by Ned Rorem
Father and I left Twig for Chicago before the others, so as to attend a Rorem reunion in Clear Lake, Iowa. There I persuaded Father to let me go on to the city a day ahead of him. On the train I read with ecstasy The Grapes of Wrath, arriving back home around dusk. Just as I can never hear Delius or sniff the taboo incense of a Catholic church anywhere in the world without floating back to the Dorchester Avenue bedroom, so the September return from the healthy country into any city’s dusty allure contains, for an hour or two, a power more persuasive than art—Debussy (or Steinbeck, if you will) is mere embellishment. I scrambled some eggs, not knowing that butter’s a prerequisite, and stank up the house. Then went to Géorg’s at the Century Hotel. We both picked up Hatti and the three of us made the rounds of Fifty-fifth Street bars—the Old Bear, The Wharf, the University Tavern, Hanley’s. Do you recall those long-razed haunts? In the middle of the night (bars shut at four in Chicago, three on Saturdays) I invited them, plus a stranger culled en route, back to the apartment, only to find that Father had arrived in the early evening. All my life Father has had the at once touching and exasperating habit of turning up unannounced on my doorstep anywhere in the world, a reverse of the classical scenario.
In his little tale, La farce du château, Cocteau portrays a group of children who concoct an elaborate surprise for their beloved mother. Dressed in masks and robes they crawl up to her balcony and into her room, only to find her in bed with a strange man.
… nothing is as unfortunate for the people as reigns which last too long. I hear that God is eternal—which says it all.
—Chamfort
That week Hitler entered Poland, and a world war became irreversible. Man seemed not to have evolved with the millennia, not shown himself essentially “good,” nor even better than he should be; nor will he again achieve the disinterested level of other vegetables until he has hatched from out of ugly Homo sapiens confines, into the unflawed air of Bach and Giotto. Then again, Giotto and Bach depict crucifixions, while in the ideal world there would be no need of art. Or so I concluded. If the human race were evil by nature, that would have to include Roosevelt. Just to want to be president seemed corrupt inherently, concessions being obligatory from the word go. (I think I’ve used this sentence earlier. But I’m writing in an election year, forgive me.)
In the strain of resurrecting geographies and histories and liaisons of yore, the core gets lost. What was I thinking while in Twig, or Yellowstone, or at the world’s fair? What was I thinking in the arms of those strangers—or at the announcement of German encroachments—beyond how to protect my own skin? Most of the time I was thinking about music, or writing it, or reading and dreaming about it. The issue of that thinking was, ten years, forty years after, more thinking and reading and writing, while the world proper grew increasingly invisible to me, and I to it. That is the pith of an artist’s life. So his biography contains everything but the essential.
With the autumn I became sixteen and a senior in high school even as Rosemary began her freshman year at Beloit. I don’t remember how the ensuing scholastic season seemed in an atmosphere with Rosemary gone. I do remember learning, though scarcely mastering, all thirty-two Beethoven sonatas, all twenty-four Debussy preludes, and dozens of bonbons by Poulenc and Palmgren, though I’d never heard of Copland. This music, digested overnight, still remains in my hands but remains wrong, impatiently fingered, sloppily vanquished in my haste to devour it, like the drugstore pies I couldn’t enjoy for thinking of the cakes to follow. Then I played in public for the first time. In that little recital hall of the Lyon & Healy building, the hall where Edward Steuermann had given his incomprehensible all-Schoenberg program, and we didn’t know if he could really play until the encore, which was Ravel’s Ondine, and we all expired at the accurate glitter; the hall where we listened to George Perle’s new Trio, wherein the flute, viola, and piano blend in a braid of wine, silk, and quartz. With Belle as orchestra at the second piano, I performed the great Mozart D-minor Concerto, schmaltzy cadenza by Reinecke. This was in, I think, November.
The following June I played with an orchestra for the first time—which, as it happened, was also the last time—when Belle arranged for the American Concert Orchestra—a subsidiary of the WPA’s Illinois Symphony—to accompany me in the first movement of Grieg’s Concerto. (A moldy scrapbook tells me that this occurred on 21 June 1940, with one William Fantozzi conducting in the Illinois Music Hall at 632 North Dearborn. A very mixed program also featuring two solo singers.) I carefully told everyone, especially Perry, the morning of the concert, that I hadn’t yet memorized the piece. This was not true but seemed somehow theatrical, as did my bows, during which as I bent my waist I raised my eyes to take in the audience at a sweep.
