Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  For our delectation Father wrote (in longhand) a book called Two City Children. Even as an infant I had the tact not to admit the boredom I felt as chapter succeeded chapter. Was the university section of Chicago, known as Hyde Park, truly our city? Still today the neighborhood, unchanged in so many ways, looks suburban, even rural with its vacant lots, wide alleyways, and yellow three-story granite apartment buildings with their uniquely Chicagoan back porches of gray-painted wood.

  We did go to the real country, however, during summers between 1924 and 1929, stopping first at the maternal relatives in South Dakota, then to Grandfather’s Rorem’s in Clear Lake, Iowa.

  At 916 Pine Street, kitty-corner from Yankton’s college campus, Grandaddy and Mama Miller owned half a brick house which contained themselves; their oldest daughter, Pearl (my mother’s sister); and Pearl’s six children by her ex-husband, Nash: Margery, Robert, Lois, Kathryn, and the twins, Ralph and Richard. The spontaneous tonality of this warm tribe was all that Mother loved and missed and, in her dotage, languished for, mixing it in her dreams with her own laughter and casual upbringing before World War I. She worshiped her father with wistful resentment; shouldn’t the long hours spent on the souls of his congregation have been better passed with his wife and children? But when he was home, he had lavished his time on the prettiest garden in town.

  I am in love with him to whom the hyacinth is dearer

  Than I shall ever be dear.

  Mother used to quote Millay’s verses with a frisson:

  On nights when the field-mice are abroad he cannot sleep:

  He hears their narrow teeth at the bulbs of his hyacinths.

  But the gnawing at my heart he does not hear.

  Gladys never allowed cut flowers in our home, and attributed to her father’s garden her hay fever, which I so violently inherited.

  Grandaddy, venerable now, was adorable and kind, every inch a retiree from the ministry, a twinkling eye, a Van Dyke goatee, and a continuing fondness for plant life. He honored culture without being cultured, and was proud of having heard, more than once, the singing in recital of Adelina Patti. He also knit, and taught us all to do likewise. Booties were a specialty, azure and pink, but sweaters and scarves too. I learned to cast on, but not to cast off, so that the mufflers I devised in winter grew to thirty feet and had to wait till summer for Grandaddy to give them the coup de grâce.

  Mama Miller: feeble, smiling, long-suffering, tresses coiffed high in Victorian style. Pearl and her brood were earthier, less problematic, than we Rorems. The twins ribbed Grandaddy (“When was Lincoln shot?” “Why, in 1865.” “Wrong. Nine months before he was born.” Hoots of laughter. I didn’t get it), and they would ride me, the urban sissy, by grabbing my neck and forcing my face into their pungent armpits. Robert, graver and older, nevertheless cracked jokes and cut capers in imitation of Jack Oakie. He would marry early and propagate, leaving more of his flesh to the world when killed by the new war than did his uncle and namesake when killed in the old war. The girls talked about boys while making peanut-butter fudge, pitcher after pitcher of Kool-Aid, and deep trays of Jell-O embellished with apples and cherries to soothe us from the parching heat which relentlessly, almost visibly, rolled east from the Badlands undiluted by a Great Lake. Ruby-throated hummingbirds throbbed motionless in midair before darting into the bloody hollyhock.

  Because of the heat I was allowed to spend nights on the lawn with the twins. We lay on our backs to watch the shooting stars of August while chomping on raw potatoes, neatly peeled and flavored with salt which turned their white flesh blue. The twins, five years older than me, emitted a rustic masculinity which I found disturbing without knowing why. Toward dawn cool breezes rose; but with the first sun ray the insulting warmth returned. Drugged in the grass and sweating with insomnia we would stare at the now-ugly cinnabar sky seeping mercurial pus between clusters of steaming clouds like old ladies wringing their hands, then stagger back toward the house in slow motion, turn on the fans, and go to bed.

  Once on the slow train to Yankton out of Sioux City, we saw a girl, about ten, screaming. She screamed and screamed, distracting the whole car, then ceased and bit her fingernails. Then began to gyrate and yell, “I’m going to dancing school, that’s where I’m going.” Her sole companion was an older man who seemed embarrassed. Father told us they were probably headed for Redfield, where the state asylum for children was. He explained that the girl was insane. I’d never heard the word, and thought about it a lot.

