The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Hide what you know; keep a civil tongue in your head . . .

  For a while Dad tried to beat that into me.

  I was rescued from that.

  But whatever I was “rescued” for this last time, that is not the main thing on my plate, at least not yet; that lies, so to speak, on the other side of the mountain—as in a folk song—and the now, which is not the sweet by-and-by, but in the here-and-now, one has to fit in—one has to be touching—or honored. Don’t think: sleep . . . Politics makes strange bedfellows—having sex helps.

  An Imaginary Dialogue (Not of Much Help) On Winning and Being Normal up-to-a-Point

  Self A (sixteen and at Harvard but really largely the fourteen-year-old in Carolina modified by further isolation and more complete escape): Is escaping ‘winning’?

  Self B (in his Harvard room is a mentor, of sorts, his real self ten years later, from New York—his real self with all manner of new and half-new and semi-new parts, some stolen, some having grown): It depends on how you set things up for yourself.

  Self A: In a story? Or in life?

  Self B: In life . . . A story helps you with your life: life comes first—not to the writer-saint, of course, but as the foundation or guide to where truth is.

  Self A: Who the hell are you? I don’t recognize you.

  Self B: An impossibility, actually. I have to be unindependent and imagined by you, a mere projection of yours with some surprising minerlike quality of being able to illumine thoughts you have but can’t get at; I have to be a visitor, someone you desire because you chiefly own him, before I am possible: as an independent will, I can’t exist in the same room with you ever.

  Self A: Are you homosexual? Are you making a pass at me?

  Self B: Not in a real way but yes, if I have to be, to find you in me enough that I can project you and can visit you and can comprehend some of what you are.

  Self A: So this is not happening—we can’t be doing this . . .

  Self B: No. But if I become sixty years old—years and years further on—I can project such a meeting among selves I was as a kind of mental fairy tale—or as an image: the way selves merge during utterance—the younger self speaks in the older one and the older one is foreshadowed in the younger selfs grammar and knowledge of things; and self-congratulation—and worry—and regret emerge . . . You see, in my view, you never “won”—at best, you “escaped,” you never quite understood what was at stake or what was happening.

  Self A: It didn’t feel like a victory—it wasn’t a triumph as it had been for Nonie. It felt like a relief—and, to some extent, like a victory over her but only in my head: not in real life: a relief column in an old movie of the 1930s coming to the beleaguered garrison in the desert: your kindness to me, is it homosexual?

  Self B: I would think any relationship to oneself was homosexual, in part, and androgynous in part—so that one might go looking for outer versions of parts of oneself or similars or even twins—but perhaps not exact twins: I mean I project you as not being so smart but as being quite smart enough, more like what I have come to think people are. A woman entirely different from you might hold in herself a whisper of who you are more clearly heard—or seen, if I can say that—than if you start off being alike. If you start off being alike, then ritual is needed to support the tie, to veil the self-love and the dramas of the love of others and the failure to love others.

  Self A: I don’t dislike you.

  Self B: That would be a great relief if you were not a projection . . . You see, even talking to yourself is a corruption. That is why contemplation is recommended as a spiritual exercise.

  Self A: On the other side of the barbed wire were more moments—Daniel was like S.L. and Casey was like Nonie. Like doesn’t mean the same as: it means your mind goes in that direction and casts about among present possibilities like a hunting dog—or like a light from a flashlight . . .

  Self B: I did, you know, want to understand my life, to consider it as important even compared to the war and to the deaths of my parents—just my ordinary life, just breathing and eating and sleeping—and loving and flirting. I wanted to be useful if it turned out that mind could be useful: I had such doubts of it . . . Such doubts about it that I was quite strange . . . See, I am imitating, somewhat, my unconscious memories of you.

