HAROLD BRODKEY
That is, did we have to love Valery too?
Johnno said , "I'm tired of Valery."
"What a relief. " I murmured that.
375
Then he said, gesturing, "He thinks art has two-kinds-of
falsification in it , embellishment and trying to reproduce the real."
Then he looked at me .
I said, "He can't mean that. What was it in French?"
Johnno spoke the remark in French, probably with mistakes,
but how could I tell? I repeated his French . I had some idea of a
sense of it - the sense I made of it, although not necessarily
reproduced from Johnno or the original.
He said, not quite amused, "Your French is savage-"
"Ah well: that's Miss Foxberg, Pauline, she was a judge's
daughter , Jewish , she had a mustache. She preferred the French in
all their ways to the English : hairy women: that was a political posi–
tion back home : Missouri : Miss Foxberg used to
wound
her Gentile
colleagues in the high school who were hot for England by denounc–
ing England as uncivilized and crass: Kipling, she said, was
not
Ros–
tand . And the Anglophiles would bridle and feel unfit to answer ex–
cept to refer to stately homes and the English navy. And to looks.
She was tremendously ugly, short and fat. She always had a young
man in attendance, a school officer with ambitions to go to some
school such as Princeton; he was to act as her chauffeur in return for
lessons in
la langue Franfaise;
but she was a lesbian : I believe she liked
only Frenchwomen . She thought Baudelaire was impossible: the
sense of sin or her own longing for a mulatto whore - do you believe
in sin?"
"There is no sin. It's
vieux jeux."
"Imagine: you're so at home in culture, in a Boston Irish way,
imagine being freed from commandment like you, Johnno:
vieux
Jeux,
view the Jew ."
"You're not a Jew ."
"What am I?"
"An imaginative artist, like me."
"Aren't you the silly one," I said. "Personality has to have some
foundation. You're just scared to believe we're only people . Well,
listen -" I was prepared now to try to deal with the Valery quote:
"Eyes are an embellishment of the face : they're not falsifications
either; they're eyes - that needn't be
construed
as
more
than embellish–
ment if the word isn't being attacked.
Embellishments
don't
have
to be
attacked, do you know? And the real is all there is - it is the only
thing that is represented - someone pretending to be talking of
