Wings of Friendship: Selected Letters, 1944-2003

Daniel Tamulonis has really said it all, but let me add my two cents. The book is a little on the patchy side, and one feels that there might have been a few more letters to people who aren't celebrated. And some of the plots don't receive their full development. Whatever happened, for example, to Ned's plot to make best friends out of Gloria Vanderbilt and Judy Collins? Did he ever arrange a single instance of them meeting, or did they see his ruse and take against each other the way one's friends always do. The way he writes about them, and to them, makes me like both Vanderbilt and Collins a whole lot better, by the way. About someone like Stephen Sondheim we just don't have the data. Med doesn't really cherish SS as a bosom friend, that's plain, but we don't know what's behind the rather distant, if solicitous bread and butter letters. Same with Lou Harrison (indeed most of California.) The politics behind the so-called "Academy" (The American Academy of Arts and Letters) are positively byzantine according to this book. No wonder our arts in this country are so terrible, and how difficult it would be to dislodge someone from their Parnassian spot once they've been voted into Olympus. Ned seems like a nice guy, always looking around for people who will second his nomination of some pretty unlikely suspects. Did James Purdy, for example, ever make it into the Academy? The Academy must be the place where Ned does most of his major hanging out. I felt sorry for James Hamilton-Paterson, a man of whom I had never heard before reading WINGS OF FRIENDSHIP. I guess he's English, I forget, maybe he's a writer of some kind? Anyway Ned offers to sponsor him as an "honorary" Academy member, but then finds out he doesn't have quite enough pull to get him in there all by himself, and nobody else wants to help out, so he has to go back to Hamilton-Pateron bloody but unbowed explaining the facts of life to him. And to everybody, he's always, by the way have you ever considered writing a libretto? Ask me! I could make a great libretto just about your siege of the Academy and trying to smuggle in gay men by downplaying their gayness. The truth is, Ned Rorem is a hero and these letters just show us new shades of his unself-conscious effrontery.

Ned Rorem has more than twenty published books to his credit and scores of published scores. He often writes of the composer as writer and the writer as composer. For those of you who know Mr. Rorem's writings, you may need no further encouragement than to know that there is another book by him. For those new to Rorem the writer, anyone interested in the writer's craft, the art of letter writing, musical critiques, Americans living abroad, New York and Paris of the years since 1940, the life of a composer, being gay and out before either word was really coined, any or all of these topics are covered and then some in Mr. Rorem's selected letters. One is immediately immersed into the world of Ned Rorem, surely a baptism of fire, ice, sunshine, rain, and hard butter. Behind it all is his music, which, if you haven't heard, you will probably find yourself very curious to hear after reading only a few of the letters. The fifty-nine years' span of the letters is a lifetime for many and each letter reads like a tightly played scene from a huge masterwork (which, indeed, is Ned Rorem's life). The already much cited long _cri de coeur_, a letter never sent to a lover who rejected the young composer, is an entire play-within-a-play. Any one who has ever been in love and has had that love lost or not returned cannot read this and remain unmoved, by laughter or tears, or both. Ned Rorem is, at 81, as full of life as he must have been at 18. He is able to take all of life in and find a way to share it, in his music or his writing. Those of us who can hear and read Ned Rorem are all the richer for his gift of sharing.