Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  What a fake! Yes, but a fake what?

  There is no fatalism except for the True Believer, but there is coincidence, especially if you seek it. The foregoing paragraphs were written yesterday. This morning, 13 August 1992, John Cage’s death is announced on the Times’s front page. Immediately perception softens. How could I not feel moved at knowing we’ll never never never meet again? He was someone, after all, and prevailed for half a century. Only last March we spoke on the phone, during my incapacitating siege of sciatica and herniated discs. John gave me the number of his chiropractor (“She’s black and tough and lives on the Lower East Side, and though I imagine I feel better I don’t really feel better”) but I never called her, although I felt concern for his concern and for our mutual plight, which now I view with the warmth of retrospection. This will happen no doubt often as I advance through these pages: opinion shifts as old friends die. I’ve gotten out his few letters which will now be filed in the obit drawer (yes, I’m Order personified since renouncing spirits and tobacco in 1968 when first I heard Time’s wingèd chariot), and feel honored to be featured in John’s book, Notations (admittedly along with 268 other composers—we pick up crumbs where they’re scattered), with a replica of my manuscript for My Papa’s Waltz, and with this uttered wisdom typeset eccentrically according to I-Ching chance operations: “September ’67. Just as illegible handwriting means semi-conscious bad manners, so slovenly musical calligraphy signifies a disordered composer.… I learned more in 6 months as a professional copyist than during 4 years at the conservatory. Ned Rorem.”

  John Cage’s lavish posthumous publicity is as inane as the emperor’s new clothes that swathe him still. My magnanimity ebbs, nor will I anymore change horses in mid-page.

  So when the Academy asked me to write the memorial tribute I answered “No, and neither probably would any other composer. John never had an audience from among the musical cognoscenti, get one of the poets.” Am I jealous?

  Allen Ginsberg gave the tribute last Tuesday, ending by “playing” “4’33”,” during which the Immortals sat stonily. I later heard one of them state how dazzled he was once at a 1963 performance of Radio Music, when amidst the static came news of Kennedy’s assassination—what a coup for John’s genius. Well, anything comes to those who wait, while washing their brains. But Cage’s coup was unearned, as was his long-lasting fame. Unearned at least by standards of craftsmanship, of originality, and even of wit.

  No one can see his own century. No one, indeed, can see the back of his own hand. We can’t see ourselves or know what purpose music serves. Music-as-expression-of-the-age is an excuse for shapelessness, convulsion, and horror. Every age thinks it’s the only and final age, and every age is horrid, convulsive, shapeless.

  Eugene Istomin had moved to New York in June of ’43, and the following November debuted, age seventeen, with the Philharmonic in the Brahms B-flat. He was now living with his parents on West Seventy-first, atop the little hill between Broadway and West End. We went there often, to encounter the flavorsome solidarity of White Russian expatriatism. The language, the relatives, the kissing, the samovar, the extrovert tears, the pathological adoration of music, the heterosexuality, the Slavic melancholy which was only partially Jewish—all that lent new vigor which was not just emotional but useful. Useful because among the throng appeared one Harold Brown, a hermetic, opinionated composer, not young (maybe thirty-five), whose music was adored by Eugene, who felt I should study with him. What Betty Crawford did for my piano technique, Harold did for my interpretation of other people’s music: if black and white ivories are approached as conveniences for the fingers, the Chopin etudes are approached as evolutions of Gregorian chant. This would be gobbledegook did not Harold’s own pieces purvey a mysterious appeal (and a solid scaffolding) that I’ve never seen or heard since. His lessons, imparted through study of plainchant mixed with an exegesis of Cocteau’s movie Sang d’un poète, were a salubrious contrast to Virgil’s no-nonsense orchestration lessons down on Twenty-third Street. Harold Brown’s Quintet for Strings and his eerie songs (especially “Alysoun,” on an eleventh-century English lyric) had much to do with the medieval modality of my own early songs. If forty years later he died unknown while ever superior to many an interferer, some of us feel that in his surly urge to avoid the reeking herd—in his not playing the game which is part of the rat race—he sailed above the storm but, unlike The Eagle of Rock, he sailed quite out of sight.

