The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  Uncle Simon knew and said something about my being like “Queen Elizabeth.” He meant the first one; the second one was just a princess so far. He meant tricky all the time. He said to me once, “Tricky, tricky, tricky will never do it.”

  He stopped hitting me on the head. I did not have to go to the orphans’ home; the line of the permissible was drawn in a way, the line that no one writes about, the treaties and no-man’s-lands and actual negotiations between children and their elders year by year.

  The athletic training continued. I remained more or less twisted and nervous and substantially hideous. But not quite. I was healthier. I slept better. My looks, such as they were, returned, albeit twisted, nervous, substantially hideous, but I looked like a boy—do you follow me?

  And like Mary, Queen of Scots, I lost out again since once the border of the permissible was established, Uncle Simon, like an army N.C.O., set out to humiliate me within the law for what he thought were the best, masculine reasons. I don’t know how to say what I’m going to say next. But, look, there’s power and rank and the love they evoke, which Jews often call respect, and then there’s the phallic element, and I don’t know what that is, some element of force-and-knowledge, not necessarily worldly or unworldly, and involving the heart and the brain, and it’s phallic—it’s different from Queen Elizabeth I or what Momma did when she got her own way or ran things. It’s not necessarily even powerful in the world, this phallic thing. My adoptive father, a failure people said, had it, and my real father, who was illiterate (I knew him; I saw him at times; I was adopted because my mother had died; I couldn’t stay with him because he believed in actual beatings and wanted me to be a rabbi and not cut my sidelocks; he was crazy on the subject) had it; some school figures had it but in moderated or other forms. Uncle Simon didn’t have it.

  And he wasn’t going to have it in me. The senator, Uncle Simon’s senator, was interested in the war readiness of Arkansas. This was 1941. But Uncle Simon dallied and did not explore the few factories in Arkansas or the tanneries or talk to the unions or to the newspapermen. Simon read the paper carefully and made one or two phone calls a day, and men dropped into his men’s store. I don’t know if he had a brilliant and well-functioning network or not. How would he know if he never checked on it? Almost all bureaucrats and functionaries, almost everyone is something of a fake. Simon studied nothing and read nothing anymore. He was satisfied or nervous or merely set in his ways (Lila had said that of him). “A lifetime’s experience is what I have,” he said in his treble jibber-jabber. It does something to the mind to be attached to a fake: there was Aunt Charlotte for example.

  But Uncle Simon was unsarcastically devoted to the senator. It was just that he was nostalgically devoted even when he was on the phone with him. Passed over? Left behind? But then why did the senator call him? He didn’t call very often, it’s true.

  Simon asked me questions about public affairs and history and about politics. I mean it was a ritual grilling or test, a mode of instruction. If I answered with any conviction and showed an opinion or a structure of fact rather than stammering and being embarrassed to be asked such questions, he jibber-jabbered at me, hectoring me about male behavior. Lila and others had hectored and advised me on politic behavior, on getting-along-with-people. I read a book a day, musty or stupid or not, and the newspaper, and any magazines that were around. I had no spending money. I often felt he might want to discuss something actually without the politics of who he was and how he felt about his life.

  He didn’t want me to answer his questions. He wanted me to be junior and subservient, receptive. He wanted to drill ideas that the senator no longer listened to into my life and mind. I tried to kiss ass. I really tried. But psychology is odd: whenever I let myself, inside myhead, call him a skinflint asshole I could like him some. Or when the cook or Charlotte’s old parents attacked him, I could say and feel and see and realize, He’s not so bad.… Or in the moments when I was actually fighting with him or was on the edge of it like a Scottish border laird. But when I had to like him, the thing of producing the faked emotion minute after minute, if you didn’t in the end accept this fake liking as real—as if under torture you had finally been broken and had given in, after which you invented some sort of rigid, fake macho to make up for the oozing nightmare of submission—you lost any sense of real air and light, and you became a creature of oppression, feral and full of hatred except for the awful sentimentality of liking him.

