The Nantucket Diary of Ned Rorem, 1973–1985

1973

New York, New Year’s Afternoon

This morning while puttering with the crossword (which I seldom try, being slow at it, and never quite getting the point) I fell upon my own name. Composer Rorem was the clue. Instantly I filled in three squares with my given label. My immediate reaction was one of relief, since this was virtually the only answer I had found. The second reaction was of embarrassment that most people would complete the puzzle except for those three blanks. Finally I felt annoyed. Who am I to be thus immortalized when I haven’t done a lick of work all week! I rushed to the piano and began practicing scales.

Someone at the Times loves me. Every six or eight months for the past several years I’ve been featured in either the daily or Sunday puzzle. JH says it’s only because my Christian name, like Ava or Ari, is convenient for those short leftover slots.

The pattern of the linoleum on the bathroom floor here resembles welts from bedbug bites. Distant but nagging toothache, or gumache, again. For fifteen years the area of the right eyetooth has been exquisitely sensitive. Worry, worry.

Ice-cold Della Robbia weather showers us with sunlight.

4 January

To Steinway’s basement for first rehearsal of Night Music with Ann Schein and Earl Carlyss, my ugliest piece, and very effective, at least as they played it. An hour earlier, visit to Dr. Schreiber (Mother’s proctologist) for the aches of twenty years, aches that fade at the violin’s sound.

Madison Hotel

Washington, D.C.

13 January

Shuttled here last night with the Popes and dined with Paul Callaway. Premiere 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?… Recorded this morning for Desto.

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

24 January

Parties, concert, work, parties. Then yesterday, visit to Hurok offices, later to Tully Hall with Shirley for Elliott Carter’s new quartet which we couldn’t make anything of, but which got a standing ovation.

Visit to Dr. S., and Dubuffet’s tacky sculpture in Chase Manhattan Plaza. Death of Marius Bewly.

28 January

JH’s Chapel Concert of Satie and Britten, including his arrangement for organ of La Messe des pauvres. Landowska, when asked, Who’s the best after you? answered, Denise Restout, of course. I reply to that question, Jim Holmes, of course.

Sans date

Our cousins, Chester Ronning and his daughter Audrey Topping, came with my parents to dine. (Famous spiced chicken, plus Grimble’s cheesecake with a hot strawberry sauce.) Chester and my father, both seventy-seven, look fifty-nine, and suave Audrey in white leather, blondined and booted, hardly seemed smack out of Communist territories. But both, though Norwegian capitalists, are Chinese linguists and, by now, cool and collected with interviewers. After supper Eugene Istomin came over with John Trapp, and we took family pictures.

Chester, when asked no doubt for the millionth time what humor is like in China, replies it’s like anywhere else, and illustrates with a joke: A henpecked husband, fed up, exclaims, I’ll die before I let her get away with this anymore, whereupon he drops dead. Now that’s not funny in itself, nor hardly just Chinese, the figurative-as-literal being one of the four basic devices of all times.

But there is rich-people wit and poor-people wit, French humor and Jewish humor. People are different, with their ethnic and national fun, primitive and sophisticated fun. Humor is not exemplified in The Funny Story, since there are too many ways to relate that same plot. Humor is tone based on irony, a Janus head. Children, being literal-minded, have no humor. Which doesn’t mean they’re pedestrian: they literally see a blue elephant flying, a candy house, Santa Claus. Humor will come to them with disillusionment. By this definition the Chinese peasant probably lacks humor since he lacks training in the nuance of contrast—at least in our nuance of contrast.

French: brevity. Jokes about cuckolds.

German: drawn out (German jokes are no laughing matter). About food and scatology.

American: sex.

Did Handel have humor? His music’s too removed to assess in perspective. Perhaps he was not even great. How long does greatness last?

What is musical humor? How wearying to hear forever about Haydn’s wit. Play him with a movie on childbirth (as Cocteau played Bach for a suicide) and you’ll hear how witty he is.

If Chopin’s tunes were better (funnier) than Beethoven’s, was he greater than Beethoven?

Have I said all this better elsewhere?

All great art contains humor. Insofar as Beethoven lacked humor he lacked greatness. Children and the insane lack the irony of humor. Ironically, the great are sometimes called grown-up children. They are not. They are like everyone else only more so—like everyone else, but no one is like them.

Humor means seeing three sides of one coin.

Hall Overton’s Huckleberry Finn failed utterly and for the same reason as my Miss Julie, these operas being two sides of one coin. Both composers miscalculated their language: Overton chose chromatic speech for an essentially uncomplicated exterior situation, while my speech was diatonic for a complex inner situation.

Dodecaphonism, inherently tense, has built in too many humorless Luluesque associations to be usable for a Mark Twain book despite its updating to center on Nigger Jim, while diatonicism, inherently relaxed, is incapable of illustrating madness, at least current madness (and Strindberg is more current than Twain). In theater style is all. Even calculated misplacements are risky.

Thus neither Overton nor I by nature of our language could translate the subject matter. Had we traded librettos we might have hit the jackpot.

Fakery in opera is more discernible than in other modern music’s modes. Being so slippery in so many ways, particularly in reliance on words, opera cannot depend on rhetoric rather than on expressivity. Opera must depend on expressivity. It is hard to imagine one by Stockhausen, since he depends on philosophy, on extramusicality.

Yaddo

11 February

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.

15 February

Copland concert at Skidmore. Despite the fact that Aaron’s Aaron, the performances are no more excellent than when I’m in a similar situation. Aaron, humble star, likeably avoids clamoring students to confer with me & Alvin. Alvin in four séances has finished my portrait to replace the one from 1943. Missing JH. Little work.

New York

24 February

JH’s Saturday mornings are passed playing organ at Temple where many an American Jew will not permit an American Gentile to voice an opinion (other than favorable) about Israeli justice—as though that distant war were not a dire concern for Gentile too. (Jews technically are more anti-Semitic than Gentiles. The Jews we mostly know, of Slavic or German descent, bitterly hate the truly Semitic Arabs.)

God sets us a bad example. Those Holy Wars. An Indian Giver of Life.

