The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  I remember Remsen’s bitter dependence on a kind of kindness to an infant, a suckling element—or a merchandising one—in such ideas as the ones he admired: But that’s just because it makes you feel good, I would say; and he would say, This idea is pure torture, Wiley—I am tortured by it—and I would say, Oh you just want to win the argument; you don’t care [if] what you’re saying is true or not.

  And in the books he read, he pursued this sucker’s comfort—often, he entered onto a kind of swindler’s pact with the writers or philosophers: he would cheat as they did, merchandise comfort (and command of the universe) as they did. What was so different about him was that, unlike Jass, a Protestant, and me, adopted and all that shit, he never was puritan: hardworking but not puritan. This part of him—comforted, in part, seductively comforting—as a swindle—but in a pact—the ideas of greatness—and of sexy indulgence now—as if sex were separate from time and death—like our odd, or very odd friendship—or half-and-half on again, off again love affair—not homosexual but a bit on the freed side—this part of him was utterly extraordinary to me—even if suddenly at times it grew stale for me, and when it seemed familiar and boring when he passed out of reach and when the whole thing, him, his mind, his looks, his will, his theories, his affection, all of it seemed unworkable then, so that one felt him as suicidal even if one didn’t put that name on it or use that word much, if at all, except in jokes.

  The menu—the program—he offered (of comfort, of comfort withdrawn, of cruelty, of obedience, of mockery, and so on) is that which someone might offer who had the curious exoticism of his background in that he grew up in a slum and had very handsome parents whose sexual and social reality was never particularly real to him—he never saw himself as an appendage of their lives, or them as foliage rustling with time and being rushed onward by time and rushing further, by their will, into and through time—he had then lived in a semi-slum and then his parents became ‘rich’ and moved here, to the suburbs—to University City. He still goes back from time to time to the slum and the semi-slum to visit people: perhaps he reroots himself—he goes back—he has mentioned it but he hasn’t described it to me—he has no intellectual or emotional gift for description—he keeps too tight a grip on his sense of his possible off-again, on-again command of the universe—he doesn’t tell me about his trips back, but he gets sexy right after. From somewhere—in his past, in the slums, and from analysis now and his doctor, and from his reading, and from what he sees in school—he has a notion, an idea of actual love-and-friendship between men, something necessary, but something obscure to him—he is as eyeless as Samson in Gaza—he is something of a hero, he is partly a man (a young man)—sublimely strong, half-captured, sublimely dangerous—and subject to holy messages (so to speak)—and he had an idea of loneliness—alienation rethought and placed in a suburb—and of despair, acedy—modern and not necessarily Christian but firmly affixed to an idea of God’s absence in some physical sense which involved there being just two of them, as on the river—or as in a dream—anyway, as I go rushing on—like me on my bike—among trees, in the perspective of the suburb’s streets, under the vast, colossally beautiful, truly immense Middle Western sky—because of all this, intimacy was easily and piercingly possible with him—even on the phone—but more so in his presence and much more so if it was somewhere such as his own house or his father’s car which he was allowed to use: if he owned it; if we were as if inside his head and he was wakefully thinking—dreaming us, permitting us, but allowing some independent will in the figures in the dream.

  This intimacy was not contractual—or a matter of private sacrament. It was not intently conspiratorial, us against the world. It was not truly intense as in operas or staged readings of Romeo and Juliet or in books about boys at English private schools (called public) . . . But that may have been me.

  Much of what I am is someone who is—and he partly knew this but he often forgot it or did not any longer notice—like a hunter or a scientist in a duck blind, interested in finding out what is true that is not me: what the ant does if the shadow of my head does not fall on it; or what happens in the woods if I am like a fallen and partly rotted tree trunk . . . I am interested in what in him I can command through my intelligence, my role(s) at school, my looks now, my social standing (such as it is), and my socio-sexual masculine-friendship wit—or wit in regard to those things—but I am also interested in the world behind the not entirely glass bell of my existence, beyond the glass smudged with my breath, or opaque with inscriptions or with hope and will; and I presume to a passivity of observation and to odd moments of presence in which I dream but dream myself into a kind of knittedness, or holes-in-it or holiness and trellislikeness of the skull so that real light, of the moment, and the natural light cast by the artificial light of the mind of the other, leafily and shade-spotted, enters where I am, in here.

