Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  28. Another tiring but pleasant 4 hours with Madame Gauthier. When she speaks of her past, especially the years in Java and the sound of the Orient, I am transfixed. But when she sings through a song (with her still-expressive equipment) I am so outraged at her rhythmical ignorance that I would scream reprimands if it weren’t for making her seem incompetent before her pupils. She takes far more than “a singer’s liberty”: she’s oblivious to note values, rests, clefs and proper entrances.

  In the 6th Ave. delicatessen I come across John Cage at lunch and pause for a shallow chat. Then meet C. Turner to see the Gide film at the lavish new Paris Theater. Somewhat moved, but on the whole disappointed. Gide is almost dull with his perverse wholesomeness. I do like striking truths but need new effects too. And isn’t it unforgivable that a brainy film like Symphonie pastorale should not experiment with the camera to amaze the eye as well as to satisfy the reason? Instead we’re given the same white series of flashes.

  A touching letter from Mother—now out of the hospital—enclosing snaps of little Christopher and Rosemary still looking pregnant. (My dreams remain full of RR when not of lions.) Also, finally, the pictures taken by Ebony magazine at my party last June (forty people in one small room), showing Virgil looking sly, Donald Fuller plastered, me coy, Flanagan surprised, Frank Etherton idiotic, Muriel friendly and patronizing, Reid Arendt vacant and handsome. Quelle collection of accurate horror!

  3 October, Sunday midnight.… As a child I murmured the word “magnolia” before going to sleep, and on awakening “gardenia.” The idea was to start and end the day well, no matter what came between. Why? And why flowers?

  Eva, always the rabid politician, shows me, with gloating elation, an article from American on how communists have infiltrated even such venerable institutions as the Guggenheim Foundation. There, among former fellowship-holders, we see the names of Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, Douglas Moore as leaders who wish to “overthrow our government.” Is this scare that’s flooding the country a desire for liberty accompanied by the stronger fear of the responsibility of liberty? Nevertheless I erase Blitzstein as a reference in my Guggenheim application and substitute Eva Gauthier. Incidentally, Douglas Moore, whom I’ve never met, gave me an unsolicited recommendation based on the Hippolytus score. Challenge: to be more concerned about what I think of others than about what others think of me.

  In Philadelphia this evening. Very pleasant. Rae brings along Teddy Letvin, living as an undergrad in her house as I once did, and he monopolizes the piano with a rather good sonata by a new Curtis composer, Rochberg. Cousin Olga, who must be terribly lonely, answers, “But Aunt Gladys, my friends are in the movies.” Mother seems much better.

  29 October. Indian summer. Tonite David Sachs and I went to the Gotham Book Mart to hear Rexroth read his pseudo-butch poetry. Paul Goodman in society now acts like a blind man (his vision is 20/300 and he hasn’t worn glasses for years because they’re “unmedical”), for he says things when nobody’s looking, so nobody hears. He says: “By the time I’ve finished a work I haven’t the energy to think of the audience.” … Rexroth’s verse, like Saroyan’s prose, hoists the everyday into rarefied ether, which makes it more singable.

  1 November, Monday, 2 a.m. Tonight, yearly lecture from Eugene apropos my behaving disgracefully two nights ago and alienating all my friends. And he asks what am I doing with analysis anyway when I make no effort to eliminate the grizzly combination of self-adoration and self-humiliation?

  Every popular song today is concerned with money.

  Tomorrow we vote for president. Last week Nell and I saw Truman on Broadway: Times Square was a bedlam of anticipation, sirens for minutes heralded his approach preceded by 300 cops on motorcycles and several double-sized funeral autos. Terrifying and unreal, for a single simple man. (I have added a portrait of the young Schubert to my collection of beautiful and monstrous faces.)

  3 November. A long time ago I read in Ripley of a Persian prince whose total behavior from birth to death was recorded by a relay of secretaries always in his proximity: his every gesture, spoken phrase, each time he scratched his ear or kissed or read, or smelled a rose or dreamed or shat. But in the end, how monotonously incomplete this must all have been.… Maybe I shall dispense with the compulsion to notate daily every whim I glean. My essential anguish—linked with ambition, passive and enthralled—I find difficult to clarify, even to Kraft.

