The Blazing World: A Novel

by Siri Hustvedt

  Were you afraid, Harry?

  Yes.

  And then he let go of your neck, but you did not move then either. Did you?

  No.

  And then he slapped you, hard. And did you move?

  No.

  You were like a child frozen on a stool in the corner, a child who had been punished for speaking out of turn, for not raising her hand in class. A silent child made of stone.

  And Rune said he was going to keep the work as his own. It’s mine now. It’s disguise and more disguise, Harry, he said. You lift up one mask and you find another. Rune, Harry, then Rune again. I win.

  What did those words mean?

  And then he said, People know, people know about your illness.

  My illness? I repeated.

  Your mental breakdown.

  And I thought, my breakdown? Did I have a mental breakdown? Was that a mental breakdown I had after Felix died? Yes, probably. I had told Rune about the throwing up, about Felix, about Dr. F.

  I became conscious of my swallowing. I had to swallow loudly. I couldn’t remember how to swallow quietly anymore.

  Then the stone child stood up on its stiff stone legs, leaned over, and picked up the purse that belonged to the happy woman who had come through the door earlier. How many minutes earlier?

  The feet mechanical go roundI

  She found the jeep on Hudson Street. The world outside looked jittery to her. She looked into the windows of Bubby’s and saw people eating, forks in motion, up and down. She saw mouths chewing, a hand curling around an amber beer on a table. She saw another mouth open in a laugh and, below it, a chin bobbed, above it, eyes squinted. But her motion was not theirs; her rhythm was not theirs. It had never been theirs, had it? No, she lived in another time, another tempo. She drove to Red Hook, whoever she was, and she lay down on the floor of her studio. The Barometer brought her a drawing of a fallen angel with huge veined wings. He said, You look dead, Harry. She said, I feel dead. And he said, That’s okay. Don’t worry. It happens to all of us sometimes, and later, hours later, she called Bruno, and when he came, she told him some of the story, but not everything. She had to hide her shame, cover the burns that would become scars. She could not tell him about Ruina, that unhappy child who had turned to stone and then walked into the street with her head down.

  * * *

  I. Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 372. The line is a quotation from the poem that begins, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—”

  Maisie Lord

  (edited transcript, June 13, 2012)

  Just a week ago, I found one of my mother’s notebooks hidden behind a row of books in the small building on Nantucket we called “the children’s house” because Ethan and I slept there when we were little. Mother has been dead for eight years already, but many more years might have passed without the notebook coming to light. Ethan and I had decided to sell the Nantucket house, and we were there alone, sifting through things and deciding what to save and what to give away, and we laughed a lot and remembered finding the dead gull on the beach and pretending the green stones we found were magic, and I swam every day, and Ethan didn’t, because he’s hydrophobic and can now admit it, poor guy. He used to go in the water when we were kids, and he learned how to swim, but I think he was always afraid of drowning, and now he doesn’t have to pretend he likes swimming anymore. The plain gray notebook was stuffed behind Treasure Island and Pippi Longstocking, and I instantly recognized my mother’s extravagant handwriting with its big loops, “Notebook O. The Fifth Circle.” She labeled the dozens of notebooks she kept with letters. I had spent years going through her notebooks for The Natural Mask, which is finally finished. After she died, we found hundreds and hundreds of pages of her writings that filled one notebook after another. Together they make a veritable tome.

