Virgil Thomson

Matthew Paris interviews Virgil Thomson.Engineer: Edited by Dave Zimmer.

Matthew Paris writes:

The co-founder of American classical music with Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson was probably the wittiest talker in New York City. He is the only guest I had who never went to jail yet whose lifelong hero was Jesse James. Like nearly all geniuses had had no airs He was the same when talking to a grocer as he was to a scholar. One of the things I learned from Virgil is that if one wants to be good at something, one should be at it all the time. "Musicians don't talk about making music; they make music," he said. Virgil like John Cage treated the world as their straight men.

When Virgil didn't trust somebody, he gave them a lot of objective facts he knew well; he was also a polymath. I didn't find these performances of facts with others all that graceful. He was a natural and charming man. It hurt him to be detached about anything or anybody.

Virgil was most easily explained by saying he was from Missouri. He valued other Missourians who had the direct manner and frank quality of Mark Twain, Harry, S. Truman, Edward Dahlberg, and so on. He would quote Mark Twain often. He knew and admired Harry Truman socially. Missouri wasn't a southern state, but it had slavery until the 1860s. Virgil used to say with ironic pride that his family was all folks who owned slaves. One never heard from this man who liked to advertise himself as a dangerous and garrulously sinister fellow that he was one of the advocates at all times of getting a lot of Black people a job. His Four Saints in Three Acts had Black actors. If one accused him of any virtue, he'd dismiss it. "Black people talk beautifully," he said.

When one got to know Virgil well, one saw that he was a profoundly charitable and compassionate man who felt he had to hide all of his natural virtues. Some of his mature observations were based on Nietzchean principles, but his talent was always rooted in delight in making beautiful music. Some of Virgil's greatest music like the Edward Lear Songs is not yet commercially recorded.

Virgil had in his conversation some of the tribal traces of his generation. He once told me: "Jews are too melancholy; there's nothing in life to be melancholy about. You can take life anyway if you want to." Virgil was a Judeophile. He perhaps hoped to disguise that his close friend and former lover, Maurice Grosser, was Jewish, that Virgil always promoted Jewish sitarists of all kinds, visited the state of Israel with Maurice, was even asked by Lazar Saminsky of the the Fifth Avenue Synagogue to write a Jewish Sacred Service. Virgil was embarrassed by almost nothing but anyone suggesting that he had any virtues.

Virgil never admitted that he liked anyone. He was more comfortable saying that he had enemies. "We all have them," he said. "We couldn't live a life without them," he said. Sometimes this lack of articulation of who much he liked and loved people could be quite dramatic in its silence; when old friends died Virgil didn't even shrug. In public, Virgil was very detached about Aaron Copland. In person, Virgil broke down and almost cried one day when he thought of Aaron and his problem with dementia. 'He's noble, very noble," Virgil said, almost sobbing. I was astonished, not that Virgil felt that way about Aaron but how strong the emotion was in him.

For somebody who made his living for a while as a Baptist church, organist Virgil had a particular dislike of Christianity, "Jesus just made wisecracks," he would say. "What's so good about that?" Once he told me," I superpose Jesus was a nice guy, but mostly he was a crashing bore. I prefer the holy ghost."

Virgil as an intellect a very much opposed to the fashionable Freudian ideas of his time. He used to say if somebody felt lousy," he must have a liver complaint." He would talk about "knowing" things in the style of William James. Knowing to him meant observing the phenomenal mechanics of something. His skepticism about all things abetted his reading of two or more English newspapers he had delivered to him and his monthly reading of the London Observer.

Virgil's range of interests was infinite. He was one o the first creative intelligence to make extensive use of computer technology. He knew all about mystery novels. He was an expert at cooking and philosophy.

Virgil was very modest about his intellect. He once said to me: "I don't know whether I have the substance to carry a whole book of my thought." One heard this from one of the smartest men on the planet. Maybe when you got that intelligent, you also get modest. You know what you don't know.

Those days classical composers never offer the public any other profile than a cipher. Virgil wrote and talked in a racy Americanese that stood out in his day for its amusing qualities.

Virgil's suite on the 9th floor of the Chelsea Hotel was about three rooms with a small kitchen. There was a maple baby grand piano in the living room, three large soft chairs, a table that usually had cookies, various paintings of Maurice Grosser on the walls, a window with a northern view of the Hudson River. He read over his breakfast every day on a large maple table was decorated with the English journals. There was a small library of his musical tapes.

His kitchen had surprising items in its larder for a fastidious gourmet. He liked canned peas.

Everybody quoted Virgil's epigrams among his friends. James Purdy, Maurice Grosser, and Ned Rorem were often quick to tell others about his quips. Virgil never repeated himself never set himself up to deliver prepared witty remarks. They flowed from him smoothly as breathing.

How did he do it? One can analyze half of it. He would usually take a second or two to compose whatever reply he had to make to anybody. He also would always say what was on his mind whether it offended people or not. He could tell bizarre sexual tales over dinner.

In his last years, he would invite people to a table at El Qujote, the Spanish restaurant downstairs in the Chelsea Hotel. Virgil knew everybody in the place from Viva, the Andy Warhol ingenue, to George Kleinsinger in a penthouse above him, the only one of the hotel residents who had a baby hippo in his rooms.

Virgil was in his way a health nut. "Everybody in my family lives into their nineties; my grandmother lived to be a hundred," he would say, minimizing his efforts to keep himself trim. He did exercises into his eighties.

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