28 February

Mitchell Wilson’s funeral. Vast throng, in which Stella keeps herself admirably invisible.

Another visit to Lillian Libman at the Hurok offices. She will definitely organize and manage two concerts of my music planned for next November in Tully Hall. She feels, however, that it would be prestigious to present these under Hurok’s name, assuring me that Hurok himself is thrilled at the notion (He loves composers! After all, he presented Glazunov, Rachmaninov, and Stravinsky. But how and when?). The hitch is that we must use only Hurok artists. Now, even assuming that any luminous name on the roster would contribute services for the love of new music, none of his singers knows how to sing songs.

The New York City Opera’s presentation of Pelléas et Mélisande is the best I have ever seen, here or in Paris. Its quality was unquestionably due to the internationality of talents, people who, precisely because they were not French, made a superhuman effort to enter the French brain of the past (of the Dark Ages of Bluebeard, from whom Mélisande had escaped, and of the Paris of 1900, where Claude Debussy lived and loved), an effort not always made by the French who inadvertently sabotage their masterpieces. Frank Corsaro placed the singers in a decor of art nouveau (which the French call modern style) from which New York’s Patricia Brooks emerged as an appropriately nubile Mélisande, Canada’s André Jobin as an unusually masculine Pelléas, while Viennese Julius Rudel conducted the piece like the symphony it is, a violent reverie, an instrumental tissue with words superimposed.

Elsewhere, Corsaro’s knack for turning the stalest chestnuts into marrons glacés has earned him the position of the City Opera’s chief caterer. Yet, when the chips are down, he is more brash than brave. His directorial reputation is based on presenting other ways for the tried and true. Even his Susannah was a second look at what had become an established staple. To give hypodermics to old war-horses is to take safe chances in the public eye: what may be lost in taste and tradition may be gained in energy and acclaim. True risks—those inevitably run by directors of courage—are in new works. Yet one feels that under Corsaro’s guidance even a world premiere would be an alternate version.

Sans date

Scenario. Curtain rises on an exquisite eighteenth-century drawing room. People of quality assemble around a pink keyboard at which is seated a young lady in a powdered wig. She executes an ugly étude in the style of Schoenberg. Everyone smiles, claps politely, withdraws. Curtain falls.

Beauty Limps: title for an essay on masterpieces. (Did Cocteau say it, la beauté boite, when the dark angel descended the stairs in Blood of a Poet?) Achievement of perfection is for dressmakers, pastry cooks, or performers like Casals for whom the Tragic Flaw would be fatal. The hero, or so-called creative artist, can only strive for perfection. He never arrives. (How far can this be pushed?)

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.

4 March

JH’s Poulenc concert at the Chapel, including four choruses from Dialogues des Carmélites, as grand with organ as with orchestra.

6 March

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.

27 March

Recital last night by Steber at which she sang my old Alleluia, and everything else on the all-American program, if not as gorgeously at least as convincingly as in the old days. Party later chez Tobin.

Noël Coward died this morning, making me feel more bereft than seems fitting. He was among the golden few who, though seen but rarely, are so giving, so volatile, so there (not looking beyond you at someone more important), that their brief presence is more memorable than certain dear friends enjoyed daily. The quality can’t be faked, can’t be bought.

29 March

We gave a cocktail today for the following: Mother & Father, Rosemary and three of her children, Janet Flanner and Natalia Murray, Lillian Libman, Ellen Adler, Shirley, Robert Phelps, Hélène Rémy, Arnold Weissberger and Milton Goldman, Patrick O’Higgins, Hortense Calisher. Four huge quiches, salad, lots of fruit incl. strawberries, and my Orange Cake.

7 April

Death of Picasso. Jane Wilson’s exhibit. Jerry Lowenthal records the Piano Concerto in Louisville today with Mester. A Place in the Sun on TV.

There are no angelic choirs; there are only the choruses of Bach and Palestrina sung by men. Those choruses are not preparations; they are the last and only word. They are impersonations of what does not exist. Men sing like angels, but where are the real angels and what do they sing? If there were real angels, we would not have invented Bach and Palestrina. There is no God, there are only proofs of God, and Bach and Palestrina are the word.

Unlike Superstar or the Beatles whose propaganda power derives from lyrics attached to the tunes, Stockhausen’s propaganda power lies in words extraneous to the music, that is, in program notes which are ultimately dispensable. Except that his program notes are the music.

Stockhausen, too, has sold out. He plays to sold-out houses.

Albuquerque

14 April

(Father’s in Alaska.) I’ve been three days at the University of New Mexico. This afternoon the octogenarian composer, Dr. D. J. Robb, drove me to Santa Fe via an Indian reservation. Look at that beautiful river, said Robb as we passed a brackish pond. Those gentle faces, as we passed hate-filled stares. They love us, when clearly they loathed us, as he barged unbidden into their quaint but desperately poor little church. In Santa Fe we had lunch at The Compound where—just as New Orleans reeks of Tennessee Williams, not the other way around—everything sparkled with Stravinsky, because I’ve just read Horgan’s book.

The future, our sweetest possession, melts like ice cream, so the past, though unbearable, sustains us. Aging into the seventies is the bug ascending an ever-thinner reed which bends toward the ground. Dying is the rope dancer vanishing into the sky. Stravinsky has gone and the world’s weight’s changed.

Britten may be a lesser composer than Stravinsky. The fact remains that to vote between the single most extended work (as the clock ticks) of each man, Peter Grimes and The Rake, is to elect Peter Grimes. Britten’s opera in all ways surpasses Stravinsky’s: technically, coloristically, literarily, and operatically. It is more rewarding for singers, more inspired, more moving. If both pieces are pastiches—and they are—Britten’s works and Stravinsky’s doesn’t. Which is not to say that Grimes is superior to Sacre. But staged opera was not Stravinsky’s forte. Rossignol and Mavra are his weakest scores.

15 April

Some notes before leaving:

Concert of my pieces at the university last night. Professional. Ditto the speeches, and also the Albuquerque Orchestra which on Friday did Beethoven’s Ninth, the first piece of junk in the grand style.

