“Wiley . . .”
“Does he imitate Bogart, too? Sort of educated-Washington Bogart?”
“Yes . . .”
“But Bogart?”
“He picked it up . . . Bogart came from Good People . . .”
“Jack told me even crime disappointed him.”
“I like it best when he talks about the Middle Ages . . . He would like to have faith and be a baron . . . He likes the idea of Heaven and Hell. He says Catholics are the best cannon fodder—everything they do gets forgiven . . .”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Wow. Yeah. Yes. I keep forgetting that. Does your dad ever listen, or does he just do monologues?”
“He just does monologues. Doesn’t he let you talk?”
“Only if I insist on it. Then we do alternate monologues.”
“Well, that’s it, then. He talks to you more than he does to me now. Don’t ever trust him, Wiley . . . He does things. He breaks up things that concern me. Bomma never thought he was any good—she didn’t trust him.”
She just wanted to talk? She was frightened of something? She’d cheated on me?
“He seems very tricky; he makes up quotes. He changes the dates of historical events, even quite famous ones, such as the order of Civil War battles—then, if I correct him, he says he wanted to know if I was paying attention and if I knew my history. I’ll never get used to his way of arguing—is it a ruthlessness? Is swapping lies useful? Truth can’t win with him. I catch him out over and over. It doesn’t faze him. He has great assurance.
“He’s such a spider . . . He’s ruined my life, Wiley.”
Well, she was up to something—she was giving me something I wanted, booklike talk about well-to-do Americans.
“So you’re crippled and not pleased with your life?”
She made a face. “He nearly ruined me . . . ,” she said correctingly.
“You know what he told me: Find out who keeps the little black book—that is, who the procurer is for the others in the group—and find out who disburses the spendable cash—that’s all we need to know. So you’re saying his lack of idealism ruined you, nearly ruined you?”
“Bogart and Jack went to the same school in New York. Jack used to tell a story about how he hurt Bogart’s feelings in first grade . . .”
“God . . . humiliations and a lot of hide-and-seek—is that grown-up life?”
“I don’t really understand you but that sort of life, the sort you’re talking about, no one does it anymore—it’s out of date.”
“It must have been grotesque. Jack keeps talking about decadence but what else is there for people who have to die?”
I still didn’t know what she wanted.
Jack, after a day of drinking, late at night, and he and I are in his library and he is still drinking: “People like you and me, my dear putative son-in-law, are part of an army of the comfortably dispossessed—we have no time for heaven or for hell, not in America—just shrewdness . . . SHREWDNESS is all. You heard it first from me. In America, character is independence—not fate. I am a positivist of grace. Can you follow me? You Jews have good things but you don’t know much about grace . . . As I read the Bible, you are concerned with the Blessing—which is a very different thing. Calvin had a number of interesting points—a number of interesting things to say . . . I bet you haven’t read your Calvin—or your Luther.”
“I have. I don’t understand much of it—I had some cultural difficulty with it.”
“Did you? Did you now? Well,” and he leaned forward combatively: he did a great many imitations. “What, with the cultural difficulty, DID you see?”
“Protestants have a quite sophisticated sense of reality.”
“Unh . . . Oh, you saw that, did you? Protestants do have quite a sophisticated sense of reality. What I learned as a boy is people in nice houses throw stones, and that a daily manner—and the right style—mean more than God, are God, are God embodied—if you accept the notion of grace—if your life and your notions are shared by enough of the right people—by enough of the people to get elected. It is all interesting to a Protestant. Christian belief conveys certain difficulties inherent in life—in sex and breeding, for instance. I’m not Christian: I’m pagan. But I know where my life, and my written English, is buttered. I know the Christian past it emerges out of . . .”
“From . . .”
“I speak American English . . . Out of . . . Language and class; do you know about language and class?”
“Know how much, sir?”
“About Christian belief—post-Christian intensity? What we have—and this is something the scholars miss—is the search for a way to return to belief—do you understand? Thought and reason—and a sales pitch—are you following?”
