Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Thanks to the nudging of Seymour and Shirley, Eugene, even before I knew him, was already dipping his toe into the shallower waters of nontonal music, fooling around with Alban Berg’s bland Piano Sonata, and actually learning Ben Weber’s accessible bagatelles, which came closer to wit than any atonal music I’ve since known. Humor, as couched in a joke, relies by definition on resolution, while the twelve-tone language by its nature avoids resolution. (Which is why twelve-tone music is ideal for dramas like Schoenberg’s psychotic Erwartung, but fatal for chic comedies like his Von Heute auf Morgen.) Still, Eugene’s interest was more intellectual than heartfelt, and perhaps a bit defensive. He seemed as wary of French repertory as he was of homosexuality, which did not prevent him from exalting at the “revelatory Gallic newness” of Debussy’s early Air de Lia (actually a tame reflection of Massenet) when he was assigned to orchestrate it, or from vicariously plying me about my sex life.

  If I used to be called good-looking I mention this only because my looks had an effect on certain people, and that effect changed the course of my life three or four hundred times. Once in passing Shirley mentioned my good looks. “Oh, is Ned good-looking?” asked Eugene, the idea not having struck him till then. My budding acquaintance with Lenny, about whom Eugene felt at once sardonic and intrigued as he did about my open homophilia, forced him to consider intermasculine sensuality as something more than “fairyish,” as his friend Byron put it. Like Kipling’s East and West, our French and German sensibilities nevertheless seemed not to mesh. As his naïveté was being chipped away, Eugene never tired of hearing about ghetto terminology. (Neither did I, for that matter, since Pennsylvania slang differed from Illinois slang: a minty was now a dyke, belles became queens, jam became straight, queer became gay, jacking off became jerking off.) But he was also convinced that if I just met the right girl, etcetera. He himself was dating an uninteresting creature named Lila, encountered like most of his extramusical contacts at L’Aiglon. Eugene’s manner with Lila, meant to dazzle us as much as her, was based on the lady-killer tone of George Sanders, a suavity which rested quaintly on his childlike brow. Still today, world famous and, among performers, the most neurotically intellectual of musical psyches, Eugene likes to impress with his cool mondanité. And still today he feels it’s okay for his friends to be gay so long as they stay in the closet. Back then the consensus was that Ned should lose his virginity before the age of twenty. So I agreed to go to bed with a girl before the end of summer, if Eugene would learn Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit.

  • • •

  Such sex as came my way in Philadelphia was easygoing, unsentimental, and generally found on the inroads of Rittenhouse Square or in the various hot spots beyond Broad Street. Especially fun was the Music Village on Juniper, where the bar was gay and the restaurant was not, and where the music was strictly classical. Occasionally with Shirley, often with Alvin, I would hang out there swigging beer among the almost exclusively military clientele while Tod und Verklärung rang from the jukebox. I seldom got incomprehensibly drunk, as I had in Chicago and would again in later years, partly because of the competitive discipline imposed by Curtis, partly because bars closed early. As the witching hour approached we’d down three bottles of Schaefer at once, maybe with a boilermaker, as the crowd grew restive with the anxiety of “making out.” Should I make out, where would I go?

  If Shirley were with me we’d sometimes take my pickup date to an all-night movie on Market Street, where, after an hour, he, seeing that the film was more urgent than sex, would vanish. This happened as we viewed Claudia and The Sky’s the Limit, wherein Fred Astaire sings “One for My Baby.” (Here is the moment to declare that I cannot bear Fred Astaire. True, his early pictures with Ginger Rogers were watchable, but his slightly nasty, much too old, self-assured come-on was something I, even at twelve, could never stomach. Nor can I stomach Groucho Marx. Yes, he’s witty, but not that witty, and twice is enough. I tend to resist cult figures anyway, and the more Groucho’s “cultivated” the more I resist. The same holds for boring Charlie Chaplin, who, like every star comic, is quite humorless. Maurice Chevalier’s smarmy putasserie makes my flesh crawl—although Pierre Bernac, Poulenc’s exemplary interpreter, cited Chevalier as his premier model. Insofar as everyone loves Beethoven, I despise him.)

