Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Memoir is style (French). Diary is content (German). A diary is too close to the fact to be stylish (does one write of one’s breaking heart with style?), while a memoir is too far from fact for substance.

  Chronology is to the autobiographer what a poem is to the song composer: the skeleton’s there, it just requires flesh—the recall of flesh—without need for inventing a plot. Aware that nobody wants to read about other people’s childhoods, much less their progenitors’ childhoods, I’ve nevertheless recollected early affinities for Mother and Father. Now that I’ve decided to stop this book by 1952, well before my thirtieth year, and subtitle it “A Memoir” rather than “An Autobiography,” I’m indulging in detail, since I have the detail. The problem: there’s no climax, there can’t be, even with autobiography, unless the author slits his wrists on the last page.

  It was my second summer in Morocco. This time I would stay until nearly September before heading up to Paris. The season was a duplicate of 1949, so far as society is concerned. Movies weekly, books daily (Tropic of Capricorn, Wings of the Dove, Paul Goodman’s new The Dead of Spring). Arab concerts monthly. Endless letter writing, mainly to parents, and to Monsieur Vadot of the Néocopie-Musicale. Evening picnics in the cool hills of Immouzer. Twice we dined in the very humble abode of Messaoud and his mother, touched by their effort to prepare a stifling meal in the stifling heat, and of the rigid yet barefoot hospitality.

  But a sad fog had settled over the planet. The war in Korea seemed incomprehensible, coming as it did so soon after the armistice, menacing what everyone thought would be a third world war. I hadn’t yet learned that people don’t learn, that mistakes are repeated, violence sanctioned, love mocked, hate relished.

  Ramadan ended on 16 July, replaced by rain, and more rain. Add to this the intimations of hemorrhoids which had brewed for a decade, injections Guy gave me for allergies aggravated by the weekly ingestion of a carton of Koutoubias, and the wet heat that encouraged nightmares (mainly about Martha Graham, for some reason), on the occasions when persistent narcolepsy could be said to be blessed by bad dreams, and you have the mood from which I recoiled daily to write music. Attempting now to see myself through Guy’s eyes, I must have been insufferable. He said so frequently, yet reticently, torn between awe of the general situation and impatience at the particular self-indulgence of a spoiled American. The French may pamper their pet dogs, but with each other they are stoical; even the rich practice the sensuous reticence of peasants. Guy’s affection was bemusing, as when he suggested I dally with one or another of his confrères (I never did) on the grounds that I shouldn’t be wasted just on him.… Was I insufferable? People still say so. Why they suffer me, I do not know. Yes, I do.

  The confrères were many, mainly straight young couples like the Rémys and the Millets, always intelligent with a conflict of interest: dedication to sanitizing this not-yet-independent and very foreign culture, yet nostalgic for their native soil. Piaf on the radio, or Charles Trenet singing “Revoir Paris,” was enough to dissolve them. The male homosexual medicos were decorous if outspoken, as is the case with colonists, not just because they’re far from home but because the “natives” have nothing against the practice, if not the Greekish emotion, of same-sexuality. Typical and rather mad was the bald Dr. Salme, now retired, who in his unqualified love for a Berber boy sent the lad a sheaf of Mallarmé sonnets. East and West were no less remote in those days than Romantic Love and perfunctory sex in the current curriculum of young Americans. (Not that perfunctory sex is not love: simply, it’s love telegraphed, perhaps more poignant than long-lived cohabitations which, by nature, collect passionless barnacles.)

  On the weekend of 12 August, after serving as witnesses at Millet’s wedding in Ifrane, we proceeded to Tangier to change traveler’s checks and to visit Paul Bowles in his as yet unlivable house in the Casbah. Next day Paul and Brion Gysin showed us the house: four narrow stories, one room to a story, a smell of damp plaster, no furniture except for a box of sapphires. We went for lunch to the beach of the Hercules Grottos, chauffeur-driven in Paul’s new Jaguar paid for by royalties from The Sheltering Sky.

