by Ned Rorem
Of those pieces, the one which most realized his desire, Joan of Arc at the Stake, seems now as frozen as a Griffith spectacular, featuring what Virgil once called “that least musical of instruments, the spoken voice.” Yet Virgil cited Pacific 231 as among the five most significant works of our first half century. That piece has not, however, remained noticeably in the concert repertory, while performances of a gem like Pastorale d’ été are rare as hens’ teeth. Certainly Honegger’s String Symphony does not go unheard, and his oratorio, King David, is practically a staple in our more elegant Episcopal churches. Though all in all his music no longer fills a need for most audiences, particularly the young, and the young constitute the one public a maître most longs for.
This ostracism personally touched the gentle musician during his last years when (despite being such a vastly “appreciated” creator) he decided to publish some rather melancholy verbal reactions. These he modeled on Gide’s Corydon, using as his duologistic foil Monsieur Bernard Gavoty who, under the pseudonym of Clarendon, was France’s most redoubtable old-guard defender. Their conversations were published in 1967 with a resonance not unlike the music’s: personal and poignant, bold and witty, a trifle old-fashioned.
The personal poignance lies in the composer’s pessimism. “A few years hence the musical art as we conceive it will no longer exist,” states Honegger, who goes on to deplore the performer’s precedence over the composer: music now “comes nearer the domain of sport than of art.” Not twice but twenty times he reiterates “that we are living in the last stages of our civilization; inevitably, these last moments are painful. They will be more and more so.” He would advise young hopefuls against the profession of composer: “It is a mania—a harmless madness,” a lifetime of dedication which will reap scant glory and even less money. The talks read like the laments of an unknown failure; indeed, the first five chapters are variations on the title Complaints. Not until the book’s halfway point does a certain humor appear, albeit ironic.
His bold wit stems from this irony. Arthur Honegger was the most withdrawn—the least mondain—of Les Six who were promoted in the twenties as enfants terribles of a compound mentality, but who in reality soon went their six separate serious ways. Honegger’s way was not like Poulenc’s toward the salon and Roman ritual via Diaghilev and Latin liturgy, but toward mass culture and the Protestant ritual via professional pedagogy and vernacular Old Testament sagas. He did once collaborate, and gorgeously, with the stylish Cocteau, though his constant unqualified admiration was for the prose verse of the stuffier Claudel.
If his recollections seem a touch old-fashioned it is not so much in his wise bromides about matters professional; composers when they’re not composing have always voiced pretty much the same complaints in different words. Rather it is in his assessment of the future, i.e., our present. Forty years ago he declared: “I strongly fear that the twelve-tone fad—we already see its decline—may initiate a reaction towards a too simplistic, too rudimentary music. The cure for having swallowed sulfuric acid will be to drink syrup.” Certainly he had a blind spot—or was it a pang of jealousy?—about the newest Terrible Children. Still, greater than he have uttered worse, and anything, even a shopping list, is important if scribbled by a genius. Whether Honegger was or not remains to be seen.
Late in November I flew to Copenhagen for a weekend with Rosemary and her husband, John Marshall, who, as a biochemistical whiz, enjoyed a two-year fellowship for research paid for by Carlsburg beer. They had three children now, Christopher aged four, Mary, three, and the just-born Rachel. They called me Uncle Ned, gazing solemnly into my features through their glasses, eerie replicas of their grandparents. We went to Elsinore. How cold, how spartan, this Danish landscape after the giddy Catholic suavity of France! And handsome John, how boyish and paternal, sensible and stable!
Rosemary and I, these past years since our parents died, have grown nearer. As each other’s closest kin, on the face of it we have little in common (she enjoys group work, and populist self-expression; I’m a hermetic snob), but beneath the surface we are seldom at a loss for conversation, enjoy each other’s company, and are deferential to the individual paths.
Returning to the Hôtel Bisson from Denmark I went on another four-day binge of unprecedented darkness, during which I was robbed, and sent a suicide note to Jerry (“When you read this letter…”). Marie-Laure, shocked, urged me, when I reemerged into light, to forward a reassuring cable.
