Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Guests included Paul Eluard on whose long poem, Figure humaine, about the Résistance, Poulenc had composed his choral masterpiece. Nothing in Eluard’s Grecian physiognomy hinted that he would be dead within a year, at fifty-seven. His tan skin, snowy hair, black turtle-neck sweater, cherry-colored mouth, deep kind eyes, and love of the fray indicated corporal immortality. Eluard and his third wife, a strong-limbed nurse named Dominique (his first wife, Nusch, had died; his second wife, Gala, had married Dali), were summering in Vallauris where the poet, with Picasso, was collaborating on artifacts. Eluard would improvise a poem by inscribing it literally upon or among the lines already limned by the painter, or Picasso would improvise a drawing by curlicuing charcoal lines among the already written words of the poet. (Even so would Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers join talents in the next decade.) I noted at the time that Eluard quoted Picasso’s famous remark: “Every artist is half man and half woman, and the woman is insufferable.” The poet continued:

  “Actually all creators are women in men’s bodies [what, then, of female creators?—didn’t the surrealists admit them?] and I myself have mainly feminine instincts. I feel like a penetrated woman. Normally an artist seeks to sleep with men, or with the various substitutes of men found in real women. Artists like me and Picasso who prefer women are abnormal: we’re really just a pair of old dykes.” And he downed his brandy. “It’s better to be drunk than sober.”

  A firmly convinced Communist, emotionally and rationally, Eluard made me feel vaguely… well, American. Still, for him artists were the exception to any rule. This mishmash of surrealism, politics, and high art, plus the conflict and allure of different nationalities and generalities, repelled me, yet drew me to Eluard who always treated me gently, though he was clearly bored with Marie-Laure chanting my praises.

  Claus von Bülow (without the “von” in those days) showed up, un-Eluardian, dapper, from London where he was learning law and speaking English almost perfectly for one born to Danish, excepting those little giveaways like “there” for “here,” or “zed” for “zee.” Georges Hugnet came by too, and the Markevitches with whom we drove to Aix to hear Nell sing her compramario roles. Schoenberg died on 16 May. David Herbert materialized with an entourage, during which, in another room, I phoned Philadelphia (the connection required thirty minutes) and spoke to Mother and Father for the first time in twenty-six months.

  Scene:

  Marie-Laure and Oscar and me, just the three of us, having lunch at Saint-Bernard. The sliding doors are wide open, aviary and sheep bells chirping and tinkling as background to a cordon-bleu meal and to a conversation of high culture between me and the hostess. Oscar at his worst, pie-eyed, not eating. He begins:

  “Marie-Laure, you make awful noises when you eat. Get your jaws rewired. You won’t sound so pretentious when you talk. I hate the sound of eating. I hate to fuck you with your fat twat and loud moaning. I want a young girl. Or boy. You disgust me.”

  “Oh, Poochie,” says Marie-Laure. She can’t bear others shushing Oscar. I am used to his ranting, so keep mum.

  “Don’t Poochie me, you capitalist bitch.”

  Finally, I pitch in: “Shut up, Oscar.”

  “As for you, you little fairy …”

  Because he is attacking me and not her, I get up and, Quaker that I am, taking the water pitcher from the side table, empty it, cubes and all, over Oscar’s head, then sit down and calmly resume eating. At which point Henri, the maître d’hôtel, enters, observes the mess, says nothing, and serves us dessert.

  “You did right,” says Marie-Laure to me. Oscar, nonplussed:

  “Since everyone hates me in this house, I’m leaving.” Off he goes to pack his bags. Henri later informs us that Bacchat has driven Monsieur Dominguez to the Toulon station, from whence he doubtless took a train to see Picasso. Perhaps I “did right,” as Marie-Laure said, but she can’t truly believe this. Any action taken by any person that might cause Oscar to disappear is a faulty action.

  Marie-Laure often drank with him, just to goad him on. Sometimes this odd couple could look as touching as two adolescents on their first date. In Paris, Oscar generally spent the night, leaving at dawn before the concierge came on duty, for the rich are slaves to their servants. What the Vicomte felt privately about his wife’s liaison is anyone’s guess; no doubt he was relieved that Marie-Laure was occupied with something regular. Marie-Laure kept them apart, of course, though the few times they met Oscar said “vous” to Charles and never acted up. Marie-Laure, in turn, befriended Oscar’s former wife, Maud, and his former mistress, Nadine Effront, a svelte Belgian sculptor; the three would meet regularly and shake their heads over their problem child.

