The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  Deuteronomy said, apropos of nothing (a phrase fairly popular then), “Why don’t you write a play for me?”

  The insistent, insurgent urgency of ambition—“By the time I try you may have begun to dislike my work.” We were for the moment almost entirely ambition with only a thin rim of the human. “What kind of play did you have in mind?”

  “Hunh?” he asked warmly, agreeably: a joke. “I wanted some young art—you know.”

  I had a small vocabulary of American boy noises. I made a naive squeak and said, “I don’t really like the young art bit …” Cal Higgins had told me, Don’t think, just sing like a bird—God, he was awful. I said to Deut, “I don’t like the birdsong shit.” People don’t have to understand you; they’ll ask you to explain if they care.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to do American work but psychologically grownup—not just daydream freedom-and-success shit …” Very unpompous in manner when being pompous: that was politeness.

  He had become still, physically. It is immodest to say so, but he felt something in what I said, in the noise I’d made—he’d had a glimpse of an idea like a glimpse of a deer in the woods, the whispering of the small a’s and b’s of an idea in the shadows and lights of his mind of something he could use. I suppose it was as if I was doing Moira’s role but from an angle unlike hers.

  “What you mean?” he asked in a voice so gently musical that I smiled involuntarily.

  I said, “I resent having this form of interest as a young writer—it is like being a male model, one so handsome he can’t act, his face is so dimensionally suggestive that he can suggest little further: he can merely carry the damn thing around and flicker, now and then, with feeling, while others’ dreams of happiness play on him. I want to be sufficiently in control that I go to hell or heaven in the light of some responsibility I have carried out on my own. I know how to be understood, but that means I say things in order to be understood: it is not my real face: it is like a director’s face, an invented face. I intend to make a try at creating something American—but unexpected. I am talking about young art, the thing of being young—”

  “Yes? But the thing you want to create, what is that? What would it be?”

  How do you say enough to get them interested to the point they give you money and a contract? Or do you just let go? Or do you go off on a serious tangent that they can’t use, although even a singer like Deut can find a way: “Well, first, you have to know that the language we use mostly only points to what is there already in language, something in a book, copyrighted, something already said, a territorial noise for a generation.” We didn’t use the word media yet.

  “So it has a weird double nature as comprehensible and as not-yet-sensible: we know life is different from language. You have to go take a look—the herd of lions has to trot over the top of the hill and see the herd of okapi. And learn English to cover the exigencies of the hunt.…”

  “I like okapi,” he said warmly. But my weird little joke was a dud. It wasn’t right for the 1950s.

  “Language can have a predictive nature. Visual images are inherently worldly since their mistakes don’t involve prediction. They simply misrepresent what is there or not, and if they do, that becomes the draw of fantasy, O.K.? I don’t want to mislead anyone. Perhaps I could invent a way of dealing in more lifelike perspective—but what if this is just adolescent bullshit, you know?”

  “Gosh, if I were you, I would do it. The thing about being young—you should do it for people.”

  “Make a fool of myself.” I said, “Well, it’s a mastery tussle"—Deuteronomy let me go on being boastful; I mean his face was kind—and interested—“I see the United States as a series of adjacent legislatures with various bullies and systems of bribery and of voting: this is the nature of reason here. I am told, fairly often, almost daily, as a matter of fact, that if I would convert I could have the prizes, and if I was silent, silent about my being a Jew and about my writing being a Jew’s writing, Jew-writing, I could have some of the prizes. Or none if I do what I want to do, do you follow me. I’m the writer who got the word Jew in The New Yorker the first time. I am seen as a blind kid. It’s the second-rate who band together and who conspire. I mean in America it’s the lone figure that matters, the lonely Neitszchean kid next door—you know what I mean? It’s terrible here in a lot of ways … I am watched as a monster, a monster-bully, a sissy-monster-bully, minor, a Jew …”

  Then I tried to, I don’t know, show I knew what was going on: “Ideas, good or bad ones, mediocre ones, strange ones have a particular value in this country where no one is anything much for long. No matter how stupid I sound, it is a matter of ideas but not such intelligent ones that they aren’t easy to modify.” For popcult: we didn’t have that term yet.

