Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  My cachet rose in Saint-Germain, thanks to that sole brief time with the master. Julius asked if I’d send reproductions of François Jèze’s pictures to Cocteau, which I did, and which were duly commented upon (unfavorably). Over the years I never spoke to him with other than intimidated respect, addressing him always as vous although he said tu to me as he did to everyone—even whole groups. Our letters were raunchier than our conversation, and more to the point.

  No, we never slept together, which answers the first question Francis Steegmuller put to me when preparing his biography. Because Cocteau never publicly denied his homosexuality, it was assumed by post-Victorian heterosexual Americans that he was indiscriminately promiscuous. But to be outspoken does not mean to be outrageous. I don’t know about his sex life beyond what others have hinted, and what his own drawings (though not his writings) imply. Nora Auric said that, as a parlor trick, Jean Cocteau used to lie naked on his back, and surrounded by a cheering section, with no manipulation, no friction of any kind, would achieve ejaculation through a penis which, in erection, curved not toward his navel, but toward the scrotum. Jacques de Pressac said that because Cocteau’s many disintoxications from opium rendered him impotent, he played the passive partner to the ministrations of his heterosexual adopted son, Doudou Dermit. My instinct suggests that, like most flamboyant personalities, Cocteau was more interested in facts than acts, and that, like most hard workers who couldn’t stop talking, Cocteau never shut up enough to indulge. He was even modest and mannerly about such matters, more so certainly than the Protestant Gide. As for Steegmuller, he was fascinated by a phrase in Cocteau’s second letter to me: “Je ne crois guère aux hommes de petites verges” (“I don’t believe in men with small members”), which he mistook to be an affirmation of Cocteau’s lifelong obsession with big cocks (unlike most people?). In fact, I had told Cocteau that Professor Kinsey, at the end of each interview, gave the subject a card to be filled out and returned, stating the dimensions of the subject’s “member” in repose and in erection. Cocteau’s full reply was “Kinsey must have quite a file, and I don’t believe in men with small members,” which I take to be metaphoric, like his admonition that a true work of an art will inspire in the viewer an erection of the spirit. (What about female viewers?) Cocteau was not a lecher. His interest in people, distributed equally between women and men, was more clinical than carnal.

  Whatever I asked of him he granted. That he may have done as much for the next young fan who came to call—but were there that many, really?—does not lessen his value. I treasure the many drawings he dashed off to my prescription (he could only “dash off,” could never mull, although, as he said, his “hand does not have wings every day”), from the first 1951 portrait of a boy at a keyboard to be used as a passe-partout music cover, to the last line drawing limned shortly before his death, representing my setting of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about Ezra Pound in the booby hatch.

  Other than the little 1945 song, “De Don Juan,” I have used his words only twice. For a 1955 oratorio, The Poets’ Requiem, Paul Goodman translated a speech from The Knights of the Round Table (“Look Segramor, you know the language of the birds.…”), which I set for two male voices, chorus, and orchestra. And for a Cocteau memorial in 1990, I made a seven-minute opera for soprano and piano out of the early monologue he fashioned for Marianne Oswald, “Anna la bonne.” I also in 1967 prepared a background score for Auden’s translation of The Knights of the Round Table which Herbert Machiz directed in Southampton.

  I type these words on the kitchen counter of an empty house in Pittsburg, Kansas, on 7 July 1993. Hot, flooding rains. Jim Holmes, my reason for existing during the past twenty-six years, and I have stopped here for several days. JH’s parents, like my own so recently, have receded into a retirement village called Sunset Manor. The family property has been sold, but before new owners take charge next week, JH and his local siblings swab it from stem to stern. He wept, seeing the old home again, deserted now like “The Cherry Orchard,” when we arrived yesterday. From the basement where he vacuums he plays Carissimi’s sad cantata, Jephte, on the new portable CD machine. A fifteenth-century Italian chorus echoes through this midwestern house as I write about the Paris of a half century ago. I have never been in Kansas before. After Friday, when we drive on to Aspen, I’ll never see Kansas again.

  We gave another party, this time at Julius’s. I am amazed, today when I see so few people and am uneasy in full rooms, how natural it seemed yesterday to summon enthusiasm for perpetual reunion. Jennie Tourel was in Paris and longed for fans. This we arranged in a trice. Nell Tangeman was in town too (she had arrived on the 9th and we immediately celebrated—but what were we celebrating?—with Robert Kanters) and curious to meet her more successful colleague. Mezzo-sopranos were prevalent then, but Jennie possessed the most disturbingly lustrous sheen on her nasal diction, and the most intelligent repertory. Was she forty-eight? Nell, far younger, was still a shadow, though with a no-less-special instrument. She would never become a star, if only because of her personal instability. (Singers are a breed apart in the world of executants. A pianist, a violinist, can theoretically perform convincingly with a strep throat or measles. Not so singers, whose every physical indiscretion shows in their delivery, which is why singers are such backslapping, self-pampering, uncomplicated bon vivants. They suppress an inquiring nature, lest that nature warp their artificial gift for communication.)

