Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Were I to dare interrupt a phone conversation with a query about some illegible smudge, Virgil would remonstrate either by amending the smudge to look worse than before or by declaring: “That’s baby stuff, baby. Don’t bother Papa with baby stuff.” “Baby” was one of his favorite words. So was “amusing,” which in English rings more preciously than in French. Everything was amusing: Macbeth, a cherry pie, his mother’s heavy overcoat. When he said to the stony Leana before she went out shopping, “If you see any vegetables that look amusing, buy them,” she came back empty-handed.

  In the afternoons Virgil, dressed, would receive in the parlor. Again I eavesdropped as he rehearsed his Violin Sonata with Joseph Fuchs, or served coffee to the staff of View magazine, which wanted an article from him, or chatted with his most frequent visitor, Maurice Grosser, friend and longtime lover from Harvard days, a topnotch realist painter of people (Jane Bowles), landscapes (the coast of Maine), and foodstuffs (mainly eggs and rounded fruits and vegetables like eggplants and pears, all vastly enlarged). Maurice, a Mississippi Jew, was in physical stature reminiscent of Morris Golde, sinewy, short, excitable; in mentality he was, arguably, the brains behind Virgil’s brains. Have I already mentioned that it was Maurice who took the raw sketches of Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts and superimposed a scenario which blossomed into the ideal libretto, even as Alice Toklas wrote Stein’s famous autobiography? But neither Stein nor Thomson gave credit its due, and their paramours were willingly silent partners. True, Maurice did have an independent career as a painter and a cult public of sorts; he also wrote two intelligent and useful books about painting. True, too, that Virgil encouraged Maurice (his junior by a few years) by recommending him, talking him up, but only insofar as Maurice didn’t grow too tall. Even long after, when Maurice Grosser died at eighty-three (of AIDS, astonishingly), Virgil was oddly mum.

  Indeed, he was oddly mum about anything that might compromise him publicly, if not socially, especially sexual innuendo. Campy and gossipy and aggressively effeminate as he was at home, so was he circumspect in the world. This may have been due to the still-recent trauma of the arrest in that male whorehouse; more probably it was due to his cool rivalries and deluded notions of himself. Because my Paris Diary, published in 1966 a few months prior to VT’s own autobiography, was unprecedentedly plain about my own homosexuality (it’s not that I made a point of it—on the contrary, I didn’t bother to pretend), he cut all references to me in his book for fear of being compromised. Who was he kidding! That book, an otherwise unique document on the economic history of the arts in contemporary America, has a faint but common stench, not just because he doesn’t mention what Gide called la chose, but because, hypocritically, he does mention his passions for various women.

  Virgil, who spoke as he wrote, economically and to the point, in whole sentences and paragraphs, had the wittiest English language repartee of anyone around. Even physically he had imitative gifts of cutting precision, as when he would rush across the room with tiny tight steps, imitating a Gibson girl in a hobble skirt playing badminton. But he was no less competitive than most artists, as well as imperious about his lore. How often I saw him alienate unalerted folk he was meeting for the first time—a professional photographer or a brain surgeon, for instance, to whom he’d explain the craft of soft-lens focus or the details of a scalp incision! For the young (“All young people look alike to me”) he also had all the answers. What is this silly old fairy trying to say? they would ask. Of course, Virgil spoke always in French-style generalities, which are anathema to literal-minded American children.

  After six months or so of secretarial work chez lui, it was thought I needed more formal training. He never admitted it, but Virgil felt a vague sense of responsibility vis-à-vis my father; after all, he had talked me into forgoing my scholarship at Curtis in midstream and moving to New York. And he was aware that the meager salary he doled out was my sole income. So he took it upon himself to give me lessons, no extra charge.