  Brr and Deut were listening, and mad Moira put a blue-and-white plate of peaches on the table next to me where I slouched on the couch with a big sunflower: “There, that’s Renoir and Van Gogh,” she said, refreshed, re-pilled; she’d vanished for a while; her eyes were dead, her smile was sweet, her voice was rather eely … She wasn’t jealous. She was offering me to Deut and Brr. Brr’s nickname came from a New Yorker cartoon of a showgirl wearing a fur coat, who said, I got it for going Brr in front of Bergdorfs.

  The last time Brr had taken an idea of mine, he’d given me a black-and-white sketch of me by a woman painter who was mostly only fashionable but had an interesting series of lovers; she suffered articulately and was willing to divulge everything on the telephone—she was a star on the telephone circuit. She later jumped out a window—we had a lot of suicides. The 1950s were hard on everyone: perhaps it was guilt. Or remorse.

  What good would it have done anyone to love Deuteronomy—he reeked of sellout. Not just common sense but a whole, crass poetry of it. So did Moira and Brr. And Ora, my lover, tried. I’m not quick enough or smart enough to be king of the hill—if you take into consideration characters’ behavior over a span of minutes, you get a different notion of character, as linkages within an enterprise, an agenda (not a word we used then). Why bother to act anything out when you can pretend nothing is real?

  Moira said, “Oh you’re a brilliant young man and you’re having your hour—”

  Brr said, “How does it feel?”

  He was strange.

  “You get cheated and used a lot,” I said.

  Deuteronomy said, “Come on: tell us how it feels.” He and Brr thanked me at times for saying things or writing things useful to them. But they never did it in public. Still, Brr was respectful, and Deut was on an arc of sweetness that didn’t obligate him; he was tougher than I am, at least toward the world. I don’t know how evasive I was and how malicious he was. I know how malicious Brr was: it was an uncontrollable element in him, for him I mean. He had to cheat you. Maybe everyone is like that a little bit: a sly child-man.

  I said, “It feels unusable as example. In public you become merely a phrase or some such thing, a political image, I think. But if I am actually good at what I do, then it is completely unusable as example. I feel famous and overinflated and not famous enough and underrated—I feel a lot of different things: it depends on details and on the time of day. You’re more famous than I am. And no one is interested in seeing how style arises as moral choice out of the rush and charge of the multiplicity of moments.”

  He nodded. He got his ideas from everywhere but his notion of being young came from me—for a while. I was useful, which was dizzying.

  Moira has said she would like to be hurt by a grasping Englishman or vain, arrogant Frenchman. She wants to be part of the background of her time. I guess I did too but in a different spirit.

  Anyway, she seemed to understand my position or rank. I thought her vulgar and irritating in her interest in Pygmalionization: “We have to buy you some nice clothes—or who here is the same size you are?” Get the clothes free.

  “I have already decided to wear the wrong clothes: it’s a kind of privacy.�
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  Deuteronomy naughtily said, “Brr dresses like you already. He says you are the next style.” If he’d taken an idea from me, it was because Brr had suggested it.

  I wear modified Harvard black tinged with rabbinical black—black cashmere with a slightly hoodlum tone.

  Deuteronomy said, “I wore a sweater Brr liked once and he did a piece on sweaters in every one of his magazines: it was eerie going to the theater and seeing maybe a half-dozen men dressed wrong like me, only it was no longer wrong.”

  “Whitto does it now,” Moira said smiling nicely, too nicely. Her smile was a mad headlight.

  Brr said, “I got my style from Jouvet.” A French actor of the 1930s and 1940s, very tall, very discreet in style, very different from Brr. So Brr was perhaps joking.

  What I meant about Moira’s vulgarity in her Pygmalion sense of clothes and stardom and psychoanalysis was that it was a-song-and-dance, a whole rigmarole, pre-suicide stuff—you lost yourself.

