The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  The absolutist, or dreamlike nature, of the looming bridge, the way it was there and was looming, the claim of deep meaning was rude and antagonistic; it was also childlike. The proportion of failed art and failed will, the size, the scale—this was before the 1960s argued that art didn’t matter. The sermonizing and lamentation were amusing, but it was also the use of art as a bludgeon, a who the fuck are you? It is an attempt to be authoritative and deep in relation to truth-as-politics. But then the backlash of the noticeably failed genius or whatever of the place and its makers was something that affected the people there and formed a kind of cage of fixity and staleness of reference, not of art but of minor coquetry with truth so that the result was merely fashion. Which could be seen as psychological punishment or daily failure through the loss of God. But the chief use of art-failure and serious politics of the left or right is that in the end, obviously, one really isn’t overshadowed by it except psychologically esthetically: Other people are overshadowed for you in their politics. It is just a frisson of the moment in the city.

  Things in America are so much a matter of date and the onrush of flows of money that certain words and phrases used back then have in my memory a special air: they suggest the era and the Kellows and their friends and my youth: witty, rich garbage, artists, artistes, socialist, pretty, serious, neurotic …

  Socialist meant genuinely human, not racially snobbish, sexually profound—really, it did for a while. It meant Would-not-EVER-have-been-Fascist or Nazi. It meant is not now sanguine about the bomb. It meant is in no sense a killer but is richly human. I suppose it meant that it was a lie and propaganda and it really meant something else. Have you ever seen a movie in which the flight of wooden arrows in a late medieval battle is reproduced along with the various sounds they make, the twang of the bows, the whirring in flight of the missiles, the thunk when they hit? One is as if caught in a warlike flight of a wooden rain of arrows, among actual deaths, failures, psychological collapses … I was on the right side: I am ironic. … It was that kind of era.

  Moira said in her nervously aging, mad ingenue, toothy way, the tones of which got in your head and stayed there, “Oh (uh) I ih- hate it-teh-teh when rihich people have me-eeee-an fayissis [faces; high-pitched voice and staring-eyed, rictus-grin] and don’t enjoy theee-’ngs; ruhitch pee-uh-pill oh-utt tuh-ooo enjoy thih-em-sell[deepened tone]ves: I … love having a good time … do you?”

  A melancholic hysteric, recurrently suicidal: God knew what she ever meant—I mean it was as if a poet had written her speeches for her and meant them to remain obscure. She sometimes said she wished she could get a poet to fall in love with her and write things for her to say; she said she would like it if I came to see her early in the morning and “told me deep things to say.…” I had been ordained as a poet by some critics although I wrote prose; the term meant I was a Jew and used adjectives and was a smart-ass and it also meant that I was not politically identifiable. It didn’t mean that I was a poet except with some critics, and by poet they meant eccentric and competent—no more than that. Yes, it did.

  “The bridge is falling,” she said and giggled, but she half-persuaded herself; and she craned her neck and looked toward the windows to see if the bridge or its shadow was bending. “It feels like the end. I dreamed about the ovens again last night. I am truly mad, you know: I come from New Jersey and that is just too much to ask of someone like me. Ha-ha. I have imperfect breasts and a lot of sorrow—a lot … I think we all should be good: we should all go and scrub out the temple and see if there’s any oil left.… Or say Kaddish because it is the apocalypse …”

  Everything in her was directed toward an unarguable guiltlessness, innocence at last. The 1960s were being bred or hatched here.

  From where I sat next to Moira on a couch in a grouping near the wall of light, I saw the rapid, current-rippled rush of the East River, muddy eddyings seventeen floors down which were at moments in the light white-gilded. But there was no sound, I didn’t actually hear the throatily murmurous noise of the water or smell the water stink … but they were there in my head, memories in the jumble of blown and lightly drifting, changeable, and itchy rays and intimately atticy old scenes and feathers … a lot of fancy-slanted impermanencies. The mind, more scarily and less persistently than a window or a river, is newly and stalely and stably and unstably itself every moment. This aging junior world is a spherical dervish in a half-sunlit path—I whispered that one sentence in Moira’s ear. She giggled. Ora is watching from half a room away. And is jealous. Ora once dreamed she was a horseshoe crab scuttling in shallow water (in Maine) and a gull got her: And the gull was you, Wiley! It carried her aloft and dropped her in order to crush her shell; it wanted to eat her, Ora said.

