Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Anyway, that tingling cliché, “Art is a lie that speaks the truth,” is skewed. Art never purports to be Truth. Art is art—though sometimes it clarifies some aspect of fact hitherto blurred, even to the artist.

  Inaptness of metaphors comingling the arts, like “architecture is frozen music.” Is music, then, liquid architecture? If the seven deadly arts could express each other, we’d need only one.

  Innocent civilians. As distinct from … guilty soldiers?

  In due course Nell migrated south to crown the prince in Monte Carlo, thence back to her studies in Torino, but not before trying to impress impresarios in more ways than one. Nell would kiss the hand that slapped her, as well as try to seduce “important” people even after contracts were signed. She made an indiscriminate pass at every class, at the hotel maid, at Shirley in a taxi, even, for all I know, at Boulanger herself. Her aim was less to slake a lust than to prove her existence (maybe it’s the same thing)—a need to be reacted to. I understood, because it takes one to know one, and I despised her for it.

  The day after she left, on 3 April, Eugene Istomin showed up with Leon Fleisher under his arm. Eugene, en route to Perpignan, would figure as performer and organizer in the first of what became an ongoing yearly celebration (later moved to Prades) centering around the personality of Pablo Casals. The chromatic tendency of this celebration, although transpiring in the French Pyrénées, leaned toward Casals’s mostly Germanic repertory—what Virgil Thomson used to call the Fifty Masterpieces. Eugene was ripe for this milieu. It’s not too early to announce that Eugene would become, through the years, a fixture of the festival, an intimate of Casals, almost a fils adoptif. In 1973 when the grand old cellist died at ninety-seven, Eugene married his young widow, Martita, the beauteous and canny. Together they’ve kept the flame while pursuing separate but adjunct careers, he as a soloist and she as director of minor musical empires internationally, with a loving elegance.

  As for Leon Fleisher, ex-pupil of Schnabel’s, now at twenty-one already a well-launched pianist, I had heard him play the Brahms B minor in Carnegie Hall, but never met him. Here he was on vacation, planning to spend the summer in France. As can happen with a person one has perceived first from afar, up there on the stage (an artist at work is always beautiful), then later meets socially, Leon now emanated a pristine aura. After five minutes, like anyone else (except actors), he was just like you or me, or rather, like all pianists, a bespectacled extrovert. Leon at Shirley’s Steinway that month of April was a delight. He made the unvarying Brahms-Handel Variations and the interminable Schubert B-flat Sonata sound like real music. The Mendelssohn Song without Words—the one in E-flat—under his fingers bloomed into a song with words, an effusion which in its joy made the hearer long to sing out with some improvisatory verse, the way other great music, even including Beethoven, moves the hearer to dance. Leon accomplished this, I think, not by approaching the score as sacrosanct, but as the blueprint for a pleasure that all music inherently is, albeit sometimes dark pleasure, as in a Mass for the dead.

  On the 12th Shirley flew to Casablanca, thence to Fez to spend two weeks practicing, culminating in her first public recital ever, at the Cinéma-Théâtre Lux of Fez. While she was away I noted: “April 13th, the Arab and the concierge.… 14th, drunk with Douglas A. & the ugly English girl, later Jean-Claude & Jessie. [Jessie lived upstairs with an American couple, Fern and Ken O’Brien, who took pictures.]… 15th, dîner avec Alberto Esteban.… 16th, Leon & Margie at 7. Stephen Spender and Jim Lord at 9. Later, Elliott Stein and Daniel Mauroc.… 17th, see M. Vadot, call Doda, call Souzay, Inv. 62-79.… 18th, Souzay à 16 heures, 18 av. de la Motte-Piquet. Guy & Shirley will call—6:30. Onion soup at midnight with Eugene’s horrible friends (au Royale).…”

  Yes, on the 18th, Benga’s bartender from Rose Rouge summoned me to the phone, the only one in the building, two floors down. Shirley and Guy’s voices sounded plaintive and distant. Then came a letter from Shirley, quite different in tone, now that our geographical locations were reversed, from her previous one in December:

  Nedo chéri, it was divine to hear your voice last nite. Both Guy & I were very sad afterward. We miss you so. I love you more than I ever did. I feel that we’re so close & right together now & that nothing is hidden. Heard “L’enfant et les sortilèges”. I was so upset by it I cried. Saw you at the piano & singing, I never missed you so much before.