  Paul showed no interest in ever composing again unless this were bolstered by a healthy commission—“But nobody remembers that I ever wrote music.” Brion painted fervently, and would become something of a cult for the beatniks in the sixties, with his strobe-light images which I found infantile. He lingered in Tangier for another ten years, where he eventually opened a fancy restaurant, then moved to Paris, wrote infantile music, lived in a little Moroccan-style flat overlooking place Beaubourg, where saltimbanques turned handsprings day and night, and maintained a canny good humor until he died of rectal cancer in 1985.

  On the roof of the house Brion took snapshots of me, peroxided, and of Paul’s teenaged Spanish boyfriend. (Paul said: “The light one and the dark one, as Jane would say.”) Then we returned to Madame Porte’s for some divine pastry which, after the creamed-topped pear tarts of Italy, now seemed, in the Spartan plainness, unsatisfactory.

  More movies, books, music copying, swimming, quarreling, cooking, and heat.

  Then on 28 August I took the night plane for Paris, arriving next morning at Orly, bus to the Invalides, taxi to the Hôtel de l’Université. Now that Shirley had gone, Leon Fleisher had taken over the lease on the Harp Street pad, so I had booked a third-floor room-on-the-street (toilet down the hall) of this agreeable “artists’ inn” at 22 rue de l’Université. Phone number: Littré 93–97.

  The second evening, a Wednesday, quite mild, I was seated on the Reine Blanche terrace, bored, with friends, when I spotted Julius Katchen striding rapidly among the tables, then entering the bar, alone. I’d not seen him since that brief meeting last spring with Souzay. Nor had it meanwhile occurred to me he was queer. But the Reine Blanche was the gay hangout of the quarter and here he was. I went into the bar, found him surrounded by fans, ordered a beer, and reintroduced myself.

  Much later that night we went to his place at 3 rue Cognacq-Jay. Julius had a bedroom there, plus access to the large apartment of an elderly bourgeoise, one Madame Ponthès, known as Tante Marthe, whom I never cared for—too smarmily calculating with her cold, knowing eyes. Julius had just turned twenty-four. He had also just come out of the closet. With all the guileless conviction of the newly converted he was as determined as a Saint Bernard humping your leg in public. Julius, who had lived in Europe since the end of the war, was both a grand pianist and a successful one—surely the most successful American instrumentalist on the Continent and in Britain. His professional assurance helped lend authority to his lovemaking, for he thought of himself, with his gross features and hairy back, as physically ugly, which he was, but sexually so. We nevertheless never did it again. Next morning a young student was ushered into the bedroom by Madame Ponthès, a Belgian who had apparently written Julius about coaching sessions. Julius immediately brought him into the bed. I was understandably horrified, and left.

  Julius was everything that I was not. Warm, welcoming, self-assured, loud, nonalcoholic, patient, concerned about others, a performer, nearsighted, muscular, with a footballer’s quick pigeon-toed walk. We became close friends and professional collaborators within the week. During the next month and a half we were inseparable, Julius modeling his notion of both homosexual and composer on myself; me modeling my notion of the virtuoso and knowledgeable interpreter on himself. He was the prodigy grown up, with 150 concerts a year, a repertory of—at a day’s notice—fifty concertos and twenty recital programs, and a recording contract with London FFRR which gave him carte blanche.

  His repertory, like that of most postwar Americans residing by choice in Paris, contained no French music. These pianists, mostly Jewish, liked the food, art, love, language, and freedom of France; but while they would not have dreamed of living in Germany, whose language they loathed, they played mostly German classics. If what we term “classical” can be linked to a school of French literature, the term is nil in French musi
c. Musical classicism originated, developed, and decayed in the Austria of the late eighteenth century. The opulently controlled Impressionism which France introduced to the planet through her four great masters, Debussy and Ravel and Poulenc and Messiaen, was anathema to these virtuosos, who thought great meant big, and for whom the three Bs were doppelgängers. Julius once confided that while playing the Andante from Brahms’s F-minor Sonata at a London recital, he got an erection and quite literally climaxed.

