Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Anyway, since high school, where’er in the world I roam forlorn, it is the Jews, thank God, who act as a welcoming committee. Thus for two years my “crowd” contained mostly those I met that first week. Yet, except for violinist Ellen Greenberg, who briefly turned up later in New York, I never saw any of them again after I quit Northwestern. Slowly but surely I was absorbed, with all my shyness, into a heterosexual Jewish ambiance. But if somehow that didn’t count (since Jews are notoriously friendly, and I as a Wasp was automatically desirable, where’s the challenge?), neither did it count with women. Not until I was forty did I allow that the other sex was not inferior; those extraordinary females in my life were the grand exceptions—monsters with male attributes, like brains.

  I do remember Anna Louise de Ramus, black piano student of Pauline Manchester’s, whom Gerald Cook had told me to look up, and who was also adopted by the Jewish contingent. And Ralph Meeker, a good-looking product of the School of Speech, who, like so many actors, came to our side of campus for voice lessons, and who was affable, very. I do not remember any soloists, and certainly no composers, who went on to greater fields.

  Because the university offered degrees, and because Father believed in degrees, I remained at NU while envying my friends at the Chicago Musical College downtown, which seemed more purposeful. Classes seemed déjà vu except for my major. As a pianist I became something of a star (which only proved what a dreary lot they were here, for to myself I was middling). Under Van Home’s tutelage I grew intimate with virtually all of Chopin as well as with the Ravel Concerto in G—the one for two hands recorded by Marguerite Long and published by Durand in a lavish red and silver edition.

  Sometimes the new friends took me to football games, where I pretended to be engrossed, while inwardly frowning as ten thousand anonymous robots rose in concert and roared while something incomprehensibly minute transpired down there in the field; the Quaker in me rebelled at the players’ competitiveness, and at the spectators’ willing renunciation of their separate identities. Sometimes, if I had the family Buick, which was rare, we’d drive down to Howard Street for a drink or three, Evanston being dry, and Howard Street denning the city limits of Chicago. Sometimes, too, I’d attend campus events of real singularity. For example, when the Bartóks gave a two-piano recital, Robert Trotter and I were chosen, what an honor!, to serve as page-turners. I turned for mad Dita. Bartók’s eyes, like Picasso’s, were rays that pierced to your unworthy soul, but whereas Picasso’s were hot and humorous, Bartók’s were like black ice. Their program featured both Debussy’s magical and disturbing Lindaraja (which I never heard again, but which lingers indelibly), and his En blanc et noir which in retrospect is the one mistake from he-who-can-do-no-wrong (everything’s right about it except it). Another time I attended a lecture by Thomas Mann, sitting noticeably in the front row, a dissolute Tadzio, so as to distract the master, who gave an anti-German speech in a gruff accent, and who didn’t once glance my way.

  Mostly, however, the nonscholastic hours were spent on home ground. I felt more comfortable in Mandel Hall’s coffee shop at the University of Chicago with Maggy than at any Evanston hangout, or seeing French movies at International House—called Int-house—up on the Midway with Hatti. Maggy had now left home and was living with Hatti in an empty flat on Harper and Fifty-seventh. Hatti, meanwhile, finding herself pregnant, married the “evildoer,” a fetching French cellist named Andrew Martin. (The apartment was called MagMar, though I don’t recall Andrew living there.) Down the street was the Art Center, where Mother volunteered and where tea was served in the late afternoon, when she would don a bandanna and read palms, a craft learned from her sister, Aunt Midgie. Still further down were the university hangouts like Woodworth’s bookstore, then the university itself with the blond poetasters and stocky hockey players, an alluring milieu into which I blended—and yet didn’t—with Maggy, who was the unique friend to still call me by the baby name of Nedo. Here too, in this ocean of Gentiles, I felt guilty, since I should legally be in Evanston where tuition was being paid. I felt guilty at being innocent—at playing innocent (the besotted Tadzio)—just as I felt guilty at liking sweets. The mere word cake embarrassed me: what tastes good must be bad. Like sugar, like Debussy, like wine, like passivity, and yes, like Jews. And now like Gentiles, when they became taboo.