  I’m terribly upset about J[ean] C[laude]. I’ve only one letter since I’m here. These stories about 3 in a bed & his not coming home (he would never be at his mother’s) have disturbed me profoundly. I don’t know what to think. I’m quite miserable!

  I practice, wanting so much to play well despite the low caliber audience. Your music is giving me a headache!! And the last movement of Opus 78.

  Guy is marvelous.

  Please write often. And tell me the truth about Jean-Claude.

  How am I going to work with these horrible thoughts in my head?

  Love X

  Best to Leon & Eugene. Did he meet Casals?

  Elliott Stein and Daniel Mauroc, the American and the Frenchman, were coeditors of a bilingual little mag called Janus. Each was a poet and, as poets go, generous to their brethren by keeping their periodical alive for several years. Partners in crime if not in love, they cooperated at the office, but socialized individually. Daniel lived at home as do all unmarried French males until middle life, while Elliott lived at the Hôtel de Verneuil.

  Of Daniel, whom I brought to see Jean-Claude with the successful hope that he’d print J-C’s poems, I retain most clearly a balmy afternoon smoking kif on the terrace of Café de la Mairie, place Saint-Sulpice, the café of Dr. O’Connor in Night-wood. After awhile we began to see two of everyone passing by. But we were not seeing double: the identical pairs were talking to each other. In fact we learned next day that a Congress of Twins was currently meeting in the vicinity. Moral: Unlike liquor, which distorts reality, in cannabis veritas. Daniel was a plain man with a perpetual grin and a conspiratorial tone. If you would prefer to listen to the general conversation in a given group, Daniel always managed to draw you aside with details about his big toe.

  Of Elliott, whom I came to know more solidly in a frame lasting to the present, I retain most clearly the one-room fifth-floor walk-up and communal hall toilet (the kind you squat in, supporting yourself upon cement footprints), his permanent residence in France. The walls were plastered with portraits of starlets, comic-strip personages, crocodiles, Tiffany lampshades, muscle men, and a font for holy water. (Susan Sontag told me, circa 1966, that Elliott’s room, no less than his pince-sans-rire rhetoric, was the chief source for her “Notes on Camp”—camp being a glorification of the garish-as-high art, or the queen getting them before they get her. Since there is no record of Susan telling this to anyone else, I’ll give Elliott credit where it’s due.)

  Elliott, twenty-one, was the precocious Jewish kid forever. There was nothing he didn’t know about Clara Bow or about Henry James. Unlike most literary thinkers he loved music, especially opera with its extramusical theatrics. Within a year Elliott would become my first librettist, with his richly free adaptation of Hawthorne’s “The Snow Image” turned into a whimsical tragedy called A Childhood Miracle, a half-hour opera for six singers and thirteen instruments.

  Stephen Spender and James Lord.… Like Leon Fleisher, Spender was preceded by his fame, specifically by his story “The Burning Cactus” which in 1940 I devoured and redevoured in an already ancient copy of Hound & Horn, and wrote tales myself with ambiguously sexed creatures named Tyl. I met Spender first when we lunched à trois in the tiny dining room of José. Naughty French tongues had even referred to them, using George Sand’s title, as Elle et Lui.

  “Every time I meet Americans, that’s what they tell me—how they identify with Tyl in ‘The Burning Cactus.’”

  This left me silent. Silent I remained later when just the two of us were on the street, and Stephen confided that he now found Jo
sé “rather triste, with that air of seeming in the know, when really he’s never made it either as a thinker or a doer despite the grand people he rubs elbows with.” Did Stephen know me well enough to put down one of my closest friends? My naïveté could not reconcile this attitude in a person known for his right-thinking—that is, his left-thinking—during the Spanish Civil War. Of course, just as a dictator coldly slaughters a mob but hotly weeps for his ailing daughter, so a philanthropist defends the masses while bitching his peers. Yet I myself wanted to rub elbows with Stephen, if only because he might put in a good word for me with Edith Sitwell. So I invited him over to Harp Street the following week, to hear me play and squawk “The Youth with the Red-Gold Hair.”