Kids on campuses ask: Why don’t you use words like the Beatles’ and compose music like theirs if you think they’re so good? But I do, why don’t you listen! But I don’t, why should I, since they do it so much better? I speak my language. I wear saddle shoes.

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.

One aspect of intelligence lies in perception of unexpected similarities, fatal affinities. The amateur sees faces in the clouds, the artist sees clouds in faces. The retreat from standard relationships may seem dubious to outsiders for whom Picasso’s faces, Pollock’s clouds become frauds. Others will find a rapport even between Picasso and Pollock, as the mill turns full circle unviciously. The scientist finds unlikely relationships and makes them stick. The artist finds unlikely relationships and makes them seem to stick.

Amateurs think about meanings, professionals think about means. The beginner’s art is a bull session and his social life is very serious. The established artist, taking content for granted, worries (secretly) about technique, while socially he gossips, discussing art mostly as economics.

Skill is suspect when mediocrity is the rule: good writing seems sheer affectation. Economy is deemed poverty by the long-winded. Now, the core of any philosophy can be shown in a phrase, yet such a phrase (the preceding one, for instance) sounds like a mere epigram to the unwashed.

Credibility gap? But there are limitless concepts of Truth which, if it really existed, would be dull, dry, and sad. A politician’s duty is to be unambiguous; his statement need never be open to interpretation, for politics is a simple business. But a composer is necessarily ambiguous; his statement is never inarticulate, but too articulate for words. He always says what he means, though he never means what he says. It is Nixon’s business to tell the truth. It isn’t mine. My business is to speak the truth.

Some deplore the déjà entendu of discs; I rejoice in it. Ninety times, unfatigued, I have thrilled at the identical twist in a Benny Goodman phrase, at a dragged triplet on Kincaid’s flute, at the elegance of Toscanini’s slight tenuto—twists and triplets and tenutos that were never quite so good because they were never quite the same when heard live.

As to the intellectualization of music, or rather, the diagnoses around music, when we hear what’s talked about we realize that proof of the pudding is not in the recipe. If expressive content in art equals flavor in cooking, today’s tasteful music is monosodium glutamate.

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

Performer. His value lies in what can be learned from him. One performer invests those chestnuts with revitalized fragrance. Another makes even the new sound stale because he lacks the vulnerability that is the artist’s earmark. Beauty must be ugly to last. He is boring because he is perfect.

Perfection?

After a point, most pianists spend their lives playing the same pieces which they polish and re-think. Do polish and re-thought produce finer results, or just different?

Suppose an accomplished pianist decides to restrict his repertory to one work. Suppose he practices only Chopin’s Etude in Thirds five hours a day for twenty years. During those years he examines all editions, occasionally changes a fingering, and may even alter the tempo as he apprehends the various ways to skin his rabbit. Suppose after twenty years he has not grown tired of the Etude. Will he play it better than at first? If he has grown tired, can he play it better? Is there better? Did Casals play a Bach suite or Serkin the Hammerklavier better at forty than at twenty, at sixty-five than at thirty-two or ninety? Prove it. Progress does not equal improvement unless an advancing cancer can be said to improve. How often do our giant classicists force those they interpret to grumble in their graves?

New York

23 April

Spent the afternoon listening to Eugene practice his Debussy group. Those French waters washed me back to Lake Michigan’s adolescent waves, waves which were La Mer in 1937, and swept me then to Vuillardian parlors where, muskily submerged in vin rouge and fumes of Camembert, the composer composed Khamma. The Paris I miss most is the Paris of my imagination before I lived there. But it can be summoned clear as a snapshot of the Pare Monceau, and the sound of a series of secondary sevenths is enough for the snapshot to smell of almond leaves.

Offended by the piano playing for Dances at a Gathering, Eugene remarks, Imagine how it would have been with Rubinstein—although with Rubinstein we wouldn’t need any ballet. How would Chopin react to the assumption that his works are sacrosanct, vulgarized by Robbins’s use for dance? Vulgarity is a part of art (as Beethoven proves), and yes, Robbins is vulgar. So is Chopin. The shock to E. is the superimposition of twentieth-century vulgarity on nineteenth-century vulgarity. So much Chopin came from dance!—mazurkas, waltzes, tarantellas, polonaises. Other of his music is sprung from acts of motion: a Barcarolle to inspire boat rowers, a Berceuse to accompany cradle-rockers. You say these forms have been stylized by Chopin? Must they be heard only in recital by rows of motionless freaks? Is it corrupting to move with the sound? The highest compliment a composer can hear: You make me want to sing and dance. All music, from the burial hymns of old Egypt to the urbanities of Varèse, rises from the vocal cords and from the human torso in contraction and release. And musical performance that does not provoke kinetic response is not worth the trouble.

Shirley is distressed when I say that the best music must be nasty as well as beautiful, that it partakes of the gutter as of the altar. It is not a question of whether Beethoven took from the gutter, but of whether the gutter is bad. For Shirley it’s bad. For me it’s just another place. Gregorian chant had the best of both possible worlds.

There’s good music with charm but no character: Federico Mompou, Reynaldo Hahn, John Gruen. There’s good music with character but no charm: Beethoven, Bruckner, Berlioz. There’s good music with both: Chopin, Falla, Mussorgsky. Now, the music with both is not generally considered the greatest. Is there good music with neither?

2 May

Two-day symposium on Music in the Church at Saint John the Divine, with Iain Hamilton, Charles Wuorinen, et alia. I read aloud my Notes On Sacred Music, taking pleasure in stating I don’t believe in God. Nobody cares.

6 May

Noël Coward memorial. (Skits by Tammy Grimes, Helen Hayes, and such nonsense.) I’d have liked to leave early, since he wasn’t there. Walked part way home with Lucia Davidova. Proctological concern continues. Pure Contraption and The Final Diary are both delivered to Holt. Feeling depressed. Seeing people constantly.

Sans date

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. Such carnal purity is never apparent on the faces of audiences at concerts or galleries, who display the stupor of ecstasy or just plain boredom; nor is it apparent in second-rate performers who, with their respect of art, are simply worshipful, hence ego-ridden.

Narcissus was not sensual. Heaven forbid that genius not be ego-oriented! But the act of genius is selfless.

