by Ned Rorem
The premiere on 20 November was followed by three other performances. The musical group consisted of flute, cello, trumpet, and piano, of which I recall only Seymour Barab on cello and me on piano. (I remember, too, that at one performance when the trumpeter was ill, Chuck Turner stepped in at the last minute, unrehearsed, and played the part on his fiddle.)
Three months later, on 26 February 1949. Cock-a-Doodle-Doo opened, also for a run of four performances. This new play by Iris Tree was directed by Margaret Barker, known as Beanie, who would become a lasting colleague. Beanie, already in her mid-forties, had been central to the old Group Theater, but now was drifting. She lived with Ann McFarlane, the same Ann McFarlane for whom Allela Cornell had ended her life and who now was a big wheel in AA. So was Beanie. I was not. Nor did I sometimes show up for rehearsals. Beanie lectured me, but the lectures incited me hopelessly, as though to prove my good I had first to prove my bad, so as to be worthy of your good, a vicious circle.
The play was a hillbilly confection about magic and love and crops. But the cast was dynamic. Charlton Heston and Darren McGavin were febrile and sensuous, born for the stage, and so was Peggy Feury. The Stylized Movement by Felicia Sorel involved, among the overall choreography, a little jig for Heston accompanied by a cello solo, all pizzicato. He came to my dreary room one Sunday morning to rehearse this, and seemed so warm, so comradely, that I felt we’d be brothers forever. (His movie career changed that. The only time we ever met again was at the White House for a “Festival of the Arts” in 1965. He was chatting with someone Important, and responded to my greeting with an unfriendly shrug, like Prince Hal with old Falstaff.) The music, for just piano and cello (intoned by me and the trusty Seymour Barab), was based on a Kentucky folk tune, eventually published as “Mountain Song,” and still played from time to time on other people’s recitals.
23. Ned’s Diary (IV)
Two weeks ago I dreamed I strangled to death a woman who had no name.
1947
July, Tanglewood. If I fall in love a hundred times, requited or no, the cycle is complete each time. If I love 7 a week, each day has the same gamut, the same tender tortures, as a year. We cannot fall. Suffer daily for someone new I have never seen.… Tanglewood is frightful, not the happy memory of last year. Too social for concentration, but I am happy when I am the center, thereby overpowering shyness. The haircut makes me bullnecked.…
Headaches at orgasm. Sensation accumulates, becoming more and more intense so that at the climax I grow blind with an unendurable crunch in the temples. Takes nearly 36 hours to abate totally. Not always does this happen, but often enough, especially when sober.…
If I am passive, the earth is more so. I do make things, which is more active than lying fallow. Man grows passive through lack of craft; the imminent mass suicide looms because he cares no longer. The strong of the earth—who are evil—know this. “Follow me to your destruction,” they say to the jew who reports with mathematical docility to the gas chamber. Until individual man is rendered incapacitated (arms chopped off, presenting a rational excuse for non-aggression) he will continue to vent his vicious insecurity upon the poet.… My strength is extraordinary, being creative—next to the bartender who petrifies me.
18 August, New York. The longest binge ever: 7 days. Robbery again, and six days ago I woke up with this snapshot in my hand [photo of a wedding couple being photographed, pasted in diary], from somewhere on First Avenue.… Smattering of love last week when Latouche administered some African therapy to my overboard condition of emergency.
Martha’s Vineyard.… dreams: often of lions. (Wrote a poem called Lions.)… Made up a movie as we drove to Chilmark. During the credits, behind the written word, face of a boy comes closer. Credits finished, all we see filling the screen are his lovely head and naked shoulder, perhaps tears. Hair of a woman perceived descending from top of screen, face upside down, she glances at boy, disappears. Only his head & shoulder. He screams, loud, and fades. Everything is black. Movie begins.
Suicide by injection of a fork into the eye, revolved into the brain. This is done at a café table.
Sartre’s trashy novel: “One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly to oneself.”