  If Alvin were with me we’d sometimes collect at one of the all-boy parties organized at closing time in someone’s nearby pad and dance until dawn. If I were alone I’d sometimes go to a far-off hotel room, with maybe the burly marine from Pittsburgh whose tense biceps and clean-smelling khaki have stayed with me, or simply to the vacant lot just off Spruce between Nineteenth and Twentieth. Once in a while I’d bring someone back to Delancey. The only problem was not to collide with Rae Gabis’s all-night Saturday poker party, a round-robin tradition which once a month occurred in her dining room, i.e., my bedroom.

  There was the French sailor, invited home from a park bench, who, when I coyly took his navy blue cap with the red pompon, said quickly: “Surtout ne le mettez pas” (“Don’t put it on”). Instantly I realized the gaffe of my silly civilian predecessors and flung the cap onto a chair. Years later I recalled this admonishment while reading Colette’s squirm-making Le képi, wherein the Older Woman commits the fatal error—in her elation after a good screw—of marching about stark naked with her young lover’s hat on her head. That ended their affair.

  Various others I would see semiregularly, on hot afternoons, quite noncommittal. I never said “I love you” in Philadelphia.

  Then there were the bedbugs.

  They began meekly enough. Shirley complained of itching one morning and showed us the ruffled pink of her scratched flesh. A day or two later, same symptom from Rae. My back room seemed immune for the moment; but to sit down in the upholstered armchairs of the front parlor was to rise up twitching two minutes later. Bedbugs. It’s said they can survive unfed in a wall for years, only to emerge when just the right blood type shows up; like sharks they then go mad, eating even each other. Nocturnal, they act when the lights are out and bite only such parts of a human as are exposed—the face and necks and hands, never private areas under the sheets. Soon, though, our bedbugs shamelessly crawled down the wall in broad daylight. They look like flat ticks, have a nutlike odor, and the welts they impose resemble mosquito bites, but more virulent and longer lasting. We each had sequences of bumps like little mountain ranges along our arms which we clawed till the craters oozed red lava. (A decade later when I asked beautiful Nora Auric about her prematurely white hair, she explained: “When Georges and I were in Poland—that was in 1928—we stopped at a country inn. In the middle of the night we discovered bedbugs. We surrounded the mattress with vats of water, because bedbugs can’t cross water. An hour later they had collected on the ceiling and were dropping down on us by the hundreds. Next morning my hair was white.”)

  Rae hinted that my god-knows-where-you-find-them friends had brought the vermin with them; the predicament was as embarrassing as the seven plagues of Egypt—what about her poker games? So the exterminator came to fumigate the two front rooms, which meant the whole building had to be vacated for six hours. That night the women slept easily.

  Not so I in the back room. At 2 a.m. I awoke, writhing, turned on the light, saw a dozen glutted bugs trying to escape. They (and how many others!) had immigrated to the dining room during the exterminator’s inquisition and had already set up housekeeping. Crushing as many as I could (it’s not easy: they’ve survived a billion years thanks to an armor both slippery and uncrackable), I defied the wartime curfew and left the light on until dawn. Neighbor Roy Grossman, our local air-raid warden, fined me. And the exterminator was telephoned again.

  If the provenance of the bedbugs was moot, the crab lice which now replaced them were clearly borne by one of the Philadelphians to whom I never said “I love you.” If only the bedbugs could have devoured the crabs! Again, chemicals were the sole solution. When Rae found the bottle of Larkspur lotion in the ba
throom she hit the roof, demanding that I be good, or she’d throw me out.

  I was good.

  In the light of present-day medical horrors throughout the globe, these benign annoyances now seem more innocent than measles.

  The other day I asked Naomi Graffman if, when pouring tea for the Curtis undergraduates, she crooked her little finger the way Mrs. Bok used to. “Do I ever!” she said. “And what’s more, I make them crook theirs.”

  Naomi’s husband is the eighth director of the Institute, and although certain stresses have since veered slightly from right to left (composers are now admitted to be crucial to music), Gary Graffman has retained the protected luxuriant ambiance of yore: same thick carpets and high ceilings, same rigorous standards for the same limited cast of strictly scholarship whiz kids (they all know each other), and same Wednesday afternoon tea in the lobby, dispensed by important females. The third director, Efrem Zimbalist, was a dim presence in the hallways when I was a student, and Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who founded and endowed the school eighteen years earlier, was the chief hostess. During the scholastic year of 1943 these two, in their mid-fifties, married each other. We were all informed that Mrs. Bok must now be called Mrs. Zimbalist—no problem for me, since I never called her anything. From her kindly imperial height she spoke to me only once, to exclaim how pleased I must be that Scalero had taken me, for Scalero was her pride, while her joy lay in Barber and Menotti, whom she supported splendiferously in Mount Kisco.

