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Knowing When to Stop
A Memoir
By Ned Rorem OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1994 Ned Rorem
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2775-4
CHAPTER 1
Baby Pictures
I very early understood that the universe is divided between two esthetics: French and German. Everything is either French or German. Blue is French, red is German. No is French, yes is German. Cats are French, dogs are German. Night is French, day is German. Women are French, men are German. Cold is French, hot is German. Japanese are French, Chinese are German (although Chinese become French when compared, say, to Negroes, who are German). Gay is French, straight is German (unless it's the other way around). Schubert is French, Berlioz is German. Generalities are French, specifics are German.
If all this is true—and it is (you disagree? you're German)—then I fall roundly into the French category. How do I draw these distinctions?
The difference between French and German is the difference between superficiality and profundity. To say that the French are deeply shallow is to allow that superficiality is the cloth of life. One's daily routine is mostly casual, fragmented, perishable, mundane, but the years flow by, and through such give and take our little lives are rounded. Even with close friends, how often do we sit and ponder the meaning of the cosmos? Such meaning is reserved for work.
French is superficial in the highest sense of the word, skimming surfaces to invent Impressionism, the sight of an apple-cheeked child caught for a millisecond before the fading sun shifts ever so slightly through the sycamores, the never-to-recur Debussyan glint on an unseen ocean wave at the stroke of noon. The French are not long-winded, but like cheetahs they cover distance fast. French is economy.
German meanwhile is superficially profound, driving one spike as deep as it will go, like Beethoven's motive of da-da-da-DUM hammered 572 times into his Fifth Symphony, devitalizing any subject by overanalyzing it, even humor. (A German joke is no laughing matter.) German is extravagance.
The famous quip of Jean Cocteau's (which in my presence he once generously claimed to have "borrowed" from Péguy), "One must know how far to go too far," might be expanded: A true artist can go too far and still come back. Satie does this, Bruckner doesn't. The secret lies in knowing when to stop.
Cocteau in 1920 contrived the scenario for Darius Milhaud's ballet Le boeuf sur le toit. Gide, Colette, and Proust respectively published Si le grain ne meurt, Chéri, and Le côté des Guermantes. George Santayana, already settled in Rome, issued this assessment of the period: "Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom—picturesque, passionate, unhappy, episodic— may be coming to an end." Meanwhile, in New York that year Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence had just appeared, so had This Side of Paradise by Scott Fitzgerald, while farther west, in Yankton, South Dakota, my mother met my father at a picnic in the early spring.
The intermediary was Father's former college roommate at Oberlin, Art Borough, now already married to Marie, Mother's best girlfriend. (The Boroughs were Catholics, an exciting, strange, even wicked condition when I became aware of them in Chicago. Marie had kissed the Blarney Stone. That fact plus her long hair formed a magical combination. I used to plead with Mother to let me visit Marie on Stoney Island Avenue, so that I could comb her dark Rapunzelian tresses, her Catholic tresses. Mother did not acquiesce, any more than she acquiesced when I wanted to play the role of Jo in a school production of Little Women.) On 10 August, Clarence Rufus Rorem and Gladys Winifred Miller were married.
Clarence, as his siblings always called him, or Rufe, as all outsiders including Mother called him, was the youngest among five offspring—and the only one with a university education—of Ole Jon Rorem who had emigrated in the 1880s to become a well-off Iowan farmer until the crash of '29. Ole Jon, born in 1854 (why, he was eleven years older than Rasputin!) in the valley of Rørhjem—meaning "mixed Horne," and shortened to Rorem at Ellis Island—on the Isle of Ømbe in the harbor of Stavanger on Norway's southern coast. (I'm still not sure how to pronounce our name. Father said Ror-em, Mother said Ro-rem.) Ole Jon married Sine Tendenes, a fellow Norwegian, only after reaching America. Sine never made it into the twentieth century. My father's sole recollection of his mother was as a corpse, when he was four, with family members moaning. When he felt moved to moan, too, the infant Clarence was shushed by the grown-ups; his shock at this mean reaction was a lifelong trauma. Grandfather Rorem, whose singsong "squarehead" accent was hard to understand, remains a remote presence, as does his second spouse, whom I never cared for, Elizabeth, an American in the style of the viragos forever taunted by the Marx Brothers.
As a boy Father had a formidable power of concentration. He was literary but not, as the saying goes, creative; about those who were, he felt wistful rather than jealous, and spoke admiringly of Thorton Wilder, a mere freshman at Oberlin when Father was a senior, who wrote sonnets in Latin. Father himself knew French, had even seen Bernhardt's La dame aux camélias in Mason City, Iowa, circa 1915; but if he never mastered the language orally, he read it fluently and regularly throughout his life, especially Anatole France and the bathetic love lyrics of Paul Géraldy, Toi et moi, which he translated and offered as a gift to young Gladys.