A few weeks later, same thing. On 19 December I smashed my forehead against the plumbing of the Pergola’s John. Next evening I was to accompany Marie-Laure to the unveiling of Cocteau’s Bacchus. She was dismayed, taped a bandage over the bulging sore which would not stay stanched. Thus garnished, in a black velvet suit, Marie-Laure in her bright blue gown, we arrived at the theater. During the second act, François Mauriac ostentatiously rose and fled the premises in a blaze of flashbulbs. Next day on the front page of Le Figaro he published a somewhat hypocritical diatribe against Cocteau’s anticlerical pretensions, signed “Ton ennemi qui t’aime.” (He too had tampered with the forbidden fruit.) A few days later Cocteau’s rebuttal, a sort of “J’accuse” appeared on the front page of Le Combat. Despite the vitriol between old acquaintances, their public feud was still literary and coherently argued. Could one conceive of such behavior on the front page of American papers? It seemed reassuring to be living in France. I still retain the scar on my forehead. It’s called “The Bacchus Mark” because, like the wound in the hand of Blood of a Poet, it cannot be rubbed out, and denotes my abiding faith in JC—that is, Jesus Christ and Joan Crawford.
Yet I felt myself sinking. Paris was too clever, too rich, too dangerous. I told this to Honegger, told him I craved the quiet of Morocco where settled work and love awaited. He had nothing more to give me really, and agreed that I should go away. He would sign my monthly Fulbright vouchers or whatever they were, would “cover” for me, would forward checks, and wished me a hopeful future.
We never saw each other again.
At the start of the new year I returned to Marrakech.
The racing horse slows to a trot as I gradually withdraw, sticking to the decision to cut this short on 31 December, a day celebrated calmly with Darius and Madeleine Milhaud, later frantically with Claus Bülow and Marie-Laure. Dare I dip a toe into 1952?
I would like to have talked about the ballet Dorian Gray, composed with Jean Marais on his houseboat in the Seine, and mounted in May in Barcelona where I spent an evening with Mompou, and learned to loathe Gaudi. (Every great art work is in some way a glorious mess. Gaudi is an inglorious mess—a mess of cowpads.)
I’d have liked to describe the breathless young woman, in navy-blue taffeta with ermine trim, whom Julius brought to Bousquet’s salon one Thursday, and who became a determined chum for years. This was Jean Stein, and her immediate claim to fame lay in interviewing Faulkner for The Paris Review. (Am I alone in finding Faulkner stultifying? Every twelve years I try anew, and try anew in vain. He’s the Bruckner of books. Their plodding matter! What they do with it!)
I’d have liked to enumerate the turmoil of lunches with Cocteau, where he arrived in black and yellow drag, to celebrate Poulenc’s new Stabat Mater. Or where he claimed that “Only a fool believes that two plus two make four. For the banker two plus two make twenty-two, and for a poet, two plus two make five.” Or his description of the leather-clad motorcyclists in Orphée as emissaries of Death whom they flank on either side: “O sacred cyclist, with your heart ’twixt your legs.” (Auden: “I’ve often thought that I would like/To be the saddle of a bike.”) Or his description of Marais: “Just as a camel will come to resemble a cloud, so Jean Marais now resembles a Cocteau drawing.”
I’d have liked to commemorate Henri Fourtine more than in one little entry. We met in the shadows of the Observatoire, off the Boul Mich, on 22 April, fourteen years to the night after I lost my “virginity” with Perry O’Neil. He was among the eleven Great Loves. In early May
I took the room next to his, 75 rue de Vaugirard, and we remained lovers for about eighteen months—he was my beau idéal—and friends thereafter.
