Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  What worked for Satie did not (to my ears) work for Virgil, for Virgil was a sophisticate faking naïveté, while Satie was a true naïf hoping for sophistication and achieving it despite himself. Virgil, like so many, misread the name Satie by inserting an r betwixt the i and the e.

  In case you’ve been wondering, Virgil and I never “had sex,” nor did he ever make a pass. Except once. One winter afternoon, when I had to stay late to make corrections in something I’d botched, Virgil said:

  “I’m going to take a nap. Will you wake me at exactly four fifteen.”

  At four fifteen I opened the door into his darkened room.

  “It’s four fifteen.”

  “That’s no way to wake Papa. Come over and wake Papa with a kiss.”

  Am I supposed to say no? So I leaned down, as upon a great lady—a great, doughy lady like, say, Nero—and kissed him on the lips.

  “That’s how to wake Papa,” he said, quickly realizing he’d maybe done the wrong thing. I still hear the wistful voice now as he turned toward the south window through which the light was fading fast over our grimy city.

  “It looks like Barcelona out.”

  Where is Barcelona? In Spain, the only country besides England that Virgil had visited outside of France during his long years abroad.

  Six months passed before he was aware of Morris as more than a name I lived with, and who sometimes phoned to ask where the hell I was. The Second String Quartet had just been published by New-Music Editions with, among its hundred-odd pages, one minor misprint where a flat was omitted. The thousand extant copies were delivered from the publisher. My job was to enter the missing flat into each copy, pack the whole into a footlocker and deposit this hundred-pound object at the American Music Center at 250 West Fifty-seventh, then bring the footlocker back to the Chelsea. I said that my friend Morris Golde would help with the cab. When Morris showed up, all tough and eager, he hoisted the footlocker like a feather onto his shoulders, and off we went. Virgil was thrilled.

  That evening we dined à trois at Bleeck’s. (Lucius Beebe was there and had a drink with us. He feigned remembrance of our Chicago orgy five years ago, especially when I mentioned that Frank—now in the army and whom I’d recently seen in a gay bar called Ralph’s on West Forty-fourth, where he stole my new wristwatch—had stolen my wristwatch. “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs,” remarked Beebe, blushing as much, or as little, as he ever would. “Du côté de chez les voleurs,” added Virgil.) If, as Virgil said of his first meeting with Gertrude Stein, “We got on like Harvard men,” he and Morris hit it off like long-lost Jewish cousins, and remained close—closer than I ever was with Virgil, or at least in a different, noncompetitive way—until the end.

  Morris Golde lived and still lives on West Eleventh, but now he owns the ground floor, while then he rented the one-and-a-half-room flat on the fourth story back. The half room was mine, plus a rented upright, the décor was Mexican with a view onto a courtyard complex en face as in Rear Window, and the street remains one of the prettiest in the Village, with only eleven short blocks up Seventh Avenue to Virgil’s to where I walked each morning. Each evening we ate out, usually at Drossie’s, a good and cheap downstairs bistro on Greenwich Avenue run by a Miss Jeanne Drossie with her two Americanized Russian-born sisters who resembled the witches of Macbeth, only shorter and oh so warm. All the waiters were gay and so was half the clientele. The other half was high bohemia. Joe Gould, for example, with his sweet darting eyes and bushy beard, toting the notorious manuscript of his ongoing Oral History of the Universe; he was the premier intellectual homeless bum who one early dawn came to pass out on our floor. (“A myth is as good as a smile” wrote Cummings about little Joe Gould’s winsomeness.) Or Maxwell Bodenheim, author of Replenishing Jessica, who would descend the five steps into the restaurant where, pausing among the candelit tables, he lit his cigarette with a theatrical sweep of a wooden match up the back of his pants, then danced a little dance and vanished. Or the bitchy and likable Dougie who, like Dante Pavone (another patron), proclaimed himself a “layer” of Djuna Barnes’s Dr. O’Connor and who in fact had been immortalized by Kay Boyle in her Valentine for Alan Ross MacDougall, who had published a collection of Attic recipes called And the Greeks, and who—though twice his age—was now Alvin Ross’s best friend (for Alvin, too, was now in New York). Or the sculptor Zadkine with his white granite hair. There was no liquor license, you could bring your own, but most people, even bohemians, didn’t drink on weeknights—Americans don’t drink on weeknights but make up for it on weekends, which the French find infantile if not gross.

