by Ned Rorem
With fairly naïve chutzpah I sent the same quaint photo to André Gide along with the “Alleluia” and a letter congratulating him on his eightieth birthday. His address, 1 bis rue Vaneau, was given me by Truman Capote, who claimed Gide as a dear friend, assuring me that the Frenchman “would adore that sort of thing.” Young people don’t know that their very youth gives them entrée. Indeed, Gide replied immediately, claiming he was now too old, alas, to do more than shake my hand across the sea, and suggesting I look up his young friend, Robert Lévesque, who had just been named professor at the Lycée de Fez. Lévesque turned out to be forty, licentious, smart as hell, and eventually became a valued associate, especially of Guy’s.
I tried my hand at writing stories in French.
On 20 December, with Nell Tangeman’s mezzo timbre in mind, I wrote one of my best songs, based on a sextet of Spenser, sent to me, like so many marvelous texts, by the caring John Edmunds, copied in his ornate scrawl on the back of a postcard depicting the head of a Vermeer girl:
What if some little pain the passage have
That makes frail flesh to fear the bitter wave?
Is not short pain well home that brings long ease,
And lays the soul to sleep in quiet grave?
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life doth greatly please.
I can understand a poem only by setting it to music. Thus it becomes mine, and I grow anxious should someone else admire the poem alone, though it may be a thousand years old. I don’t know anything about the human voice except how to compose for it; the gracious vocal line is common sense. We are what we sing. (Edward Albee, after he became famous overnight, gave classes in dramaturgy. Bill Flanagan: “What does Edward know about writing plays?—he just writes them.”)
Someone must have been telling lies about Ned Rorem, because he awoke one morning to find himself arrested by a communiqué from Shirley which ended thus:
(Paris, Dec. 22, 1949)
… Ned Darling, I’m suspicious of you. Your letters have that ever-so-content-with-myself quality which chez toi is treacherous. My sweet boy, you’re not the best American composer—& if you’re going to follow in Paul Bowles’s footsteps there’s no expecting you ever will be. Instead of writing a bad novel why don’t you write a good last movement to the sonatine? Or work on the first sonata? When are you going to face the difficulties of your work and solve them? It’s not easy to be a composer. If you continue doing this like falling off a log your music is going to sound that way. This African idyll is fine but it’s bad too. You forget so easily even when you’re surrounded by reminders. Very little of what you have written is worthy of you Ned. For God’s sake remember that. Remember too that mama & papa don’t know anything about music & their approbation has nothing to do with the quality of what you write. Oh if you knew how badly I want to see you fulfill all that’s golden in you—& frankly I’m sick of the trash. Think Ned, all that gold!!!
Bruce & JC send love. My best to Guy.
I love you—
S.X.
Shirley’s letter disconcerted me because in some way I felt she was right but didn’t know what to do about it. After all, I did work hard, and yes, some of the work, like the Spenser song, came like falling off a log. But was the song less good for that? Maybe it’s not easy to be a composer, but neither is it hard—at least not for a composer, which is what noncomposers are loath to realize. Shirley entertained a notion about Great Art and Dedication that was, if not Hollywoodian, at least German in its head-in-hands solemnity. She was asking a cat to be a dog. I was losing it both ways.
(There’s a gag about the fraternity man whose roommate’s parents visit the frat house unannounced. While waiting for their son to appear, these proper folks engage the fraternity man in small talk, when suddenly he sees, coming down the stairs behind them, the roommate stark naked and very drunk. To divert the parents’ attention the fraternity man yells, “Hey, look!” and points to the window, not realizing that out on the lawn are two dogs fucking.)
Nor had it yet grown clear that there are in this world two basic genres of composer: the mad extravagant Teuton who thinks big and is complex, and the logical thrifty Gaul who thinks small and is simple. Mahler’s Ninth can be cut in twain and remain Mahler, but change one bar of Daphnis and you no longer have Ravel. (Reptiles are French, canines German, though some reptiles, like crocodiles as distinct from garter snakes, are German, while some dogs, like whippets as distinct from Newfoundlands, are French. Crocodiles, however, become French when compared to alligators.)
Well, Schubert could write five songs before breakfast, “like falling off a log,” while Poulenc labored for months over one ditty in order to make it sound easy.
