Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Anyway, since I was steeped in E. E. Cummings, it seemed logical to acquire Cummings—to make him mine—by setting him to music. One day I wrote two songs: “All in Green Went My Love Riding” and “in just spring,” then made legible copies. Next day, overhearing an incantation issuing from a practice room and, peering through the little pane, realizing that the charm came from a girl rehearsing one of Ravel’s Trois chansons, I entered without knocking and asked her to read through my new songs. Singers are a breed apart, even in music schools. I had never met one before but sensed that here was a kindred soul, if not a mind, who by the nature of her profession was outward and giving, stagy and physical. A singer’s instrument is in her body—she is born with it—not in her hands, so she doesn’t (necessarily) have to practice to thrill us. Singers used to have a reputation for being dumb; the reputation still holds somewhat, at least among soloists (choristers must be able to sight-read or they’ll lose their jobs). For my part, I look upon the entire interpretive world as upon talking dogs. From this remark I don’t expect to make any friends among performers. But since in the current professional music world performers are that world (in the ken of even an enlightened public) while composers are not even pariahs (to despise something, it first needs to exist, and composers are invisible), they can act huffy all the way to the bank. A singer may earn in one evening what I may be paid to write an opera which would take a year. Composers are to singers as nectar to humming birds. The parasite is more famous than the flower, but crucial to the dissemination, from town to town, which the creator hasn’t time to … etcetera.

  Frances Maraldo, a stream of black hair falling around her face as she leaned to squint at the manuscript on the piano rack, now deciphered quite creditably with her very red lips the settings of Cummings verses as I, tense and patient, accompanied her. Hers was the very first voice ever to sing my songs! After an hour of polishing, we sought the public. Upstairs we ran across Earl Bigelow in the hallway. Would he listen? He would. So here was the very first audience ever to hear my songs! At seventeen I was none too young.

  I wrote more songs, on my own words, on those of Bruce Phemister, on the sonnets of Millay and Blake of course, and even an Ave Maria as homage to Leo Sowerby. (Leo found my calligraphy and spelling pretentious. I had, for example, in notating for a soprano in the lowest register, used the bass clef. My clef signs looked spidery. And I thought it stylish to use double—even triple—sharps.) Frances and I performed them for parental friends at a tea on Dorchester Avenue. Did we perform them at school too? I can’t recall. But during the next decade I completed a hundred songs, sung by America’s best, with major reviews as to how I was unsurpassed in comprehending the artifice of the human voice. Yet I didn’t know terminology, couldn’t define a mezzo as distinct from a spinto, a baryton martin as opposed to just a plain tenor. I’m not entirely ashamed of this. I still feel that singers are too quick to limit themselves according to high notes, to restrict themselves according to what their teachers tell them is good for their range rather than according to what, emotionally, they are longing to wrap their tongues around. I wrote music, not vocal music; the singer within me, not the bass or the soprano within me, silently transcribed the impulse to paper. If I wrote what singers call “grateful” songs—an arching line that follows the text—it was not from love of the lyrical but from respect for the lyric. Respect is alive. Who was I, after all, to take a preexisting shred of literature and proceed to wrench it from its contextual shape and crucify it on a clef? I had no knowledge, let alone theory, on how this should be done properly. Only later, when I created for specific singers, and when I beheld the carnage wrought by fellow composers on their fellow poets, did I convert my practice into theory. Only then did I learn what the larynx was, technically; only then did I put into essays the ABCs of how to write a song. But my new songs were no better for all this. In fact, I finally sought to emulate the Ned of yore when he didn’t know any better.

  Frances Maraldo did not, so far as I know, become “someone” in the cruel and rewarding spheres of opera and song. After Northwestern I lost track of her for around forty years. Then out of the blue she too wrote me a letter.

  I have been married eleven times but never divorced.

  If marriage means a two-person rapport that contains more than sex and that lasts at least a year (my most recent “marriage” has lasted twenty-seven years), then eleven it is for me—with perhaps another eleven semimarriages, a score of uncommitted honeymoons, and unlimited anonymous one-night stands.