  Everyone’s life is an act. We play ourselves.

  Did we break each other’s hearts? Looking back, did we have the time? Promiscuity reigned. We kept lists of those we slept with. My own list grew so extensive, finally so nameless (the boy from The Wharf, the man from the beach), that it bored even me. Was there safety in numbers? Was love—that cinematic category—ever in question? What about Rosemary’s virginity? I thought it mature to persuade her to lose it, like the all-knowing siblings in The Blood of the Walsungs, ah Mann!

  I drove up to Beloit to visit Rosemary one weekend. With me was Don Hopkins, a fraternity man who was trying unsuccessfully to pledge me. (He was the only carnal encounter I ever had at Northwestern, nor had I any local gay confidant during all that time there.) We took Rosemary the sensational new twelve-inch two-sided Gene Krupa version of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” a rhapsody in percussion improv. Rosemary was one of a trio, Andrews-sisters style, that performed at school dances (“If You Ever Change Your Mind” a specialty), the three with their cropped yellow curls looking fresh as peaches or baby foxes. Rosemary was otherwise, thanks to Chino, an apologist for the Soviet Union, though it remains uncertain how focused her ideas were.

  With a diary each day blots out the previous one unless snared and glued to the page. With an autobiography the years themselves grow chronologically confused. The pressure of a diary is necessarily unavailable to a memoir, even as a diary is by definition antinostalgic.

  I read The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Swann’s Way (which Maggy said “makes gayety so chic”), and reveled in movies made from the early Maigret novels.

  Proust is close to Balzac. Simenon is close to Balzac. But Simenon is not close to Proust.

  • • •

  Géorg went to Mexico and returned excited. The excitement was contagious to all, not least to a certain dancer, Josephine Ubry, svelte, coyly tough, good looking, conniving but not unlikable, who had choreographed Copland’s rambunctious El Salón México to the recent Koussevitzky recording, and who longed to visit Mexico. Géorg in turn longed for the security which he felt, as so many gay men did, was located uniquely with a woman. He married Jo. They honeymooned for several months in Mexico, came back with Jo pregnant. Géorg used to sit close to her on the sofa, his crippled leg tucked beneath him, and while the stained and stubby fingers of his left hand nursed the ubiquitous cigarette (an Avalon, thirteen cents a pack versus fifteen cents for Camels), with his right hand he caressed her preposterously huge belly, or put his ear to her navel, and smiled: he was the source of this life; he was a man! A daughter, Carla, was accordingly born. Then things fell apart.

  It had been with Géorg that I swallowed my first real drink, a straight shot of whisky from my parents’ cupboard. I took to it like a duck to … to water? That shot was revelatory, instant protection, freedom of a sort. Freedom from people? Everyone seemed to drink. Just as it never occurred to me that classmates were mostly not planning to become composers, so it never occurred to me that everyone didn’t drink to excess. Excess has no meaning except to other people. A transparent wall builds itself gradually but inexorably around the incipient alcoholic; a liquid wall so nurturing that he’ll sell his own mother to stay inside.

  Water, pure water. If you’ve never been on a three-day bender you can’t know the ecstasy in a glass of water, pure water, even when you can’t keep it down. Oasis of dehydration … mucous-colored drizzle in a cheap hotel room. Is it 9 a.m.? 5 p.m.? Outside the rumble of a real world. Inside a rational voice—me there versus me here—asks if an arm is broken, a wallet swiped, as I smell my own gassy breath. No one else. Go back to sleep before taking stock.

  This
will recur on a weekly average throughout the world for the next thirty years. At the moment, the resilience of youth was phenomenal; I’ve always worked as concentratedly as I play. Drinking has often interfered with my social and sexual lives, rarely with my professional life. Being a periodic binger, as distinct from a continual loner, I early learned to stagger (pardon the expression) the binges so as not to conflict with professional work. Cause and effect were indistinguishable: a binge was the macabre reward for violent work, while musical composition was the guilt-edged punishment for the violent binge. But I learned this the hard way.

