Contents
COVER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY HAROLD BRODKEY
PRAISE
DEDICATION
NATURAL HISTORY
1930
LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
1944: 6:12 a.m.
The Masturbation
A Brief History of Being Loved (and Unloved)
I Move Toward the Bathroom . . .
The River
THE INHABITED UNIVERSE
My (New) Mother’s Voice: The Other Narrator: 1932
The Real World Addresses the Baby Boy
S.L. Takes the Baby Aside
Nonie
THE RUNAWAY SOUL
Ora: New York: 1956
Nonie in Love
Nonie Continued
Wiley in Love: 1956
UNNATURAL HISTORY
David Coppermeadow
The Germans Invade Poland: 1939
SAINT NONIE
Forestville
Nonie When I Grew Taller: 1943
The War
HOMOSEXUALITY, or Two Men on a Train
In Which I Partly Enter a Story from Which I Am Excluded
One of Abe’s Sons
Daniel’s Kindness
HOMOSEXUALITY 2: After the Train Ride
On Winning and Being Normal Up to a Point
HOMOSEXUALITY 3, or Second Sight
I Study What Is Normal (Up to a Point)
LOVE STORY
Casey and Nonie
Love Story
Love . . . Is It Love?
LEONIE, or The History of a Kiss
On Almost Getting Laid
Leonie’s Fiancé
THE END MUSIC
Remsen
The Last for Now About Nonie
COPYRIGHT
About the Author
* * *
Harold Brodkey lives in New York City. He has taught writing and literature at Cornell University and at the City University of New York. His many honours include two first place O. Henry Awards.
ALSO BY HAROLD BRODKEY
First Love and Other Stories
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
Praise
* * *
‘It is suggested that Brodkey is vain, that he is arrogant (faults of which other writers have apparently never been guilty). Why, the fellow has actually permitted himself to be compared to Joyce, to Proust, to really great writers! Quick, quick, chop him down. Isn’t that what we do to tall poppies, especially to short poppies pretending to be tall? The coy, giggling injustice of this generally prevalent attitude reveals more about Brodkey’s critics than his book. Have we become too lazy to respond to such a huge carnival of language, such a riot of voices, such – to use one of the book’s earlier titles – a party of animals? This novel pleads to be read as it was written; slowly, savouring each sentence. Take it at its own pace, and it yields its riches. There are trite scenes that don’t work. There are faults. But there are also great seams of precious gold. Has our fast-forward, three-minute culture forgotten how to sink into a long book, how to listen? It seems necessary to say of Harold Brodkey that, as Arthur Miller said of the salesman Willy Loman, attention, attention must finally be paid to this man’
Salman Rushdie, Independent on Sunday
‘Brodkey is a great writer. There are passages, entire sections of The Runaway Soul concerning what Wiley calls “the ordinariness and specialization of being young”, by prising them open and then prising open the meanings harboured within them, invests with a near-hallucinatory sense of the specificness of things – and not only things but sensations, impressions and moods over which, we feel, the “specific” should have no leverage. There are sections in which Brodkey pulls off astonishing coups, like describing birth as a subjective, at-first-hand experience (the novel’s opening pages, a passage of pure genius), or masturbation, or orgasm. Sections, too, in which his characters (Nonie most unforgettably, but also the narrator’s two foster-parents) are endowed with such kinetic, almost pushy aliveness, that all the hollow, conventional attributes of “character psychology” in the usual literary sense are mercilessly exposed’
Gilbert Adair, Harpers & Queen
‘Brodkey captures, better than any writer before him except perhaps Freud, the amateurishness of selfhood – the layers, the gradations, the unruly secrecies of consciousness . . . On every page there are sentences that glisten, rhythms which prowl and teeter, words which seem to have found their bright exact destiny’
James Wood, Guardian
‘The Runaway Soul may be difficult, it may be long to excess, it may dare to spend a score of pages on a single fit of masturbation, and even longer on a sexual act. But it is a painstaking work of great emotional candour and audacity. Brodkey has strived to illuminate the ties of personality, the lift of speech, the idiosyncratic language of the decades succeeding the 1930s. He has also worked out an elaborate philosophy, which, though difficult for even the most assiduous reader to fathom, is offset by many incandescent passages and one-liners that speak volumes. One is compelled to forgive the novel’s faults for its sheer lyrical brilliance, its intricate psychological depth. And Brodkey may well earn the distinction of being able to characterise the ethos of New York City in a single phrase, as “raw envy acting as if it were intelligence”.’