  I told Ethan I would read the notebook first and then give it to him. It’s funny, I would never have dared to read it when Mother was alive, but the dead lose their privacy, or much of it. The controversy about Mother and Rune and Maskings has not gone away, although those of us who were close to Mother have a pretty good idea of what the truth is because we believe what she wrote. After I had read the notebook, I handed it to Ethan and went for a walk down Squam Road, the old road I knew so well, feeling bruised and churned up. I suppose I was trying to fit together my discontinuous mothers into one person, and it wasn’t easy. I had to fit Father’s double life in, too, and that hurt. The game with the masks Mother and Rune played on Nantucket would be turned into the dances in Beneath, and it seems to me that the man Richard Brickman and the girl Ruina represented two warring sides of my mother. We all have weak parts of ourselves, and we all have dominating, cruel parts, too, but I think they are usually more mixed together than they were in my mother. Her entry about her visit to Rune and the tape he showed her made me sick. I had glimpsed a sadistic side of Rune when he taunted me with a key at the opening for The Suffocation Rooms. I have asked myself what Mother wanted, what she hoped for. It is so tiring, so crazy, so humiliating, this world of winning and losing and playing the game, but she wanted to be part of it somehow, and Rune knew how to get to her, where to aim the knife. To be honest, I had an urge to suppress that entry and others, too, to rip them out of the notebook and burn the pages, but that would have been stupid. As I walked under a hot sun on the dusty road past the familiar mailboxes, I kept seeing a picture of my mother, not as a grown-up but as the child in her simile: You were like a child frozen on a stool in the corner. That’s the mental image I still have when I think of that awful meeting between Mother and Rune: my tall, strong, passionate mother as a silent little girl, a girl who had been turned to stone.

  When I returned from my walk, I found Ethan lying on the lower bunk bed with the notebook beside him. He turned to look at me, and I saw Mother. That moment of startling recognition lasted only seconds, but I saw my mother in my brother, and then she disappeared just as quickly as she had appeared, but it shook me up a little. I sat down beside Ethan, put my hand on his arm, and waited to hear what he thought. He looked over at me and said, “I like the writing.” I burst out laughing. I think I was relieved. I hadn’t thought about aesthetics at all. Ethan went on to say that he admired the way our mother shifted person from first to second to third. She made it look easy. I told my brother that I loved him. He nodded. When I send Ethan an e-mail I always sign it “Love, Maisie” or “Love and kisses, Maisie” or “Your loving sister, Maisie,” and he signs his “Ethan.” That’s how it’s always been and that’s how it will always be. I’m used to it. Ethan said that some entries in the notebook had to be included in the book, and he would scan the material and call Professor Hess right away before it was too late.

  I thought we should think about it carefully, weigh the pluses and minuses. I wanted to know if he didn’t find the entries upsetting, creepy, in fact. He said yes, but we were talking about our mother’s legacy, her work as an artist. This notebook, Ethan insisted, explained the mystery of Richard Brickman. He believed “Harriet” would have wanted the story of that pseudonym told. Brickman was yet another of our mother’s alter egos, part of a larger narrative. In the end, Ethan convinced me he was right.

  I asked Ethan which sinners were in Dante’s fifth circle of the Inferno, because I had forgotten. The wrathful and sullen, he said, Cantos VII and VIII. The wrathful and sullen are doomed to wallow in the filth and the stench and the fetid air of the river Styx. Ethan has a wonderful memory for books. He says that often, not always but often, he can see the page and the page number in his mind and sometimes read off the passage. He couldn’t do it this time, but he knew that Virgil and Dante meet the Furies, who call on the Medusa to come and turn Dante into stone. She doesn’t do it, of course. Had she succeeded, the poem would have been over. Rune turned my mother to stone, for a while, anyway. I hate him for it. I hate him still, even though he’s dead. And I understand Mother’s anger, her rage, her fury. Inside the cover of Notebook O, I found
these words: “Let go upon this man the stormblasts of your bloodshot breath, wither him in your wind, after him, hunt him down once more and shrivel him in your vitals’ heat and flame.”

  Those terrible words are from Aeschylus, The Eumenides, the third play of the Oresteia. Orestes has killed his mother, Clytemnestra, and in the play, the murdered woman’s ghost eggs on the furies to avenge her death, to punish the matricide.

  Mother still comes to me in my dreams. She is always a ghost now. In the two years or three years after she died, she used to come to me as her old living self, and I would rush toward her and, a couple of times, she took me in her arms and held me, her lips pressed against my neck, and the sensation was warm and happy. But then she began to recede, and now, when I dream of her, I know she is a phantom, a dead person, and I cannot reach her. She is often rattling around in her old studio in Red Hook or making mime-like gestures at me that I cannot interpret. Just a few days ago, I dreamed that she walked into my bedroom at home. She was completely transparent, a real old-fashioned ghost, and when I called out to her, she turned in my direction, extended her arms, and opened her mouth. I could see way down into her lungs, and I heard her breathe once, and then the whole room was on fire. I wasn’t afraid of the blaze in the dream, and I didn’t try to speak to her. I just stood by quietly and watched the room burn.