  A more amicable example from among the émigrés was the Siberian Alexei Haieff, he of the perpetually worried smile and ingratiating stutter, ten years my senior, and the very definition of what was already named neoclassical, being one of Stravinsky’s tight entourage—with Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero, and Irving Fine—until they were each traumatically dumped at the end of the decade with the advent of the remarkable Robert Craft in the life of the genius. Alexei was an intimate of Kiriena Siloti, who had been Eugene’s first piano teacher, and was herself daughter of the legendary Alexander, Liszt’s chief pupil, still thriving now in New York. Alexei’s music was crisp, elegant, playable, nonvocal, fun to hear because it “sounded” (what you saw was what you got—very French), but there wasn’t much of it. He invited me one afternoon chez Siloti where Stravinsky was to be guest of honor. This was the first of three times (in thirty years) that I met the man, and being intimidated, never said more than “How do you do.” Stravinsky remained seated, seemed hunched (as indeed he seemed always during the various magical times I watched him on the podium), and nodded with a childlike grin in eager silence as the other guests, one by one, ventured to sit beside him for an allotted five minutes. After a while he left, just as Aaron Copland arrived. The two greeted each other at the elevator. Can one forget Aaron’s first words to the rest of us as he took off his coat?: “Imagine! Stravinsky’s going down just as I’m coming up.”

  Eugene, now eighteen, still liked to be thought of as a roué, though in fact he was an overweight apple-cheeked prodigy, perhaps even a virgin, who steeped himself in classics. In giving me Leibniz which flowed over my head, and Henry James which filled me with tears, Eugene changed my perspective on literature. I wouldn’t read more than A Turn of the Screw before moving in 1949 to France, where I would devour dozens of James’s novels and canonize him along with Proust and Simenon, but already the master was ensconced.

  Last night, punchy from five hours of television, I decided to crack Henry James again. But the preface to The Golden Bowl seemed so impenetrably arch—like a satire of James—that I burst out laughing. Isn’t life too short for such madness now, or am I just stupider?

  Then this morning, in the line of dutiful research for these pages, I rummaged in old storage boxes labeled 1944–45 and found pieces I only dimly recall, beautifully copied and fading, pieces not even listed as NR’s “unpublished juvenilia” in various reference books. An Overture for GIs, for military band, which had been sent to Bill Strickland, who gave it a reading in Georgia but which I never heard. Two suites for piano solo, and a Portrait of a Young Girl, dedicated to Shirley Gabis. I phoned Shirley to talk about this.

  Didn’t I remember, she asked, when she used to come up to New York to spend weekends with me and Morris? On one such Saturday she retired at midnight, while Morris and I continued drinking at the Welcome Inn where a soldier made a pass at me and socked Morris hard on the chin, ripping his lip open. We came home bloody, and Shirley was not amused. A rift. I composed the Portrait and sent it to her. Which eased the rift, somewhat.

  Tragedy with a happy end is true to literature if not to life. A Room, with a View, for instance, or maybe Middlemarch (which isn’t a tragedy, though it is a drama of a self-made woman, as I recall). Comedy with a sad ending is true to life but not especially to literature. Les parents terribles comes to mind.

  The storage boxes contain also a Suite for Orchestra, and penciled songs on verses by Jackson Mac Low, Conrad Aiken, Frederick Prokosch, and a collection of Five Portraits for Oboe and Piano (
the portrait idea I stole from Virgil), which Josef Marx performed with Betty Crawford on an ISCM concert, and later on WNYC. Of this mass of material I marvel at the worthy energy, and at the mostly worthless outcome. Certain of the songs written then, and during the next five years, are as excellent as any I’d ever write (during the next forty years sometimes I’d try to imitate the élan and professionality that the young Ned unaccountably possessed), but all of the instrumental stuff—all of it!—is duller than that of many a teenage applicant rejected today by me from Curtis.

  I apologize, sort of, for enumerating these unknown works. They’re for the record. The only justification I have for this memoir is the prestige, such as it is, of a composer.

