A Chance Meeting, page 31
Marcel Duchamp by Richard Avedon, 1958.
After that first meeting, Cage and Duchamp had crossed paths now and again, at social events and at galleries. Cage wrote a piece called Music for Marcel Duchamp that accompanied a short film of Duchamp’s work in 1947, and Cage remained very aware of Duchamp all the time that his own compositional style was developing. As he began to make music using operations of chance, he found he was particularly indebted to some of Duchamp’s early experiments: the one where Duchamp dropped meter-long pieces of string onto a piece of glass and glued them down the way they fell to create a new image of measurement; or the way Duchamp and his sisters drew notes out of a hat and used them to make musical compositions. Cage once ran into the Duchamps in Venice and said, “Isn’t it strange, Marcel? The year I was born you were using chance operations.” Duchamp replied: “I must have been fifty years ahead of my time.”
Cage took chance to be the elimination of personality, but Duchamp thought chance unavoidably carried with it an interpretation, which he felt was the expression of a person’s subconscious. Duchamp sometimes said to people, “Your chance is not the same as mine, is it?”
•
When he came for chess lessons, Cage was reluctant to ask Duchamp any direct questions; he was content to be in Duchamp’s presence. They talked of mutual acquaintances or mushrooms or the war in Vietnam. Cage could be a little vague about politics, but he was more and more concerned. The next year, Cage would dedicate his book A Year from Monday “to us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less.” Probably they talked about chess. Marcel Duchamp played chess steadily, was the International Correspondence Chess Olympiad Champion, designed a pocket chess set for which he could not find a market, and co-wrote, with German chess expert Vitaly Halberstadt, a book entirely about a rare situation in the endgame—the book was called Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled. Teeny Duchamp was herself a very good chess player, quite capable of beating Marcel on occasion.
Teeny Duchamp had first been married to Pierre Matisse, the son of Henri Matisse; Pierre Matisse ran a very successful gallery in New York. In this respect, too, Teeny Duchamp was helpful to her second husband, who supported himself in part as an art dealer. When Cage came to their apartment, he saw paintings by Matisse, Miró, and Balthus, and a Duchamp painting on glass that had been a study for The Large Glass called 9 Malic Molds. Cage and Duchamp might have talked about the art business; there may have been long periods when nothing much got said at all. But somehow the Duchamps found out more about Cage’s work, for within a year they had asked for a complete list of the music he had written.
Cage was interested in the texture and resonance of sounds of all kinds: radios, typing, people drinking glasses of water, his own voice telling stories. Duchamp was attentive to sound, too. One of his early readymades, With Hidden Noise, had a secret object inside it that rattled around when you lifted the piece, surprising viewers in 1916. Nearly fifty years later, when Duchamp picked up a Rauschenberg construction in which Rauschenberg had also put a hidden rattling object, Duchamp said with a delighted smile, “I think I recognize that tune.”
Cage always felt that he was working very much in Duchamp’s line, but, as Cage said later, Duchamp “spoke constantly against the retinal aspects of art,” while “I have insisted upon the physicality of sound and the activity of listening.” It might seem like they were taking opposite positions, “yet I felt so much in accord with everything he was doing that I developed the notion that the reverse is true of music as is true of the visual arts.” But Cage also knew that his use of sound upset the tradition of harmony in very much the way that Duchamp’s use of things made painting, as Duchamp said, “intolerable.”