Later that night, natty in my white suit and maroon tie—the required outfit for graduation from high school the previous week at Rockefeller Chapel—I drove with Maggy back to the South Side, specifically to the lagoon’s edge behind the Museum of Science and Industry. With us was Loren Smith, a dashing married man, perhaps thirty, on whom we both had a crush. Maggy and Loren necked. I just sat there, left out. I include this mainly because Loren was a good, simple, handsome friend to us all; so when the draft began gobbling males during the next two years, Loren was our first war casualty. In the navy, he seems to have been slammed in the head by an iron chain, on a dock in San Francisco, and killed outright.
Between these two concerto performances flowed the final semesters at U-High. Was I popular? Heavens, no! Too effete to be a jock, too pretty to be a nerd, too indifferent to be a prize student, too lazy to pretend to be straight, and preferring music to sports, I hardly fit in the narrow standards of the Beautiful People, although I admired, without envy, the throbbing physicality of Chuck Cahn and Elise Leiberman, of Tom Mullins and Dorothy (Bitsy) Goes, royalty all.
Father continued to be bemused by my dreary grades. He had been a Phi Beta Kappa, an organized, indefatigable worker excelling in virtually anything that can be learned, like geometry, cattle breeding, carpentry, accounting (which for years was his bread and butter), even practical English grammar, which he wrote a handbook about, predating—and terser than—Stumph’s; thus he was distressed at my profligacy. On the other hand, though he didn’t begrudge my hours passed in record listening, he felt I should channel them more systematically; since he could master that which can be learned, he envied those who could master that which can’t be learned, i.e., the arts, and felt I was going about it wrong.
Cynically staring back upon the University of Chicago’s Lab School, I learn that I learned nothing—nothing, that is, that was provided in exchange for the hefty tuition—and this was not my fault. Classes were pointless interludes between extracurricular activities. Subjects were not imparted with any sense of purpose, of delight, of goal, but as abstractions: algebra for its own sake, biology too, even French. French had begun back in third grade, under the pristine Miss Spink (very feminine, with tresses rolled into a bun encased in a blue lace snood, sharing a house on Kenwood at Fifty-seventh with Miss Millis, very masculine, with neckties neat on a stiff white shirt tucked into a wool skirt), who on the first day taught us to say: “Je prends le livre, et je le pose sur la table.” Thereafter, from Miss Spink through Monsieur Bovée, with the redoubtable wart on his forefinger, to Madame Greene, with her mean smile gleaming through the conjugations, I retain nothing. Because nothing was more than itself. Where was Madame Bovary when I needed her? During most of the 1950s French would be my sole language, no thanks to that early training, which didn’t even inform us of the second person singular, since the tutoiement had no equivalent in English. How did I master the language? Through the poetry in Poulenc’s songs—Apollinaire and Eluard and Aragon. Admittedly, this wasn’t much help with Parisian cabdrivers at first, but one thing leads to another.
Good teaching means leading a horse to water and making him drink, not solely through knowledge and nouns but through enthusiasm. Yes, one thing leads to another: the
horse, the rein, the water. Nor had I found cause and effect with Leo Sowerby; what had four-part harmony to do with the music I loved? Nor did one thing lead to another at Northwestern University, where the next two and a half years would be spent.
How did I end up in Evanston? Father, dismayed at my rejected application to his alma mater, Oberlin, because of low grades, and armed with a dozen of my composition notebooks, undertook a visit in person to Dean Beattie of the Northwestern Music School. The following week I auditioned there in person (“Can you play for us “Way Down Upon the Swanee River’ in D major?”) and was accepted.
On 14 June the Germans entered Paris without resistance and hung their banner on the Eiffel Tower. We wept; it was our France too. Special urgent value was given each free day before the start of a frightening new school next September.
Random recall:
—New Year’s Eve 1939, stricken with a strep throat, I could not go out on the town with the others, so went to bed with The Magic Mountain, which had just come out in English and which Rosemary had bought at Marshall Field’s as my Christmas present. Reading until dawn (as I would with The Idiot six years later), I finished the first third and learned more French in the Walpurgisnacht conversation between Claudia Chauchat and Hans Castorp than in all those years in class.
