Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  On 18 June when we took the train to Martha’s Vineyard, Paul and I were headed for Menemsha, where Shirley’s mother, Rae Gabis, had taken a house. There were eight of us: Shirley and Rae, Eugene Istomin and Byron Hardin, John Eustace (a friend of Norris’s from Saint John’s), Paul, me, and Miriam Gideon, with whom I shared a room as well as a birthday (she was born 23 October 1908). Paul brought his just-published Kafka’s Prayer and was the guru of the fortnight. I read Sartre’s just-published Chemins de la liberté, and everyone else read Reich’s just-published The Function of the Orgasm (in a plain brown wrapper) because Paul was a devoted Reichian. This literature was absorbed on the beach, where the poet Edward Field often joined us. I was jealous of Field’s good looks. Paul had solutions for everyone.

  Me: “I don’t like the way Ed Field talks.”

  Paul: “Then cover his mouth with kisses.”

  Byron: “I don’t have dreams like ’Gene does, of coming onto the stage stark naked.”

  Paul: “You’re probably not as good a pianist as ’Gene.”

  Rae: “Well, I still think Roosevelt was a great man, even if he did get us into the war. Great men can make mistakes.”

  Paul: “Then what makes them great?”

  On the beach, at Eugene’s request, Paul wrote out a pretty good translation of Alyosius Bertand’s three medium-class poems which Ravel used as epigraphs for his virtuosic piano suite Gaspard de la nuit. Eugene reprinted them in his programs throughout the world. I was impressed at Paul’s grasp of French, though of course he had the grasp of anything. (A year later, when Jean Cocteau passed briefly through New York, we all went to gaze upon him at the Gotham Book Mart. Paul, who worshiped Cocteau and who was never intimidated, was intimidated. He spoke to the maître only in English—“My translations of your works are better than these,” gesturing toward a display—which Cocteau didn’t understand. “Tell him in French, Paul,” we all prodded, but he didn’t. We knew French then, but not how to speak it.)

  Homely but sexy, big nose and glasses, his broad New York accent belied his vast education. He made passes at literally everyone of every age, sometimes even at dogs, because he felt that repressed Americans deserved fulfillment. Despite his two common-law wives, Ginny and Sally, and his children, it was not girls but boys, 95 percent of the time, that made his eyes shine and his heart break. Since everyone on earth, whether they allow it or not, is bisexual, why shouldn’t Paul himself be the answer to any man’s secret gay yearnings?

  To John Eustace, on the beach: “Give in to your feelings.”

  John: “I do give in to my feelings. I just don’t think you’re attractive.”

  When Paul died, no one denied him as a serious mind: there were homages emphasizing his contributions as sociologist, city planner, psychotherapist, linguistic theoretician, political and educational reformer. All mentioned Growing Up Absurd; some talked about his diary, Five Years, which juxtaposes tracts on creative method with carnal encounters; a few applauded his novels (is that what they are?), The Grand Piano, The State of Nature, The Holy Terrors, and The Dead of Spring, a tetralogy on an iconoclast’s passage through the Empire City. But if he was that rare thing among radicals of the time, an educated poet, no eulogist brought up his poems. A disconcerting number of fans, even among his friends, did not realize he wrote poems.

  That was partly his fault. Hardly modest, Paul nevertheless did not stress the sheer variety of his talents. Like Cocteau, who classified his own output—fiction, movies, plays, ballets, drawings, paintings, criticism, and pure life—under the one heading Poésie, so Paul called himself a humanist. “Everything I do has the same subject,” he would say, a quite European nonspecialist attitude for one so American—or rather, so New Yorkish.

  Yet his poetry is not the same as his other works. It rises higher, and will be viewed as individual long after his thrilling but didactic ideas, pragmatic and doctrinaire, are absorbed, as they already have been, into our anonymous culture.

  His poems, a third of them, complain loudly of his loneliness, how no one returns his love. (The love, physical and moral, addressed perhaps twelve people a day!) Yet he wasn’t a particularly giving person, except as therapist. When the objects of his affection grew up, he lost interest. I went to bed unsentimentally with Paul as long as he wanted but never initiated it. He smelled of his baggy sweater and pipe smoke. Out of what he thought was duty, he’d make a pass at, say, Shirley, an hour after me. He felt—and was probably right—that humans didn’t fuck enough, or with the right relaxed purging pleasure. But he wasn’t every man’s ideal.

