Between Men

As Malevich has written, the airplane was not contrived in order to carry business letters from Berlin to Moscow (or the diplomatic pouch either from New York to Dublin) but rather in obedience to the irresistible drive of this yearning for speed to take on external form. In this line, Fama Volat: the Meneghini has sung. More later: it was more than just a night out.

I am off tomorrow to lonely, wintry, appropriate Manitoy to work on the outdoor-summer-night play, The Archons. (Seditiosi voci who do work of summer in winter, especially when work in question is, well, seditious, and features, as did Massine’s ballet of the Seventh Symphony, the Creation of the World, the Destruction of the World, and the Descent from the Cross in between.)

“For a while,” wrote Hart Crane, “I want to keep immune from beckoning and all that draws you into doorways, subways, sympathies, rapports and the City’s complicated devastation.” And Albertus Magnus, no less, directs “those wishing to reminisce, should withdraw from the public light into obscure privacy: in the public light the images of sensible things are scattered and their movement is confused; in obscurity however they are unified.”

Added to which, Aquinas says Prudence has eight parts: memoria, ratio, intellectus, docilitas, solertia, providentia, circumspectio, and cautio. All of which (do) (does) boil down to two words: skip town. To work on the play. The Archons. That’s the epic-allegory one I warned you about—the two-hour Gnostic version of the War Between the East Side and the West Side that we’re thinking of staging in the park and videotaping (television in the middle ’50s having become, thanks to the likes of you, something more than auditions).

It’s a little like a shorter version of the Mahabharata cut into Hardy’s Dynasts with more than just a nod to Monsignor Hugh Benson’s 1907 fable Lord of the World, a peppering of Plautus’s Asinaria (much with restless plebs) admixed with Coriolanus (idea of The Voices, as in The Cigarettes ) lines to cleave the general air with horrid speech. Boasting as it does, in addition to principals, a large cast of character men and women—Sixth Avenue will be put to work—bawds, grooms, bravos, duennas, domestics, porters, alquazils, alcaldes, night watchmen, municipal sanitation workers, and all the other forces of apparent good and obscure evil to be found in a great metropolis.

Basically, the good archons occupy the East Side—headquarters The Sherry Netherland, and the bad the West—headquarters The Dakota, and the theater of war is The Park. Except that the bad are in secret possession of the cathedral and Fanny Spellbound. I see him sitting under a hair dryer in the shape of the papal tiara. (And ye, ye unknown latencies shall thrill to every innuendo, and after all how desperately lèsemajesté is it? Monsignor Benson has the satanic airships destroy Rome and the pope with it.) Should I give our strategia control in return of St. John the Divine? Do we want it? They do of course have control of The Met, Carnegie, and City Center, but The Dr. Mabuse of Thirty-ninth Street is in secret league with the enemy. The one that started out as a comic rewrite of the Bacchae (you remember, it was called Revelers until Paranoy, peering over my shoulder at the premiere of NOIA at the program in my lap to see written the line “Mother, stop it—you’re tearing me to pieces!” groaned aloud), then veered off in the direction of the Troades. (You can blame your-pal-my-auntie for all this—it was she who insisted fifteen years ago I come back to New York, go to the Jesuits at Regis and learn Greek.) It’s the one that now bears the epigraph from Ezekiel 9: “Cause them that have charge over the city to draw near each other, each with his destroying weapon in his hand.”

You can see I’m hell-bent on being the next Maxwell Anderson/Christopher Fry: weighty themes/elevated expression of same—particularly the warning that New York could well disappear, exactly the way Byzantium did, and become the sore point of stories with morals in them. (Serve everybody right, too: New Yorkers, amateurs of Byzantine melodrama and Befreiungskrieg.) And which, due to the success of the carnival shindig of Equinox last, and to the warm relations obtaining between (the aforementioned) Herself The Madge and Hizzoner, the mayor, late of Yorkville, we can get The City to let us put it on—or photograph it, anyway, at the Bethesda Fountain.