  But I often slip up—I slide not merely into jealousy and selfishness, self-will and private ambition, and not merely as a given or baseline, but I do it as conscious revenge on the other; and, often, I presume to ascribe to myself a too large amount of innocence because of the passivity, forgetting that one’s reputation and one’s physical existence—and not only that but one’s physical existence moment-by-moment—that my time-riddled reality continues with all the traces and actualities of my will and of my purposes, even while being passive, being heartily present . . .

  That is, I religiously (unrealistically, stubbornly, almost as a matter of principle) refuse to see myself as temptation and as eliciting behavior and truth (of a kind and limited) in that role.

  So I am inclined to announce that Remsen had such-and-such a program of friendship, when I ought to pull myself up short and let me be my mind and heart where he is concerned and say I do not know of him caring for anyone as he did for me and that I persisted in ignoring that and taking it as ordinary, as ordinary neighborliness (of minds-in-school).

  Again, so, if I leave abstraction to one side and remember his eyes in a specific moment when he was talking to me—lecturing me really—on friendship in a universe of absolute meaning—absolute meaning having no great interest in friendship—absolute meaning having great interest in love, in primacy, in jealousy, in the fate of the self (and of the universe), in supernal (superior?) love, and in revelation . . . “Friendship is secular and belongs to us,” he said . . . He had a perfectly enormous vocabulary which he thought was an absolute vocabulary and, so, unless I was irritated or playing a game with him, I never used words in ways foreign to him, so far as I could tell, or words new to him or that referred to social and emotional realities he was, with his slum background and his present state of being monied and his analyst and his reading and his handsomeness, unfamiliar with . . . If I remember his eyes at such a moment—well, then I am hurled into a novel of such moments—of the variations on that theme—or that stuff moving onward in time because of him and his sisters and him and his parents and analyst and him at school and because of me, him at me, because of him observing me—because of what he learned, I mean—because of a whole, semi-vast story I choose to hint at.

  So, it must be a scene and it must be a scene in which the one writing it is not too artificial in his use of time, or, if artificial, is truly brilliant, or inspired, or lyrical in the false (and editorial and amended) sense of time. That is, if we want him to be real. If we want him not to be animated statuary, mere symbol, only a fleshly flag—flesh-as-a-flag—OF MY YOUTH—if we want a picture of youth, male youth, with the truth in it, of more than one male will—not a multiplicity of gods, not insulting final meaning in that sense—but multiple gods anyway, his, mine, the different aspects of God, not only in what we thought but in what we embodied, the differently onrushing opacities of separate bags of time, the bags themselves being time, handiwork—I don’t know what.

  But I am perverse, too—like him—and in his honor—or in male imitation; or I was it from early in my childhood, as he was—and I foreshorten the sc
ene, viz., the front seat of a car, well-kept, the car, in wartime, dashboard, leather of the seats, horn steering wheel: I am large and skinny over here—oh, it cannot be done—all that I am in his eyes cannot be shown: let me say it was the boy who had the session with Leonie, him plus the boy who read so many books—he used to start at one end of a shelf in the local library and read through the entire shelf, more or less murmuring to himself, Imagine that . . . The boy at the river: his face, his shoulders—the shirt, the odors—the cigarettes we smoked to show we could do as we liked—the odors of fabric, then of armpits; it is night; the car is halted at a stoplight; we do not have just his eyes, we have the eyes of the other boy, a boy who, or whom, at the moment I do not claim relation to; we are following, and perhaps terrifying, another car . . . Remsen is going to lecture me on loyalty, sexual permissiveness within that loyalty, tolerance, and the nearly automatic absolution of each other as friends—I do not know all the terms of the negotiation; I do not really know what he is going to say; I know approximately what the power is in the car. It is a matter of balls although not, in my view, as that was shown in books that year (and for a decade after). In some respects, we have here rank based on the balls of the mind—if I might be allowed to say that—and that rank tested, denied, toyed with, fought over in various ways.

  Remsen will say, or I will point out to him, to his unflinching and handsome face—but his eyes will be roiled and threatening—or placative—and to his chest, so to speak, and to his hands on the steering wheel: his hands are already hairy and mine are not—that you don’t necessarily share money, or moods, unless you felt like it.

