The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

at 9 a.m. but it’s being April Fool’s the boat was very late (6–8 hours late because of fog which kept us sitting in the Channel), she made friends with an English lady on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Maggie is very beautiful + her accent and intonation reminds me of Peggy. We drove from the boat under a tunnel (river) (!) very much like the Hudson Tunnel, through Rotterdam, The Hague and finally Amsterdam. One city runs into another as in New Jersey. But of course Holland is beautifully flat and there are windmills and canals and some tulips already blooming. Because of the canals you often see boats sitting out in the fields; in Los Angeles they would be turned into Ship Ahoy restaurants because they are near the main highways. Almost nothing of the effects of war is visible since the Dutch are so neat and industrious: the utterly bombed-out parts appear now as parks and each city has large areas of building resembling our housing developments. Many people use bicycles and there are many flower-shops.

      Maggie took us to her house and we drank Holland gin. Then her chauffeur took us to a hotel and she went to the opera. After the opera she had a supper-party at her house and we were there until 2:30. This morning I am up late and hoping that these 8 months or 7 will not be as packed with activity as these 2 days. Maggie has made all kinds of appointments, parties, etc., for us for the next days and wants us to spend August here with her in a house on one of the old canals. The whole experience is extra-ordinary and on the overwhelming side. We telephoned Peggy + and that was a pleasure and also a sadness that she was not here. And how often I wish you both were here too! You would love it so much.

      The boat had its smoothest crossing in ten years. I was not at all ill. We met charming people: one who will arrange concerts in the U.S. zone in Germany. She is the wife of a man in counter-intelligence.

      I have to hurry to lunch with Maggie. Will write soon again.

      To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

       April, 1949 | Amsterdam

      Have just written a letter to Maro¹⁵¹ explaining about music and court arrangements and you can get that information from her. Everything has happened one thing after another. I have made connections here with the Society for Contemporary Music,¹⁵² and they will present a concert with Maro playing the Sonatas. I have met many composers and seen so much that is beautiful and to remember. Tomorrow we go to Brussels. I telegraphed to find out if they still expect me to play but there was no answer, so I do not know. The man who made the arrangements is very ill, so it may be that with a new Director I may not play. We will see.

      I have also telegraphed ahead for reservations in Palermo, Sicily, and the address from April 20–30 is Villa Lincoln.

      Via Archirofi 10

      Palermo, Sicily

      Italia

      Peggy’s friend Maggie Nogueira has been marvelous to us, letting us use her car (with chauffeur), inviting us to lunch and dinner + tonight to a theater. She is a lovely + energetic person. There is so much to eat in Holland and it is all so good: everything is rich and full of butter. The cost of living is about like New York

      The flowers—all kinds—not just tulips just about take your breath away. One of the most amazing things in Amsterdam is the red-light district which is the oldest part. The women at night sit in their rooms with the curtains pulled aside, just as though they were on a stage. They mostly spend the time sewing or knitting until someone stops. Then the curtains are drawn and for those on the outside the Act is over whereas actually it is only then beginning. All of this in a setting of canals + beautiful old churches. Amsterdam, I hear, is famous as the “city of women in shop windows.” The water in the canals is so poisonous that if you should fall in you would later get very ill if not die. They were always pushing Germans in during the war. More soon.

      To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

       April 15, 1949 | Paris

      Dearest Mother and Dad:

      I have not quite recovered from the surprise of getting the Guggenheim.¹⁵³ But I begin to. I sent you the telegram and then finally came to my wits and wrote a letter to Mr. Moe, the Secretary General, asking him to postpone the period of my tenure until my return to New York. I hope he agrees to do that. I am also sending him this afternoon a doctor’s certificate as to my health. And I corrected the biographical statement. If there is more for me to do, either you or he will let me know. I cannot believe that it happened and that I am not dreaming. How marvelous to be relieved of the financial problem!

      Sunday we leave for Palermo, and until then have been loaned an apartment in a chic hotel near the Champs Elysees by a friend, Muriel Errera-Finck, whom I don’t think you met. She is charming and has gone to Mt. St. Michel for Easter and thought it just as well that we stay in the apt. She and her husband have taken very good care of us taking us to dinner, lunches, etc. We had a very good and cheap room on the Ile de St. Louis which is my favorite part of Paris, right behind Notre Dame, about 75 cents a day for 2, but here we are with a bad typewriter, a real bathroom elegance et al. Muriel is also trying to swing a concert in the home of the Comtesse de Polignac,¹⁵⁴ which is the top of musical life in Paris, if not in Europe. I haven’t done anything about music in Paris yet, because I was so surprised about the Guggenheim which happened the first day here. In Brussels I met many composers and had a marvelous time; there may be a concert in October at the Palais des Beaux Arts there. I am going to have to have a suit made in Italy because my brown one and blue one wore out completely and all I have is the linen one and Dad’s Xmas one.

      Paris is out of this world beautiful and the weather superb. Last night to the Jean-Louis Barrault Theatre and again tonight to see Hamlet. It is quite different from before not in itself (Paris), but in me. I love it. Merce works everyday in a studio near the Place Clichy and is trying to arrange a dance program for May there. The city is so beautiful and it is so easy to be alive here, almost too easy; you have to protect yourself I am sure by working, but right now in transit cannot work. It is difficult to imagine how America got to be so unEuropean; there is so much general understanding here about how things should be to be beautiful and make life a joy.

      Forgive this letter and its incoherence and lack of news. I simply don’t know yet which way to turn.

      To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

       1949 [ca. April 26] | Palermo

      Dearest Mother + Dad:

      The Festival¹⁵⁵ proves so far to be not too worthwhile. There have been 8 works so far and only one, the Pierrot Lunaire of Schoenberg (which is scarcely contemporary music), has been surpassingly beautiful. There are many fine people here and I was interested last night to meet a Mr. Gradowitz from Israel who is very devoted to my music. I have been several times with Panufnik,¹⁵⁶ a Polish composer whose work I admire; and so it goes. The town itself is as I wrote: dusty, filthy, noisy and full of beggars and people who try to get as much out of you as they can. The food is mediocre and one is semi-ill all of the time, + flat on his back the rest of the time. A rather unpleasant picture. As soon as you leave Palermo and go in the country everything improves and is quite beautiful. The hills are drier even than around L.A., rocky + covered with beautiful tiny dwarfed flowers: iris, poppies, etc. And every view of the Mediterranean is a joy: it is a deep blue but a bright turquoise color near the shores. And if you walk out on a stone pier where there are fishermen cleaning fish + people carrying nets or mending ropes, you can see right to the bottom—the water is so clear and transparent.

      In the pension there is (as everywhere) a shortage of water, and that makes bathing, etc., almost a major problem.

      It seems to take about 4 days for an airmail letter to reach me. From the 3rd to the 7th of May I will go to Milan where you could write c/o American Express (I don’t know their address), but you could find it out by asking the office in N.Y. There will be a festival of 12-tone music and I will review that too.

      To Peggy Glanville-Hicks

       April 27, 1949 | Paris

      Dearest Peggy:

      Your letter to Palermo came