It’s the one, in which, if she takes a shine to it (or they, my archons, the angels of the Rialto, offer her a whole lot of money, whichever happens first in the order of consequence). Or remind her that Shaw wrote Major Barbara for Eleanor Robson and she became Mrs. August Belmost. Perhaps I’d better not, though: the Miss Robson that was got took care of by the august August because she turned Shaw down. Still, Bridgewood is more likely to think of capturing a Texas millionaire through her art, through spectacle (even filmed) like the one The Redactor has made up for you in his pages, called Tulsa Buck O’Fogatry. Not bad. I’ll find out who the little bastard is if it takes overtures to the FBI and its heinous fag director through the very famous fag eminence I’m planning to excoriate in The Archons. Perhaps Strange will help me: I know these boys, they end up telling everything in confession.

La Bridgewood will be playing a cross between Mnesilochus, protagonist (in drag) of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae (and like him/her required to speak in hendecasyllables, but I think she does that already), Ezekiel (aforementioned), and the Chrysler Building—all lit up, the way it was to have been originally, when they molded all that shining Krupp steel into New York’s signal cathedral facade, and to have a high priest consort called Nimrod. After all, I tell myself, and I’ve told Bridgewood, Bernhardt, La divine horizontale in The Great War, carried over the trenches in a litter to give performances of the last act of La dame aux camellias by calcium light at night, played Strasbourg Cathedral in a pageant. “Let’s make a name for ourselves”—she, La Bridgewood, will announce (in imitation of Praxagora) to the assembled throng of chic refugees speaking all the tongues of the earth, the redistribution of all wealth and influence in the metropolis, while being ferried across from The Ramble in a poop. (Anecdote: two yentas on the sidewalk at the intermission of a Long Day’s Journey into Night matinee. One to the other: “Well, it’s not really a show—more of a play.”) I’m hoping for the reverse reaction. (And of course, lest the enterprise should be thought allegorical, it will be done in the up-to-the-second equivalent of New York Togate, and not palliate.)

Am hoping to feature opposite Bridgewood somebody beautiful. There are no more at home of course like your former Carnegie hall-mate. Percase whimsically did wonder were I to offer The Graybar Building to Cornell, and play John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers in the dual-piano version, might Marlon Man come back to be in it with her, as Grand Central Station, but we know, don’t we, he has bid sayonara to the stage.

Somebody beautiful, because the part is suggested by the career of Alcibiades, of whom Aristophanes (my predecessor) wrote: A lion should not be raised in the city, but if you decide to do so, you must cater to his ways. (Sounds like Bringing Up Baby, no? Also reminds me that Marlon has already played a lion—a blond one. What we need here is somebody who looks like your current pet—he who can only act only for the camera and only under Sirk—and can act in the flesh at the level of—oh, I don’t know, Tony Perkins? What about gorgeous Tony?) The career of Alcibiades and the melodrama of his being accused of throwing a raucous party on the eve of the disastrous Sicilian expedition that defiled the Eleusinian mysteries. The one, finally, that contains that vaudeville of elements from Greek tragedy and comedy both: Oedipus, Orestes, Elektra, Antigone; Philoctetes, Ion, Io, Hecuba; Tiresias, Pentheus, Medea, etc. Plus The Bacchae as nuns—remember I told you what I thought nuns were, and how they arose out of the cult of Isis, the Magdalen, and Maria Egiziaca. They are the Christ’s bacchantes, and instead of tearing Dionysius to bits they “receive” bits of their etc. Just so you know.

You wouldn’t tear a beloved to pieces of pressed white bread, would you? Anyway in the normal order of things a nun is not, despite the honorific title, a mother—pace Heloise—only I was thinking: you can always take the girl away from the nuns, but can you take the—but you took yourself away, didn’t you? Anyway, Tynan, next time he comes to town nosing for a job, will be sure to say I’ve been influenced by Giradoux and by John Whiting. He’s probably right.

Speaking of French influence, one wag said he heard it was going to be a sort of American Soulier de Satin spanning over a decade, and that the argument starts when Bridgewood loses one of her fuck-me pumps at El Morocco. Not bad. I’d sooner be compared aforehand to Claudel, who, even if he was a Nazi sympathizer, was also a diplomat (and used the diplomatic pouch as we do for his correspondence), than to Fry, who is really only a schoolmaster trading in on the myth that Shakespeare was one, too, which is ridiculous, because Shakespeare, the bulk of him, was the sequestered twin brother of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who may have run a little lyceum for young men, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

[Further this theme: the voices of the New York night “scripting” the book of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, The Archons, their lives, art politics, music politics, world politics, Destiny itself in the long run. Samples overheard and copied down (everybody is taping everybody at home and between the Inquiring Photographer and roving reporters on radio and television Everyman is a player.’]

