The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Prince What’s-his-name …”

  “Prince? Myshkin? The Dostoyevsky one: From The Idiot. I thought you were telling me Moira thought I was dumb.”

  “She thinks you’re a big brain: she hopes you’re big elsewhere, too. She says you’re heavy …” Not light company.

  “I’m sorry I’m heavy,” I said. “Phallically, I’m maybe more the family economy size than giant.”

  After a moment, he said, “Do you think your approach works with … people?” He sounded naive for a change.

  I looked at him, big-eyed, meaning I don’t know. I said, “Work how? For what reason?” I was on the defensive in his house.

  “Don’t you want to write a Proustian novel? And have a good life.” Proust, in this set, was supposedly the best novelist ever.

  “No. Do you? I want to write best-sellers like Jack London and Hemingway: sincere, popular—”

  He caught on faster than I could talk: “You are an idiot,” he said so quickly that it gave an interesting rhythm, I thought, to the dialogue, which struck me as intelligent dialogue, not because of what was said but because of the structure given to it by Brr, who was so alert and ruthless and such a captain of industry.

  “But not saintly—not like Myshkin,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. His yes was like a self-conscious sentence, but it didn’t require knowledge of sentence structures. He meant I was weird.

  I was dressed in very dark gray flannel slacks and a good black cashmere sweater and a white shirt: it was all I could afford in terms of dressing up; and it was a sign of respectful effort toward people who cared about clothes. I don’t know how this was taken except that after a few weeks, other people—some women—showed up, dressed the same way. Of course, in this social group of hard-working people, mostly freaks, to use Brr’s word ( They’re all freaks and their work is their masks, Moira has said), I was given the role of someone healthy—a specialized form of ephebe, supposedly a sexy man, but the favorite of the house for the moment. Everything everyone did in this room was a signal, was semiotics because of everyone’s careers.

  Ora knew other people from her girlhood: the governor of New York State, for instance, who was the third-richest man in the world. We sometimes saw some of those people. They were often put off by me—and my clothes. What I’m trying to say is that what was signified wasn’t clear at all outside its own context. The critic wanted me to talk to him and Ora; he kind of wanted to see if I would whore her. That kind of stuff can be done good-naturedly; in the middle of night sometimes back then when I couldn’t sleep but had an attack of panic, I wished Ora was a cold-blooded, ruthless climber who did sleep around and get us places like many of the women we knew.

  Calvin Higgins’s wife—Higgins was my publisher—his wife was extraordinarily ambitious and pretty and charming but stupid, too, and pretentious; she was very jealous of our knowing the Kellows. She had a little high-pitched voice and short legs and she said to me in her kitchen, “I am Faustian: I made a Faustian bargain with my life when I married Cal.” She said it in this little high-pitched, Ivy League woman student’s voice, which made it all even stranger, and I felt cold terror.

  She was sensitive and quick and mannerly and had money of her own, but she was, in a way, high-bred white trash, hysterical and full of calculation and not capable of much victory. She was really a supernumerary and exploited by Calvin, who was a small, nervous, determined man, a great liar, and charmer—a heart-tugger once you got past an initial shudder at some clownish and very white physical repulsiveness he had. He hinted at a tragic sexual past and told anecdotes of being spurned—he managed to avoid mentioning which gender. He was so thoroughly second-rate and so irresistibly sweet—but it was a lie; he was ambitious; and his wife was nearly as imprisoned as Moira—that if the sweetness didn’t put your teeth on edge, knowing him put you on edge.

  He wrote deeply sincere, very sweet social diaries about how human and humane the ruling class was, but I don’t think he knew the ruling class; he knew some fine-drawn, well-educated, rich people. His books did gloat. He loved writing about maimings. He had worked to establish my reputation.

  Anyway, Higgins’s wife, unlike Moira, adored Ora, her life, her social standing which she recognized. Higgins’s wife was from North Dakota or Indiana. She had a Faustian woman’s college dormitory crush and she spoke of Ora as such a big person, so brave, she goes out and meets life halfway—I want to be like her.

  So at the party it was confusing to me that Ora was sort of disapproved of and not much liked. Ora said to me sotto voce, “I am humiliated when you defend me: let me defend myself.”