  On Clear Lake little returns to mind beyond the bitter privet leaves that we would chew into a pulp, slate sidewalks on which to play hopscotch, and the unshaded whine of midwestern female relatives sounding sad even at their happiest, like certain lesbians whose vocal drone resolutely shuns the giveaway nuance they deem too feminine.

  Does a diarist recall an occasion more radiantly through what he later wrote about it than through how it now rattles the memory without benefit of interim editing? In April 1974 I returned for several days to South Dakota and Iowa for the double premiere in those states of a big oratorio called Little Prayers. This evening I remember nothing of how Yankton looked that April, although I mentioned the occasion at length in a published diary. But the Yankton of forty years earlier still throbs like the hummingbirds undimmed.

  I think, therefore I am. Well yes, of course I think. But am I?

  Somewhere along the line Rosemary had her tonsils out. Oh, the sight of her sitting there, on the counter in the entrance of Chicago Memorial Hospital, bright tam-o’-shanter atop her frightened face, little legs in half-hose dangling as Father filled out forms or something.

  She grows smaller. Do people leave daughters alone in hospitals? That picture too is fading.…

  In Paris during the summer of 1953 I composed, with no special aim, a setting for chorus and organ (the first of many works for that useful combination) of the un-Parisian thirteenth chapter from Corinthians. Rereading the text, I wonder if I believed it then, as I disbelieve it now, especially these phrases:

  When I was a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child:

  but when I became a man I put away childish things.

  For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face:

  now I know in part: but then shall I know even as also I am known.

  Had I, have I, become a man? To understand as a child—isn’t that the mysteriously lucid mode of an artist’s mind? Isn’t the putting away of childish things the abandonment of scope and fancy, acquiescing to the safety of grown-up reasoning? Is it not adults who see through glasses darkly, children who see face to face? Yes, I still know only “in part,” but shall never aspire to “know even as also I am known.” (Gide: “Do not be too quick to understand me.”) And though age is more precious than youth—anyone can make a child, while long survival takes channeled energy (or is it merely blindness that allows us to prevail on this sorry planet?)—still, youth is the madness of ego.

  Anyway, I never put away childish things to a point of forgetting the manic idiocies of the under-ten. That aimlessly complex game, for instance, of leaping over Father as he lay on the parlor floor. Yes, Rosemary had dolls, Patsy-Ann dolls, which didn’t interest me, but neither did baseball. We both had bedtime companions, slices of old sheets or of Mother’s cast-off pink silk slips, which Rosemary called Whoffy and I called Foffy, and which we would cuddle as we fell asleep.

  Pink cheeked and wide eyed, children have undifferentiated notions of justice; their knack for cruelty turns even rawer than that of big folk whose power they seek to emulate. (The Sioux, exhausting their program of tortures, turned captives over to the children.)

  Am I interested in children? Not especially. I identify with them, am jealous of them, can admire the more gifted of them, but on the whole they bore me. I resent their breathing of my air, and their being, finally, stronger than I in their guilty naïveté and dumb, smooth bodies.

  Power of children. The last time Father took me over h
is knee I burst out laughing. Spankings were ended forever.

  Was there any crime on earth for which I did not feel responsible? About homosexuality I had no guilt at all; I tried to, but could not.

  How I loved Mother, her lemony hair which I brushed, her lap which I jumped into, her aromatic clothes closet which left me intoxicated, her ability to bend her double-jointed elbows like Sargent’s portrait of Madame X. But I tested her by kicking tantrums without (I can still think of no) reason.

  Do mothers experience the same pleasure nursing a female infant as a male? Do fathers experience the same satisfaction teaching a male child as a female to steer a car, with that child sitting in his groin?