“Belief is immanent, not present?”
“Yes. Protestants understand how to be truly temporary.”
“In modern circumstances of truth and untruth—truth and truth and untruth and untruth—the Protestants are ahead of the rest of the world.”
“That’s not bad. I will confess to you—you are a little priestly: you will admit you are a little priestly? My class of men, able or disabled—ha-ha—are compulsive, clever, and resigned—capable of constant lying . . . Slanted truth . . . But I like you. I really do. You’re not empty. I don’t mind your being Jewish.”
“Ora minds my staying up late, drinking . . .”
“Ora is well educated but she can’t talk like a man.” His eyes were moist with alcohol, lies, and slanted truths. And his body, all of it, was tense and quivering with will and exhaustion averted, a sort of ambitious reality of moment-to-moment existence as a mechanism of devilry—as a voice, so to speak, of hell.
He never kept his physical distance from you for long. He slid forward on the chair, leaned over, touched my leg, then my arm. I could feel the quiver—the truth element of it—the thing of its being true as a gesture in a moment in time but not all that true, but rather a thing of a moment of feeling and of physical existence beyond churchly summary and to be worked out and observed over time . . . His dishonesty, his trickiness had an unabsolute quality. No part of what he did was determined. There was nothing contractual or fixed in it. It dismissed eternity and moral consequences while engaging in a skirmish with them. It was contingent—a way of owning my attention: a command to me that might be worded as Hold my affection and Think about me.
He said something kind of opposite to that: “I’m a faithful cuss—and son of a cuss. I’ve stayed with the same woman . . . I stuck around while my children grew up . . . That’s the meat-and-bones of it.” He meant, I think, that his character, his affection were not absolute but were contractual after all but that that was tragic for A MAN.
Or tragically unsatisfying. “Most of my heart’s desire, most of a real man’s character, most of reality is of a forbidden nature—and doomed,” he said in a Tristan sort of way. “Have you noticed that every single one, every single one of the Seven Deadly Sins is a social virtue if you want to amount to a hill of beans in the world: pride . . . anger . . . gluttony . . . lust . . . covetousness . . . despair . . . and the other one. Intemperance? A man is underground—is an underground soul—he is background for everyone else . . . But I believe men throb with the rhythm of the universe.”
“Are you writing a book, sir?”
“Yes. Yes, I am. Human nature as we know it in our class”—gazing at me—“came into existence in this country around 1850 as the social possibility of antislavery developed and industrial modernization. And it lasted until 1932. You should know about this . . . It should be taught in school—the betrayals by weak-minded imbeciles of their class: every attempt at class principles has gone down to defeat through betrayal. We have betrayed what they are most anxious to imitate—fools, fools, fools. Hah.
“Boys will be boys,” he said in a savage tone. “Prep school was a school for fools . . . Ambition, position, pride—I am an American realist
—except that I like words; it runs in my family—words do. Well, you can’t buy the world with a little masculine naughtiness . . . A naughty nastiness won’t do—not when it’s THE WORLD . . . Ora can wait . . . Men have to talk . . . Have to learn . . . Nodding, nothing matters if you don’t understand power. Emerson is Schopenhauer. The question is power. We add and subtract from that question at our peril. Our peril! Do you know what those words mean? Our lives, our bodies, our souls of honor are at stake. It suits us to play around? Then hellfires gape. I have accomplissed, -plished, a little in my time, and I know one or two things; I know this subject—I know men. You think I lie like any man of affairs, but I tell you I make the stories I tell more pointed than men who are more famous than me, than I, do.”
He was about fifty; he was taut-bodied, fully present—not shyly present. Nasty and dirty, short-leggedly strutty even when sitting down, just in how he shifted, around, he was of a rarefied nature mentally with an agonized sense of truth—of one truth, one truth only, one truth ultimately—not Jesus, or not admittedly, but through Christian minds and Christian speech, through the hardworking famous minds, mostly English and German, of the last two centuries.