  Example: So dazzlingly did I master the Ravel Concerto that Harold Van Horne recommended me as the chief feature for next Tuesday’s solo class at 10 a.m. We performed it at two pianos; I was instantly the toast of the school and invited by Dean Beattie to repeat the feat next month. Next month, the night before the performance, I went out on the town with David Thompson (a philosophy graduate of the University of Chicago and a beau of Maggy’s, but that’s another story), ending up at the Orrington Hotel with two bottles of champagne, and at 4 a.m. leaving a call for nine. I had thought one day bore no relation to the next. I played like a pig in a fog. When the student audience nevertheless went wild, Van Horne with sarcasm said, “It must be your red hair.” An indelible souvenir for two reasons: first, it demonstrated what has later been confirmed only too often—that even specialized audiences don’t know good from bad; second, it must indeed have been my red hair. Van Horne’s remark, because he was a gentle soul usually, was wounding. Never again have I played in public without allowing at least a week to pass between a binge and the performance, just as conversely I would never swallow an Antabuse before swallowing a martini. (John Cheever: One glass of sherry shows on the page you’re writing.)

  In our separate ways Rosemary and I now led such gaudy lives that the parents thought maybe, during the summer break in 1941, it would be wholesome for the girls (Mother and Rosemary) and the boys (me and Father) to split for a month or two. Blackening clouds preempted European tourism. Since Géorg—a family favorite, especially now that he was “normal”—was constantly plugging Mexico, it was decided that Father and I together would take a trip south of the border.

  12. Mexico 1941

  Was Mexico “wholesome”? Well, wholesome’s a matter of age as well as of vantage, and the strength of a vice—of a virtue, too—alters with clocks and the weather. (Lapps drink differently than Libyans.) Also, in time of war a moral relaxation pervades a society, even when that society is not itself at war. The fact that “they” are dying over there justifies the carpe diem over here. Add to this the very tonality of Mexico, an augmented-fourth skip away from Illinois, and you’ll find that wholesome is as wholesome does. The Europe of our experience four summers previous was the Europe of Protestant snow—Newcastle, the North Sea, Oslo, and Hamburg. Chartres was as close as we came to Catholic Rome. Now, the two thousand miles south toward Acapulco was psychologically farther than the five thousand west across the ocean. Even Father, who prided himself that in the line of duty he had visited all forty-eight states, and during World War I went all through France and England, had never visited Italy or Spain, much less seen an Aztec Catholic. He too, as we “boys” headed south, was, like me, invaded bit by bit with a laissez-faire indolence while the sun soared closer to the zenith and farther from the girls.

  How many days between Chicago and Mexico City? Three? Four? Father is very much at ease chatting with common strangers. When I ask why he always talks to middle-aged people he replies: “Do you want me to talk to a flapper and be bored?” We’re at ease with each other too. Did we share a compartment on the train? What about meals? I do remember changing in Saint Louis, and in Laredo detraining to sup in some squalid café where we were serenaded by green-gowned girls who were actually putas—or so we were assured by a knowing male passenger. And I remember that a glass-domed observation car was attached at the frontier, and that the night between Laredo and Monterrey was so thick with shooting stars they seemed a trillion barrels of sapphires aimed at our heads. Then that changed to rain. With the dawn a tropical rainbow, of colors more primary than our Anglo-Saxon rainbows, covered the whole sky, softening the flat scenery that remained along the Sierra Madre before Mexico City. The first glimpse of the city itself was something else, like the entry to Fez that I would come to know so well, with the steep fall from the heights into that meaningful valley of ten million souls (including Dolores Del Rio’s) all speaking Spanish.