If it is a defeating thing to insist on producing Art or Nothing (a new dramatic experiment, replete with progression d’effet, charpente, facade, cadences—and at military funerals there’s always one to count the cadence—not a morality for ranted recitation), then I shall go down howling. Or perhaps, better advised, instead, and better put in the words of my favorite extinct Ulster bard, the blind Seamus MacCuarta, to the people of the Cooley peninsula, for not properly recognizing his literary worth, I shall let them be—as badgers living underground their narrow lives, gorging themselves on the sweetmeats of innutritive illusion (as in any bawdy house on any side street north of Forty-second Street between Sixth and Eight Avenues you care to name).

After the Gotham signing party for Under Nephin (funny the way they think they owe me something for cutting me out of the Sitwell picture. They cut Jimmy Merrill out, too, and I don’t think either of us is going to suffer much from it: if only it were a sign of some transaction or other, but I can’t imagine it is) I don’t plan to be back in New York making the rounds rigged out in me fancy Dan until the New Year. (“Where does he go?” one linebacker asked another, I was told. “Oh, you know my dear, that island, somewhere off Massachusetts.” “Hm. He ought to be going to one off New Hampshire, called Smuttynose.”) Except of course to check one or more further Meneghini apparitions—the Tosca, the Lucia—and perhaps to spend an afternoon with her and Leo Lerman. (She’s not much for the passagiata: the publicity has been wormy—the Time cover, Dolores, the coy attentions commencing to be paid, we are told in appalled whispers, by “The Old Oaken Bucket in the Well of Loneliness”—and really, what a vicious parody of the divine Marie Dressler that one’s turned into: Cole Porter is a disillusioned cookie to think her fun; Johnny Donovan, drunk at Madame Spivvy’s, doing imitations of the Hy Gardner interview—like that.)

There was a gag going around that the ghost of Toscanini had appeared to the Meneghini the night before the opening, wailing, “The music is too great—it is beyond human powers. Cancel!” In any event, it was not a great official triumph, but details anon. One interesting theory had it that it is the only role she will not have a great success in at the Metropolitan, because the gods (which is to say the Elohim, dear, and not merely the Family Circle) will not have it. They will have it that Rosa’s triumph in her greatest role will here and only here go uncontested—her statue up on the Miller Shoe Building and all. I’m reminded of what you said of MMC, quoting Chorley wasn’t it, on Malibran, that nature had given her a rebel to subdue and not a vessel to command. I’m going to the second one, of course—we all are. Shame about her and New York—even about her and the Met. After having been treated as an anagram of Scala itself, and breezing of an aftermath into Biffi to be met as if she were Iside-stessa by those gaggles of gorgeous and ecstatic melochecche—well, schlepping it with Tony Arturi and Frances Moore from the Old Brewery across to the Burger Ranch, or down to Macy’s could hardly have been her idea of fan romance, and the Gotham City High Life, though it may attract her attention, can never do for her what the Milanese have done, for she lacks your (and Milanov’s) flair for the Ringling Brothers aspect of thuh opra, and for corralling private citizens in significant numbers (and Leo could make her welcome anywhere that mattered in New York, save Nuncle’s elevator at the Chelsea).

As a matter of fact, at Herbert Weinstock’s party for her last week (fully of those people from the kick-line, momentarily diverted from talking about you to talking about her) she was terribly quiet and shy—and when I mentioned you (I had to: she wasn’t wearing glasses and didn’t know who I was, not that it’s in her interest to recall me, especially from three years ago in Mexico City) she gave that odd look composed of complicity and awe: the awe I saw on her face on stage when in the boudoir scene you down-winded her with that open chest “figlia di Faraoni!” Open chest, incidentally, is something she should give up using: she is of breath too short for the gesture. So there.

Meanwhile, the father pulled us into the kitchen and announced summarily, “In my daughter’s breast there beats the spirit of Thermopylae!” (Not to be confused with the Spirit of Marathon—q.v. Under Nephin—who was in fact The Pythia herself—of Delphi—who raised a fog that confused the invader under Brennus—by the way not a Boi—most likely an Illyrian Keltoi—so that they fell about, and taking one another for the enemy, slew their own in overwhelming numbers.) “I don’t know if he knows what he means, dear,” I heard Leo L. whisper to Robert Giroux, but I hope to God nobody tries to convince Maria to sing Xerxes!” I thought to myself, self-immolation at the hot gates of hell?

