The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  Brr said, “People always say Moira ought to be a writer.”

  “No one ought to be a writer—it’s a dog’s life …”

  “They say she should just write the way she talks, just write down what she says,” Brr said ignoring me.

  If you listened carefully to the talk, if you noticed the real shape of it—the physical shape, the stirrings of meaning and intention, the breaths and the hysteria—Deut and Brr were stringing her along. I mean she couldn’t write but she was, forgive me, insanely interesting (in a way). But they were cheating her, fooling her—was it hatred? I don’t mean only in the overpraise, I mean in the ways they looked at one another, in what they understood and she didn’t.

  She said, “I wish we could afford a really expensive apartment but Brr says we’re always broke, because of me …” She giggled again. “Brr is stingy …” She was fighting back perhaps.

  Deuteronomy, at that time the most famous, let’s say upper-middle-class, entertainer in the world, said, in a slightly other voice—a voice slanted some way: “It is a clever room.… I can’t say it is stingy,” he said drolly.

  The room was important in that decade: to some extent it defined our lives, our careers: does a room do that?

  Moira said, in a strangely evil voice, “It’s a room for clever talkers.”

  Neither she nor Brr, who have, of course, influenced each other, can go for long without making threats or demands as in this implicit ukase that we be clever or forfeit our right to spend time here. But it had a jokey tone, the threat.

  “I come here to bumble,” said Deuteronomy, privileged—he is a star but it is more than that; he is close to Moira and to Brr.

  “Bumble bee,” said Moira. “I like the James writers, James Joyce, Henry James, and James Jones … I like Noel Camtippy best because he kisses my hand …”

  Brr said, “He kisses her ass: he steals ideas from Moira.”

  Deut said, “The James gang. You left out Jesse …”

  Brr seems young for his age, almost pre-pubic, as if he has been able to stay close to being ten years old, as if he had never been wrenched by puberty and physical size.

  “Honey,” Moira said to Deuteronomy in a complex New York inflection: New York of the 1950s. She was addressing him with unusual intimacy, and I lost my attention; I blacked out; I didn’t want to know about their intimacy.

  The room was beautiful with handsomely radiant, softly glaring light. The maybe-marvelous floral fabrics of the chairs bloomed meadowishly. I remarked that I was “devoted to not spilling coffee on myself.” Then I asked Deuteronomy if he was aggressive. I meant because he was a famous star. It was maybe half all right for me to say odd things.

  “Passive aggressive,” he said. He had a kind of young innocence that was part of 1950s style.

  “You’re aggressive,” mad Moira said to me.

  “You’re interesting,” Deuteronomy said to her with a different sort of smile, an encouraging smile, contingently intimate.

  “Life is aggressive,” Brr said.

  “Books aren’t,” I said.

  “We like books,” Brr said.

  “We steal our lives from books,” Moira said.

  “We depend on books,” Deuteronomy said.

  “We depend on and steal from books,” Brr said.

  “Ha-ha,” I said, unable not to laugh. “Do you think the word shtick comes from stichomythia?” I asked.

  “Oh you talk like a book,” Moira said. She had a profound sense of the unfairness of things, social class and talent especially. She said, “We’re acting just like Protestants …” Wasp hadn’t become a social term yet.

  Socially you are what people think you are. Sharply observed by these souls expert in our sorts of lives, the young man was in a state of cold visitation, of animal expectancy and naïveté mixed with youthful nerves.

  “We get our routines from books,” Deuteronomy said. In the webby thing of real life, they are talking for Moira but really for me—a seriocomic normal, with a normal surface.

  “I hate it when everyone agrees,” Moira said. “I want everyone to be nasty—and fresh—I love insolence in men. Englishmen are good at it. Although the French aren’t bad.” She leaned back still further on the couch and crossed her legs and did something with her torso, a sideways arch.

  “Routines are the soul of America,” Deuteronomy said sadly.

  Brr said, “Sincerity is the key—you have to recognize that a lot of people are sincere.”