  “But you weren’t defending yourself: you were crying.”

  “Don’t live my life for me. Now everyone knows about me.”

  “Knows what about you?” Do you ever have talks with someone that you think are utterly meaningless but that a day or two later you see a meaning in, but you can’t check it out because they don’t remember clearly enough and neither do you. And they don’t want to talk; their mood has changed.

  “That I’m a victim and a fool—oversexed.” She really wasn’t. But she was a brave, moving, sexual sight: a mother of dynasties. Among her old friends, I was, if not disliked, distrusted and looked at askance, just as she was here: I think it was the amused value I placed on myself that upset the Prots she knew, most of whom were famous, just as the unamused, subcutaneous value she placed on herself upset the Jews here.

  “Ora, I thought you were trying not to make a scene for my sake”—because of Kellow’s commissioning a piece from me.

  “You think I’m weak—you think I’m a nobody—”

  “I think you’re a hero …” But then I went too far: “of the Third Reich …”

  “I am not anti-Semitic! I am as good with you as any Jewess could be!”

  “Ora, so help me God, I’m going crazy: you’re absolutely nuts: let’s not have a scene at this party. God, you’re driving me crazy—”

  “You live in a dream, Wiley. You’re so spoiled because you have a brain—”

  “Fuck off, Ora.”

  I hadn’t any real idea what we were talking about. She was jealous, I was a star there, in that house for a while. I don’t know; I smiled at her: the smile just happened—how frail and intimate real life is … I mean the smile was uncalled for and had no subtext except amusement, partly at the horror.

  The speed and dexterity of the man, Brr, the distance back from the surface of his eyes that he stands and his sadly triumphal, tireless (pilled-up) nature afflict me with vertigo. And amusement.

  “I kiss your shoelaces,” Sam Chonberg said to me in echo of Whacko’s kissing Moira’s feet. Chonberg is semi-openly homosexual as is Camtippy, but Camtippy, not a Jew, is much much more famous. Moira said to me, “I love anti-Semitism—it just twists the whole world into knots and fills it with lies.” Gloria Peeler (my agent then) said Chonberg offered ridiculous terms for me to work on a script of a movie for him. You can’t lower yourself that way: you can’t afford to yet—you’re too small potatoes now …

  Peeler is openly, and in the most friendly way, an S&M lady, sort of Let’s Tango, Let’s Tangle—a famous Tough Cookie and friendly New York presence.

  I told Moira what Peeler had said, and Moira chanted, “Small potatoes, small potatoes …” Then: “That’s better than itty-bitty balls.”

  Kellow and Chonberg and Deuteronomy and Christian (a Jew). Ah, Kellow is pure Arabian Nights, oriental; Chonberg is The Little German turned American Star. Peeler does what she does for The Feminine Principle.

  Brr had earlier crushes on both Leonard Doetroch, who is, after all, kind of a very great commercial director, with pronounced elements of being an artist of some sort, and on Little Sam Chonberg (Kellow is a Jew who likes Jews) who is maybe a great comedian, who is at least very, very good, and who will never do comedy again. He is about to make a top of the line, top of the world movie in Eng
land, with Sir Edmund Buller and Lady Joan in it for class: “I can use extra dialogue—if you have any …”

  Moira whispered, “That’s a nineteen-forties wisecrack. We don’t do that anymore.” She said in a regular voice, “We do nineteen-fifties wisecracks,” and she looked at Chonberg warmly. God, even that is an act of flirtation.

  Chonberg and Brr have certain abilities in common: they are very good horsemen: I am a butcher boy when I get on a horse, without finesse or posture or sensibility: my procedures work but they’re brutal and stupid. They both dance extremely well. They both burn with restlessness.

  I am a counterbalance to Chonberg. If I get out of hand, Kellow will make his way to Chonberg’s side. Actually, I think that Kellow intends to own me and this little movie I want to make with Connie Lewistein: that is, he expects it to reflect his world and to be about him. There is something about psychoanalysis that turns people into being almost General Terms: Kellow is Maneuver and Ambition.