Absit omen. Sounds to me like her fantasy runs to mass suicide after her final performance—and to think that this underground epic accuses you of Stuvwxyzchina—with notes left all over town, reading Go, stranger-to-this-mystery, and tell the Times, the Tribune, the Journal-American, the World Telegram and Sun, the News, the Mirror, the Post, and the Brooklyn Eagle, that here, obeying her behests, we fell (or were burnt to crisps. Really, she should leave Marfa’s scene to you, even if you have poached on her Violetta). Whereas you’re content with bringing them screaming to their feet, she must have them paroxysmal, fetal, trussed in straitjackets, begging for surcease of sorrow and for merciful death—and you never know: if the kick-line runs out of steam, if you stay away more than a single season, if you retire to have children, she could prevail—which, after all, might be, well, as the Princeton boys are said to say, only fair—because as for life as you—and I, sometimes, construe it, she is, I’m afraid, maladapted.

The Time cover story was vile, and obviously threw her. (She is a very nervous woman, pace, spirit of Thermopylae, and it ought to be remembered that the size of New York, compared to that of Milan, or Chicago even, is enough to throw anybody, not to mention somebody it’s already thrown out, so to speak.) Neither is she terribly well educated—but you knew that. She is witty—or caustic—but for instance, she missed the point entirely when, in some banter at Herbert W.’s about the fee controversy, it was mentioned that Tucker was reportedly outraged and might not do the Tosca because she was getting secret outside help, as it were, Leo Lerman snapped, “Doesn’t he realize Maria wishes to emulate the virtuous woman of the Bible whose price is above Ruby’s?” One thinks of what you yourself might have said of the Meneghini (in relation to the Frankly Dowdy Diva from above the Gelateria in Parma) countering the charge that the fondness for luxury and couture seemed to sit ill on a supposedly dedicated artist. “Sure, where’s the harm at all—and a bit of class.”

And, after all, although it’s a shameful truth, Time is a great part of New York: a vile part, but a significant one. I must tell you, it did occur to me that, feeling the way you’ve felt all these years about her, we might have mobilized something preemptive—but who knew that Luce would do what he did, in the holy name of motherhood? (And he likely entertains some confused notions about her premature antifascist activities during the war.) He would have done the same thing to you, you realize, when you landed here—unable as he was to disentangle the skein of your story, buying the story that you had been singing in Omsk, in Minsk (as opposed to Minsky’s, in Jersey City; it is known you went there with Auntie, Consuelo Gilligan, and Grainne de Paor, but whether or not you gave them a song is not recorded), in Vitebsk (and probably convinced in his own alleged mind that you pushed Masaryk out the window like some Bohunk Tosca), had you not known what you know: had you not given that private warble over in Jersey, and enjoyed that fortuitous deep-dish tea with Lucy Moses and Lila Tyng, who’d so adored you that winter in Paris as Amneris, as to the true authorship—and the exact remuneration involved in the transaction—of The Women. (I remember how you said, “But there is a copy of the script in the Library of Congress with her handwritten corrections, and Paranoy’s pointing out how easy it was to sit at rehearsals and transcribe the action of director and rethinking and cast rethinking and rewriting to keep the audience from leaving the theater. And you said it seemed so much her story and how hard it was to imagine a man writing it. Well, perhaps now, in the light of what’s been coming to light you wonder what your story is, in relation to the said text—and so perhaps does Neri [see below].)

Pity all the same we couldn’t have foreseen the attack this fall on your friend—or the remake of The Women as The Opposite Sex (and the Variety headline Ralph made up trumpeting the hoax: “Luce Lip-Sync Gyps”). She might well have paid a courtesy call on the American ambassadress in Rome, sipped a companionable Campari or two, and spoken a few straight words—delivered a few home truths (as Dawn Powell says), something like, “Listen, bitch, we know who wrote it, and for how much.” Especially since the noise about Trovaso Corradi being interested, because of Visconti’s admiration of the Cukor pic in Mrs. Luce’s (of, for forty thousand bucks George S. Kaufman’s) American comic master-piece. (Rather diverting it would have been, too, than the Barber-Menotti opus for Jurinac—and you know the full T on that, don’t you? They showed it to your friend, hoping to make it her Metropolitan debut, and she said: “Rewrite it so that Erika is the heroine, and I’ll think about it.” As the watchword hereabouts nowadays goes—taken direct from your devoted bodhisattva, Panama Hattie-Three-Sheets, or M. Chowderhead Bahadur Baksheesh: Tee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee.)