  At the party Lukas Foss took over. Seated at Julius’s Steinway, he accompanied his own convincing “composer’s voice” in his own huge vehicle, The Song of Songs, which he had recently conducted in Israel with Jennie as soloist. As Lukas belted out the entire score Jennie mouthed the words semiaudibly. “Why doesn’t she just sing it herself,” whispered the jealous Nell, while I felt small in the light of all this virtuosity. Doda, for his part, deemed the piece “bloated,” admiring it, but sensing not only my inability to write but to want to write such a fat piece. Lukas was not a French composer. One year later Nell and Jennie became congenial coworkers when they shared the stage of Venice’s Teatro La Fenice in the world premiere of The Rake’s Progress.

  During these same six weeks I saw a good deal of Norris Embry and Bruce Phemister, of Alvin Ross and Homer Keller, of Gerald Cook and John Coleman and Todd Bollender and other Americans passing through. Of Americans in situ there were the pianists James Shomate (Souzay’s accompanist) and Noël Lee, the latter being the only one of us to have stayed on to this day, and who has turned into a composer, one of haunting singularity. And always the tireless Elliott Stein.

  Of the French, I saw regularly Doda Conrad. Doda took me to dine chez Pierre Bernac in the avenue la Motte-Piquet, same building as Souzay. Bernac’s odor as Poulenc’s chief interpreter, unlike his flamboyant English counterpart, Peter Pears, seemed permeated by a pathos stemming from maximum know-how couched in minimum métier, which is what made him the greatest vocal teacher, at least for French repertory, of our century.… Doda took me to dine chez Marcelle de Manziarley in the rue des Plantes. Manziarley’s fragrance as France’s chief female composer, unlike her perhaps drier American counterpart, Louise Talma, was replete with the astounding technique that all of Boulanger’s flock acquired. They solfège with machine-gun accuracy, a training unrequired in even the most expensive American conservatories; the training may not result in better composers, but it does result in quicker ones. Marcelle had a no-nonsense directness, culled from Mademoiselle, which made her attractive.… Doda took me to dine chez Boulanger herself, to whom he had explained that alcoholism (his word, and hardly a French concept) was a vital ingredient of my singular gift, providing the guilt requisite to all creation. I didn’t buy this notion any more than did Nadia. Nor did she ever bring it up during my visits when, after a critical and unpaid perusal of my latest Moroccan outpourings, she would grasp both my hands in hers, look weeping into my weeping eyes, and say: “Our poor perishable body is the sole vessel for a lasting gift, and must be tended with
care”—making the sentiment sound like philosophy.… And Doda took me to dine in the underworld of Pigalle, the rough bars of Barbès, villages within villages ruled by an autonomous apache mafia. (I say “mafia” for lack of an apter term, since the Italian word is an acronym for “morte agli francesi.”) I was too shy to rent a room in a hôtel-de-passes with any of the presumably loomingly available gangsters toward whom Doda nudged me.

  But I did have four regular lovers that brief September: a raunchy voyou named Marcel G. (Norris called him Legs Diamond) who stimulated himself twixt the gray sheets by reading the new issue of Crapoullot ever-so-daringly devoted to homosexuality. Maurice H., a Dutch student from the University of Leiden, handsome and clinging in the Germanic mold, perhaps too clinging and too handsome, for he bored me (when Julius played in Holland a month later I arranged for them to meet; they hit it off in the dressing room during the intermission of Julius’s recital), but when I reread his letters now and look at his snapshot, like the snapshot of Marcel, I acknowledge the wasteful haste of childhood. Their very European smell is evoked this morning in Kansas, and the destructive squeeze of their caramel biceps.… Less pungent because more intellectual was the ongoing flirtation with José’s Romanian, Richard, and of Doda’s friend, André B., who, after our tryst in those same gray sheets, lent me (I never returned it) the wittiest pornography since Petronius: Apollinaire’s Les onze mille verges, an insolent pastiche of the insolent Sade, and the most deliciously readable incentive for anyone studying French.