  But Oscar’s behavior did not improve. Nor did Marie-Laure’s tolerance waver. Indeed, Oscar grew ever more intractable, more convinced of the futility of persevering in a world where only Picasso could reign supreme. In 1959 he propped a canvas upon the easel of his studio, slit the veins of both wrists and ankles, and with the blood began a painting. But he expired before it was finished.

  Marie-Laure never recovered, for this was the insulting close to an affair in which she had invested everything, patience and affection, the conviction that she was truly needed, and the hope that, with all its drawbacks, love will redeem us. (Auden: “Every farthing of the cost,/All the dreaded cards foretell, Shall by paid.…”)

  Marie-Laure survived Oscar by eleven years, but never drank another drop, and encouraged all others to abstain.

  On 1 August, Bacchat drove me to Marseilles. There I visited for an hour with Yvonne de Casa Fuerte who had a little house in Mitre. We sat on her terrace and watched the pewter sky turn sick in the ceaseless mistral, talking of her daughter Flavy, whom she loved, and whom Virgil had musically portrayed in his Tango Lullaby. Then Yvonne drove me to the Marignane airport where I boarded the plane for Morocco.

  During the next twenty-six days in Marrakech—my third African August—I wrote two songs, “The Nightingale” and “A Christmas Carol,” both to anonymous texts, and, on record if not in spirit, duplicated previous visits, wincing from the heat, taking excursions, swimming some, and reading constantly (Giraudoux, Gide, Sartre’s Le mur, and Peyrfitte).

  Returned to Hyères at the end of the month. Whereupon Marie-Laure and I, with Christian Mégret, set out for Italy. Since Charles de Noailles never appeared with his wife in public, much less at social bagatelles, I would escort Marie-Laure to the Ball of the Century given by Mexican trillionaire Charles Bestigui in his Palazzo Labia with its Tiepolo ceilings. Coincidental with this international mondanité was the world premiere of the Stravinsky-Auden Rake’s Progress, the cast of which contained three close friends, Cuénod and Tourel and Tangeman. These three scarcely paralleled in seriousness the guests of the ball, and the site itself was disconcerting, seeming everywhere to resound with the deaths of Wagner, of Diaghilev, of Aschenbach, or simply to echo with the sounds of quarreling. As a narcissist I felt somewhat de trop in this first trip to Venice, a city which perpetually reflects upon itself and has no eye for visitors. I romped at the core of a dying splendor. At the time, Bestigui’s fête seemed like a moral indecency. With the fading of time, Stravinsky’s opera seems even more grossly pretentious. I drank a lot; brought strangers back to the Danieli, where I shared a room with Marie-Laure, when I knew she was at the hairdresser; went to the film festival with Elliott Stein (we were quite taken with Vivien Leigh’s Streetcar); went to museums with Arthur Weinstein, who told me in livid detail about a new Robbins ballet, The Cage; and generally behaved like the belle of the ball, while both Marie-Laure and Christian wept. Christian, using my names as anagram, penned this alexandrine: Qu’il erre ou qu’il dorme, il orne le monde.

  After eleven days, Hyères again. Thence, since my Fulbright stipulated a course at the Ecole Normale with Honegger, to Paris. Of this voyage I have not forgotten the three-hour delay at the airport, during which Oscar primed himself at the bar. Once aloft, Oscar roamed the aisle like Frank
enstein, bellowing: “We’re going to crash. We’re all going to die in profile!”—his surrealist contribution to the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity of our terrified midair fellow travelers. Tom Keogh met us at Orly around midnight and we all repaired to Lipps for sauerkraut and ale. Tom had made a reservation for me at the Bisson, a delightful small hotel at 37 quai des Grands-Augustins overlooking the Seine. At 4 a.m., when I went to check in, as I stood on the pavement waiting for the night clerk to open the door, a Senegalese stranger approached me from behind, beat me to the ground, made off with my passport and all my money and cards.

  Juliette Gréco too lived at the Bisson. We never spoke, but because I was in love with her, I enjoyed her presence like a fashionable ghost in the halls.