  So the whole contract as he outlined it was worthless: I would argue this—lightly enough. You were just boys (we were) or, I suppose, men; of course he was more a man than I was, being older and larger and so on—we were companions, drinking buddies. Explorers of the world. We-do-not-love-one-another was his formulation, but it was a form of love—agape, maybe; something sophisticated, though . . . I could tear his calm up by saying it was love. I’d done that, accidentally, not knowing what would happen, only once—and then, once to test it, to see if it was so—and, then, never again.

  I would have to care about him more than I mostly did to risk such an upheaval . . . You (one can) love to one degree or another and varyingly. And besides the tumult of degrees is the noise of tones. And throbbing under all of that is sexuality—curiosity mostly—but that takes various forms. And the urge to know someone? That can be carnal—that can concern the penetration or sexual exploration of each other. But the main thing about it, in the unmendable relativism of reality, is the way it consists of mutual measurement, of attributes not always consciously known as velocities, or unideal, and not always accepted as given in the terms of the moments; but felt as the grounds of warfare, almost that, as part of the bloodbath of measurements.

  Of course, like my dad, one hopes one can know peace and know peacefully, and that things will settle down and so on.

  Remsen and I—now it is my aged eyes that speak—did not love one another as friends or romantically or sexually—or as souls—or in the romantic tradition—but in that other romance, as cousins, which we were not, and as neighbors, with the other elements being present—we play around, as if with fire, sometimes with love, love without limit but from within the bounds of truce: we play with sexuality but inhibitedly: it is not serious.

  But it is real and final in its way—and absolute. I mean it is absolute in that we carved and shaped each other: I had other people, many of them; he had fewer . . . I would not presume to propose here an equality, an equivalence, or a justice. In the male world Nonie can never enter and will not, except in wartime, with fliers, glimpse, in the moral sinkhole, or moral primacy, in the freedom, in the murderous freedom and intellectual fires, in the nothingness—take your pick, choose all of them if you like—Remsen is not smart enough to know he wills a kind of shapelessness, like that from which beauty comes into existence—he wills a blurred buddedness, that comic punctuation at the end of winter on empty, windswept branches and withes. This shapeless semi-shapeliness, although affectionate, and even though affectionately representing a form of closeness, is dismissed as a prior boyishness even while it is happening—prior to Freudian maturity.

  And one sees this on his face—the flinching and budded rush of how determinedly he has named (and placed) his feelings which exist, in spite of that in him, in other terms, quite other terms, terms entirely other from those within the rush of emptied eggs his breathing becomes in the car. Or in his house. That sort of comedy—of his face and feelings—the enormous passion of it—the aerial view of that is outside the range of fashions in intelligence, a range to which he, in his worldly ambition and his corruption, limits himself—he has given himself to this—the comedy then of feelings, of his feelings, is outside that range and is outside the range of his mind.

  I see this only in terms of my own nonexistence—a kind of death, a very frail opacity, nearly a transparency, in the actual moment. He nearly comprehends me—and to such an extent that it is like a long description or a passage of love. He abjures the comedy because I am so aerial—so given to flight, flights of mind, and to evasion, in hiding myself, in being unlike myself with him when I am at school, in going off to nurse my parents—or some such thing—but also flights of mind, soft, heavy-bodied, predatory flights as of an owl-body: I mean I think, now that I am old, it was true then that my eyes flew with heavy, nearly silent wingbeats toward him in a perpetual dark shouting visually WHO-WHO . . . I can escape the difficulties of this by proposing myself as unloved, but then he vanishes as a presence in my memories. I do not know if this is a flaw or lapse or absence of mind. A repellent vanity. Or a fine thing. My father, dying, said, You think you are like David . . . In the Bible, I think. I was said to cheer him, and we were said to be a David-and-Saul sort of story . . . It is painful to me to admit to myself that perhaps I danced in my life or sang—with my eyes, so to speak—even though I feel it is true as I say it. But then it is clearer—to me—what it was like in the moments back then that he—Remsen—whom I at times preferred to my father and at times ignored in favor of my father—feels he has a better but less appreciated mind than I have. Nonie—and my dad and mom—felt that way, too—I guess a number of people feel that way toward me as the primary thing they consciously feel where I am concerned. But that is the school’s fault for insisting that I am smart. Remsen and my father blame me for this stuff; they say I am a politician who arranges the above, cleverly. And Nonie and Mom blame me as unloving and male, and they blame the world for misseeing things where women are concerned . . . I half know The Law of Opposites is in operation in many of the uses of language. My father, when he was alive, and Remsen did try to arrange the above. And Nonie and my mom are, in different ways, and out of pride, unloving and female—defiant, you know?—and create intensely as-if-perfumed corners of the world, harem-realities, in which I am mis-seen as a (phallic?) prop of their lives . . . And so on.

