He spoke of such matters as everything being permitted in the death of God—he said this was according to Nietzsche (and I said, And Dostoyevsky)—but that that had always been so in defense of God and of one’s class. He spoke of such matters differently in the course of an evening’s drinking, depending on the time of night and on what had been happening in his life and what his purposes were at the moment and how Ora had acted recently (in front of him and to him) and according to national and international politics and his mood concerning recent events: he would say, oh, at ten o’clock, after some flop of an international conference on the tariff and Ora’s recent deafness when he spoke to her, “After all, we need to know that act B can be taken to preserve value A . . . Why do you look doubtful?”
“We need to know what act B is and under what circumstances it is likely to occur, in a human sense, in real time, and moment by moment; and we need to know a good deal about value A.”
In an odd voice—disappointed—Jack said, “Well, we can see you’re not a man of action.”
“No. I’m mostly not Nonie.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t know . . . I’m not a man of action, I agree.”
“A man of reaction?”
I looked at him with gratitude: “Yes . . . Yes . . . I need to be that way . . . Morally . . .”
“A priori absolution?”
It is difficult to write honestly about men you have learned from, taken a large part from of what you have become. It is hard not to act superior in retrospect, in the amendments of a memoir.
Ora, in college, after the war, turned me down three times over a space of three years, and then, in the fourth year, she came after me, more or less full tilt and ironically-comically—I mean really not kidding around, so that it was flattering and really Very Very Confusing.
“Do you want me or not?” she said in an earnest and yet devil-may-care and complicated way.
“Give me twenty-four hours to think it over—okay?”
“Well, telephone either way. Don’t be a shit. Don’t be a shit who’s too cowardly to call to say no. I always said no to YOUR face.”
I called her in an hour and twenty minutes and said, “Well, how about maybe?”
She laughed. “It isn’t funny; but I’m a madwoman—so what the hell?”
Why did she want me? Well, others had failed to interest her—and some had failed to be held by her. I think that, for a lot of people, it is true that we hold on to the interest of someone who interests us—you want to make someone happy, you mostly can. She got around to me. How come I was on the list of such a woman?
I was in style, sort of—male target of the month . . . sort of. Off and on, for a number of years. How did it happen that I was in style? I was male but not entirely obtuse—not pure momentum and endurance. I practiced a nothingness of the self, negative capability, a form of educational readiness, an at-least-halfway-honest openness to idea for a while. This involves a humility toward one’s past and considerable risk toward one’s future—one uproots oneself and is unmoored . . . And probably unroofed, unfloored as well. But the lack of immediate purpose, the sense of indulgence of one’s deepest curiosities—this opens you to others and you listen to ideas, expressed in those other lives, that other flesh, if I might say that—I am truly not a Platonist or am, at best, an incomplete one—and you have little flashes, flushes, of inspiration, not always valuable but still something; and you are inferior to people who start their careers young or who are hotly ambitious, now, while you’re doing this; but you’re open, as well, to new perceptions . . . whatever that is worth; and, well, what the fuck, I had the impression that I was considered “good-looking” but not “handsome”—or I was considered “the handsomest boy” but still “not handsome” if you know what I mean. Possible: is that a useful term? If I went to see a girl in a rooming house or in a dorm, a lot of people might be gathered to see me arrive, to watch me with her. People said things such as You’re ugly and You’re funny-looking. Or they muttered about how good-looking I was. In the mirror and in photographs, it wasn’t clear, it never is, what evidence is being presented. I knew very little about her—some gossip. I hadn’t done any of the social climber’s homework—or any of the lecher’s homework either. Which is odd, since I did want to be shrewd. Shrewd, clever, and practical. Licentious, corrupt, and amusing. I suppose I thought it was shrewder in regard to her not to be shrewd at all. She said, “You are violent and absurd and sweet.”
You would have to feel the last word as a kind of definition of a dilution or weakness of appeal—of course, she might be lying—it was a negotiation.
Naïvely I said, with a certain lopsided smile, bulkily leaning over her—a posture I had put together during a year I spent in Europe being an American type, Jewish—“And shrewd?”