  He didn’t interest me even as a tyrant suffocating me, that was the truth. And the phallic thing re-arose mentally—physically I was hardly phallic yet—from its own ashes over and over. Music is a big help; if you don’t use it as background music or as a source of hallucination, but if you listen, it is amazingly curative. Some of the musicians in Russia who appeared after the war were surprisingly free, and I never knew what to think of the musicians who had remained in Nazi Germany, but I couldn’t hear the strains of sentimentality and hatred in their music.

  So I was willing to settle for him feeling the damage might be impermanent.

  But that was lying in bed or sitting in the branches of a tree or on the toilet. Face to face with him in his life, settling-for-him seemed like an a priori foul betrayal of him, although I did not twist his life in any way, and he did twist mine. But he could sense that other betrayal, that indescribable thing of no affection and what it meant. But if I gave it, it would have no power because it would be false, it would be like other affections, like Aunt Charlotte’s, which did him no good. He had so little from me that it might be called the shell of a reality, but he could sense the animal spirit inside. I suppose it was like the shell game with a pea, with a prize.

  It was painful but real, myself as Lila’s sad and not-entirely O.K. banished son, an absurd, musty aunt, a difficult and to-be-satirizeduncle, a fool with power over me, dying people upstairs, and the commandingly provincial and actually important senator offstage, and a whole, large cast of characters several hundred miles to the north in St. Louis. My nutty uncle and his quick jib-jabbing patterns of speech, I had to let him shape the way I talked. I had to imitate him at his insistence. I had to adopt his conclusions, his systems. I had to use his sense of truth. I could have moods only if they were like his, if they were miniature versions. He tested me daily on my ability to mimic him adequately. If we had been more closely attached by blood instead of being first cousins once removed, this might have happened normally. Or perhaps for boys ordinary life is hellish and that is why they have testosterone and become such hellions. I don’t know. The imitation of Uncle Simon by one visiting subfireman (kid) had to be inadequate, juvenile, leaving him room to correct me, to strut and preen because that was what his waking—and I bet his sleeping—lives largely were, 90 percent preening.

  He used to ask me to tell him my day in detail even if I had spent it near him or with him. “And in good English,” he would say, and the son of a bitch meant his English. In those days I still had the energy to be able to imitate radio announcers and politicians, imitate and rearrange—I fairly often did it for company in St. Louis when I was allowed to show off. I could imitate upper level middlebrow English from novels on the order of The Good Earth. I could do the supposedly Chinese dialogue. I did it to make the asshole laugh. I did it to broaden the moment—and his mind. I did it for the hell of it and because I was a brat. I did it because I was pre-phallic, pre-something he had never been.

  He said, “No, no. English like mine.… Don’t be a stoopnagel.” He said, “Always use good English, respectable English. Get some self-discipline; it will do you some good.” He meant well, but how can you mean well if you’re stupid and close-minded? Besides, it was often visible in the tension in him, in his neck and hands, and then in his eyes that he meant to clap me into a box. He knew, not in language like this, but in his own terms, he knew what he was doing andadmired and forgave it. One time, having forced me to sit on his lap, he tried to kiss me on the mouth after such an interrog
ation as the above and without knowing I knew how to do this, I opened my lips so that our teeth met and clattered and rang. He had bridges and maybe dentures, and he grew rigid and seemed to be numbed. He raised his hand to his teeth, and I slipped off his lap.

  Then he reached for me and whopped me. Aunt C., who was in the room said, “It makes him mad to hear people use English disreputably.”

  Hard as it is to bear, there is a rank in these matters. As nearly as I can judge after all these years, looking back, his talk was made up of school-English improved a bit by official army English, eased a bit by Little Rock journalistic English and minor league sports English—which is very different from major league sports English, being jokey and deprecatory and defensive, and not wild, not inflected so much by ambition and worldliness. I hate to say this but I had already published in grown-up newspapers, poems and accounts of school occasions, and one time a piece on Eleanor Roosevelt. And one poem in a local literary magazine.