Dream: Huge boa-constrictor, with a dog’s nose of elastic & vast manipulatory power, hangs in a lone tree above an empty highway. A fast new car approaches upon which this snake means to drop & encircle, demolishing. But the car’s too fast and the snake falls just short of it onto the road. In anger he makes jerking gestures with his jaws, as though to swallow the car—which has vanished. It has become night, the road now a city street in silence. I walk with a friend, but the boa squirms behind; he becomes an auto. The auto nears now, slows down, and from it 3 rough men appraise us. Solicitous? The car makes a U-turn, follows slowly. Street dark and quiet. I am in the foyer of a slum-house, a house of danger—or rather of unpleasant mystery. My family’s? Darkish red glow. A distant room like that of a medium, screens, messy canopies and lace, people without faces fade in and out, never close, always across the black room. (Yesterday I saw 3 movies: in a cartoon a dog’s nose was detachable. Later in Mary’s bar, 3 gangsters frightened me.) I have been drinking again.
11 September. Every afternoon on awakening I have turned into some new kind of animal, a lobster, a hound. Today in a haze I sat with the sober world of Stewart’s cafeteria at 32nd and 6th Ave. Spastics, snarling cashiers, senile stupidity, general un-beauty. Is this the real world I emerge into?…
16 September. Weird things are happening. Why will not burglars leave notes? My house, flimsy thing, is inhabited at nights when I am gone.…
… Now the suitcase is stolen. Heart hurts. Today the postcards of apology. Close to alcoholism. Nosebleeds, the sheet smeared with blood clots. An alarming letter from Janet [Fairbank] about how my reputation as a dependable musician is going down the drain. I can explain nothing of the world to myself. Am I a failure? What difference does it make?
An evening with Frank Etherton is inevitably odd. Last night he pried open the iron safety-door of Café Society, and down a long flight of steps, through a porthole, we saw Nellie Lutcher, stark naked, powdering her breasts before a mirror.
5 October. The piano is in the same condition as myself, poor battered thing.… I was robbed again last night, but had only 7 dollars.
2:30 a.m. Have begun Gide’s journals. What shameless sincerity! How is he to be admired this day? Yet he has become the Great Man with the speculating fruition behind him. Will we who are young be able one time to turn back to decades of recalling? There looks to be another big war soon. We will never have known middle age, but will have been here for the world’s end.…
8 October. Louise Holdsworth woke me yesterday noon (I’m writing a dance, Egress, for her) and asked me out to lunch. My eyes are bigger and browner, she says, than before she went to the coast. She cannot work, discussed her divorce. Does she mean to seduce me?… Then after school had tea with Chuck Turner: same problem. Dined with Janet Lauren who proferred some slight but solid advice, from her singer’s vantage, on the new songs. We saw Marked Woman, the old Bette Davis farce. At midnight Eugene and Seymour came by with icecream and ginger ale; and at 2 Shirley called all laden with marital woes. This busy manner diverts the ego, but is hardly solitude.
28 October. Is will be was. There’s more room where people aren’t than where they are (age 7).
I’m 24 now, and hygienically have begun to die. Tonite the 3 of us (Gene, Sh. & I) ate at Chambord—50 bucks! Christ, I can’t even touch rum-cake or fruit in wine or brandy sauce without going askew. I shall see a doctor?
Does a man who has spent years in a concentration camp recall any moment of this with the nostalgia indigenous to the past, or is such sentiment beyond human nature?
31 October. Don Giovanni this evening, that perfect thing. Talked to Sally Goodman at intermission; she had come by yesterday afternoon at 3:30, but I (having just awake
ned) was sitting in bed with a jet black man & woman, drinking vermouth and eating baked beans. I didn’t think to invite Sally in for fear she’d be shocked: she wouldn’t have been, except by my face which was ashen.
Last night an hallucination. Having retired with the remnants of a shattering hangover after only 8 waking hours, I found it difficult to fall asleep. Room in total darkness. After tossing for a while, I opened my eyes. Blazing light! I could make out some exquisite snow-white buildings in the shimmering distance, but immediately a hand passed about a yard above my vision and dropped a flower on the pillow beside my head—or was it a crumpled note, a message? This all took but a second. I trembled, and after an hour dropped off.
When I come home (alone & sober) late at night, I’m always afraid someone is in the room, until I turn on the light.
5 November, Wednesday. Now that autumn’s here (frail rain falling, soon snow) I have all of my breakfasts home, in a part of the room called the Yellow Corner: 3 yellow rugs, chair with a yellow cloth, lemon-colored table-spread on a box and a bowl of golden apples, bananas and oranges. And the chair’s wood is blond. Very insane.
Saw Dr. Kraft today. Am I sure about this? Therapist = the rapist.