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

1958. Visit to Mitropoulos, New York Hospital.… He maintains that the orchestra members are his children, his ‘barnyard of chicks,’ whom he fucks collectively at each performance.)

JH for a decade pondered Messiaen’s La Nativité. Now he proposes to omit an added sixth in one of the final chords, on the grounds that Messiaen would no longer hold to such a cliché. Yet that added sixth may be just what Messiaen most clings to and has never questioned.

It is not trashiness that an artist rejects, or even sees, in his own work, so much as loose seams. He may hate the frame, not the picture. Nothing is riskier than to ingratiate yourself with an artist by showing that you love his work enough to suggest improvements.

Hearing. We do not know how music of the distant past was heard, nor yet of the recent past, nor do we even know how current friends hear single sounds, much less how they hear phrases. We can compare performances; we can define differences between them, but not how we are hearing them.

I love David Del Tredici’s new wild Pot Pourri for chorus, soprano, rock band, and large orchestra. But what I love there he ignores. I hear long lines where he intends jerks, laughs where he asks for tears. Elsewhere he uses intact Bach’s Es ist genug. Ever since Berg’s fiddle concerto—which David professes not to know—brought us this chorale, it has beguiled me, not for those enigmatic progressions but for the straightforward jazz of measures 12–14. The third beat of measure 13 is clearly a blue note, if the phrase is heard as E-major. To David, who hears the phrase in A, that beat is a mere subdominant. If we hear it differently, how then did Berg hear it? or Bach himself, who never knew the blues? We four composers may agree only as to the chorale’s value, not its character.

We are more unanimous about the fact of merit than about the nature of merit. Tuning in on a Haydnistic piece we’ve never heard, we’re sure it can’t be Haydn, not because of the style but because of the quality. You and I concur on that quality but listen to it differently. Good music seems absolute, retaining goodness through myriad massacres.

My first compositional trouvailles were notations of misreadings of Bach. To this day the forty-seventh bar of the second movement of Mozart’s K. 309 is pure Salome, since I learned that sonata the same week I first heard Strauss’s opera.

All of us hear all music by comparing it to all the other music in our ken. Such comparison is colored according to the time-space between juxtapositions. If we don’t know any music beyond what we are presently hearing, our experience is clearly narrow—the case with, say, most rock freaks.

21 May

Affection for Lillian Libman and not for Sol Hurok led me to accept an invitation from the former to compose a fanfare for the latter. Since Hurok, in name only, is sponsoring my two concerts next November, it seemed appropriate to offer something built on that name only. The something was conducted this evening by Robert Irving as curtain-raiser to a gala at the Met honoring Hurok’s sixtieth year of service to the Performing Arts. I called the fanfare Solemn Prelude.

Hurok seems not to recall me from one time to the next during my many visits to Lillian. Admittedly, concert managers have no concept of composers (their business is to sell performers, not what is performed), yet one would think that Hurok, with his old-world style, would feign some civility, given his presumed affinities with at least Glazunov. Meanwhile a composer has nothing to lose by blasting management. All an impresario might ever do for him is not to discourage some contracted performer from playing his music (rather than a war-horse) in hick towns.

Nothing about Hurok’s vulgarity offends me beyond the pretense of being what he’s not: a servant to art. Art (that is, the performing artist) is his servant. Now all performers are to an extent whores. Their pimps profit from this. But no pimp, not even Diaghilev, can contain the glamor of the wares he peddles, and the fact that Hurok should place himself above his performers is only too typical of the nonmusical hard sell of our musical world.

Hurok did not thank me for the brass piece because he didn’t realize it was played. I’m quite modest though I try not to show it.

JH is being slowly fired, he who in the past two years—all enterprise and no budget—has held together as distinguished a music service as any in a Manhattan church. Now a new vicar has come, Father Williams, avid only to swing with the times (substituting rock and gospel for Monteverdi and Messiaen—why not just tear down the church and celebrate mass on the lawn?) and to replace the white choirmaster with a black one. This racism is unconstitutional, but how to prove that? There is less an artistic than a chemical clash. Williams who is black, feels that only blacks have the right to determine Whether Integration; that the service should be tuned to a black tonality. JH feels that it’s his church too; that blacks (however one rates their suffering), just as they are Americans and therefore cannot be separatist Americans, must be Christians first and black Christians second or never.

Tomorrow I fly to Paris.

Paris

23 May–10 june

Years after I’d come back to New York for good, I wrote Virgil in Paris to ask if he’d seen my lost youth. There’s plenty of lost youth around, he answered, but I don’t know if any of it’s yours.

A city’s staying power—its ability to inflict pain—lies less in intrinsic beauty than in the force of faded friendships. Yet Chicago, the town where my every First Time occurred, is no graveyard; it is I who return from the grave into a vital center that has no room left. And so today in Paris, where once I loved and lived, I’m lonely not so much for dead friends as for my own mislaid corpse.

What hits most about a childhood spent in Hyde Park is not specifics, like walking home from the Midway age nine on ice skates because shoes had been lost and being limp with iodized welts for a week, but the sun, the heavy western sun flooding the concrete between Dorchester and Lake Michigan in any season. What hits most about seven French years, with so much to recall that’s now congealed into a single flavor as hours and years bubble by, is not famous meals and heads tasted and observed, or heady hearts, but a single stifling afternoon reading Howard’s End to the smell of tuberoses in Marie Laure’s garden, place des États-Unis.

… as an adolescent scanning Balzac with a map of Paris to pursue the circuities of Vautrin. Brought up a Quaker, meaning in silence, needing noise, meaning music, and by extension, France (certainly not Germany) and the bejeweled Catholicism of the Mediterranean …

Like Guitry’s tricheur, all unknowing I plucked that poison ivy for the Boy Scout, after he relieved himself in an Indiana glade, to use as toilet tissue. God guided my last Parisian visit in 1969 to say adieu to Marie Laure a month before she died. This week I re-return, three years after her death. Paris: what no longer contains Marie Laure. The presence of her absence is so everywhere apparent. Paris, filled by a void.