  Morris and I were Americans, and he knew the city like the back of his hand—not just the concert halls and baseball arenas but the drinking holes. Of a gloomy, snow-covered Saturday we might decide, before landing at Drossie’s for the evening meal, to go pub crawling, starting at noon and working up Sixth Avenue bar by bar. But we’d seldom get beyond Fourteenth Street since the pub grew more crucial than the crawling. Or we’d have a martini, or two or fourteen, in a gorgeous orange-and-black Longchamps, perhaps the one on lower Fifth, where the walls are banked with pink glazed mirrors into which yellow lamps reflect their discreet heat, and you are in another world. Outside the sleet pelts the late afternoon and slush accumulates on the salt-strewn sidewalks, but here the gin in its funneled tumbler protects you from reality—or rather, becomes your reality—and Morris tells me about Kafka. A sober Sunday, after such a Saturday, could be no less unreal. Do you remember—we were there!—when the airplane crashed into the Empire State Building and hung like a maimed bat in a hole on the sixtieth floor? Elevators fell sixty floors in six seconds. We were too distant to make out what the radio reported: a woman’s head—she had red hair—impaled on a girder.

  Energetic, Morris rose early, rushed to the IRT local which whisked him near the Forty-fifth Street office where he ran a flourishing direct-mail and printing-press business with his older brother, Michael, married with children. (A still older brother, Ben, a successful businessman, was gay.) Among their many musical clients was the Town Hall’s series called The New Friends of Music. For them, thanks to Morris, I made fifteen extra dollars copying the parts, astonishingly unavailable commercially, of Ravel’s Chansons madécasses directly from the full score, which Martial Singher accordingly sang with the Albeneri Trio. I emphasize “astonishingly unavailable,” for in those days everything in music was available. You had only to walk into Chicago’s Lyon & Healy store, Philadelphia’s Theodore Presser store or similar sheet-music outlets in any medium-sized city across the country and buy the always-in-stock complete works of Gabrieli or Griffes, Praetorius or Poulenc, not to mention standards like Stravinsky or Schoenberg, all for sensible sums. Today printed music must be sent away for; six months later your Gabrieli may arrive from Milan in a battered photocopied facsimile, with a bill for $200, or more likely a memo saying “permanently out of print.” So much for the age of quick communications in the high arts.

  Evenings Morris and I would dine out, usually at Drossie’s, sometimes at the more expensive ($2.50) Waverly Inn, where the chicken pie and the cinnamon apple tart à la mode were special lures, occasionally at the old Brevoort Hotel on lower Fifth Avenue, which had an outdoor café in summer months. Two or three times we dined at Morris’s parents’ in the Bronx. Romanian immigrants with marked accents, they lived comfortably on the Grand Concourse, doted on their three money-making male offspring and served gefilte fish, which turned me off. Mrs. Goldenberg was domineering. Her husband, stricken with Parkinson’s, was not ambulatory. He hummed little folklike melodies of his invention, which I notated properly on music manuscript paper. His pride in this physical evidence of his talent was touching; he made scrolls of the sheets and kept them in a crystal vase to show the neighbors.

  During the eighteen months of our cohabitation Morris and I were never unfaithful, although there was habitual teasing and flirting, especially at all those after-hours all-boy dancing parties we
ended up at, after a dogged ingestion of beer on Saturdays at the Welcome Inn or the MacDougal Inn, identical gay bars side by side on MacDougal Street. We quarreled some, made love a lot—about eight times a week—and listened incessantly to music, usually all at the same time. The lovers’ bed resembled a shipwreck, the room smelled of muscle, the phonograph heaved with Der Rosenkavalier’s horny evocations, as we fell panting to the floor, then rose to swill milkshakes with raw eggs and sherry. Often I’d copy my own work at home on the cedar table while Morris read aloud: Vincent Sheehan’s Personal History, Denton Welsh’s Maiden Voyage, Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon about the landmark on East Seventh where we sometimes hung out.

  Morris was friends with, and had been the lover of, harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, a patrician presence of massively organized intellect, already half blind and very tall. It would be hard to imagine two creatures more disparate, Morris with his darting, wiry verbosity, Ralph all calm and cultured as he sat at his Chalice-made instrument. Kirkpatrick’s series at the YMHA of Bach and Mozart sonatas with violinist Alexander Schneider was a landmark of performing excellence, as were his solo clavichord series at the Carnegie Recital Hall. Harkening to the clavichord is a craft in itself, knowing how to stay still so as to hear each silver teardrop tinkle in an ever-growing necklace miles away.

  Ralph loved Billie Holiday, even knew her a little (a little is all anyone knew her). We visited the singer at the Onyx Club, where I got drunk, and in adulation sank down to put my head ’neath her skirt, which smelled like a Catholic church. Bringing her back in the early hours to Ralph’s small flat on Lexington Avenue it became clear that Billie, in all her uneducated glory, could attend as astutely as any trained musicologue. She admired the harpsichord, its construction, its repertory, became a silent audience to Ralph the executant. Billie was a jazz star, never a blues singer except for a few forays, notably into Bessie Smith’s repertory, and in her own “Fine and Mellow.” Like surrealism, which was a literary (sometimes by extension a painterly) movement that excluded the art of music as sissified and irrelevant, so the blues is a poetic form that can exist independently of the music that ornaments it—a series of AAB verses in iambic pentameter:

  My man don’t love me treats me awful mean

  My man don’t love me treats me awful mean

  He is the lowest man I’ve ever seen.