But physically he was utterly a rushed, half-drowned relativist, crowding you in his thrashing, maybe powerful strokes, the powerful strokes of a semi-champion swimmer.
“I am not a fool. I am not always a fool. I am conscious I was shaped by my mother’s notions in 1920 of her parents’ gentilities and privileges—their beliefs were Victorian; the dominance of the Anglo-Saxons after the fall of Napoleon: that was an active part of their politics . . . And of our religion. We needed the willfulness of the Germans. We distrusted the French. The Vanderbilts were always backing the French . . . My mother cordially loathed the Vanderbilts, the Morgans—and the Rockefellers: the awful Rockefellers, she called them—but not to their faces. Oh no. Never to the faces. She always said the ‘geniuses’ who matter are usually of family.” Then: “Tell me: why am I not a great man?”
“But you are, sir . . .”
“Outside this house! In the books!” he said.
Ora is the child of his wished-for, dreamed-of greatness. The existence, nonexistence of his life historically fathered her mind. She talks in the middle of the night practicing her greatness.
“The final eschatological truth testified to Calvinistically is or isn’t the question,” Jack said. Jack wasn’t a good reasoner or speaker to the point that he could make his rhetoric cohere or persuade. Its influence on anyone was slanted as the truth was in it. He said so: “To understand me, you have to be prejudiced in my favor. I come from a social class of privilege and duty; but in order to serve my country I have had to become an honorary dishonorable citizen of another class, one of ability and of high occupation, and I can’t always live with it, Wiley. No, I never saw battle: I am of the order of aides-de-camp: but I have been disgusted. Disgusted. Don’t misunderstand me: I give orders. But I’m a sissy—but I know it’s us or them . . . I can fight. In the end we are tested by war, real war, but, my friend, also by the infighting of civilization . . . Don’t go: it does Ora good to have to wait. Youth’s a stuff that lasts forever—didn’t you know that? It lasts forever for a while . . . Where was I? How much money you have counts—it adds up. Intelligence and the ability to talk are for parlors. Power. Power. Power . . . that’s what a man cares about . . .”
“But then the best jazz musicians are low since they have no power—”
“They have the power to corrupt—”
“And the worst highbrow musicians are high—no matter how limited their understanding of music is because they command people and money.”
“Music doesn’t matter, my boy.”
“Not even in an analogy?”
“Not even in an analogy.”
“But if it’s power—and not any other issue—and not a choice of pleasures—that is the question, then it’s a very specific question for you that I want to go now to be with Ora. You want to demonstrate your power(s).”
“My daughter is probably as frigid as her mother,” he said, with a guileful and wild-and-demonically-well-bred-and-crashing-through-barriers and licensed look. Ora has said to me that her father listens outside the bedroom doors. One time I saw his eye and part of his face at the slightly open door to his bedroom when I was on my way to the bathroom after Ora and I had screwed. He said, “How much reality can you bear?”
“It depends what kind it is and why one should bear it. I have the power to walk out of here, right?”
He said, “Tell me about Ora and your carryings-on: I ask it as a dirty old man who thinks you’re a very, very interesting person, a fine person.” He gazed at me naïvely, as if he could be exploited.
I said, “You always thought Ora was frigid—like her mother?”