  The jibing at you, jabbing jibber-jabber of his talk formed at that point in his life a dead and papery speech with a noticeable absence of human connections in it. Pugnacity had once kept his language alive, political issues that he dealt with in campaigns, alive and perhaps dishonest or bland—I don’t know; I wasn’t there. He still was a small, ugly, combative man but that stuff was dead within him. I was as a mean ten-year-old boy still a language-smitten child—it was the only non-self-aggrandizing area you could play around in in the school I had gone to. My uncle’s jokes and his unbearable eyes and the emptiness of his life and the omniscience he claimed and his trembly jibbering-jabbering voice and his temper and his will, his old guy’s last-minute narcissism and ready contempt left over from his political heyday and his considerable courage still—God, it was hard. Kissing ass is always hard. Maybe it’s harder in a democracy where it is improvised at the will and intelligence of each kissee, unlegislated by custom, unworked out, and so harder and harsher, much rougher, hairierthan in Europe or Asia—part of why democracies seem savage and scare some foreigners so.

  Uncle Simon had a Jew’s interest in the power, deftness, and strength (of varied kinds) of men of power. Difficult as I was, he made me sit on his lap while he told me about his meetings with famous ballplayers—“just as human as you and me. And he knew the value of discipline. He had wrists as big as your knees.” A pitcher, Cy Young maybe. At the time when I was his captive, I listened to Uncle Simon, but memory is likely to take on aspects of critical interpretation, and I see his mouth and his eyes and balk—actually my memory balks—at pulling his words and phrases out of silence: “A big-timer knows how to be a gent’man with the small fry. There is not a big man, a politician, a great leader, a financier, an industrialist in the world who does not know this. Wiley, you can tell who a man is by how he deals with little people.…”

  No one’s little, Uncle Simon, I might say. I might say, Lila has a system of who and what you have time for. But some people feed you and some people drain you. My dad, S.L., says it’s all show and lies and you have to watch out for the rednecks. Momma says, First you have to get the say-so and then you can be nice. In books I’ve read what you’re talking about, Uncle Simon, is called the common touch and none of the really great figures had it although some of them were popular with the public. Lincoln and Caesar never had it, or Napoleon. Hitler does. But Generalissimo Franco doesn’t.

  Simon talked a lot about Franklin Roosevelt and his methods, but he was interested only in Roosevelt’s relation to Congress, and particularly to the Senate, and even then only with reference to the methods and systems of Huey Long in a neighboring poor Southern state—bribe and pay and payoff. Uncle Simon never spoke cynically or used a cynical vocabulary. He was never ironic like S.L. when he spoke of a Huey Long hospital making jobs and pleasing the poor and quieting the rich families with doctor sons.

  Simon’s courtship rested on him sharing his knowledge with me, so that I might base and center my life on what he knew and grow to “be as successful as he was, grow to be someone like him with the same collapsed remainder of life in him. I was supposed to give a further meaning, further in time, to what he knew, I was to bear and propagate the elements of omniscience in him both willingly and as he trained me. He wanted me to acknowledge that what Simon said was the chief treasure the world had to offer.

  Momma said to me a couple of times, “Everyone is religious—it makes me sick.” Her everyone was always men; women she referred to as women and never lumped into everyone, only into they as in you know what they say. Children were always little children. Simon’s everyone was journalistic, was whoever was gathered at the fire, or whoever had political clout in Little Rock, or was the philosophers’ all or mankind but used journalistically with special reference to Little Rock and the surrounding counties.

  I felt that Simon (in his way, in his style) was interested in me and what I felt. He cared what I felt. But it genuinely hurt, how he finagled obedience, how he trained me, how he played with what I felt. I missed Momma, not emotionally, but in terms of amusement. She had warned me, “They’re very very dull, they are dull people. Charlotte is really dull, and Simon is—well, you can stay awake by starting a fight with Simon. How sad life is, pisher—it has so many details.”

