An Honest Ghost

by Rick Whitaker

  I am forever getting advice from well-meaning friends—and knowledgeable professional advisers—to “go commercial.” Silly seasons always are with us. Tinkering over sentences at my computer, I believed, really and truly, that a great cyclotron of art was at hand.

  Lately, my sexual life has become very pure. Revenge fucking may not be the sweetest sex, nor the most satisfying, but it’s the most urgent. I felt excellent. Nonetheless my condition of feeling quite guilty continued for the longest time. Loners can be morbidly sensitive to this sort of thing.

  It was all too good to be true.

  Unending flights of screeching birds, which skimmed low over the water, from afar resembled drifting islands.

  Other people see us in ways that we cannot anticipate; we cannot know ourselves because we cannot be everyone else in relation to ourselves; and so on.

  I entered silently, sat beside the sleeping boy for a moment, then wandered about the other room. Then I stood in front of the mirror and stayed like that for so long that my reflection became a stranger and looked absurd. After that it was necessary to hold sadness at bay with a brandy, though not successfully.

  Writers are a scourge to those they cohabit with. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. The better you try to be, the bigger mess you make. Yet I could not, would not, dismiss my beloved boy.

  I am beginning to catch sight of what I might call the “deep-lying” subject of my book. I have always, all of my life, been looking for help from a man. And this must be where my mistake is.

  My mother’s femaleness was absolute, ancient, and there was a peculiar, helpless assertiveness about it. My mother was a faded old lady, sort of like the Queen of England. This was her only form of self-defense. And walking in vain, suddenly she would sit down on one of the circus chairs that stood by the long window overlooking the garden, bend forward, putting her hands between her legs, and begin to cry, “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” repeated so often that it had the effect of all words spoken in vain. For nothing could stop my mother when she reentered the past and plunged back into her disastrous childhood. The dizziness and queer sensations that sometimes followed she took to be a proof of how much good it was doing her. Women baffled me, my mother in particular.

  I was born between two miscarriages. It was an ill wind that blew nobody good. It was 1968. A sordid sexual event had occurred at some point.

  From the beginning I sense that something is wrong. It’s something almost imperceptible. Grown-ups tried to sweeten the pill, but there was no hiding it, children were the most oppressed creatures on earth. I was a bastard child, I had no right to the social order.

  My mother was completely out of my control; she was two women, and which of them would be seated on the porch when I got home from school I never knew beforehand. Days and nights were like verses of an infinitely harmonious dark song to us. After I had run away from school, no one knew what to do with me. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back from my failure in everyday life. I became a voracious reader; I was ambitious for an intellectual life I imagined belonging only to towers, gray cities, winter—to monks in cold cells, poets in scarves, women in furs, Edmund Wilson. Land of noble ideas. New York City rose out of the sea looking like nothing on earth. New York seemed like a mirage to me. Meanwhile, the possibility of the lone genius remained. Thank you, Proust. I was glad that I was going to be alone.

  Then the amazing thing happened. My mother wanted me to be a homosexual. “My dear,” she cried, “I’m going to give you this dress as soon as I’m through with it.” My childhood was not, however, quite the gay whirl that one might imagine from the above statement. My mother has always been a heavy drinker. My father went crazy and became a cocaine fiend. Though long dead, he is very much alive in my dream.

  Insanity, of course, runs in families; and it was, perhaps, too much to expect me to escape it.

  We find our true nature writ small but clear in our childhood lives.

  “I didn’t,” said Joe, “until to-night. My experience of life is that it’s very fragmented.”

  Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading.

  12.

  David woke next morning very early, with a sense of immense interest in things in general. He changed some of his pet habits—that of spending Sunday morning at the Turkish baths for instance. At all events, it was in the autumn that he resolved to become the greatest writer of all time. There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He regarded himself as working in a state of aesthetic revolution, even against himself: “Many times I’ve put myself up against the wall and shot myself.” He had many literary friends. It was a pity his name was not more Irish-looking. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. For the moment his most basic decision was in favor of art’s precedence over every other human activity.

  He felt that he loved his wife sincerely, tenderly—as much in fact as he was capable of loving a human being; and he was perfectly frank with her in everything except that secret foolish craving, that dream, that lust burning a hole in his life. He had a life apart from her—his sexual life. The idea of secrecy is the last refuge of romance. I am sure they are very good friends. Which made it particularly ticklish. Mind you, he was still the tenderest of husbands, in fact, more than tender, a perfect angel. His wife was well satisfied. But nobody came. Obscurely, each thought—or fondly hoped—the other was sliding into musty celibacy. She noticed that the people whom he passed looked back after him; but he went straight forward, lifting above them a face like a February sky. At such moments he was horrified by a sudden awareness of his own insufficiency and a profound sense of failure. It’s corny, it’s sentimental, he doesn’t talk to people about it, but it feels at certain times—now, for instance—like his most essential aspect: his conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck it all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we’re going to start it all over again. “I suppose I am just a half-man,” he used to say bitterly. The metaphor wasn’t so far off the mark.