  Words from the dead: Where are your secrets now? The suicide, finally all effected, did not succeed. For you carried the trial here, followed by what was meant to remain, trouble being deathless. Therefore do not die for yourself, each world’s the same. Had your confessor vanished in suicide, where then would be your most secret dreams?… Suicides that fail are the ones that kill you, since you’re no longer here to savor them.

  Last night Donald Fuller and I drank spheres of Manhattans, becoming so ravenously high that he didn’t vote, but we laughed raucously all through the ballet. It deserved it too: what a disgrace to perform multiple entrechats in metered mimicry of Ravel’s icily impeccable orchestration of Empress of the Pagodas.

  2 a.m. Having completed the first two lacerations, I’m about to begin “—and in the open air.” I now like Russians (especially dirty ones, perhaps crusted or sticky but youngish, healthful, vodka-soaked and garishly handsome) since the “oppositeness” of Italians no longer satisfies, nor offers sufficient mystery. Stavrogin’s confession.

  8 November, 1:30 a.m. Terribly upset by the recent murder at the Waldorf, and by the pathological beauty who did it. It’s all I talk or think of, and collect clippings and pictures. Apparently he was punishing his father by this symbolic gesture. His name is Barrows.

  I find cats in my room. When I come home they have crawled through the broken window pane (it’s been out for two years) to elude the cold. Finally they vanish slowly with somnolent arrogance. And I hate cats.

  Depression persists with a taut expectancy. But it’s still general: my whereabouts in this ill world.

  28 November, Saturday, 2 a.m. Well, I’m still waiting for love more earnestly than ever, having completed a blistering 3-day binge over the Thanksgiving holidays, during which I won the $1000 Gershwin prize, and though Wagenaar swore me to silence, I’ve already told 50 people. What humiliation if it should be a sweet dream merged in with the nightmares of these days.

  David takes an hour on the phone to say how insufficient my writing technique is (Sylvia Marlowe’s recital tonight. Jesus Christ!). I write such silliness to keep myself company this cold sad morning. Whole body aches from drink.

  1949

  11 January. Lindaraja. Last night at Herbert Weinstock’s I heard this for the second time—the first was 8 or 9 years ago when the Bartóks played at Northwestern—and retrieved with perfect accuracy that tantalizing motive.

  Needless to say the holidays were hysterics untold, embellished with benzedrine and bile.… I’ve stopped analysis, and for the basest reason: to save money I might afford to spend elsewhere. And the movie Carl Goldman has made of me is almost completed.

  Rosemary’s son is an angel. Arc-en-ciel d’innocence.

  Winter rain. The evening sun makes lavender reflections in the pavement. Ansermet: “In music the present is extended.”

  24 January, 2 a.m. Gieseking’s recital tonight was canceled at the last moment. There was battling with the pickets, and he was carried away to Ellis Island. And Billie Holiday’s been arrested again. If Gieseking is partly wrong, certainly another part of him is great and thus untouchable. Can we afford to deny ourselves the rarity? Billie to me is of equal importance. An artist should be always the exception.

  Supper with Father. Over a month now since I’ve seen Kraft. I am the same. But busy—little commissions, many performances. Working fairly well, though middles are hard (anyone can write beginnings and ends). Reading Stravinsky’s Poetics.

  27 January, 12:30 a.m. Tony came to see me today for the first time in 2 years (quel type extraordinaire!
) and I bought him $5 worth of opera records. The mere proximity, that lank hair, the ungrammatical accents, the knowledge that he could crush me in a trice, all that’s enough to set me on fire. So I’ve gotten an Italian primer and have begun to study.… Tonite we finished the film on me. Chichi, but I look beautiful.… L’enfant et les sortilèges remains my chief sonic infatuation. Now that I’ve actually seen Ravel’s instrumental score, I recognize my talent as one long shortcoming. I would die to have composed it.