  Whatever Remsen says, or confesses, and he says and confesses a lot at times—and often he is silent—and whatever he does or professes, for a certain number of years, in school or in his car, or if we are walking along a street toward his house, in a rich part of the suburb, I think he watches me with the infatuated attention of ambition, various ambitions including those of love, love immediate, love ultimate—like hawks sitting on his wrists and on top of his head, a raw helmet of sheer life, absolute in the moment, and waiting on further evidence—as real-life absolutes always do and always must—a stirring of animate meaning—final in my life if in no one else’s, his love, if it is love, his love such as it is, and him being, presumably, of the same species, and yet foreign to me and unlike me, as unlike me as a hawk. Or as an angel—a boy with his own parents, the different moral principles from his past and from his sessions, talkative or silent, with his doctor, moral principles derived differently and applied to a far different world, different i
n terms of how time flowers in it—we might, if we love each other enough, die almost in the same moment, but we can never make the actual time we contain congruent with the time in the other.

  Or intellectually and economically, and in terms of the processes he sees as running things (or as adequately symbolizing the procedures of the world, in the way chemical formulas might represent the real-life steps and sweat for making this or that)—and his principles or no, what I am aware of is his beauty—such as it is—of the storylike aspects of this moment (its treasure, its being a treasure house of that stuff for me)—and of a distance from Nonie here—her guilt, my guilt—and it is like smelly feathers and a fire of will and of opposition, burning in a hawk—a hawk lazy or in flight and busy—and this is, at times, as if apparent along his edges, the forward shape of his legs, each one when it moves forward as he walks, or of his stomach—or of his chest—inside his shirt—or at the crown of his handsome head and its tousled hair . . .

  But if one enters into-the-moment—if one tries to approach the meat, or the meat-and-potatoes, as a teacher I had named Gangtinney said about a lot of topics—if as a human duty or as an act of conceit or a moment’s boyish daring, one goes further into reality—if one invades Russia, if one crawls, or walks, scratched and stung, toward the center of the as-if-thorny thicket—those last are my private terms—then the shapes and blinking of the other boy’s intelligent eyelids and the broad cheekbones of his bonily handsome but boring but brightly health-tinctured face which somehow yet has in its pallor of thought and its melodrama of egoistic occasions its occasional spurts of glamour . . . If I love him in this way—or maybe it should be stated as when I love him—he astounds me, he is so lithe—so strong, so sad, so smart. So at the end of his rope. So firmly and fiercely there. And so frail and deathbound—and in a way absent. He is a ferocious presence. And he is barely alive at all . . . It is as if I hold a rifle to the hawk’s head. He has a raw helmet and visor of hungry identity—it is his identity, so to speak, which loves me, if I am not in error about his feelings in that regard—and he has an extreme physical validity which bores him—it is not just looks but it is an exceptional vitality and an exceptionally strong physical will: but it is contradicted by something, his restless vitality, by a sense of death as meaning—and as genius—by himself as fully alive only for a final second or two: that is what I suspect of him: some unabsolvable childhood thing of limitlessness, a final cry, a truly unsleepy, undaily thing of the proposal of oneself as the child of the entire universe and the bearer of the sole important meaning: anger and guiltlessness: a thing from being a younger child, a Jew, and not quite of the social class he is in now—he is not really of any social class anymore. He is mobile and unabsolved and modern. He commands love and silence, sympathy and the stages of the moments on which he appears with what he is with this fatality of sadness . . . But this is for himself, too. He cannot set up the mirrors in such a way that he, too, is not misled. His looks are of that sort: I mean the would-be sly king—or David—but he is merely ultimately truthful about the nature of his own will. He is tremendous but not valuable at our school in wartime . . . But he will be in the next war—if there is a next war, and if he lives . . .