Joseph Olshan, Sunday Times
‘Forget the Proust comparison, Brodkey is himself and many pages here have the deep rolling profound thrust, painterly originality, and lightning-bolt flash of great art’
Kirkus Reviews
‘The novel is unlike anything else you will read this year, or next year, or the year after. It is a painstaking work in scale and in emotional pitch’
Hugh Barnes, The Times
FOR ELLEN
AND ANDREW, ROGER, JONATHAN
BILL, ROBERT, AND HAROLD
Harold Brodkey
THE RUNAWAY SOUL
NATURAL
HISTORY
1930
I was slapped and hurried along in the private applause of birth—I think I remember this. Well, I imagine it anyway—the blind boy’s rose-and-milk-and-gray-walled (and salty) aquarium, the aquarium overthrown, the uproar in the woman-barn . . . the fantastic sloppiness of one’s coming into existence, one’s early election, one’s senses in the radiant and raw stuff of howlingly sore and unexplained registry in the new everywhere, immensely unknown, disbelief and shakenness, the awful contamination of actual light. I think I remember the breath crouched in me and then leaping out yowlingly: this uncancellable sort of beginning.
The other birth—of a mind shaped like a person—all that skull buzz and mumble—a mind starting up, a mind that wants so much to know the truth that it makes the effort and takes the shape of a and comes into existence: only a first draft at first, sketchy, watercolored, cliched—cardboard air, a symbolic wrist, a painted eyebrow—a tattered, half-real boy as proud as a mind: an apple-eater in an unspecific light: two differently born creatures, one guy. Imagine the twists of suspense in being in two different autobiographical narratives at the same time. Think of all the myths of single meanings . . . of there being a single line of one’s own history.
And then to be born in two sharply divergent ways, if I humor the hypothesis of two births, if I admit I sense MYSELF as a consciousness, a more or less consciously alphabetical gesticulating shadow—but real-seeming—and real, as real as real, but as only partly filled in, not to others but to myself, two days old, two years old, five years old, fourteen, fifty, sixty . . . Well, imagine a shadow-consciousness imagining itself a sleeping fourteen-year-old boy, real in St. Louis County in the month of May. That would be 1944. A boy, ill once, who in his delirium felt
himself to be triply born, quadruply born, to be a son of illness, nutty with delirium (and near death), and a son of luck and recovering to be a body and a mind, a difficultly born descendant of Adam born once more . . .
LIFE
ON THE
MISSISSIPPI
1944:
6:12 a.m.
Sometimes waking feels piggish: you know? Rooting and snuffling and snouting around? Do you think dreams are elegant? I do. I think they are—sometimes.
Anyway, sometimes it seems a shame to leave one’s dreams. Maybe it’s because real life is hard. I don’t, as a rule, have strong opinions about those matters any more than, when I first awake, I know quite who I am or where I am, I don’t remember what I am supposed to look like. The unfixity—well, I was adopted into a new family when I was two. Waking up was weird then. I don’t remember waking with confident expectations about the color of the hair I had; in life, my hair has changed color often—I was white-blond until I was five, dirty blond for a year, then reddish-blond ever more reddish; and then I had brown hair, dark in midwinter, reddish in spring, blondish (again) in high summer, and so on. And people talked about this, so I erratically knew it was so while it was happening. As a question it was something like a kite attached to me—Wiley’s hair as a subject of conversation and of reality. His aura, sort of. My mother, ill in 1944, lately makes scenes about how I look like something the cat dragged in and shame her by not being sane, clean, semi-Godly, sensible, the rest of it she wants me to be kempt, groomed, whatever the term is.