  29. Last night we penetrated deep into the negro section of Brooklyn to hear Margaret [Hillis]’s choral program, and once again the perfect Schubert Mass. Brooklyn! I had been … is apprehensive the word?… and it was well founded. Never having ventured past the Bridge and Sand Street, I was overwhelmed with a sentiment that comes only with neighborhoods, neighborhoods on warm and rainy nights. O I can only fall in love with someone from Brooklyn, the simple lives and simple loves. The streets there have the names of all the streets in America—presidents’ names—though they seem to cut through this huge borough with the quaint irregularity of a child’s knife in a square gingerbread. Couldn’t we name streets nostalgically: Street of the Dream, of the Black Strawberry, of Weeping, of the Family? This sounds Spanish.

  Sunday night, 2 a.m. Again benzedrine! I swear I’ve never been so concentratedly concerned with sex as since the analysis stopped. All my waking hours—and, of course, the sleeping ones. But I do it too, sometimes twice a day. Possibly I’ve been involved with a thousand souls, but the summery idylls seem gone forever. I don’t even want to talk to the partners. Shall I go on the wagon for six weeks now that I’m working again? Donald Fuller has done it and is no longer a zombie.

  I miss Shirley. Word reaches us that in Sicily with Norris she is miserable as ever.… It would be impossible to write worse than Tenn. Williams’s Desire and the Black Masseur.

  7 February. Carleton Smith tells me that “The Lordly Hudson” has been voted “Best Published Song of 1948” by the Music Library Association.

  Now it’s Dexedrine! But it was needed to fortify against a working day, after drinking so much at Louise Holdsworth’s sweet party yesterday. Laden with contrite sorrow I dined at the Calypso with my new friend G., a reactionary middle-westerner of whom I seem to be fond—full-lipped, well-hung, with the charm of right-wingers when they’re charming. My energy was expended solely through playing Lena Horne on the jukebox.

  Reading Balzac and more Melville.

  I don’t give myself time to do anything, satiated like the hero in The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Possibly only an American is so nervously blasé as to find no pleasure in long seduction but drinks so as to speed up what of course can’t be accomplished when drunk.

  13 February, Sunday night. Robbed of a wallet & good overcoat.

  Tepid, almost sultry weather. Night oozes with perilous calm.… Ralph and Jim rout me out of my unhappy bed, and we drive to Wall Street, steeped in deserted Sunday terror. The sky’s been sweaty and black all day. I come home and screw from 5 to 6, then meet Alfred A. at 7 for a lush steak and the new Sartre movie. Return and try to finish the Knight music for Tuesday, full of remorse for having taken Eugene to a strange party last night to see my film. I got drunk and we wept over Shirley, who’s almost destroyed in Sicily now. Then to San Remo, later the thievery. Also more benzedrine tablets. Finally they’re all gone.

  My broadcast went well enough yesterday, but nobody heard it. Also Beanie is satisfied with the play’s music. Eugene’s convinced I should return to Kraft. Reading Joseph Conrad.

  16 February. After the Stravinsky concert tonight I met Aaron in the Tap Room. Why am I worried that I looked so ugly? I’ve never liked my character when with Copland, but I can’t forever be a child, wearing the maroon Christmas T-shirt Nell gave me, sitting with Dick Stryker. I want Aaron to think me a good composer.… I have concluded I am the best accompanist around.

  A moving letter from Dr. Kinsey today which I must treasure. He says I can bring joy to the world, that society must learn to appreciate a musician for his contribution.

  But there is so little time. The day has only 24 hours, and I hear so many wild things within that they cannot possibly all emerge before I die. Fifteen more years and I am forty. To look upon my work season by season, how little it seems. Some of it’s good, even very good. But importantly good? or great? What’s great? how few seasons are left? How many lives are wasted more than mine? What’s waste, when self-destruction becomes the very fertilizer of creation? How I despise the teutonic image of Beethoven, glum and mean, plowing his way over the countryside. Is the in modo lidio where his illness led him?

  Laundry is the most daunting of nuisances if you’re drunk for weeks. I want summers when Hatti and I dined at International House, outdoors, dressed up in sheets drinking gin in sunlight, but mildly. That was 10 years ago, and in another city.

  Temperature yesterday over 70°.

  27 February, 2 a.m. I like movies more than anything. I would rather see a good movie than hear my own music. I’ve never seen one I haven’t been completely absorbed into. Transference is total, and impression sticks for several hours. How then can I be expected to get in bed afterwards with the person who went to the movie with me. This was the case tonight, and I managed to alienate another new acquaintance. But now that this seafarer has just gone, I have space for regrets.