  Was it during intermission in that marble room on Orchestra Hall’s second floor that George Garratt and I first stared at each other, each from the confines of his own entourage? He was a rangy, horsey, hard-drinking and heavy-smoking twenty-three-year-old maverick from a well-off Pittsburgh family. Now he was a postgraduate double-major, the pet both of Ganz and of Max Wald, who was the composition professor at the Chicago Musical College where George played the role of mad genius. He was a pianist of thunderous agility, excelling in Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, and a composer of breathtaking accessibility, resembling Scriabin and Rachmaninoff. Like so many of the students at the college, he exuded instant know-how (a cachet lacking at Northwestern), which stemmed from being active in the real world of professional music. Because of George I began hanging out with that crowd, pianists Alice Martz and Jacobeth Kerr particularly, and composer Hall Overton, in the confines of the Loop and of the Near North Side, while continuing classes and residence in Evanston where George contributed his share of empty gin bottles to the closet floor.

  George himself had a flat in a brownstone on Bellevue, heavily carpeted and agreeably gloomy, where we holed up for days emulating the two gentlemen in Murders of the Rue Morgue and read aloud to each other while drinking straight bourbon. I recall an issue of Hound & Horn featuring The Burning Cactus, with its problematical protagonist named Tyl. So then I stopped being a Poe character and became a Stephen Spender character. Not that George was a thinker (his favorite book was Jean Christophe); his keyboard alacrity came less from staunch practice than from canny aping of knuckle-busters like Horowitz and Arrau; his own compositions, exclusively for piano, though well formed, were instinctive, emotional, aspiring toward grand melody without being impelled by a true gift of tune. I was not uninfluenced by George’s musicianship, based on bluff and mindless inspiration, because it “spoke,” because it was out there being played, not back in the classroom, and because he had an extroverted panache which I had not. And I was influenced because he was that much older than me, and by his glass-in-hand stance, plus his authoritative style, though he never said anything very memorable. He also lied. Since I, although in other ways monstrous, am not a liar, the trait seems anathema and otherwise tedious. George’s lies, like all good-hearted liars’ lies, were based partly on what he thought we wanted to hear and partly on the resulting inability to state a plain fact without amendment. On the one hand, for example, he claimed to know people he didn’t know. On the other hand, he would say, “There are three apples on this table,” when in fact there were four. But he was good to have around in those days and was hugely likable.

  Father liked him too. During the summer of 1942 he worked as an errand boy in Father’s Blue Cross offices on Division Street, his first “responsible” job, which he held for a season despite neurotic flare-ups. And Mother liked him. Many a sober afternoon was passed on Dorchester Avenue, making fudge, investigating phonographic repertory, or picnicking nearby off the rocky barricades in Lake Michigan across from the Palm Grove Inn where Dorothy Donegan used to play. Given his intuitive (as distinct from brainy) artistry, I shouldn’t have been surprised at George’s deficient sight-reading, yet was uneasy when we played four-hands on the new Steinway—his reflexes were stagnant. When we banged away at Ravel’s La valse, Mother burst out laughing. “It’s like moving mattresses,” said she.

  Hatti meanwhile was now attending Moholy Nagy’s School of Design. She had moved downtown t
o a dreary apartment on Wabash, just off Chicago Avenue and right above Tin Pan Alley, a claustrophobic tavern hosting such jazz artists as pianist Lil Armstrong and drummer Baby Dodds, whose throbbing echoed till dawn throughout the building. I don’t remember her infant, David, but Hatti seemed already estranged from her legal spouse (the fetching Andrew Martin) and was going with Davis Pratt. None of which slowed down our patronage of the Rush Street bars or of our own parties. In different corners of Hatti’s room, four or six or eight of us would neck all night long (but only with our mates) while Bessie Smith wailed from the phonograph, “Black Mountain Blues” (“Going back to Black Mountain—with my razor and gun,/Gonna shoot him if he stand still, gonna cut him if he run”), “Baby Doll” (“I want to be somebody’s baby doll, so I can get my loving all the time”) and “Young Woman’s Blues” (“See that long lonesome road, Don’t you know it’s got an end,/But I’m a young woman and I can get plenty men”), drowning out the ruckus from the dive downstairs.