  Moira mentioned a piece that Brr ran on Paris and the existentialists and Parisian women, “Lipstick and Nothingness” it was called, and she said the idea had come from me. But it hadn’t. Part of the piece had been about the aging Coco Chanel, an ex-Nazi: did her guilt matter? Brr told me advertisers made him run that piece, which, like many others, was a lie, a duty. So much for my influence.

  But he was on some sort of arc now; he took pills too but he managed them. He called in the youthful semi-butler and sent him upstairs to get a Chanel suit that Moira wouldn’t wear but would lend out so I was to look at it to consider the Pygmalionization of Ora. Ora wasn’t to choose; I was.

  It was an extraordinary object, that suit, rough, nubby, navy blue fabric, workmanlike or vaguely seamanish, a uniform suggesting adventure and dutifulness and patience all at once in a world when workmen and barmaids were sexual objects. Or if it was a uniform, it was a uniform for a long sail across the universe, gold buttons and black braid. It seemed more fully an invention than any other such dress object I had, until then, seen.

  “But she was a Nazi,” Brr said, lightly stroking the suit with his fingerends. “A loathsome woman. I loathed her—”

  “Brr dislikes a lot of people,” Moira said.

  “Ora, would you like this suit?” Brr said in a loud voice, in front of everyone.

  To my surprise Ora said, “I had better try it on …”

  Deut said, “Women trying on clothes are very sexy.”

  Brr said, “I always masturbate after Moira tries on clothes in Paris.”

  Schwearzen said, “I am a great, great, GREAT masturbator—”

  Brr, who from time to time did sudden riffs, said, “I am a Napoleon of masturbation—masturbation is my art. ”

  “Oh goody,” Moira said. “Now we’ll have fun for a while.…”

  Brr said, trying it for purposes of giving interviews, “Masturbation is the foundation of my work.” (Moira said in an aside, “He’s wonderful when he gets on a subject.” She did look interested.) Brr said, of masturbation and the fantasies that went with it, “That’s my secret life—I can have no women after Moira.… No woman compares with Moira.…”

  (Most people figured he was queer—that’s how we said it back then.) Deuteronomy said of masturbation, “That’s the secret of show business—but I love Hollywood—”

  I said, “Masturbation, after all, after the first few times, is largely memory-lane plus amendments. It’s interesting that you pay attention: you pay attention physically: this is my prick, this is my abdomen, this my grown-up hand, these are my rhythms … You keep watch internally—”

  “That’s really true, “ Deut said.

  “Childe Harold to the dark tower came—or This is what I didn’t do for so-and-so (in the last fuck), or This isn’t what so-and-so did for me—. these steps to—whatever, the waste dump, the ash pit after—”

  Deut said, “At least it is something I know how to do. I don’t have to worry what someone else thinks of my technique.…”

  Then I lost my head and didn’t hold back: “No heavy reality of consequence overlays this act-and-physical-reality: going too fast, going too slow, being fat, being small-pricked, none of it matters. It’s king-of-the-dream-of-final-power time. People say that it is just jacking off, or that so-and-so is just jacking himself off, meaning wasting time: the term comes from Jack and refers to the common people, to what ordinary people do—it refers to labor. The watery eyes, the slack mouth. The little jolts along the spine. Sometimes it feels like the doorway to suicide—a natural underlining to biological isolation. Sometimes, after a fuck with a lost orgasm, the kind of coming where it seems lost in a cloudy thicket, you know, I jerk off and the damned orgasm then brings tears to my eyes, but I’m ashamed—ashamed and embarrassed, ashamed and embarrassed and defiant—I wonder why. Well, I suppose it’s cheating on lovers and parents; it really is kind of an exploration of being alone and self-willed—you know all those myths where someone behaves well and is given power and wishes and then goes berserk with the wishes? That’s what it’s like. Your body, your mind, you take them over. The desperate chronicle, the secret club and blasphemous thing of it, this sneaking off to the treehouse, the rebellion keeps twisting this way and that, and you don’t have to notice, you can be quick and not look. If you slow it down or think about it driftingly, after, you can see that it twists and turns with strange beliefs, strange dishonesties—honesties, too. But it is rarely used in dramas—we don’t see Hamlet jacking off and deciding to die. Or Lear doing it. Or Macbeth. You can find out that you don’t love someone very much or even the world. And it’s a chronic thing to do it—it’s really not just sexual. Prometheus stole more than fire. Our jokes as kids were Aladdin and his lamp, djinni and the light brown pubic hair, Jack and the bean stalk, et cetera—”

  “Don’t say et cetera—it’s not fair …” I.e., tell us everything.