  Have finished, copied and orchestrated Death of the Black Knight. There remains only the production chaos, which can be other people’s worry for a change.… Slept through the Cock-a-doodle-doo rehearsal yesterday, refusing to answer the phone, causing 7 other souls inconvenience, nay paralysis. At least Beanie belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous and understands.

  The monotony of the necessary time it takes to notate, after one is already bored and thinking of new ideas.… Reading Hardy again (The Mayor of Casterbridge); also Camus in French (La peste). Rehearsals every day this week.

  7 March, a.m. Back from Philly. Can’t say no, so I make dates, then break them by mail. Tonight I phoned Fred Keating’s hotel and left a message that our appointment was canceled. Too weak to call him at Spivy’s Roof.… And now again I’ve sent someone off into the very cold night and already regret it. (A person connected with the FBI.)… I deny myself sex, but can’t resist blueberry pie or gin or Dexedrine or hair bleach or morphine derivatives if they happen to be lying around.

  Finished The Scarlet Letter. If the amazing chapter “The Minister in a Maze” were written today it would no doubt occur that the things he believed himself to have only thought & felt (as he went down the street after the forest interview) really took place, whereas the things of disguised innocence which he spoke, were actually in his imagination. This might have been disclosed in the last chapter as a kind of revolt of the people who now understand his profane meanings after he has shown his scarlet letter.

  6 April, 1 a.m. Began smoking again after 5 days of brutal strep infection like barbed wire in the throat. I haven’t gone a day without tobacco since my tonsils were out at 19. Maybe the illness was due to being between the devil and the deep; for behind is a month of unchecked drinking (which is why I’ve not written here), and ahead is the concert with Nell. Jittery. In rehearsal my piano tone has always had the silky glow of distant rubies, but today it was like swine at untuned harpstrings. My chest is strung in taut rows of unrelieved snot! (Went to Mel Kiddon’s to have my ass shot with penicillin.)

  Till recently the weather was unseasonably Edenic. Now 12th Street is a smear of cold drizzle without personality. Oh for the sunsets which closed like a dusty spray over Chicago—a sad amber peacock folding his fan.

  3 May. Dined at George Bemberg’s with Sam Barber, just the three of us. George sang for us, with his accurate toneless tenor, an attractive song of his, “Elizabeth the Beloved.” Sam sang for us with his true, true baritone, an unpublished song of his about a swan in French. And I sang with my wheezing howl, all of Penny Arcade. Sam, so suave, ah so suave, always ribs me goo
d-naturedly (because he, being 156 months older than I, feels wistful about the two of us being the only songwriters in the land?) and now offers a vocal lesson on how to intone for what he calls “all the countesses” when I land in France next month.

  As I orchestrate, the radio blasts the all-male chorus from South Pacific, “There Is Nothing Like a Dame,” which, considering the percentage of queer chorus boys, seems as incongruous as an assembly of female gym teachers lustily apotheosizing the masculine form.

  Bill Flanagan calls them Rat Ladies, that brand of movie star with a stunted torso, soulful eyes in a huge wilful head, football shoulders tapering to the toes which are only four feet below the scalp: Swanson, Crawford, Shearer, Colbert. Now our own Stella Brooks is a baby version of these, the poor man’s Lee Wiley, ungifted and brassy in her own repertory (“I’m a little piece of leather, don’t you know/So well put together, don’t you know,/Just a little piece of leather,/Strip off the skin of life”), but within a radius of one square mile, from Sheridan Square to 14th Street, she’s everyone’s favorite fag hag. So we went to hear her yet again last night, at the Little Casino, and, well …

  4 May. Photographic session at Oscar Hammerstein’s on East 63rd, as sort of a warm-up for the concert Saturday. Avon Long is there too, cutting capers, and Alec Templeton who will play Rhapsody in Blue, and who is a very warm man, as the blind are wont to be (like Hattie’s father), unless they’re cranky—there’s no middle ground. Hammerstein, despite being pockmarked, paunchy, and old as Father, is sexy. I hardly spoke.

  22 May, Sunday, 12:30 a.m. It has been raining for 72 hours.