  The power of silence. The power, for example, of a lover who doesn’t answer letters, a critic who never reviews you, a famous artist who adds to his mystery by ignoring fan mail. The power Quakers invoke, of course, is the inner silence of a group meeting—he who talks too much seldom says anything… But is this true? Cocteau, Tallulah, Anna de Noailles, never closed their mouths but were worth attending, while a lot of quiet fools are foolish in their quietness.

  The wheel turned, the spokes fanned out now toward such diverse stimuli that it’s a matter of selection. Several events in the spring of 1945 immediately precipitated a new direction, which, all told, was a nice direction.

  Morris kicked me out. After eighteen months of cohabitation he longed for a change of scene, a room alone, a lack of me. (Once when Morris was away I brought a sailor home “after hours” and played the phonograph full blast with the window open while making love. Billie Holiday’s voice moaned in the courtyard, “You follow me around, build me up, tear me down,” and the neighbors were not amused.) Morris was kind but firm, wanting me gone by tomorrow. Since I couldn’t yet move into the little flat on Twelfth Street that had been promised as soon as a friend vacated, I stayed at George Garratt’s big apartment on East Fifty-third. Morris and I remained close, saw each other nearly as often as before, and he was concerned about the adventure, attractive and frightful, of my living completely alone for the first time.

  Then Father persuaded me to return to school. He would pay tuition, an allowance and rent (twenty dollars a month) if I would aim for a degree at Juilliard. A degree, as distinct from a diploma, meant attending various nonmusical classes. At the entrance exams in April, I passed the musical tests with such flying colors that I was not required to take most of the theory courses. Still, to qualify for the “secular” curriculum at Juilliard I had to enroll for eight weeks of summer school, in general history and English lit., at NYU. Which meant commuting from Garratt’s down to Washington Square five mornings a week.

  The upcoming school plans precluded further work with Virgil, with Harold Brown, and with Betty Crawford (at Juilliard I would be a double-major in piano and composition and would continue orchestration with the comp teacher). As with Morris, my new and strictly social role with Virgil would continue on the best of terms. My last day as Virgil’s lackey, he took me in a cab to the Mary Chess Boutique on Park Avenue and asked me to pick out the biggest bottle of any cologne I fancied. I didn’t fancy any (Paul Bowles had gifted me with a lifetime supply of patchouli oil), but chose the Russian Leather because it brought back the past.

  Virgil also suggested I contact soprano Janet Fairbank. Having looked over my songs, he concluded that Fairbank, who specialized in arcane Americana, would love them. So I became Miss Fairbank’s rehearsal pianist.

  As for Betty Crawford, she was soon to leave New York anyway, as a bride. Her parting gift was to pass on her job playing for Martha Graham. This seemed too interesting for me to forgo.

  How I juggled these friendships, academic deadlines, and pianistic responsibilities while still finding time for the semiweekly binges of a newly divorced narcissist, I cannot imagine. My body of today has shifted its resilience, and so has the century. But with my back to the mirror I can’t always tell the difference.

  16. Martha

  Everyone called her Martha, but no one was her confidant. She tore through society wearing blinders, looking neither to left nor right except to ferret out samples of what she would call “truth”: children in the subway, a gazelle at the zoo, buildings, boulders. She had no urge for small talk or broken hearts, and thus, like most obsessives, lacked humor. (Actually, we all have humor, but yours may not be mine.) Yet her works, half of them, are about prefeminist strong-minded females, victims as well as predators, often embarrassingly horny; the other half are about transcendent saints or silly geese and can be genuinely funny. Being a genius, she fit no definition. The personal coldness, couched in a guise of extreme cordiality, was pure self-protection. Remoteness is the coin of involvement’s flip side. She was Garbo’s mirror—Graham acted, Garbo danced.

  I had seen the Graham company years earlier, been impressed, found it agreeable with its seductive scores of Paul Nordoff, though not all that different from Chicago’s own Ruth Page Company with its seductive scores of Jerome Moross. But in 1945 Martha, aged fifty-two, was at her peak (the redoubtable Sol Hurok had just signed her), and even I realized that there must be a discombobulation when one meets the original after one has already known the imitator.