  In the 1950s Moira is Isaac on Mount Moriah, the child-creature who is to be sacrificed. The rest of us are busy. And have projects. She does not like being the one who is sacrificed. Harvey Deuteronomy said in his patter, in his show, that the secret appeal of religion was that it encouraged you to disembowel your children. Brr’s children—four of them from three marriages—he uses as evidence of his normalcy. He espouses doctrines of their sweetness; they have no room to be anything but saintly in relation to his worldliness. Being famous is attention-getting, soul-wearying stuff. But it is a party, and you use people.

  “He sounds like Gerard Manley Hopkins,” Deuteronomy said to Moira about me, an old joke between them used for other men. He speaks with his famous sweetness, sweetness of an order specific to him, to his public performances, Deuteronomy’s.

  “Oh I don’t like him,” Moira said and grinned evilly because I was so young and wouldn’t be able to know if she meant me or the poet Hopkins. My blood ran cold with guest’s fear and then with dismissal of her—and with hidden anger. I have a secret inner life not much like my outward manner. “Who?” I said stern-faced: a tall boy said it.

  Deuteronomy said, “You know: all those college professors—those biddies—who talk about the priest writers as so manly and muscular … are peculiar.” Deuteronomy disliked the Catholic writers. All the people in that room were better informed than I was.

  Brr was rarely courteous if you were tall; he measured out such things with a curious exactitude, a form of beauty of manner; he said, going back in the conversation, “It’s a compliment.” He said it courteously—it seemed to me almost an admission that I was being courted and competed for by all of them.… A game.

  I had no idea what any of them knew—or planned. Faintly drunk, bold, I said, “A RARE TRUE HOPPING TOUGHLY MANLINESS KINNY-KIN-KINS …” Much of the time (when I write or in company) I am being funny or making jokes, but few people notice. These were surprisingly unfrightened people.…

  Moira said, shifting the intensity, “There is more happiness in a good movie than in all of New Jersey. That’s why I left New Jersey.” A special stink of time-riddled language as of old clothes, but Freudian-rebellious, sucked in, well-adjusted-by-rote, the word happiness. “We’re just rich garbage.… I’m glad I’m not an artist … I’m an artiste—I’m a socialist …” She didn’t want to talk books.

  I think Moira was sexually profound in her self-destruction and in her destruction at the hands of men and of society, and in her vengeance, which was to spend money and to have style and to go mad: a form of intelligence and real wit. Not in what she said—but in her destruction. Perhaps it was a narcissistic masochism but I don’t think so.… How strange everything was.… She said, in a kind of ugly way, sneering at Deut and Brr: “I like Chekhov.… And you know what he says? He said, How are we to live?”

  “We are to live well,” Deuteronomy said. Living well as a phrase and idea had a lot of meaning then but not Chekhovian meaning, but a weight of its own weightlessness. “Seriously,” he said in a droll way. Serious meant to attempt to be ultimate.

  “Do you like the way we talk? Do you like New York talk?” Moira asked me.

  “I feel we’re floating around in the idea of the quotable …” I was trying to be interesting.

  In Moira’s house, it is sophisticated to be grudging. Also, a social get-together is a rehearsal, a part of preparation for worldwide performance—that’s a kick. But my audience is smaller than theirs. Moira believes that
art is as well-paid as it is for Noel Camtippy or Picasso, as in the small Picassos on the walls of her room, men she desires or likes.

  The two ex-movie stars here are aging women of powerful presence and extremely pronounced views (on everything). Perhaps in some sense they are whores, as Moira has whispered. But they are universal whores. It is hard to read the signals of a person such as Moira. It is easier to know what the screen image of either ex-star means. Also present is another show-business corporation figure, a behind-the-scenes intellectual, who knows thousands of critics and writers and who gives parties and determines reputations and the gloss or glamour on them. Here is a fairly famous script writer often called The Jewish Noël Coward by well-informed movie reviewers who don’t get to come to these get-togethers. He is a “famous” parlor wit and “famous” lover. Moira has said, “We keep score on Stanley.” He is describing a movie comedian star: “No Funny Business” Martin Stone, “the shlong of destiny: he just puts it in and salutes Charles Darwin.” Then he said, “Now that Noël Coward is old and Dorothy Parker is toxic drunk, I’m the quickest tongue in the non-Communist West, the daddy firecracker, the daddy wisecracker—”

  God, I’m the poorest one here.

