Ultimate American in Paris

By CHARLES MICHENER

The best memoirs tell us not only where and with whom the author has spent his time in the past but also what kind of person he has become in the process. On the first count, Ned Rorem's Knowing When to Stop (Simon & Schuster; 607 pages; $30) is the scintillating chronicle of how a gifted, remarkable, good- looking young man from the Midwest grew into a leading American composer, one of our finest craftsmen of art songs. On the second count, the book is profoundly exasperating.

Describing his Quaker parents and Chicago boyhood, Rorem vividly evokes a vanished time when certain American middle-class families combined strong moral convictions with cultural avidity and a surprising broadmindedness. In the budding composer, these tendencies took more extreme forms than were typical: he was a lifelong pacifist, revealed a precocious appreciation of modern music (Stravinsky) and poetry (T.S. Eliot), and -- beginning at age 14 -- fearlessly cruised the local park for anonymous sex with men.

A scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia gave Rorem entry into the company of the other wunderkinder and their mentors who, from the 1940s on, would do much to define what serious American music was all about: Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, Lukas Foss, Samuel Barber, John Cage. Rorem's feelings of admiration, doubt, jealousy and gratefulness for these figures inspire the sharpest sketches in a book crammed with sharp sketches. On two composers who straddled the concert stage and Broadway: "Lenny Bernstein would never have been quite what he was without the firm example of Marc Blitzstein, yet there's nothing Marc did that Lenny couldn't do better." On Cage: "What a fake! Yes, but a fake what?"

Like most other artistically inclined young men of the time, Rorem felt the call of postwar Europe. An ardent Francophile, he became an American in Paris par excellence, finding still headier mentors in the likes of Jean Cocteau, Nadia Boulanger, Francis Poulenc and Marie-Laure de Noailles, the legendary patroness of the avant-garde.Rorem never misses the opportunity to tell us whom he slept with -- and whom he didn't. (Cocteau belongs in the small, latter category.)

The saga ends in 1951, by which time the young artist has, more or less, come of age. He had one hell of a time getting there -- and the reader has had a hell of a time too, swept along by the potent names, the glamorous and seedy settings, and Rorem's gift for the sometimes penetrating, some-times facile bon mot. (Debunking originality in art: "Anyone can build a better mousetrap, but it still snares the same old mice.")

Still, one leaves this rich meal feeling curiously empty. The reason may be that Rorem has been voluble about every facet of his life except whom and what he really cares about. Explaining why he felt his protege was "not a dependable critic," Virgil Thomson once said of Rorem, "His egocentricity gets in the way. It prevents his seriously liking or hating anything." Rorem quotes this remark, along with others even less flattering about himself. It's a gutsy thing to do, but it only points to a terrible void.