  It was a false situation, for I disdained the maestro and felt soiled at being identified as “one of his.”

  Nevertheless, for reasons that now elude me (possibly because the war was intensifying and who knew where tomorrow … etcetera), it was agreed that I would spend the summer in Philly and continue lessons with Scalero. The lessons, for which he now charged five dollars each, transpired at his home in the new bank of apartments on the Parkway, two miles away.

  That summer was suffocating. Often hungover, semihallucinating, I dawdled en route to Scalero’s, pausing to rest in the shadow of the great museum, with a paper bag of grapes and cheese. Sometimes I entered the cool galleries to commune with the beloved Rouaults. With effort I would detach myself from this spectacle to regain sanity—is that the word?—in the air-conditioned parlor of my reactionary mentor. Never, not once, did he show me a rapport between our thousand counterpoint studies and their practical appliance—their relation to the realities of Palestrina or Bartók.

  During the heat wave I took a train to Washington, D.C., for a weekend with Paul Callaway. An electric change bloomed for me in the capital after the torpor of Philadelphia. Nothing poetic, everything erotic, in that purposeful proliferation of military motion on the steaming avenues. In buses, in bars, and in beds, all the citizens—the majority in uniform—were unquestioningly locked into the international tragedy.

  Smiling little Paul, unchanged except for his soldier’s apparel, short and cute and sinewy as ever with that squinchy smile, contrasted with the debonair and savvy style of William Strickland, with whom he shared a civilian apartment while serving—both of them—at the Army Music School. Except for, and even during, a steady ingestion of dry martinis during leisure hours, Bill (whom I’d never met before but had oft heard of from Sowerby) and Paul lived and breathed music. They were music, and reinforced my enthusiasm, as Lenny had done, about a need for American music. Reared, like Paul Callaway, in the Episcopalian milieu of choirmasters and organists, a milieu now as then more tolerant of living composers than any other group in church or state, plus his new alliance with the Army Music School, which trained bandleaders in the best of what there was of a specialized repertory, Bill Strickland was a first-rate conductor, avid to expand the catalogue. For hours on end, at the clanky upright, he played for me American works by the dozen, mostly choral, some orchestral, a few songs, including those of Ives who was not yet a cult, and Samuel Barber’s enigmatic chant for unaccompanied choir, “Anthony O’Daly.”

  That night I went to a party. George Garratt, who earlier in the month had swung through Philly and failed to impress Eugene with his prodigal improvisations, had implored me, should I be in Washington, to look up his precious boyhood chum, pianist Earl Wild. Earl Wild, as it happens, had recently broadcast Rhapsody in Blue under Toscanini and was a military star stationed in Washington in the line of military duty. I wrote him, he sent back a phone number which I now called from Paul’s. Earl Wild seemed not to know George Garratt, but invited me to a party at the house of someone called Alison, if I had a dollar to spare for a taxi—it would cost that much to get to the suburbs.

  At the party, besides the host in mufti, were a dozen soldiers and a Steinway grand. Among the soldiers were organist Virgil Fox (flamboyant yet old-maidish), Eugene List (simple and sweet, who would soon make headlines as the official pianist at the Potsdam Conference), and Earl himself, the epitome of raw talent honed fine. List played Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels. Then Wild asked us to give him four notes—any four—on which he accordingly improvised for fifteen minutes in the styles of whatever composers’ names were called out. Everyone got drunk and danced to pop records. Was this your typical army get-together? I note the episode only because in later years List and Fox and Wild would each perform my music, but none remembered meeting me in Washington, or even that such a party took place.

  That night I slept in Paul’s bed. Next morning, over waffles and bacon, Bill Strickland said: “Ned, if you write us a piece I’ll conduct it here in September—something five to ten minutes long, for men’s chorus and a few winds.”

  “Even if you don’t like it,” I stammered.

  “Even if I don’t like it.”

  That was my first commission.

