An Open Book

But all teasing aside (Howard Moss did the funniest satire of The Paris Diary in The New Yorker years ago), one has to be impressed by Rorem’s industry between epic drunks as well as by his culture, even by his decision to keep a diary for publication, not exactly an American endeavor. He’s a wonderfully companionable writer because we explore the brand new Old World with him, and for a moment he allows us to see what it would be like to be universally adored: “The writer Miserocchi told me too that when we met at Bestigui’s in Venice ’51 he’d left a note at the Danieli saying that since his young friend’s suicide I was the only one who could give him the goût de vivre. I never answered and had forgotten. If we are good to all who love us, what is there left for ourselves? Rome, Rome. Each one says selfishly: ‘No one has loved you as I do.’”

If he’s silly it’s in imitating much older people who were brought up to integrate social charm with erudition, an awareness of rank with an aesthetic acuity. Also, as he has remarked himself, “Silliness is germane to the diary-as-genre.” Unfortunately, he also learned to imitate his elders’ cruelty, as in this unforgivable passage from The New York Diary: “I don’t like cripples (including especially the blind), or the aged, or children (their self-conscious vanity), or the Chinese, or the irritating and noisy confusion of women’s purses, and elbows and voices.” Only Rorem would know how to temper the intolerable with the insufferable.

His ultimate tribute to the demigods of his youth (when he himself was a full-fledged god of beauty) can be found in his memoirs of 1994, Knowing When to Stop. Now that he is in his seventies he is less concerned by how many hearts he’s breaking and more by the fine differences among all those hearts he’d collected. Rorem himself might say, “Whereas youth is narcissistic, age is curious.” (The epigrammatic style is infectious.) “Youth is personal, whereas age is social. Keats is a young man’s poet; Jane Austen is an old man’s novelist.” By that token, an old man’s journal is less interressé if the old man himself is interesting and has known enough success to become disillusioned but not bitter. Rorem fits the formula perfectly and brings a generosity (always nuanced, of course) to a reexamination of his past. If in his book from the late 1970s, An Absolute Gift, he gave us a professional musician’s assessment of Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc, in Knowing When to Stop he takes the human measure of Marie-Laure de Noailles (whom James Lord has also portrayed in his Six Exceptional Women). Such a figure—known only for her taste and her conversation, a faculty and an activity as insaissisable as charm—is always particularly difficult to capture in hindsight and through the static rendering of a literary portrait, but Rorem succeeds admirably in catching her on the iridescent wing.

He presents us with a woman fabulously rich, surrounded by Goyas in her hôtel particulier on the place des Etats-Unis, the sumptuous interior decorated by Jean-Michel Franck before the war with white calf leather on the walls. Here she entertained mainly artists, including the painter Balthus and the sculptor Giacometti as well as Man Ray, Leonor Fini, and Dora Maar. Her mother, a descendant of the Marquis de Sade and of Petrarch’s Laura, had been one of the two models for Marcel Proust’s character the Duchesse de Guermantes. She rarely saw her husband, the Vîcomte Charles de Noailles, even though she loved him and even revered him. As Rorem depicts her, she was a strange combination of haughty dignity and a puerile impulse to shock.

When Rorem would one-up her in conversation she would call him by the pet name she’d given him, “Miss Sly” (which she pronounced “Meeze-Lye”). She was a compulsive reader, and she alone could compare the use of dialogue in Henry James’s plays, of all things, and Diderot’s novels. She read constantly—as did Rorem, if his diary of the period is to be trusted. Thursday it was T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, Saturday The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sunday a Sartre play, Tuesday Ronald Firbank and Hawthorne, Wednesday Gogol’s “The Nose.”

The studious days were followed by bibulous, riotous nights. During one of these sodden dinners, according to Rorem, Marie-Laure said, “‘Ned is America’s gift to France. We all want to bugger Ned. Even Henri.’ She alludes to the maître d’hôtel who, pouring more blanc-des-blancs, interpolates without changing expression: ‘It’s an interesting notion, but I’m sure Monsieur Rorem would object. And I’m not made that way.’”