The art of music does not improve with the centuries but swings like a pendulum forever between contrapuntal eras and harmonic eras. Contrapuntal eras are more complicated (Bach, Schoenberg) than harmonic eras (Ravel, Poulenc), nor has France ever produced a contrapuntist of note. Shirley was trapped, through her instincts and friends and background, in a contrapuntal era; I was trapped in a harmonic era. We could thus each not grasp what the other was driving at. Still, if her words made me feel impotently guilty, my miffed resentment forced me to state: I will, in the next year, compose at least one of everything, submitting to the disciplines of big forms as well as small. Whether or not the result sweats and shrieks and breathes and bleeds—lives, in short—at least no one can say it’s ill-formed. God herself is not always on target.
This statement, of course, was not what Shirley had in mind. She wanted me to ponder, philosophize. Which was not in my nature. Still, I have her to thank, tant bien que mal, for whatever larger scope ensued.
The word “symphony” was still cause for awe. Friends and relatives bowed in respect, while orchestras were more likely to program a new American work, whatever its shape, if it were called symphony than if it were called Nude Descending a Staircase.
In a little more than three weeks, beginning 22 December and ending on 17 January, I composed and orchestrated and copied my Symphony No. 1. The last of the four movements incorporates a fragment from a Berber wedding tune as a binding motif. The first movement is a stately curtain raiser; the second an Andantino in the lilting meter I was overexploiting at the time; the third a Franco-Hinde-mithian lament. Copies of the full score, via the Néocopie-Musicale, were duly mailed to hopefully interested parties. One of these must have been the American embassy in Paris, because Jonathan Sternberg, director of the Haydn Society in Vienna, wrote that he had borrowed the score from Miss Herle Jervis, then the cultural attachée, and would like to do the premiere with the Vienna Philharmonic. I agreed, provided he pay for reproduction of the instrumental materials, which I could not afford. The first performance accordingly took place in February of 1951, though I did not attend. (I have never to this day set foot in Austria.) Following this there were many hearings elsewhere, particularly in the United States, but I never heard a live one until Alfredo Antonini conducted the symphony in Carnegie Hall exactly five years later.
How all these performances came about strikes me today as astounding. I, a complete unknown, was living far from the political centers, and had no agent (still don’t), much less a steady publisher, as representative. Yet everything I wrote was performed almost as soon as it left my desk. In our current philistine age no composer, no matter how famous, would dream of writing an uncommissioned symphony just for the love of it, without a down payment, a deadline, and a guaranteed premiere date. Things were easier long ago. There were far fewer composers, and far smarter audiences in the homogenized classical world.
I made a transcription of the Andantino movement for organ solo, called it Pastorale, sent it to Peer-Southern, who printed it in 1953, at which time I dedicated it to Henri Fourtine, the lover who would succeed Guy. The full symphony would not be printed until 1972.
“What If Some Little Pain,” incidentally, was published by
Hargail in 1952, and dedicated to Julien Green, who by then would be a persuasive influence. Dedications, as every poet knows, can veer from manuscript to galleys. After the journey, sometimes years long, one may finally be indifferent to the initial inspirer, while owing something—a kiss, a dollar—to someone new on the scene.
The weather during the last week of 1949 was tepid, even sweaty, although it had snowed on the 13th, leaving ridges of ice on the edges of the huge palm leaves. According to the book I got drunk on Cinzano cocktails in a bar alone, the night before the snowfall, and didn’t know how to behave. This was almost my sole encounter with alcohol while with Guy in Africa.… Young Michel Royer, now doing his obligatory service militaire but stationed at home, had for some reason to be circumcised (aged twenty-three!), and we visited him at the clinic, his mother, Madame Royer, armed with her fudge squares and a worried mien, his sister Jeannine expressionless. Michel’s virile member appeared infected and wormy. In two days he was released.
On 22 December, the symphony’s seminal day, I note that we purchased a parrot and a backbrush.… On Christmas Eve we shared réveillon at the Royers with Robert Lévesque, and with their oldest son and his pretty wife and infant, visiting from Casa.… On the 28th Zelda Goodman was to broadcast my two psalms from Jerusalem; and I studied the score of Boléro.… On New Year’s Eve, which was also the eve of Guy’s thirtieth birthday, I made Jell-O (a recently introduced novelty, which, I correctly explained, was made from horse’s hooves) in three different colors, red and green and yellow.
