The Paris Diary & The New York Diary, 1951-1961
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The Paris Diary & The New York Diary, 1951-1961
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Overview
One of America’s most significant contemporary composers, Ned Rorem is also widely acclaimed as a diarist of unique insight and refreshing candor. Together, his Paris Diary, first published in 1966, and The New York Diary,which followed a year later, paint a colorful landscape of Rorem’s world and its famous inhabitants, as well as a fascinating self-portrait of a footloose young artist unabashedly drinking deeply of life. In this amalgam of forthright personal reflections and cogent social commentary, unprecedented for its time, Rorem’s anecdotal recollections of the decade from 1951 to 1961 represent Gay Liberation in its infancy as the author freely expresses his open sexuality not as a revelation but as a simple fact of life. At once blisteringly honest and exquisitely entertaining, Rorem’s diaries expound brilliantly on the creative process, following their peripatetic author from Paris to Morocco to Italy and back home to America as he crosses paths with Picasso, Cocteau, Gide, Boulez, and other luminaries of the era. With consummate skill and unexpurgated insight, a younger, wilder Rorem reflects on a bygone time and culture and, in doing so, holds a revealing mirror to himself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480427709 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 06/18/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 399 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Ned Rorem is one of the most accomplished and prolific composers of art songs in the world. Drawing on a wide range of poetry and prose as inspiration, his sources have included works by Walt Whitman, W. H. Auden, Paul Goodman, Frank O'Hara, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Paul Monette. In 1976, Rorem received the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his orchestral work Air Music. His prodigious literary accomplishments include the publication of thirteen books, nine of which were released as ebooks by Open Road Media in the summer of 2013. Rorem lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
The Paris Diary and The New York Diary
1951â?"1961
By Ned Rorem
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1967 Ned RoremAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2770-9
CHAPTER 1
May-July, 1951
Paris
_________________
No artist needs criticism, he only needs appreciation. If he needs criticism he is no artist.
GERTRUDE STEIN
A stranger asks, "Are you Ned Rorem?" I answer, "No," adding, however, that I've heard of and would like to meet him.
Have been back in Paris over a week now. I'm never really happy here: not only because I drink too much and don't work very well, but also because I have no chez moi and am envious of all friends who do. It is spring with warm nights beautiful and sad. Most of the time I spend endlessly walking from quarter to quarter ("looking for love where it can't be found—waiting for love where it will not come"), and have memorized the entire city, knowing also where love can be found.
Lunch yesterday with Nora Auric and Guy de Lesseps. We talked of nothing but masturbation. Guy maintains that, yes, it does cause circles under your eyes, being an unshared act, an unbroken circle of sensations given to oneself with no true release.
Two years ago tonight (May 20th) I left New York for Le Havre, where the S.S. Washington arrived very early on a morning of screaming sea gulls and silver fog. France. And I looked toward the land knowing that deeper into it, behind those gutted buildings, lay the place where I would not have to bring myself. (Dr. Kraft had warned against the danger of displacement. He was wrong: displacement has made me new.) Very early, as on the morning of Christ's ascension, in a drizzle of gray toward a miniature country seemingly made of berets and real, live French stevedores, I descended from the boat, and my first long home has since become always the farthest away of dreams. The two months I'd planned to stay became two years, and may become two hundred.
The other day in Galignani's Julien Green bought me a beautiful Bible with gold-edge pages. Robert Kanters, browsing, saw us, and whispered to me: "Quel puritain!"
"Mais non," I replied, "Tu serais étonné. C'est fou comme la Bible peut faire bander, elle aussi!"
Youth is beautiful, age ugly. But is the wisdom of age beautiful? We know nothing old we did not know as children; we merely submit essentially unchanged reactions to a wearier refinement. I detest subtlety; I like strength. Strength is never subtle in art or in life.