  Moira said eerily, “Oh you won’t sell out; that’s not what coming to see us means.” Moira said it in a little hopping voice, mocking everything. Peccinorda di Gustibus, the lesbian, is watching Moira carefully.

  Moira had stepped on the summoning bell and a manservant had appeared and been sent to get champagne, “not the really good stuff,” Moira said with a little laugh. “No one will notice.”

  Whacko came in from the balcony, knelt, and kissed her feet again.

  To be here is as mysterious as hieroglyphics. It is like floating out to sea. I said something like that to Moira.

  “A group is who is friends with who, and everyone has secrets, and I don’t know, is this a good group?” Moira said, looking around—the style she was adapting was French and American, like one of those American women who spent time in Paris.

  Did I say that Ora accepts the Kellows’ judgments? So does three-quarters of the educated population of this country. Ora fawns on them—I can think of a dozen or two dozen women in whose careers Brr was the initial or secondary figure of discovery, who gave them public names, public existence, public roles as women, establishing the public image of the proportion of looks to style to brains. She is fascinated by what they know, and she is enragedly jealous—or fawning.

  When he introduces Ora—who is of another social caste from the people in the room: exiled, upper-crust Maine—to someone, he says, And this is Ora, leaving off her last name. I think what he is doing is encouraging her in her magnetism and brainy good looks, her aura of power and heat, to be bitter; he wants her to cheat on me. He makes trouble for all the couples: he is known for it.

  He is likely to take her arm and seat her next to Peccinorda di Gustibus, famous for being lesbian and brainy, and then he looks at me innocently. Ora doesn’t want to be defined as The Lesbians’ Darling—her phrase—but she likes those women; I often find a number of monocled and booted women, a lot of them European, with powerful haircuts and brilliant eyes, in the front room of our apartment; they look bruised emotionally—by Ora. Ora said once, Well, sweet housewives aren’t going to call me and ask to have tea anymore. (They had at the beginning.) But now we were too famous, and she was dressed wrong for a housewife; she worked for Arestow, the photographer, a friend of Brr’s.

  Or Brr will seat her next to famous male lechers such as Jewish comic scriptwriters deep in analysis for their male nymphomania and who have written movies about all their women and who are notoriously forward and vital and suffering. They attract women justly. One has heard Ora in this very room say sternly, I am not a schiksa, I am a person. Also, she was totally not blond—I am partly blond but she is nut-brown.

  Or Charles Pearl, the most popular movie star of that time who was also a famous lecher, and so maybe was the most famous fucker in the world at that moment except for Porfirio Rubirosa and Alden Whitto: he said to her, “Hello—my god, what nice breasts you have,” cupping one. Ora, dark-eyed, vibrant in her dark youth, in her renegade Maine upper-crust avatar—and often coldly ferocious with people who mauled her, although she was as likely to become passive and victimized and tearful but scathing-mouthed and contemptuous. (Pearl also cornered her in the back hall near the bathroom; he said to her—he told me—Touch me, just touch me, see what you do to me, and Ora said, No, this wasn’t my idea—whatever you do, you do on your own.) And saddened when professors did it or someone she wanted to know. Now she was confronted by a movie star whose work she admired and a man she would like to work with (if nothing else: I didn’t know what her desires were in men), and she may have felt left out and betrayed by me and ill-at-ease in that group. She looked slick-haired and finely erect. Already a number of Brr’s photographers had imitated Ora’s look and exaggerated it—she herself was unphotogenic; she closed in when a camera was aimed at her—and then cried, “DON’T DO THAT! I HATE THAT!” Then:“I’M PRACTICALLY MARRIED to him!” And she pointed at me. This was when Pearl mauled her in the Big Room.

  But she didn’t push him away. I did that, and she berated me later: I can take care of myself. Well, she can and she can’t; she can’t within the frame of a monogamous affair; and she doesn’t want me to sleep with (fuck) Connie Lewistein with whom I am making a small movie.