  There is no such animal, according to Thomson, as the teaching of musical composition (do as your idols do, not as they say), which is an esthetic study best left to analytical Germans. Composers become composers not because they take lessons but because they beg, borrow and steal. Certainly I had learned counterpoint and harmony until they came out of my ears, while amassing a repertory was merely a question of answering to the heart (we wouldn’t be musicians in the first place if we didn’t like to hear music) and of attending a regular dose of concerts, thanks to the free tickets provided by Virgil. But academic instruction of the so-called creative arts is a nonexistent process. Good teaching, the imparting of extant knowledge, is a healthy infection which leads students to rich mineral waters and makes them drink; but no teacher can cause a piece of music to be, he can only criticize it after it exists; if he is a composer he can teach only by himself being—by allowing himself passively to be imitated. But there is a craft, if not an art, the lineaments of which can be imparted, even from one untalented person to another, and that is the craft of orchestration. Instrumentation is physical fact, not theoretical idea. That is what Virgil intended to show me.

  At first I was wary. What, after all, did the maker of all these simple-minded ditties I’d been transcribing know about teaching? But during the eighteen months I worked with Virgil I was to learn more than during the long years, before and after, spent in the world’s major conservatories. In mastering the art of calligraphy a young musician becomes answerable for every note among millions, for the need for clarity on the page (because music, before it can be heard, must be visibly communicable), and the copyist eventually knows the score better than the author of the score. Meanwhile, if orchestration, unlike composition, is the study of specific balances—a study available to any layman—then Virgil, in placing before me the principles of this study, explained once, and only once, the sonic résults of every physical combination of instruments. Just as overhearing the phone conversations—and thus his manner of behavior in a professional milieu—was an indelible instruction, so I can recall today as on a disc each word he spoke during our lessons fifty years ago.

  His lucidity was due no less to an innate clarity of mind than to a voicing of that mind through an ideal language of thrift: he spoke French in English. Since he knew what he was talking about and didn’t waste words, merely to be in his presence was to learn. And merely to think about him is to risk being influenced, as these pale phrases attest, for no one out-Virgils Virgil.

  My ambivalence about both him and his work rose and fell with the years. I could live without his music, yet his two operas on Gertrude Stein’s texts are arguably our only American operas. His music resembles, more demonstrably than with any composer I know, himself. It is impatiently terse, free of fat or padding, eschewing sensuality to a point of self-indulgence, and one absorbs it like an icy acid which bathes a core of hot prettiness. At its best his music is very, very witty—if that adjective makes sense when applied to nonvocal works.

  I was Virgil Thomson’s sole pupil, which makes me proud, and made him proud, too, so far as it went, especially when he eventually heard my opulent scoring—so much more opulent than his—but which retained a transparency that only his training could have produced. (Transparency means that no matter how many instruments you use at any moment, each one—each group—is heard, nothing vanishes in the fray. This is French, as distinct from German, where, since every instrument or group is doubled, nothing retains an individual stamp.) Still, Virgil, who was old enough to be my father, was always slightly jealous of whatever successes I may have had after I went to France, where hitherto he had been, or so he imagined, America’s only musical representative.

  One spring night at Drossie’s, Morris and I ran into Paul Bowles. He was sitting in a corner with his cousin, stage designer Oliver Smith, eating the homemade apple cake for which the restaurant was renowned. Learning that I was now Virgil’s copyist, Paul asked if I’d be interested in doing a copying job fo
r him. So next night we visited him.

  Paul rented a small penthouse nearby, at 56 Seventh Avenue off Fourteenth Street, with a spectacular view of downtown Manhattan. (Did you know that Seventh Avenue curves at a 110-degree angle while descending toward the Battery?) The larger of his two rooms was all in white: white sofas, a white piano, with long white curtains moving slightly in April’s first warm breezes, and a white fur rug wall to wall. A white telephone with the number removed. Drums here and there. Like his room at the Chelsea a year ago, this one reeked of perfume, as indeed did Paul himself, wherever he went. He had spent the better part of his Guggenheim fellowship on raw ambergris which he combined with other basic essences to confect heavy oils that imbued the furniture, never to disappear. A luscious cage of scent for him to hide behind. He brewed the gooey incense in various flavors and titled them for special exotic friends: a vial of Evil Eye for Hazel Scott, Green Devil for Elsie Huston. Garish books, with a careful casualness, were strewn over the floor: a tome of Goya’s horrifying Caprichos, a collection of Weegee portraits of murderers. Paul reinforced his effect when speaking of Man Ray, who once showed him photographs of slaves somewhere in North Africa, chained to pillars and living in their own excrement. (Eight years later, when Man Ray befriended me in Paris, I asked him about these photographs. He had never taken pictures of slaves, he claimed, never been in Africa, never heard of Paul Bowles.)