This afternoon I met Picasso.... Valentine Hugo had come to lunch, after which Marie Laure de Noailles sat me at the keys like a wise student to play my little pieces. Then Valentine (she who costumed Dryer's Joan of Arc) with her blond Anna May Wong bangs, bewitched by new blood, danced for me (at her age) Le Sacre du Printemps as she recalled it from that fatal day in 1913.... Later Marie Laure took me to a screening of Los Olvidados (Buñuel had, after all, been her poulin). We arrived late in darkness. The somber finish unprepared me for the coquettish tap on Marie Laure's shoulder when the lights went up. We turned: it was Picasso. Those jet bullet eyes both burned into my brain and absorbed me into his forever. I was so carbonized I forgot their glib exchange.... Later, with Jacques Fath, we went to dine in the country chez les Hersent, and I returned in time to meet Guy Ferrand's midnight train at the Gare d'Austerlitz.
Jennie Tourel, never better, sang Schéhérazade at the Empire. At "ou bien mourir" she threw her whole weight into the audience!... Tea with Ciccolini. Souper chez Fulco Verdura, Quai Voltaire.
I know I can compose and I know how; but I don't know why I came to this instead of to sculpture or poetry, or perhaps even dance. (Couldn't one kind of creator have been any other kind?) After ten years of chattering every known musical speech, of imitating now one and then another school, of wanting to become famous by writing like the famous, I've decided now to write again the way I did at eleven when I knew no one: my music from my heart with my own influences. It's important to be "better than," not "different from," and everyone has forgotten how to write nice tunes.
I guess this music is really French at the core (though I steal from Monteverdi occasionally, and pretty much from Bach naturally—not to mention what I hear at the movies, what I hear all around).
In New York I had already heard of Marie Laure de Noailles; I was aware of both the lady and her attributes, and on leaving for France in the spring of 1949 I was determined to know her. I arrived like any other francophile tourist with intentions of spending one summer. But from the outset that insular nation contradictorily greeted me with open arms: within a month I knew and—so much more important!—was known by most of the musical milieu.
My first meeting with Marie Laure took place that fall at the opera. Eager Henri Hell presented us. I said: "How do you do?" She turned her back.... Second encounter: the Méditéranée restaurant. She, to Sauguet: "Je ne le trouve pas si beau que ça." Sauguet: "Ah, non? Mais vous luiressemblez beaucoup, chère amie."... Third time, chez Mme. Bousquet. Me: "I'm writing a ballet on your Mélos scenario for the Biarritz contest." She: "We'll see that you win it." And again turned her back.
After interludes in Morocco and Italy I returned to Paris for another siege. Then occurred my first contacts with Cocteau, Julien Green, Marie Blanche de Polignac, etc. But the Vicomtesse de Noailles remained insaisissable. One afternoon I learned she was to attend, that evening, a performance of Yes Is for a Very Young Man. I went, too, alone, in a black turtle-neck sweater. I approached her and her companion Charles Lovett and we adjourned to the latter's apartment. Marie Laure was simultaneously cool, coy, and cultured; I, playing the ingenuous American. She invited me to lunch next day, to various events the following week, painted my two portraits (one pale blue as a voyou, the other dark green as a Satie student), and I felt I was in.... A fortnight later we were to leave at dawn with Labisse for a month at Hyères. When I arrived for the departure at her house, 11 Place des États-Unis, they'd already left. This was the first of her endless "tests." So I got drunk with Boris Kochno (who was also to have gone) and we telegraphed to Hyères. (Such abject persistence has, hopefully, quit me: it's the prerogative of le jeune arriviste.) Marie Laure answered cordially that we should come down the following week, and we did.
There began our bizarre and fruitful friendship, our love affair. The fact that we were both born under the sign of Scorpio is what finally converted her.
At first I behaved as I felt she wanted me to. She encouraged gaudy and exhibitionistic comportment, partly in defiance of her formal background, partly to give herself an identity with the post-surrealist gang she hung out with. For instance: a few months after we met she gave me a party. It was to celebrate the première of my Six Irish Poems by the radio orchestra with soloist Nell Tangeman (whom Marie Laure hated: my soprano friends frustrated her because she couldn't sing). A buffet, groaning with champagne and smoked salmon and apricot tarts, voraciously stripped to a skeleton by rich old dukes and pompous movie queens elbowing their best friends as though they'd been starving for weeks, while Marie Laure, with a Giocanda smile, looked on. I arrived brash, open-necked and, above all, young. By 3 A.M. I'd downed who knows how many magnums. Whereupon, in front of everyone, I approached the Vicomtesse, and with no conscious provocation gave her a whack that sent her reeling to the floor. "Mais il est fou!" they all screamed, as I was restrained by the masître d'hôtel and Guy Ferrand. But the noble hostess motioned for them to release me, then rose with a bemused stare of utter satisfaction: she had triumphed before her friends: somebody new cared.