  It sounded to me more like gull equals girl and she was dreaming about the ecstasies and deaths in being female and she was blaming me, which I guess was to the point.

  I told her, and she said, Explain that to me, say it again slowly, she said it to me with a kind of angry rapture of attention. At the party, in that particular present-tense moment—of teasing her (perhaps)—what comes back most sharply is how uninnocent I was: I feel my gull wings spread; I feel my intelligence like a very-hard-yellow-beak-attempt to tear at her, to turn her over. To make her momentarily helpless, sunny side up. And in her neck, her young neck, in the thin tendons of her strong young neck and her bare arms, in the dank womanliness of her postures—so unlike Moira’s dryness, so unlike anyone: that patient, maybe sullenly amused sweetness, that thin, restless shell of patience, is life and resentment. It is clear even in the death-gamble of her beautifully boned, fine-eyed face—a face for stories.

  But the resistance in her, the intelligence and yet the incomprehension—like a coil in a heater so that the electricity of the woman is joined to the electricity of the rage … the toughness. She glows darkly with anger behind the patience verging on the actual intention to betray and hurt and even murder, actually murder, the urgency to lie—she has a code of honor but no conscience; she is willing to go to hell and to be suicidal rather than be obedient, rather than listen to anyone, rather than learn.

  And I know this genitally as well, that she is sexed up by this stuff. But with her sexuality is nothing ideal, nothing movielike, it’s just Ora and her deep-womanly sexual shit, the Ora stuff …

  And she shifts her posture, a vaguely semi-boyish stance of the legs—and a quivering abandonment of her breasts, a fleshly, dirty, runaway thing.

  I am uninnocent. The papery now is astir as if with fire, with its merciless transience; motion is the substance of love. Anyone might wish for stillness, for an end to the eerie lawlessness of people in reality.… Oh, the restlessness of the light … I am a music of fireworks. Real truth is not necessarily meant for humans to see in human terms and might very well be lightless. One is a guest in the universe—I whispered that to Moira. We can spy but we cannot know. Blinking eyes and the reality of the sun are a bitter explanation of the condition of motion—geographical motion plus a continual efflorescence and dying, the tiny spiraling and flick of the gray, unnameable, undammable, damnable mumble of bustling unstillness in an unnamed everywhere. Of course we are mad in the fixed-liquid-airy-wind, The Breath of God, I am sorry. It is pompous but I am half-consoled by this unmapped and emotion-laden condition, this ungeographical, seaborne, breathborn sense of God-as-motion. I don’t know the moral weight or the consequences of saying that Time does not forgive us. Time offers no protection against chagrin.… Imagine all posterity laughing at your errors, cursing you for your errors, without bothering to remember you. What would timelessness be, Moira? Moira is nailed and fixed in place in psychic pain, in overwhelming meaninglessness, crucified by nerves … And I am uninnocent as hell— for the moment—but I do not intend to harm her.

  “Do you feel you’re on a strange planet?” Moira asks. She says to Harvey Deuteronomy of me, “He is easy to talk to.”

  I really do not understand time, but I feel myself as a young
stalk of it stretching his legs on the couch, and goony with consciousness: one lives in the moments wildly no matter the austerity one attempts. My state is fringed with distances and exhaustion and doubt and voices.

  The queerly swift shuffle and giant glides of the mind are part of a disbelieving rivalry with light. Moira (born Sadie) is real. Her real name is This Moment, is her sudden swallow of champagne. “Look: the sky is raw with time,” she said to me. How strange it is, the moment of re-entry to the world. The city is so noisy it is like an echoing porch around this room.

