Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  The preceding week I took the Golden Arrow to London (first time since 1936) and settled with Julius Katchen at the Hyde Park Hôtel whose nearby lanes gleamed thick with the still-classical waves of fog between which tuppeny-uprights materialized, uttered a seductive phrase, then vanished. Of this five-day sojourn I noted: Visit with Stephen Spender in the Saville Club at 69 Brook Street. Visit with old acquaintance, John Edmunds, the sole American composer—now, alas, unremembered—who cared about the fact of American Song. Visit with conductor Richard Austin, and with composer Lennox Berkeley (on the same page I noted crabs!, which were then as ubiquitous as bedbugs). Bar tour with someone called Angus. Reading: Paul et Virginie. These episodes are now lost in a London fog. Two others remain.

  I took Julius to meet Sonia Orwell. She in turn brought along Lucian Freud, and we convened in some expensive pub, later dined à quatre at some expensive restaurant suggested by our British friends, where Julius grudgingly footed the bill—he was, after all, the rich American. We were ill-assorted. Sonia and I liked to drink, Julius, did not. Drinkers quickly inhabit a dimension that excludes abstainers. Lucian Freud, solemn, smart, and fetching of his person (was he queer? could one ever tell with the English?), cared no more about music than did Sonia, and neither seemed much taken with Julius who went off to practice at Steinway’s factory, leaving the rest of us to drink until closing time, which was 11 p.m. Lucian, grandson of Sigmund Freud, seemed determined to impose his own identity. This he accomplished, over the years, with his meticulous pointilliste visual essays, mostly of other human beings, no less influenced by Francis Bacon than Bacon by him. Lucian interested me because of his unironic devotion to Marie-Laure de Noailles, whom—on learning I lived in Paris—he incorrectly assumed I knew. I assumed, meanwhile, that Marie-Laure, if she harbored this somber, thoughtful boy, might not be all froth. A year later, when I was living with Marie-Laure in the place des Etats-Unis, Lucian brought his fiancée for lunch. Lady Caroline Blackwood was heart-stoppingly beautiful, but vague. There she sat, in Marie-Laure’s octagonal drawing room, on the edge of a sofa, legs crossed, one knee supporting an elbow extending into a smoking hand which flicked ash abstractedly onto the blue Persian rug. Caroline, very blond, with eyes the hue of the Persian rug and large as eagle eggs, uttered nary a word, neither approved nor disapproved, just smoked. Marie-Laure was leery of her, as of all attractive females. After Caroline divorced Lucian, she incongruously married the American composer Israel Citkowitz, with whom she lived on New York’s Twelfth Street, across the way from me. From my second-story window I occasionally spotted her down there, still attractive and hazy in blue jeans, bargaining with the butcher. When Israel died, she married the poet Robert Lowell. She was—she remains—a savagely original novelist.

  The other episode regards Stephen Spender, toward whom I had come to feel warmly. Since Julius was to give his recital on Saturday at three o’clock, since Stephen’s wife, Natasha, was a pianist herself, and since neither of them had met Julius, why, Stephen wondered, couldn’t we come to their house in Saint John’s Wood for lunch at 12:30?

  Natasha turned out to be an eager amateur. She had just mastered Sam Barber’s big new sonata which she immediately played for us with tarnished splendor. The piece impressed me more than any other work of Sam’s; its very scope (the sonata had been composed for Horowitz who had premiered it in New York) was blinding, and made me apprehensive about my own more modest sonata which the Spenders would be hearing in a few hours. At lunch we chatted about Sam, who was their closest American musical friend, and about Chuck Turner, who had recently written a Barberesque orchestral poem, Encounter, so-named after Stephen’s literary magazine, a magazine Spender would soon repudiate on learning it was subsidized by the CIA. Then we piled into a cab and made off for Wigmore Hall. After Julius’s concert, at which his performance of my piece was, as usual, dazzling, the Spenders bade me a brusque good-bye—no other comment—and left.

  Was their dismissal of my piece for its style or for its content? Not style, surely, since they were so pro-Barber who was more conservative than me. It must have been content. Stephen was never again congenial with me (yes, he was, at a Northwestern University picnic in 1966, but that was a nonmusical affair). Soon after, he pronounced Elliott Carter as America’s only important composer (this, apropos of Elliott’s admittedly powerful First String Quartet, performed in 1954 at Rome’s CIA-sponsored festival of “Music of the Twentieth-Century”), and cooled off on Barber too.