Thus ended a decade, and also my first seven months away from America.
27. What Truman Capote Means to Me
When famous artists die, nine times out of ten their fame dies with them, particularly in our century when glory is extra to what is glorified. If this is true with, say, Gide or Hindemith, who were not products of the American publicity machine, but whose vast reputations relied on their physical presence on the planet, and whose works became all but unavailable the morning after their deaths, how much more true it is of pianists and actors and ballerinas and bestselling authors. Bartók was a rare exception in having died needy and becoming immediately rich posthumously. Likewise Sylvia Plath, maybe Jackson Pollock, and of course Scott Fitzgerald. Mostly, though, we strut our fifteen minutes on the stage, then vanish.
Truman Capote would have seemed—before he died—an ideal candidate for oblivion. Like Warhol, he was famous for being famous; but how many of the gawking fans, who witnessed him drunk and incoherent on talk shows, ever read a word he wrote? The last half of his life was so cheap, so dissolute, so vulgar, so public, that, like a sort of reverse Rimbaud, he renounced writing (while advertising himself as the greatest author since Proust), and vanished into the spotlight.
Insofar as she exposed me to a new and invaluable mode of thinking, and insofar as I admired her as much as any friend I’ve had, the most crucial “older” woman in my life, after my mother, was the Vicomtesse de Noailles, known as Marie-Laure. Long before I moved to France I’d heard about her as a creature of flamboyant mind, eccentric mien and endless wealth. When I first glimpsed her I was struck, not by how far but how near she came to the pre-set image. I recall that glimpse like yesterday. It was at the start of what would be a gin-soaked night, during the unbearably satisfying minutes of a Paris dusk, on 29 October 1949, in the Pont Royal’s basement bar. She sat a few tables away with a redhaired man (he later proved to be the American painter Tom Keogh); I was with Truman Capote, who had greeted her as we entered: she stood up for him, as gentlemen stand up for ladies, and kissed him on the lips. “That’s Marie-Laure de Noailles,” whispered Truman, “the most powerful woman in Europe,” but he didn’t introduce us. It would be a year before we actually met (with her melting, like most legends when you get to know them, into a vulnerably interactive intelligence), and another year before her mansion in the place des Etats-Unis became my home, which it remained—even after I’d quit France—until her death in 1970.
Truman Capote, meanwhile, I’d met only six weeks earlier at El Farhar in Tangier, but his notoriety, like Marie-Laure’s, preceded him. Indeed, the previous year when Other Voices, Other Rooms made headlines, I had devoured it between classes at Juilliard, finding it, as I still do, though dangerously influenced by, superior to Carson McCullers. (Superior because, unlike McCullers, each word, as with poetry, was unextractable, and the words together formed inevitable chains, like perfect wreaths of roses, which in turn formed themselves into paragraphs, pages, chapters.) The notoriety lay, of course, less in the surprise that the book was good literature (even rarer then than now on best-seller lists), than that the back cover was adorned by a photo of the author gazing at us, doe-eyed ’neath yam-colored China-doll bangs, from a prone pose on a Victorian settee (“it assumes I’m more or less beckoning somebody to climb on top of me”)—scarcely the stance of our Hemingways hitherto. If in real life he was not so cutely passive, he looked every bit as infantile—physically, that is—although his utterances, in that much-mocked voice, were always pointed, disarmingly honest and, I suppose, adult. Still, Truman wasn’t like you or me. He was a conspicuous sissy, and not one bit ashamed. When I had asked Bowles how such a specimen coped in the actual world, he said that, well, Truman didn’t often venture far from his geniuses and dowagers, but when he did (showing up in the Casbah maybe, or on the Lower East Side, or indeed in the plains of Kansas where a decade hence he would be documenting the Clutter murders), he was the source of disbelief rather than of scorn. Fame and chutzpah were his shields. He graced the odd side of Quentin Crisp’s coin: being unreal, neither man posed a threat, but whereas Crisp as defiant victim got bashed now and then, Capote as defiant lord seemed immune to battery. This was clear in Paris now where I saw him every day. Other Voices had just appeared there, under the weak title of Domaines hantés, and I served as translator during interviews (like many good writers—and composers, too—Truman Capote lacked the gift of tongues) which were conducted in places like the Deux Magots, where strangers gaped approvingly. The rest of the time we talked.