After Oberlin, a dignified stint in the army during the Great War, and a trip abroad, post-armistice but still in uniform with his father and my uncle Silas, he became a salesman for Goodyear. It was as a traveling salesman that he happened to be in Yankton. Though we used to kid him about it, and though they did speak of a miscarriage during their first year, I doubt if Mother was pregnant at the wedding. Except for a mournful period after their first decade their fidelity was (I believe) continual.
Gladys, as her family called her, or Glad, as all outsiders including Father called her, was fourth of the five offspring of a dirt-poor itinerant Congregational minister, the Reverend A. C. Miller, of Dutch-German descent, and of Margery Beattie, who had been born in Newcastle, England. The esprit de corps was contagious among the Millers (my middle name is Miller) and a sense of jollity in the face of adversity as they traveled from town to middle-western town. The jollity was curtailed when the youngest son, Robert, underage and patriotic, was killed at Belleau Wood in 1918. Gladys never recovered from the news, spent a full year in seclusion, while the remaining years of her life were a roller coaster from lowish heights to darkest depths, with always a revulsion for war and any civil injustice. Judging from early photographs, however, the melancholy only added to her beauty. The silken mahogany hair, the gigantic deepset eyes, the overample bust, the firm waist and erotic hips (her legs were a sore point, but their unesthetic thickness did keep her close to the good earth and lent stamina to the long and hearty daily walks) and general stance of flirtatious vulnerability were surely traits that so quickly drew Rufus to her. Grandaddy Miller married them in a garden ceremony, after which they spent (so far as I can deduce) a year on the road, eventually taking a small apartment in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1922.
That was the year of The Waste Land and The Enormous Room, of the Sitwell-Walton Façade and Willa Cather's One of Ours. It was also the year of Ulysses, of the death of Proust, and of the birth of my sister, Rosemary. Father, who was permitted to assist as spectator at the births of both my sister and me, says that Rosemary, although the result of a long labor, emerged as daintily as a rose unfolding, and was pretty, if grave, from the very start.
She and they removed then to Richmond, Indiana (for the record, to an apartment on National Road in West Richmond, on the second floor of a private house owned by people named Leslie), where Father taught accounting at the Quaker college of Earlham. They also renounced their former religions (Father had been raised Methodist) to become permanent members of the Society of Friends. The decision was philosophical rather than godly. Mother, especially, sought to ally herself with a group actively devoted to promoting a concept of peace in time of peace as well as in time of war.
The year of their conversion, 1923, was the year of Huxley's Antic Hay, of Ronald Firbank's The Flower Beneath the Foot, which the author described as "vulgar, cynical and horrid, but of course beautiful here and there for those who can see...," of Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, Djuna Barnes's A Book, and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium. Nineteen twenty-three also saw the appearance of Millay's The Harp Weaver and Other Poems; Stravinsky's greatest ballet, Les noces; Falla's El retablo; and Honegger's Pacific 231; plus Chaplin's movie A Woman of Paris and George Grosz's picture Ecce Homo. Hitler led his "Beer Hall Putsch" in the Bügerbrautskeller outside Munich. Katherine Mansfield died at thirty-four, as did Radiguet, age nineteen (the same age that Rimbaud "retired"), likewise Sarah Bernhardt, who in 1844 had been born, as was Franz Liszt, on my birthday, 23 October.
Mother said I "slipped out like an eel," easier and happier than Rosemary. I was also longer, twenty-one inches, and would grow to be the tallest of the whole clan, including first cousins on both sides. Apparently I beamed continually, despite being circumcised on the second day, like most middle-class gentiles of the period. Unlike Rosemary, who was breast-fed for a year (which left Mother's "bosoms"—as she called them—pendulous and sacklike), I took to the bottle at six weeks, and announced each meal's end by hurling the bottle from the cradle with a crash. Also unlike Rosemary, I was what's known as a birthright Quaker. Again, unlike Rosemary who grew gregarious only as her years unfolded, I began by sitting on the laps of anyone who'd permit it and demanding "Rock me," while as my years unfolded I built a glass wall around me and, grimly shy, frowned on the extroverts outside.
The red is genetically in the green tomato, it's only a question of waiting. Were my so-called talent, sexual bent, love of candy and alcohol, latently in me as I lay there smiling? Was the oratorio, Good-bye My Fancy, which I would be composing when the phone rang sixty-four years later to say that Mother was dead—was it already in the blood?