I will love you forever may be said by one person in honesty to many, since one person is many, though not at once. If he is many at once he could only collectively say I will love you forever, and collectivity isn’t love. Take a dozen cherished skeletons, grind to powder, add a quart of adrenaline laced with Chablis, strain and refine until the liquid thins down enough to immerse a metropolis with invisible atomic silk. Observe through tears from a distance of twenty light years, and you’ll see Lutèce as it looks this morning.

38 rue des Épinettes. Of course it’s as though I’d never left, rain and cold, but a warm supper chez Edouard Roditi.and his circle of eccentrics—a mother hen in the Tower of Babel.

It’s easier to love the stupid than the bright. The word France strikes terror in the hearts of homebound Americans, but there’s no rent to pay, taxis are cheap and meals cost about the same while being superior, so I spend dollars on posies for ladies. Exhausted, constipated.

Sunlight peeks furtively now around corners in the seventeenth arrondissement where each humble grocery on the Avenue Saint Ouen upstages with bloody roses and giant tomatoes the equivalent on Madison Avenue. Protective wrath of Nora Auric over the telephone, she having misread a reference to Georges in Critical Affairs.

When people ask if during my years in Paris I ever met Les Six I like to say, Yes, I knew all five. How? Through knowing their music—that’s the way to a composer’s heart. Thus in 1949 toward dawn on a stool in La Reine Blanche I hummed to Auric, whom I’d just met in the bar, themes for each scene of Sang d’un Poàte. Thus when we played guessing games at Lise Deharme’s with Milhaud I tested his tunes by heart to him—tunes he’d forgotten. Thus to Germaine Tailleferre I sang Madame n’est pas Ià on Pinget’s poem. Thus to Honegger the theme from Pastorale d’Été. And thus to Poulenc.… It’s not so much that I knew these people’s music, or even that I knew it well, as that I was a Young American Composer who knew their music. A Y.A.C., then as now, was a contradiction in terms to the French, and if they weren’t particularly interested in my music they were interested in my interest in theirs. And … not that I was their type.

I’m 5 feet 10½ inches and since age twenty have weighed seldom less or more than 150 pounds. Dark brown eyes and hair, though the latter was bleached during the early 1950s (the French still think of me as blond). Slim legs have turned skinny, though my shoulders remain good-shaped. Hands, especially the right one, begin to spout liver spots. Extreme nearsightedness such that I’ve turned—with glasses—quite farsighted, and can read now only with the naked eye. Externally slim ass (internally bloated with what would appear to be swelling brains) and fairly flat stomach. Small nose, selfish lips, as yet no double chin nor much gray hair, but sagging ears and eternal dandruff. Have never had a venereal disease. Was once extremely pretty if you like the type, which I detest. With magnetic charm, which others name crass monopoly, I pontificated forever, having long since coldly concluded that shyness is never rewarded and that I was no dumber than other pontificators in the room. Where’s the silver infant who once monopolized by silence? who (so he thought) made philosophy futile in the face of lust? Longing at once to be guiltless and guilty, passive and active, ravished in flesh and dominating in mind, I simply never get laid.

My major weakness during the Paris Years was believing flattery (that I was cute, talented, etc.). My strength was in work. But if I never let flattery stand in the way of work, clearly I did work because I was flattered. After a point the goose of Encouragement is more needed than the gander of Fancy. Fancy is the donnée of any artist; obviously he would never have been encouraged if he had never produced to start with.

Certain behaviorists claim the contrary—that inside every banker is an artist struggling to get out—and their nurseries swarm with toddlers urged to express themselves. But where, pray, are the artists who get out? More cogent: Inside every artist is a banker struggling to get out.

Conversation is neither an art nor a graceful fashion for English-speaking peoples. Americans mean what they say though they sometimes struggle to say what they mean. The French do finally say what they mean though they seldom mean literally what they say. Despite their indirection, their metaphor and irony, the French are succinct; Americans, despite their one-track-mindedness, their clumsy longing for a bull’s-eye, are convoluted. This dogma is French but I am American.

Marie-Louise Bousquet has finally died. No American who knew Paris did not know Marie-Louise: the very soil and fluid of two cultures, in her sandwiches and daiquiris, merged every Thursday at the sun-filled flat in Place du Palais Bourbon. American specialists, mainly of Harper’s Bazaar, learned about general practice by drinking with the French. We met our countrymen (Jean Stein, Thornton Wilder) and those whose country we were visiting (Cartier-Bresson, Josette Day). Not that a party’s as good as the guests; it’s no better than the host. Knowing who she herself was, Marie-Louise had the freedom to learn about you, and that was great fun for her. But such salon life, never a part of America, is ended forever in France. Marie Laure, Marie-Blanche, now Marie-Louise—les trois Maries, as they were called—have flown the coop.

Of all the females of my generation I loved most, during the early fifties, Heddy de Re. Brief hour in the Orangerie where Degas’s Absinthe again reminded me of us then, then two hours with Heddy herself. Absent, still pretty, disappointing, asks me nothing of me after sixteen years and, with her friend, drinks Calvados, claims to have forgotten English.

Why when today’s so dull should dredging yesterday prove less so? Yesterday, when as an adult I returned to Chicago—that sole shelter and thus sole menace of youth—I was struck not by what my mind once learned there but by what my body had felt: smells of leather in Woolworth’s Bookstore, of summery debris in October underscoring anxieties of forgotten homework, and especially of sex forcing itself from behind every door on Kenwood, on Blackstone, in Mandel Hall: every bush in Jackson Park seemed witness to our virginity perpetually lost and found, as every bar on Rush Street hosted our sprees.

Paris becomes the Chicago of my maturity, a maturity which shows nothing of culture. There from the Reine Blanche (Christ, it’s a milk bar!), kidnapped to Morocco by Guy Ferrand twenty-four years ago this month.

Once with Heddy, as we drank deep into the night, we listened wide-eyed while the now-defunct Robert LeMasle (one of several self-proclaimed models for thethe pleasure of newlyweds should dwell in the complicity of knowing Nightwood doctor) declared: Hangovers are needles thrust full length into unanesthetized flesh, and I’m a tattoo from sole to scalp with no space left, yet I remember every one.