  Summer of 1929, for the first time, we spent in Oberlin, site of Father’s alma mater, and current home, on Woodland, of his eldest sister, Agnes Thompson, and her five good-looking offspring, all much older than us: Olga, the blond eccentric; Phyllis, who married a Catholic; the two boys, Maxford and Junior, who were house painters with their father, Emmett; and Kathleen, the youngest, who was learning the viola, later to join the Toledo Symphony, marry flutist Ted Harbaugh, and have a son, Ross, currently cellist with the New World Quartet.

  Of Oberlin I retain the picture of a long Giverny garden of zinnias—coppery, russet, fire, crimson. And kohlrabi, a staple on the Thompsons’ table. The menu otherwise resembled that of Yankton or, indeed, that of ourselves in Chicago: overcooked vegetables, scalloped potatoes, overcooked pork chops and steak, no seafood ever except salmon loaf, popovers, salads of apple and walnut melded with Kraft mayonnaise, or of cottage cheese and pineapple and marshmallows, desserts with a gelatin base, or of chocolate wafers slapped together with home-whipped cream. (It would take another decade before I tasted garlic, or even heard about corned beef, pasta, gefilte fish.) No one in the Middle West “ate dinner”; one “had supper,” and preparations for this, especially in large families like our country relatives, required an afternoon. During years of dining at the better tables of France I never encountered the … the final satisfaction of American cuisine (including canned apricots), and loathed rare beef.

  Scene: Playing King of the Mountain with plump Mrs. Wigton and her two sons, Teddy and Billy, who lived next door. We’d try to climb on the bed while Mrs. Wigton pushed us off with her feet. The back of my head was ripped open against the radiator, and to this day I have a scar where no hair grows.

  Aunt Agnes played piano and gave us lessons in sight-reading. (Or was this a few summers later?)

  Where indeed was music during the formative years? Yes, our parents were “cultured,” immersed as they were in the intelligentsia of the University of Chicago’s young marrieds, but our exposure to the finer things of life came mostly through books and pictures (every painting in the Art Institute of the 1920s is as branded on my brain as Cleopatra’s “burnished throne burned on the water,” and so are the two brass lions welcoming visitors to Michigan Avenue). Music would surge only in the 1930s.

  I do remember one event, a Passion perhaps it was—but where did it take place? in a church?—with massive clanging, wild-eyed women rushing up and down aisles with shawls on their heads, singing, and I shook with incomprehension and fear. Mother said I shook because of Art. And don’t I remember a choral event in Orchestra Hall where the singers issued onto the bleachers endlessly—“like a nosebleed,” was my simile—followed by harps and tubas and such, which were as much fun to watch as to hear? But it didn’t stick.

  If this was Art, I hadn’t yet grasped that its appreciation required the shifting of a perception from one plane to another, that music was the translation of an experience into a separate form. Much less did I grasp that the shifting, the perception, were controlled by the artist. Or that the artist is like everyone else, only more so. Like everyone else, but no one else is like him.

  I was thus even further from learning that an artist is not his work, that I could feel cheated and lonely because, say, Wilde the man died before I was born, we never shared this world. Does he live still in his book? No, the book is not him; it doesn’t know us, we know it. What about tenth-rate artists who are nevertheless “sensitive”? What of themselves lies in their (derivative) oeuvre? Stravinsky claimed he was merely the vessel through which The Rite of Spring flowed. He was an idiot savant. Geniuses are all village idiots.

  “Don’t look back,” said Cocteau, who spent his life looking back, “or you risk turning into a pillar of salt—that is, a pillar of tears.” I have just looked back over these first pages and have not turned into a pillar of tears, though I do weep at their inexpert and fragmentary form, and realize in my flailing soul that what counts has already been used up, is unrevivable.

  In autobiography, as in any crafted work, technique lies in omitting. Not omitting through tact, but through a sense of shape. Actual life repeats and repeats and repeats itself.

  When I tell people I’m writing a memoir they say, “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for ages?,” referring to the published diaries covering the years 1951 through 1985. A memoir is not a diary. Diaries are written in the heat of battle, memoirs in the repose of retrospect. A journal entry, even when honed before printing, is made from reaction to a recent occurrence, or to a current state of mind or heart. A diary has no responsible literary outline, is forever ongoing. A memoir melts the jellied past into a new consistency. It does have an outline, but the outline must be discovered, chiseled from an already existing shape which, paradoxically, is not already existing.

