by Ned Rorem
Guy met the train in Avignon on 30 July, two months to the day after my arrival in Paris. (Those eight weeks had laid a foundation to which I could return.) From Avignon we drove through the Midi, honeymooning in Cannes (at the little Westminster Hotel on the other side of the tracks, far from the maddening Croisette), La Turbie, and Monte Carlo (where we saw an octopus on the beach), thence to two days in Marseilles and Cassis. In the underground bars of these towns I—in the black turtleneck given me by Jean-Claude—was taken for a mute and local hustler, but only in the dark. In the light, even the most debauched American in a long-rehearsed disguise will never be mistaken for anything else: his eyes may be bloodshot, but they will forever reflect innocence—albeit sometimes an evil innocence. On 4 August we drove the car into the hold of a small liner named Sidi-bel-Abbès, and made the twenty-six-hour crossing in first class, dining on the best filet mignon I’ve ever tasted. On 5 August we sighted the Algerian coast, with behind it six thousand miles of a raw new ancient steaming continent.
So there was Africa, which would be my intermittent home for the better part of the next two years.
26. Morocco • Paris • Morocco
Just as my inverted basic education—that of being inadvertently exposed to the works of today before being indoctrinated into those of yesterday (classical music thus becoming as problematic to me as “modern music” to you)—turned out to be correct while the scholastic veneration of the past seemed wrong, so Morocco would represent during the next twenty-eight months, esthetically and professionally, the right place at the right time. Gertrude Stein: “I like a view, but I like to sit with my back to it.” For a narcissistically ambitious Chicago boy, aged twenty-five, the sudden isolation of Africa was a refuge against the competitive rat race of Paris and New York. With no rivals to impress, I could either implode with boredom or work concentratedly. During this period, therefore, I composed my First Everything.
An artist works because there’s nothing else to do; whatever else he tries will make him sick. However, one might add that much of the “else” feeds his art: brandy, sex, and oversleeping, as well as books and paint and country sunshine, not to mention procrastination—all this serves as fodder.
In Marseilles, that huge old grimy port to which the penitent red-haired Mary Magdalene retired after the Crucifixion, we visited the Château d’lf, and consumed apéritifs on the Canabière, the most splendid avenue in France. Our last night there, after a bouillabaisse at a waterside bistro of the so-called ancien vieux port, we saw Louis Jouvet’s sadistic Fantomas après Fantomas in a cinéma du quartier, then roamed the nontouristic byways of that metropolis of crime, of Fernandel and Mistral and Raimu, and of the rippling italianate accents voicing the nonetheless Gallic homilies of a logical race, then returned to our dumpy hotel to make love.
Imagine now Oran, a thousand wet kilometers to the southwest on the hilly Algerian coast, identical to Marseilles (at least in my inexperienced ken) yet peopled with Arabs: the jolt of another language, another continent, another spooky culture where I too now am the Other—no longer an American in their eyes (what is America?), but a Nazarene from Europe. Oran was Marseilles in reverse, the site of Camus’s La peste.
It must have been an afternoon landing, since I remember driving west for a hundred miles, arriving in darkness at Oujda on the frontier, and passing a bedbug-ridden night at a somber auberge. The landscape was indeed lunar, but purposeful somehow in its barren yet masculine grandeur. And now Morocco, more mountainous than Algeria as we began the descent toward Fez, seemed maybe sweeter despite the lack of France’s color, the stark emphasis on silvery tan and cactus green. The countryside of France had been squared off, neatly parsimonious, each acre accounted for; this was extravagant without generosity, without ownership. League after league of unchanging biblical—Koranical?—décor which had little to do with me. Yet I did not feel like an interloper, much less a hostile witness, for I simply did not exist. Nor would I have suspected Moroccans themselves existing in this lifeless plain if we hadn’t had engine trouble and stalled; whereupon a dozen djellaba-garbed men materialized (we, how silly! were in shorts, and thus prey to a trillion flies which also materialized) to slit our throats—no, to give us a helpful shove.
Approached by motor, Fez is first glimpsed, like Mexico City, as an oasis way over there in the valley. Founded in 808 by Mohamet’s brother, it is the holiest Moroccan city. You gaze down upon a hundred mosques jutting from three centers: the Ville Ancienne, the Ville Nouvelle, and the Ville Française. Guy’s “very agreeable house” was situated in none of these villes, but within a dusty medical compound outside the wall, a hundred yards from the great Bou-Jeloud gate, a savage arch of blue mosaic, and abutting an Arab cemetery. Since Muslims are buried uncoffined and upright, hyenas sup on available scalps and shriek their pleasure in the moonlight. Outside at night, sounds of other animals I didn’t know combined in a sad, thrilling canticle that made me ill at ease: owls, dromedaries (which were called chameaux, or camels, despite their single hump), sometimes jackals. By daylight flies, flies everywhere, snarled between your toes, in your hair.