Notes from the Hotel Chelsea: Uncle Virgil, Lone Defender of the Mitigated (aka the Countess Razamowsky) wasn’t there—or claims not. (Paranoy said, “No, he wasn’t there; Nuncle prefers—trahit sua nunque voluptas—to fall asleep nine stories up at home on Twenty-third Street these days rather than in public parterres on Thirty-ninth and Fifty-seventh streets—where love no longer beckons. Not to mention the fact that some people are beginning to say Who? and even to confuse him with the other T, the one with the P up in Cambridge who writes those chorales and sanguine, gusty symphonies that flirt with dissonance but are not besmirched.” He, Nunc, has however heard she’s a hoax and has apparently written to—get this—Mary Garden [they being ‘on s’en passerait’]. Yes, dear old Mary, that pillar of strength, sanity, and perspicacity, known to the world, as was Jenny Lind, for piety, modesty, charitable good works, intrinsic worth of heart and delicacy of mind, and a spotless private life—aka to her intimates “Little Egypt” and “Isadora”—she learned dancin’ in a hurry, and ’fore the days of Arthur Murray.) Written to say so (she is a hoax) in so many words: apparently he is in his own mind the Flugelmann of that small band of vocal connoisseurs convinced that the rising tide of superstition and Kabbalism is too damaging to society to be ignored. This gives him a cause to which he can append his energies, lest he subside altogether, like any number of old bags around town, into beadwork pillows, sailor’s valentines, gin, and jigsaw puzzles.

(Not to mention the fact that he would much rather dish with Mary over some really significant and timeless issue involving for instance her art versus that of Povla Frisch or the realization at long last of her ambition to sing Kundry—which he could easily arrange with a single phone call to Josephine La Puma and what better venue after all for Parsifal than the Palm Gardens [Madame Middleton would surely graciously demur] than deal with these upstart blow-ins—except to point out of course the fact that Sabatini, after all, did create frissons in her, Mary’s, honor at the Ambassador, whereas what has been created for this Callas at the Ritz, only some new kind of greasy doughnut.)

Remember, Nunc was all set to denounce you, in Aida (probably for waking him up so rudely in the boudoir scene, with “figlia di Faraoni!” For that and the unfortunate contretemps with the Neri transformation). “Nothing, I fear,” he was heard to whisper to Olin Downes in the can after the Triumphal Scene, “but a rather more hysterical Herta Glaz, costumed in an overexuberant and yet, for a royal personage surely underclad manner, fielding a performing style and a blazing pyrean headdress together suggestive less of Miss Gladys Swarthout than of, say, Miss Margie Hart—and reminiscent of that of the gigantic red-haired harlot impersonated by Bert Savoy.” (Did they run that back to you, at the interval to send you into V-8 overdrive in the Judgment Scene, reducing the presbyter to a mass of quivering mandarin jelly? He later denied saying it at all—claimed he was maliciously misquoted by a rival; that what he’d actually said was “an uncanny portrait of a mysterious heart: she is a fiery Amneris who calls to mind no earlier exponent of the role, but rather the greatest of all Aidas, Theresa Stolz, the toast of the House of Savoy.”)

Nunc is of course most famous—apart from giving Lou Harrison a nervous breakdown—for his pronouncement on another of your favorite pieces of Americana, recently reimmortalized by your favorite new American soprano. “A libretto,” he said of Porgy and Bess, “that should never have been accepted, on a subject that should never have been treated, by a composer who should never have attempted it.” (Clearly, he was aching for two more nevers to make up a resounding Lear-like crescendo, but Rhetoric, the tease, failed him.) Paranoy says Nunc has become like an old Roman principessa (perhaps he’s been influenced by the creation of the mythical “Principessa Oriana Incantevole, deaf since the bombing of Rome, in MNOPQR STUVWXYZ), living on the piano nobile of her mind’s crumbling palazzo, amidst the fantastic wreckage left behind in the wake of bands of marauding visitors (which gave me the shivers, for I’ve always liked the Chelsea).