—Strep throats became such a recurring theme that sometime during the next year—or was it in 1941 or ’42—my tonsils were ripped from my adult body at Chicago Memorial Hospital, where Rosemary’s had been ripped years ago. The night before, I was in the front seat of a car, parked in the shadow of International House on Blackstone, with a man who forced me—but it didn’t take much force—to go down on him. Well, I thought, as I nuzzled his velour thighs, I might as well be killed for a goat as a lamb—or whatever the saying is! Next morning the operation was traumatic. Anesthetic didn’t function, the doctor explicated each bloody rent to a pair of anxious interns, then dangled the severed tonsils in his forceps before my eyes. I cried profusely for hours. Next morning they gave me pear juice, sent me home, couldn’t swallow for days, but sulpha coated my throat in ermine. A week later, out drinking, a hemorrhage let loose. Convalescence for a month. I never saw the man in the car again, but would have liked to. I still get strep throats.
—To be in your parents’ car taking you to church, and to drive by the place—a bar, a bench—where last night you fell in love.
To be in a police car taking you to jail, and to drive by your own house where Mother is expecting you home from school.
—Sunday afternoon outing with the whole family where they’re showing Kitty Foyle. Across the lobby is Frank with a group of friends. I’m currently having an affair with him, but my family certainly doesn’t know. We nod imperceptibly to one another.
—Did I mention that, with Mann and Cocteau and Dos Passos, Hugh Walpole was my favorite writer, and that I planned to make an opera from The Inquisitor? Did I mention that I hate the jangle of ice cubes? Or that when we sang the college songs in Mr. Vail’s music class, I heard them as the French hear what they call olorimes: “Wave the flag for Old Chicago, without a peer she stands” evoking a stalwart female, somehow headless (on our library shelf stood a miniature reproduction of the Nike of Samothrace), walking on water? (“Lead me not into temptation” became Lead me not into Penn Station, and Inquire became ink wire.) Did I mention that Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, already a mythological pair in early 1940, performed Romeo and Juliet in the drafty Auditorium Theater, after the Ballets Russes had left, but no one could hear a word. (Twenty-five years later, when Olivier had his face-lift, he told John Houseman who told Virgil who told me: “I looked so good I wanted to go down on myself.”) Did I mention that Ella Fitzgerald’s way with words was a way culled from the twenties and stretching outmodedly into the sixties: she put a mordant—a sort of tilde à la Falla—on unimportant words like “the” as well as on important ones like “love”? Or like Debussy’s self-conscious setting of the word “nu,” with a little trill, in Placet futile. Or like Genet’s comparing Nijinsky’s dancing to his name: the dotted j twixt the two dotted i’s sinks and rises in jerky slow motion. (Mae Swenson once in a poem drew our attention to the same iji, hoping, I suppose, that we wouldn’t have seen it already chez Genet.)
—Can there be a shape to a memoir other than through the straight line toward death by natural causes (which includes accident, suicide, and murder)? We always die alone, yes, but we live alone too. Since Man has no soul (though certain animals have), shape is moot, does not exist in nature, and the memoir will sink and rise in jerky slow motion, arbitrarily, like some negligible detail out of the Big Bang or, more likely, the Big Whimper.
11. Northwestern 1940–41
While revisiting Northwestern in 1977 to get an honorary doctorate and to give the commencement address for the music department, I passed a free hour alone in the strange, familiar patterns of the campus, stretching for a mile along the lake which gave off the identical taut, sad smell of muscle and wind as thirty-seven years earlier when I had arrived, sixteen and anxious, with my sister and her swain from Beloit, Bill Harrison, who would deposit me at the dorm, have a hamburger, then leave me to my fate away from home. Was I lonely or was it indifference? For the next two years I would not feel a part of the scene, retreating to Hyde Park on frequent weekends (against the better judgment of the parents who so carefully hoped to wean me) or to the Near North Side to see old pals and otherwise get into mischief.
