HAROLD BRODKEY
377
John Wayne - the Woman Bernhardt - a Jew.
I said, "The best thing about you is that your stupidity is occa–
sionally intelligent."
He ignored that. He said, delirious with a kind of malice so
complexly toned with wish and feeling and no-feeling that it stung
me more to know he had such feelings than that he was attacking me
in this way: "Bernhardt and Crawford-Joan-that's you, your
thighs have a flutter oflust just like Crawford's in her fuck-me shoes,
I am a great poet whether you know it or not."
He was, sort of. But mostly not. I was safe from envy in a
Jewish thing having to do with Jews and
thought,
I guess. I didn't
think of it as a Jewish thing. I can see he might have felt it in me as
something detestable or sexual or appealing, my sense of my own
power, of being ultimately a better artist than he was.
But I couldn't prove it. And suddenly I was - inwardly–
shaken. He displayed his feelings as a form of showing he had a
human power, pretty much saying, All right, now let's see
your
romantic depths. And your erotic reach. Your human depth of char–
ity, how much right one had to be loved now, and historically as
someone with the soul of a large-souled artist.
If
I thought of myself with Ora, I was consoled if I thought
without thinking, but when I remembered more about us, I shivered
and wondered. And my stories so far, I mistrusted because part of
the structuring of them had been to hide my sense of tragedy, to be a
young voice interchangeable with others - the communal thing,
maybe falsified by my being a Jew or something: I wasn't sure.
It
was intelligent and rending of him to do what he did but it
was
rehearsed
and polished.
The momentum of one's rebellion then, against
him,
propels
one into a heartlessness that causes anguish, let's say, assuming he
cares. I have to be modest and I have to be shrewd - he liked so
many people. But in the stance of art, something else occurs: Johnno
wanted me a lot: obsessively.
He was himself and he was an esthetic construct and he was an
imitation (and a rival) of his drunken mother. He said once,
I hate it
that I realize I am dragging her into art.
He used talk as someone else
might use muscle or skin - as a physical lure. J ohnno's sense of sex–
ual drama was secularized holiness, himself as Pope and others as
brigands raping the Holy See, sadism and command, the heartless
and unspiritual others. I am the Jew Genius Big-Bodied Outlaw.
"You love me," he said.