  Bruno Kleinfeld

  (written statement)

  My epic poem. Harry’s grand experiment. Neither one of us could heave the darlings overboard. I sequestered the Meisterwerk over in my slummy digs, which I had retained for the sake of my manly independence, and brought out the twenty-pound MS. (stored in the closet on the shelf above three retired baseball mitts) for brush-ups, revisions, cuts, and additions, unbeknown to Harry, who listened joyfully to MS. #2, the ever-growing Confessions of a Minor Poet, the mostly true tale of one Bruno Kleinfeld, a moody Jewish fornicator from the Bronx, whose adventures hewed closely to mine but were blessed with the gap that inevitably arrives between present-self scribbler and his various tawdry or gallant past selves, a chasm also known as humor, irony, or forgetfulness. I salute Harry for kicking my ass, which in turn loosened up my old knuckles for work on the Olivetti’s sleek keyboard, a machine inherited from dear old Uncle Samuel Kleinfeld in 1958. The story of my life, such as it was, seemed to arrive easily and breezily, a saga of, among other things, cream sodas, gefilte fish, and Doris McKinny’s maddeningly distracting breasts, which were allowed three pages to themselves once I arrived at puberty on page 101.

  I am not alone in observing that autobiographies lose interest when the hero leaves his youth, so I decided to give my middle age short shrift: twenty-five pages devoted to my all-around failures as poet, husband, and father delivered in a mock-heroic tone to relieve the reader of realism or maybe naturalism—whatever that grubby genre of rusty sinks and honest squalor is called. After that truncated interim, I arrived at my three grown-up girls, and the noblest of all my seminal offshoots, my grandson, Bran. Yes, my Confessions are shaped like an hourglass. The form of my time on earth eschews the middle for its fat ends, early and late. Bran came squalling into my life as an ugly red-faced little bruiser, but as I write these words, he is running around the diamond and kicking a soccer ball and explicating the ins and outs of avatars to me, and has become, I must say, the shining light of his granddad’s dotage.

  The very day after Harry lay on her back and told me the tale of her visit to Rune in a voice as cold as steel in winter, I noticed that her thoughts had been tinted by or maybe sprinkled with paranoia. Harry knew she had struck a Faustian bargain, had made a soul-killing exchange, which had been fraught with risk from the beginning. Rune, once the great white hope, had turned into Beelzebub. She worried that the dead spouse had shared intimate stories with his young “friend.” Hadn’t Rune seemed possessed of an uncanny knowledge of her from the start? Rune’s cleverness began to look paranormal. When Harry loudly proclaimed that four of her works were missing from her studio, my guess was that one of the assistants had mislaid them under a mountain of ready-mades. Between her stints of depth cleaning, Harry let congenial chaos reign in the studio. Arms, legs, heads, wigs, and hairpieces littered the floor. Stacks of lumber, sheets of glass, coils of rope, wire, cable, tools, and mystery machines lined the walls. In one corner, Harry stockpiled “notable dross,” an unsavory collection she had hauled inside from the general vicinity of the docks, various thingamabobs and whatsits that had moldered, withered, languished, or rusted into states so crumbled, mottled, decayed, or lumpish their former identities were no longer with us. Keep looking, I said. Maybe they’re hidden under the notable dross.

  But Harry blamed Rune for the missing works. She insisted he had broken through multiple locks and an alarm system to snatch her art. I jokingly asked Harry if she hadn’t mixed up Rune with the Barometer’s fallen angel, a tall man with wings who flew in and out of the lodge as he pleased. It’s just not possible, Harry, I said, but she wouldn’t believe me. One night, her face quashed with misery, she whispered to me, “He’s climbed inside me, Bruno. He’s seen the fear. He knows more than I know.” I hated the S.O.B., but I knew he was human.