Last night at George Bemberg’s, as we talked, I suddenly heard a bird singing. When it sang again an hour later I asked if there was a canary in a nearby apartment. He said no, but his own pet finch died a year ago & a certain few of his friends can hear it sing now (he can’t, because he lives there). George has a European charm, a cross between Gian Carlo and Alexei Haieff, but being literary his style is more complex.
Tiger’s Eye. Why must each new little-mag format be lavish & extravagant, boxing vacuum? The story I read by Anaïs Nin an hour ago is already forgotten. And New York seems to host a surplus of modern dancers, all à la Martha, popeyed, longhaired, rich-lipped, vastly facile and utterly monotonous from a relentless hammering on the least amusing of the overdone psychoses. These girls are naïve in their urge to express—to project—their little troubles. It’s obscene.
10 November. There’s no such thing as good or bad taste—only taste.
Saturday George Bemberg & I played through French songs all evening, mostly Fauré, Poulenc, Milhaud. Then today I get a new ditty from Danny Pinkham who sends me everything he does. He puts it this way. “Also I send you a new Fauré song I just wrote (maybe it’s Teddy Chanler instead). I think it’s pretty hot stuff myself, in its own quiet way. Hope you don’t disapprove.” Does he feel he’s weak, or is he being sophisticated about the derivitiveness inevitable to the young?
John Lindsay [Wingate] & Christopher Lazare each phone about once a week (when I am most busy) and talk forever, wittily, about their own troubles (no mention of mine). Who cares? Even my closest friends are conversationally selfish. So I have always tried not to be except with bores. The word “I” always makes me feel strange.
I no longer bring 15 or 20 people home every nite to continue drinking after bars close at 4 (and then throw them cavalierly out at 7, bottles and all). I will be quiet for a while—calmly bacchanalian, as I wrote to Danny about A Sermon on Miracles.
16 November, Sunday, 2 a.m. Just left Christopher with whom I spent the entire evening (after having passed a sober afternoon at the movies—French—with Fabian). He gave me a hypodermic of dealudite (?)—opium and morphine. An eerie, shifting, languorous sensation quite opposed to liquor, which cannot be drunk with it. Being of oriental derivation, the drug when injected is placid and sensual, not conducive to erections. Impossible even to urinate. Perception made sharper, all is apricot-colored, like drowning slowly in chiffon. Fingers shake, though the brain stays crystal clear, eyes grow leaden, shoulders tingle. At best it makes one feel like snuggling beneath the wing of an angel. But it fatigued me formidably (though conversation stays acute), made me itch & sweat, and finally vomit. Fortunately effects wear off pretty thoroughly, except for hiccups, unlike liquor—and then, appropriately enough, we had a midnite supper at a Chinese restaurant on 48th, although hunger disappears with drugs.
Jackson Mac Low stops by to leave some children’s poems he just wrote for me to set. Nice separately, but as a cycle they’re too much alike. Influenced by Paul Goodman and (of all things) Wozzeck—hop! hop!
Violence all over New York now, and murders, especially in the Village. Awakened at 4 a.m. by gunshots and the squeal of an escaping truck. Afterwards the local gin-mills empty their blinking tight customers onto the sidewalk where they unsteadily discuss the crime. It’s the second recent gang slaughter in the neighborhood.
A few dark mornings later I am again wakened by 2 people fucking right outside of, and against, my door. This disturbance lasts 25 minutes (I hear each word and motion climaxed by the wastebasket being kicked clatteringly over) and then they leave. Rushing to peep through the window, I wonder should I have asked them in. No, hallway fornication is a sacred tension. Instead I pray they won’t wake the neighbors, and long to throw them 2 white roses.
17 November. Yesterday I ate an orange, today also, and so will I tomorrow. Last Thursday noon, too, after a night of puking. Why are we not so organized that food-fuel is only needed once a week? Or if it’s daily, then eating should not be infinitely replicated (like vestigial male & female organs contained eternally within each other) but become an untried alluring taste every one of the thousands of times. Food, and discussions of it, bore me.
Bumped into Peter Briggs, and later Aaron Bell (who came to the city to see Medea) at Julius’s bar last week. How can such bright boys be so tediously opinionated? And yet, each time I leave Dr. Kraft, I realize that for an hour my voice has droned without shading—that I have been unwrapped. Then back to the world where, with our dearest, the gaudy veneer is reassumed. Is this our personality, our charm, that vanishes at the analyst’s? At birth we enter our disguises.