Life has no meaning. We've concocted the universe as we've concocted God. (Anna de Noailles: "If God existed, I'd be the first to know.") Our sense of the past and our sense of encroaching death are aberrations unshared by the more perfect "lower" animals. On some level everyone concurs—pedants, poets, politicians, and priests. The days of wine and roses are not long, but neither are they short; they simply aren't. Hardly a new notion, but with me the meaninglessness was clear from the start. Our family stressed neither God nor the devil, so the indoctrination of meaning was no more crammed down our craws than was, say, the idée reçue that Beethoven had genius. When I first saw photos of the Gazelle Boy, raised by wild creatures and captured too late for the grace of civilization to take effect, I was enthralled to apprehend that if one is not conditioned to "learning" during the first three years, one will never read or even speak. Similarly the Roman church knows that a true Catholic cannot be sculpted from an unbeliever after age seven. (In Catherine Was Great Mae West, as the lusty empress, requests that the handsome man who has lived in the dungeon since birth and never seen a woman, be brought before her. We are not shown the outcome.)
To contend that life has no meaning is not to say that life is not worth living. For if life is not worth living, is it then worth dying? Calderón said life's a dream. Isn't it rather a game? The charade of self-expression, so urgent in childhood, and the rat race not only of moneymakers but of Great Artists, is a not-so-complex competition to kill time before time kills us.
Yes, the red waits in the green tomato; but no, the artistic tendency is not there from the start, it's socially induced, in Debussy as in Palestrina—Debussy inhabiting an era like ours where art is socially superfluous, and Palestrina in an era where art was an unquestioned angle of routine. What is there from the start is the gene of quality. I've often claimed that I can teach anyone to compose a perfect song, according to the laws of prosody, melodic arch, and so forth. But I cannot guarantee that the song (even my own song) will bleed and breathe, that it will be true music, worth heeding. Only God can guarantee that—the God I don't believe in.
What do I believe? For years I believed (still do, sort of) that you, them, it, all of us, exist only in my fancy. All will stop when I stop. Then do I still ache for a more decent world? Sure. But at the age to which I've come, seeing new men in high places still stumbling into the old cruelties, there seems no hope until we evolve, or perhaps dissolve, from Homo sapiens into another species.
How I came to such belief will not be a basis for this book of memories, except insofar as such belief, being pure sense, is the basis of all culture. My life—my meaningless life— has, after all, been not unfair. Everything connects.
No one is more different from oneself than oneself at another time. Standing back to focus on other Neds at various heights and shapes cavorting, I will surely experience more than a twist of envy, of astonishment, of embarrassment, of ho-hum. If the vantage were from tomorrow or yesterday the recipe would surely vary, with anecdotes added or removed. But today is the day I've planned—since a year ago—to begin the trial, and I'm an organized creature. Organization keeps me from suicide.
Otherwise stated: If indeed the universe is divided into French and German, then Mother was German and Father was French, or mad and sane; and if indeed I'm a combination of the two of them, my whole existence—though I am seldom conscious of it—has been passed in crawling from the wild contrasts of folly into the dreary safety of routine without which work is implausible, then falling back, then crawling forth again, continually.
CHAPTER 2
Looking Forward to the Past (1924–29)
In June 1924, aged eight months, I moved to Chicago, taking with me my sister and Mother, and of course Father, now a professor of economics at the university. For a year we lived at 5464 Woodlawn, then until May of 1927 at 5537 Kimbark, neither of which I remember. In 1928 the very young Robert Maynard Hutchins would impose his enlightened presidency on the university ("No faculty member can ever be fired except for rape or murder committed in broad daylight before three witnesses"), but the so-called Lab School, still active today, already functioned as a continuing flow of experimental curriculum, from nursery through graduate college. Progressive education, it was called. I was enrolled immediately in the nursery, Rosemary, too, and a cluster of other faculty brats, including three who would become "best friends": Jean, child of Davis Edwards of the speech department; Bruce, child of surgeon Dallas Phemister; Hatti, whose father, Frank Heiner, who had been born blind, was a sometime lover of Emma Goldman's.
Experiments began. At two I was isolated for a fortnight with a group of male peers, our sole diet: canned apricots. Coming home, none the worse for wear, my first request was for canned apricots. Moral: Familiarity does not breed contempt, it just breeds more familiarity, a truism I sometimes stress when lecturing on what is still called "modern music." If familiarity bred contempt, people would long always for less food or less sex after a good meal or a good screw.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Knowing When to Stop by Ned Rorem. Copyright © 1994 Ned Rorem. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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