The one-story house was a concrete affair with modern bath, big kitchen, big L-shaped parlor-dining area with grand piano, and big bedroom with big single bed shared by me and Guy. (In those days, and up through 1957, I could sleep in the same bed with another; since then, not—not even in the same room.) Big porch, big windows, tile floors, fans everywhere. Outside, no greenery, just a few smaller abodes here and there occupied by the personnel. Sand, parched gardens, skinny dogs, palms, tarantulas.
On the second day, Sunday, 7 August, Guy gave me a labyrinthine tour of the Old Town. Street of Tanners where bleached hides reeked. Street of Dyers where shimmering skeins of scarlet stretched endlessly. Street of Coppersmiths where pots, vast and wee, were fit for pantries of giants or pygmies. Each street claustrophobically narrow, flowing with loud women in veils, hawkers, and screaming kids. A mosque doorway now, in whose shadows lurked the lepers, one of whose facial cancer had caused her cheekbones to protrude like some undersea creature with eyes on the ends of stalks. (I thought of Lana Turner, so perfect in black chiffon that night at Café Society.) The utter misery. Then the utter peace of mint tea in the rich gardens of the Hôtel Jamai in the heart of the Médina. Street of the Whores, where we drank more mint tea, and where the fake houris, unveiled and middle-aged, seemed decorous and indifferent. Street of the Jews, the Mellah, where all doors are painted blue to discourage the flies (flies hate blue), in contrast to the Médina where the Arabs, who despise the money-lending Jews to whom they are indebted, don’t paint their doors, and so have flies.
The tour was too quick, indigestible, remote, with forbidden flashes of some incomprehensible truth. Through it all had come glimpses not just of the result of a mores, but of those who had fostered the mores over millenniums and were rushing now past us, alive, foreign, yet breathing the same air as us. The glimpses were discombobulatingly erotic. While there was scarcely a sense of the hidden female, the ubiquitous male gave new sense to the word “virility,” each one a sort of hologram of that unshaven far-ago man in Jackson Park. This was virility in the abstract, in the absolute: the Arab male was the Other by nature, and desperately attractive. I was doubtless the sole American inhabitant in the whole of French Morocco (decadent Tangier was still at this point an international port), certainly the only American composer on the entire continent. How was I to make contact—was I morally meant to make contact?—with this mysterious breed which was unanimously homosexual in practice but not in theory (thus overturning Kinsey’s hard-earned premise)?
There were too many hurdles with the French language to start from scratch with the Mohgrebi dialect of Fez. Besides, I was here because of Guy, not to get laid indiscriminately, and needed to work hard, having not penned a measure since “Rain in Spring.” Nor was there often a question of drinking. Morocco is not equipped to deal with hangovers. (Just as in Rome—which is also n
o land for drinkers—where if you venture forth too soon the morning after, you’ll grow dizzy at the sight of a yard-long marble foot, so in North Africa, a country of legal cannabis where alcohol is religiously proscribed, if you drink you will drink alone.) Since I knew that, chez moi, one drink leads to twelve, I preferred not having one. (Not even wine? people always ask, as though wine were some inoffensive pap.)
Guy had a servant, Messaoud, a lean appealing thirty-year-old jack-of-all-trades (will he rape me? why not?), illiterate, serious, married, who showed up each dawn and departed at dusk. He ironed, washed, cooked oddly but well, was forever barefoot, spoke French badly. I was bemused that Guy would tutoyer Messaoud, the same as the policeman had tutoyéd the prisoner in that Jouvet movie. Guy said to listen: Messaoud also addressed him, Guy, in the familiar second person singular; the Arab language has no vous (just as English has no tu) except in the plural. Messaoud said tu to me too, of course, and called me “M’siou Nit.” He seemed to accept me solemnly as part of the household. When Guy occasionally was away for twenty-four hours inoculating some tribe in the far country—the bled, as it’s called—Messaoud would stay at the house overnight, sleeping outdoors on the moonlit threshold to protect me (symbolically—but then again, realistically) against intruders. Which moved me. He never asked questions.
What Guy’s colleagues thought of the fact of me, I have no idea. It was as though he had come home from a bourgeois summer vacation with a bride. Such a situation is more relaxed in the colonies. No one pried. Of course, I was on an intellectual par (to say the least) with the French intelligentsia of Fez and, being a young American musician, I was more presentable than most colonials’ lovers, who were generally Bedouin houseboys.