  Self A: I really didn’t want to be isolated anymore . . . I really was scared of having no mind except a specialized one . . . I didn’t think I was smart; I thought I had certain very limited possibilities—but never without cost. I didn’t see how to exert will without doing damage. I was afraid of falling into a condemnation of life—and of my life—and not ever being able to escape from those postures, that actual imprisonment of blame . . . I think that adolescent fear (and oddity) represent a sort of truth of blamelessness: I was not a prince or the heed of the family. I wasn’t scared to be cannon fodder—it really wasn’t conceit. It was a matter of logic—well, not of school logic. But the thing of winning—the thing of winning out—I’d wanted to have what Nonie had; I’d wanted to get to Forestville; I wanted to leave home—I would rather have gone away to school—Forestville was second or third choice—Lila picked it out; one saw her planning away, figuring things out, making sure that number one was represented . . . See, S.L. had lost—he’d gotten ill and had gone under; and when I didn’t run away from him, I was stained with that—like a priest or like a doctor. You get away; people sort of like you; things happen—but who are you then, really? An old self? From childhood, from before any trouble arose? The intervening steps are gone. You’re plunked down without a thread and without a logical structure to the self. You’re a sort of glitter-mirror No one who has, at best, a glitter shape, light in a mirror . . . An image-shape—I mean your shadow is the truest thing about you . . . I’ll tell you something you’ve forgotten: all shadows are perfect . . . Not to themselves: they are full of longing for dimension; they are appetite in the sun. I used to sit in the sun in Carolina and I would see my extraordinary shadow, narrow and tucked under me if I was lying on a towel, or flying outward, like a shaped sheet without any blemish, without any feeling really except flight and a significant reference to feeling in posture—or to sexuality—and to youth when I sat up or stood up, the evidence of proportion and even of scientific rationality: I have a shadow. I have a mind. Nonie-Nora, as a twenty-two-year-old, coming down the steps of the house to the pool, bodied, strange, and her fine shadow flying ahead of her or flying backwards toward the house; and I see that I see her as a Nike—she, like Casey, like Lila, knew how to win; Nonie and Casey had not been savaged by illness and some defeat. Nonie and Casey, like Abe, knew that stuff although not perhaps on the same immense, immensely lunatic and life-shortening and incremental scale that Abe did; but they outlasted him; they won actually . . . My victories, such as they were, were always of an odd sort: a rank, a confession or two, a thing of being a focus of feeling for someone or for a number of people, the finding of an opportunity to think and of evidence of life, of actuality, for the thinking that might very well be useless or half-useless but would certainly be flawed. One could see the greed as a kind of light from a window at the top of the stairs, a greed to propound a system, to speak, or to appear to speak, to God—to finality. A real victory is never actually minor, is never actually unevil. A rank, a confession, always partly unearned, always partly projected toward a higher point of the imaginary steps and toward the absolute thing. Mine were never equivalent to others’ victories, never actually rectifications of the past, never were a form of true or adequate revenge; but were something much more terrible and much, much weaker—they had almost the charm of babies—or of an adopted child at the age of four beginning to speak again or mute still: a sort of shadow triumph—without life—not actually part of any worldliness. And others die, go mad, snap and fight; and they see the shadow triumph as real but they never acknowledge it and they go to great lengths to keep it from turning real . . . This can’t be helped mostly. Most people fig
ht in order to live; most people, most of the time, fight on the wrong side. I, of course, think I am right—and not just the people who already have similar ideas—of limited victories. It is my set of ideas on the subject that I prefer. I have a shadow set of steps right next to the real imaginary steps of system and of doctrine: it is a scene in a ballet: the shadows clash with real life in duels that matter. Perhaps the shadow backs off, Utopianly, semi-absolutely . . . And then one leaves life to the others—the ones who know how to win and how to hate—and one becomes a master, in a way, of impostorships that fool no one. One is this rather tired, sweet, overmental, perhaps pretentious person—a shadow with parts of a body attached—do you know what I mean?

  Self B: Yes.

  * * *

  Escape was not escape. I won nothing—except some access to time, some bits of drama—some moments of irritating other people the way you irritate me—and everybody else—(Lila)—some sunlight and moonlight taken as itself and detached from emergency.

