Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Spent evening accompanying fiddle sonatas with Chuck Turner: 2 Mozart, 2 Beethoven. Then read all the plays in Paul’s Stoplight, hoping to find one for music. (I must have him “lucidify” 2 of them.)

  The stained glass of Riverside Church is all in bird colors: cardinal red, parrot green, diaphanous bluebird blue, canary yellow. The luminosity too suggests fluid: orange crush, the deep blue of sunlit sea-depths, green of crème-de-menthe, red blood.

  How happy are the doctors’ names: Kraft, art; Freud, joy; Jung, youth; Reich, state.

  Have never encountered in literature this situation: A good man in high place, an evil man in low place. Through their interactions the good man is caused to sink, the evil man to rise until the scales are balanced. The left side then continues up, the right side down; the good man is destroyed, evil triumphs. The Good has a flaw of course; and perhaps Evil’s “flaw” will be a trace of good. But Evil will not be punished, and Good will go unavenged. How real is the logic of this dénouement. Still, we leave the theater filled with pity and fear, struck by the circumstances around every corner. Othello?

  Aaron says that with all the rapid and liberal advancement (particularly in jazz which has furnished a complete new system of orchestration), only in Love Music has there not been a change since Wagner.

  … been snowing lavishly for a long while this evening. Supper with Tom Stauffer, just over from Germany. (Snow has always reminded me of him.) He’s plumper, looks well at thirty, same fierce pontifical manner, grand height, short hair, childish aggression, wears glasses, still stutters.…

  Paralyzing interview at Kraft’s, all from the flimsiest dream-fragment: Alone in a huge empty pillared marble hall, my sister enters in Grecian mourning. Associations total and terrifying.…

  Rimbaud last night made me sad, it took a long time till sleep.

  Glassy, cold, yellow, bright, snowy. I was the only one with spectacles, without a tie, and who didn’t say a word in Sociology today, but I learned that a Stradivarius’s comparative high quality is fiction. A pertinent point.

  Pointless session with Kraft. Tense supper with Papa.

  15 December, Monday afternoon. Refrigerators: nasty food-houses, civilized traps, how I hate them. Anything concerning food offends me.

  Saturday. Lunch at Muriel Smith’s. Fine supper and alcoholic evening again at Alfred Auerbach’s. David Lloyd recorded 2 of my songs.

  Last night, suicidal evening of bourbon with Bill Flanagan & Billy Johnson; later with Will Hare, in whose house I collapsed.

  Man created God in his own image. Except for me.

  2:15 a.m. Hangover’s finally worn off, and I’m better. Tom’s Texan just left. 4 hours!

  Ate at home here with S.G. tonite; hamburger weirdly done. After, we went through the Couperin twice—the Third Tenebrae Service. I could expire to that piece.

  Baudelaire: “Drugs can only reveal to man what is already there.”

  Dream of a butterfly the size of a peacock, trembling and transparent, fringed with silvery crimson. How nice to own a peacock the size of a butterfly.

  Winter’s here, with black astonishment from the sky. The need for love is more real than love. Worst blizzard since 1888 (the year Debussy wrote the Arabesques). Streets still piled high with sick ocher sleet. Subways jammed, yet male members of the Blind (indistinguishable from one another) persist in parading from one end of the cars to the other, soliciting money for their lack-of-talent by playing not only the accordion but trumpet and saxophone and snare drum, singing popular songs devoid of style. Everyone is embarrassed.

  Visit to Central Park Zoo last week before meeting Grace at her dance class. What a clever diversity of fauna fellow the earth with us. Entering the lion house I quiver and recall my dreams. The amber cast on a lady panther’s bristles as a jailor plays a hose on her; she spits, eyes straining back as she seeks to recollect her forest home a thousand years ago. I see that she is called “Chicky.”

  1948

  14 January. Went to see Marc Blitzstein this aft. He says we are all political whether we like it—or know it—or not. In his work he feels he must speak directly, not being a subtle person.… But aren’t most of our historic masterpieces direct?

  M. Blitzstein also said that Cocteau (he knows him) is an unhappy man: that each new work is to be the chef d’oeuvre, but never quite is. That Cocteau has made the broadest and most basic of human emotions—love & death—into chic vogues.