LE TOUT PARIS. It is easy to become intimately acquainted with the unapproachable innermost snob-life of Paris. You need only know one member, and in twenty-four hours (which includes the attendance of a single party) you will know them all, because each individual of this group knows no one outside. There are only about seventy-five members (of which the musicians are the classiest), and of course it is simple getting intimate with seventy-five people in twenty-four hours.... At a dinner offered by the delectable Mme. Hersent there was a discussion on new "motifs" for next season's Balls. Jacques Fath suggested that everyone come so completely disguised as to be unrecognizable. What inexhaustible boredom! I suggest that sixty-nine refugees from la Place Blanche be introduced into the grand salon and that le Tout Paris be told that these are other members incognito. Marie Laure proposes costumes so arranged that only a toe, a nipple, or a tongue be allowed to show.... Such is their conversation.
At fifteen I used to sit in school, scared at not knowing the answers (at being "dumb," hence conspicuous). For the night before, instead of doing my homework, I had been discovering love as thoroughly as I ever will. Were my classmates aware?
Each time I go to Henri Hell's we hear again Ravel's Poèmes de Mallarmé. This is delicious music, music that can be eaten. Is it because my first association with Mallarmé was the word marmelade? André Fraigneau once wrote: "Les oevres de Mr. Ned Rorem ... ont la candeur éblouissante du plumage du cygne de Mallarmé. Très personnelles, elles sont pourtant autant d'oiseaux qui se souviennent de la France...."
I bite away my fingernails and cuticle, realizing I'm practicing a sort of autocannibalism. We shed our skin completely every seven years; and I'm sure that without knowing it, we eat our own weight of ourselves during our lifetime.
One New York evening long ago, at Virgil Thomson's with Maurice Grosser and Lou Harrison, the four of us planned to dine in, and, as the maid was absent, we proposed preparing the meal ourselves. So everyone bustled about. Everyone but me. I stood around inefficiently not knowing how to behave. (I've always disliked domestic cooperation.) Maurice, peeved by my usual vagueness, handed me knives and forks, saying, "Here, make yourself useful!" But Virgil piped, "Leave Ned alone! Ned doesn't have to work. Ned's a beauty!"
Since birth I had lived by this slogan. I'll always be a spoiled child, but will never lose track of to what extent. Nor, I presume, will Virgil. I was working for him then as copyist, in exchange for orchestration lessons (every lucid word of which I'll always remember) and twenty bucks a week—of which I banked five! Such thrift impressed him, just as I was impressed by his thrift with notes. And so I composed my first songs, with an instinctive formal economy which I've since tried vainly to recapture.
All great [artists] have robbed the hives of diligent bees and, paradoxically, genius might be said to be the faculty for clever theft.
ENID STARKIE, Rimbaud
My song "The Lordly Hudson" (1947) is dedicated to Janet Fairbank, a kind and needed lady who died the day it was published.
Everett Helm gave a Christmas party in 1946. But it was John Edmunds who got all of us to write songs, and in their presentation as an "affectionate garland" to Janet, it was he who presided. After everyone had played his piece and Janet's initial thrill was calmed, the performers each sang. We did my "Alleluia"; then Romolo DiSpirito sang Poulenc. I had never heard "C" before, and at the final words "Oh ma délaissée" when Eva Gauthier began to weep, I began to compose as I often do when my brain is befuddled (this time on hot punch).... I went to meet George Perle and played for him what I could remember of "C." He retched! My guilt began. We drank a lot of beer and went through a lot of music (mostly twelve-tone, and Machault, on whom he was writing a thesis). But always "C" kept running through my head, getting increasingly distorted—more distant, changed. I'd heard it only once.... When I woke up it must have been Sunday. I wanted to write a song. The two sections of "C" that I liked were the same that everyone likes: "De la prairie ..." and "Et les larmes."... I recalled that Poulenc had skipped the voice a fifth to the ninth of a ninth-chord. Naturally this had to be changed a little. But I'd forgotten the tune, the rhythm. I looked around for a poem onto which I could force my vague ideas, and though I was sick of using Paul Goodman, I decided to borrow "The Lordly Hudson" (which was called simply "Poem" at that time). I'd already once made some not very successful notes for these verses but had thrown them out.