  “Iambic pentameter,” said Billie. “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Had I gleaned anything during three and a half years at Northwestern and Curtis, other than some practicalities about the craft of formalized sound? Certainly I had mild crushes on this or that male or female teacher, but I never forged such scholarly role models as Father and Paul Goodman represented in the outside world, or Debussy and Ravel from the evanescent past, or Virgil and Aaron in the very close future. But I did learn that, just as there’s no one right way to play a piece (there are as many right ways as there are smart virtuosos, and even the composer’s way is not final), so there is no one perception of any fact or concept or, indeed, “truth.”

  Having firsthand knowledge of homosexuality, and seeing that the world is mostly blind to, or wrong about, homosexuality, wised me up early. Jews are similarly wised up about their status.

  I had a recurring nightmare which makes no plausible sense, and which began (again) in 1944. Today, putting myself in the Me then, the Me then puts himself in the Me of infancy when it all started. The dream does not concern human or animal rapports. Just a mass, immense, shifting with and against other masses, cloud shaped and lugubrious. The counterpoint of mass-against-mass is like the motion in Messiaen’s music, as distinct from the line-against-line in Bach. No variety, no progress, no illumination. Only inexpressible fear.

  And every year or so throughout my life I dream of being pregnant, literally. How I got in that condition, and by what route the child will emerge, I do not know. (Magritte’s green apple fills a room.)

  Seated for my daily stint between parlor and bedroom, I observed Virgil Thomson running the world. When I arrived each day at ten, he would have performed his ablutions, and now, in clean orange pajamas from Lanvin, propped up and surrounded by an ocean of pillows with a sharpened pencil and a big yellow pad (he never learned to typewrite), he conducted the musical life of Manhattan from his bed. If it were Tuesday the phone would be off the hook as he scrawled (his handwriting was as infantile as his musical calligraphy) his Sunday sermon, which he would then, with no revisions, dictate by phone to his secretary, Julia Haines, at the Tribune. The subject of the sermon, he explained to me, could materialize from anywhere: the previous month in concert halls (he reviewed three concerts a week), crank letters from strangers, reactions to the state of modern song in France, or from a question Maurice Grosser put to him en passant. On other weekdays he would spend the morning hours on the bedside phone, mostly on business for the paper: making assignments to his staff of critics (which included Paul Bowles), or telling them his reactions to their reviews from last night. He might otherwise extend or accept invitations involving Oscar Levant or Sir Thomas Beecham (whom he loved) or Ormandy, or simply gossip with his Franco-American cronies, who included the art world as much as the music: the brothers Berman, Sylvia Marlowe, Philip Johnson, Tchelitcheff, Peggy Guggenheim. Since the bedroom door was wide open as I labored, naturally I overheard all this, often with a lifted eyebrow (I was the bourgeois he was pleased to épater), unless he specifically asked me to close the door, an academic gesture since his shrill voice carried.

  On one such occasion his mother, Clara May Thomson, then aged seventy-nine and in New York for the first time, was present. She slept in a room down the hall but arrived at Virgil’s each morning at 7:30 to help the cook—a large and humorless old-world Negro woman named Leana—shell peas or iron shirts on the other end of the table whereon I labored. Toward noon I was asked to close the door, and we all cocked our ears as Virgil dialed Paul Bowles.

  “I have to bawl you out, Paul dear, so have you had your breakfast?”

  “Breakfast at noon!” snorted both women with midwestern righteousness.

  As for Paul Bowles being chided, it struck me as … as against nature that anyone could be in the driver’s seat with Paul; Paul was just not accessible. I hadn’t seen him yet since living in New York, but still thought of him with vague awe if not respect. Virgil’s reprimand concerned what he called Paul’s “pose,” going around saying he didn’t know anything about nineteenth-century German music, for this made mockery of criticism and by extension of the Herald-Tribune. Of course, Virgil had no love for, or careful knowledge of, German music either, but when a review of, say, a Brahms symphony was needed it was assigned to Jerry Bohm or Arthur Berger or, faute de mieux, Paul Bowles, who was admonished to do his homework. Meanwhile Virgil took his mother to all sorts of recitals, including one of John Cage’s for prepared pianos. Asked her opinion, Mrs. Thomson replied: “Nice, but I never would have thought of it myself.”