The World Is the Home of Love and Death (44 page)

I am of an indefensible order of the human. It is cheap and special to be like me: you never have to live, or know how people live: you never have to feel except as notes for scenes. I didn’t want to spend my life like this, but then one isn’t a boy for very long. So far as I know, someone’s social surface is a lie as a mark of civilization. I am a liar too and a recent lecher, and not a river god or really a boy among the currents and artesian Wellings of time. Style is a brooding patron of metamorphoses who gives you a liar’s surface, partly as a privilege.

If you refuse social metamorphosis, refuse the riverine, and substitute the mental stroll and flight of
keeping track
you think all sorts of strange things such as that I am the child of my child self more than I am the child of my childhood. The fruits of Eden and the walled garden and the spirit that moved among the leaves and on the waters, how am I bound to such selves? How unfinal they seem, and the fragility of them, of one’s past roles. Truth is as different from that as bringing a real tiger into the room—and releasing him: not a portrait of a tiger, not a poem about a tiger; but the complete thing.

I mean, if you’re serious, and if you wake from daydreams about your life to a dream-tinged life, to wakefulness and a landscape of attention to parties, and with ideas of truth and of work you might do like a tiger in the room, hinted at, but invisible so far. I am someone my younger self would resent—although he would have been relieved that we have not turned out to be no one.

Brr stared at me, bug-eyed; he has a natural state of being bug-eyed, very insectlike, which he controls and hides and then reveals. He wants to know what I mean by my not saying anything about selling out.
Moira
approved of selling out; she was a
famous shopper
, she was mad and deep as a shopper—she said matter-of-factly (but with a giggle), “I’ve had visions while I was in Bloomingdale’s—I never talkabout them though. I have a thing about escalators.” Then: “You’ll write an unkind book about us, you’ll see—I can look at your eyes and see right into your soul: I’m a
witch!
A Dostoyevskian witch—” I
think
she meant she was a Russian-Jewish witch.

Brr interpolated: “She’s a reader! I’m not a reader at all …” He was rivalrous with her but also protective and he did a sort of public relations boastful thing about her.

Moira hurried on; she said to me, “You’re The Idiot played by Gerard Philippe with a lot of Yankee Hollywood male ingenue thrown in but we all see the Captain Bligh and Stavrogin in you: I know it’s Stavrogin in that other bad book I like so much although it’s not
Crime and Punishment
and it’s not
The Brothers Karamazov. The Possessed
? I love that title—”

“I do too,” I said.

“I mean it literally: I
love
it. I know it’s Stavrogin because I want to say Raskolnikov—so if I think Raskolnikov, I remember to say Stavrogin: my doctor has taught me to do this.… He taught me to be
personal
about how I use my mind. My poor mind …” She said she thought about these figures sexually and allocated sexual organs to them and love scenes and seductions.
“Raskolnikov
was a jerk-off with a little prick, one of those troubled lover-murderers who are round. But Stavrogin …” she gushed in pantomime. He was a sexual big-shot, a hot-for-damnation character, a figure of limitless danger, always staring at her in her mind, she said.

“Moira has the most expensive shrink in the Western World,” Brr said quietly boastful. (Seventeen years from now, she will cut her throat and wrists and bleed to death while he is in the next room in a pill-induced sleep. That happened in the 1970s.)

Moira said loudly, “Stavrogin is more responsible …”

We are discussing the nature of trespass and social horror—how we harm others. But we are unclear in this. I said, “I like very strong people so that whatever happens is not my fault—”

“Well, that’s deep,” Moira said. Then, with an evil sort of giggle: “I never know what I think about deep things until I see my doctor. I
love
my doctor—literally. I think
he’s
scary—he’s a Stavrogin but not so mean—not so good-looking either. I’d love to marry him—he makes more money than God—and he’s more interesting. I love guilt when it makes men, you know, English and
mean.
“ She had a real ability to interest me, real power in her observations, a competence at being trespassed against: one implication of her manner was that she was having an affair with her doctor and was sleeping with Deut and Brr, and they all knew about one another.

“Moira’s deep,” Deuteronomy said sweetly. He was never entirely not onstage when I saw him.

“Oh, Moira’s
deep,”
Brr said in a theatrically mysterious tone. It had to do with having power. Moira and Brr invented a kind of journalism. Moira maybe matters more in post-war culture than is known. She propagandized for this or that political or cultural idea, a mad duchess of pop literacy, a mad American Jewess-genius wife who changed the world. Somewhat.

It is fashionable and pungent and shitty and post-war that in this set they hold over one another’s heads the sort of judgment that they are or are not
artists.
Almost everyone in that room will still be unforgotten fifty years later, but no one in that room except me has held the rank of
artist
in that time. I mean only that all the false dealing and swapping and buying of the term came to nothing. My rep may wind up being that of a swindler.

One of the directors there had made a popular movie about jazz—an interesting movie, kind of crude. He came over to join us, and Moira praised his movie; she said, “I loved all the dim light—” It wasn’t insulting either. But I didn’t understand it.

He said, “I don’t like movies—I don’t like jazz. I’m just a hired hand.” He was drunk and wore cowboy boots back in the fifties when that meant
Time
magazine would think he was
avant-the-rest-of-us
(Moira’s phrase). The way he said what he said aroused a kind of stillness in Moira: he was a viable and durable and influential sensibility: male, maybe more competent than talented and certainly strong.

Brr said, “A hired hand who does
great
work.”