I’d have liked to relate the sensation of revisiting New York in the autumn after twenty-eight months. Of, for instance, Jane Bowles’s Halloween party, to which she asked anyone who hadn’t been asked elsewhere, and where John Myers, after presenting Jane’s puppet play, A Quarreling Pair, flung me into the arms of Tennessee Williams, which led, during the following years, to composing music for two of his plays—plays less fine than the finest of his stories.… Or of John Latouche’s Christmas party’ where Frank O’Hara edged toward me on the floor and announced: “They say you’re from Paris, don’t you think Boulez is divine?” which led, during the following years, to unique collaborations.… Or of the voice of Lenny, in the studio of his new apartment at the Osborne, intoning Trouble in Tahiti (premiered at Brandeis by Nell Tangeman earlier that summer) about an ill-fated marriage, composed on his recent honeymoon, and then Felicia entering the room to find us.… Other voices, other rooms.
Such occurrences are receding now, not looming. Many many many other crucial characters want to climb aboard, though I’ve grabbed a hatchet and begun to chop off their hands.
O, but what about that man who.…
CHOP!
To stop a memoir midway is to sever a body with a buzz saw. Veins, arteries, intestines, threads of life hang limp, unattached, unresolved, plotless!
Yet where is midway? And are not all lives plotless, leading nowhere except to the unvarying inevitable? They may have themes—art, ambition, love, politics—but no satisfactory expositions, and never a recapitulation or a coda that make sense, least of all to the livers of the lives.
Epilogue
Encore un moment, Monsieur le bourreau …
—Madame DuBarry, on the scaffold
Encore un moment. J’étais au point de tout comprendre.
—Paul Valéry, when asked what his dying words
might be
“Can the jar be lovelier than the water?” asks Eluard. Can style survive content? Any self-portrait of the artist as a young person necessarily skirts the essential—the justification for the word “artist.”
This book pathetically tries to revive a brash sad boy who is dead, to describe music which can only describe itself, to invoke the gods of craft through redundant incantation. Begun as an autobiography that would end as it starts, at my parents’ deathbed, it became, when I realized how high it was growing, a mere memoir of my first twentyseven years.
This book is all Content without Style, and Content is German while Style is French. Because autobiography is German while memoir is French, it poses as memoir while in fact it’s autobiography. Speculation is fun, but tone of voice is a fingerprint. We don’t change as we advance, we become more of what we always were. The Catholic priest is right: we’re all pretty much “made” by age seven. So again the book reflects cantankerousness of age trying for spontaneity of youth.
Will it make people cry? Since I’m unable to write about what I think of others, only about what others think of me, it will not make people cry—people don’t cry for Narcissus. Is Ned even what we call “a nice person”? Did he ever grow out of his didactic vanity, while becoming more of what he always was?
To write about your life while that life is still being lived, as in a diary, is to stand still on a merry-go-round. Viewpoint shifts hourly; past expands like a peacock’s tail, while future shrinks like a decapitated head (or is it the reverse?). To write about your life in retrospect, as in a memoir, is to show how one thing leads to another (if you allow it to), and how finally, in medias res, you must call a halt. I could never today fall in love and move to Timbuktu, or arrange to be at the right place at the right time to meet someone who might be important to my career if I’m nervy enough to play the right cards.
None of it’s true, or even fact. Dates may jibe with those on a parking ticket or concert program, but the sounds of a clock ticking between 4:55 and 5:00 on that warm special Friday are unrecapturable because they—solidly—never were. None of anything’s true, there are no facts. Biography represents just one of seventeen simultaneous fugitive visions.
Truth or no truth, a whiff of melancholy does quicken the atmosphere as I recork the bottle after letting out so much air of an era gone, albeit plodding along chronologically, unironically. Whatever our bent, wherever the heart, we are all by definition spawned by our time. Poulenc’s songs are more conservative than Mussorgsky’s yet it is impossible to hear them as nineteenth century. Music does not progress in the sense of improving; it careens twixt harmonic and contrapuntal eras, back and forth, forever, never learning, but sometimes elating us poor listeners.