  I was still not entirely happy with the sleeping arrangements. But one has to admit that if there is one domain in which, in discourse, deception has some chance of success, it is certainly love that provides its model. There are moments when the force of marriage—not love but marriage—is greater than the force of the individuals who must endure it. It was all quite dazzling. Moral: slack beds make slick battlefields.

  I rubbed his shoulders and arms and back and buttocks and legs and feet and buttocks and shoulders and buttocks. The poor man, the malleable, pitiable, wretched man. Still, he has all the nerves in the usual places. I didn’t like him, but at that moment I wanted to fuck him more than I’d ever wanted to do anything in my life. I told him I was writing a comedy.

  A dreadful silence overcharged with bathos followed.

  13.

  By late September Joe was back in New York, depressed. My son lived a life of laziness and luxury. But he came home lonely, penniless and discouraged. To travel without a maid was not possible. One day while talking about his mother he made an interesting Freudian slip and instead of my mother said, my money.

  He lay half the morning behind his eyelids, a prey to visions of electric flowers flickering with girls’ faces, of such banality he grew ashamed. We’ve been discussing the soul. He slouched down opposite me, ordered a Coke, pushed the glasses up on to his lovely head of blond hair and quizzically cocked his sun-kindled features. “When I try to do arithmetic clouds come down upon me like they do in Tannhauser.” The slight asymmetry of the center dip in the cupid’s bow of his upper lip is one of those intriguing flaws in an otherwise p
erfect face that makes the viewer catch his breath. I liked being with him as I like being with swift animals who are motionless when at rest. Those who meet him become calm and purified.

  “This,” I said to him, “is the happiest moment of my life.” Believe it or not, I am reasonably happy.

  “Who, slow down,” said Joe. “Do you really mean that?” All his life Joe had dreamed of an all-consuming love that would go on forever. I exaggerate, of course. He never gave much thought to questions of the future. That would be too bourgeois. But in general, as Joe put it, “I hate being in any situation that is over with.” He waggled a portentous eyebrow. “When one is frightened of the truth (as I am now) then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.” He was so lonely, he often sat on the steps in someone else’s house and thought he was going to die of misery. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. He remembered his dreams and transcribed some of them into a copybook. In this he would write till midnight chimed and long after. “Thank you for the dream book. Where did you get that thing?” The book was a present. Joe had been doing a lot of art work, most of it hallucinatory. It is all strangely fantastic, phantasmagoric. I could not help thinking of the scene in which poor Gregor Samsa, his little legs trembling, climbs the armchair and looks out of his room, no longer remembering (so Kafka’s narrative goes) the sense of liberation that gazing out of the window had formerly given him.

  The price he exacted for submitting himself to so much culture was the frequent excursions that we made together into the world of popular entertainment. It seemed to amuse him, so I complied with his odd request. I am a white American male who listened to nothing but classical music until the age of twenty. I felt myself sliding deliciously downwards into a miasma of kindliness. That is how everything works, pluses and minuses. Silence, he said, was of all things the most oppressive to his nerves.

  We take long walks among the flying leaves and ponder turnings taken by our lives. Sunshine, a bird with a special, rather literary song, country noises (a motor), solitude, peace, no aggression. Forced to make do, we do rather well.

  You never stop learning, that’s what’s great about life. Apart from that, I really can’t think of anything. To all appearances it looks like calm, like I’m unflappable. Or maybe not.

  It was that dim grey hour when things are just creeping out of darkness, when everything is colourless and clear cut, and yet unreal. The other houses on the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. Joe said, “I’m confident I can teach myself everything I want to know by reading books and seeking out the knowledge that interests me.” Then he was silent for a long time, shuddering and sighing like an animal. He wanted to be a veterinarian. He believed that animals, too, have souls and that man is an intermediate link in the chain of beings connecting the world of animals and the world of pure spirits. “All you’ve got to do is simply learn to resist yourself. In other words, there are all sorts of things that happen that make us…that let us make one choice rather than another, hmm? You have to tell a story! I will not be silent anymore. Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. Our twentieth century has been almost one long holocaust of world wars and local genocidal conflicts, with the largest losses of life being caused by huge bureaucratic governments systematically exterminating their own subjects. The aim of life, Freud says, is death, is the return of the organic to the inorganic, supposedly our earlier state of being. One last point. The future has not yet produced anything to be happy about. Everyone today will agree that the world we have fabricated during the last two hundred years is hideous compared with any fabricated in earlier times.”