  A visit to Rosemary, who was spending the summer in Baltimore as a bonne à tout faire for a Mrs. Gilpatrick in exchange for keyboard lessons which this woman seemed to offer solely to female collegians on vacation. Gilpatrick had a “method,” of course, stressing relaxation and closed eyes, allowing the body to be saturated with the meaning of sound, or something. (“Horowitz is a bad pianist because he’s too tense.”) Rosemary was not blessed with the aptitude of a public performer but was always, still is, an easy mark for therapists. She thrives on group spirit; I do not. Mrs. Gilpatrick and I didn’t see eye to eye. But Rosemary showed me how to mash potatoes, and later in Philly she cleaned the Gabises’ kitchen, to the horror of Rae, who felt that Shirley should have done it. We also went up to New York together for a sober day.

  While lunching with Rosemary at an outdoor café near Rockefeller Center I saw Lenny for the last time before his permanent explosion into glory. He came toward us from across the street—with an older woman who turned out to be Helen Coates, though she wasn’t introduced—and said (I remember the wording, because Rosemary later quoted him to Shirley): “I’ve just had some mildly interesting news. Rodzinski has appointed me assistant conductor of the Philharmonic. And this”—he designated Helen—“will be my secretary.”

  Lenny had moved to the Chelsea Hotel, an old-world edifice on West Twenty-third, possibly because Paul Bowles was there too. It was at the Chelsea that he showed me Bowles’s ballet Pastorela with its haunting duet, originally a rollicking folk song in 3/8 based on the couplet “Pobrecito, huérfanito/Sin su padre, sin su madre,” slowed down and reharmonized as an Adagio. Paul Bowles, man and musician, beguiled Lenny. In March, the latter had conducted the first (and only) performance of Bowles’s zarzuela, The Wind Remains, at the Museum of Modern Art, and forever after, in salons and lectures, he lauded his idol as one of America’s least-sung heroes. Yet he never again performed a note of Bowles’s.

  Bowles for the moment was an established light, but within a few months Lenny would outshine him a thousandfold. Just as in 1946 Menotti, with the success of The Medium, became and remained more renowned than his life’s companion, Samuel Barber, who had hitherto been the star of the family and who grew accordingly sour, or as in I960 Edward Albee, with the
success of The Zoo Story, became and remained more renowned than his life’s companion, William Flanagan, who had hitherto been the star of the family and who grew accordingly sour, so Bernstein, who had absorbed Bowles’s jazzily perfumed modes by osmosis, eventually allowed himself to believe that he was their originator. (In 1954, at Jean Stein’s on the Rue Bassano, I sat for a minute at the piano, noodling on a theme from The Wind Remains. Lenny stopped whatever he was doing and said: “O God, Ned, when did I write that gorgeous thing?”)

  Did it ever occur to you that Albee, Menotti, and Tennessee Williams each wrote only two works—a small one and a big one—from which all their ensuing works were pallider spin-offs. Albee never surpassed his early short Zoo Story and the long Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Menotti never again equaled his early short Medium and the long Consul. Williams never afterward came close to the early short Glass Menagerie and the long Streetcar Named Desire. I’ll speak of the reasons when—and if—I come to Tennessee.

  Paul Bowles himself I would see soon again.

  Forays up to New York grew more frequent, sometimes legitimate, sometimes not. With Shirley we made several six-hour round trips to cover the complete sequence of Beethoven’s piano music offered, with snorting bravura, by Artur Schnabel at Carnegie Hall. (In preparation for these events I relearned all of the thirty-two sonatas, even as in the spring I had tackled all of Schumann. Tackled, not thrown.) On my own I went there mainly to cruise, bedding about, catch as catch can. I’ve no remembrance of how the days were spent beyond using the shining private washrooms of the Winslow bar on Lexington for my personal toilet (I didn’t yet shave much, still don’t), and subsisting on milkshakes and apples. Evenings I drank at the Old Colony, and accordingly ran into Arthur Weinstein, soigné and pretty as ever, who turned out to know everyone I knew, only better—Lenny, Aaron, and Paul Bowles too. Back at Arthur’s Upper West Side apartment we called Bowles. (On the phone Bowles told Arthur that, yes, he remembered me from Taxco, but remembered my father more.) He came by in a mist of perfume, and we talked and drank until the wee hours.