Rorem’s portrait of Virgil Thomson is no less indelible than his picture of Marie-Laure, although naturally a chapter on a composer will necessarily be more technical than one on a woman of the world. When he tells us that Virgil always spoke (even to kids) in “French-style generalities, which are always anathema to literal-minded American children,” he’s hit the rusty nail on its dull head. When he explains to the reader that teaching composition is as useless as creative writing courses, he adds, with indisputable authority, “But there is a craft if not an art, the lineaments of which can be imparted, even from one untalented person to another, and that is the craft of orchestration. Instrumentation is a physical fact, not theoretical idea. That is what Virgil intended to show me.” He shows us Virgil at work in a clean, pressed pair of Lanvin pajamas sitting in bed and running the whole New York musical scene over the phone. He presents us with a Virgil who is deliciously indiscreet except with regard to his homosexuality; when Ned brings out his scandalous New York Diary, Virgil removes all reference to the confessed pederast in his own forthcoming book. When Virgil’s lover, the painter Maurice Grosser, tells Rorem to help out by setting the table, Virgil announces, “Ned doesn’t have to work, Ned’s a beauty.”

When I met Rorem in the 1970s, I had been awed in advance by his legend, that long peacock tail of memories—heavy, encumbering, glittering—that accompanies him wherever he goes. Perhaps because he started publishing his memoirs at age forty and had by then written so many volumes of them, he held no more secrets for me—or, rather, Rorem was for me an open book but a closed life. To commandeer one of W. M. Spackman’s titles, he was “A Presence with Secrets.” An author one has known only through his writings may seem miraculously approachable, a professional charmer, an idealized version of oneself with his vademecum smile, but the flesh-and-bone man can have a strange accent, be haughtily impatient, tuned to his own past and its denizens like a bird dog to a pheasant but blind to the present—and to one’s own humble, arrogant needs and expectations.

Rorem was not indifferent. He had a harsh way of treating himself and of discounting compliments, but I supposed this was an aging beauty’s way of coping with the deceptions of flattery. Or perhaps he was displaying that famous French “realism” I’d heard so much about. But with me he was attentive and observant, which was flattering, and wary, which was even more flattering, especially since I had published only one slim volume at the time and even now would not intimidate a fly. I kept thinking he was like a woman who’s just had a face-lift and isn’t sure what the effect is and whether those complimenting her are admiring or compassionate.

I suppose what he liked about me was that I was someone younger who still cared abou his world—the world of Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, and Virgil Thomson. I recognized the names of the painters who graced his walls (he had a sketch of himself by Cocteau and a painting—was it of boatmen in a clear afternoon light?—by the neo-Romantic Eugène Berman). I was responsive to his idea of conversation—which was serious, cultured, questioning. Any banality I might utter he’d immediately subject to the interferon treatment of his paradoxes, qualifications, second thoughts. Americans (especially Midwesterners like him and me) are routinely more fond of sunny unanimity and easygoing optimism than anything more controversial, but Ned would arch an eyebrow and with an uneasy smile start bombarding any momentary truce with his testing questions. He’d tease and probe, talking with his Donald Duck lisp. He seemed teleprompted by his Parisian ghosts, for surely no American left to his own devices would ever want to break up the first tentative tone of concord (perhaps we treasure peace because so much potential violence is always just under the surface, whereas the French cultivate saucy sallies because under their surface is the all-too-tedious predictability of cultural uniformity).

Once at his apartment I met Janet Flanner and “Darlinghissima.” They were both old ladies and Ned was very courtly, though still provocative, which I now see he considered to be a social grace. Every soft, furry phrase he uttered had a sting in its tail.

And yet he was a wonderfully gentle, kind man, so different from the moody, childish, bacchic boor of the early diaries. The source of the difference, I learned, was drink; he’d stopped drinking in the late 1950s and after that his suicidal moroseness, his mood swings, his belligerence had all vanished. Even to this day if I meet someone who doesn’t like Ned Rorem, I say, “You must have known him before 1960.” Which is invariably the case.

He represents a vanishing breed, alas. In the United States intellectuals are usually dowdy professors on provincial campuses, whereas socialites are power-mad philistines. In France, however, there are still a few of those salons where rich and titled people like to mix with artists. Just the other night I was at such a dinner; one of the other guests was an American billionaire stockbroker who, puzzled and offended, asked his bewildered French hostess the next day, “Why did you have all those artists to dinner when you could have had a power dinner—there are lots of makers and shakers in Paris at the moment?" Ned is the sort of artist who had his manners and wits shaped in a salon that never witnessed a “power dinner.” Now that Paris is no longer in the same league as London, Berlin, and New York, it must be contented with the appreciation of the art of the past. If America is the country of great writers and lousy readers, France today is the land of great readers and bad writers.