  Over the years I’ve kept track of Stephen mostly through his journal, from which extracts appear periodically here and there. In the mid-seventies I noted in my own journal that his, while holding the attention, made me dimly uneasy with its unflagging highmindedness. Is this because I feel that as he plows through life he surely must have fancies beyond (or beside) those of Grand Art and the need to be useful, or because my own diary seems so déclassé—so unnecessary—by comparison?

  In his reflections on Venice, for instance, he observes what I never observe, finds continual connections between then and now, both personal and general, and has the discipline of history as voucher for opinions. Still it’s a poet talking, and though one can’t begrudge his urge for immortal utterance (since it takes one to know one, I spot his diarist’s tricks in a trice—avoidance of dropping names by arranging to have his own name dropped, here by Peggy Guggenheim, there by total strangers in Harry’s Bar), he’s sometimes prosaically wrong. He hears like an author just as I see like a musician, but he commits the layman’s fatal error of comparing the arts. Example: In an interestingly careless paragraph about Venetian painters he contends that “both allegorists and symbolists use visual imagery or symbolism as poets use them.… When Shelley saw eyes instead of nipples in his wife’s breasts, he was merely projecting upon the external world the way in which images were juxtaposed in his poetry. A picture of breasts with nipples as eyes would seem surrealist, but not a line in poetry such as ‘Thy paps are like eyes in thy breasts.’ This use of associations springing from the unconscious is conventionally poetic. It is only when it is applied to painting that it seems surrealist.” Let’s overlook that what Spender says of Shelley (“saw eyes instead of nipples”) and what Shelley may have actually said (“Thy paps are like eyes”) is to confuse metaphor with simile. What Spender forgets is that language is itself symbolic, painting is not, which is why painting, like music, is not “translated.” The word “bird” symbolizes (is a metaphor for) a bird. The painting of a bird signifies (is a representation of) a bird—or ucello, oiseau, pájaro, Vogel—and to a Chinese or Pole is a bird, whatever they name it. And however “abstracted,” a bird is a bird is a Vogel. For painting is never metaphor. Since language is always metaphor, literary surrealism is always less startling than to the eye.

  And music? Is music symbolic? Symbolic of what?

  Reading further in Spender’s diary, again the easy laugh. He may well lament the ornery ignorance of his Florida undergraduates, but when he notes that “the only modern poets they seem to have heard of are Bob Dylan and Rod McKuen (if I spell his name correctly)…,” the parentheses, like a pair of tongs, distance Spender in our eyes from what he finds offensive. He does, in fact, spell McKuen’s name correctly, and knows it, yet feigns the same indifference which is real in the students, and which he reproaches them for. How little we learn from the great unwashed, and how even less from our peers.

  A day or two before London, José gave a lunch for just me and the Aurics. I hadn’t seen Georges since that night in the Reine Blanche twenty months before when I hummed for him his various movie scores. Here he was again, the same homely, overweight, sexless, funny genius, as well versed (monolingually) in our world’s books and pictures and politics as in music. Nora I had never met—though she was often pictured in the society pages—and was struck now by her delicately willful features. She was of that rare and lucky breed who, as they grow older, grow better-looking. On her prematurely white hair coiffed à la Jeanne
d’Arc she wore a powder-blue satin pillbox like Eva Gauthier’s. Her face, hard and clever, had a structure that could never deteriorate: high cheekbones, ivory brow, thin red mouth, sleek chic skin. In Dior clothes her body looked sensational, nude it looked its age, around forty-eight (as I would witness soon on the beaches of Hyères), fleshy, not stately.

  Nora, of Russian-Jewish parentage, had married Georges in the late 1920s, and who knows what intimate rapports transpired between this stern beauty and that comic buddha. Perhaps none. No one ever knew much about Georges’s sex life, while Nora from the start had lovers. Since long before I knew them, they had lived à trots with a younger Franco-American good-looking, amiable, dipsomaniacal fool, Guy de Lesseps, grandson of the Suez Canal builder. Now nominal chauffeur of the Aurics, Lesseps had a small room down the hall from the lowceilinged fourth-floor apartment of his master and mistress in the place Beauvau. Georges called him always Monsieur de Lesseps, Nora did not go out with him in public; in public she and Georges were exemplary, worldly, knew everyone, treated Lesseps like hired help, though Nora shared his bed each night.