  But the danger with reporting is that, often as not, the reporter’s own spirit is projected more than that of which he reports.…

  Though healthy people are seldom heard from. The unadjusted (adjusted to what?), if they have anything to say, make, by definition, our great men.…

  Even our most advanced societies have their noses in the ring of God. None is to be trusted, even the Quakers, when they speak in the name of the Lord. But how by logic are they proved wrong?

  Calm evening, after a drastic weekend, at Sid & Joan Simon’s. Sam Kramer and his wife (who looks like Madeleine Solonge) were there, also Frances Osato. Nice meal. I sang my blues songs, and Frances her Basque folk songs.

  Didn’t want to go to Kraft’s today, but as usual in such cases the “lesson” was more than regularly edifying. Certain fears become illuminated, as I start to understand alcoholic compulsion.… Made a reservation for Antwerp, May 26th. I’ll find the money somehow. France and Italy will make a crucial change in me; the American strain is my background but not my milieu.…

  24 January. 3 a.m. Fierce insomnia, which always comes with a hangover, and I must get up at 7:45. I’m told that on learning the bars were closed, I charged purposely into a lamppost head first. Now I feel it.

  Read 2 awful books: The City and the Pillar and Other Voices, Other Rooms.

  Each meal eaten hastens me to death; each word spoken binds me tighter to the world. If I denied myself consciously, would I live longer than in the abandonment which leads to nothing? Let’s concern ourselves with differences of technique less than with sameness of motivation in the making of music as in the making of a good world.

  I itch! God, but I itch! For weeks I’ve itched on all parts, and at night the itching turns insupportable. Before I finish scratching deliciously one section, another section commences; I am an octopus in a multiple self-embrace of scratch and wrench from the ceaseless tantalizing tickle which attacks all places reachable and unreachable. Pink warts, bleeding hives, crabs, ringworm of the crotch, scabies—all of it itching, itching like a hair-shirt 24 hours a day, and nothing to be done.

  6 April. I shall not write here for a long time. It’s partly the impact of this recent murder which prompts the hiatus. I may still spend more time in destroying myself than in constructing fine things. But when I return from school to be phoned by the Charles Street Police Station (asking about a man with whom I had a one-night stand; whose name, Victor Trerisse, rings no bell; who was found with his skull crushed in his apt. on Perry Street; who had noted my number in his address book), I am stunned into recalling the thousands of hours these past years wasted in squalid—no, dangerous—company. Happiness and love count less than an even keel for work. The analysis must become my raison d’être. Delights which ornament the weeks, sweet or sour, must remain in the head. Talk now, don’t journalize.

  6 September. The 6-month interim contained my giving a good party, an M.S. from Juilliard, meeting Nell Tangeman, Rosemary’s marriage, inebriated orgies, suntans, haircuts, Shirley in Europe, a sick mother, lack of love, and also piles & chicken pox.

  • • •

  Because of Dr. Kraft’s current vacation, my thoughts return to these pages. The holiday consisted of a miserable 4 days at Tanglewood (though Hugh Ross did the new Madrigals exquisitely: he knows them better than I do). Then 2 weeks at Truro with Jordan Whitelaw, than whom it is inconceivable that anyone could be more monotonous, but the last evening there Paul Cadmus came to dine (by way of contrast), and we saw a great whale spouting out there in the bay. N
ext day I returned, slick and tawny from the haughty sun, to the problems of this magic city.

  At Provincetown, Julius Monk quickly spread the tale of when I threw the full beer bottle at his white piano; I had forgotten that when the police asked me “Why?” I replied (with lowered eyes), “Because I’m unhappy.” I’d gone to his boîte with Bob Olsen, Stella Brooks and Ellis Kohs—an incongruous trio.

  Although I wrote two songs (to Sitwell poems) I spent most of the time careening through the countryside swilling stingers with the coyness a suntan allows. And I feel in my vacuum of boredom that, despite my genius, I shall compose nothing great until I am no longer beautiful.… Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, quotes Richepin: “L’amour de l’art fait perdre l’amour vrai.”

  Today, hungover, went to the plangent new French Dietrich movie with Nell Tangeman and Martha Lipton (Marlene striding toward Gabin with a steely urgency that one half her age can envy). Then to a party and had our handwriting analyzed (spooky). Later, Nell and I watched a man undress from her back window.

