Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Tyranny of innocence! What did I learn from this blackmail? Not, certainly, how to manipulate people through bargaining, since Mother did tell Father about Tillich and about the grades. I learned, but only in retrospect, that a Great Thinker, who preaches that God is the object of the human search for truth and purpose manifested in Christ, can be as fired by a lowly élan vital as you and me, and that a Great Artist is usually, in his flesh, merely another homme moyen sensuel. In less than five years this truth struck still closer to home, when younger members of the philosophy department said within earshot, “Ned is okay for screwing, but spare us his literary opinions.” I had thought that philosophy, not to mention raw intelligence, were tools for making what is known as a kinder world.

  Arnold Schoenberg was another teutonic refugee who passed through the university. The elder Rorems, the Paucks, the Tillichs, and also Cecil Smith of the music department and an appendage of the young marrieds, all attended a lecture by the Master. With a blackboard and a yardstick, Schoenberg explicated his twelve-tone system in an English incomprehensible to both Germans and Americans. During the speech Father composed this limerick:

  Here’s to our Austrian cousin

  Who handles his notes by the dozen,

  Some of us wept

  And some of us slept,

  But none of us understood nozzen.

  Frenchness arrived, oddly enough, in the guise of yet another German. The pianism of Walter Gieseking in the repertory of Debussy and Ravel (also Liszt and Mozart, who are French, too, of course) was more persuasive than the same repertory under the fingers of any Frenchman, including the ubiquitous Casadesus family. The French, at least in the first half of our century, love their own music too intensely to know how to play it. They overindulge it, caress it with nuanced sighs and romantic smiles. Ravel’s piano music at its most ornate has never a note too many, and, by being tailored, spare, crystalline as Dom Pérignon and resistant to interpretation, is strictly twentieth century. Ravel’s own performance of this music was strictly nineteenth century (Germanic nineteenth century at that), with left hand anticipating right when the two hands are scored together, and with otherwise “meaningful” phraseology. Debussy too, judging by early piano rolls, missed the point of his own music. His mind was in the present, his fingers were in the past. Gieseking had the virtuosity to play what was on the paper and no more; shading for French music lies on the page, not in the interpretive imagination.

  Among other pianists we were taken to hear, usually in Orchestra Hall but occasionally in the civic Opera House on Wacker Drive, I recall the hoary sight of that archetypical genius, Paderewski, furrowing his brow ‘neath a snowy mane and curving an elegant digitus o’er his own Minuet in G, not to mention attacking with his whole torso the annunciatory octaves of Grieg’s Concerto. I recall the giant specter of Rachmaninoff, salt-and-pepper crew-cut set off by a military tux, hovering above his inevitable Prelude in C-sharp Minor, which he deigned to offer as a bis. (I wasn’t yet aware of Rachmaninoff as final embodiment of the nineteenth-century virtuoso wherein performer and composer were one, the composer being not only his own best interpreter but a finished executor of other men’s music. Nor was I aware of the Russian’s self-destructive youth, by which I would later justify the poignancy of my own.) I recall the businesslike stance of Josef Hofmann, acolyte of the legendary Anton Rubinstein, seated at the forty-five-inch Steinway keyboard specially built to accommodate his little hands. Hofmann, too, was a composer (pseudonym: Michel Dvorksy) and a sometime carouser who in 1926 became for twelve years the director of the Curtis Institute, among whose students I would eventually be listed and among whose faculty I currently preach.

  All was not piano and dance in the extra-academic culture of our childhood. My sister and I were entranced by the husky diction and stagy action of the Russian actress Alla Nazimova, who brought her Ibsen repertory regularly to the Loop. We were taken to Hedda Gabler (which I later memorized, to Father’s nationalistic pleasure, and which introduced the allure of suicide), and twice to Ghosts, which disturbed us mightily, without our having an inkling about syphilis. During intermission at the latter play my sister and I, feeling grown up, remained seated with our parents. A dowager behind us murmured to her companion, “Imagine bringing children to a play like this,” whereupon Rosemary turned around: “It’s people like you that make plays like this necessary.”

