NEW YORK REVIEW: "When you went to Europe, Mr. Stravinsky, we heard that you were intending to go for good."

IS: "For the better anyway. At the time I left Los Angeles, it already seemed too late for a phased withdrawal. The smog was like Mace; but then the air, apart from radioisotopes, must be better anywhere else now, even in a coal mine. A major earthquake was predicted, too, not merely by seismologists but by the religious protection rackets, which were transferring east to pray out the millennium and to await the second option of chiliasm there . . . At about that time, as well, the American Legion opened its campaign against my San Diego neighbor Professor Marcuse, an action I read as a warning to keep my peace about the war or risk being dealt with Chicago-style myself . . . I took the least frequently hijacked run to New York, and then to Zurich."

Igor Stravinsky at eighty-eight is a lean and dragonish filament of a man, small, swift, acerbic, who has with the utmost restraint and greatest reluctance declined the invitation of fate to become the Russian Groucho Marx. His latest conversation book, Retrospectives and Conclusions, is presumably his last, although I suspect he will confound his critics, who have persisted for the last decade in treating him posthumously, by transubstantiating his immortal remains into yet another book, entitled Scances and Exhumations. Stravinsky employs a gleeful and at times parasitic mastery of Americanese to lightly convey his scorn of cultural dipsomania, sentimentality, vulgarity, and mordancy. He despises the orotund, the bucolic, and the self-immolative. His thoughts are not the sorrowful responsory of an embittered or "mightily praisefed" superannuated composer:

Men of my age like to see themselves as the end of culture, and to dramatize themselves as last defenders of true art-in a tone which suggests that their own passing is likely to bring on a winter of Pleistocene duration.

The secret of the man has always been his wit. His sense of humor overcomes the grotesque spectacle of being stranded in Los Angeles, that sub-Fellinian mammalian circus. His wit has also prevented the vegetative decay which afflicts so many old artists. The man who has known and worked with almost every major artist in this country, has lived in Los Angeles with Huxley, Isherwood, Mann, and Schocnberg, and seen all but Isherwood pass away, is essentially a happy spirit.

Stravinsky has never found himself paralyzed by reticence, or embarrassed by garrulity. There is a brisk riot of social opinions, delivered with varying degrees of mockery. He censures the "military version of Manifest Destiny," the "victims of peace scares [stock-market investors]," the punitive assault on drug usage, calls for "an Onassis tax, a tax on tax expatriates, and not-likely-to-get-through-the-eye-of-a-needle-tax." He serves delicious remarks on the moon shot with "our three Astrobards reading Bible poetry to Sabbatarian earthlings," rips into the reptilian dowagers and Saharian financiers who run the orchestras. We hear of a recent concert tour-"a via dolorosa "-which took him (against his will?) to Miami, where "everyone looked like he was fried in butter," and Hawaii, where everyone was addicted to pineapples. He had to bribe a waiter to keep him from dumping the ananas ("the French sounds like a Biblical sin") onto the spaghetti. One of the finest comic moments offers a scenario for the antics of an anonymous conductor, with strong hints that it is "Von Mehta":

It begins with a tableau modeled on the Descent of the Cross. The arms are lifeless, the knees bent, the head (hair artfully mussed) is low, and the whole corpse itself is bathed in perspiration. The first step down from the podium just fails to conceal a totter, but in spite of that the miracle worker somehow manages to reappear forty-six times.

His meticulous, wry ferocity is in full sail in an analysis of Puccini's transoceanic disaster La Fancuilla del West:

The one conspicuous success in the "Fancuilla" is the attempt to make it American-i. e. simple-minded. This is achieved by having the gold miners sing in unison, and by repeating a Grofe-type trot-rhythm to the point of incandescence.

Like a Chekhov character, Stravinsky has "a positive intellect. Can't stand mystics, fantastics, the possessed, lyrical people, bigots." More seriously, he strikes out against the increasing stridency and publicizing of our time, against the mentality which demands that every new work of art be apocalyptically, original, which precludes germinal innovations, and that these doomsday products shatter the benighted with all the force Madison Avenue can summon. Eventually we would need a cathedral to house properly a concert which consisted of one hundred amplifiers tidally shoring up our ruins with the unforgettably moving sound of a single human hair being twisted.

Igor Stravinsky is one of the least bathetic men who has ever lived. He cannot tolerate the placid idiocy and demagogic pollutants of American society. He criticizes, as an American citizen, the corruption of monotone imaginations. He follows an austerely classical sense of art as the discipline of craft. His credo is essentially that of da Vinci: "The only liberty is through discipline." But he is saved from prodigiously sterile, mechanical retrogression by the capriciousness of his intellect.

Like T. S. Eliot, with whom he has a deep affinity, Stravinsky always worked to burn through the opiates and aphrodisiacs which unremittingly encumber clear, precise thought. He reiterates the lesson of all great artists, that vigor comes from continuity, from the regenerative originality which only a sense of history as present in every living moment can nurture. He has been free to pursue his own thought because he has been quick to admit the timeless creativity of Monteverdi, Gesualdo, and Bach. A musical convention is a point of departure rather than a creative surrender. Stravinsky's music has always been imitative in the Aristotelian sense (which is the only sense), and always classical, never "neo-classical." "Neo-classical" is a fruitless neologism, a fetid, indurating bit of synthetic classification which obscures the music as it sustains useless discussion. A work of art, for Stravinsky, is an object to be crafted, expressive of immutable, universal forms, rather than a personal drama of expiation and self-explanation, expressive only of idiosyncrasy. Like all classical artists, he refuses to discuss style. Art must not indulge the consciousness by pandering to its usual experiences and conceptions. It should refine those conceptions, by enlarging the intellect to a higher capacity for complexity and sympathy, through the mental discipline of form.

Since conceptions are structures, the work of art must act upon the intuitive-discursive structures of mind, through its own structures. In literature this process has evolved from the architecture of myth to that of symbol; in music, from the forms of homophony, to sonata, to series. The classical artist does not preoccupy himself with the potentially paralyzing self-conscious effort of contemporancity. All time is present to him at all moments because he sees the world as formal process rather than as an enigmatic cauldron perfused with subjective data. The classical artist's work is to eschew subjectivity in order to illumine in form what changes and does not change in the life of man.

The investing of the musical object with the listener's subjective responses is actually nothing more than a form of the pathetic fallacy.

Music for Stravinsky is speculative volition. The composer controls his art at the level of causality through his choices. This leads Stravinsky to make some forceful remarks on some of the avant-garde habits, particularly the extremes of solipsism and mathematics, as represented by Cage and Xenakis. "I still admit to a need to go from a beginning to an end through related parts."