Friendship for Eugene Istomin led me to hear his Trio play the sort of program (all Brahms) I rarely attend. That they should begin an hour late (because, as it turned out, Isaac Stern had overslept) and then perform routinely (except for Eugene’s cohering excellence) didn’t lighten matters, particularly since during the wait a couple in my overcrowded loge were necking with a sound like the squashing of hot peanut butter in armpits. Despicable public shows of love! What do they do privately then? In the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées the pleasure of newlyweds should dwell in the complicity of knowing what’s coming later or what just came. But to come now, in the open, is to come for us—and we are less jealous than offended: it interferes with our rhythm.

Seventeen years since I permanently left Paris. In October 1957, the Claude episode closed, I returned to America to start a career, as Virgil put it, revisiting France only in 1964, briefly again in 1969 and now in 1973. Yet during intermission people say, It’s been ages! Have you moved? And in New York, meeting me for the first time, someone asks, But don’t you live in Paris?

Slowly, into place de l’Alma, uphill, savoring and withholding, away from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (little in common now with the gratin, ignorant of our Watergate) into rue Freycinet, disturbed by the shadows. As though I were walking home, like ten thousand times before, with the intention of crying when I emerge into place des États-Unis. But home’s now a huge hollow tombstone. How long did I stand there in the inky frost, watching the so-familiar leaves quiver so late in the night over the wall as I had watched the leaves outside Polignac’s mansion fifteen seasons ago, watching the still, still, still house behind whose boarded windows no light flickered? All Paris has become a cemetery where this Magritte-like monument dominates and, finally, without life, looks foul. Quickly I walk away and will never return.

Sleepless night, dreams like daydreams, nocturnal daydreams. In blackness the door opened to Marie Laure’s house, which became a box of sunshine. Entering there with the white-haired Roro, we walked among white roses wide awake, and way back there another door opened and four beautiful women emerged, two with blond and two with black hair. They strolled toward us but did not (or pretended not to) notice us. Returning through the house alone, I reached the first door which reopened back into this black bed. A cat whined continually. And as if that weren’t enough, I kept getting ideas (mostly on how to contain French Music into a definition) and had to turn the light on to record them, then turn it off, then on. A sleepless night—une nuit blanche, as the French say.

Nuit blanche. Once in the dear dead days of long ago Gordon Sager visited the Turkish bath of Harlem. Next day he announced, "The only other customers were Caucasians. J’ai passé une nuit blanche."

New York, with the singular virtue of expanse, lacks, by virtue of that virtue, the exterior intimacies of Paris. A French dusk, for instance, is heartwarming: On a rainy afternoon we watch the tabacs on the rue du Bac switch on their lamps and fill up with clients pausing for a coup de rouge on the way home; later we peek into windows where families sit down quarreling to their lentil soup; or, from indoors, in any season we look out onto passing heads of lovers and sycamore leaves and hear the clink of boules. In Manhattan we eavesdrop by phone, nor is it a city of easy cafés, of Peeping Toms, of (as Robert Phelps calls them) followers.

Dull brilliance of liquor, dull pleasures of a sauna, sharp dullness of health. If vice were replaced by intelligence! Yet in a sense, vice is intelligence. Along the mall in Central Park, observe the homely Hare Krishna youngsters dancing their uninventive dance. (Mother drops coins in their cup, then asks, Now will you give me some coins for peace? They look through her, uncomprehending, and dance off.) A few yards farther, see the health-nut kiosks replete with signs informing you what not to eat so as to gain a heightened consciousness—this accompanied by five simultaneous transistors blaring rock.

It proves little that no mutual friends visit her grave (they’re permanent residents, after all), or that I, who never do such things, do. But always one to do things halfway I do not, in the taxi to the Cimetière Montparnasse, clutch the cluster of custard-colored roses dreamed of. Nor do I expect, as the caretaker leads the way, to end up at the Caveau Paine-Bischoffsheim (the Caveau Noailles being in another part of the forest) where, if you stand on tiptoe and peek through the vines you perceive not a quarreling family but, next to Marie Laure, the stone coffin of Oscar Dominguez. No morbid tone, no sensation of what Henny Penny called The Distinguished Thing. Annoyance, on the contrary. To be dead is unlike you, animated witch. Come out from under there, be yourself! Your silence makes a wild noise in me now. You were the only French person who cared about America.

Satie’s the most overrated of the underrated composers, yet when you speak with the avid Satilophiles you often discover they’ve never heard of Socrate, the composer’s sole piece that might remotely aspire to grandeur, in itself and without quaint appendages, on strictly musical terms. Fifteen years ago Poulenc was in a reverse position but for the same reason: of all the overrated composers he was the most underrated. His piano miniatures and most harmless songs were done to death, yet the existence of his major works (meaning, for once, larger works—the religious and profane operas and cantatas) was ignored, at least in the U.S.A.

… like Gide who, the one hour in his life he lay with a woman (on the beach at Hyères, according to Marie Laure), sired a child, Poulenc became the father of a daughter.

… the rocky, inexpert French of those longtime expatriate females haunting, drunkishly rich, the rue de Rivoli in 1949. Esther Arthur, Mrs. Forrestal. A language when mastered is mastered in a year or less; the rest is nuance. Yet the nuance already caught by a native child of five will never be caught by you, foreigner. Gift for tongues is unrelated to gift for music.

We each speak our personal sub-tongue. Except for a widening vocabulary, there’s no improvement past a certain point. Our French is our French. Desiring, when I first lived here, to transport my English to my French—to seek the inevitable equivalent for each Nedism—I merely applied myself. My French is as good as any foreigner’s, yet in grade school, seeing no future in French, I was, despite my musical talent (my good ear), the worst in class.