  15 September. Finally visited Mother at the hospital this afternoon. It was pathetic. With Father, we spent an hour walking through the grounds which are endless and paradisiacal: forest, formal gardens, rocky streams which truly gush beneath Japanese bridges, arbors, benches, occasionally a nurse with a strolling charge. But poor Mother remembers nothing. Or rather, she seems scatterbrained. Still, it is good to find her as happily manic as she was melancholic before. Later I felt like crying, and did, and hated to leave Father. Mother had kept asking us for cigarettes and wanting us to meet all her friends (which is against the rules), and even the nurses, though she says some of them are cruel (she meant cold, or businesslike).

  It is not “human nature” to wage war. When a fascist leader of strong personality woos the crowd which longs to follow, he’s not addressing an instinct of self-preservation, but a desire for self-expression which is stronger.

  A funny day. Got up early for Kraft and accomplished nothing. Phone rings incessantly: spend an hour a day talking to people I detest. But I can’t seem to write a thing, which has never happened before. Visit from Warren Hassmer (who came all the way from Boston to see me—a disappointment), and from Chuck Turner (we lunched on his sandwiches in Bryant Park).… Harold Brown, despondent as ever, stopped by for a short while, but I had to leave for a silly cocktail affair at Nancy Reid’s, so we took the subway together (I seem to spend another hour a day underground).… Nancy wants me to compose a “one-man” cantata for the instrumentation of Sauguet’s La voyante; I think I will, if Paul’ll write me a groovy enough text. The guests, except for Nancy (the world’s most affected woman, who looked beautiful—from a distance—in a long scarlet skirt), were all male (queer), mostly snobs, and included Stanley Bate and pleasant Colin McPhee, neither of whom I’d met before. Left with Oliver [Daniel] and we talked of living together which got me back a half-hour late for my dinner date, and was detained still further by bumping into ra-ra Gene Fuller. Being stood up, I went alone and hungry to the Billie Holiday film which was degrading and bad for jazz. Billie looked fierce. Then to the San Remo for a coke (I drink liquor only on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, as the 4 weekly psychoanalysis sessions are at 10 a.m.). MacDougall’s with Tony Clark, since I had been an hour late meeting Sally.… Strange to walk those streets sober, those bohemian streets through which I generally reel, seem pointless and drear. Values askew. Indeed a stupid day.

  The room crawls with tropical roaches, dust by the barrelful, rust in the sink, scum around the tub thick enough to slice and serve as consommé madrilène. All my music in spectacular disarray. Despondent fatigue caused by the ceaseless parade of the inevitable pair: drunken night, shaky day.

  Friday finally cleaned the house and smeared the last of Paul Bowles’s ambergris (which has lasted a year and ½) into the wood, & then got drunk at Julius’s bar with a bunch of Bostonians; later, limitless gin-&-tonics at Morris’s where it was good to see Alvin Ross after months. Last memory: Harold Norse lugging me home in a taxi and tucking me in.

  Saw three movies today with a new friend, a jet-haired cross between Dana Andrews & Robert Cummings, named Frank Bland. I introduced him to Howard Moss who said, “And I’m Howard Exciting.” Now I am alone. Tomorrow begin again the job at Mme. Gauthier’s, which means a little money and a lot of experience, but still anxious at not being able to write.

  Frank Etherton just phoned (it’s 1 a.m.) from his seat of monstrous repose at the Algonquin, and for 15 minutes mouthed squalid whimsies, mostly gossip, about the frightful impression I had made on Alec Wilder at some snobbish audition months ago where I was not yet too tight, but sincerely told Wilder, in what must have been honeyed rhetoric, how much I admired certain of his songs. Important item: Frank, calling me in the company of a paratrooper, flatters me in porcelain accents, reiterates the phrase “successful young composer.” But this is self-praise, for he throws famous names around like chicken-feed, to substantiate himself in the eyes of his friends. Does he exist for himself, or for anyone else, when alone in a room? Do I?

