Rorem - The Later Diaries of Ned Rorem

THE

Later Diaries

OF

Ned Rorem

19611972

Contents

1961

Great art works, being unique, are final: they do not open doors, they close them.

NR

New York

16 April

Sitting in one denuded room whose center contains a mountain of packing cases to be removed tomorrow by Robert Phelps. Without paying last months rent I fly Friday for London, meanwhile have already left, can only sit, wondering, for five days more.

Wondering about those three things (and there are only three) we all desire: success in love, success in society, success in work. Any two of these may be achieved and possessed simultaneously, but not all threethere isnt time. If you think you have the three, beware! Youre teetering on the abyss. You cant have a lover and friends and career. And even just career and love are, in the long run, mutually exclusive.

Paris

2 May

Ten days in London robbed the bloom off this Paris Ive missed so long. Has it been only three weeks since I abandoned the 13th Street apartment, dopey with flu, flew to London and collapsed? Yesterday, Julius and Arlette Katchen in a new Fiat met me at Orly, their prosy chatter distracting from the enjoyment of return. Yet arent they precisely what Im returning to? Thrill of coming backs aborted by too quick contact with humans. The first needs the noses: smells of home, of baking bread, smokestacks reeking, are more immediately overwhelming than renewal of human love.

Virgils garonnire here in the Cour dIngres awaited primly, swept and stocked. But no sooner did I arrive than the Katchens (teaching me the principle of the nouveau franc), and the Graffmans (Naomi unchanged since the first postwar summer in Tanglewood where she posed on the lawns with exotic Tally Brown!), took me out on the town. Less a French than a Jewish welcome. Always its the Jews of any environment who first reach out to make me feel at home.

Late in the evening we strolled toward the Odon via the busy street of the Ancienne Comdie where at a corner, stretched on her back with legs waving, a very old clocharde zealously masturbated. Knowing that passersby would offer no alternative, she was, for her practical purposes, alone. But her indifference to us rendered her more nasty than pitiable. (What a nice ugly resonant noun, clocharde, like a bell clanging between a set of withered kidney stones.)

9 May

Paris is different from what Id expected, because similar to what Id remembered. Yes, there are police around now with machine guns (no one pays attention), and a new breed of gigolo like scabies (everyone pays attention). If in Manhattan you can go out to buy a nail file and find the corner drugstore reduced to rubble which next week becomes a skyscraper-tenement that houses a race of intellect you never dreamed existed, here the same Proustian heads, after decades, reassuringly spout the same chilled wit. I alone have changed, for those heads no longer turn when I pass the Flore.

Virgils sublet is a boon and Im even working a little. Writing what? Letters mostly.

Dream: Enveloped by musicnot by its sound but by the tools. Staves entwine us with their five endless tentacles while treble clefs unwind and re-stiffen into unstable towers which crash upon the sand, sand crushed from a trillion yellow neumes.

12 May

Although I no longer live in her house, Marie Laure is a daily companion. Arriving on the 63 bus each noon to Place dIna, I lunch with whomevers around, then spend the afternoon working upstairs. But now that Ive rented a piano which arrives tomorrow, the routine may change.

French table conversation, at least at the start of a meal, is, of course, about the menu at hand. The Business Lunch does not exist here. If their creamy mousses and heavy Bordeaux destroy their liver (foie is a euphemism for large intestine), their uncontaminated tobacco and leisurely siesta save them from lung cancer. They allow table talk to grow, are not literal-minded, leave room for expectorating voices though not at the expense of forgoing what enters the mouth. But I watch my table manners more with the working classes than with my peers, because the working classes are better bred.

21 May

In this cold spring of France nothing seems altered, except myself as the prince who awakens Sleeping Beauty. She wont get up. The faults mine, cavorting as though past were present, while no one reacts. Four years since I made love well, four weeks since I made it at all. Particularities form my nest. Is time being wasted, or whats time for? Joys not my strong point, boredom is; charity isnt, envy is. Decay of self-preservation.

Now that Oscar Dominguez is dead Marie Laure appears more dtendue. Perhaps thats just time passing, time now spent on others. Yet for her, Oscar was the vital nuisance we all require; without him shes benign, although still chain-smoking those eternal Gauloises de famille kept in a gold case drawn forth from her skirts every ten minutes. (True, Jean Lafont exists to the point of occupying the room that for six years was mine. But he is a pacifier, not a surreal inflammation.)

Her reaction now to me seems too casual. Ive been gone four years, and she took up the conversation as though wed left off that morning! The childlike assumption that were all a part of her life rather than that shes a part of ours is what makes us exasperatedly love Marie Laure.

27 May

The femme de mnage shows up every two days and Im able for once to receive rather than to pay visits. Gave a party Wednesday early evening with the sun ablaze in the Cour dIngres below. A plump buffet skeletonized by friends and foes in unlikely couplings, Claude with Charlotte Aillaud, John Ashbery with a full open car entering the courtxard, Benjamin Lees with Ninette Lyon, Aaron Copland (not invited but welcome), Marie Laure de Noailles and Richard Ngroux, Violette de Azevedo and Lise Deharme, Denise, Jos, all drinking scotch provided by Doda Conrad at PX prices.

Action seems forever governed by thoughts of sobriety. The past lies ahead. The future is happily The Thing No One Knows. Trapped by the future. Homemade atom bombs, now la porte de tout le monde, oblige scientists to develop, in bottles like morphine, a kind of canned peace to preserve equilibrium. Canned peace. The toilet here is placed before a full-length mirror so that one watches oneself. Is it an action: the watching? Is there a photographer for such action?

I go to the bathroom four, five times a daynot so much because I must, as because its an excuse for not working. Todays the lendemain of a hangover, far worse, as everyone knows, than the dreamlike hangover-day itself; reality (or rather, the habit of unreality) reappears but were not ready for it. The skins still too dehydrated, the head too befuddled to confront daily problems, quarrels, phones. Bathrooms then are perfect hiding-places.

30 May

Dined last night with Philippe Erlanger at the Elyse Club, a sort of superior Sardis with a ground floor catering to after-theater supperers, and a private membership sous-sol for solvent artists, mostly theatrical. As we began our turbot la reine, who should be ushered to the next table but Nol Coward, alone, who proceeded to order an incongruous meal of snails and hot chocolate. While Philippe ever so properly continued his ceaseless chatter (suddenly more discreet), Coward and I intensely examined each other and calculated our separate advantages. I lit a cigaret, he hummed the opening bars of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, I nodded