Classical Composers - Biography, Modern Classical Music - General & Miscellaneous

Knowing When to Stop

Name: Knowing When to Stop
Author: Ned Rorem
ISBN: 9780671728724

by Ned Rorem

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Overview

He is among America's great living composers. His prose has won him distinction in literary circles. Now, in a revealing memoir covering his first twenty-eight years, ending in 1951 when his published diaries begin, but always with the perceptive wisdom and chagrin made inevitable by the intervening years, Ned Rorem analyzes his astonishing career. Published in four volumes, Ned Rorem's diaries - an ongoing chronicle of his life and work - have taken on cult status and have won plaudits everywhere. "Rorem is a marvelous writer," raved James Dickey. "His prose is supple, vivid, arresting," wrote London's Times Literary Supplement. "His intelligence never permits him to be blinded to the truth. He is candid to the point of scandal . . . racy yet poetic, earthy yet exquisite," said Saturday Review. With the appearance of his Paris Diary in 1966, Rorem became a hero for the pre-Stonewall gay movement as the first cultural figure to come out of the closet without apology. The new book's unflinching candor goes well beyond the narcissistic boundaries of his diaries. Recounting friendships with such vital presences as Leonard Bernstein, Martha Graham, Jean Cocteau, Billie Holiday, Francis Poulenc, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, and, of course, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Knowing When to Stop explodes old secrets and examines new truths. Starting in Chicago, moving to New York, Paris, Morocco, and other points both exotic and familiar, Ned Rorem's memoir is a masterpiece of distances pulled together, lives resurrected, opportunities ignored, chances recaptured. It also gives full expression to the terrible sexual and alcoholic dissolution of one famed for his youthful beauty, but possessed of an indomitable will not only to survive but to triumph. Here is the life of a man who knew himself perhaps too well.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Rorem is arguably this century's finest American composer of art songs--but better known to readers as the author of the remarkably candid, irresistibly readable The Paris and New York Diaries. Admitting he was a ravishing youth, he scandalized 1940s New York and Paris by his nonstop drinking and avid sex with any man who would share his sheets. He writes brilliantly, illuminating what could be dull moments with unknown people--as well as offering marvelously frank portraits of household names, among them Jean Cocteau, Aaron Copland, Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham, Truman Capote, Virgil Thomson, Igor Stravinsky, Billie Holliday and Paul Bowles. All this, and a constant flicker of outrageous opinions too. One reads on, paralyzed with pleasure by the flashing intelligence, the exact, colorful mot , the endless quotability. Why a memoir, and what does it add to the diaries--especially since it covers only Rorem's first 27 chock-a-block years? ``A memoir is not a diary. Diaries are written in the heat of battle, memoirs in the repose of retrospect.'' So the reader enjoys not only a whirlwind picture of bohemian artistic life during and just after WWII, but a touching self-portrait of an elderly semi-recluse, happily ``married'' now for decades, utterly abstemious of booze, reliving a madcap youth with only occasional regrets. The reader also enjoys Rorem's quotability: ``Minor artists borrow, great ones steal. All art is theft.'' ``People seldom change as they age, they just get more as they always were.''``I compose as I do because no one else is making quite the sound I need to hear.'' Rorem has marvelous fun classifying everything as either German (which he dislikes) or French (which he loves). ``This book fails,'' he concludes, ``because it is all Content without Style, and Content is German while Style is French.'' Wrong. His memoir overflows with both. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Celebrated American composer Rorem has written a contemplative, touching, funny, occasionally shocking memoir covering the first 27 years of his life. The reader becomes an invited guest in legendary parlors as Rorem tells of his life and the circles of which he was a part. Billie Holiday, John Cage, Eugene Istomin, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Martha Graham, Alfred C. Kinsey, Truman Capote, and Jean Cocteau are among those Rorem discusses. Spiked with introspection, these reminiscences serve as his vehicle for exploring in print the questions that he has pondered all his life. The result is well written, though parts of this book plod as Rorem, by his own admission, attempts to include what he thinks should be in a memoir. Nonetheless, Rorem provides a clear window for those who wish to peer into the artistic period of time that he and his associates claimed. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Kathleen Sparkman, Baylor Univ., Waco, Tex.