“Oh, you’re a devil. You’re shrewd . . . But let’s don’t talk about those things—let’s not be lovers of that sort.”
“Um? What sort?” She raised her eyebrows. I said, “Who just play psychoanalysis and talk about themselves?”
“You guessed it . . .”
“Why? What would you like to play? Us to play—as lovers?”
“Oh, let’s just be sensible lovers.”
“Are you sure, Ora? Are you of that opinion about us?”
Often when I shifted the level of discourse, or pulled up the hem of my secrecy, so to speak, and showed my more or less actual legs, again so to speak, she shifted, too, but dilutingly, educatively—perhaps evasively. “I have faults, Wiley—and one is that I’m too sure of things.” She is a year older than I am. “You aren’t naïve,” she said. “That’s such a relief.”
“Am I sophisticated?”
“You’re a full-fledged nut,” she said. Then: “You’re a young man with a vision . . . I think that’s really pretty nifty . . . I’m a very serious girl . . .”
I could not believe in my or her significant relation to our pasts. Ora said in the early days of our sleeping together, before either of us began to be silent and amazed—before we began to listen with odd parts of our bodies to what was going on in the room and in the eyes and breath of the other—“My background is bad, Wiley . . . My people don’t have enough money to matter . . . We don’t have real power . . . I intend to be the first one in my family to be big.”
I said to her, “At this time I do not want to believe that your identity or mine matters much if we are willing to accept what comes in the way of hurt.”
“It’s pig-in-a-poke—you think?” she said. “I’m a mere bag of emptiness—from nowhere—from the gutter actually, if you want to be exact about it.”
I believed her, but not with much knowledge of such contexts as Helen Thwaite, say, had, by whose standards Ora was ill-born. I believed Ora literally and yet I assumed that what she said was part of a “pose.” I tend to believe people face-to-face and then I think later about what they said (and did), but face-to-face I believe people literally and I answer them literally: “You have risen from the gutter very nicely.”
Her looks. And manner. And mind.
Ora said, “You’re new . . . You’re infatuated with me . . . You overrate me. You’re new blood; life is better for you—it’s fresher in your nostrils.”
She was an uninhibited cliché user and quoter whose quotes and whose cliches weren’t always familiar to me and she gave no ascriptions or footnotes: she believed in Universal Common Knowledge. “No giants live in our society now . . . It is a mass society, Wiley, and it is good only for people with elbow.”
Later, when I met Jack and Millie, I half saw a little of why Ora had said what she said. “But your parents have some money,” I said.
Ora said, “Wiley, when J.P. Morgan died, Rockefeller said, Think of all he did, and he wasn’t even rich.”
“Oh . . .”
It was a certain familiarity with summits—maybe a false familiarity—well, who cares . . .
Then, still later, when I complained
of The-Eat-Shit-Initiation-Rites in New York for a new writer under the men and women who were overseers, or thought they were, of admission to the Temporary Pantheon . . . the local branch of the Fraternity of National and International Brilliance (they thought they oversaw SERIOUS Success), she said, “You’re lucky . . . It’s a good thing to have happen to a person. You’re not honest about it. Lovers should be honest with each other, Wiley, otherwise what’s the point of living?”
“Living or loving?”
“Living. If love is no fun. And fame is worthless, Wiley?”
“I’ll try to be more honest . . . I am trying,” I said. I meant in the social-class way she meant—as one of the rulers of the world (sort of)—and also as an artist. Or would-be.
I said, “But what is happening right now is not giving me an identity to crow with, Ora—it’s taking my identity and throwing it away.”
She looked at me sort of obliquely, her head at a backward slant. “You are a very good liar . . . You had daydreams . . .” She said the last accusingly.
“No. I didn’t, not the ones you mean. Even after I wanted you, I never daydreamed about you. See, I have this thing: you’re not supposed to borrow real people or real lives and use them in your head—unless you pay royalties to them. I partly mean this, I partly mean what I say, Ora, I don’t like to lie; it uses up my head’s spaces, its peace—I don’t lie very often. When I was a kid, my family told me I was a very poor liar . . . lousy.”