  One of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi heroes takes a day trip back through Time to the jungles of prehistory. There he finds a transparent floating path winding without contact among the lianas and coelophysis. The understanding is that the hero will look but not touch, for if the least ant is crushed the future will be altered. Nevertheless he plucks a leaf. When he returns across eighty million years to the present, he is able to read but not to comprehend the world he left only yesterday. Each word and thing is slightly askew.

  Would my memory of Bradbury’s story prove incomprehensible to Bradbury? Would these recollections from the trove of childhood prove incomprehensible to the child himself, were he to return and coexist with me, which in fact he has?

  3. Preadolescence (1930–36)

  In 1929 my father’s knowledge of accounting, business, and statistics earned him an appointment to work on studies that already had been started by the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care. In the next two years he completed and saw the publication of two such studies: The Public Investment in Hospitals in 1930 and Private Group Clinics in 1931. This work took Father to Washington, D.C., for eighteen months. We lived in Chevy Chase—first at 18 Hesketh, later on Rosemary Street (the name was a thrilling fortuity for my sister)—the only period in my familial cohabitation centered elsewhere than Chicago, and the only period when we lived in houses, not apartments.

  Closing my eyes tight I squeeze out images as from a painter’s tube and smear them pell-mell upon the page. Here is our bungalow on Hesketh, Mother handsome as a model flapper, likewise cousin Olga, who is staying with us; there is the new puppy, Simba, half collie, half shepherd. (Father and sister are not in the picture.) Behind the house glimmers what seems a forest but is probably no more than an overgrown suburban acre, uninhabited. The lungs of the forest exhale green rot and a rusty growth of moss, tortoises, ferns, oaks, and crickets, all to my ecstatic joy, for I want to be a biologist someday, and move to Africa and live with Tarzan.

  Tarzan gave me an erection. The twins in Yankton said Jean Harlow gave them an erection—a hard-on, they called it—and couldn’t understand why Tarzan, or indeed the entire unquiet universe of Edgar Rice Burroughs, should affect me so. The phenomenon accounts for the first of three episodes I recall from Hesketh Street:

  Discovering that a mere thought could visibly affect my anatomy in a trice, it seemed proper to share the game. A prepubescent erection may be a pathetic twig of hairless ivory, yet an erection it remains. One morning, faking a fever, I
stayed home from school. Amid the bedclothes I built a farm, using pillows, little boxes, and other paraphernalia about the room. Then I concentrated on Tarzan, got the erection, called Mother. “This is the farmyard,” I said. “Here is the barn, here is the pigsty, and here”—I displayed myself—“is the silo.” She was shocked. I must never do that again, she would tell Father.

  Second episode. What grade was I in in Maryland? (I remember first grade in Blaine Hall at the University of Chicago because a soprano came to the holiday party and sang a quick ditty, rolling her Rs, “Merry Merry Christmas,” which caused giggles; and second grade with Miss Parker; and third grade with Miss Richardson. Were Rosemary and I here at some intermediary class?) The school building itself remains indelible, across a vacant lot, walking distance from home. One day there appeared in the vacant lot a deep hole with a dead horse, eviscerated. We were drawn to it, stunned; the glassy eyes, the clotted mane, the cramped pose, the wound from which flowed yards of multicolored intestines, the brown blood, the suffocating feculent stench. For weeks afterward, in confusion and terror, we played Dead Horse, twisting bedsheets into the shape of rainbow ejecta, laying the ghost.

  Third episode. Early morning. Our parents tell us to go look out the back window, there’s something new. That automobile, we assume, is the neighbors’, so “something new” must be the wheelbarrow. But no, the car is ours, an Essex, secondhand, odd colored, like khaki or a fat tick or baby vomit. Immediately we took a ride through Rock Creek Park. Father was a pretty good driver, if overfast and absent-minded. Mother had country talents: she could rend an apple neatly in twain with a twist of her bare hands; could peel the rind from an orange in one long golden belt. But her driving was ponderous, dutiful.