  George moved to a high rise on East Delaware where I see myself poised shakily in the window thirty floors above the abyss and shrieking “I’ve had enough of life” while George played Rachmaninoff’s Third. Stagy behavior was par for the course; how I made it to morning classes, much less how I practiced with the sturdy regularity needed merely to acquaint oneself with the wide repertory, I cannot imagine. Except to say: youth has time for what it needs, and youth needs all. I have never comprehended those who declare, “Gee, I’d love to read more but just haven’t the time.”

  Do not forget Frank Etherton, for he will weave in and out of the next fifteen years. Frank Etherton was what the French call an invention—and which we call a protégé—of Maggy’s, although he had a firm identity before she took him up. Maggy, by now a philosophy major at the U of Chicago, was also, along with Dick Jacob, red-hot in the theater department. So was Frank Etherton. It’s uncertain whether Frank ever actually enrolled at the university, but he indisputably had the female lead in that winter’s Blackfriars show. As such he was so convincing as to take away the parodistic enjoyment: he was a woman. In real life he was a woman, too, or rather, the fairy mascot of fraternity row. Like Truman Capote’s, Frank Etherton’s effeminacy had less to do with homosexuality than with chutzpah; he would be safe in the roughest locker room for the simple reason that no one could quite believe it. Indeed, it was the duty of one hapless pledge to escort Frank, in drag, to a fraternity dance. After the dance they went, just the two of them, to Riccardo’s famous restaurant. Riccardo himself served them the ravioli and champagne, intrigued by this weird lady. At closing time Frank sent the pledge home and went off with Riccardo. For days afterward he abstained from bathing, so as to retain the victorious smell of his conquest.

  Frank Etherton was bright, aggressive, weak-chinned, with high-pitched, breathless speech and insane eyes framed by tortoiseshell glasses, and was good company for about thirty minutes, if you too were drinking or, more seriously, smoking pot. But it was hard to talk about, say, Rilke with him (he would yawn at your pretension), or to imagine him with a breaking heart. He had a thousand confidants, but did he have friends? Or lovers, given his sole predilection for doing rough trade? In 1947 Paul Goodman and I wrote musical skits for him to perform with John Myers in Greenwich Village. Ten years after that he killed himself in Cuba, swallowing thirty-four Nembutals, one for each year of his life, but leaving no identification beyond an unsigned note. His image was flashed across the TV screens of Havana and recognized finally.

  Somewhere in 1942 I was summoned by the draft to report for a physical. When in 1949 I saw Franju’s brutally compassionate film Le sang des bêtes, about Parisian slaughterhouses wherein condemned beasts are dealt with anthropomorphically (mass hysteria, tears in their eyes), I thought back to this dehumanizing trauma. It took place in some great bare arsenal. A thousand naked boys, joking and scared shitless, were lined up and prodded by their experienced superiors as though this were already their first day in boot camp. I felt both empathy and scorn for my fraternal cannon fodder, sick that they should suffer this indignity, yet aware that never would I be able to share their fausse bonhomie and would decay alone.

  Mother hoped my classification would be 4-E, conscientious objector, which as a certified Quaker I could register as. This merely meant that I wouldn’t go to jail, but would go, unpaid, to a CO camp for the duration and work in reforesting or as a hospital orderly. Father, though proud to have been honored in World War I, felt pragmatically that since war was unrelated to morality, why be moral about methods for avoiding it. I was an artist before I was a war resister. “Tell them anything,” said Father, “so long as you stay out, but we’ll stand behind you whatever.” Meaning, I suppose, that I should tell the army doctor about my love life and be branded 4-F.

  But the army doctor was uncaring, and I didn’t have the nerve to tell him “anything” (as I would during identical examinations in 1943 and again in 1947). They gave me a deferment because of school—1-D, I think it was.