  Kellow pretends to a kind of (sexual) interest in Ora but actively dislikes her—he has “confessed” this to me. Chonberg has actually made a pass at her but doesn’t really feel drawn to women so far as I can guess. Kellow, sitting on the arm of the couch, his arms folded, asks me warmly, “What do you believe?” I can’t remember an immediate context in the last few minutes in which that would fit in. I look down at my hands in my lap.

  In a voice of much more overt cleverness than Brr’s, Moira says to Brr, “Ask him what does his smile mean?”

  Brr said, “Chonberg has done a great piece for us on smiles.”

  Deuteronomy said, “You rarely smile, Brr. You part your lips and sparkle a little bit, and then you call it quits.”

  Brr looked at me, meaning he wanted my opinion.

  “You have a different tonality of no-smile for each one of us: it changes so swiftly I get the feeling of wind blowing off you, to me,” I said.

  “You are very quick,” Moira said to me.

  “I thought that before and remembered it now,” I said.

  “You are like a rock,” Brr said mysteriously.

  “A quick rock?” Then: “Epater the rocks? It’s a kind of agony being small-time compared to everyone else in the room.”

  Moira said, “You ought to make a real movie—with Brr—on your own, you analyze everything too much.”

  “My mind is a clutter of darkness,” I said.

  “Oh listen to the child,” Moira said.

  Kellow wanted me to use in my movie a very small, very short, fine-boned Chinese actor, aged about eighteen. Kellow said the Chinese guy was the most beautiful adolescent model in the world. (This was a long time ago; being Chinese was exotic.)

  “How can he represent freakishness?”

  “Have him wear glasses.… He loves a girl bigger than he is: a blond girl with big breasts—someone who never saw a desert, who hardly even knows he’s Chinese. ”

  “Is he greedy? Is he competitive? Why a desert in China?”

  “What do you mean? The Gobi.”

  Moira said, “Is he bossy? Does he always walk faster than everyone? Does he set the pace? Does he always have The Best Gossip? Where did you learn to notice things?”

  “In some ways, you always manage to have the last word … Wiley,” Deut said.

  I am of an indefensible order of the human. It is cheap and special to be like me: you never have to live, or know how people live: you never have to feel except as notes for scenes. I didn’t want to spend my life like this, but then one isn’t a boy for very long. So far as I know, someone’s social surface is a lie as a mark of civilization. I am a liar too and a recent lecher, and not a river god or really a boy among the currents and artesian Wellings of time. Style is a brooding patron of metamorphoses who gives you a liar’s surface, partly as a privilege.

  If you refuse social metamorphosis, refuse the riverine, and substitute the mental stroll and flight of keeping track you think all sorts of strange things such as that I am the child of my child self more than I am the child of my childhood. The fruits of Eden and the walled garden and the spirit that moved among the leaves and on the waters, how am I bound to such selves? How unfinal they seem, and the fragility of them, of one’s past roles. Truth is as different from that as bringing a real tiger into the room—and releasing him: not a portrait of a tiger, not a poem about a tiger; but the complete thing.

  I mean, if you’re serious, and if you wake from daydreams about your life to a dream-tinged life, to wakefulness and a landscape of attention to parties, and with ideas of truth and of work you might do like a tiger in the room, hinted at, but invisible so far. I am someone my younger self would resent—although he would have been relieved that we have not turned out to be no one.

  Brr stared at me, bug-eyed; he has a natural state of being bug-eyed, very insectlike, which he controls and hides and then reveals. He wants to know what I mean by my not saying anything about selling out. Moira approved of selling out; she was a famous shopper, she was mad and deep as a shopper—she said matter-of-factly (but with a giggle), “I’ve had visions while I was in Bloomingdale’s—I never talkabout them though. I have a thing about escalators.” Then: “You’ll write an unkind book about us, you’ll see—I can look at your eyes and see right into your soul: I’m a witch! A Dostoyevskian witch—” I think she meant she was a Russian-Jewish witch.

  Brr interpolated: “She’s a reader! I’m not a reader at all …” He was rivalrous with her but also protective and he did a sort of public relations boastful thing about her.