  “We had names for it from comic strips, Dagwood and Superman or Blondie and Mickey Mouse. I knew a guy who called it Swan Lake because of the neck of the swan. A lot was movies: Public Enemy Number One, Little Caesar, Gone With the Wind, Come with the Breeze—the weird one was Casablanca: I thought it was maybe Hump-free Bogus. But later I heard that kazzo is one of the Italian terms for prick, so it could mean white prick. Nothing is ever just Freudian-sexual, Freud was a sexual dud which is a kind of a good thing to be, romantic, you know, but we do lie a lot if we’re like Freud. Writing, it’s masturbatory, it’s Jack and the bean stalk stuff, just you alone with the world with hallucinatory accompaniment. A lot of what we are in a democracy is a jerk-off society—you know what I mean?”

  Kellow, although he’s quite good-looking, is physically repellent. So is Deut. Brr is famously dapper and does very spruce, pretty things with graphics (we said with art direction in those days) in his magazines. He is fine-featured, well-proportioned, and has handsome hair; he knows about being attractive, he deals in this stuff but, physically, he is accepted with difficulty—it’s his nervous, insectlike drive. It’s him. Often you have to choke back real distaste if you want his company. He is repellent. He is maybe spiritually a cockroach. Or chaste. A cockroach, the waving legs, the foreignness, the scuttling movements, the oddly unsettling shape … A famous figure in art, after all.

  Perhaps he was phenomenally odd-looking as a child or was persuaded that he was, and, so, became an expert in self-presentation and in enraged disguise, in perfuming hidden stenches and the like—and now he preserves by some magic or other his childhood ugliness and his sense of methods and so is tremendously successful in the world, and is caught by that success. He can’t exist physically. He milks the cockroach aspect and is appalled by himself and is sad and dangerous like someone deformed and vengeful, like someone smart.

  Deuteronomy said, “Do you find you want to get even with everyone for your being smart?”

  “I’m not smart,” I said automatically. I minded the doubleness of what he was doing: the offering of friendship and the shoving me into
a sack, the warning he was issuing.

  Deuteronomy said patiently (with acted out patience), “What do you call what you just did, what you just said?”

  “I only heard part of it: I was too busy saying it to notice it. I would say it was a talent as in a tennis rally—I don’t know what it is. If I’m so smart, how come I’m not king of the world? My mother said there was such a thing as being too smart: so you weren’t smart at all. Brr is smart, pig-smart, doesn’t Moira tell me you use that word for him? He uses everything; he finds everything useful: I mean, in running his magazines—as in seeing who will talk and show off. All I do is show off in speeches. He makes faces at me and gets me to talk to see if I’m loyal—buyable …”

  What I said wasn’t making sense because I was trying to hide what I thought of Deut and Brr. I haven’t much gift for intimate politics. But I can see what is going to happen, but that separates me, it doesn’t help me join in.

  Brr was heroic and caught in a psychological-social bind in relation to a personal pain since it guided him to success in mass market stuff, it guided him to a sense of the mass mind, or whatever. To go back to the it-began-in-childhood theories that he held, I saw him as a sly, unpleasant child whose embraces and attentions had been unwanted because of something vile in them, a precocity of powers of association and of courage in acting on those powers in spite of his being displeasing to his parents. He dealt in his own shit and had an appetite for glamour, for constructions of meaning and propriety because his family did, but he did it better. Years later, I saw some Arbus photographs, and I think Brr must have been a horror, or thought he was. He liked women because they were less violent and more interesting than men—this is seeing him in the third person, not the sort of third person that is oneself in dreams or in a mirror; but I’m trying to see him not in relation to me. This sliding in and out of one’s self and trying to see him is strange, is as strange as looking at a cockroach.