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His Refuge

The diaries of Ned Rorem are obviously intended for public consumption. The fact that they are intensely revealing and gossipy in spite of this is what makes them a intriguing example of the genre. The venerated composer's ideas about his work vacillated between a dogged conviction and a flimsy humility accentuated by his verbal outpourings. On the surface, his writing has nothing to do with his music and vice versa, but the astonishment that such a thing should be true comprises the only inner dialogue between the two. These excerpts from his Nantucket Diary reveal a man in middle age feeling for his own time.

13 January 1973

Shuttled here last night with the Popes and dined with Paul Callaway. Premere at Library of Night Music. The first movement, Answers, was no sooner intoned than a female voice, audible and cross, rose from the audience: "What are the questions?"

Later. New York. Dietrich on TV in Dishonored, her most perverse, surrealist, nervy film. She is forever more equivocal than Garbo.

11 February 1973

Mostly reading Willa Cather in the warm ease of the Pink Room, while out there lurks the sub-zero weather. But Alvin Ross is here too, pacifying and clever, and doing a still life of a marble cake the model for which, after a week, has, thanks to preservatives, turned hard as marble.

Quaker Meeting this morning with Aileen Ward and Elizabeth Ames. Elizabeth tells the story of Indians entering this very Meeting House with their tomahawks two centuries ago. When they beheld the worshippers, heads bowed in silent oblivion, they put their weapons aside and bowed their heads too.

2 March 1973

A blocked artist is not an artist. Whoever says, "I shall store this away, let it swell and finally burst like an orchid or a pimple," is not an artist. An artist does not store away, he has no future, he blooms now.

6 March 1973

Visit to Stella Adler, sitting Shiva and staggeringly beautiful. After she received Lulla (who emerged weeping from her tête-à-tête) but before she received me, I glimpsed Stella disappearing down the hall in a long white robe, then returning in a long black robe. Very actressy. Yet I felt from the core that she meant it when she grasped both my hands and said there was nothing more to live for.

15 April 1973

Teaching sterilizes. After the first year you repeat yourself, and end up believing what you say. I often say that I write music because no one else quite provides what I need to hear. (Not that I need to hear my own music, once it's done, more than once.) But I also compose from a sense of failure, which is probably true of any artist.

I've not composed to "express" myself since early youth. I do it now to make a living — it's all I know — and to keep a clear conscience, to one-up myself. Nothing I've made is perfect, or even good. My so-called best songs seem now an assemblage of concession and imitation. Every work is a new try at what has continually failed.

Critics of words use words. Critics of music use words.

11 May 1973

To place Beethoven on a pedestal is to miss his point. Place Reynaldo Hahn there instead, for he was ethereal and removed. Beethoven is too all-embracing for the preciosity of pedestals.

The looks of a performer while performing prove something. If he is the real thing, though otherwise ugly, he will project an appeal while playing. An artist at his easel oozes sex. Concentration on something not himself is a composer's one refuge from ego, and only a body freed of ego can bear scrutiny.

Yet in my old diaries I find the following entry: "Amsterdam, 1951. With great sweetness Julius says he can never play the Andante of Brahms' F-minor Sonata without an erection, and once during a concert he quite literally came."

12 June 1973

Suicide as an art form. Mishima at his peak dies publicly for what he feels to be truth. Truman Capote at the ebb of his power kills himself publicly for what he knows to be a non-truth. Where Mishima grows ennobled, Capote shrivels (if a toad puffed up with hot air can be said to shrivel). His sketches of others are ultimately harmless, but the unwitting self-portrait is putrid as Dorian Gray's.

All that Truman touches turns to fool's gold. A book may or may not be a work of art, but it's not for the writer to say so, or even to know so. An artist doesn't "do art," he does work. If the works turns out as art, that's determined by others after the fact. Art and morality aside, Truman's work can't work. A work which names real names but whose author is fictitious? An author must be true, his characters fictitious.

2 July 1973

At a party I tell John Ashbery that, having recovered from a love affair, I don't intend to start over. "I'm tired of being shit on."

With concerned disbelief John replies, "You are?"

6 August 1973

Returned to New York to find that JH has adopted a cat. The seven-year-old, fifteen-pound Russian Blue was in a frantic state of being discriminated against by a clan of other cats at Gustavo's. JH took pity and brought him here. One gets used to anything. We call him Wallace.

23 August 1973

How eerie to be leaving Vancouver after just three days. Not that I feel at home. As in San Francisco there's a personal oxygen which is quickly habit-forming, an ether, this constant private snow, not especially lovable, but lovely and welcoming, like the inside of a halo.

with partner James Holmes

18 June 1974

On the train yesterday I fell upon Rockwell's review of Ariel and felt thwarted. When he's written about my friends I've found him always right. To be belittled by someone one finds always right is bitter. How can he know it? Or what can a composer believe, since what he says is in contradiction to what others say in similar places?

If music could be written about, it wouldn't need to be written.

20 June 1974

Airborne, confined to his box, Wallace arrived petrified, in a pond of urine, shit, and vomit. Within twenty minutes he was at home on West Chester, licked sleek, proprietary.

29 June 1974

I am growing more superficial. "Why" interests me less than "what." Surfaces are all: the smell of roses or peanut butter, the story line in Kierkegaard. How these things came to be, what forms them, no longer intrigues me.

Profundity is for the young. It has little to do with being alive, though it has much to do with being human. (Ironically, sex, which has everything to do with being alive, preoccupies me hardly at all, not even vicariously. In Deep Throat the orgies are continually slowing down the plot.)

Do people die because they've said all there is to say? Style remains. Yes, but that point's been made too.

Last night, alone in this ocean, after a supper of yams, fresh tomatoes, and oatmeal bread (one dollar a loaf), I took a stroll at the hour between dog and wolf, overcoming the honeysuckle and foghorns but not the non-melancholy mood which seems to indicate: Why even bother to kill yourself?

This morning I feel all right again.

3 July 1974

Are there, this hot afternoon in Chicago, ten thousand youths masturbating to Michigan breezes in a blazing room, as we learned to masturbate there thirty-six years ago? By the average law, my life's two-thirds done.

He has led — comment dirai-je? — a dead life. A dead life. How flat falls the phrase.

The large kitchen has passed from yellow to gray even as I've typed these few words, and the lanes of Nantucket begin again to resemble those of Tangier as night falls, with the hills and cranberries charging through the window, and the hour turns sad again, as though JH, son and father, had died.

One's happiest days are those when one was saddest — that is, more open to reaction, to new experience and heartbreak, the first long journey away from home.

10 August 1974

We can sympathize with, but not feel and so not weigh, another's pain. The hurt which for days JH has borne is almost too much for me, yet I don't ache. We can "project into," but not adopt and so not judge, the flesh of the opposite sex. No man or woman will ever know from inside what is a woman or man. Nor can we be readers of our own writing, and music composed in a swoon is sneered at. We might know the facts of our youth, but can only repeat them blurred on the edge of an expensive coffin.

with his sister

"Appetite" - James Iha (mp3)

"Gemini" - James Iha (mp3)

"Waves" - James Iha (mp3)

Ellen Adler