All is mudpies. World unrest now leaves me indifferent. It is hard to dote on the earth of today, the young with their loud blank stares, the old with their tireless warmongering. Or to believe even in song, my own or anyone’s, or in the power of literature, or in man’s goodness, or to behold other than unabatable enmity. Ninety percent of my hours are spent alone, not with the famous people used to flesh-out recollections. From such a vantage, how could I hope to snare a vanished perception? Gulps of experience, sweet and sour since 1951 (body collapsing, hair grizzling), with my music growing in and out of fashion, have inured me to trends of romance and sorrow. Or is this not true either?
Still, this book has been a friendly solace. It too, after its fifteen minutes in a pale sun, will sicken and turn to dust in a country library. But as I type these last few words, I feel unhappy at relinquishing it.
Unhappiness is not becoming after forty. Unhappiness is for the young. I’m seventy. Childhood ended forty-two years ago with the close of this book. Since 1970 I have had no alcohol, no tobacco. Nor have I ever suffered a venereal disease (except crabs, scabies, herpes simplex, and an oft-broken heart), and feel less “impelled” when I write music. I do ponder the paradox of the AIDS virus which has claimed so many friends, for it too wants to proliferate, but, being a parasite, must kill its host, and so itself die; and the paradox of inspiration without which one is free to write better music. Inspiration is a trammel, a smoke screen for amateurs. I feel ready to compose a perfect piece.
When he was eighty, Father declared, as man to man: “I never make love to your mother without her reaching a climax too.” These words seemed uttered without boast, without pretense, but with a poignance (Mother already was growing vague), a generosity, even—dare I say it?—a puritanism that, though not eschewing nudity and lust, aspired to responsible fidelity, which scarcely jelled with my willy-nilly mil e tre mentality. I was deeply impressed that Father still proudly made love with Mother, the only creature, except for the distant Miss Ring, he had ever slept with, and that Rosemary and myself had once emerged from the vapors of those “climaxes.”
More than sex or love, appreciation is what humans crave and seldom get. So I am lucky in having always known what I wanted to be, in being able to be it, and in being acknowledged for being it. If jealousy goes hand in hand with success, then no, that faraway Ned is not “a nice person.”
It’s not easy, in life as in art, to practice that most urgent virtue of knowing how to stop. But the Ned who was speaking has gone. The setting’s the same, but new actors crowd the stage.
And that galloping horse? That literary conceit for my alter ego? He doesn’t seem to be here in this stable where I’m about to cease writing. Indeed, some hours ago he veered off toward the horizon.
I’ve quite lost sight of him.
PICTURE CREDITS
Unless otherwise credited, all pictures are from the author’s collection.
P. 270: Paul Parker Studio
P. 279: © Herbert Kubly
P. 324: © Hella Hammid
P. 357: Victor Kraft
P. 381: Fred Plaut
P. 441: © Harold Halma
P. 508: Paris-Match/d.r.
P. 516: © Henri Cartier-Bresson/MAGNUM
P. 563: Claude R. Michaelides
PHOTO SECTION:
13. © 1982 by Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Reprinted by permission. “The Youth with the Red-Gold Hair” by Edith Sitwell from The Collected Poems of Edith Sitwell, © 1949. Copyright renewed; used by permission.
16. Patrick O’Higgens
19. Gianni Bates
23. © Harry Benson
Image Gallery
NR sanctified by John Heliker, 1946.
Morris Golde, New York, 1944.
Docteur Guy Ferrand, Fez, Morrocco, 1949.
NR with Janet Fairbank, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 1947.
NR with Maggy Magerstadt, Chicago, 1946.
Aaron Copland’s class at Tanglewood, 1946 (NR second from left).
Nell Tangeman, 1948.
From my autograph book (1956-57): Marc Blitzstein; Robert Veyron-Lacroix; James Baldwin; Kenton Coe, NR, Jean-Pierre Marty, and Aaron Copland; Edward Albee; Samuel Barber; Henri Sauguet; Lukas Foss; postcard signed by Marie-Laure de Noailles, Oscar Dominguez, and Jean Genet; Ben Weber; Francis Poulenc; Truman Capote.