  Jerry Robbins I had met twice in the States, but he only vaguely remembered. Here he was now on 2 October at the Boeuf on rue du Colisée, and we hit it off. I had seen two of his ballets. The carefree Fancy Free in 1944 had skyrocketed both him and Lenny Bernstein to fame. (One wonders at the fate of the world if Paul Bowles, the original choice, had composed the score and not Lenny.) The neurotic Facsimile in 1946, again with music by Bernstein, cemented the fame. Jerry danced in both of these madly American works, electrically sensuous with his swarthy complexion and thinning hair. The crescendoing score of Facsimile crackled like a hostile generator when, in a violent pas de trois, Robbins and another male dancer tossed the odd-looking Nora Kaye back and forth between them, until she screamed “Stop! Stop!” And they stopped. The three of them. The music too. And there was silence in the house.

  Now Jerry talking, affable like the city, was informally stimulating. What was he doing in Paris, without a dance company, adrift but social? Was he biding his time before flying back home to face the McCarthy hearings, perhaps to name names, perhaps to be blackballed from gainful employment? The anti-Communist turmoil in America was not a fact of life to expatriates, at least not to me, and Jerry never rubbed this in, thinking me ingenuous on many a topic, especially painting and politics.

  During this brief autumn, Jerry exhaled humor and innocence; it was a constant pleasure to behold the world through his choreographer’s eyes, eyes as receptive as the enthralled eyes of those children in the Tuileries which Jerry found more engrossing than the Guignol that so bewitched them. Every situation which confronted him, Jerry saw as a prospective dance. For example, he was highly amused at the relation between Guy de Lesseps and Nora Auric, the handsome oaf and the domineering female.

  “I must make a ballet,” he announced, “called Madame Auric’s Lover. Beautiful lady in leather, whip in hand, emerges onto long, slanted platform and summons her fool.…”

  “What music might you use?”

  (Pause) “A Liszt concerto.”

  Another time, at the Cirque d’Hiver, we witnessed an American trapeze artist, the black-eyed Rose Gould, whose silent style between demonstrations was as riveting as the leaps themselves. Motionless, she posed for a minute—two minutes, five minutes—on the fragile aerie in the highest curve of the tent, left hand gripping the trapeze bar, right arm stylishly behind her neck holding up the raven tresses until they flared, left leg rigid, right leg bent like the Venus di Milo’s, waiting, waiting, as we too waited. Without warning she flung herself into space, with a drumroll of ohs and ahs, and alit somewhere miles off with self-congratulatory aplomb. Now she wriggled and bowed and blew kisses. “She is,” said Jerry, “the Norma Desmond of the high wire, and I shall make a ballet on her.”

  Marie-Laure, who grew fond of Jerry, pronouncing his name “Jeddy,” English-style, invited us for a weekend to her husband’s estate, the Palais de Pompadour, in Fontainebleau (while the husband was abroad), and brought along Oscar too. Jerry both did and didn’t take Marie-Laure seriously. If he was impressed by her luxury, he was appalled by Oscar. We played croquet. Also charades. He liked games, improvisations. Before the evening meal on Sunday Jerry came into my room, which adjoined his own, waving a piece of paper.

  “Look what I found in the desk. Stationery marked Hôtel de Pompadour. She’s rented a hotel for the weekend!”

  I explained that the first definition of hôtel was mansion, or private town house. Still, Jerry wanted to play tricks.

  “When we go down to the dining room let’s say there was a lady moaning up here in the hall, dressed in white.”

  Later, in the dining room, Jerry said: “There was a lady moaning in the hall.”

  Marie-Laure, without missing a beat, asked: “Was she dressed in white? That must have been Charles’s great aunt. She often shows up on Sundays.”

  We drove with Marie-Laure and Boris Kochno to Enghein where yet another ballet company spread its wares. Boris to Jerry:

  “I’d love to commission a ballet from you, but I don’t have any ideas at the moment.” Jerry to Boris:

  “Well, I’ve a few of my own.”

  He explained to me later that Boris dated from that Diaghilevian epoch where scenarios were provided to hirelings, as from the Esterházys to Haydn.

  Unreal yellow misty velvet weather.

  We went Chez Geneviève in Montmartre and heard the patronne bleat Prévert to an accordion background. We went to Inez Cavanaugh’s in the Latin Quarter and lent her money.

  We went to visit a married pair called Tyne in the rue du Dragon where the very blond Shelley Winters, with her self-centered ear-splitting ungrammatical assertions, lent new meaning to the noun “vulgarity.” Farley Granger, her recent partner in Behave Yourself, was there too, slow to react but very much the movie star in looks.

