The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Lies: A Diary, 1986-1999 by Ned RoremDavid Bergman
Ned Rorem. Lies: A Diary, 1986-1999. Counterpoint, 2000. 416 pp. $30.00.
Lies is the latest installment of Ned Rorem’s diaries, a chronicle he has been keeping since the early 1950s and releasing at intervals between collections of essays, memoirs, and letters. Lies is the fifth volume. When the diaries first began appearing they caused a scandal. As a Quaker, Rorem is dedicated to stating as truthfully as he can what he sees and feels, and as a result, his early entries shocked people with their bitchy honesty, their rampant gossip, and their uncensored homosexuality. They have not changed, but the world has, and what once was shocking is now daytime television fare. What is clearer today, however, is Rorem’s exquisite use of language, his passionate engagement with the world “undimmed in his eighth decade of life,” and his humanity. These diaries frame the years in which his partner, James Holmes, suffered with AIDS. Rorem never makes Lies into an AIDS diary, but a diary in which, as Auden writes, suffering “assumes its human position,” which is to say, in which it is an inextricable but subordinated part. The details of the illness’s progress is woven into his frequent expressions of frustration with the state of American serious music, his continued warfare with Elliott Carter, accounts of his renewed friendship with Gloria Vanderbilt, his own problematic health, the waning of his compositional energies, his odd enthusiasms and obstinate peeves. If no words are ever wholly true, Lies comes as close as any author can to the thick description of the actual. [David Bergman]