“I know. I know,” she said, pursing her lips and bringing her head forward. “I know. You’re a poor liar. But even partly . . .” That I partly meant it—maybe she meant: she picked that out to respond to: “You’re ambitious—I’m someone who sees things and I see you; I know about you: I face things—where you’re concerned.”
I sighed with a kind of pleasure. Life during courtship is sometimes sweet, even Edenic. I said, “It’s hard for me with women, or girls, who are too nice.” Who saw none of the things Ora saw. Who would not have known what to make of Lila. But even as I blushed I heard the maybe-insult.
“Oh, I know. I hate those Goody-Goody Two-shoes,” Ora said sternly. She talked, some of the time when she talked, without self-correction, no matter what she said, a good-looking woman with no apology in her. Strong-nerved. She really wasn’t a flirt in the sense of being delicate about it. She was more like a climate putting itself over to you, turning itself over to you as the rainmaker or the sun-evoker.
Or she was like a robber chieftain welcoming you for a while . . . With some humor in it. She said, “After all, it’s your style to be honest.” Then: “Do you think style is just the way people handle emptiness or are you one of those people who thinks style is the soul of things?”
“No. I think style is usually just the way someone gets past the pain of amateurishness. I learned that from Guy . . .”
Guy was someone I knew in college, a young man, rich, with a great deal of manner (or style) who had been and still was, sort of, a friend, and, at odd times, not often, a lover. I mean, it’s hard to explain. He didn’t attract me. I am not drawn specifically to that stuff. I didn’t like him enough. I liked him some. I was drawn some. I wanted to be fair to his feelings; I was nosy . . . I don’t know. Feelings don’t name themselves in me . . . There’s just sort of a heat, a bubbling . . . I had to force myself to shake his hand, to kiss him—on the cheek. But other stuff happened now and then. I liked him somewhat and it was also true that he repelled me. He, too, wanted to be famous—like Jack Perkins; he had the same notions of hierarchy as Ora—fame or celebrity, entering history that way, was the main or highest thing, at once real and luxurious and ideal in that you existed as an image in the shadow world, racingly. Ora and Guy looked a bit alike. Their mothers looked alike. Ora, when she met Guy, said to me, Clearly you have a type and we’re it. I was not as clearly established as what I was as they were as what they were. I didn’t know if I had a type. I didn’t know what I wanted sexually—or professionally.
Neither of them was welcome at all among Serious People. They were both sour about Serious People—they used really quite a lot of invective toward them. One other thing constrained me toward Guy: he was unreliable as a friend—he was jolly and rather cavalier about it. I’m no good, he would say. But in his favor was that he wasn’t shocked by me. Or, if he was, he kept quiet about it. In private, alone with myself, I was not able to accept my life: he accepted it for me.
But he never had the rank with me as someone it was important to have my life accepted by that Ora did.
“Rank” was Jack Perkins’s word.
Guy was nouveau riche, he said (that is, third-generation rich), and queer (that was the word he used then) and suicidal (he said so), but he was handsome and very rich; people chased him. He was a figure of scandal and glamour. Ora had been a much more out-and-out figure of scandal since she was fourteen and wore black fingernail polish and came home to Jack and Millie with a tight-eyed, nervous ex-convict she’d picked up at a gas station. They were somewhat alike, those two: I figured I’d been influenced by Lila. Guy, too, was famous for his looks although not to the extent that Ora was. I thought Guy’s looks were unappealing.
The mystery, though, was simple, as it did not chiefly concern Lila: Guy and Ora looked like my real mother: I didn’t entirely know this. But the sight of them and the presence of either of them placated, pacified something in me in the hard years that college was for me. My first mother at some fantastic degree of social luck . . .
It is always impossible for me to see Ora without caring what becomes of her. In a way, I was as concerned with her as their fans are with singers. Love: a kind of love: kinds of love . . . But after I knew her for a while, a good deal of emotion came from knowing her and was separate from the resemblance thing, or was linked to it only strangely, painfully really.