  Is there no crime for which I don’t feel guilty? Paradoxically I feel no guilt for anything I’ve ever done. (Regrets, sometimes, for what wasn’t done, but no remorse for what was.) Yet there I sit, on trial for my life—for having performed some act or believed some tenet that never harmed a soul. If you’re a gay pacifist alcoholic atheist Quaker composer, they’ll get you coming or going, but for which category depends on the year. As Quakers are legal COs, so they are legally excused from swearing “to tell the whole truth, so help me God,” on the grounds that they don’t swear, that they don’t lie (but that if they do, swearing won’t keep them from it), and that God is beside the point. And what is the truth—that wavering monolith—as distinct from fact? Cocteau said: “Je suis le mensonge qui dit la vérité”—his definition of art. A tree on a canvas is not a tree, La mer at the concert is not the sea.

  During the summer of ’42 while George worked for Father, Father let me take special courses at the Chicago Musical College. Which meant private lessons with Max Wald and a class called piano technique with Molly Margolies, Ganz’s assistant and, some say, mistress,

  For Wald I composed pieces, real pieces rather than exercises, for the first time under supervision. Physically Max Wald was a doughy, featureless, middle-aged presence; socially, although of no compositional reputation, he was a self-assured monologuist who could go on about, say, MacDowell’s healthy home life as opposed to Stefan Zweig’s sad-gay fiction, even to singers who couldn’t care less. I retain not a word of what he said about my little Garratt-style impromptus, but at least I was free legitimately to express myself. (Be it said at this point that I’ve never retained any wisdom from any comp professor. There is no such creature as the teacher of composition. The only composers I’ve ever learned from are those I’ve never met.)

  Physically Molly Margolies was a brunette Belle Tannenbaum (her chief Chicago rival): a levantine body, squat torso with spindly legs, big head and broad shoulders, five feet tall; socially, although of no continuing public career, she was a dynamo of opinion, half gossip and half common sense on how to play the piano. The perfect performance, said she, was no more and no less than playing the right note with the right tone at the right time. In my private treasure chest, which otherwise contains Mother’s letters and a lock of Marie-Laure’s hair, lies the rare Breitkopf & Härtel edition of the Chopin Etudes with Molly’s indispensably useful markings in red and blue pencil.

  I did not know, on starting the junior term that fall at Northwestern, that I would remain only through December. George Garratt and I would live together at the halfway mark between his school and mine, in a six-story edifice on Kenmore, around 5600 North. The one-bedroom apartment contained a piano which we fought over when returning, each from his own daily forays elsewhere, in the evening. Or else we fought tout court. I still have visions of our chasing one another fiercely through the halls, past the front desk and into the street, for no reason other than drunken games, cruel or coy.


  I can’t focus on what any of us, male or female, now that we were involved in grown-up love affairs, thought about fidelity, or how we defined it. Certainly we didn’t practice it according to Victorian precepts. When I discovered I had the ability to hurt people, I hurt people. It gave an illusion—no, a reality—of power, ergo of existence, and stemmed directly from having been shunned by those butch numbers at U-High (not to mention from too many Bette Davis movies like In This Our Life which I sat through four, eleven, times at the Harper Theater).

  We were young enough not to bother emulating the great lovers of literature. Romeo and Juliet didn’t endure long enough to apprehend the horrors of bourgeois fidelity; the classics never portray love as long-lived. Tristan and Isolde ingested a potion brewed to last three years, the maximum period that any two persons find each other bodily stimulating; after that, if the marriage prevails, it’s based on sterner values (but Isolde and Tristan had no chance to learn them). Zeus and Hera quarreled about who takes more pleasure in love, men or women. Zeus claimed women, Hera claimed men. To settle the matter they consulted the hermaphrodite Tiresias, who said: “Women take more pleasure in love than men.” In her fury Hera struck Tiresias blind. In his compassion (since one god cannot undo the damage of another) Zeus told Tiresias: “Though you are blind, I will grant you the gift of foresight.”