  Moira-Sadie says to me, “I see it in your eyes: you’re someone who can use a little help. You’re so sure of yourself …” She is clearly troubled by madness. Pain, when it gets bad enough, jealousy, say, things in the mind, things in the body, is a smelly lion on the path … I think she told me this; I think she made up the image; and I stole it and in memory I hear myself saying it.

  But I think it was Sadie-Moira. Her mind, like mine is a cagey, broken rustling of bits of caught or fleeing attention.

  Moira said: “I don’t know how to behave with intellectuals.… Well, I’ll just invent something.” I realized how valuable in this world people’s methods were to them since they had risen to this point, so I assumed she was talking fictionally. Whacko Williams, the elegant comedian-turned-television producer, moved nearer. Moira said, “Look: here is the Handsomest Man in the World—and the sexiest except for a couple of English bastards no one has ever heard of—”

  “Oh,” said Whacko, “those duchess-eaters …”

  “Duchess-eaters.” repeated Moira said with a sly you-are-stupid-I-am-wicked grin.

  “They are pussy cats,” Whacko said.

  Moira giggled and laughed enthusiastically: “Oh let’s talk dirty some more,” she said.

  “Pussy cool cats,” Jeffrey Bestmann said, a tough guy, promising director. And yet a hanger-on.

  Whacko Williams, a big-shot show business corporation figure in the business world of that decade, said, “I want to drink champagne from your slipper, Moira—”

  “I’m a size eight,” she said drolly.

  Whacko, still in his making-love mode, said, “You know all there is to know.… You are a sexual Britannica …”

  Natalie Bone, a ballet star once, then a movie star, then an ex-star, married three times, and well-married still, called a great beauty because her large face was streamlined, large-boned, Nordic, and famous in gossip for her bad temper, for her being a dominatrix, for her tormenting men who pursued her, said, “I hate champagne in the afternoon …”

  “I always need a lift,” Moira said pitiably and put herself as a rival to Natalie as someone agreeable and feminine according to 1950s Freudian analysis. She turned and said to a man on her other side on the couch, “Judy Garland is wonderful but she’s stale.… Alden Whitto, he’s really wonderful, he has a dirty purity.… He’s not trapped in the middle class.… He’s escaped.” She was an expert, a woman consulted by columnists and people writing for magazines; she knew a lot, encyclopedically, in the language of her particular world.

  Thirty people are here so far. Ten are strewn in the couches that molest you. Some are walking around or standing here or on the balcony outside the windows. The younger, less famous, more decorative men sit on the floor in supple self-advertisement. Some are in the dining room.

  “They get haircuts that look good blowing in the wind,” Moira said of the people on the windy terrace: all were men. There are many more men than women; there are only a few women.

  Harvey Deuteronomy was standing over us and looking down at us, and he said in a witty manner—a kind of cabaret comic actor manner: wittily as a trick of manner, as someone pretending—in a carrying voice, “Why is it like high school here—why is it I never escaped from high school—why are the grownups always someplace else? I think your bridge is giving me a migraine.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful ?” Moira said with her giggle. She said in the high-pitched, slick voice she had sometimes, “The bridge is nicer in the morning.… It’s shadows and blur …” She means with sunglare pouring through its beams. “We should have people in then, but I can’t face people in the mornings.”

  “I’m so gauche,” Deuteronomy said humorously, sinking with a neurotic, tousled, gangling air into a couch at right angles to the one Moira and I were on.

  American speech, with its transposed keys, its mimicries, its Gentile and Jew thing, its democratic and snobbish elements, is almost never used in books—it’s too hard. An American conversational exchange is a peculiar thing, businesslike or like an encounter in a wilderness even if it is erotic. In general, you have to be careful because you are in contact with so many social and psychological categories of people.

  Moira said, “The French are so tiresome, they think they know everything, such snobs; after all, I’m gauche, I’m hardly going to hold it against the men or boys who visit here: I don’t want to be bored, but I don’t care if you’re gauche …”

  And you had individual, current professional standing and marital standing, and current and former social classes, lied about, hidden, or exhibited; and gender attitudes—Natalie Bone was a feminist and a purposeful bitch: it was a famous style: she had done it in the movies and been apostrophized in magazines as a goddess.