“The whole theater was an insane asylum—fists waving, pummeling, hoarse guttural exclamations and anguished cries filling the auditorium. Strangers fell sobbing into one another’s arms; delirious women clinging to one another staggered toward the exit doors. There was an undeniable sense of a universal chaos out of which some entirely new era was being created.”

Somebody said Marcia Davenport was there, telling everybody who would listen that this woman was a flash in the pan and that the real news was Jolanda Meneguzer. Paranoy said, “That wasn’t Marcia Davenport; that was Rodney Bergamot’s new drag.” But we know for a fact it was the only child of Alma Gluck, not merely from the way she sat out the intermissions in the stark attitude Dostoyevsky (who really should be raised to render the scene) made the derisive mouth of Nastasya Filipnova decry, to wit: “If I sit in a box in the French theater like the incarnation of some inapproachable dress-circle virtue . . . etc.” Not only, but also because she dropped her program on the steps leading down from Sherry’s on the way out during the final curtain uproar and some deft queen retrieving it for her and spying script, pulled a quick switch then disappeared up the secret Thirty-ninth Street side stairway to the Family Circle. (It all came out the next day on the Line, along with the following.

“Suddenly, Vincenzo began to sob. He doubled over and buried his head of golden curls in the bent crook of his arm. All of Paris was humming out the window. ‘Qu’as-tu, cheri?’ the Countess whispered, putting down her needlepoint and turning to him in alarm. ‘What is it? Que (Qui?) fait-tu mal? What has disturbed you so?’ ‘Niente . . . niente,’ he muttered (for though joy is a convulsion, grief is indeed a habit, and emotions had long since become his events) his wet face gleaming with tears in the demi-lune. ‘Sono trieste—e straniero!’”

And yes, your pet lunatic standee (or is that slandee?) was there for the seasonal opening: the one we call Bartleby; the one you and the countess maintain lives in a broom closet at Patelson’s and forges antique baroque scores. Dressed in the usual semiclerical black, with the worn collar reversed. Listened, as always, to everything from the Fortieth Street lobby, sitting under the bust of Caruso, clutching Fear and Trembling & A Sickness Unto Death, reading from them at intermission, acknowledging (in the piercing and haughty luster of that gaze enjoining any notion of fraternity) nessuno.

Whereupon I myself saw, wreathed in blue cigarette smoke, either Dalí or the false Dalí (the latter, I’m inclined to think, as there was no version, true or false, either of Gala at his side, only a gaggle of the living foredoomed). Whoever he was he was heard to proclaim, much to the consternation of the score desk gnomes, “The music is irrelevant with Callas—she is elsewhere from the first measure. I have in my life in the theater come upon only two incarnations of the tragic muse, this woman, Duse and Margarita Xirgu.” “Who? ” one score desk gnome wailed.

(I might have told him, but Lorca’s ghost came floating at just that moment out of the men’s room, flashed his eyes, put a finger to his lips, and yet I heard him say, “You know how I have suffered in this city, I cannot bear to be here, I don’t know why, but do not allow this terrible man to profane by speaking it the divine name of Margarita Xirgu!” I promised him I would prevent all further discourse of the only woman he could ever love, and then I felt his chill ameliorate and indeed his dark and diminutive ectoplasmic form dissolve in the light of Sherry’s chandelier.)

All right, I can’t not talk about it all night. She may have three voices, all of them archetypes capable of defining for a generation the music she sings, but for me—to keep the triad argument going—she is everything in two of the three great essential manifestations of the Triple Goddess as envisioned by Mozart in the letter to his father wondering if he could snag Da Ponte after Salieri was through with him. That is to say the seria and the mezzo carattere. I don’t see that she can ever be the buffa, which you can and have been. I’m sorry, but there it is.

The immediate problem, according to one seer, is: she is at the Met up against the psychic remnant of the greatest Norma of the early century, and cannot, for all her genius, best it. (She’s even known to have given on the subject of the sometime vaudevillian who once gave voice lessons and sang a piece of the Verdi Requiem with Joan Crawford, “with her voice you can’t compare us—it’s not fair.” Fair? Sounds like the canard about Princeton boys and a certain specified reciprocal erotic configuration.) Whatever the reason, this Norma, unless it undergoes a metamorphosis (or unless she starts some class of blazing affair in Gotham) is not going to be the one. Anyway, according to everybody that’s already happened, yes? In London—twice: and that’s the second part of the argument, that having done that, she simply will not be given what she was given there: so that the two great Normas of the century as it turns out will have been Ponselle here and her there. You know how people go on. (It’s true, life is like that.)