  All this would be chitchat were it not relevant to another aspect of the man which grew clear in the next half hour, and which changed my life as Socrate and Sacre had changed my life. Paul asked if he might play for us a recent piece of his. This turned out to be an air-check of a five-minute arietta from the zarzuela The Wind Remains, which had been recently broadcast with Maria Kurenko intoning the Lorca text. I was bewitched and remain bewitched after five decades. Would Paul enjoy comparing my state to that of Dorian Gray to whom Lord Henry lends a copy of A rebours, precipitating poor Dorian’s descent into “esthetic corruption”? Alas, Paul’s music is the picture of health. A more proper analogy might be the petite phrase of Vinteuil, like Lenny’s “Taxco tune.”

  The petite phrase in this case was that most melancholy of intervals, a descending minor third, the “dying fall” that—I later discovered—threads all of Paul’s music. This arietta was a mere bagatelle, after all, yet it had more impact on my thinking than any symphony of Mahler, who also favored the dying fall yet whose nature was the antithesis of Paul’s. The little phrase was a mannerism which Paul is doubtless unaware of; we live with our signatures, so never think much about them. For me, though, it was a conscious expressive device which I appropriated and have retained. I have composed ten times more music than has Paul (with the 1949 advent of The Sheltering Sky he shifted, in the ken of the general public, from the role of composer-who-also-writes to that of author-who-used-to-compose), yet somewhere in my every piece lurks the rhythmic or melodic lilt, albeit disguised, of the invisible mentor. Influence, of course, is all art’s fertilizer: thievery is embellished, then branded with the new owner’s tic. Paul Bowles and I are separated enough in years for me still to wish, at this late date, for his approval. He would surely feign astonishment at this juvenile admission, especially since he might not see—or hear—himself in me.

  If I stress Paul’s musicality, it’s because that musicality seems to have fallen away in our world. The bulk of his fans today are unaware that he ever composed, much less have they ever hummed his tunes: Americans are meant to be specialists. So for the record let it be said that Paul Bowles is, like Europeans of yore (Leonardo, Cocteau, Noël Coward), a general practitioner of high order. Unlike them, his two professions don’t overlap—neither esthetically nor technically. Composers when they prosify (Schumann, Debussy, Thomson) inevitably deal with music or with autobiography. Bowles is the sole fiction writer among them, and his fiction is as remote from their prose as from his own music. His stories are icy, cruel, objective, moralistic in their amorality, and occur mostly in exotic climes; they are also often cast in large forms. His music is warm, wistful, witty, redolent of nostalgia for his Yankee youth, wearing its heart on its sleeve; and it is all cast in small forms. No American in our century has composed songs lovelier than his. None of these songs is currently in print. That fact echoes the indifferent world that he elsewhere so successfully portrays.

  The only secretarial work I did for Paul was to copy an extract from a ballet, Pastorela (fifteen pages for fifteen dollars), but with the years I had occasion to examine piles of his music, including the beloved moment from The Wind Remains. If the sound of his music remains like the wind over an otherwise barren earth, the sight of it was like a beginner’s. The manuscript was puerile in appearance, the spellings and placements on the staff were frequently incorrect, the orchestration seemed so unbalanced (according to my textbooks on instrumentation) as to sound like a smear. Hey, what was it with these trend-setting New Yorkers that they knew less than I about the basics of their profession!

  Father came through town and stayed at the Waldorf. Having never met either the roommate or the employer of his son, he hoped to play host to the three of us. We would dine à quatre in Peacock Alley. Virgil was amenable. “I’ve met fathers before,” he said, when I invited him, wondering nevertheless if the Waldorf might strike him as rather too snazzy for his presumably impecunious student’s sire. Father was eager as a boy at the prospect.

  Morris and I arrived first and went up to Father’s two-room suite. Father took me aside to announce the sad news that Don Dalton was dead. At boot camp Don had walked into an airplane propeller and been torn into a thousand shreds.… Poor clever, gentle Don, no death is dignified. His mother, Arleen, and my mother became friends then and exchanged letters for years. After Loren and Géorg, Don was my third death, and they were war casualties only indirectly. Yet the war was beginning to gobble our young men as AIDS gobbles them today. The thought of Don shrouded the evening.