  Then you have educational differences and sexual attitudes hidden or paraded; and various kinds of susceptibility to intimidation—What? you haven’t slept with Moira? or You haven’t read Camus? Depending on how innocent and helpless you appear and on how powerful you are, then when you get things wrong—and how can you not when people’s lives are so unliterary and sprawling in America—the person you’re talking to maybe will set out to get you in order to prove themselves to be O.K. It’s a kind of sparring and is a measure of wit-and-power on Park Avenue. Sometimes it’s said that it is better not to listen too closely, that it’s better to swing along like a playground swing, alongside and parallel.

  Mostly in real life, American men don’t talk—talk is a special trait with us, specially indulged in, men and women … Books use phony dialect or modified English dialogue, which is stylized to start with, and it suggests the characterization, not a real person. So does the theater. And the movies.

  So this group sounds like movies. Pauses in the middle of a speech to think, changes of direction, hands over mouths, bold eye-stares are fairly theatrical. And do form an almost complete language. So mad Moira, if she wants to be a conversationalist, and if she imitates books, her druggy voice will be mannered for performance synchronous with Deuteronomy’s, and influencing his songs and other work, as if Harvey and Moira were lovers or were brother and sister. She has her own style, but it is not eccentric but is derived from successful examples in her time.

  Moira said, “I love my drugs—Don’t mind me—I’m just making party talk.… I need a little help to get through the things I have to do.”

  “Be married to Brr and drink champagne … ?” Whacko said.

  “Why not be superhuman if you can get a prescription for it?” Deuteronomy said. He was very sharp-witted, very bright.

  Moira giggled. Then: “I never wanted an ordinary life.”

  A handsome, oldish man smiled at her, hearing a joke I didn’t get.

  Moira then complained that she wasn’t a writer or a performer, she had no money of her own, she was dependent on Brr: “I’m not an artist: I’m mostly just hungover from all my wonderful pills.… Haha.” She gave a mad Bohemian toss to her magnificently tended hair. She said in another voice, abruptly other, “I used to think it would be worth selling your soul to get the hair of your dreams.”

  Deut said, “Brr, he do has he little ways … Brr knows how to get the hair of your dreams …” He is talented and strange—I don’t think he likes being talented. I don’t think he is possessed by it—he hasn’t that kind of greatness. He was a huge new celebrity, a singer who wrote and sang the new songs—he led the next wave in the American Popular Song. He playacted na
ive and bumbling but he produced his own shows and was already very rich.… He is maybe androgynous.

  Deuteronomy said, “I like this room …”

  Moira said, “Oh it’s a stage set: it’s so gloomy when no one’s here I never enter it.…”

  The room’s anatomy glimmered when it was empty, unlit; I had seen it, a semi-vast social machinery of space and furnishings.

  Brr said, “An arm and a leg …” His English is like that of his magazines, but when he is being personal, he leaves phrases off: this was a phase he went through. “I’m eaten up alive—”

  “Keeping the ball in the air,” Deut supplied.

  “I have no time: I would like to create something before I die …” I think he was imitating Moira—as I said, we all stole from one another. “The only thing I can say of this room is that it photographs well—”

  “I run away in it, in it,” Deuteronomy said; he had a large, unarguable, naïve, deeply photographable, deeply feelable smile.

  “A little bit,” Moira said. “You can be comfortable here: you’re among friends …”

  Brr said, “It’s for running away a little: You can be comfortable here: you’re among friends.” He tended to own, to hold a copyright on anything said in his presence.

  He had a trait of looking sad when he subsided from his tough mode into politeness, a form of visiting his past, before he was so successful. His awareness of your style was the mark of his awareness—his own style was never discussed (he owned quite a few magazines).

  Moira said, “I think it’s moral to have a good time.… Oh look at the bridge: it’s a big net and the clouds are little fish.… The sun is a big fish—ha-ha.” She pushed her riffs quite far. Her laugh was unsettling, discreetly soft, but still looney and threatening: an Oh God, I am so unhappy laugh, a fuck me …