What about? Not art, certainly. Do professionals after twenty ever talk esthetics (exhausting both their energy and their secrets) rather than money, sex, and contracts? Nor did we talk music, since Truman like most literary types knew nothing of that. (His impression of Jennie Tourel: high heels and silk pyjamas, even when hiking through mud at Yaddo. His impression of Esther Berger: “I think she’s sweet”—I lifted an eyebrow—“like a cobra.”) Mostly I listened as he improvised around, for instance, his “dear acquaintance,” Denham Fouts, an American who in the late thirties slept with just everyone—Jean Marais, King Farouk, the Maharajah so-and-so—everyone, that is, except Hitler. “Had Denham Fouts yielded to Hitler’s advances there would have been no World War Two, and Denham would not have had to slit his wrists in the bathtub of that Roman pensione.” Truman talked of the long poem he was making, The Postman’s Lantern, which would surely be settable to music (where is it now?). He speculated on why Paul Bowles stayed for so long in Morocco, then put it down to the available sex. He was stirring in a description of Jack Dunphy, who had left his wife, dancer Joan McCracken, to live with Truman forevermore. Jack’s modest but true gift as a playwright Truman praised to the skies, but he praised too Jack’s wise eyes, pale hair, and virile nape, and claimed to need the color, taste, and smell of each segment of Jack’s body. Still, I seldom saw them together. Truman’s life was compartmentalized. The two men were as unlike as Topsy and Eva, characters they had portrayed at Cecil Beaton’s costume ball the night before I met them in Tangier.
In early November Truman left for Sicily and I returned to Africa. In March 1951 this was mailed from Taormina to Marrakech:
Dear Ned, Your card was forwarded to me here where I have been for over a year working on a novel. Am leaving in three weeks for Venice and late in July sailing home. Would so like to see you; I hope you will come back to N.Y. I hope you are working. I think of you often. M
y love to Marie-Laure—my love to you
et mille tendresse [sic]
Truman
In N.Y. my address is still 1060 Park Avenue
But our paths didn’t cross until two years later when he turned up again in Paris. Meanwhile, his reference to “sailing home” impressed me (most expatriates in those days repudiated America), and his emphasis on “working” influenced me; a short story collection and The Grass Harp had just come out, and I read them with pleasure and envy at his knack for unstilted metaphor and structure, virtues I sought to impose on my music. On 28 November 1953, he came to lunch in Marie-Laure’s blue marble dining room, and told us he was taken with the rich because they were rich—he wanted to use what made them tick, if in fact they ticked by being rich. Ostensibly he swapped his fame for their wealth. But did the rich ever in fact coolly sign checks to him? and can it be seen, looking back, that he ever “used” all that research in his books? He was vicarious in the sense of being a prudent watcher, moralizing about, without participating in, the global gangbang (nonpolitical department). On 17 December he dragged me to one of those loud caves in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (sober, I loathe nightclubs—the din!) where we sat for hours watching the young dance the Java. He said, “You have an innocent profile, at least from the right.”
He never came to France again, not while I lived there. In New York we met from time to time, generally tête-à-tête, though sometimes with his famous flock. I do treasure an evening with Dietrich, another with Gloria Vanderbilt. Still another in a Third Avenue cinema, theoretically watching To Catch a Thief, actually refereeing an onanistic exchange between a male couple in the row ahead, after which we supped at Johnny Nicholson’s now-defunct café where, over a chocolate soufflé, I heard about the chores of celebrity. “Yesterday, five minutes after my new phone had been installed, and nobody could possibly have known the number, it rang, and a voice said, ‘This is Speed Lamkin.’ Talk about opportunism!” (Speed Lamkin was to have a brief run as the poor man’s Truman Capote during those distant years.) I remember also the first television production of a Capote oeuvre, “A Christmas Memory,” and Frank O’Hara’s guffaw when Geraldine Page appeared on the screen, looked mistily out at the country dawn, and uttered the script’s first line, “It’s fruitcake time.” In 1959, with Valerie Bettis, I composed a dance called Early Voyagers, based on Other Voices, Other Rooms, which toured the U.S. with the Washington Ballet Company. And so forth. If Truman and I weren’t quite friends we were staunch pals, always casual and mutually respectful.