  So here I was, sitting across from the original, being interviewed for the position of classroom pianist—not, as I had hoped, of rehearsal pianist, which would have meant playing the new scores being choreographed for the coming season. She was all affability, now a flirting girl, now a grande dame, now a businesswoman, now a fellow musician. She did like me, or why put on such a show, yet I couldn’t tell what was expected of me. “You know,” she announced, “Leonard Bernstein once worked here. He really was ‘On the Town’ in those days. It didn’t work out—he couldn’t help playing ‘real music’ and mooning around at the keys, rather than playing rhythmic incitations.”

  Virgil once summed up the whole dance world in a phrase: “They are autoerotic and have no conversation.” About Martha in particular, Agnes De Mille wrote: “No one can remember exactly what she says.” Well, I can remember exactly two things: “The pay will be three dollars per class; and you will need a Social Security number.” Thus Martha Graham became my first official employer.

  The Graham studios were on Lower Fifth Avenue, number 66, above the Cinema Playhouse, which showed a perennial double feature, Blood of a Poet and Lot in Sodom. Classes then, not unlike Yoga sessions now, built gradually from the floor to the ceiling systematically over ninety minutes, entirely on counts of eight, barefoot, stressing contraction and release. Six or seven girls, three or four boys, some of them students, most of them company members, began the session prone on the uncarpeted parquet. With lowered heads betwixt hunched shoulders, they exhaled to a beat of eight; then with head and shoulder thrown back they inhaled to another beat of eight. These sequences were replicated in different postures for half an hour, until, with a lovely sweep of arm and hip the assembly rose in unison to an upright stance, and the routine was repeated. For the final half hour, still on counts of eight, the class hopped about the room in various postures and at various speeds. Or so I recall. Current practitioners of the Graham Method (the method that rocked the world in one generation, it has been asserted, as opposed to the three centuries it took for ballet to evolve) would say I’ve got it wrong. Yes, probably. My fingertips are eidetic, but my torso is not kinetic; I never took a class, and improvised on the keyboard only according to what I thought (or vaguely felt) the class wanted. “Play any old notes,” Martha advised, “as long as you keep the beat.”

  I performed for three classes a day, five days a week. The first was taught at 8:30 a.m. by Martha herself, whom we all agreed was “inspiring” (“we” being myself and the dancers, who had the souls of children and were easy to empathize with). She would talk a lot. Example: “Yesterday while wandering through the Museum of Oriental History I came across a Buddha of cobalt alabaster. His shaved pate was lowered in profound meditation and I felt a clash
of East with West rush through me like slow lightning, a respect tinged with envy, an attitude it would be well for us all to emulate. It is such meditation—such dynamic, fruitful meditation—that I could hope each one of you might absorb.” Then she would approach the thrilled and baffled youngsters and one by one stretch their limbs with her magic hands (“do as I do, not as I say”), while my improvised pianistic drumbeats, or sighs, orgasms, always to a throbbing count of eight, and sometimes using music of old masters—Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, for instance—tried to impel their movements.

  The second class was led by Erick Hawkins, whom Martha loved (they would be married—briefly, catastrophically—shortly thereafter, during which this unique monster would legally become Martha Hawkins, a role from one of her hillbilly creations), and who was her company’s romantic male dancer, with Merce Cunningham as comic or evil relief. Erick often joined the students as a warm-up in the earlier class, but everyone else was new—except me. He, too, would talk a lot. Example: “Recently I visited the Oriental Museum and came across a Buddha with a shaved head. This Buddha represented the rift between West and East, and I wish you could emulate him.” Poor Erick, he longed to be taken for a thinker. But in appropriating Martha’s nonanecdote (though he might well have been with her yesterday at the Oriental Museum—wherever that may be), he diminished himself in my eyes. Still, to watch him leap, or gyrate, or touch with such gentle formality a fellow moving body was to see Nijinsky converted to modern dance. Like most people, he resembled his name, with that aquiline nose, those chiseled cheeks, the Tom Cruise gaze, a craggy ramrod. He was less intimidating than Martha, easier to follow.