  My own brand of American English, my dear Americanola (dear to me), irritated Simon uncontrollably: his nose twitched, his jowls waggled, his eyelids flapped, his lips involuntarily parted: “Roosevelt doesn’t have to do big-shot manly things—he’s a cripple. He gets to be clever—and smart: that’s why he’s so good.…” His obvious androgyny, his wide repertoire of responses, his flexibility of response.

  Aunt C. slipped up and sent a pro-war poem I wrote to the Little Rock Gazette, and they published it. That made Simon angry. Then he was scornful and haughty in his dry, jibbering-jabbering, nonstop omniscient way. He really thought I was inarticulate and illiterate and unfortunate in terms of language, and he really thought he was the cat’s meow—that’s Lila, of course—the big cheese local panjandrum Mahatma Gandhi: that’s how my father S.L. sometimes talked—when it came to rhetoric and brains.

  And if you keep the context small and neat and if you niftily trim the edges and omit sickness and emotions, he was smart. But if you include any of those things or even something as dumb as dogs or flowers, he was a stupid shit. The belief, the faith that Uncle Simon was the center of the universe, the faith that love and being a son or like a son should bring, the sense that universal truths were bound up in him—him not as an object of sarcasm—stinks, and the pain, the teasing agony of it is really outside the scope of these sentences. But one can lie in bed, an ugly, nervous, more-than-irritating ten-year-old and feel the soft busyness of the dark air as acceptable death.

  I make Simon mad—but he is interested. Is this what girls find in the world? I see now looking back, my inner tone and outward actions toward him, my attitude toward his merits as a thinker, match, mimic, mirror in some humanly awful way of hopeless ass-kissing and violent, heartbroken sarcasm, mirror in a ten-year-old’s scale his behavior toward me. The staleness of what that felt like was terrible! And my uncle sensed that but only as a private set of dog images, me as a dog and like a dog whose pelt has a stale smell. He sniffs at me, he grabs me in his arms as if in a set of jaws, drops me and draws back and comments on my appearance—ugly, bookish appearance, but changing in his house, I must admit.

  At other times he rubs me against him in a doglike way—he is a man of language; I am a mere barker and sniffler. His life has attained an awful decency, thoroughly tainted, but not to be judged, his public sinlessness, his important cipherhood. He still deals with the real world but mostly in a dead way, an honorific way; he is careful not to be overstrained. He drags me around with him all day every day unless we are fighting. People are rarely rude to him, I notice, in the ways they are rude to Lila and S.L. It takes me a while but I see after a while: no one flirts with him. He kisses ass, he flirts with customers. Aunt C. obeys him. He
says, like Lila—they are brother and sister—“I can get a thing or two done still.…”

  Uncle Simon’s perceptions and systems of thought and of public action had created his and my shelter, our position. He knew about male disrespect, male assertion—he knew about sexual pride. He knew about the emotional singularity of the male showiness under the surface manner of salesmen—he had that, or had had it, himself. He knew about the escapee’s pugnacity and he knew how the world treated outsiders. He was primed to deal in humiliation and subservience: I saw it often, in his store, with customers, and he withdrew it and treated some customers as rough equals, slightly lower than himself, and some as dirt although they were clearly men of power; and in some style or other, they took it. Very little was at stake except rank, but the details of this ranking, man by man, were Uncle Simon’s laugh, literally: he laughed, blinked, joked, smoked cigars, leaned back in his chair, stood, and walked back and forth.

  But the game was absolute for him; it never lapped over into truce or into real amusement or into really mattering. It was petty. It was a case of splitting hairs but using a smart but not refined ax to do it. It seemed an enormous, enormous, enormous waste, the dried out, pointless, endlessly detailed struggle over precedence.

  No wonder Lila had for years refused to visit him. She wouldn’t talk to him on the telephone more than once a year and then only if she had a headache, had taken aspirin, and was spending the day in bed, “doing her duty with the telephone.”

  “Here,” he would say to me, “tie this man’s shoelaces for him.” Or: “You got something on the cuff of your trousers, Jim—the boy here will clean it.”

  I couldn’t do it. The second time Uncle Simon said this, I said, “No, he won’t. The boy won’t.”