  Nora Auric was a skilled painter of minor talent whose subjects were submarine fauna and human portraiture on small canvases. She referred to these canvases, mostly in pastel oils, as “songs.” These “songs” were small potatoes, according to her, in the shade of her husband’s masterpieces, for she was a good wife, faithful for all practical purposes, and protective of Georges’s time and gifts and reputation.

  Did Georges compose masterpieces? By 1945 he had become and would remain the premier composer of movie music in both France and England, having scored all the films of Cocteau, of René Clair, of Clouzot, and of classier Korda productions across the channel. Like each member of The Six he had in the 1920s composed ballets for Diaghilev, in the thirties for Lifar, and in the forties for Cuevas. But masterpieces? As the most intellectual member of The Six (he was breathtakingly well-read—when you and I were out carousing he was home with a book or a score and a bottle of whisky), he was also the most artistically repressed. His nearest friend in the art world was Poulenc whom—though they were exact contemporaries—he treated like a pupil. Every work of Poulenc, from his adolescence unto the present, was submitted to Georges’s scrutiny. For if Georges had less natural a gift, he was more stylish a grammarian with a finer ear for shape than his more extroverted protégé. Did you know, for example, that the first version of Poulenc’s 1919 cycle, Le bestiare, comprised twelve songs? Georges it was who whittled them down to six, corrected their awkward spelling, and switched their order. The cycle as it stands, less than ten minutes long, is, thanks to Auric’s editorial hand, a chain of unflawed jewels as indispensable as any of Schubert’s more bloated suites. But Auric himself could not have composed it. His own songs, though skilled, fell flat, with neither blood nor breath. Brains stifle instinct.

  The Aurics as a couple were a witty contrast with enough power and charm to be accepted anywhere, creative bourgeois at ease in the post-Proustian milieu of crumbling nobility. Madame Verdurin herself was no less palpably opportunistic than the Aurics, about whom Marie-Laure once quoted Cocteau, “Ils ont l’âme chaussée par Raoul” (“their soul’s decked out in second-rate goods”), which I never quite believed. Marie-Laure was always envious of Nora’s lovelier face; and Cocteau was never unkind, whatever else he may have been.

  Whatever the Aurics may have been, I was flattered to exist for them. So when Nora asked me to phone on my return from England, I felt glad.

  During the seven weeks after the return from England I started and finished a ballet called Mélos. Since there was no piano at the hotel, Julius arranged for me to use the piano of his friend Michel Girard, a middle-aged art-loving businessman who owned a sumptuous rez-de-chaussée apartment with eighteen-foot-high ceilings and bottle-green sheer-velvet curtains, at 56 rue de Varenne, next door to Julien Green whom he used to know well but, astoundingly, had not seen for twenty years. Michel had already heard of me from Leda Fournier who said: “Ned is so insufferably pretty, you want to throw cyanide in his face.”

  Mélos was composed for a competition sponsored by Biarritz. Contestants were supplied with a scenario, commissioned from Marie-Laure de Noailles, who would also provide sets and costumes, and whose name presumably lent prestige. Her scenario would have been apt for any French ballet of a century earlier: Young Man wanders onto stage, communes with his Spirit, meets with figures of Architecture, of Science, of Drama, struggles individually with other Muses, ultimately settles for Music, represented by a soprano (Denise Duval in the ultimate production) who intones a parody of the aria from Mignon:

  Connais-tu le pays

  où fleurit l’adagio …?

  as the assembly exits in a parade honoring the Seven Arts. All the composers in Paris—that is, Nadia’s entire class, plus a few pupils from other professions—were busy writing their own Mélos. The winner would have his or her ballet mounted by the Cuevas Company in Biarritz that fall, while the two runners-up would receive a bit of cash. With hindsight the requirements seem excessive: when dozens of competitors compose and orchestrate a big ballet, what will the losers do with their leftover music, music which in principle is good for just one occasion?