  What a strange mind! He dismissed bourgeois society as a mechanism lacking the poetic element, an agglomeration of individuals motivated by self-interest and not held together by any moral bonds. Among the strongest impulses of his imagination was an urge to find parallels and connections between events that occur on a local, human scale and events that occur on the vastly larger scale of history, evolution, and cosmology.

  Everywhere, between the houses, those old and dingy houses, whose windows would catch the sunrise with untold splendor, showed plots of garden, like snatches of old song. “The main thing,” Joe says, “oh yeah, the mainest thing … is, when you fall, fall in the direction of your work.”

  I was stirred by these ideas. Fortunately, I am not a hysterical person. “Well, yeah,” I philosophized. “You know what you should be doing, you know what is right, but that is not what you do.” If you care to put it that way, you can say it is a simple story.

  “I don’t,” said Joe. “Who is your favorite writer?”

  “Karl Ove Knausgaard,” I said.

  Towards dark he went out.

  I had been rescued from my solitude; I had been given another chance; and I had high hopes of a future that would cancel out the past. I of all people. Loveless, landless, wifeless. Since this sensation was utterly unfamiliar and not at all unpleasant I decided that, if experienced again, I would refer to it as contentment. I Google it. How quickly the mind swivels in response to what it learns.

  I found myself in the same grey light and tumult I have already described.

  All I could hear was the wind sweeping in from the country and buffeting the window; and in between, when the sound subsided, there was the never entirely ceasing murmur in my own ears. That’s the ego.

  Convinced life is meaningless, I lack the courage of my conviction.

  14.

  An ambulance hurries to a home on a hilltop. The crimes sparkle in the moonlight.

  If only I could commit a crime, and be done with it. My intentions are better than anything else about me. So much for “naturalness.” In this sense, we are all artists, or death- artists.

  “I’ll teach you a thing or two, you little prick!” That’s a pledge from the very bottom of my heart.

  David laughed gleefully. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him. “Such as …?” That indeed is the question. “There is happiness in doubting, I wonder why.” Tilting his head back, he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. “Please, do not be evasive! We all live in a chattering crowd, each of us waiting for a chance to be heard. Do you know any compliments?”

  “Nothing is got for nothing,” I said. The writer does not ‘wrest’ speech from silence, as we are told in pious literary hagiographies, but inversely, and how much more arduously, more cruelly and less gloriously, detaches a secondary language from the slime of primary languages afforded him by the world, history, his existence, in short by an intelligibility which pre-exists him, for he comes into a world full of language, and there is no reality not already classified by men: to be born is nothing but to find this code ready-made and to be obliged to accommodate oneself to it. Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am. I’d far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. After all, it has taken several degrees of contusion to create a jaundice as pervasive as mine. I was a very, very bad kid. Punish me, please.”

  “You are quite Voltairean!” he murmured. “Things can always get worse.”

  “Ah.”

  Longing for sweeter grass, he wanders away. “I don’t care for children.”

  Very ingenious, one feels, but how much better not to have said it! And since, on occasion, he quotes Levinas, people take him for a great mind.

  A moment later the engine roared and the tires squealed out of the driveway.

  When I was left alone in his house, looking around the library, which was, in some mysterious way, the incarnation both of his absence and his presence, I asked his spirit (it was, of course, a rhetorical question) why things had turned out as they had for us. There was no denying it was
interesting, but would it be enough to sustain a long-term relationship? It was fascinating, it was empty and spectacular, but after a few days it also got a bit boring. I work better alone. I forbade myself to go on brooding about it.

  Leafing through a pile of books, I have been wondering if there has ever been in America a novelist with a point of view toward the taking and giving of pleasure even vaguely resembling Colette’s, an American writer, man or woman, stirred as deeply as she is by scent and warmth and color, someone as sympathetic to the range of the body’s urgings, as attuned to the world’s every sensuous offering, a connoisseur of the finest gradations of amorous feeling, who is nonetheless immune to fanaticism of any sort, except, as with Colette, a fanatical devotion to the self’s honorable survival.

  15.

  Eleanor “sprang from a noble race.”

  “If you want to call it that,” she said. “I’m always kind to people who have good Louis Quatorze. No one’s supposed to know about that,” she said, more resignedly than annoyed. I found it all repellent and queasy-making.

  As a child she was lonely and shy in public, with a “desperate inner life.” Once she thought she heard voices and stopped, only to hear nothing at all. At this point a wonderful piece of luck came her way. Flowering puberty. A great deal of what we value in civilized life depends upon it.

  There were stormy scenes at home, sobs, moans, hysterics. And then, who knows how or why, the situation gradually improved. The struggle, if there were one, need not be described.

  Traits that we all recognize in ourselves are, in her case, blown up into intense inner (and sometimes public) dramas. She was under the spell of that timorous curiosity which leads women to seek out dangerous emotions, to go see chained tigers, to look at boa constrictors, frightening themselves because they are separated from them only by weak fences.