Brr said, “You know what Whitto said to
Life
magazine—” Whitto, iconoclastic and marvelously popular and sullen, was often in this set proposed as a source of prophecy, a mad young rabbi really. His quality of
truth
as an actor had the quality of a temporary religion. Brr has an idiot savant’s memory for journalistic quotes and he reproduces Whitto: “ ‘Jazz is the great American art: it comes out of oppression. Jazz shows you how to react—if you have a good conscience you can have a good time among the criminal actions of your country.’ “ Brr was such a good mimic that it was as if Whitto were talking in the room, but Brr can’t really
do
Whitto despite what I just said; Brr’s version is stupid and noble and questionable, Broadway versus Hollywood—theatrical.

Brr has to run things. The purpose of his activity is to overcome you—he is
like a four-year-old
, Moira says. If he was not like this how could he run his magazines successfully? Each of his writers had theories and friendships and was calculating; he negotiated with agents and had a staff of photographers. He said to me once,
Everyone is in rebellion all of the time. I spend too much of my time being a policeman.

“What do you think movies really are?” Brr asked, setting a topic. A few people in our group sighed at the classroom essay aspect, the thing of being used.

Moira told the jazz-movie director to pull over a table and sit on it: “It’s less like a speech, it’s easier if you’re sitting.” He was short and pudgy, very energetic and commanding in his cowboy boots, and kind of sycophantic in an offhand way—
cute
that was called back then.

He did pull up a table but he said, “You only fed me bagels and caviar: I listen to jokes for that, I don’t answer questions—”

That remark of his had the quality of being applauded or nodded at good-humoredly. Brr Kellow as a laughingstock, him and Moira as jerks, as pushy users and jerks, oddly that was part of their having so much
style.
I don’t know how people do that no-mercy and yet
sycophantic
thing.

In the long-drawn-out afternoon of Apocalypse, the ex – movie star women preen on a couch facing ours. Supposedly innocent professionalism is coercive, unstable, a plenum of rights claimed and enforced. It stains everyone that this is the decade of
perfect breasts
, wild brassieres that bestow weird, jutting bomblike breast shapes. Such lies make it difficult to be sane: sanity is social, somewhat Freudian. The idea of a fanciful reality and of people’s secrets is built in to the local notion of sanity, of normalcy.… This is a group high in nervous breakdowns and charity. The men (but not me) have a frightening and fashionable idea of a universal but ideal and tireless and undemanding
fucker
, and they wear very expensive, impressive clothes.

The brute structure of being
cute
(in the youthful sense) and possessing a maybe bullshit veracity, and the semi-Baudelairean
corrupt
reality—behind these styles are the beliefs and terms of people who live in personal hells, me too, but mine is diluted in the middle of the supposed Eden of the U.S., a suburb of Hell. The eerie thrum of holiness in a given moment may have a homosexual tinge—that too is an issue.

Deuteronomy said, “Movies are what you have to see so you can stop hearing your mother’s voice in your head say,
Don’t handle yourself, Harvey …”

“Simple stories for simple people,” said one of the woman movie stars, someone I’d found attractive when I was thirteen: she was still attractive. It was strange how
known
to me she was, her voice, her mannerisms, some of the shapes of her body. An element of dream was attached to the memory of her.

Moira said in mad, sotto voce mockery, “Simple stories for simple people.” She was often rude to women (a party as arena for unnamed championships).

The show business corporation head said, “Movies are how I know I’m unhappy because my life is
not
like a movie, but they make me feel good anyway because I know I am not as dumb as a movie. Ha-ha.”

“Wiley,” Brr said. He is
calling on me
to speak. The bastard.

I said, “I never knew a simple person. I don’t think such a thing exists. So movies are simple forms for complex people, but then people want to be simple too, like ads and movies. They get competitive. Or they run out of ideas. Or it looks good—it’s a victim-thing. I think movies are truly terrible simplifications, smothering. But they get their power from two things: what movies define is popularity for now. Movies themselves are operatic hallucinations with motions substituted for the music in opera—but simple: simple, dirty music. Like dirty talk it tends to have a limited vocabulary. Their force is derived from the way hallucinations become active delusions during masturbation. And in dreams—what makes you out to be handsome or powerful and kingly. They’re in the genre of masturbation-accompaniment.”

“Go on,” Brr said.

“No,” I said. But I did go on: “I mean it’s interesting that movies are so fake, and we make them real. You are alone in your head in public, and you roar along with the crowd for God and community—I dislike the way movies bully and dominate the audience. What we
know
about sex—and people—never gets shown in movies.… Isn’t that strange? Movies do dance numbers and scenes of women getting dressed really well. Maybe everyone wants to see faked, tamed stories of self-willed sexuality. I think movies are hard to do: it’s hard to get the victim-thing, even only parts of it, right: and to palpate the audience and kowtow and to take the punishment the audience hands out and being made use of and also being adored. It’s very tricky: it’s all S and M sexual terror and faking it all—”

The jazz-movie director said, “We’re all downtrodden in Hollywood—”

Deut, who was tall, and who had a much greater public popularity at the moment than anyone else in the room, said, “Oh that: that’s socialism—” A joke. “But, also, you’re very short.” Nearly everyone laughed. Brr was short and mostly liked only short people except for Deut and me.

I was tense from talking the way I did, kamikaze and without direct calculation: a role.

“It’s getting too deep for me,” said one of the women ex – movie stars making a play for importance in the room.

Deuteronomy said with great as-if-onstage charm, “It’s the sibling rivalry tango …”

The short movie director had been Deuteronomy’s (and my) predecessor as Brr’s closest friend. Brr’s dominance was because of his knowledge of style as much as because he controlled so much publicity. Also, he wanted it, and people granted it—it was Sunday.

Moira said, “Aren’t we
heavy?
”
Heavy
was a term in use in New York then. “It’s a relief sometimes to be
heavy
.”