  He liked to go out with mobs. Usually these were other pianists who would request, at the Café Saint-Germain, that two tables be shoved together. The mob would then gather round, eating croquemonsieurs with coffee or chocolate, and vie happily among themselves about the high prices they commanded, about some little restaurant discovered in Omaha or Osaka, about the SRO audience in Manchester or Munich (or about—this was a brave admission—how in Antwerp only nine people showed up), and about the digital failings of less successful competitors. Food, fees, fingerings, and foes: such was the subject matter of public performers who had never had a “normal” childhood, because their youth had been swallowed by the practice room. They were all educated and acquisitive, loving the literature of the lands they visited, and furnishing their homes with artifacts from these lands. But their conversation, after a long day at the keyboard, relaxed always into gossip.

  The mob consisted of stars—Americans with their European counterparts—who met off-duty during summer sessions in Paris with their acolytes or legal mates. With Julius presiding, there were likely to be on any occasion Jacques Abram, Abbey Simon, Willy Kapell, Miriam Scriabin with Bobby Cornman, Eugene List and his new wife, Carroll Glenn, Gary and Naomi Graffman, plus outsiders like Larry Adler or Janos Starker, everyone sober and screaming, except for the composers who, like me and sometimes Jean-Michel Damase, were quiet and drunk.

  If these jovial confabs are now gone with the wind, like the Café Saint-Germain itself, it’s not because performers no longer convene self-congratulatorily but because composers are banished from the convocation. Interpreter and maker now face in opposite directions, seldom turning around to join forces.

  Julius differed from his three frères semblables by being even more monstrously to the manor born. His sound never equaled the melted gruyère sumptuousness of Istomin, his comprehension never had the aristocratic precision of Fleisher, and his fingerwork lacked the platinum incisiveness of Graffman. But his scope was more expansive than theirs, and his technique shamed Horowitz’s. His grasp of repertory and of virtuosity was transmittable, and he enjoyed teaching.

  The chief protégé was sixteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Marty, a pupil of Boulanger’s. Julius’s interest in Jean-Pierre was no less for Jean-Pierre’s serious gifts than for his pomegranate physiognomy and athlete’s form housing an intelligent but frightened spirit. Jean-Pierre, half Jewish, had during the war avoided arrest by the Germans through the intervention of a well-placed French lawyer, le maître O., who for this protection demanded his pound of flesh from the boy. Jean-Pierre later suffered traumatic relapses. During one such crisis he imagined himself the Saviour, and informed me that I was chief among his sanctified angels. I agreed, but advised him not to shout it from the housetops, the world might think him crazy. He took the advice. I eventually dedicated one of the Barcarolles to him. His next forty-five years have been no less problematic for him than for us all: he passed through phases of professional musicality as pianist, conductor, even composer (not bad), and currently directs the Fontainebleau School of Music, a job inherited from Boulanger. Surely it was Julius who had put the bug about my sanctity in Jean-Pierre’s ear. He did the same with his other protégé, a young painter called François Jèze, for his puppy love was contagious.

  He assumed that because he found me appealing, everyone else should. We organized an impromptu party for Lenny Bernstein at what was now Leon’s pad on rue de la Harpe. Lenny’s high-powered sister, Shirley, came too, and Yvonne Loriod, and Lukas Foss, plus other American geniuses, mostly performers, all showing off. It was understood that Doda Conrad and I would perform Flight for Heaven. (For that reason I did not drink beforehand but dined with Doda at the Ministères where we laced our carrot soup with mustard—it’s a stimulant.) When the room quieted down, we gave the private premiere of the cycle, after which you could hear a pin drop. Julius whispered that the roomful of people was so enthralled by my magical presence there was no place to go but home. More likely the people were so embarrassed by the inexpert roaring of our performance that no one dared show us up by further presentations.

  Julius took me to dine at the home of Pierre Fournier, France’s preeminent cellist, rivaled in the world only by Piatagorsky. Besides the cello, the two men had in common a wife, Leda, currently Madame Fournier. She had an unidentifiably throaty accent in her theatrical blond body, and an opinionated amateur notion of music buttressed by the assurance of her marriages. Pierre’s social elegance contrasted with Leda’s aggressive interest in anyone male. They had a drab-looking thirteen-year-old son who, Leda guaranteed, seemed to be turning into a veritable Adonis with each bath she gave him.