  Stephen arrived with James Lord, he of the square jaw and la-di-da accent out-Englishing the English despite his New Jersey roots. Even his French, which was grammatically and colloquially irreproachable (he’d been an interpreter for the army), was anglicized. Yet James’s affected and sarcastic quips about all that’s sacred belied his gentleness in human relations. He was the opposite face of Spender. He too rubbed elbows with the great. And why not? The great are, on the whole, more intriguing than the non-great, and James clove to them not for their greatness per se but for what the greatness stemmed from. One could argue that this very cleaving eventually rendered James himself as great as a petit maître can become. His depiction, in words, of what it means to be a Giacometti or a Picasso is unlike anything: he describes what cannot be described—the process of creation as it occurs, the finished product while it is becoming. If the actions toward monumentalizing Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence rated him a Légion d’honneur insignia, his printed words on the painter’s milieu during the middle third of our century are beyond price. Like Elliott Stein, James Lord also prepared a libretto for me, based on his disturbing story “The Boy Who Wrote No,” but it never panned out. We did become uneasy friends, especially late in the decade when he replaced me as token American in the retinue of Marie-Laure de Noailles. And once, in August of 1954 when I was agonizing as only the young can (but I was already thirty) over a love affair, James slipped a poem under my dinner plate. I set it to music. Called “In This Summer,” the poem contained this line, obvious but consoling: “… and human nature was not conceived to conform to human needs.”

  That song was perhaps not as persuasive as the Sitwell settings. But on this special Sunday, knowing Shirley was away, James and Stephen seemed less interested in my music than in sizing up Jean-Claude whose prettiness had been bruited about the quarter.

  When Shirley returned from Morocco, order was not restored. Fifty years hence I may fill in the blank. For now let it be said that her tryst with Jean-Claude was waning, that she felt weary, and that she canceled her part in the upcoming embassy concert. When Leon Fleisher was conscripted to replace her, he agreed, on the condition he could have daily access to our piano to learn, in two weeks, my new Sonata and the three Barcarolles.

  During these same weeks I practiced with Janet Hayes while Charles Walker assembled singers for the Sappho madrigals. (French choristers who sing English do not grow on trees.) Added to this, in a pre-Xerox age, were the problems of photographing rehearsal copies (printed scores never arrived from the United States), of finding appropriate clothes (I borrowed José’s old-fashioned tails), and of spacing the requisite binges so as to remain fresh and witty. The agenda is stuffed with rendezvous: April 19th, L’homme de cendre d’Henri Léger à la Comédie-Française.… 20th, Yves Salgues 3:00 au Montana, Jane & Nikita & Jean-Claude au Mabillon.… 21st, haircut, Doda Conrad at 3 rue de Bruxelles, Pierre Pichon au Colisée.… 22nd, Robert Kanters and André Fraigneau.… 24th, Snow. Dine with Gérard Souzay chez Francis in place de l’Alma, then all five Beethoven piano concertos by Julius Katchen, Cluytens conducting, au Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.

  Doda Conrad was to be a crucial colleague. Already in his late forties, he was the only child of Marya Freund (b. 1876), a humorless, self-important Polish soprano who, true to her generation, could scarcely read notes but was Europe’s answer to Eva Gauthier: a specialist in contemporary song who had not only created the Wood Dove role in Schoenberg’s Gurreleider in 1913 but was the first to “speak” the French and English versions of that composer’s Pierrot lunaire. She dwelt and taught in the same flat as Doda, who also shared his mother’s pomposity, but with dollops of what might pass for whimsy. (His code word for homosexuals was Egyptian Royalty, and his knowledge of their soberest members was limitless: that the tragic pederast Pierre Bernac had a corkscrew-shaped sex, for example.) Tall, overweight, multilingual, Doda had become an American. Like all naturalized citizens he was unduly patriotic—proud beyond the line of his battle scars from World War II, and uncomfortable with my Quakerism. In the world of music he claimed not only to know everyone but to have been instrumental in everyone’s basic career, not least that gifted boy, Arturo Toscanini.

  He demanded his pound of flesh, but it was ever for favors rendered. Doda was tireless in promoting what he believed in, and what he believed in was always first rate. For Chopin’s centennial the previous year, he commissioned Louise de Vilmorin to write six poems—a Nocturne, a Scherzo, an Etude, etcetera—and six composers to set these to music, including Sauguet and Poulenc and, for the Etude, one Leo Préger, whose name was new to me. Préger’s song was haunting with its poignant curves, its every pearly note in perfect place.