•
John Cage and Marcel Duchamp were interested in measurement; they particularly liked to know the answer to the question, For how long? A friend of Duchamp’s said of him that “his finest work is his use of time.” Duchamp loved chess in part because he could see the game developing across time in his mind. He said the four-dimensionality of chess made it a “visual and plastic thing.” Cage, though he probably didn’t think of it as an inheritance from General Grant, often specified that his performers synchronize their watches before beginning, and later he composed a work that would take six hundred years to perform—a cathedral in Germany eventually undertook the project. To make his most famous piece, 4'33", Cage used chance operations and the charts of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, also called the I Ching, to determine thousands of tiny increments of time, which he then added up into three movements of 33", 1'20", and 2'40", at least in the published version of the score. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds the pianist was to come out and sit in utter silence. Cage said he had been inspired in part by Rauschenberg’s white paintings. The piece caused a furor when it was premiered; it had the quality of not quite being able to say what it is, the same quality that characterized Duchamp’s inventions—the readymades, The Large Glass, and, finally, Etant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau 2. le gaz d’éclairage.
After Marcel Duchamp died, it was revealed that he had been working in secret for the last twenty years on Etant donnés, the title usually translated as Given: 1. the waterfall 2. the illuminating gas. Teeny Duchamp had helped model for the naked body seen through the peephole in the wooden door, but otherwise no one knew of its existence. Duchamp used to say that most works lose what he called their “emanation” after about twenty or thirty years. For example, he said, his Nude Descending a Staircase was now completely dead. The mastery of Duchamp’s endgame was that Etant donnés was enduringly unexpected. It particularly came as a shock to people who had loved Duchamp’s work and his ideas that the piece seemed to be retinal. Cage, grasping the contradiction more easily than most, said simply, “Only a great body of work could include such an extreme reversal.” Thinking back to those chess conversations, he remembered that one of the rare remarks about art Duchamp had made, and he had made it several times, was “Why don’t artists require people to look at a painting from a specified distance?” “It wasn’t,” Cage said, “until his last work was finally revealed that I saw what he meant.”
•
John Cage’s dearest friends—Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham—also became involved with the work of Duchamp. Johns and Rauschenberg took to coming around fairly often. They had been to Philadelphia together to see the collection of Duchamp’s works that Walter Arensberg had donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They loved the readymades and were overwhelmed by The Large Glass. Johns conceived the idea of building a version of The Large Glass to be used as a set for one of Cunningham’s dance pieces, Walkaround Time. He later said that, when he proposed the idea, Duchamp, “with a look of horror on his face,” asked who would build the set. He relaxed when Johns said he would do it himself. Duchamp, though aloof, was glad of this new attention. He had gambled heavily that the artists of the future would care for his work, and as he prepared his final moves it was very nice to feel that he could count on Johns and Rauschenberg and Cunningham and Cage. The set for Walkaround Time was made of plastic pieces resembling the elements of The Large Glass; it was, according to people who saw it, extraordinarily beautiful. Cunningham remembered that, after the dance performance, Duchamp, though he said he was nervous, held his head up and went onstage to take his bow, climbing the stairs without once looking down.
Duchamp thought a great deal about how to make art that went around painting; his fundamental work was his because he chose it, and also because it happened to him by chance. He found it easier to work in this way in America. He explained to an American interlocutor that in England, people act as the grandsons of Shakespeare, “and so, when they come to produce something of their own there is a sort of traditionalism that is indestructible. This does not exist here. You don’t give a damn about Shakespeare, do you? You’re not his grandsons at all. So it is a perfect terrain for new developments.”
There was something of a riddle to Duchamp’s pronouncement, for he also said that his choices weren’t without antecedent. Duchamp thought of himself as drawing on Gertrude Stein, with whom he had so urgently debated the fourth dimension fifty years before at the rue de Fleurus. In a rare interview given at the very end of his life, Duchamp compared himself to Stein and began to explain the lineage of his own American tradition. But the interviewer, who made the common mistake of believing that because each American chooses his or her own influences America lacks tradition, missed the significance of what Duchamp was saying and interrupted him.