  I bit my fingernails to the bloody quick, everybody did. (Rosemary could bite her toenails too, as could our cousin Kathryn, but I was never that limber, boys aren’t.) Mrs. Allee, our Sunday-school teacher, offered a dollar to the first person who allowed his nails to grow to “normal” length. After a restrained fortnight, I won. Immediately I began to gnaw my nails again. Mother was taking a psychology course offered free to faculty wives. She learned that people who bite their nails are short on Mother Love. That’s when she asked: “Did you ever think you’d like to marry your poor old mother?” I wanted to, and never understood years later why I couldn’t—after all, she’d asked me. (Later still, with equal discipline used to stop biting my nails, I would “control” drinking for set periods, only to replunge worse than ever.)

  I earned another dollar shortly thereafter. Father, convinced I must learn the value of money, not to mention how to interact with strangers, launched me on my magazine route. How I loathed it, pretending to care about money, pretending to enjoy competition which here as in sports was an end in itself, pretending to be alert as I slogged along my beat through Hyde Park, knocking on doors with the pitch, “You don’t want to buy a Saturday Evening Post, do you?” Unbeknown to me, Father followed at a distance, his heart breaking as I became a man. Well, I did sell a requisite number of subscriptions (was it my parents who bought them?) and received the coveted one-dollar bonus offered by Curtis Publishing to enterprising scouts.

  What did I spend the dollar on? At the butcher shop on Fifty-fifth and Kenwood, Jean Edwards and I purchased a goose for exactly one dollar, a live goose, which we brought home as a pet. None of our parents would permit the fowl in residence. We had to return it. The butcher claimed the goose had lost a pound and gave us back only ninety cents. I learned the value of money.

  Jean Edwards was my staunchest pal for years. I don’t recollect her from kindergarten, when our respective parents became intimate, but we played daily after 1931 when the Edwardses moved to 5623 Dorchester, the building next to ours.

  A rebellious tomboy, Jean had an open face, dark eyes, straight hair with bangs of chestnut silk which she never combed. Against what was she rebelling? Her family, I guess. Jean’s father, Davis Edwards, plain and walleyed like Sartre, but suave and provocative, was a professor in the speech department from whence, in mellifluous tones, he broadcast playlets over the university station about matters cultural. (Us kids—we kids?—once took roles, one line each, in a spelling bee led by lexicographer Samuel Johnson.) Jean’s mother, Jill Edwards, beautiful and suave, was a radio actress. She and her friend Judy had a weekly fifteen-minute slot on WGN called “Jill and Judy” consisting of giddy chatter on serious subjects. Later, as Mary Morgan, Jill hosted a variety show starring Don Ameche (for weeks I thought Donna Meechie was a woman), then published a book called Personality Pointers which Father described as “lessons in how to paint diamonds.” Jean’s older sister, Carolyn, was svelte and stuck-up; her kid brother, Clark, played jacks and scraped his knees. The elder Edwardses stood for “appearances,” but the privacy of their apartment was squalid. Against this stagy propriety, then, Jean reacted, with me as foil, sometimes as subsidizer (I got twenty-five cents a week allowance, she only ten).

  I am not a leader, I’m an aggressive follower, but I follow only what interests me and quit the path when it grows too straight. I have no ideas, I exploit those of friends, but I choose friends according to inborn taste and revise their notions into—I like to think—a personal lexicon. For about four years Jean was my leader toward occasional virtues and frequent follies. We brought o
ut the worst in each other.

  Our follies, all instigated by Jean but abetted by me, were standard: We stole from Kresge’s, small coin purses mostly, and were caught by the manager, who called our parents, but a week later we stole again and were caught again. From the balcony of the United Artists movie house we shook pepper down onto the audience, which sneezed paroxysmally, and were caught by the management, who called our parents. We hung by our knees upside down from the fire escape eight floors above the concrete pavement; from that same vantage we aimed water bombs and rotten eggs at passersby. We tormented a waitress at Steinway’s drugstore by saying, with a bratty snap of our bubble gum, that her engagement ring was cheap. At the school gymnasium, during noon recess when the building was vacant, we swung wildly from the rings, pissing and shitting onto the polished cedar floor; next day we did the same and were caught, our parents alerted.