From the window, ô délire, while writing, I can look over there into another morning window giving onto the court from the rue J. Keller where a man, mirror propped against the pane, shaves, stripped to the waist, biceps at play, black curly hair on scalp and chest, the works, quoi!—while behind in shadow the visage of a red-haired woman. The Paris of Gabin, which, having never been known, is most missed like—do you recall?—that May day in 1953 when Georges Geoffroy met James Pope-Hennessy for the first time, yet had dreamed of him the night before and in the dream reproached him for not appearing years sooner, so much time’s wasted.…

Paris, the place where she isn’t. Paris, a disease once had. There remains a glamorous contagion like the perfumed maze through which Gide’s Theseus rambled. Heavy rain. Lunch chez Lily Pastré, prey now to gaps of memory, and Boris Kochno, so warm. The ease with which they speak of funerals. Boris retains the guile of alcoholics—their childlike wish to provide antidotes to being a pain in the neck. He’s Russian too, of course. The past presses in like a mean tea cozy. I ache to be in this very room as it was years ago. Yet the room hasn’t changed. Unless caught quick it’s lost for good, but it’s never quick enough, and always wrong. Rain. Not a foreign country but a homeland whose patois I’ve forgotten. Two Mormons just knocked on the door.

The Épinettes is a cobblestone quarter sufficient unto itself, as remote from central Paris as … Wooden shoes, window boxes with leeks and zinnias of every color, a bandstand in the adjacent rue Collette. Am vaguely superfluous, like those French journalists living permanently in New York, but are invisible to New Yorkers. Except that their raison d’être is to report on the present; mine is the past that grows more labyrinthine than the future. Everywhere mirrors in which to seek a friendly reflection, always more distant, less intriguing.

Robert Phelps, lunch in nearby bistro, rue Lantiez, then, beginning with the Cité des Fleurs, a seven-hour promenade. Manic and vicarious, Robert plays the role of professional loser whereas he’s a true winner of sorts, being unique in what he does, which he does well: to fix situations through the lens of the brief word: the French gift, bestowed on a Yankee, of the spoken photo. But the gift’s not no-strings, flashed in my vision. Unrecapitulatable is to be these three things: in love, in Paris, in your twenties. Poor Robert cannot be twenty. He sees the city as I saw it then, inconveniences are quaint, all crotches godly, ashcans are Greuzes and advertisements pure Corneille. Thanks alas to (they say) Madame de Gaulle not one pissotière remains, so that particularly art-nouveau mystique which represented the compleat eroticism of a not-so-distant day’s defunct for Robert.

He asks what three things I’m most ashamed of. Quick retort: (1) Sugar, (2) certain sexual attitudes, and (3) my best songs—as though what feels good must be contemptible. Yes, expatriation does not make Americans more French, it makes them know increasingly how American they are.

One thing may lead to another but art runs faster than beauty, said Paul Goodman and Jean Cocteau. Well, art may run faster than beauty, but one thing leads to another. On April 3, 1952, the first time I ever was in Grasse, Charles de Noailles invited me and Marie Laure (his spouse) to lunch with Cocteau. Afterward the four of us visited Marie Laure’s mother, Madame de Croisset, who lived in a nearby rust-colored stucco villa which contained a Pleyel, so that—at Marie Laure’s insistence—I could play the ballet Mélos for Cocteau. I recall two things mainly: (1) On arriving, Cocteau announced to Madame de Croisset, It seems like yesterday that I was bringing Marie Laure back from our outings. (He’d not been in this house since the summers of World War I when the adolescent Marie Laure began nursing the love-hate she never forsook.) (2) Rather than do it herself, Madame de Croisset rang for a servant to open the drapes in the salon de musique. Oh, there were other things too. (Cocteau wore a white leather jacket; drank straight gin before eating; talked movies with Charles de Noailles as though Charles cared. Wasn’t there also a feeling that, although he’d probably made the brief trip from Cap Ferrat mostly to see me again and to hear the music—we’d met only once before—he was disappointed to find me in the company of the Noailles? As he said good-bye, taking his seat beside the curly-haired chauffeur of the white Porsche, he immediately drew forth a notebook and began to work, having already lost an afternoon with the likes of us.) But what is forever striking is that nothing is as (complex as) it seems. To discover that two people whose milieu is presumably identical have not met on home ground for thirty-five years! An outsider concludes that famous contemporaries spend their lives mutually hobnobbing. (When, the outsider might well wonder, do they do the work for which they’re famous?) As for Madame de Croisset with the curtain, it was not I (a bourgeois American) but Marie Laure herself who later remarked, Couldn’t she have pulled it herself? (M. L. added that she’d not realized Cocteau didn’t know English. Her surprise surprised me: how could she not have known?)

That same year I first saw Nathalie Sarraute, at the Catalan restaurant, deep in conversation with a mutual friend, Dora Maar. Marie Laure and I watched from across the room. They later joined us. Sarraute appeared to be what I already knew Dora to be: a no-nonsense hardworking reasonable left-wing artist as contemptuous of frivolity then as women’s liberationists are contemptuous of it now. Thus it seemed contradictory, a week later, to receive Sarraute’s novel, Portrait d’un inconnu, amicably inscribed. Frivolous act.

Twenty-two years later, at George Braziller’s in New York, I reintraduced myself to Sarraute, reminding her of that other time and place. She said: You know, that’s the last I ever saw of Dora. For two decades I’d assumed they were friends. Actually I know them both better than they know each other.

Dali exhibit. Exhausted, he now imitates himself to where only the signature, which literally never alters, breathes life.

Petit Palais, exhibit from Maoist China of ancient art works and crafts. Impossibly crowded and reeking. So with a catalogue I withdraw to a sunny cloister to examine photographs of the artifacts that surround me. (This trip’s a macrocosm of the experience? In an actual teeming Paris I’m enlivened only by memories.)

Eugene’s touching solicitude of ailing John Trapp as they cross Avenue Marceau, holding hands, on way to restaurant. Eugene disabused about Hurok. Managers do little beyond providing a mailing address. Dates are gotten through personal contact. Professional criticism. My unfabulous but literal memory retains less what critics have written about me than about others. Even when good (even when bad), reviews of my work or words bore me. I already know, deeper than they, how good (bad) the work or words are. If the review itself is literature (Mazzacco on Diaries or Flanagan on Cycles), I’m more intrigued by how it’s written than in what …

Five o’clock at Nathalie Sarraute’s. In the late sunshine of her wide high parlor, a stone’s throw from Marie Laura’s, we talk pleasantly about our countries for five quarter-hours and drink Fresca. She doesn’t feel cordial toward Susan Sontag (who once introduced her at the YMHA, then didn’t stay to hear her speak), but loves Mary McCarthy. McCarthy and Sontag are the only American representatives in Paris at present, but I’ve yet to find a Frenchman who, in his darling insulation, has heard of either.