•
In 1968, a little less than a year before Duchamp died, Cage and Duchamp played chess in public for an installation piece by Cage called Reunion, which Cage was pleased was also the French word for meeting. Cage, establishing an even stronger connection between his work and Duchamp’s, said that this piece was the third part of the work with silence that he had begun with 4'33"—a “chess match, or any game at all, can become a distinctive—another essentially silent—musical work.” The two men sat in front of a chessboard that had been wired so that when they moved pieces, randomly selected segments of music by Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, and David Behrman were heard by the members of the audience. While they were deciding on their moves, the auditorium was silent. After Cage and Duchamp finished, Marcel Duchamp played Teeny Duchamp until only Cage was left in the audience. They left the endgame and went home to sleep. The next morning, they came back and finished playing. Teeny Duchamp won, which perhaps gave Cage some satisfaction. Cage had lost the night before, though Marcel Duchamp had given him a knight at the beginning of the game.
36. NORMAN MAILER AND ROBERT LOWELL
NORMAN Mailer was in just the right mood. He was feeling a little cantankerous, but not too put upon, he was possessed of conviction, and a little nervous about all the projects he’d committed to, he was envious of the successes of others, while still able to appreciate them, his outrageousness was gathering, but he wasn’t denying it, and he knew, down to the last contradictory detail, how he was feeling. In this mood, with different winds prevailing at different moments, he was asked to be present at a march on the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War. Although his first instinct was not to go, he said he would, and two days before the march he found himself in Washington, D.C., at a dreary cocktail party hosted by well-meaning academics with only one other famous person in the room, at that time the best-known poet in America, Robert Lowell.
Mailer was getting drunk. He and Lowell went and sat at a table, and, Mailer later reported, “ignoring the potentially acolytic drinkers,” they stuck out their elbows “like flying buttresses or old Republicans,” and they talked. Lowell said to Mailer, “You know, Norman, Elizabeth [Hardwick] and I really think you’re the finest journalist in America.” Mailer, hearing condescension and remembering that Lowell had never made that opinion public when it might have helped, felt bourbon and outrageousness swelling inside him and said, “Well, Cal,” never having used his nickname before, “there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America.” Things were off to a good start.
Mug of bourbon still in hand, Mailer followed the rest of the party over to the Ambassador Theater, where crowds of young protesters were waiting to be addressed by the few public figures who had, hesitatingly, agreed to be part of the march. Later, Mailer gave a glorious account of his drunken performance as MC in his book The Armies of the Night. He stood onstage and bellowed at the audience in his full range of accents, including his southern Texas sheriff and his Irish bruiser, and descended into extreme obscenity, and the audience got irritable and restive. Then, finally, Lowell came on, with his great Puritan slouch—“one did not achieve the languid grandeurs of that slouch in one generation”—and, commanding total respect, read some of his poems from For the Union Dead.
Lowell had written For the Union Dead, published three years earlier, thinking that many of the fault lines in the country were very like those that had opened when his distinguished ancestors were serving in the Civil War. The title poem considered the monument of Colonel Shaw, leading the 54th Massachusetts, the colored brigade. “At the dedication,” Lowell wrote, “William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.” Lowell found the sculpture a painful reminder of all that had not happened since the city of Boston optimistically gathered to start a new era: “Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat.” The people in the auditorium would have been able to hear Lowell’s anger rising: “There are no statues for the last war here; / on Boylston Street a commercial photograph / shows Hiroshima boiling.” People listening to Lowell read his work out loud said, as they had said of William James before him, that in public he had a rare quality of sympathy.
Mailer, sitting disconsolately backstage, found that he was jealous of Lowell’s patrician authority, and of the sense that generations and generations of Boston were behind him. Mailer didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t care, that Lowell had dropped out of Harvard, from which Mailer himself had graduated successfully. Nor did it matter that Lowell’s family was the lesser known branch of the Lowells, or that Lowell shared with Mailer a predilection for drinking and bad accents, his favorite being a bear who spoke with a Boston Irish accent. Once, in a manic outpouring, Lowell had held the poet Allen Tate out a second-story window and, in the voice of this bear, recited Tate’s own poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Mailer felt that when he pulled a stunt it was an amusing antic but that people saw in Lowell all the pathos of a great artist struggling against his illness. The way Mailer conceived of his own role—as a war reporter from the domestic front of his own experience—was close enough to being superseded by Lowell—as the conscientious objector in his—that Mailer, leaning against the wall backstage and watching the audience respond to Lowell, had a moment of self-doubt.
