Wings of Friendship: Selected Letters, 1944-2003
by Ned Rorem
Shoemaker & Hoard. 332 pages, $28.
LETTERS ARE both intimate and self-conscious. In them we describe our life as we would like at least one other person to know it. What kind of life does Ned Rorem describe in Wings of Friendship, a volume containing almost sixty years of his letters?
In part, it is the life of a gay celebrity. Rorem came of age in the years after World War II. He was a gifted composer, studying at Curtis and Juilliard and winning major prizes for his compositions before he was thirty.
Rorem was a copyist for Virgil Thomson and studied with Aaron Copland. But besides being a hardworking composer who supported himself with fellowships and commissions, he was also very good-looking. Rorem not only knew many of the prominent figures in the arts, he slept with a number of them. Is this not everyone’s dream, to be young, gifted, and gorgeous? And gay: the world began to read about his artistic and sexual adventures in 1966 when he published The Paris Diary, the first of his seventeen books and still the most famous. Now we have his Selected Letters. Despite the fame of the author and most of his correspondents, readers hoping for scintillating gossip in Wings of Friendship will be disappointed. And while there isn’t much backbiting and no shocking revelations, there’s plenty of intelligent discussion about music and writing. Looking back on his youth, Rorem sees himself as a sexual innocent who didn’t set out to seduce or be seduced. The letters support this claim, ever returning to two main themes: friendship and work. Because the correspondence covers so many years, we can see these concerns deepen as Rorem’s life changes. No one is spared the eternal verities of decline and death. What matters is how we face them when our time comes. Rorem is a touching example of a gay man facing them with decency to others and a determination, through his work, to “leave something.” Decline was the last thing on Rorem’s mind in the 1940’s and 50’s, when his letters show us a polite, ambitious, and somewhat self-absorbed young man on the make. He is enthusiastic about his musical projects and grateful for the help he receives from elders like Thomson and Carl Van Vechten, as well as his contemporary, Frank O’Hara, whose poems he set to music. We might prefer more description of daily life in Europe in that now mythical post-war period, but for Rorem, writing music and getting it performed were what mattered. Still, he doesn’t regard friends as mere steppingstones in his career. Letters to correspondents across the ocean always end with his fervent wish to see them soon, a refrain that will continue as Rorem and his friends scatter throughout the world. One curious inclusion is a twenty-page excerpt from a 1956 letter, originally written in French, to a man who broke Rorem’s heart. We know too little of the story to have much reaction, except to say that the young Rorem often seems to be striking a pose of heartbreak and angst rather than expressing real feelings. This overwrought, artificial tone appears nowhere else in the book. In a warm reply to a young playwright who had sent him a fan letter in 1963, Rorem could be describing himself when he states “you are lucky beyond belief in knowing what you want of the future, and in your perseverance in how to achieve it.” In the 1960’s and 70’s, Rorem knew what he wanted: to compose major musical works that would reach a wide audience. Although he always resented the neglect of his work by the music performance industry, in 1976 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Air Music, a long orchestral suite. The best discussions of music are found in letters to the pianist Eugene Istomin and the critic Andrew Porter. The best comments on writing come from the many letters to Paul Bowles, a man whose work Rorem admired and for whom he felt great affection, even though Rorem calculated they had seen each other a total of 43 hours over a 55-year period. Rorem is not shy about stating his opinions: he tries the twelve-tone system “for about a week,” and he questions the praise heaped on 1970’s icons Sweeney Todd, Woody Allen movies, and Beverley Sills, describing all three as “okay, but not that okay.” He gives John Simon and Norman Podhoretz firm rebukes for their homophobic comments while reminding them, somewhat sadly, that they’re still friends. As Rorem reaches his sixties in the 1980’s, death and decline make their unavoidable appearance. His parents and his artistic fathers, Thomson and Copland, fade and pass away after long lives. Jim Holmes, his partner of 32 years, battles AIDS for five years, although friends were not told the nature of his illness until after his death. Letting James Purdy know of the death, Rorem writes: “Nothing seems very important anymore.” Rorem has outlived most of his contemporaries. In letter after letter, he pays generous tributes to famous friends and expresses his condolences to their spouses and partners. Increasingly alone, he comes to wonder if he exists only through his work. The final letter compliments Angela Lansbury on a performance, but it concludes: “I am proud that we are friends.” Rorem’s work will endure. After reading these letters we hope he also knows he has been a kind and loyal friend to many people. Daniel A. Burr is an assistant dean at the Univ. of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he also teaches courses on literature and medicine.