Sarraute, when I confess that Tel Quel and company is just too thick and cold, suggests I look into Butor’s nonfiction, especially his words on music. And kisses me good-bye.

Hôtel Biron, gardens and nursemaids, specter of Rilke. Again, museum as environment, as place to inhabit, but only incidentally to look at pictures in. Rodin’s pictures, superior to his strangled sculpture.

Pour Ned Rorem avec une amitié et une admiration qui pour une fois est vraie. Does he recall having thus inscribed the flyleaf of his short stories in July 1957? With the same eyebrow-raising candor I inscribed Critical Affairs: Pour José-Luis de Villalonga avec une amitié et une admiration qui pour une fois est vraie, presenting it to him last night in his Neuilly apartment, which has black walls and a mirrored floor, before we went forth with his very new youngish spouse, Syliane, not pretty but with chien in gold lamé turban and white lamé pants and plenty of gold-and-silver accessories, and whose baby (not José’s) was born last month during a seven-minute labor. ("Sept minutes d’horreur," she adds.) We dined at the Sept, which is where one dines, and were joined by a Guy Monréal whom José had said meurt d’envie de te revoir, but who showed no sign of ever having heard of me. Despite this false situation—is it a Spanish situation?—one likes José for his unlikely combination of hyper-intelligence and hyper-chic, not to mention his kind, kind eyes with which through his sangria-colored glasses he once gazed down on us from the screen in Giulietta degli Spiriti and now gazed at me, while over there with a covey of young beaux dined ageless Danielle Darrieux in yellow. I’m not what Villalonga remembered; lacking mondanité now, I bored him.

Pop music, all of it, here is still in 3/4, so I grow testy, fevered, and they drive me home to the sticks of Épinettes. Retire late with sore gums, sore finger, sore foot.

Familiar streets, Varenne, Grenelle, with no longer a lustful rendezvous while waiting in the rain to cross with the green light—green fire, as the French call it—just dates with sentimental agony, for. instance Lise Deharme, bejeweled, the same, all in orange. Invited for tea, yet offered nothing but her husband, Jacques Perrin, kept in a side room, and the plump pink pussycat. Nothing has changed except everything. Old friends are reruns with new wrinkles. Only JH, who phoned last night, remains always new.

Rereading Butor, his essay on music. The question is not does he date—everyone dates—but does he date well. Too soon to know, but not too soon to know he dates soon. His whole tonality, like that of current French music (if one can speak of non-tonal music as having tonality), seems a decade off. Of course this judgment is by the same American scale as in 1969 when I last reacted to the music of Paris, and different lands flower differently, some never. Russia never had painting, but did have the novel-of-frenzy and the music-of-frenzy a century before Germany. Germany never had cooking. Italy never had song (as opposed to aria) and England had no music at all during twenty-five decades, though her poems and pictures then … etc. Mais Butor! When non-practitioners (even Huxley or Mann or Proust) write about music, musicians (even second-raters) twitch. It’s hard to learn exactly what point Butor is pushing as he speaks of music as a realist art. To a professional his essay reads (like Pound’s essay on harmony) as an obvious conclusion reached the hard way—by hit or miss. Butor seems to have talked to Boulez or someone and then come home to note his own reactions, naive but hardworking.

Music is indispensable to our life, says he. Why?

One need not be concerned with political implications in music, says he, whereas in other realms it’s clearly established, etc. How?

In other realms, too, the stronger the politics the weaker the art.

Butor willfully refutes Stravinsky’s notorious mot, music is incapable of expressing anything, while alluding to all music as song. Now, all music is not song, but since all song is a musicalizing of words it does gain literary sense and expresses something. Yet Butor goes on to claim that unless we know the convention we cannot grasp more than a part. His statement’s right but the conclusion is wrong—that a man who knows nothing of classical Arabic can still delight in the calligraphy, but he resembles a museum viewer who can contemplate only the shadows of statues. There is no single way to love anything; but as soon as we comprehend a language we lose its beauty, visual and sonic. A Frenchman can no longer hear French.

… transcription … the possibilities of literal imitation which music possesses are vastly richer than the onomatopoeias of spoken language. Butor is speaking of musical grammar which has acquired an enormous range of flexible discourse: the noises of machines in Varèse, the songs of birds in Messiaen. Yes, but do Messiaen’s birds fool real birds? Are real machines taken in by Varèse? In seeking the fundamental connection that unites music and words Butor becomes the hopeless researcher. Why not seek the fundamental disparity (for if the arts all meant each other we’d need only one), or posit a thesis on the rapports between rhythmic shapes and colors (though not meanings) of a given nation’s music—which came first, the talk or the tune? If I hear a Schubert song without understanding German, says Butor, I may find the music wonderful … but only when I have understood the poem’s meaning shall I appreciate its fitness to the words. Supposing another composer used the same text with equal, but contrasting, fitness? If Butor insists on that formative process we call rhyme, which in music is generalized into recapitulation, variation, development, how would he compare music to prose?

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. Eliot in 1920.

Inexorable dirt of the nostalgia is less like Proust than like the going-back sequences in Our Town or Un Carnet de bal. Or is it that these works themselves are so far away, while the situations within them now return? More quickly than the sight or sound, one can retrieve the smell and taste of a flic or ouvrier long ago adored and now doubtless decrepit or dead. First hot days, daffodillian, and prenubile girls, as they always have in this season, like white bats swarm the byways squeaking offensively in first-communion garb. First hot evenings, orchidian, and muscled paragons, as never before in old seasons, like butterscotch statues avoid the streets in favor of the working-class gay bar, rue Davy, in their salopettes. And one goes to bed, alone, disturbed.

Long ride through torrential downpour to Villejuif in Jacques Dupont’s car with Sauguet back-seat-driving all the way. (The reward was