  My only other reading seems to have been Gide’s funny—really and truly ha-ha funny—Les caves du Vatican. But we went often to movies: Noblesse oblige, Monsieur Verdoux, City Lights (Chaplin was then what he remains—a humorless clod who can épater le haut monde), Kismet, and, perhaps most importantly, our friend Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks. Made when the good-looking Kenneth was a mere seventeen, Fireworks is a prequel to Genet’s Un chant d’amour in its California depiction of rough trade, a sailor, the crotch from which explodes a Roman candle, and the bemused adolescent exploring. (Kenneth makes one error, which is not an example of “Beauty Limps”: for the soundtrack he superimposes Ernest Schelling’s A Victory Ball. I am possibly the only creature on earth to know this music; my preestablished associations for it don’t jibe with the filmed images which are accordingly weakened. Unlike Kubrick’s use of an archfamiliar Strauss waltz to jolt us with its odd juxtaposition in 2001, Anger’s use of Schelling jolts only me. Still, one is too many.) Cocteau once brought a group of pals to the Cinématheque to view this young American’s daring new movie. Unbeknown to the late-arriving Cocteau, Lily Law (as Elliott called the police) had confiscated the film, since even the French have moral standards, substituting a documentary on the brothels of Budapest.

  Cocteau’s own new film, Orphée, came out on the Champs-Elysées. I saw it just two days before I saw Cocteau himself and was bowled over. The film does weather badly, seems a touch dumb today, but fun, and better than the 1928 play on which it’s based. The music of Auric passed for hip, but dates too, except for one inspired moment: when Death (portrayed by Maria Casares) turns on the radio, there issues forth a magical flute which happens to be a quote from Gluck’s Orpbée aux Champs-Elysées. Silly me, the only musician in France who didn’t know this reference! When I exclaimed to Auric about his original score for Orphée, I added: “Especially your inspired moment when Death turns on the radio and we hear that magical flute.”

  What else? With José to the ballets Parade, Les forains, Le boeuf sur le toit, after which we went to Le Boeuf sur le Toit bar, on rue du Colisée.… Tea chez Herle Jervis, where Serge Koussevitzsky, whom I’d never met before, said: “You must come to Tanglewood.” When I said I’d been there, he answered, “Well, then you must be given a Fulbright.” We never met again. But two months later, without having applied, I was offered out of the blue a Fulbright fellowship “for further study in Paris,” which I accepted.

  Visit to Henri Barraud of the French Radio, 36 avenue Friedland. Recital of my songs with Doda chez Heugel in the rue Vivienne. Afterward, mob meal, including the imperious Marya Freund, chez Lipp.… 9 October, the 10 a.m. flight on Air France from Orly arrives in Casablanca at 5 p.m. That night in Fez Guy and I went to see César. With us was Jean-Claude who, since Shirley had quit France, was at loose ends, and had wandered far afield.

  • • •

  Back in Fez I immediately set to work again. The calendar notes on 26 October, “finished slow movement, piano concerto.” By 20 December the entire three-movement affair was complete (except for the orchestration, which would be accomplished at leisure over the next six months). This concentration is surprising, given my state of health. Attacks of piles were increasing and painful. Perhaps the concerto was an antidote, composed, so to speak, through my tears. Yet the piece is living proof that what one endures in mind and body is not necessarily relayed to the page. It makes happy sounds.

  Piano Concerto No. 2 (so-called because, as with String Quartet No. 2, there is a No. 1 which, though disavowed, must be counted) is a twenty-five-minute dessert in three Lisztian layers entirely confected around the quirks and virtues of Julius Katchen’s pianism. (For various reasons the work waited over three years before its premiere, with Julius as soloist, under conductor Jean Giardino and the Orchèstre de la Radiodiffusion Française in Paris, May 1954. Julius would still have held out for a more auspicious unveiling had I not wearied of waiting. So Julius said okay, on the condition that I arrange for him to practice chez Marie-Laure each night for a week, from midnight to 6 a.m., since he was forbidden by his neighbors to use the piano during these hours. The performance itself, of which I retain an old 78 rpm, was of clattering grandeur, fast as hell, not unlike the playing today of Pollini with every note, in sprays of perhaps twenty-nine to the second, of equal value and equal clarity. This took place in the radio studio with no audience except the other composer who shared the program, Heitor Villa-Lobos. What a warm, unassuming, and physically short creature he was, for someone whose music was so glacial, aspiring, and physically problematic!)