  Our plan was to stay there for a week before continuing to Taxco, so that Father, as he always did everywhere, could consult with hospital supervisors. The brutal grandeur of Xochimilco Park still comes back in dreams, as do the meringue pies at Sanborne’s. We looked up an artist friend of Géorg’s, one Jose Paredes, who showed us his studio from where I bought an extraordinary mask, carved in cork, of a distorted weeping face, crimson and tan, twice life size and ponderous but weighing a mere six ounces. (I have lived with this mask for fifty years, am looking at it now as I type.) I was embarrassed to tell Paredes that we were lodged at the pretentious Hotel Reforma, he seemed so plain and serious, so poor. We invited him to the Bellas Artes to hear, among other things, Debussy’s El mar (the sea is masculine for the Spanish), conducted by Chávez, whose own Sinfonia de Antígona and Sinfonia India, so stark and spare and diatonic, were close to my heart. Indeed, just as New Orleans today summons up the plays of Tennessee Williams more powerfully than it imposes its proper identity, so the music of Chávez yesterday evoked Mexico more than Mexico evoked itself. Nature imitates art; now there he was, swarthy and fierce, in person on the stage of his homeland. I had observed Chávez once before, the previous winter, from the highest gallery of Orchestra Hall, when he conducted his Concerto for Four Horns. (The Chicago Symphony for the 1941–42 season had commissioned composers throughout the world to celebrate its semicentennial. The centennial in 1991 would feature my own oratorio, Good-bye My Fancy.)

  After the concert Paredes at our request guided us to El Salón México. “A Harlem type night-club for the peepul,” said the guidebook. “Three halls: one for peepul dressed in your way, one for peepul dressed in overalls but shod, and one for the barefoot.” Each hall featured a Cuban or mariachi band, all playing simultaneously; one could appreciate the tempting challenge to Copland of merging this Ivesian din into a cohesive, succinct, danceable medley. Yet I didn’t care for the place. It lacked what I thought of as glamour, and it certainly lacked sex. Here again was nature imitating (badly) art. Copland’s terse evocation of the dance hall was more inspiring than the dance hall’s unknowing evocation of Copland. And so, since during this first week, giddy at the altitude and queasy at the prospect of Montezuma’s revenge, drinking was taboo, we left the premises early. But not before Paredes introduced us to a handsome Hispanic with charcoal eyes and a sky-blue necktie. Carlos, too, was a friend of Géorg’s, or rather, of both Géorg and “Josefina” Redlich. In fact, I’m not sure why, he drew forth a letter he had received that morning from Jo. The letter, in Spanish which I could not decipher, was signed Te amo, which of course I could decipher. I pointed to these words and asked, “What does that mean?”

  We went to Taxco by bus, stopping for lunch in Cuernavaca, and arrived midafternoon. Taxco, so lewdly quaint, was nearer to a fairy tale than to America’s Midwest, and there was an instant familial glow even before we stepped from the bus. Not “family” in a sense of mutual love but in a sense of everyone knowing everyone—the Spanish, the Mayans, and the loco Yankees who, were it not for the war, would be in Capri or Cannes, converged to make Taxco an operetta town, Latin division. Certainly there was suspicion, even hate, amongst the social and racial groups, but not inhibition. Géorg had forewarned: everyone’s available as long as you don’t take them for granted; one tourist’s head was cut off for having seduced a native, not because the native resented the act but because he resented being taken for queer. Standard rough-trade reaction, Géorg had said
, about which I was more naïve than not. Anyway, Father knew still less of such things.

  We stayed at the Tasqueño Hotel on the edge of a cliff on the edge of the town. Two dashing waiters in white coats served meals; I loved them both and wondered what they thought of me. Dogs barked nearby and all through the valley continually, especially at night. Father said nothing could be done about it.

  The chemical makeup of whisky is close to that of sugar, which is why recovering alcoholics crave sweets. That may explain, since Father and I to avoid dysentery were still taking Enterovioform, why the sight of that American cake after a week’s diet of rice and beans seemed so mouthwatering. The rich yellow batter in three layers, topped by fudge frosting identical to the kind I regularly baked in the States, was displayed on the tea cart of Magda and Gilberte, a pair of handsome forty-year-old European ladies sitting out the war in Taxco, and whom Géorg had told us to look up. I begged Father to let me visit them alone; a parent, especially a male parent, appeared de trop if I was to mingle with the Mexican elite. Twenty years later, to my shame, this notion still held water. While professing at Buffalo University in I960 I invited Mother up to hear Josef Krips’s crisp performance of my Third Symphony. But I asked Father not to come, explaining, “Composers don’t have fathers.” Father often quoted that to friends when the occasion arose and smiled, no doubt to clothe his hurt.