Hi, I say snidely to the pillow, to wakefulness . . . to the morning.
The tone of snotty self-address is adolescent, upperish-middle-class . . . wartime. I can place social class and physical setting, the era and me—I mean my age and size, my physical condition in terms of sports. A suburban fourteen-year-old in wartime 1944, Middle Western and large.
—Who are you, Kiddo?
—That’s for me to know and you to find out . . .
—Ha-ha. You’re as funny as a crutch . . .
I’m Wiley Silenowicz . . . I am real, a fate for others . . . I am real . . . God, what a mess.
In one sense, waking is like leaping from a boxcar into roadside gravel, into the realities of your own waking breath. The night’s long jostling in the runaway actions of dreams (which insisted they were plausible) fadingly echoes in the unstable, living-in-a-weedy-ditch-among-old-fading-pictures shaky moment waking up (in bed) when I hear my own breath. My monkey flesh . . . flibbertigibbet electricities . . . me . . . I’m here classically—in the physics sense: life-size—in the almost always unreportable actual scale of the world. Not a dreamer, I have lasted to this age, this moment. I am colossal in the mistaken sense in which consciousness tends to feel itself and its reality first as an image of all that is real—this is in the remaining and drenching sense in which it was the universe for my dreams and the landscapes and the inhabitants and machinery in them.
But now one has a side, daylit, leaning and lit at the edge of the unknown future, at the very edge of an unknown logic—a day with others in it—every one of them independent of my mind and ungoverned by my consciousness. The not quite daylit world. Science was different in 1944, not so scientific, not so widely popular. In my morning confusion, I am a Jew suspended for a moment in no real order of things. Boy, did I love everything. It’s odd to have the beginning of not being young, of my being flesh and blood in my pajamas. I feel battered by waves of the barely albino pallor of the air. The vague lightedness of the air: objects in the room had dim outlines, not clear ones; and the air outside the window screens is translucent. Inside the room the darkness is more complete, although, as I said, things are visible at their edges. My outward senses, like butterflies newly out of the chrysalis, do a slow monochromatic fluttering. I am deeply patterned for the moment by the night’s introspection.
I have to take a leak. The I-have-landed-on-a-new-planet thing, the realities of the room ticklingly hardening, the all-that-is-here, the slow, pale—half-dark—roses of the actuality of sight, the thing that nightlong was not lifelong although it seemed it while it was happening: this stuff means my nighttime gullibility aches and fades. Here is a real windowsill. The upper edges of real trees, the real leaves there, lightly scratch at the window screens. The sounds in the variably shuffling Middle Western air joins with the sound of my breath in the pillow: I pay attention to one and it predominates and drowns the other. Then I switch. I am the-voice-that-matters and I have risen to the day—fascist—image-drenched—fantastically nursed. The sensually factual present tense after so many chapters of images (from the flesh-pool), so many episodes of dreaming—in it are no figures from my dreams. The onetime seemingly actual people have been erased, massacred, obliterated . . . Waking is pitiful—my father used to say (S.L.)—it is naked and republican for me now; the weight of tousled hair on my new skull is grown-up hair after the years of having a child’s fine hair up there. I stare, a fourteen-year-old boy, at my own wakefulness. I am no longer a dreaming tyrant who can command and match the light. I am geographically placed here with my head at the foot of the bed, where air from the windows in two walls flows . . . It is May. In St. Louis, Missouri. The window facing me as I lie here looks down into a walk-trisected, flower-bedded, U-shaped courtyard. We live on the third floor. The courtyard is empty in dim light. My skull, boulderishly heavy, is farther from my feet than I remembered—I have grown more than twelve inches in two years. I have gained thirty pounds in that time . . . If I loved you, this is the creature who would love you.
When I sleep, I breathe outside the mysterious circle of my attention. I breathe on another planet, far from the stories in front of me. I start in now on a male flirtation with my breath. In a blurry alertness, a sort of embarrassment, I feel my new skinny neck—my Adam’s apple . . . my height: my toes down there: gosh . . . And I breathe.
