in Paris
“You ain’t no oil paintin’, but you are a fascinatin’ monster,” declares Mae West at the close of Klondike Annie, pulling Victor McLaglen into her all-forgiving bosom. The description could fit Oscar Dominguez who was certainly a monster, if not quite fascinating, but in fact a sort of oil painting by nature. Elephantine of body, hydrocephalic of visage, semi-incomprehensible of speech, Oscar was an Hispanic artist completely in thrall (as were all Parisian artists) to his compatriot, Picasso. Because he was not Picasso, Oscar drank. Born ugly in Tenerife in 1906, he never accommodated to any beauties of our physical world and thus became a natural recruit for the surrealists as debunker of virtually all standards, high and low. He was proud of his Canary Islands origins, spoke fairly fluent French with a thick accent, flailed rather than walked, and was likable when sober. But his veneration of Picasso was abject, and Picasso, who doubtless felt warmly toward him in the good old days, was now wary of the woozy impromptu visits Oscar often paid. Oscar’s own pictures and sculptures were not, except for an occasional foreshortened face with three eyes, especially Picassoesque; nor did they in any way resemble himself, as the work of a true artist somehow must. They were precise, geometrical, like a teacher’s layout, with square or round spaces left for the pupil to fill in with primary colors. Marie-Laure’s “rich-girl” pictures, with all their lack of discipline, vibrated with a more personal urgency than Oscar’s, a fact which made her uncomfortable because males are better than females, and anyway her lover, by virtue of being her lover, is by definition a genius.
But Oscar and Marie-Laure were not yet lovers when I dined with them that May evening in the Bar d’Enfer on rue Campagne-Première, near Oscar’s apartment in mid-Montparnasse. Oscar took an immediate shine to me, called me then and thereafter Dorian Gray or mon fils, loudly embracing me in public with the open-hearted extroversion of one safe in his heterosexuality. For the moment he was under control, attentive to Marie-Laure, filled with questions about me, answers about himself. His elephantiasis, for example, he credited to excessive masturbation in his youth. Did that happen too in Chicago?
She imagined herself a bohemian, mistress of a painter, benefactress to a composer, hostess to the needy. The “needy” were mainly well-known visual artists—Man Ray, Labisse, Leonor Fini, Giacometti, and especially Balthus and Dora Maar who were semiweekly lunch guests in her blue marble dining room, or dinner guests at the Catalan. Just as I recall Monsieur Vadot’s Néocopie-Musicale, where I still went regularly for the duplication of scores, as a purposeful and thus an inspiring ambiance, I remember with the same pleasure four other Paris environments, icily purposeful in their nonsymbolic ability to aid in the birth of something more than themselves: the Desgobert lithograph parlor, where Marie-Laure took me to watch her etch on giant blocks in a vast space resembling Easter Island; Karinska’s studio, also with M-L, another vast space with twelve seamstresses sitting amid numberless bolts of ecru satin stitching costumes; the Steinway factory where Julius Katchen was permitted to practice from midnight to dawn among dozens of grand pianos, and where, drunk in the obscurity, I played and sang Socrate for him and Heddy de Ré; and the Catalan restaurant near the rue Dauphine. The restaurant’s tonality, being no more th
an four walls on a second floor, depended on its clientele, and this group, almost first-rate, gave off a thrilling smell not soon forgotten.
Man Ray, already sixty-one, was the eldest. For some reason I’d preimagined him as Parisian-born and was surprised to hear his broad Philadelphia accent refracted by his imperfect French. He had just returned from a wartime decade in California with his much younger wife, a dancer named Juliet, who resembled Ava Gardner. (Man Ray, in fact, had provided the cameo photo of Ava, emblem of the new film Pandora, using Juliet as model.) Though unafraid and decorative, Juliet, as a younger American, never quite fit into this nest of old buddies, relying on me as interpreter and as drinking partner. (Not that I fit in either.) Man Ray was a sober Oscar, in the sense that he never spoke without trying for effect; he spoke continually, and the effect was meant to be outrageous (“the holy-water fonts in Saint-Sulpice should be used as ashtrays”; “women are really men who have amounted to something”—that sort of thing) but not meant to offend. Like Sir Arthur Sullivan who thought his collaborations with Gilbert inferior to his now-vanished oratorios, Man Ray pooh-poohed his immeasurably special photography in favor of his comparatively mediocre oils and ready-mades. From our first meeting both he and Juliet talked always of how he had never used nonfemale models, and how I would be ideal to break the mold. After two years of this I said: Do it now. So, in a dark wool sweater, a bright red scarf, and Jerry Robbins’s dirty white raincoat, I posed for Man Ray in 1953 at his wide, dark studio on the rue Férou. On one of the negatives, at his request, I calligraphed the opening bars of the waltz “Tout beau mon coeur,” based on verses of Georges Hugnet, which I had dedicated to Man Ray and Juliet. (This song, never published, is recast as the “Bal Musette” in the 1983 suite Picnic on the Marne for saxophone and piano.)
Félix Labisse, like Man Ray, excelled more at what he belittled—in this case theater design—than in what he praised in himself: the somewhat embarrassing overrealistic nude women with blood in their hair. Like Man Ray he too was no slouch at repartee, but being francophone the words flowed more easily.