When do you work?
I’m never not working.
Everything pertains, one thing leads to another, you can even eat ambrosia abstractedly if your mind’s on a modulation. But outsiders want a tangible routine.
In Fez the routine was tangible. Once settled in, Guy was gone all day at the hospital, except for the de rigueur midday meal (which I loathed), even in the Saharan heat (which I loved—I eventually spent three summers in the dry furnace of Africa, laboring continually, without fatigue: the weather report—No Relief in Sight—being ever a cause to rejoice), after which came the de rigueur siesta when we made love while the frowning Messaoud clattered in the kitchen.
Between August and October I composed two sonatas, one for piano solo (the second), and one for violin and piano. The Piano Sonata was in three tightly crafted movements. The Overture, one of my few works in classical sonata form, contains a first theme sounding (to me) like a Provençal chant, and a second theme cribbed from an Arab lament overheard on Messaoud’s radio. I was, after all, in Africa—weren’t composers supposed to absorb the folk elements from the environs? The Nocturne is a lush blues skewed, as though pictured in a fun-house mirror. The closing Tarantella, copied from a remembrance of something by Rieti which Bobby and Arthur had played in June, is frothy virtuosity at its most delicious. In this version the sonata would be premiered by Leon Fleisher at the American embassy in Paris the next May. Soon after, I changed the order of movements, added a knuckle-breaking Toccata, and gave the new version to Julius Katchen, who played it all over the world. As such it was printed, under the title Seconde sonate pour piano, by the French publisher Pierre Noël (now Billaudet), and dedicated to Guy Ferrand. Katchen recorded it in 1952 on London/Decca, my first record ever, and it sold well everywhere to nice reviews.
The first of the Violin Sonata’s four movements was already finished in 1948, and now served as a curtain-raiser to a languid Waltz, a passacagliac Dirge, and a Final Dance. I mailed the twenty-minute result to the only violinist I knew, Maurice Wilk (he had played in In Piazzas Palladio), who premiered it in Washington in 1950. Now titled Sonata in Four Scenes, it wasn’t published for another twelve years (by C. F. Peters), at which time it was dedicated to Edward Albee, mainly because Albee had just dedicated to me his play The Death of Bessie Smith.
Evenings, which is when I prefer the main meal of the day, we dined in one of the three restaurants of the New Town, preferably À la Légion, a European bistro frequented by, among others, an old queen who surrounded himself with légionnaires, while we obliquely observed the manéges—the supposed vying for favor with royalty among these rugged semicriminal foot-soldiers. (Is it offensive to refer to that customer—with the unearned disdain used for a fellow member of one’s own minority group—as an old queen?) The khaki-clad légionnaires, with their Yugoslav accents and rustic joshing, were objects of mystery. Unfaithful lovers by definition, they also reeked of the sand, as Piaf moaned from every jukebox.
Il était mince, il était beau,
Il sentait bon le sable chaud,
Mon légionnaire.…
After our yaourts au citron (I had never before heard of, much less tasted, yogurt) and powerful cafés espresso we would either go home and listen to records and play the piano (Guy had subtle catholic tastes but, like my mother, banged the instrument with reckless abandon), or go to the one cinema in town, queuing for tickets while the sun, the size of a circus tent, collapsed over the rusty gravel. I noted seeing that summer La femme en rouge, L’amour autour de la maison, Echec au roi, A chacun son destin (during which we were again assailed by bedbugs), Halte, Police!, La rivière rouge, and other French films not made for export. Also the Swedish Appassionata with Viveca Lindfors flailing at the keyboard, and American films with Abbott & Costello or Paulette Goddard jabbering in French. These forays proved culturally instructive, if only because the jargon issuing from the screen—especially the dubbed American movies I’d already seen—represented a usefully vulgar counterpart to the rigorous grammar I was elsewhere studying.
Because in grade school I was a lazy student, albeit from a cultured family, I spoke correct English without knowing why. Because in Morocco I devoured a French grammar until it oozed from my ears, I ended up knowing the “whys” of French more than of English. To this day I don’t know what a declension is in English, but can conjugate the imperfect of the subjunctive in any irregular French verb. The fact that the French speak in alexandrines as naturally as Americans speak in iambic pentameter affects their music too; the waves of their alexandrines, being longer, flow smoother than our choppy iambics. Indeed, the French language, being the only Indo-European tongue without a tonic accent in any multisyllabic word (solitaire, for example, or tablier, can legitimately be set to song with a stress on any of the three syllables), French music, even the nonvocal music, is the least rhythmic of all Indo-European musics. Which is why, no doubt, Ravel composed Boléro, that most doggedly on-the-beat piece in the repertory, to show that “I too got rhythm.”