  We dined also at the home of Philippe Boergner, editor-in-chief of Paris-Match, who with his wife owned an apartment off the avenue Foch. Julius was anxious for the magazine to do a feature on me, which it did the following February, written by Yves Salgues.

  Since my real home was Fez, Julius planned a visit there during the coming winter to maybe give a recital as Xénia had done before him. He planned also to program the new sonata all over the world if I would add a fourth movement to bring down the house. While we’re at it, why not write a concerto for him?

  Julius’s indefatigability, like Lenny’s, seems breathtaking even today, as though he were making up for lost time—not just time lost by not avowing his homosexuality until twenty-three, but the time he would later lose when his life ceased at forty-three. Did he ever sleep? He practiced eight hours a day, socialized wholeheartedly with everyone in every city in the world, and consorted with at least one person a day, sometimes two or three or four. He would meet us every evening toward eleven in the quarter, returning by foot at dawn to the rue Cognacq-Jay, pausing at every pissoir en route. Not that my own routine was less strenuous, but it was accompanied by alcohol which, by definition, impelled a certain relaxation.

  His learning capacity, as a valedictorian at Haverford, had always been evident. Though vulgar (i.e., extrovert, as distinct from Quaker), he was widely cultured and quadrilingual. He could also tune pianos—a virtue born of need, as when appearing in, say, Burma, to find himself confronted with an off-key upright. These traits I chalked up as merely Jewish, making light of his rare accomplishments. Julius, laughing, would pretend not to be hurt.

  • • •

  As with Poulenc, I have over the years written five essays on Jean Cocteau, the twentieth-century poet to whose work I feel most akin. And as with Poulenc, these essays in theory are still available. They deal mainly with Cocteau’s work in ways that seemed hitherto unexplored, at least in English (his relation to music and musicians, for instance), although the man shines through inevitably, for there are few examples in history where the worker and his work seem more inextricably linked. The man alone (though Cocteau would be the first to agree that he did not exist except in his art) was so public as to be the intimate of the universe, although this “man alone,” being also the artist, could not be an intimate of the universe, since the universe by its nature ignores art. He was endowed with the knack I’ve cited before (in connection with Boulanger, Jane Bowles, Frank O’Hara, Sonia Orwell, Lenny Bernstein, and no one else) of making you feel, when alone with him, that you were not only the sole person to understand his work but that he was the sole person to understand yours. The knack cannot be faked or bought. I don’t have it.

  What can I say then, outside the essays, of this too-famous paradox whom everyone knows, and whom I alone know?

  And what did I write in the letter of self-
introduction to which I appended, as was now a habit, a picture of myself, that it should evoke so quick a response? “You must invent a way to see me,” answered the poet by return mail. “Miracles succeed better than formal appointments. I do have a phone number and an address …” which he indicated with arrows swirling toward the bottom of the plain sheet of paper. I dialed the number, made a formal appointment, and showed up at the address, 36 rue de Montpensier, at 11:30 a.m., on 6 October, wearing the green sweater Mother had bought at Wanamaker’s.

  The succeeding two hours comprised the most time I would ever spend alone with Jean Cocteau. My report of these hours in The Paris Diary, written the same day, is accurate so far as literal fact is concerned, but exudes an unearned snippiness in keeping with the tack of outsiders who thought they were insiders. It was stylish to mock Cocteau as being a chic liar, since that was precisely what he termed himself. Anyone who passes the line of permitted glory is due for bad press, prefiguring immortality. I fell in with the vogue. His every gesture I put down as an affectation (e.g., that he remained standing for the entire visit, while I sat; that he gesticulated upward with his thin famous hands, letting the folds of his azure peignoir fall to the elbow; or that he had opinions about America which, because they were drawn from a different perspective than mine, were false), without asking myself why I had come there in the first place. In reality, Cocteau was the soul of kindness. Why else squander his morning on a complete stranger? (I was to learn months later, through André Fraigneau, that Cocteau had found me serious and candid, but that when he heard I’d taken up with Marie-Laure he despaired of my future.)