There was no question of pledging any fraternities with their Neanderthal elite, but I did bunk for the first year in a men’s residence, Lindgren House, nestled in fraternity row and peopled with one-dimensional Phi-Delt hopefuls (no females allowed, which was okay, since I had frequent male overnight guests, being more able then than now to sleep in a single bed à deux), and was obliged to wear the green cap of the frosh. The cap seemed out of sync with my extracurricularity. For example: Part-time lover, Frank (how I met him I don’t recall, a blond white-collar worker, around twenty-one), who sometimes shuttled the fifty miles from his room in Hyde Park to my room at Lindgren House, was, oddly enough, a protégé of Lucius Beebe’s, gossip columnist on The New York Herald-Tribune. Beebe, a professional snob in his late thirties, was a horny class-conscious lush who traveled in a private railway car, and whom I’d heard of, if only because his likeness had just adorned the cover of Life. When he passed through Chicago one weekend that fall Frank arranged a gangbang in Beebe’s suite at the Ambassador East, which included me, another librarian boyfriend of mine named Joe Stein, Don Dalton, and a shopkeeper sidekick of Frank’s. Room service sent up magnum after magnum of Dom Pérignon (the word magnum seemed sophisticated, as did the champagne—which Beebe called simply wine) and there was lots of self-conscious orgifying lolling around, passing out, pairing off, downing raw eggs in orange juice so as—according to our host, who was pleased to épater us midwestern hicks—to replenish the sex ducts, sniffing the bottle of Russian Leather cologne on the dresser, plus one sortie to a dyke bar called Billie Leroy’s to eat rare steak. Twenty-four hours of such glamorous tedium was too much for my sixteen-going-on-seventeen years. I asked Don into the marble bathroom so as not to be alone when I evacuated; we then snuck off, took a bus home to Dorchester (setting a portable alarm to ring when we reached Fifty-seventh), and I sobered up for another twenty-four hours by the family fire. Back to the campus on Monday, I redonned the green cap of innocence.
One mile south of the dorm and almost in town loomed the Music Building, a dirty-white Victorian barn quite out of keeping with the vine-covered gentility of the campus proper. The building emitted a continually amicable clank, for in the basement were practice rooms always in use. All music classes were held here: harmony (but hadn’t I had enough at the conservatory?), taught by wizened little Albert Nolte, a schoolmate of Richard Strauss’s, and rumored to have a beautiful wife; keyboard harmony and also counterpoint with wry Earl Bigelow, who also taught piano; modern music with Felix Bo
rowski, who was lucid and caring about Scriabin’s Prometheus, which swept us all away, but I recall no other pieces; chorus with Robert Howerton, glib and wisecracking, who that year would inaugurate the new Lutkin Hall with the American premiere of Ravel’s unaccompanied Trois chansons (the middle one, “Trois beaux oiseaux du paradis,” is not only the most movingly perfect short piece ever composed but the best model since Monteverdi’s madrigals for a cappella writing); and private piano lessons—piano was my major—with Harold Van Horne, a bespectacled forty-year-old technician whom I liked immensely, and who committed suicide in the 1950s, I don’t know why. In the Gym occurred Phys Ed (for boys only, the draft was imminent), and in the Journalism Building occurred English lit., taught by Moody Pryor, sarcastic and well-informed, who whistled with contempt at my book report on Kay Boyle’s Gentlemen, I Address You Privately. (This was in freshman year. As a sophomore, after having been to Mexico, I took Spanish with Señor Carter.) We could smoke in class. And teachers no longer called us by our first names.
My friends? I didn’t have any that measured up to those I’d been raised with—toward whom my heart ever yearned. Besides, I felt that Northwestern as a center of musical instruction was pedantic and off center. (The center should have been, of course, contemporary music. Let us concentrate, as every century but our own has always concentrated, on our own music and let the dreary classics shift for themselves.) The people I did hang out with were all Jews, and they welcomed me with an instantaneous warmth that the sniffier goyim withheld. In my reticence I felt at once beholden and indolent. I felt guilty too, as a Nordic erotically drawn to Semites.
Does prejudice come in layers? In the end of Spike Lee’s film, when the pizza-parlor owner—exhausted from harassment during a heat wave—finally yells “Nigger,” does that imply that when the chips are down his true feelings will out? Do Mencken’s swipes at Jews in his Diary equate him with the Ku Klux Klan, despite his public statements in support of minorities? Do cruel words during a lovers’ quarrel express repressed truths, or are they merely the quickest path to the jugular? To wound a friend is to attack what he cannot deny (a big nose, a small cock, old age, or, indeed, negritude or Jewishness). Veritas lies not in momentary vino but in years of fermentation. I am not race prejudiced, but I make prejudiced-sounding remarks to certain people under certain conditions. Admittedly, I resent antigay remarks under all conditions, except from gays to other gays.