  The early autumn in Africa was passed, when not working, on reading (Lautréamont, Jarry, Maurice Sachs); on seeing movies (Stromboli, Vulcano, Sarabande, Le cas Parradine) with Jean-Claude and Guy and Lévesque; on attending lectures (Norbert Dufourq’s presentation of Bach, after which we gave him a reception; Maurice Fombeure’s “La vie à Saint-Germain-des-Prés); attending plays (at the Lux, Huis clos with Marie Déa, co-billed with La putain respectueuse starring Ginette Leclerc); and on arranging for Julius’s December recital. On 23 October I turned twenty-seven, and took to bed with the flu.

  In early November Julius sent me a long letter so heartfelt and soul-searching that my perception of him began to shift from one of mere passing affection to one of rich empathy. (His widow has denied permission for the letter to be reprinted here. Well, it might have injected a welcome change of voice.) In essence Julius confessed to more frequently occurring periods of depression, which I had never suspected; and said that he was taking stock of his social life which had turned lopsided and vacuous, of his flourishing career which left him lonely beyond bearing, and of a gnawing urge to settle down—all this garnished with a masochistic thankfulness for my having both brightened and darkened certain hitherto unknown corners of his subconscious. Over the years I received dozens of other letters from Julius, all wearing his heart on his sleeve, some grandly objective with musical insights that only an interpreter could think up, a few snidely witty but with a guileless honesty, and none reread by me until now. My reactions then would have been of embarrassment, discomfort (on being thought of as a figure of domination), and a bored noblesse oblige. Today I feel honored to have been so singled out by that busy friend.

  The war in Korea dragged on. Possibilities of its expansion into China weighed heavily. The African autumn, garish in the crimson clarity of its drinkable air, seemed nonetheless polluted as the Dakota air must have seemed to Mother thirty-t
wo years before when her brother was slain at Belleau Wood.

  Michel Royer spent a fortnight at his sewing machine concocting a scarlet woolen monk’s robe, complete with hood, for me to don on the ever-cooler evenings. More movies, more quiet nights, more Arab concerts, more tours of the bled. On 15 November we lit the first fire in the grate. A touring company of the Comédie-Française brought Phèdre and Le malade imaginaire after which were parties where Arab boys from Robert Lévesque’s class recited Baudelaire.… More concerts. More work. More movies.…

  Julien Green’s novel Moira was just published. This story of a dullish American redheaded boy who kills the thing he loves, transpiring in the small-town ambiance of the United States but recounted in the language of Lautréamont, had a timbre new to literature. Lévesque urged me to write Julien Green, whom, like Maurice Sachs, he had known through Gide in the thirties, and to enclose one of those snapshots taken at Moulay Idriss of myself with tan legs in white shorts.

  On the 28th Yvonne Loriod arrived for her recital in the concert series, and stayed with me and with Guy, whom she always referred to as Le Bon Pasteur. Yvonne is an extraordinary performing musician. Just my age, old-maidish in appearance, she had until recently specialized in two-piano recitals with her sister. They were intensely solemn to behold while hunched over the keys with their steel-rimmed spectacles. (Sauguet dubbed them “Les Soeurs Lissac,” because their publicity photos resembled an ad for Les Frères Lissac, the well-known manufacturers of glasses.) Now she was the mistress of Olivier Messiaen, France’s greatest living composer (after Poulenc), whom she would marry when Messiaen’s wife eventually died, and of whom she was the principal interpreter. Her extraordinariness lay in her memory. For example, when Messiaen presented her with the just-finished manuscript of Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésu (which Paul Jacobs translated as “Give My Regards to Jesus”), a two-hour suite for solo piano in twenty movements of ferocious difficulty, she did not go immediately to the piano. She took the music to bed, studied it all night away from the keyboard. Next morning she played it by heart without a hitch. Similarly, when Guy learned that Yvonne’s program in Fez would contain no Beethoven, he pleaded with her to eliminate the Schumann sonata and substitute the huge Hammerklavier. He would lend her the music. “I don’t need the music,” said Yvonne. “I never travel with the music for my programs—it’s all in my head.” Indeed, the following winter, in a single week, she performed all twenty-seven of Mozart’s concertos, Boulez conducting, neither ever referring to the score. (Yvonne’s sister was said to have a similar knack with language. Not knowing a word of English, she took Hamlet to bed one night, and next morning recited the whole play by heart—with a thick accent.) None of which would have been particularly interesting were Yvonne not a sublime artist. Regardless of how she learned a piece, the result was consummate. Today she remains the most persuasive performer of her late husband’s music—so sensual and pristine, so opulently holy—as she slaps the ivories with authoritative accuracy without, seemingly, to move a muscle of her torso.