18 November. This afternoon Zelda Goodman and I did 4 songs of mine (twice) at Juilliard. Nice reception. But to call my religious music undignified, as was the case in the post-performance confab, is naive. A pile of shit could be construed as exalted. I answered all questions with canny wit, & said that while a poem or symphonic etude is complete in itself, a song is a 3rd thing, to be considered greater than the sum of its parts. And religious meanings are much broader today. (My fingers shook from last night’s beer.) Jacobi was enthralled.
Thursday. The silent bed. Awoke fully clothed. I have never been drunker.… What we absorb we later impart.…
Friday.… so I tell Kraft some of this, but withhold some too.… Last night Shirley and I went to Tosca, all dressed up and hungover. Horrible production; Tibbett a disgrace. But such music—the Frenchified splendor of those ubiquitous lowered sevenths and parallel fifths! How does a composer, without being drunk, let go enough to write such schmaltz? Can a world exist without alcohol, people work and sleep together without being high? Afterwards a strange 2 hours at Tony’s Café on 52nd where I’m allowed, being with fashionable girl, etc. Later I hear from Bobby, the waiter at Mary’s, that I had announced the nite before that I came there just to insult people (this is important!). We run into Alfonso Ossorio, with whom I make a lunch appointment and then oversleep. He is with a circle of wealthy asses, but Shirley finds him appealing all the same. (He has done a pretty good cover for Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Maybe I’ll have him do one for “Mongolian Idiot.”)
Saturday afternoon. Awoke this morning with a cold. Lesson with Wagenaar who finds Cain & Abel expressive but sluggish.… Session with Kraft, the third one, and I blush from the strain of telling my dream of resentment about him.… Ryder exhibit at the Whitney with Shirley: pungent, gloomy, inspiring. Today is like Ryder: deep, mellow, glimmering rain. Very Saturday. Tonight Billy Masselos’ remarkable program at Carnegie.
… Finished 14 Greek plays: 11 tragedys [sic], 3 comedies. And Gide’s nice book. Must resume Proust (also Kierkegaard’s Mozart essay), Ulysses (who stole it?), War and Peace, & Rimbaud.… Probably, in my horror of order, I keep thi
s journal as unacknowledged anal-eroticism (also my constant nose-picking to the discust [sic] of all). But my spitting, smoking, fingernail-biting & drinking—are oral.…
Jennie Tourel: her green silk negligée is expensive but tawdry; she’s very pretty but her elbows are a little crusty, her lipstick is inclined to be cracked, smeared; and there are chunks of vaseline in her iron-blue hair. She is tired: very Oral.… On the stage she is immaculate, a coquette, bewitching clean. She can do anything—as Virgil puts it, she can sing “high and low and soft and loud.” She is impeccable: very Anal.
Claude et Maurice. Genius vs. talent; little boys, one simple, one suave; ninths vs. sevenths; oral vs. anal; sensual innocence vs. sexual wit; outdoor painting vs. hothouse restraint.
4 December. Uncanny weather, not conducive to setting into a 4-part round the little carol Paul sent.… Jackson [Mac Low] stopped by, said nothing. He seems a frightened boy.
Blazing drunk last night at Julius’s (saw Stud Ruml who’s gotten fat, and his new Stalinist mistress who’s not as attractive as Bobbie James. He’s trying, like all the others, to publish his novel), and at the San Remo where a girl named Marjorie R. propositioned me (she liked my green sweater), but when I phoned today I find she’s left town. Alas! Woke up at 2 this aft. having wet the bed. Went with S.G. to put the deposit down for Times Hall; then to see the luscious Viviane Romance in Panic, a pleasant French film on murder & deception; then had my cards read badly for a dollar in a creepy Village teahouse; then to the analyst; then met Muriel Smith for a late & long supper. Muriel is heavier and appealing, excited by her recital at which she is not singing my songs.
I’ve always liked women with long hair, bangs, berets, very high heels, even as I’m fascinated by people who don’t drink, men with hair on the back of their hands, people who don’t need glasses, and eating in. Closely related to my aversion to the words “pie” and “cake” is the feeling of guilt when I eat pastry, which I love.