  Never heard a peep out of Mrs. Lucie Bigelow Rosen after sending her a bread & butter note, hoping to solicit a commission but apparently insulting her by saying the sound of her Theramin was like the faraway moan of a dying dinosaur. I seem either to strike people as an utter bitch or a cloying adolescent.…

  The statement that irks me most is: “What have you to be frustrated about? Why, if I had a method of self-expression I’d certainly find nothing to be unhappy about.” Art is not a screen to hide behind but a job like any other. Having a talent, one takes it for granted; it’s not a blessing but a responsibility. Having both legs, I can’t imagine being without them. (But I do have dandruff and am shy).…

  Cocktails with George Freedley whom I want to champion me. Wore the green bow-tie Stella Brooks gave me one unreal morning at a gage-party and tried to impress him with my charm and talent. I want to write the score for Hippolytus with Muriel Smith.… Henry Jackson came over tonite & we went through Britten’s Rape of Lucretia. I played him my Piano Sonata which he said he liked (no one else does). But we were interrupted by herds of old friends, Richard Stankeiwicz and a Juilliard violinist with a Chinese concubine, then John Wingate (with his Marshall) just back from Nantucket, and as usual articulately depressed—this time about his young friend’s Roman Catholic ties. Returned nine beer bottles to buy a late supper at the Sevilla, then we sat in Abingdon Square awhile. Now it’s 2 a.m. No wonder I don’t work.… Reread the scary section on execution in The Idiot.… 3 hours later. Can’t sleep. Eyes heavy and aching, like golf balls made of blood, gelatinous yo-yo’s.

  21 September. Another full day of accompanying for Eva Gauthier’s students. Politically she’s a formidable reactionary for a woman of her wide acquaintance, travel, culture. Only the nostalgia for the old lush days, inevitable for one of her years, can excuse her. For she is not a Catholic like Stravinsky or Boulanger, the former so devout that his colleague Messiaen’s devout offerings are mere “crucifixes of sugar,” the latter so cocksure as to claim that if Gide had not been raised a “Huguenot” he would not have made a career out of continual rationalizing. Gauthier’s musical reputation must be based on her repertory, for as a coach (than which few are better, which says little), she offers nothing that any other coach couldn’t. I abhor her squealing Pekingese and squeaking Siamese enough to throttle them, yet am beguiled by this 70-year-old with blue hair and a jade collection, glamour-fetishes which always trap me and which Kraft may or may not understand.

  Yesterday on the subway, which was fairly full, I sat reading and quietly picking my nose. A woman across the aisle said audibly, “Mister, please use your handkerchief.” I melted with shame and did not look up. If I’d had one, would I have used a handkerchief after such a request?

  Today on the uptown 6th Ave. bus which was fairly full, I sat in the back reading when my right ankle began to itch. After scratching, the annoyance moved
upward, though I thought little about it. But by the time I reached Gauthier’s my whole calf was a vibrating mess of welts, so that I had to apply a soothing lotion. Sure enough, an hour later in the presence of the rich and haughty Cathleen Parker Bernatschke, a bedbug big as life appeared crawling on the knee of my trouser. Eva, with regal calm, plucked it and deposited it shining into the toilet (“Brightness falls from the air”). But we all squirmed uncomfortably long after.

  23 September. Over ten years since my first sex experience. Nine years since first meeting Géorg, the first of so many dearest friends to die unquietly. Eight years since first I came home drunk. Autumnally cool tonight—going-back-to-school weather that smells of pencil shavings and starched skirts. Reading Rosamunde Lehmann’s The Ballad and the Source.

  Another opulent feast last night chez Cathleen Parker, who’s to concertize in Italy & wanted to see some more of my stuff. Gypsy Rose Lee was there (who recently married Julio De Diego, of all people). At first I was disappointed by her looks, then found that the famous physicality is couched more in vitality than in prettiness. She talks incessantly with a certain flare for comedy and sparkle, but exclusively of her own affairs which concern mostly backstage vagaries. I contributed nothing to the conversation, forced and dull, which terminated when they all took off to Karen Horney’s lecture (significantly on “The Shallow Personality as Caused by the Neuroses of Our Time”).

  26 September, Sunday. High on benzedrine and whisky with Christopher Lazare for 10 hours last night. As usual the pattern was expressionist, blurred. We went to the 111 Club to see T.C. Jones (backstage, complètement la grande dame, T.C., like all drag queens, makes me feel comparatively masculine when he bats his painted lashes and speaks of Luise Rainer in breathy tones); then to the Ebony for Billie Holiday but were barred because of no necktie.… At the Pink Elephant I see Tony R. for the first time in a year and a half, and he’s forgotten my name, quelle farce! Trouble sleeping (3 hours in all, retiring at 8 a.m. finally) because of the benzedrine. Christopher was literally loaded with his morphine, shooting up every 3 hours, but remained always articulate.… Mother phoned early and bright from Philadelphia this morning, out of the hospital, sounds fine.…