  Or rather she keeps changing her mind, yes, no, yes, no—finally, I will kill you if you fuck her—She is really odd—everyone is really odd; it’s a world of mad people: “New York is a looney bin,” Moira announces gaily.

  But Ora is the most odd: her father named her after the Latin vocative for pray. He meant her to be a virgin of light. She is, she says, the dirty girl, the Wild Girl—now in the big city, in this setting, a supernumerary: what will she do next?

  A tubby, really famous, serious critic, also famous as a lecher, and resigned mostly to affecting women writers, not young, but old, tough-minded, dirty, moved to join Pearl and Ora, one hand out and cupped. I went back to Moira.

  “Everybody loves everybody,” mad Moira said with considerable disinterest to me: she was wearing a weird green-colored thing, a silken jumpsuit or version of it, a dress with pants, I don’t know about such advanced clothes (but I am learning) and in her hair was a narrow pink ribbon, a quietly vivid unforgettable pink, that was the dominant color in the room. She was clever that way. She said with a laugh, “I don’t know who I am when I wear clothes …” Famous clothes. “Brr likes it; he makes me wear things …” Famous clothes, famous at the moment. “I am designer designed.”

  “Oh my goodness I didn’t know, ” Pearl said to Ora in a hick manner, well below his usual enunciation. “Let me get you a drink. But I would like to screw you, you know.” Very gentlemanly and dear.

  Ora turned her face aside and, without thinking, raised her stiffened arm and kept him an arm’s length away from her breasts. Ora was wearing a discarded black, sleeveless dress from Paris that Moira had given her and which was worn without a bra. Ora is genuinely beautiful often; her posture, the sloping, bare shoulders, and then the proud neck, and the great-skinned radiant side-and-front finely shaped fleshed out boniness of her face. But she was a type, gorgeous girl dowager, sadly fastidious but passive about it, something of a good sport resigned to dirtiness but so given to lies that if she liked Brr, she would deny these events had occurred. She wanted to be there. And she hated it. It was heart-stopping to see her. So good-looking and so knowing and so full of ignorance and so out-of-place there, although not entirely. And she didn’t know how out-of-place she was. She was herself, and she didn’t realize yet that for these performers, if I might call them that, everything was stylized.

  “She’s new,” Moira said with condescension to me. “Well, you know what you’re getting into when you come to this madhouse,” she said evilly: “You’re getting a madhouse! Tee-hee …”


  The fat critic Walter Pauline Christian said, “No: I expect a very sweet evening when I come here—and good food—and pretty women—and you, Moira.” He kept glancing toward Ora.

  Moira said to me, “He’s not bad in bed you know.”

  He was partly drunk, taut with party-nerves and social conceit, but he was also shy, teddy bear—like, arrogant, hard-working socially, sexually looney, and like most of the men in the room, he was quick to signal he had been recruited and used by Moira, that he had a sexual entrée.

  Brr said to him, “Wiley is brilliant …”

  This grated on Christian who was in his own view the Julius Caesar of literary reputations. “Brilliant? Brilliant?” he said: “Well, you have a backer,” he said to me, backing down, uneasy at Brr’s control of so many magazines. Christian was charming with a fat, smart man’s practiced enticing curmudgeonliness. He said to me, “I have noticed that tall writers usually overwrite.”

  I couldn’t afford to care or not to care, do you know? He was sweaty and red—like a eunuch washerwoman. Brr had stepped between Pearl and Ora. He said, “We don’t want to upset Wiley—he’s quite crazy at parties …” He winked at me. I had already confronted Pearl at that point; Brr was playing a game.

  He had already told me privately: It’s unwise to be settled down with someone while you are finding your way in the THE REAL WORLD—he tended to speak in an excited, magazine-captionish way. He meant you had to be available. He said, “Mad Moira knows all about it …” She was defeated by him but cruel about him; she’d called him Little Balls and Mr. No Love the Killer. This was when she was very high. A guy I knew and his new wife explained to me that it was part of being a good hostess and host, if you wanted to be famous for that, to laugh at your wife or husband or lover: otherwise, you excluded people, the people you were talking to.

  Brr said, “Mad Moira says you are like an idiot—” Brr spoke very clearly as if to be recorded.