“I’ll tell you something about me,” she said. “Two things,” she said, not correcting herself: simply continuing. But she was correcting herself and talking directly to me—this does not happen all that often. I was making every effort to listen. I mean, we were giving birth to one another in a factual sense of mutual identification, of a sliding address on streets of words—and of personal manner—in a world of names and events. One did this without self-interest or real purpose (or calculation) except to bring it about. And to get laid by someone you cared about. Ora called it my Pygmalion game and said all men did it to all women up and down (the social scale) and that it was a bore. Ora was sort of the leading expert on heterosexuality at Harvard and Radcliffe at this time.
“I don’t talk like a Hemingway woman and my life is not set up for pain . . . I hate pain,” she said. Then: “I’m not a jealous person, and I’m very, very strong. That’s the fourth thing . . .”
Johnno Fynner, the poet, homosexual (like Guy, whom Johnno disliked), ex-Catholic, and opinionated—to a lot of the would-be talkers and writers among the students, Johnno was sort of king. So was I, though—but differently. But Johnno liked being King. At one time I told him something I thought about a writer, and he said nothing; he was deadpan.
“Well, agree or disagree,” I said, and he shrugged. It was witty, how he did the shrug. “Bah, you’re an ass,” I said.
“Cum grano salis, cutie pie,” Johnno said.
Ora’s Aunt Hilda—a hostess of the tenth rank or thereabouts; actually, that’s not true; she slept with celebrated men and women, or had, and could fill her house with names of the third rank—said to me, with a snarl—she was a drunk—“So what’s it like to know Ora sleeps with you to punish her mother?”
“It’s not bad,” I said. “Her mother isn’t someone I worry about a lot.” I didn’t care at first if Ora’s ‘reasons’ for being with me were lousy or not. What good reasons are there?
Ora’s mother and aunt—Hilda’s nickname was Betticent—had no use for me. Betticent had an unrequited obsession concerning Ora. Millicent and Betticent were both “good-looking failed artists.” Jack said, “Be
tticent was the worst poet of the 1920s. But she could be cute. Millie was a soubrette: she had potential but no one picked up on it.”
Betticent was one of the worst people I have ever known who was not an outright criminal. She lent money to her poor friends and made them crawl. Betticent had a collection of paintings of scenes of bloodshed, mostly animals getting killed, but one was of a woman being mauled by a bobcat. Betticent’s mother, Ora’s grandmother, said to me, Have you met Betticent? Well, we’re not like her, you know. Betticent said, a couple of times, that I was a bowl of ripe fruit—that’s pretty sickening in itself—but she would add to it: Whenever you open your Harvard mouth something momentous comes out. Johnno didn’t like Ora; he said to me, “You play a Puritan-and-repentance game—save yourself, John Alden.” He said it to me with an air of wit. I didn’t get the point. I figured you had to grow up Irish Catholic in Boston to really get it. I rarely penetrated the secrets of his conversation once he started drinking on any given occasion.
To get back to Ora and me: When she said that thing about style, she meant she was afraid of what I thought of her in the light of the real life examples of style, locally—at Harvard. That stuff about style that she said was special to her in that it had to do with my rights and privileges within the particular hierarchy she recognized in regard to ambition and to being somebody in the world. In the early days, partway into the affair, Ora began to speak of us as having one soul. If someone wants there to be one soul between the two of you, it’s not going to work out for very long. Someone’s soul is going to disappear. I muttered, “You’re waiting for a son . . .”
“Don’t be Freudian,” she said. “Please . . .”
Brotherhood across the lines of gender and a surcease of the roughness of heterosexuality in a not entirely amateur courtship setup and freedom from the goad to breed and from a lot of the rivalries in real life (but called all-the-rivalries in the Eden-shit), I think she was a fabulous tactician-technician of some sorts of amateur stuff in real life. She would not have been ashamed to the point of becoming physically fatally ill if she had been unsocial, unsmart, unwomanly. She was a femme fatale, sort of. Mean, malevolent Betticent, drunk, said Ora was a failed femme fatale. Ora as a femme fatale . . . Well, think of it in relation to actual men—and to women such as Betticent . . . God. Two men, older, said, in front of me, things they wanted to do to Ora, the mildest of which was to imprison her. She has to go on living and breathing every moment of more or less twenty-four-hour days. She has to talk to people, kiss them, fend them off, lure them, whatever.
The Runaway Soul Page 33