“This is not a job for a music critic,” one vilificator avowed, “this is a job for a plumber! When she did Butterfly in Chicago, I said I’d rather be listening to Ganna Walska. Tonight I’d rather be listening to Ina Souez singing with Spike Jones! I am inclined after hearing this performance to believe the rumor that it was this voice—this woman—who gave Anita Cerquetti a nervous breakdown! I mean really. What has issued from those distended jaws is a voice such as it would be madness to attempt describing. There are indeed two or three epithets which might be applicable to it in parts. One might say, for instance, that the sound was harsh and broken and hollow, but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason that no similar sound can ever have scorched the ears of humanity. There are two particulars, nevertheless, which might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation. In the first place the voice seemed to reach one’s ears from a vast distance—as from some deep cavern under Broadway. In the second place, it impresses itself upon the sense of hearing as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress themselves upon the sense of touch.”

For my part, I’ll tell you that I have never—not even from you, not even from Lady Day (who is the only one finally to compare either of you with) heard emotional deprivation voiced with more molten anguish, whether in one voice worried into three folds, as you insist, or from the three voices the Italians demark, whichever. At white heat, which I felt she reached nearly as often here as at Covent Garden, she is the end of the known histrionic world. The mint of the musical genius—the way, like you, she does her count from within, and is so always and never marking; the way her preemptive attack and swell to full volume in next to no time allows for split-second, almost improvisatory variation from phrase to phrase within the context of the line . . . all that exquisite finesse that gives bel canto the stamp of a particular performer in a particular strait. She is with you and Victoria one of the trinity of exponents of that ars subtilior in which the giddy pleasure of rhythmic invention explodes. Such amazing, hard-won control veils only somewhat her dangerous and forbidding affect: a raging, and not so musical torrent (hence the “argument” in performance between her art and her ballistics) in contrast to your dark still well that could make me lose my mind, were it not lost.

(In fact there is some confusion of effect between you. One knows that fiatto is as distinct as a fingerprint, but were not the grain of your instruments so nearly opposite: were not her voice so molten and yours so radioactive, one might be forgiven for arraigning you in the court prosecuting her for mass audience illusion-homicide, and vice versa.) If I found any fault at all, it was in the occasional end phrase: she tends nowadays to run out of steam (the operative word, I’m afraid, among the naysayers was scrannel) certainly in relation to London, in ’52, and the consequence seems to be that she dwells a fraction of a second too long on certain final notes, until the fevered brain refires. That and (I know we don’t talk about wobble, but) the wobble you can at times now indeed play jump rope with, and the undeniable fact that she sometimes sounds absolutely like a coyote. (Somebody cackled, apropos the much-mooted Dallas engagements, “They are gonna love her out there—she yodels!”) Like a coyote or like an egregious example of the notorious bad fifth (of which I know something myself, coming from a family of poitin distillers) in Henri Arnaut’s fifteenth-century treatise on the Pythagorean tuning—and that is frightening. (And reminds me, though I never thought I would be reminded, of Mark Twain’s description of that animal as “a living, breathing allegory of want.”)

During the first intermission a combustible discussion of the sort much valued nowadays in existentialist New York got going at the bar in Sherry’s—not over anything so insignificant and contingent as La Divina’s wobble: rather over the question of Norma and motherhood. One or two loons posited that you had to have been a mother, and three or four more took the opposite view—the Golgotha Church organist (redolent of vetiver and inhaling Benedictine like Vicks) going even so far as to insist you shouldn’t even have had one. Team A cited Ponselle and the big Z as non-moms, and Neri and thee as moms (both with lost children). I thought Ralph would choke to death on rage and spit. I found it riveting: in my experience it was the first time in the history of categories that you and the Old Foghorn have ever been put in the same file, except as women or as members of the cast of Aida.