In his latest collection of essays and reviews, Other Entertainment, Rorem has lost none of the confidence that his milieu conferred on him (“Duras is a first-class second-rater,” he announces). In discussing Peter Feibleman’s Lilly, his biography of Lillian Hellman, Rorem writes: “Theirs was unequivocally a mother-son relationship, in which Peter was the mother, Lillian the son.” In page after page, Rorem delivers himself of acute, informed judgments; like his beloved Marie-Laure, he is equally at home in the French- and English-language traditions: “Like Cocteau, Auden was an aphorist who monopolized conversation with quips that brooked no argument. Cocteau too, vastly ‘official’ in his waning years, had been spurned by the very generations whose style he had shaped, and he died, successful and sad, in a mist of self-quotation. When Auden had become a monument he welcomed the interviewers he had shunned for years, but spoke to them solely in epigrammatic non sequiturs.” With the same international ease he can tell us that Sarah Orne Jewett did for Maine what Knut Hamsun did for Norway, Louis Hémon for Canada, and Jean Giono for France.

Whenever the subject turns to music, Rorem makes the sort of canny observation only a composer is capable of. He tells us that Libby Holman was the first female pop singer “to exploit the husky purple depths of her vocal register rather than (like Helen Morgan or Ruth Etting) the squeakily poignant top.” Or he can toss off a wonderfully illuminating comparison of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald: “Ella, with her nimbler vocal cords, came through as optimistic even in her plaintive songs; Billie, with her more limited tessitura, came through as plaintive even in her optimistic songs.” I wouldn’t agree (since Billie always sounds to my ears as though she’s suppressing a laugh when she complains), but I admire the kind of observation that Rorem makes and the confidence with which he delivers his opinions.

He returns for a ride on some of his hobbyhorses. He has compared the French to the Germans one time too often. His dismissiveness of Beethoven is absurd—and when he tells us that Poulenc’s song “La Carpe” is worth all of Fidelio we can only cringe. He loves to scorn the remarks about music made by most nonmusicians (although he should concede that the passionate confusion of a Proust, say, is preferable to the total indifference of most contemporary writers); in this collection he takes a swipe at Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled, which is about a concert pianist. And yet how can one resist a reviewer who starts off with a reminder of Joan Crawford’s dialogue in Humoresque: “The music I like? Some symphonies, all concertos”? Or who remembers that when someone once complained to Jane Bowles: “The odds are against me: I’m Jewish, homosexual, alcoholic, and a communist,” Jane retorted: “I’m Jewish, homosexual, alcoholic, a communist—and I’m a cripple!”

Or he recycles once again his notion that if there is a gay sensibility, then some bona fide heterosexuals possess it—James Salter, here as in the past, is the example he invariably gives. (Gay sensibility, perhaps, I can’t help but grumble, but no sensitivity to gays. I remember hurling across the room a Salter novel, written in the 1970s, in which one heterosexual man amuses his wife and a straight couple with a mincing, lisping imitation of homosexuals overheard in a bookshop: “Oh, Sartre was right. Genet is an absolute saint” or something of that sort.)

Rorem likes to correct his favorite authors. In a passage of bravura erudition, he tracks down Cocteau’s borrowings in his play Monstres sacrés and finds the sources of the various characters’ dialogue: “‘Happiness is a long patience,’ comes from Balzac, not Florent; ‘All my life I’ve heard, “Wait ’til you’re older, you’ll see,” and now I’m fifty, I’ve seen nothing,’ comes from Satie, not Esther; and ‘I don’t seek, I find,’ is Picasso, not Liane.” Typically, spanning three cultures and two centuries, Rorem is able to compare The Sorrows of Young Werther with Les Enfants terribles and Catcher in the Rye.

He tells us in several places that he is “morbidity incarnate” and that he’s less in fashion now than previously. I hope my few darts haven’t inflamed his morbidity, since he is among the handful of living writers whom I write for and love to read—one of the few, in other words, who counts for me. If he is less in fashion (which I’m not at all sure is the case—his concerts and readings are always packed out), the decline presages our fall, not his; in any civilized society his views and his art would be essential.

The Yale Review is committed to publishing pieces from its archive as they originally appeared, without alterations to spelling, content, or style. Occasionally, errors creep in due to the digitization process; we work to correct these errors as we find them. You can email [email protected] with any you find.