  Because our families would not let us convert to Catholicism, we took revenge on the church itself. Weekdays after school we snuck into the empty Saint Thomas’s, stole rosaries from a statue of the Virgin, prayer books from the pew, spangled cloth from the altar, then hollered “fuck,” spit in the font of holy water, and fled. After weeks of celebrating a black mass in Jean’s messy bedroom we grew weary of the rite, packed up the relics, and sent them anonymously to Jean’s girlfriend, Ruth Bonfield, a Catholic. Ruth told us of her family’s horror, but we never confessed.

  We also spit in the sugary fudge we confected and tried to sell from a stand on the street, along with puny bouquets of lilac stolen from Gale Smith’s backyard; whoever refused to buy was tripped by a rope we’d stretched across the sidewalk. We put clay in the keyholes of classrooms in Blaine Hall. We corraled the entire fourth grade and urged them to jump from a second-floor window as we ourselves had learned to jump by ricocheting from a nearby tree, were caught, and forced by the fearful Miss Burris to sit with our heads lowered onto our desks during geography. We quickly but studiously soaped the windows of some stranger’s Pontiac, after rifling keys and driver’s license lying loose in the seat, and throwing these into a trash can.

  I never heard my parents raise their voices, or even disagree, except with the mutual respect of affectionate peers. Jean’s parents were therefore impressive with their theatrical bickering, or their periods of refusal to speak to each other. Eventually they divorced. Jean’s mother, Jill, moved with a new husband to the suburb of Homewood, last stop on the southbound IC—or Illinois Central—into a house three miles from the small township. One weekend when the elders were away, I went to visit. The cook was there to supervise, and a caretaker, Jake, who was not right in the head. Friday evening Jean and I strolled into town for a movie. The midnight walk back to the house was spooky. Seeing headlights approach from afar, we flung ourselves in the roadside ditch and played dead. The car slowed down, idled a moment, then sped off. We resumed walking. Minutes later a cop appeared, explained that a killer seemed to be loose and insisted on driving us home.

  We picked on poor Jake, calling him crazy, he grabbed a crowbar and chased us into the house. We locked ourselves in a tower room. Jake, unable to pry open the door, barred it. Then, screaming threats, he began circling the tower with his crowbar and a ladder that was too short. For what seemed hours we cowered. (This was only the second insane person I’d seen, after that girl on the train in South Dakota.) The cook meantime phoned Jean’s father, Davis Edwards, who drove down from Chicago, pacified Jake, delivered us from maiming, and scolded us.

  Our occasional virtues were these: We learned to tap dance. How, I don’t know—perhaps from Ruby Keeler movies, or from the spectacular matinee of Thurston the Magician who sawed his blonde daughter in half, after which she came back to life and tapped her way into our hearts. In any case we perfected a “routine” to a recording of “Anything Goes,” and presented the result at a school show, wearing identical outfits of black velvet pants and white satin shirts. I can still duplicate the steps. Less proficient was our ice skating. In winter everyone goes to the Midway, that twelve-foot-deep mile-long stretch of Jackson Park bordering the university between Harper and Cottage Grove and stopping at Laredo Taft’s block-wide sculpture which we used to crawl around in. The entire expanse is flooded to form a rink. One afternoon, after struggling for an hour on the ice, ankles splayed outward, home-knit mufflers of scarlet wool flowing dramatically (so I imagined) as in a Brueghel tableau while a loudspeaker blasted “The Music Goes Round and Round,” we vainly sought our shoes, which had been left on the bank. To this day my left Achilles heel is warped from walking home on the skate blades. We also mastered acrobatics, since we hoped to join the circus when we grew up. I can still stand on my head, walk on my hands.