I of course could only think of the truth of the matter, of that boy in Jerusalem, who has certainly passed the age of the bar mitzvah. Will he remember you? Does he realize who you are? You never said you were his mother, only the neighbor, fair enough, but he must remember his years with you, your tutoring him in the Torah like a Deborah in the wilds of Ruthenia. Deborah is “swarm of bees.” “Busy little bees full of stings, making honey.” You could never have stung the boy, only fed him on honey. I wonder do I sound jealous when I speak of this great work of yours. No, I don’t think so, only mindful that I myself was in another context a boy fed on honey. Incidentally, apropos lineups, I thought you’d want to know where they put her in the rogues’ gallery in the lobby. Right next to you, flush left of the north, or Fortieth Street box office window. It took me a while to remember whom they had moved: Mary C-V, who’s now batting her eyes between Milanov and Blanche Thebom. So there.

Electing to abjure the felicities of the recessional (the gangways were, as Ralph declared, “imbedded crowded”), I cut out through the pass door to the executive offices (my prerogative now that I am an employee of the place—if that’s what the translator of Salomé is entitled to call himself [and what else can I call myself, “Bosey”? Or put another way—the way of wit: “I never call myself, dear; I’m always in; too bad. I’d like to be able to give myself a piece of my mind once in a while, but my answering service is down on strong language”]). Whereupon, the big Z, with that ample vestal Maisie Halloran in tow, loomed up in the prospect (evidently having just left the Del Monaco dressing room, where God knows what ...) very like the Queen Mary emerging from a North River morning fog into her waterfront berth. “Zo, vot are you doink, smilink like it vuz your vedding? I am goink to cabel Mawrdew Czgowchwz on you!” “Madame, don’t bother, I’m confessing. How could I live with myself and keep such a passion secret?” She looked balefully from Maisie to me. “You Irish could do anything.” Poor Maisie looked pilloried (after decades of selfless toil organizing socials, and especially after the latest salvo against Z by the Callas lobby in English Opera, calling Mama’s Aida in particular ridiculous, and excoriating the Slavic pitch. Mary was heard screaming only last weekend, “She’s the only Aida in history who sounds Ethiopian! She researched that pitch—it’s the way they sounded!”).

However, concerning the woman, she is a primitive woman, for all that she is a musical genius and for all that she has fallen in love with the Audrey Hepburn look and means to achieve it. A poorly educated, self-doubting (and therefore in respect of the genius perhaps all the more touching), primitive woman who has been terribly punished, whose overriding idea of punishing retribution makes her finally less compelling than a woman like you (well, there are no other women like you, so you) who having gone through hell is able to find a kind of restoration through kindness.

I could say more—all the nasty speculation about the weight loss from devotees of warblers at least four axe handles across the pistol pockets. Let suffice that everything you’ve held about the Meneghini all these years is still true, and the only thing to be done about it (at least until the Pope opens The Letter from Fatima in 1960) is to put the two of you back together and charge a hundred dollars a ticket to raise cash to elect the first American president who likes to go to thuh opra. Herodiade alternating the mother and the daughter? Or are you currently so steeped in mother/daughter cross-referential melodrama that all you yearn to do is—but you declined Dialogues, didn’t you? (It’s going to be a succès fou, but I never did see you in it.)

And so skip town—but first, the last First Friday of 1956. They’ll just have to do without their December: those who have not already made nine in a row must begin again. I do hate leaving town, just in case Winchell does decide to blow his brains out on television: it would give me as much joy to behold as did the public humiliation and death of the senator from Wisconsin. I know, hatred is a wound, and I pray to have it lifted . . . one day. In the meantime I am so delighted with the sponsors of his vile show for canceling him that I may take up smoking Old Gold and give myself a Toni (“which twin?”). Also, I’d love to crash the parties the debutante has lined up: the noise is she’s going in Harry Winston’s rented rocks like a showgirl. Glad I was at Herbert W’s: she came looking like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.

I could go on in this vein, but I’d best abrupt myself if I’m to regroup my forces for the day and face life (I wonder will it ever get to the stage again when I sit down and look at that thing the way we did last winter?). Best of luck with Pilgrim Soul and the ways of Eire-wohn mo bhron. Remember that Maev means intoxication. And don’t worry about playing your own mother; Gloria de Haven did it with no after effect (that one can detect).

Do write c/o General Delivery, Newport, or telephone the general store. (Massachusetts is a far cry from New York, but not so far as that from Dublin.) After last summer, they’d send out Indian runners in the winter storm to fetch the eremite off his lonely hill, down from his own Tor Ballyhoo where on the widow’s walk in the howling nor’easter Calliope is right at home amid the travails and flails of any number of wailing Whaling widows, see above.