  I didn’t, of course, know it yet, but Leo Préger, Nadia Boulanger’s favorite protégé, would get first prize—and a production—while I got second. (Another Boulanger pet called Spivak won third.) By this time I was close to Marie-Laure, who was furious at the “mistrial of justice” which she credited to Boulanger’s finagling, and refused for my sake to go to Biarritz. Still, we all got our pictures in Paris-Match, and I recycled my leftover music in other pieces. To be fair, Préger’s work was better than mine.

  I phoned the Aurics and during February visited them almost daily. Because Nora had decided to paint my portrait.

  Isn’t it funny how, when certain of our childhood pals grow up to be famous, we are proud and admiring, yet never quite take them seriously! They are, after all, just like us. (The richest man in the world may own a thousand living rooms, though he can’t live in them all at the same time. The movie star may have her image exploded simultaneously on a thousand screens, while we know she’s home brooding.)

  But when we come to meet people whose glory precedes them, especially when they are of an earlier generation, we are intimidated. Indeed, these people are intimidated by each other, unless they grew up together. Even then, once we come really to know the gods, they all have feet of clay.

  It seemed for the moment eerie that the mediocre student from Chicago’s U-High should be exchanging anecdotes with these denizens of another place and time. Every morning I would show up at the Aurics’, garbed in a black turtleneck and red scarf, and strike a pose in Nora’s studio while Georges would orchestrate in the next room. Sometimes the three of us would carry on a yelling conversation, either on current gossip generated by Nora who was entertaining without intelligence, or on the state of music generated by Georges who was curious about the doings across the Atlantic where he had not yet been. Other times, if Nora were silent, biting her lip and squinting toward me while holding up a brush like a measuring rod, I might read aloud from a just-received book, cutting the pages as I turned them—from, for instance, Cocteau’s illustrated memoir of Jean Marais. One of the Aurics might interject with a “Comme c’est vrai,” or a “Yes, indeed, Jeannot [as Marais was called by those in the know] would become Jean’s first healthy influence. Jeannot loathed Jean’s use of drugs and alcohol, believed in Jean’s immensity, and was forever apologetic about his own predominating fame in the cinema, for since he had no talent, he owed everything to Jean.” Etcetera.

  Still other times visitors stopped by to watch and chat as Nora and I maintained our stances, then stay for lunch. There came particularly Georgette Chadourne, a blond photographer, who accordingly took some dramatic pictures of me. And André Dubois, the prefect of police in Metz who during the war, in conjunction with Gide, had effected the
evacuation of hundreds of French Jews from the north into the Midi and beyond. Dubois was a seductive presence. Around fifty years old, he lived with his friend Lucien Sablé and their adopted son, Claude Romain, an actor (he played a featured role in Grémillon’s Pattes blanches) whose feline eyes and stark crew cut were those of a Dostoyevski criminal, and with whom I had a brief, dispassionate liaison. Dubois would go on to direct the liberation of Morocco in 1956, making of that country an independent département rather than a colony of France. Ultimately as prefect of police in Paris, and thus a public figure as well as a member of the aristocratic gratin, he not only banned car-honking, he facilitated my carte d’identité so I wouldn’t need to cross borders every three months to have my passport stamped. Dubois became known as The Prefect of Silence. He was in fact, though voluble, a font of taste and originality. So when he unaccountably married vulgar Carmen Tessier, the society columnist notorious as “The Gossip,” Cocteau quipped: “Le Préfet du Silence épouse la Commère.” In July of 1953 I composed a big song on a text of Marie-Laure, Jack l’Eventreur, for an extremely elastic voice, and dedicated it to André Dubois. He remained a comrade throughout my years abroad.

  On 6 February, dined with Sam Barber and Chuck Turner, who were rooming luxuriantly chez Henri-Louis de la Grange, and we spoke about the Spenders. (Sam was bemused with the notion of Natasha playing his sonata.) It was at this time that Sam, prior to recording at his own expense a goodly chunk of his catalogue in Copenhagen, was practicing with Chuck his Violin Concerto. Pierre Boulez was the unlikely rehearsal pianist. Boulez sat there stonily when Sam, always the humorous atonalphobe, asked if the first four measures of Bizet’s “Habañera” could qualify as a twelve-tone row.