  Nineteen thirty-three saw the Chicago world’s fair, promoted as A Century of Progress, and launching the term streamlined. Cars were streamlined, skyscrapers too, and so were all aspects of the fair. Jean and I daily that summer boarded the IC for downtown and spent the day in the various “streets.” “Streets of Olde England” featured the Globe Theater in streamlined versions of Shakespeare. We sat through The Taming of the Shrew (thirty minutes) eight times for love of the rugged Petruchio. Romeo and Juliet was shrunk to the Balcony and Entombment scenes, but remained indelible. “Streets of Paris” was risque because it starred Sally Rand and her fan dance. Although the city’s consensus pronounced it vulgar, Miss Todd, our art teacher, assured the class that this dance was beautiful—that the female form was nothing shameful. Parents took sides. The brouhaha provided a chance to abuse the fan dancer’s younger half-brother, Eugene, in the class behind ours, with chants of “Sally Rand, she lost her fan.”

  (A not unsimilar issue, on which parents took sides, occurred contemporaneously. President Hutchins’s wife, Maude Phelps, was a sculptor, author, liberal, and an “eccentric.” Maude made a realistic line drawing of their daughter Franya, a classmate who, like the rest of us, was on the threshold of puberty. The drawing was a frontal nude from tip to toe with budding breasts, hairless pudendum, and a pouty face in exquisitely unmistakable likeness framed by girlish braids. The picture was reproduced a thousand times on 8- by 10-inch Christmas cards and mailed to the entire faculty. Franya was taken out of school for a semester.)

  Grant Chave was the smartest boy in class, yet carnal with his intellect. During math he would delight those sitting parallel with him in the back row when he placed an eraser on his fly and bounced it around with the aid of his (newly found) erection. Like learning to ride a bike no-handsies. Interrupted by Miss John’s, “Grant, give us the square root of ninety-seven,” he’d reply:

  “Could you repeat the question?”

  “I was speaking loud and clear.”

  “Please repeat the question.”

  “The square root of ninety-seven?”

  And Grant, furrowing his brow for a moment, answered correctly. I could not have answered, yet I did not bounce erasers off my fly. I am not a leader.

  John Dillinger was gunned down as he emerged from the Biograph Theater after seeing a Myrna Loy movie. But that was in another part of town. Still, merely to be a Chicagoan was cause for comment, especially in France, for years afterward (though now not). Was I a gangster? the French elite inquired. Marie-Laure maintained that, yes, I was.

  The duet with Jean Edwards as enfants terribles dwindled naturally, not because the government of family and school felt we should be separated but because our interests were fundamentally different. Jean was in no way musical. For all her naughtiness she was unread and sexually naïve. After sixth grade she went to Hyde Park High, a public school, while I stayed on. She blossomed into a stunning creature, unselfconscious always; and though she remained in the neighborhood and had brief flings with various friends, she faded gradually into the distance. Her story contains something of Dorothy Parker’s rhymed saga of two girls, one bad and one good, who both end up marrying well and leading identically conventional lives. In 1980, when I passed through Chicago for a lecture-recital in
Thorne Hall, Jean showed up backstage with one of her eight children. She seemed subdued, intimidated, and not about to recall the bad old days.

  Mischief perpetuated in Saint Thomas’s Church was no gratuitous tantrum like so much of the other mischief. It was a bid to be noticed, no matter how abjectly, by some power—a person, a philosophy—inherently unattainable. Raised a Quaker, meaning in silence, I was drawn to the taboo glamour of the sonorous Roman mass. (Had I not been a Quaker might I not have been a composer?) Our Sunday school took field trips into “alternate” sites of worship. We sampled other Protestant sects including Baptists white and black; the long beards and orange tapers of the Greek Orthodox service on Halstead Street; the various layers—reform, conservative, orthodox—of Jewish sabbaths where we chanced upon chums from grammar school (David Levy one Monday whispered in my ear, as though it were somehow unspeakable, “Are you Jewish?”); and the regular services of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, just around the corner on Blackstone, where Rosemary and I were for a time choir children. But when we began constructing crucifixes from the family silver, Mother and Father grew leery. They grew leerier still at my pleading to become a Catholic. The removal from Quaker austerity, the galactic exploitation of the five senses in a mass that is tasted, sniffed, touched, heard, and watched, the brass and incense ornamenting the simple saints’ lives, all this returns to me whenever in the world I enter the church. Catholicism is as powerful and ubiquitous to me as the odor of Lake Michigan. Yet I am appalled by its bloody history and the fetters it has imposed on so many of my friends, alive and dead.