Very entertaining, thoughtful, sometimes moving. Haven't read any of his other diaries.

"Dwelling on the past, inclined always to melodramatize. Claude and P provoked no less trauma than did a canary once. There was, when I was twelve and avicultural, a bird show at Chicago's Blackstone Hotel where I fell in love with (premature but quaint irony) a cinnamon-throated warbler which Father thought would be one-too-many and forbade the purchase. I walked the night lanes of Jackson Park (Father secretly surveying from the family car), brooded, threatened suicide."

...

"Statistic. On page 12 of his new book Philip Roth writes: 'A phenomenon ... took place within my body between midnight and four a.m. on February 18, 1971, and converted me into a mammary gland disconnected from any human form.' On the afternoon of February 18, 1971, I gave a party at Yaddo for five guests, including Philip R. I remember clearly how he looked." ( )

It does seem churlish to criticize a diarist for being self-centered, but there's something missing here that prevents the "Later Diaries" of the 1960s from being as interesting as they could have been or should have been. And maybe it is that Ned Rorem was so wrapped up in his own personal life with its rather minor accomplishments and frustrations that he failed to see what was going on around him. I mean: the 1960s! The youth rebellion, the Vietnam War, Race Riots in the cities. He does write a little bit about Rock and Roll music, for which I give him some credit, but there is no sense that he appreciated the significance of the tumultuous decade that the time frame of this publication encompasses.

Rorem combines discretion and indiscretion in a peculiar manner. There's something "chilly" as he recounts (like Don Giovanni) his thousands of sexual encounters in his twenties and thirties - it seems as if these were accomplished through compulsion, without any true significance or meaning. At a certain point in the decade represented here, he appears to have foresworn further sexual encounters, but it's not really clear why or when he does so. Moreover, by the early 1970s he seems to have entered into a long term committed emotional relationship with a younger man, JH (Jimmy Holmes, as identified in the photographs), but there is no elaboration or explanation.

Then there's the recurrent self-pity, which is rather unappealing in a man who is living a comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle in Mid-Manhattan, without personal tragedy or major illness. He's getting older and is not quite as beautiful as he used to be! Alas.

Rorem is most interesting in writing about his friends and rivals who were also active composers of the time: Copland, Menotti, Bernstein, Boulez - they all show up here and Rorem has interesting things to say about them.

If you are looking to read the journals of a prominent gay artist in the 1960s, I would recommend the Diaries of Cecil Beaton. Beaton no doubt was "bitchier" and probably a lot harder to get along with, but the Beaton Diaries give a better sense of what it is was like to be a middle aged gay artist in the 1960s. (Admittedly Beaton was a visual artist, and 18 years older than Rorem, but he actually seems to have had a lot more young friends than the composer.) ( )

Let's get this straight (as it were). Rorem's musicv is among the best of its time, and not too shabby even in company with the great music of ALL time. Now his much-celebrated diaries are another matter. They are unique among the surviving first-person writing of composers great or small, and yet, in retrospect they founder on the rock of his own cleverness. Writing of music he is informed and passionate without lapsing into the dithering which blights other composers. Problem is that in this volume, as in others, the music-based stuff is outweighed, verbally and psychologically, by Rorem's often arch and more often acidic prose. Too bad. Musical insight, like music itself, has a much better shelf-life than gossip, and while I would never discourage anyone from reading this book (hence the 3 1/2 stars), I would completely understand a reader's emerging from this book with a sense of frustration or insufficiency. ( )