  Then Virgil showed up and had to use the toilet. Father showed him into the side room, where The State of Music was lying open on the bed. Before Father could hide the book, Virgil spotted it and was flattered. During the course of the meal Virgil found Father handsome and wise. Forever afterward he claimed that “Ned’s father is in love with him.” Rosemary ultimately met Virgil at the Chelsea, didn’t get the point of him—the continental affectations, the specialization. Mother too saw him several times in later years, and never cared for him.

  Unguided, I was composing copiously. Virgil, adamant about not being a teacher, nonetheless inspected the goods occasionally, to show off his technical advice. Among these goods was Prelude and Adagio for organ, flute, horn, and viola, which I wrote, unsolicited, for E. Power Biggs. Before sending it off, Virgil, who knew a thing or two about the organ from his youth as choir director in Boston’s King’s Chapel, gave me hints about pedal use and voice leading. I mailed the result to Biggs in Cambridge. This time he was more enthusiastic. I heard Prelude and Adagio first over the air, when Biggs eventually programmed it on one of his Sunday-morning nationwide broadcasts (on 6 May 1945, at 9:15 a.m., to be exact), assisted by three members of the Boston Symphony. I was enchanted with the glow of my instrumentation: how the real flute reflected the organ flute stop like shadings of blue in a Rouault gouache; how flute and horn, silver and gold, blended as echoes in a Hopkins poem; how the luxuriant rasp of the viola in its long sad solo was mirrored myriad times among the strands of organ piping. The work in the reality of retrospect seems stodgy and without contrast, but Biggs rehearsed it as amply as though it were, well, a Ravel premiere, and I ensuingly played the tape—I mean the old 78-rpm vinyl acetate—for anyone who would listen. Two or three organists have since performed the piece as a curiosity, but it remains as it should, unpublished. Biggs and I corresponded until his death in 1977, but we never met.

  • • •

  Norris Embry recited a quatrain of Jean Cocteau’s called “De Don Juan”:

  En Espagne on orne la ruer />
  avec des loges d’opéra.

  Quelle est cette belle inconnue?

  C’est la mort. Don Juan l’aura.

  In one sitting I set it, steeped in the Bowlesian dying fall. (When in 1950 I first met Cocteau and quoted the poem, he, like Man Ray with the slave pictures, professed not to remember.) During the next weeks I wrote other songs on verses of my own, or by friends, or by an odd cluster of poets suggested either by Norris or by his colleague, blond Bob Anderson, both now settled, or unsettled, in New York after years at Saint John’s College with David Sachs. “Doll’s Boy,” for example, on Cummings’s famous words. Alvin Ross designed a blue and pink lithograph depicting the “eight and twenty ladies in a line” which Morris used as a cover for a limited edition which he printed privately. Also privately printed by Morris were Three Old English Songs on lyrics by Chaucer—did you know Chaucer wrote lyric poetry?—the first of which, titled simply “Song,” came forth as follows:

  Lenny Bernstein, already world famous from his overnight substitution for Bruno Walter at the Philharmonic, gave the New York premiere of his own Jeremiah Symphony with that orchestra in March of 1944. The soloist, mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel, featured only in the third of the three movements, nevertheless sat on stage for a full twenty minutes—jet-black hair, deep-blue dress, uninflected gaze—before opening her mouth. When finally she rose and began the Hebrew lamentation, the skies opened. Her unique sound of nasal chocolate, enunciating the biblical text, was at once satisfying and nourishing; she was the first example in my experience of an ugly person who, through talent and sheer presence, becomes, while in the act of singing, the epitome of glamour. As for Lenny’s music, this was the first of it I’d heard in public. It was nothing if not Jewish, while mine is nothing if not goyische. Yet this plaintive heady draft infused my creative consciousness, in both tone and texture, quite as intoxicatingly as Paul Bowles’s arietta, so that I went home and notated the memory, literally. The Chaucer song, which is this memory, is as Wasp as Lenny is not. Or so I imagined.