  Paul, a couple of years after his son’s birth: “Sally and I don’t know what to do. Matthew doesn’t yet seem interested in masturbating.”

  To the always circumspect Aaron Copland, meeting him for the first—and last—time at a party: “A lot of cute boys here, don’t you think?” Aaron walked away. Paul found him hypocritical.

  Let me stress his frivolity, a quality contained in all artists, since all art is made from the contrasts formed by an ability to express relationships between the superb and the silly. Paul’s was not the simplistic sexual frivolity of a Mick Jagger, nor the thunderous German-joke frivolity of a Beethoven (whom he adored), but the high-camp, spiritually practical yet sad frivolity of, say, Haydn, Voltaire, Gogol, Auden, Billie Holiday.

  Did you know he actually wrote music too? Not very inspired, sort of Brahmsian, and technically childlike. Like fellow composer Ezra Pound, he confused homemade discovery with professionalism, though any well-trained nonentity could have done better. Still, his writing about music, critically and philosophically, was less dumb than any layman’s since Thomas Mann.

  With all his heterogeneity he never became (though for a time it threatened) a pop figure with catch phrases, like McLuhan or Buck-minster Fuller. He was too compact for love at first sight.

  He was aloof and cool—traits not unusual with philanthropists, beginning with Freud. He never ceased to intimidate me because he was, and remains, The One whose stamp of approval I seek; childhood idols never have clay feet. When the demands of glory grew, his warmth was directed more toward groups than toward individuals. I received his new poems then only through the mail. We had grown so apart that, on phoning in late May of 1972 to ask about his health, I half hoped he wouldn’t answer. But he did.

  “Should we be worried, Paul?”

  “Yes, we should.” Yet gently he added: “Nice to hear your voice, kiddo.” I sent love to Sally, and we promised ourselves an autumn reunion. But in August he died.

  If Paul can die then ànyone can die, even God, and whom can we fall back on now? In 1939 he concluded an epitaph for Freud:

  … suddenly dead for all our hopes and fears

  is our guide across the sky and deep,

  this morning a surprise for bitter tears,

  a friendly dream now I am asleep.

  Paul Goodman was a household poet, a poet who did not rework verse into Eliotian cobwebs of intricacy but composed on the run, for immediate occasions, in the manner Frank O’Hara would make popular. Two examples:

  In 1947 John Myers madly tried to turn Mary’s Bar on Eighth Street into another Boeuf sur le Toit. For the opening Paul and I concocted three blues which John and Frank Etherton at 11 p.m. intoned in the styles of Mistinguett and Stella Brooks. Heartbreaking. But hardly the speed of that clientele. Then at 1 a.m. Eugene took over the keyboard of an upright casserole and amid the fumes of laughter and beer performed Gaspard de la nuit. Incredibly, that was the speed of the clientele. (Those blues today? In the back of a trunk. But maybe the words and music would be the speed of our new clientele!)

  Janet Fairbank, that youngish soprano who during the war years gave concerts of new American music, a specialty no less rare then than now, was our sole voice, our outlet. We all collaborated on many a song that Janet sang; indeed, it was she who premiered my setting of Paul’s soaring words, “The Lordly Hudson.” The evening she died, Paul appeared on my doorstep with
a poem. “Here,” he said, “make some music out of this.” Three short stanzas describe how Janet sang our songs because she loved to sing, how we loved to make up songs for her to sing, how she is now mute and we are dumb. Too soon the final lines evoke Paul Goodman himself, with their question from the impotent survivor confronted with a dying fellow artist:

  … If we

  make up a quiet song of death,

  who now shall sing this song we made

  for Janet not, because

  (no other cause) she loved to sing?