Actually, to be tall does feel like a ladder that I escape on . . . perhaps this is unforgivable. I had not been confident that, if I slept, I would wake. I am conscious of being erect sexually—my father sleeps in the other bed in the room. Then I remember that my father is dead . . . Daddy’s dead. The breath-scraped, ribby, itchy sexual heat and then the weird memory-thing of my father’s dying four days ago, a thing which has its own heat, shakes me like two currents of steam pushing in different parts of a machine.
Then I am weirdly still. Then I shake. Then I am weirdly still.
I stretch out my arm and hand to touch the wire-mesh screen on the window. My fingertips. My rustling consciousness is stilled, light-tropic—a broken-domed, lightly hissing observatory—an aspect of light itself. In this broken-domed thing I perch in the hawkish miracle of attention. Part of what I like about girls—and my mother—is that they say, Don’t go crazy and embarrass me. I stay sane to show off to them that it’s okay to like me. In the at-the-moment-ill-lit actual congresses of the consecutive physical world, tiny particles in me, tiny Noah’s arks, carry me between now and darkness. In a kind of Goddishly faintly rolling, somewhat roiling now, silent, more or less quiet, and more and more lit, the smell, the morning smell has a blasphemously moral thing to it—freshness, I suppose. It stinks of God, kind of—stinks as in stinking, dirty Jew, rotten goy. I ask the Powers of Prediction—they’re in me, mounted in such a way they can see things approaching from farther away than my toes can feel things—Will the war eat me up? Will all the Jews be killed? Am I all right even if my Dad is dead? Do I have to die, too? Do I have to die soon?
I apologize to myself in the real air now for having dreamed night-long: I’m sorry I was stupid . . . The inconsecutive, lovely wildness of the mind in the huge present tense of the morning now, the morning head and my bony spine form material low wild angel stuff with death and a sexual fall in it. The mind pokes up blackly, snaggingly—snaggingly—witlessly—I have a queer sense of personal defect—and I take my hand from the screen and tuck it into the warmth under my chin—Samuel Silenowicz, Samuel Leonard (
S.L.) Silenowicz, my dad (by adoption) is dead . . . Is absent from the drifting, thuggish real. The mind’s caterwauling whisper is: THERE’S A WAR ON: LEAVE ME ALONE. I snuffle at the air: an electrical feat of consciousness: a snout-tic . . . Then Venetian blind passages of grief and some self-concern and wake-up peerings—peerings—water wiggles of perception, glints, flashes, and semi-mechanical off-and-ons of trying things: if I don’t blink, I see spots; if I roll over onto my side, the bed will creak; if I touch it in a certain way, the window sash will grunt. Look, look-a-here, look for yourself, see, rays of absurdly pale light out the window are touching fat, gray, low clouds and some leaves in the treetops.
The pale light—the false dawn—a diffuse grayness—do I want to live? Blind emperor-boy, Gestapo agent in his nosiness, so Gestapoish cock-a-doodle, the whisperingly breathing fourteen-year-old boy, I am alive so far—So what? I more or less want to die with this curious pain of actuality; but that is almost clearly part of the border of how wanting-to-live defines itself in me.
In a glamour of obscure distortion, I remember my face as his face from glances in the mirror—a little scared—as those glances were—with the reason-to-live stuff, the reason-to-die stuff in the silent mirror. This becomes embarrassed amusement, taut-nerved, fattened with uncertain and embarrassed recollection: imbecile. My temper: what I look like . . . who gives a fuck . . . is contentiously male. In the liquor of the blind-sightedness of recall of one’s circumstances first thing in the morning when one awakes, I remember that, on the average, he (I am) is odd-looking but okay. My looks are not a torment to me.
The Masturbation
In the strange-for-me new privacy in the room, my (maybe) okay face first and then a lot more of me, but not all of me, takes on the temperature (the temperament) of heated and mercurial permission, deadened with caution and reluctance: Sir-Kamikaze-Fleet-of-Carbon-Compounds Little-Cutie-Little-Cutie-Wants-to-Die-Love-All-Used-Up does this other stuff.
The Runaway Soul Page 1