  Harry hooked her hopes on the letter in The Open Eye. When it’s out, she said, everyone will know. I will be free. But, Harry, I said, it’s a yawner journal, arcane, abstruse. How many people read it? I don’t think Harry had a choice. She had to believe in her imminent triumph. When the magazine finally arrived, she read the letter aloud to me, chortling and crowing, chewing on the quotations that belonged to her, her face as hot as one of her electrified metamorphs. I scolded her for the testicle joke—beanbags, Harry, I said, really. And who is this character Brickman? He’s doing his job, she said. That’s what matters.

  I told you so is a phrase for assholes, and since I happen to intermittently find myself in that category, I used it on Harry when Rune screwed her over in the pages of Art Assembly in an interview, in which he was questioned outright about the Brickman letter in The Open Eye. Rune had guts. I have to hand it to him.

  Harriet Lord has been really great to me, not only as a collector of my work, but as a true supporter. And I think of her as a muse for the project. Beneath could never have happened without the long talks we had together and her generous backing. What I can’t understand is that she seems to claim she is responsible for my work. She seems to believe that she actually created it. I simply can’t understand why she would say that. You know, she had a really hard time after her husband died, and she’s been in psychiatric treatment for years. For the record, let’s just say she’s a kind lady, but a little confused from time to time, and leave it at that.

  I was on-site in the kitchen when the kind but a little confused lady in long-term psychiatric treatment hurled the offending magazine at the pot rack. I was there when she cursed, roared, went cross-eyed and then blind with rage. Head down, arms flailing, she attacked an open shelf, batting mugs, dishes, and bowls to the floor, where they met their spectacular ends in smithereens. After the crash, I knelt on the floor, wielding brush and dustpan to collect thousands of shards, while Harry sat on the floor and said over and over, “I’ll kill him.” The fact that the man had called her Harriet Lord, not Harriet Burden, had shaken extra salt on Harry’s already open wound.

  And my refrain was: I told you so. I couldn’t help myself. I had told her so. Harry penned a flaming letter to Art Assembly, which was never published. She phoned Rune and screeched at his voice mail: Liar, thief, horrible, horrible man, traitor. Her vituperation didn’t budge him. Harry contacted Anton Tish’s parents. His mother politely but firmly told her, “My son wants nothing to do with you.” Harry hired a shamus named Paille, a hazy-faced, laconic character with a Maine accent who specialized in blackmail and extortion. Paille tracked the kid to an ashram in India, to Thailand, and then to Malaysia, but after that, the boy’s path ended with his airline records. Paille promised to keep up the quest.

  Methodically, deliberately, Harry c
ompiled every shred, morsel, sliver, and dust mote of evidence to prove her case. As she dug into piles, riffled through papers, and hunted for signs of her creative ownership, it dawned on her—a rainy, bleak, gray illumination, to be sure—it dawned on Harry how carefully she had hidden her involvement. She unearthed early drawings in sketchbooks and some plans on her computer, but other drawings and further designs were in Rune’s possession. Her e-mails to him read like cryptograms, as did his to her. No slips. And the assistants, whom she assumed were in the know, were not. Even Edgar Holloway III, old studio hand, Friday to Harry’s Crusoe, had to admit that this time around he hadn’t suspected a thing. All he knew was that Harry had written a check for the work she had purchased from Rune as well as checks for the production of Beneath, but a benefactor is not a creator, and Rune had thanked her in print for her “support.”

  Eldridge came through for her. Art Lights published the story of their work, but his page of eloquence touched very few people at the time. Harry’s experiment had been gutted and crushed, and she ranted in protest. Once the gears of despair began to turn, they banged and clinked with the same compulsive music. She had been robbed. No one understood her. No one paid attention to her. They were all blockheads, dupes of creeping sexism and phallus worship. Rune should be drawn and quartered, his eyes scooped out with razor-sharp grapefruit spoons and smashed into jelly with a hammer. Her life’s work had been ruined, the ambitious project carefully constructed from the blocks of her radiant intellect, one beautiful irony on top of another—which would prove once and for all her theories about sex bias and perception and God-knows-what-else had exploded in her face.