  But I enjoyed my shadow life. I was important in that house for a while.

  * * *

  Listen, I was never a good soul—no one ever said I was that. Important—or smart—useful or well-intentioned . . . But never good . . .

  This is not about saintliness versus the Nonie-esque. This is about the comparison within a time-harried frame of always greatly unexplained lives but accurately modelled on what is possible and always in relation to one another.

  And I am the better person—and the better talker and thinker—but not always, not in all circumstances, not for every purpose.

  She has realer victories, realer defeats. She doubts this. Casey doubts it of herself. They are more assured in their comparisons if I am dead.

  Meanwhile, they have as grounds to know themselves in comparison to me as possessors of evident superiority in that they are effectually evil . . . Bad. Real. NORMAL. But normal women. Whatever.

  * *

  Lila: You have to learn to live among people—you have to learn to defend yourself—you can’t go around offering yourself as a target . . .

  You can. But that is not the chief part of the story.

  Truth, more thoroughly evoked than heretofore, is a weapon of a kind. I really don’t know. I offer it as a theory, one that I believe: and others, other people more assured of their competence in regard to life, can judge it.

  * *

  In a grammar of impersonality: my cousins treated me after a while as someone who lived in their house and was acceptable and fine-and-reliable (meant realistically) but troubling because he was odd and who troublingly did a swindler’s thing involving a faked and theatrical presentation of second sight.

  Our daily life—no: mine—was something like a dangerous festival in a comic or serious horror movie or a spy movie or like a masquerade ball in a movie. To be away from home and in another household, among its rules, the party brilliance of each day, as I felt it, was like, well, a form of dancing around inside an echoing glass bell, breakable and set up to encourage dramatic dénouements, discoveries, confrontations, a glass bell of GOINGS ON—a bell of (in a phrase I never used) SERIOUS relationships, somewhat in embryo or old . . . Theirs to one another, theirs to their lives—they were strained in their family ties and needed distraction—some new subjects and terms: me.

  I avoided thoughts of melodramatic outcomes, melodramatic moments, stolen bits of love—analysis, opinion. My mind was empty. I did not notice how much the three “kids” drank—really a lot—and Benjie and Isobel were cranked up on coffee and sweets and some drugs much of the time; or I did; but I wanted to stay.

  Or how they, the younger ones, double-cross Daniel all the time as a form of identity or how gravely bitter, how responsibly (oddly), with what clear longing-to-escape-from-all-of-them (longing carefully edited to show the presence of love and patience, some love, some patience) Daniel regarded their “forgivable” self-assertion. That he was “trapped” or “caught” like another youngish man of an Episcopalian family down the road, that such a pinioning was A Terrible Thing for a Man was something he and the other youngish man made clear enough that I understood (family) insult and “horrible ways to love” and “unacceptability” in new ways that I resented knowing about: I wanted to be a naïve visitor . . . You can’t live with people you don’t approve of—except horribly . . . So this house had only a temporary visibility.

  Anyway, I rigorously paid

  NO ATTENTION (AS A POLITE VISITOR SHOULD) (rather than sympathetic, or side-taking, attention as a lover should); I was a recipient of CHARITY and of HOSPITALITY . . . This was submission on my part although it was not exactly the fitting-in they had in mind. I was submissive while being in essence UNBOSSED, uncaught—independent-eyed, independent-necked, with a guy’s free person’s shoulders—which Casey eyed with disapproval and then she would start in with justifiable complaint couched in words that were untrue: HE’S SHOWING OFF! But if I was, it was only in the haphazard sense that the (odd) mixture of freed kid and of being independent and of being a scarred and scared penniless coward (and orphan) and something of a fool was seductive.

  I told fortunes—with cards mostly. The “kids” in the house decided I had second sight—this was a fad with them: a tentative solution.