  I did once bring Paul together with Samuel Barber—Redskin and Paleface—probably late in 1947. They were so busy not trying to impress each other that the evening lagged. This took place at Paul’s somewhat shabby pad on Ninth Avenue where he lived with Sally. No amenities except books. The oeuvre of the two men was as diametrically opposed as their personalities, Sam all stylishness, Paul rough-and-tumble. Opposites don’t always attract. Paul clearly resembles his writing. But does a composer resemble his music?

  Words are symbols for what isn’t there at the moment. Painting depicts three dimensions in two dimensions. But if music is symbolic or representational, I don’t know what of, and I’ve been dealing with it all my life. Assuming we can define what music “means,” what humans are made of, or even the four humors as they pertain to art, then certainly a composer resembles his music, since by definition one cannot exist without the other. Still, biographers often disengage the two, as though the animal source were a necessary evil to be shunned or purified. Art is not True Life, to be sure, but it is distilled life, and who else’s but the artist’s?

  I had met Sam that past summer. Once again I was among Copland’s flock at Tanglewood, and once again the guest teacher, this time Arthur Honegger, suffered a collapse and had to be replaced. Barber happened to be on the premises—he was touring the Cape and had stopped by for the weekend to hear Koussevitzky conduct his overture to The School for Scandal—so he was drafted. Again too that summer were the composers’ meetings, and at one of these Sam and I first shook hands. Those Tanglewood bull sessions were knotty, long-winded, theoretic, “meaningful.” But Samuel Barber, as America’s sole songwriter (a fact that awed me, as well as Danny Pinkham and Bill Flanagan, who were in his class), had access to “real” singers. Avoiding the nonvoiced American specialists with lunatic reputations—the Janet Fairbanks that we relied on—he understandably favored divas with big, gorgeous sound boxes. True, he had written “Monks and Raisins” for the bizarre Frijsh (who could deny her?), and soon would be sculpting his Mélodies passagères for the one-of-a-kind Bernac (whose link with Poulenc had grand cachet), but they were Europeans. Mainly, however, one then thought of Barber as the composer of “Nuvoletta” and Knoxville for the established Eleanor Steber, even as he would later compose The Hermit Songs for the up-and-coming Leontyne Price. Sadly it was not to songs but to stars that the public was and is drawn, and without arias even stars aren’t certain magnets. If foreign composer-singer tandems like Poulenc & Bernac or Britten & Pears once had box-office appeal in the United States, the famous home-boy, without an orchestra behind his soloist, did not. When Barber & Price, as pianist and soprano, were offered by Columbia Artists as a package during the early 1950s, they had too few bids to continue. (When Donald Gramm and I were offered as a package by the same management in the 1970s, the only recitals we pulled off were those we got ourselves. Today, even those would be unprocurable: nobody any longer knows, in our philistine world, what a song concert is.)

  But back to the bull session. When in deference to the songwriting Sam the question of Song was solemnly broached, how tantalizing to hear him say: “Yes, all composition is difficult, but why song more than ‘straight’ music? Why the fuss about prosody and diphthongs and declamation and word quantities? Why not write as you speak?” which is the reason vocalists enjoy him, and why my dim guilt was assuaged. When I showed him my analysis of his Essay from the previous year, he found it absolutely faultless and (like most analyses) absolutely beside the point.

  One hears Sam in his songs as unmistakably as one tastes Julia Child in her recipes, not least because he was himself a true singer. Yet is firsthand knowledge a prerequisite of first-rate work? At parties Sam would, if coaxed, accompany himself—though never in his own music—in some dear goody of yore, “Pale Hands” being a favorite. What he mocked was precisely what he once most “felt,” for his own early efforts were close to the bone of Carrie Jacobs Bond. Which explains their popularity on safe recital programs. Despite his classy choice of authors (Prokosch, Hopkins, Horan, Lorca, Rilke), his most famous songs lack profile; they could have been written by anyone. I once proclaimed the paradox that Barber has no identifiable style, yet has identifiably influenced Chuck Turner.