•
Things improved in the morning; they had a good breakfast. There was a rally in the afternoon, and Lowell made a short speech. He said that a reporter had asked him if he would burn his own draft card if he had one. Lowell didn’t say, either to the reporter or in his speech, that he had refused to serve in World War II. Neither did he say that he had then been jailed for four months. He simply said that he didn’t like the reporter’s insinuation that the men who were past the age of having draft cards in this group were not fully aware of the consequences of their actions: “Unlike the authorities who are running this country, we are not searching for tricks, we try to think of ourselves as serious men, if the press, that is, can comprehend such an effort, and we will protest this war by every means available to our conscience.”
Mailer thought this was excellent, and in documenting it gave what Lowell later said was “one of the best things ever written about me.” Mailer wrote that Lowell spoke “in his fine stammering voice which gave the impression that life rushed at him in a series of hurdles and some he succeeded in jumping and some he did not.” Mailer found himself, somewhat uncomfortably, admiring Lowell very much. Borrowing the third person from Henry Adams and Gertrude Stein, Mailer wrote that “all flaws considered, Lowell was still a fine, good, and honorable man, and Norman Mailer was happy to be linked in a cause with him.”
Listening to Lowell’s speech, Mailer felt, uneasily, a wind of modesty blowing toward him, the modesty of a good Jew from Brooklyn, and he was terrified that this modesty, which he had worked so hard to throw off—he “loved the pride and the arrogance and the confidence and the egocentricity he had acquired over the years”—could return “on just so light a breeze.” In this unhappy new state of mind, Mailer gave a calm and forceful speech of his own, which Lowell liked very much; he subsequently told Mailer so several times.
On returning home, Lowell wrote three poems about the march and Mailer. Though Mailer had thought him a pillar of strength, Lowell had felt unsteady. The speeches, Lowell said, helped to “show how weak / we were, and right.” Mailer had reminded Lowell of the lesson he was constantly having to relearn: “being erratic, isn’t the only way / to be ourselves, or Norman Mailer.” Even Mailer’s conservative clothes had a kind of integrity: “he wears / a wardrobe of two identical straight blue suits / and two blue vests.” Robert Lowell had found the presence of Norman Mailer unexpectedly reassuring.
•
On the day of the march, the veteran and the conscientious objector, arms linked, walked in a vanguard of twenty people at the front of a group of several thousand, from the Lincoln Memorial, across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, and onto the lawn of the Pentagon. All that morning, Mailer had the nervousness—the clarity and taut energy—of going into combat, a feeling he remembered distinctly from his days in the infantry in the Philippines.
In The Armies of the Night, Mailer sometimes called himself “General Mailer.” The way he told the story had a military quality; they were marshaling forces against the Pentagon. Though Mailer’s own point of reference for combat was World War II, it wasn’t that war he considered. When he had written of that war, he had been a young man alone, proving himself by breaking away. He had refused help from the writers of the past and from his contemporaries. Now he was a little older and a little more willing to brook both history and association. He wrote of himself and Lowell together, “Lowell and Mailer were thinking of the Civil War: it was hard not to.”
Many of the protesters were dressed in bits of military clothing that they had picked up at Salvation Army stores. Some had metal helmets, others were in Civil War battle garb, both the Union blue and the Confederate gray. Tuli Kupferberg and his band the Fugs (who had named themselves after the euphemism for “fuck” that Mailer had invented for The Naked and the Dead) were playing. Radical Afro-Americans carried signs that said “No Viet Cong Ever Called Me Nigger.” The air was full of tension and excitement: “The thin air!” wrote Mailer, “wine of Civil War apples in the October air!”