My verbal grasp of French hitherto had lain in the repetition of the Verlaine and Eluard texts used by Debussy and Poulenc. But the ecstatic recitation of such phrases as “Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé” or “Une ruine coquille vide pleure dans son tablier,” didn’t get me any farther with Parisian taxi drivers than the query, “Driver, what stream is it?” got me with Manhattan cabbies as we skirted the Lordly Hudson. To an anglophone’s eyes the subway announcement, “Il est défendu de cracher et de fumer” quickly translates into “It is defended to crash and fume,” until he eases, day by day, into another basic meter, the meter-of-logic. The meter-of-logic, now juxtaposed onto the Arabian meter-of-frenzy and broadcast daily to an American who has hitherto spoken in his native meter-of-impulsiveness, became a heady mixture that in retrospect I realize in no way affected my music. I read the Bible—meaning L’Evangile, or New Testament (the French have no concept of the Old Testament)—and Phèdre and Madame Bovary and Pompes funèbres, as well as the daily paper called La Petite Vigie; listened to quotidian chitchat at the hardware store, and succumbed to the language des fleurs nocturnally as pillow talk. Months later, when I again heard English spoken at the consulate in Casablanca, the sound was at once crass, warm, and embracing, lik
e awakening into a familiar dream.
What was I doing at the consulate in Casablanca? Guy had received a letter typed in bureaucratic French from that institution. It had come to their attention that an American, Ned Rorem, was residing in Fez. Would it be possible for Mr. Rorem (or, in the event that he’s one of your patients, a representative of Mr. Rorem) to visit the consulate in the very near future? Apprehensive, we trekked the 200 kilometers almost immediately.
The consul, a backslapping Yankee, hemmed and hawed before getting to the point. Had I ever, he wanted to know, heard of an Arthur Lee?… Well, yes: Arthur Lee was an acquaintance from nine years ago in Chicago, when we were both sixteen, a student at the Art Institute, friend of my friend Géorg Redlich, and a protégé of a social worker named Rosabel Velde. (I didn’t add that we’d had sex.) … Did I know if he was a Communist?… (Pause.) Well, everyone in those WPA days, you know, was sort of left-wing around the edges, though I personally had never been much interested in politics. Where is Arthur now, by the way?… The consul didn’t know; nor did he tell me how my name, after all these irrelevant years, had drifted from Chicago to this wilderness on the wings of a half-forgotten fancy. The consul was jocular, knew all about “artists,” had even been a bit lefty himself once, you know how it is.
Something about my own vaguely conciliatory stance smelled bad.
Casablanca, with its million inhabitants, bore no relation to Ingrid Bergman’s version—it looked like Detroit—but did have a great pastry shop (sugar is manna to drunks on the wagon), and some good movie shows. Once or twice a week I’d accompany Guy on his excursions into the bled, sometimes with Messaoud in the back seat who would help if the car got stuck while fording a desert creek, or ferret out scorpions beneath the seats. Thus we would embark toward Ouarzazate or Tinerhir, southerly towns halfway to the Sahara where in the summer there were no idle excursioners at the luxury hotels hemmed in by jasmine gardens. After inoculating fifty frantic Berber children in a nearby village we would return to the hotel and be served—alone in the dining room beneath a casually revolving fan—by fifty liveried youths with a menu as opulent as that on the boat from Marseilles. Or we might dine on a whole sheep in the astoundingly plush home of the local caïd, serving ourselves greasily and without utensils from the various communal pots of couscous, embellished with lamb or with cinnamon, washed down with the obligatory mint tea. I never felt comfortable with these all-male confabs, encouraging at once the (to me) barbaric practice of eating with the hands and subdued belching, and the oriental formality of restricting conversation to smug nodding. I remember a Sunday picnic with Messaoud and one of the nurses from the compound, the plain Mademoiselle Bursier, in Guy’s brand-new Buick, near the cool falls of Ifrane, and of being stung by a wasp, and then of visiting Meknès and taking pictures near the emerald cloisonée walls. Fragrance of honeysuckle, the dying sun, taste and touch of oranges, and the sad smile of the unloved nurse. I mention that afternoon for no other reason than to clear it from my head onto the page, and to include the name of someone, among billions who have died since 1949, that will have otherwise vanished without a trace.