  We went to hear Gieseking together.

  At the Deux Magots Jerry introduced me to Ellen Adler, Stella’s daughter, who had been living for some time with René Leibowitz. Ellen intimidated me, not only for her dizzying black-tiger beauty but because she seemed to know who she was, because she had the assurance of “popular girls,” and because she and Jerry seemed to share something—something theatrical and Jewish—that excluded me. (A year later, when I met Stella in New York, I said I’d seen her daughter in Paris. “The beautiful one?” murmured Stella. I wondered if there were another ugly one.)

  We conversed at length about collaborating on a ballet, to a point where in the following month I enthusiastically completed the piano score of a multimovement affair temporarily titled Ballet for Jerry. (Just as Copland had subtitled Appalachian Spring, “Ballet for Martha.”) He never used it; instead he took Debussy and made a dance called Ballade. I in turn stirred much of it, plus much of Mélos, into a third ballet written with Jean Marais early in 1952.

  Jerry sadly flew home to face the music on the day of Saint Hilarion, 23 October, my twenty-eighth birthday.

  “La vie est grave, l’art est gai,” said Marie-Laure, quoting Schiller.

  • • •

  Our entente was cordiale during meetings thereafter, but never with the same ingenuous blush. When I lived again in New York we saw each other maybe once a year until 1965 when The Paris Diary came out. Since then, when we’re in the same room together every five years or so, Jerry doesn’t recognize me.

  During this October, besides the Ballet, I composed a durable work called Cycle of Holy Songs. Where did I find the time?

  Composers compose, twenty-four hours a day; that is their calling. Sonorous spores forever whirl in their semiconscious searching for a stable idea, a form, on which to regroup themselves and start to grow. For a composer of vocal music, the stable idea is a text that asks to be sung, and the spores are swatches of prose or poetry that can be glued together into an inevitable-sounding cycle.

  If today, some hundreds of texts later, I have mixed feelings not just about the kinds of words that “ask to be sung” but about the very legitimacy of setting words at all, back then I felt that you can’t go wrong with the Psalms of David; they were conceived for song and no other outlet will do. I selected four, bound the diverse tempos together with a recurring thematic chord, musicalized the effusions according to the one voice I knew
best, Nell Tangeman’s, and finished the ten-minute group in three weeks. Hugues Cuénod read them through for me one evening at the Gouin’s, after which I sent them to Nell who gave the first public performance the following February, with Janet Fairbank’s erstwhile accompanist, Henry Jackson, at the piano, in Washington’s National Gallery.

  Displaying these efforts at Honegger’s class I felt both thrilled and gypped when he declared: “I’ve nothing to say. These songs are perfect.” Wouldn’t the other students resent me?

  And Arthur Honegger himself?

  He had the kindest face I’ve ever known, and an unaffected intelligence which served as both balm and kindling to his dozen pupils during his final years. Those years were nevertheless charged with both physical and moral torment which he dissimulated (at least with us) except for an occasional clenched fist or tired sigh. The quality of lucid restraint glimmered also through the surface fury of his art, and made him (thanks also to the somewhat sentimental and “visual” texts he often chose) the most accessible of so-called modern musicians for the general public.

  In 1951 the French crowned Arthur Honegger (although he was Swiss) their National Composer, voting his music as that most likely to survive the millennium. But a decade after his death in 1955, a curtain was pulled, not only on his life but on his work; nobody—not even the average Parisian to whom he was perhaps the one known composer—has talked much about him since. Those mid-fifties were already dominated by the traditional revolutions of the young even as Honegger and his friends had dictated the mid-twenties’ tone, not so much in denigrating as in ignoring their elders. Nowadays the life span of new generations has shrunk to about five years, and musicians grow ever more quickly in and out of vogue. Unlike painters, death does not increase their market value. Except for Bartók (who was hardly cool in a debtor’s grave before he was taken up internationally), no composer since the war has died with impunity—meaning with glory. Some, of course, like Griffes or Satie, are “discovered” by the intelligentsia a few decades late; others, like Ives or (to an extent) Poulenc, come in for revivals by the amateur. Neither category of listener seems yet inclined to disinter Honegger, although it had been his life’s desire—and here maybe was his tragic flaw—to attract both the great mass and the elite through the same pieces.