  At Tanglewood Sam was not interested in his female students, nor in fact the heterosexual ones (and they were, oddly, in the majority). He took a shine to Bill Flanagan. Also, I suppose, to me. We had the habit of gathering for martinis at the Lenox Hotel’s garden bar at six, of listening to the church bells while Sam spoke magically of the Angelus in Rome, his second city, where beauty was unproblematically available, and of skipping the evening concert in favor of some roadside restaurant. One midnight we all went swimming in the violent moonlight. I was adamant about not taking my clothes off for the plain reason, comprehensible to any male of any age, that cold water shrinks the sex, and I didn’t want to be judged accordingly. (I am, in erection, far better than average hung—let’s leave it at that.) Sam nevertheless phoned in the fall to invite me for a weekend at Capricorn.

  Capricorn was the house in Mount Kisco which he shared, and would continue to share for years, with Gian Carlo Menotti, and with a (to me) unexplained poet named Robert Horan. Sam picked me up at the entrance to Juilliard and off we hied. Capricorn seemed the ultimate luxury, rambling and isolated, with studios at each end of the property where Gian Carlo could write his Catholic dramas like The Saint of Bleecker Street and Sam his Protestant tracts like Prayers of Kierkegaard without there being internecine friction. Perhaps Robert Horan was the buffer. Horan, known as Kinch, turned out to be handsome and heavy drinking. He played the host on our arrival and remained—soft-spoken and alluring—for the evening meal, after which he left for the city and I never saw him again. Gian Carlo was away. Leaving me and Sam to play cat-and-mouse for forty-eight hours.

  Have I already said it? I’ll say it again: I can’t sleep with famous people. Or for that matter with rich people, or people in power, used to being the center of attention. I have been in bed with four Time covers—Lenny Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Noël Coward, and John Cheever (included among three thousand proportionately anonymous souls, including one woman)—and I performed out of a combination of duress and politeness. However, I grow uncomfortable when in other people’s memoirs I read of this sort of thing (maybe this will be excised when the time comes), especially when embellished by the writer’s smug sense of his charisma, boasting how he wouldn’t put out for some star. Still, it’s integral to this story to say that Sam wanted to and I didn’t, so we didn’t. He was thereafter standoffish in my regard.

  I had the impression—we all did—that Sam Barber in his heyday was the only musician in a land of iconoclast cowboys for whom elegance was the defining virtue; when he left us in 1980 at seventy he took with him, for better or worse, a concept of craft stemming from that virtue. Now insofar as it means control and taste, is elegance quite the noun for the Barber’s art? Does one confound the product with the person, well wrought in shape but overwrought in content, coolly French on top but Brahmsian beneath? And insofar as it means aloof and unruffled, is elegance actually the term for the person, and is his product so inevitably suave? Listen again to the First Symphony, frantic and—if you will—ill-bred throughout its nineteen minutes, or to the trivial and vulgar Excursions for piano. Then think back to the man himself, as Apollonian a creature who ever stopped chatter on entering a room, as canny and cultured
a companion as one could desire on his good days, yet with on occasion the cutting manners that only those born rich can get away with (or think they can) and with the terre-à-terre opportunism that every composer, rich or poor, has harbored since before Haydn. Yes, Sam resembled his music, quite literally, as Paul resembled his writing.

  Paul wrote a beautiful text for me to set to music according to terse specifications given by Danny Pinkham. Danny wanted something, about ten minutes long, that he could premiere in his Boston church that autumn. Paul, heartened by my previous settings of his words (notably “The Lordly Hudson” and the little opera), had written the campy poems screeched, with me at the piano, by Myers & Etherton, first at Mary’s Bar and then at The Little Casino: “Jail-Bait Blues,” “Bawling Blues,” and “Near Closing Time.” These were, so to speak (or so to sing), Reichian ditties:

  So often near closing time

  desire overbrims

  and comes off in the head

  instead of in the limbs

  Now Paul felt that his pseudo-Bible style would be apt for the Pinkham commission. This was A Sermon on Miracles, which I arranged for unison chorus with four solo voices and small string orchestra. The performance, on November 30 in Boston’s Second Church, was a great reward: the music sounded as I’d dreamed. (Among the soloists was Janet Hayes, blond and stagey, whom I would come to know better in Paris.) After the postconcert party I got drunk in the wilds of Cambridge and awoke in a sordid hotel bed with an Irish bartender who had a cleft chin.