  Moira hurried on; she said to me, “You’re The Idiot played by Gerard Philippe with a lot of Yankee Hollywood male ingenue thrown in but we all see the Captain Bligh and Stavrogin in you: I know it’s Stavrogin in that other bad book I like so much although it’s not Crime and Punishment and it’s not The Brothers Karamazov. The Possessed ? I love that title—”

  “I do too,” I said.

  “I mean it literally: I love it. I know it’s Stavrogin because I want to say Raskolnikov—so if I think Raskolnikov, I remember to say Stavrogin: my doctor has taught me to do this.… He taught me to be personal about how I use my mind. My poor mind …” She said she thought about these figures sexually and allocated sexual organs to them and love scenes and seductions. “Raskolnikov was a jerk-off with a little prick, one of those troubled lover-murderers who are round. But Stavrogin …” she gushed in pantomime. He was a sexual big-shot, a hot-for-damnation character, a figure of limitless danger, always staring at her in her mind, she said.

  “Moira has the most expensive shrink in the Western World,” Brr said quietly boastful. (Seventeen years from now, she will cut her throat and wrists and bleed to death while he is in the next room in a pill-induced sleep. That happened in the 1970s.)

  Moira said loudly, “Stavrogin is more responsible …”

  We are discussing the nature of trespass and social horror—how we harm others. But we are unclear in this. I said, “I like very strong people so that whatever happens is not my fault—”

  “Well, that’s deep,” Moira said. Then, with an evil sort of giggle: “I never know what I think about deep things until I see my doctor. I love my doctor—literally. I think he’s scary—he’s a Stavrogin but not so mean—not so good-looking either. I’d love to marry him—he makes more money than God—and he’s more interesting. I love guilt when it makes men, you know, English and mean. “ She had a real ability to interest me, real power in her observations, a competence at being trespassed against: one implication of her manner was that she was having an affair with her doctor and was sleeping with Deut and Brr, and they all knew about one another.

  “Moira’s deep,” Deuteronomy said sweetly. He was never entirely not onstage when I saw him.

  “Oh, Moira’s deep,” Brr said in a theatrically mysterious tone. It had to do with having power. Moira and Brr invented a kind of journalism. Moira maybe matters more in post-war culture than is known. She propagandized for this or that politic
al or cultural idea, a mad duchess of pop literacy, a mad American Jewess-genius wife who changed the world. Somewhat.

  It is fashionable and pungent and shitty and post-war that in this set they hold over one another’s heads the sort of judgment that they are or are not artists. Almost everyone in that room will still be unforgotten fifty years later, but no one in that room except me has held the rank of artist in that time. I mean only that all the false dealing and swapping and buying of the term came to nothing. My rep may wind up being that of a swindler.

  One of the directors there had made a popular movie about jazz—an interesting movie, kind of crude. He came over to join us, and Moira praised his movie; she said, “I loved all the dim light—” It wasn’t insulting either. But I didn’t understand it.

  He said, “I don’t like movies—I don’t like jazz. I’m just a hired hand.” He was drunk and wore cowboy boots back in the fifties when that meant Time magazine would think he was avant-the-rest-of-us (Moira’s phrase). The way he said what he said aroused a kind of stillness in Moira: he was a viable and durable and influential sensibility: male, maybe more competent than talented and certainly strong.

  Brr said, “A hired hand who does great work.”

  Brr said, “You know what Whitto said to Life magazine—” Whitto, iconoclastic and marvelously popular and sullen, was often in this set proposed as a source of prophecy, a mad young rabbi really. His quality of truth as an actor had the quality of a temporary religion. Brr has an idiot savant’s memory for journalistic quotes and he reproduces Whitto: “ ‘Jazz is the great American art: it comes out of oppression. Jazz shows you how to react—if you have a good conscience you can have a good time among the criminal actions of your country.’ “ Brr was such a good mimic that it was as if Whitto were talking in the room, but Brr can’t really do Whitto despite what I just said; Brr’s version is stupid and noble and questionable, Broadway versus Hollywood—theatrical.

  Brr has to run things. The purpose of his activity is to overcome you—he is like a four-year-old, Moira says. If he was not like this how could he run his magazines successfully? Each of his writers had theories and friendships and was calculating; he negotiated with agents and had a staff of photographers. He said to me once, Everyone is in rebellion all of the time. I spend too much of my time being a policeman.