“Those good-looking women: bitches all.” Then: “In some eyes, some measures”—some hierarchies—“you rank higher than I do—you get things I can’t get—although you’re not as high as I am in terms of club memberships—and for certain dinners where things are decided for the whole country.” He spoke with some satisfaction and with some worry. He said, “I admire the way you handle yourself.” I had risen to my feet; I was going to leave the room. He was affectionate, ironic, testing—desperate, uncaring: it was relativism in action, Junior Einstein (in a Protestant sense), the plotting relativist, a Protestant of family, or some such thing and me. He said, “You want to talk about Einstein? I have written a refutation of his Theory . . .” His sequence of moves wasn’t incoherent in relation to traditional meaning if you don’t romanticize traditional meaning. His fondness, his treachery, his will, and so on. He was convinced that tone was sufficient for worldly meaning. He said just then, “I have a very low view of worldly meaning but I am a pagan . . .” His masculine and almost youthful emotion was part of a daydream of historical importance. He offered no legitimate or coherent meaning among the grammatical structures of his speech. He used kinds of meaning, things from the media that he thought I’d know, he used these as toys. His thick, liquor-loose lips smackingly enunciating his quite educated ideas (if they were, properly speaking, ideas), he was correctly and incorrectly naked in discourse . . . His social class had versions of this kind of discourse in it. His ironic, impotence-potency, the despairing but ironic impudence—the wickedness—his having a degree of affection for his contingent and changeable wish for my affection—all were an ironic imprisonment in a clothed-and-naked state of intelligent-discourse-as-we-know-it-in-my-[social-]class: do you know what I mean? Ora had said of him to me, “He asked me to sleep with him in return for his paying for my college.” And: “I don’t know if he meant it.” But she didn’t, she said, and he paid anyway. “I offered to pay him back and I will. He wanted me to marry a rich man and repay him. But he never spent the money on me I needed if I was going to marry a rich man. I never had the right clothes. And none of those boys ever liked him. He wasn’t important enough . . . Or rich enough,” she said, veering in her sympathies at the end.
He said, “I am the opposite of an absolute believer but I am a Pilgrim’s Progress sort of fellow, lost in my times among the vanities and corruptions of the world and placed quite high toward my fellow passengers on the ship of fools; but low to the point I would want to sell my soul in rage at what my intelligence could have done in an era less low than this one . . .”
His life was so demeaning that it was worth it to him to sell his soul for a chance at being of public use. Ora said, It’s convenient for him to attack the era . . . It is a low era, however.
Ora said, “I breathe Jack’s air when I am near him . . . He has a good mind.” His mind succeeded in organizing the forms for her with which her mind saw things.
“A little cheap, his mind,” I said. “I mean I understand why you run away from him, why you say, We have to get away from here.”
Time-and again, we left the farm or the big house in Philadelphia like gangsters escaping. Like kids e
loping again and again.
At dinner, he watched us. Me more than Ora, and I would glance at Ora, and, depending on her eyelids—she signaled with her eyes—I would go with Jack after dinner, after pistol practice, or without such practice, to talk, under the conditions he established. Or I would refuse, in a prep-school manner—my version of it—a nasal imitation—or as a rebel, or whatever, in a different accent. When Jack and I talked, he inevitably set the lamp so that it shone in my face.
Ora was, within this frame of things (her father and his childhood, his infancy, his youth, his early years as a man), a daughter who mostly refused her father’s world: its hierarchies, its bitter dustiness. “It destroyed him, Wiley.” She “loved” him, enjoyed him, avoided him. She named him second-rate and she said he’d failed, and she named herself as the real hero-heroine and as his avenger; she would be famous and restore his pride. I don’t know if she meant it. He named himself as a failure but when she named him as it, she took the irony out of it and made it a glamourous thing—desirable. Not always. It depended. And the important consolation and justification he found in his social placement she dismissed with the peculiar violence of the blood child: What a stupidity and What a waste of life . . .
But the shining, if eccentric, literacy of the man (whether or not he lied about the degree of it), the occasionally darkly charming and often threatening love of authority in him, the blasé ruthlessness, the scale of his will, the extent of his willingness to get what he wanted, the emotional harshness and the near illiteracy of feelings (compared to books and to some people, not many), the sly wit and seductiveness of his sorts of forgiveness and of semi-forgiveness if you forgave his considerably graver and more directly rewarding crimes—(Ora pointed out epigrammatically and rehearsedly that he never forgave crimes more profitable than his own—“Jack is a democrat,” she said seriously—“especially when it comes to money and to getting away with things.”)—did he shape her? Is part of him in her, too? Now, at two in the morning? We have all had unideal parents . . .
The Runaway Soul Page 32