  Doda was right-hand man to Nadia Boulanger, as to Marie-Blanche de Polignac, the beautiful countess who sang “Amor” on that immortal Monteverdi record. He gave me three rare scores of Stravinsky and a carton of Chesterfields from the army PX for rehearsing Winterreise with him, and he was always good for changing dollars. Continually on the lookout for someone to champion, I was that someone for now. He introduced me to valuable people and commissioned works (through praise, not money) which he sang all over. If, sixteen years hence, Doda ceased to speak to me, a silence maintained for twenty-five years (the period in France paralleling our statute of limitations), he then at eighty-five wrote to say that all is forgiven. My crime was apparently something said about his mother. For the record: At Doda’s request, on 29 September 1955, I composed a nine-measure masterpiece based on Gertrude Stein’s quatrain “I Am Rose,” “dedicated to Marya Freund on her 80th birthday.”

  Robert Kanters and André Fraigneau were smart literary critics, both with regular jobs reviewing for monthlies, and both responsible for thoughtful studies on art and literature, though not music. I went to bed several times with Kanters, who was comparatively masculine and quite good-natured, in his little pad, rue de Beaune, but not with Fraigneau who was effete to a fault, and had composed an illustrated monograph on Jean Cocteau, whom he was the poor man’s version of. To his credit, Fraigneau had also produced a collection of stories called La grâce humaine, the first of which describes the author in a train compartment also occupied by a prisoner handcuffed between two guards. The author and the captive glance furtively at each other for hours. Without a word they reach an understanding, then are parted forever. I asked Fraigneau what La grâce humaine meant. He answered: “La grâce humaine, c’est toi.” (Is this a gracious paragraph?)

  Julius Katchen would one day say: “Be nicer to Fraigneau and Kanters. Think of them as your audience. Everyone is the audience.”

  Backstage after Katchen’s extraordinary demonstration I had said only “How do you do?” Not until late summer did we meet again and begin the passionately platonic friendship that would endure until Julius died at forty-three in 1969.

  April 25th. Rain. Dine with Douglas Allanbrook, Leo Préger, Paul Demarest.… 26th, terribly cold. Postpone Jacques Durand-Dassier.… 27th, Charles Hathaway (champagne) and Leslie Egleton. Grémillon!!! 28th, do music for Mauroc’s play. Kanters 5:30. José 7:30, and Poulenc’s violin sonata concert, Ecole Normale.…

  Préger turned out to be Romanian with a squat physique and beady eyes who lived with his sister. His music resembled my own
. Despite warm feelings toward this music, I never warmed to the man, not least because he would next year win first place in the Prix de Biarritz, when I won second.

  Charles Hathaway and Leslie Egleton were American fixtures. Charles was a well-off supplier of opium, through his rich lover, Hubert de Senoch, to the artistic members of the Tout Paris—Cocteau, Tony Gandarillas, the Aurics—as well as an idle reconteur. Egleton was an obstreperous swish of a now-vanished vintage, like someone in Waugh. It was they who, seeing Jean Grémillon, the plump, surly, glorious, fifty-year-old movie director seated alone at the Montana, suggested I introduce myself, for he liked handsome boys. Since I’d never heard of him, there was nothing to fear. I was wearing Jean-Claude’s black wool turtleneck (which I still have), had injected Privine in my eyes to make them shine, and was afloat in sparkling wine. Approaching this monolith whose head was on the bar, I murmured: Monsieur Grémillon. He groaned the groan of he-who-is-forever-burdened-by-strangers, then turned toward me, and his face lit up. “Alors, vous voulez faire du cinema, vous aussi,” said he, and ordered us both a drink. We ended up in bed in Harp Street, where I changed my mind in midstream and wouldn’t put out. He got dressed slowly and lumbered away, cursing Americans. Months later we met again, again at the Montana, and he laughed and introduced me to a friend as “that Yankee I told you about.” It wasn’t until after his death in 1959 that I learned what a uniquely key figure he was for French movies. (It was also in 1959, back in America, that I brought someone home from Julius’s bar at 4 a.m. That someone turned out to have an artificial leg which he laboriously unscrewed. Whereupon I asked him to leave, and pretended to pass out. Cursing, he screwed the leg back on and clanked off into the dawn.)

  Daniel Mauroc asked me to compose background music for his playlet called Il n’y a plus rien à vivre, a dark comedy and quite good. This I did, simply by having Leon Fleisher play the slow middle Barcarolle over and over into a recording machine. Jean-Claude’s pretty blond sister Josette was strong as one of the three characters when the piece was mounted.