In one sitting I wrote the song. The composing, though accompanied by a hangover, was not the result of a hangover.
Here's how I did it: deciding on 6/8 because that means "water" I suppose, I first wrote the vocal phrases "home, home" and "no, no"—skipping a seventh and rising in the sequence, because Poulenc had skipped a fifth and dropped. Then I decided on the accompaniment pattern, and for the rest of the words I simply used taste and a melodic stream of consciousness. This can't be explained, but it's called "filling in" and sometimes by accident it works. What I mean is that after the precipitating inspiration of "home, home," all the rest was devised, often in variation form (it goes without saying that "this is our lordly Hudson" is merely an elaboration on "home, home").
Without any changes I gave it to Janet Fairbank who sang it under the title of "Poem," then "Driver, What Stream is it"—until Richard Dana said he would print it, and then Paul said "call it 'The Lordly Hudson.'" We all think now it's his best poem.
Any good song must be of greater magnitude than either the words or music alone. I wouldn't mind if this piece were played in concert on the violin; or, omitting the vocal line, as a piano solo.
I was always embarrassed when I played this song over for myself. It seemed too obvious, too schmaltzy. Like most composers I can't sing well, but I can be moved to tears when I sing. And so I used to write for the voice everything I couldn't do, until I realized that singing is the most natural of all expression. Anything a composer can't sing well enough to please himself, he shouldn't write. Of course when I had to sing it for others the embarrassment began. But nobody said it was horrible, so I began to like it (one can't continue to create well without being complimented). Then it won a citation for being the best song of 1948 and so I have practically no more guilt. No one dreams of the rapport with "C." (Is making a piece of art perhaps an act of shy but aggressive guilt?)
In finishing, I must say there's a misprint in the tempo mark. It reads: "Flowing but Steady—([??]= 114)." Of course it should be [??]= 114, for as it stands now it wouldn't be flowing but a whirlpool—nor steady, but jittery.
It is a conscious plagiarism that demonstrates invention: we are so taken with what someone else did that we set out to do likewise. Yet prospects of shameful exposure are such that we disguise to a point of opposition; then the song becomes ours. No one suspects. It's unconscious stealing that's dangerous.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Paris Diary and The New York Diary by Ned Rorem. Copyright © 1967 Ned Rorem. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Introduction
- Preface to The Paris Diary by Robert Phelps
- The Paris Diary
- 1 Paris May–July, 1951
- 2 Hyères July, 1951
- 3 Fez, Morocco August, 1951
- 4 Paris September–December, 1951
- 5 Marrakech, Morocco January–February, 1952
- 6 Paris 1952
- 7 Paris 1953
- 8 England, Germany, and Italy 1953 and 1954
- 9 Paris 1954
- 10 Hyères and Italy 1954 and 1955
- 11 France Again 1955
- 12 Aboard the S.S. United States October, 1955
- The New York Diary
- 1 Aboard the S.S. United States October, 1955
- 2 New York Spring, 1956
- 3 Around the Mediterranean Summer, 1956
- 4 Paris and New York Autumn, 1956
- 5 Letter to Claude: New York and Paris March–May, 1957
- 6 Paris, Italy, Hyères, Paris, New York Summer–Autumn, 1957
- 7 New York Spring–Summer, 1958
- 8 New York and New England Summer–Autumn, 1958
- 9 Pennsylvania and New York Autumn, 1958
- 10 New York, Saratoga, Buffalo 1959–1960
- 11 Saratoga, New York, Buffalo, New York 1960–1961
- Photo Gallery
- About the Author
- Copyright Page
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