  If I lay out the cards after Isobel, maybe sexily, asks me a question, things I thought and had seen and had refused to admit to consciousness would suddenly form and jump into my speech and I would hear what I thought while I struggled to edit it, to keep it polite. I made predictions like a talking dog. Predictions and warnings did no good, I noticed. I noticed that curiosity and a protective-tariff attitude toward their own systems rule the Warners.

  Anyway, my telling fortunes and being of some use that way was part of what might be called a “quotidianization” of charity-and-affection toward ME—up to a point.

  The wobble of the limits, of the politics and comparative certainties of fitting in—the idealisms and the realities, the daydreams and Utopian moments—and a kind of ruthlessness of seeing things in a fairly real way—myself as complicated, for instance, and other people as being that complicated but with different words and gestures plus the added complications of real wins, real losses, so that I seem simple, simpleminded, and yet not purely so since I have an ego and want certain things—such as peacefulness, peaceful pleasures, a real identity, a real knowledge of how to win and lose, and the like—this stuff becomes a contingent and temporary shelter for the new inhabitant.

  To be politically sensible was to be more than charming—was to be normal and unevil since you’re easy to handle. The weird foreign-planet aspect of every day with the fatal combat aspect because you’re placed out there somewhere in new moments all-the-time . . . although you don’t have to admit it . . . We’re all combat generals in the course of the often politely unadmitted irreversibility of the moments on the territory of one’s own feelings and of the feelings of others—a perverse fever of acts and language and of will—an excitement of not being sent home—this is in a shifting and unnourishing, perhaps alienated landscape, of lovely iciness and snowiness of illusions, more or less polite, semi-illusions, ignoring things, semi-struggles, semi-forbearance, nervousness, and novelty.

  This is expressed as a fever of contentment, of Eden. I felt real gratitude when I was allowed to be me and I faked happiness at being in the house at other times: that was perversity itself—unadmitted in such phrases as waste time and get nowhere and do nothing—but truth is in our inflections and in our fortune-telling—You’ll like so-and-so, you’ll like such and such a movie—it is present phallically and cuntedly, present in actuality, not symbolically only.

  The love of the absolute, the fascism of dreams makes you a pain in the ass as the visitor or as the host but you have to have some of that stuff. The centrality of one’s well-being in waking life which cannot ever quite be the case except when love has gone wild and even then only weirdly, seems almost to be true—it is the center of hospitality
as such.

  Centrality means that all meanings, all, are available to one—to your hostess, say; indeed, they are resident in one’s language, one’s manners, one’s logic, one’s position in the house: mannerly reality operates under various spoken terms: a good hostess, good people, a good kid, a good student, a good American, a good Jew. Nothing is forbidden but don’t test this. No one is stupid but don’t be serious about this: don’t test this either.

  I was openly in pursuit of no one and of nothing. You had to stage a thing before you could say no to me—and own me that way for a scene, a drama.

  This stuff rested on paradox in the domestic or democratic pretty-much-tyrannical style of The Normal of the household.

  The kids protected me. They did it by laughing at me before Casey did, by not protecting me from each other—by getting Casey to avoid me, which meant my being okay (and not sent home) but it also meant my being powerless and on tenterhooks since in the hierarchy of that house, all real power stemmed from Casey and Casey’s favor and her knowledge of real victories.

  She was the pasha and she permitted harem-y infidelities although you couldn’t count on her not becoming furious: this maddened them—they took this, though, to be normal and humane . . . this permitted stuff that they suffered over, the suffering representing an abrasive entrapment between the shells of two paradoxes—normalcy and sexual existence and purity and between the reality of oneself and the reality of others.

  That these things might be simple for some people was a daydream of normalcy and inspired sexual desire, I think.

  But the function of desire is to extinguish itself. Life here is meant to last a while. Sex isn’t so bad if it doesn’t lead to changes . . . And if no one much knows it is going on. Casey practices live and let live but she spies, using the laundry; now she makes sudden hard-breathing descents on us; her standing in the doorway of a room and eyeing us temperamentally, in an abnormally normally-temperamental way is disconcerting but we take it as normal enough.