Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

Praise for Harold Brodkey’s
STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE

ALSO BY HAROLD BRODKEY

First Love and Other Sorrows

M
ARCUS
W
EILL
has said he is chiefly concerned with virtue and death in the movies he makes, but the truth is that his usual theme is that we are not capable of much virtue because we are afraid of death. He would have us believe that we flee from logic and order because they remind us that we must die, while illogic and disorder soothe us by proving that nothing makes sense, that nothing is certain, not even death. In his movie
La Nouvelle Cléopâtre en Avignon,
the narrator says, “Do not be cross because our characters do not always have the same faces; they are being true to life and death.” The narrator says, “We hope to demonstrate not Euclidean but mortal geometry, the grand trickery of theorems we place in nature and find there for our own delight.” So the image exists for Marcus. In
La Nouvelle Cléopâtre en Avignon,
the heroine bends over her lover. One hears a clock and the heroine’s breath; one sees the drowsy pulse, the lecherous tic beside her lover’s eye and the heroine’s finger stealing out to touch it. The narrator says, “Is it not time for her to guess that the flesh is a clock, an unrenewable clock?” The narrator says, “It is an axiom in the mortal geometry that the noise of a quarrel will drown the sound of all the clocks in a room.” When the lovers quarrel, we are not permitted to hear what they say; we see their faces change and we see that from moment to moment they are different people. The narrator says, “Uncertainty increases their passion,” and the scene of reconciliation is the most passionate in the movie. The hero lies asleep. The heroine enters his room and wakes
him with her kisses and her tears. He opens his eyes and abruptly she ceases to cry and moves her head until she and her lover are face to face; then she assumes a dizzying, not quite convincing—so bright is it—smile. The camera is suddenly a great distance from the bed; the lovers embrace in a room with melting walls. Trees appear, their branches agitated as in a summer storm. Among the trees, lions and monkeys and snakes and tigers glide and prowl or sit or crouch or sleep. Shadows are flung back and forth; in the room, the shadows have the fish shapes of terror. The lovers on their bed are figurines inside a cracked glass bell, a thin, cracked glass arbor in the middle of a wind-torn, window-haunted garden. The heroine cries out, “Ah, God, I am so happy,” and the scene ends.

Marcus is thickset, temperamental, good-looking. He has made five movies in France, one in Belgium, two in Italy, one in Greece. Four of his movies have been shown in this country with considerable critical and public acclaim, one with no acclaim. Exhibitors would like to show the others, but Marcus is careless and somewhat grasping about money, and he has signed too many contracts: who is privileged to sell what, who is to receive what is under litigation in three countries. He was born in New York and often uses as backgrounds vistas of a city—distant, seen through windows, light-struck, overexposed, resembling the sun-washed backgrounds, pale and geometrical, of early Renaissance paintings: Piero della Francesca and Botticelli; against such backgrounds his people move in simplified costumes, linear, eyes and mouths like pebbles, and dominant. He is a Jew. He avoids dialogue in his movies if he can. In life, he experiences very little simply and directly; nothing is merely itself. “For me,” he has said, “it is like the glass walls in that place in Proust—the restaurant reflected in its own walls, and the diners, and through the glass the flowers outside.” A kiss is a moment—heavy, round, a melon; the sharp abridgment of isolation is a knife into the melon, parting the tough skin; the soft pastel interior appears. Lo, it is hollow. In the hollow, seeds. His emotion for a woman tends in the early stages to be formal and dark. It is as if he were practicing one of the early religions with superstition and awe. But later she becomes a girl (or two of them) he used to know, or a bucket too small for the live fish in it, or the Rond Point: tourists, garishness,
art moderne,
flowers, fountains, all of it. He cannot evade this elaboration of the sensual event; it is a circumstance of his existence.

A movie is to him primarily an arrangement of recognitions, an
allée
laid out so that at every step what is being seen alters the sense of what has been seen. The audience must be paradoxically surprised by logic, as if logic were unpredictable. Success is to have the audience accept the conclusion in the full pride of having recognized the geometry that caused it. At the end of the film comes a recognition that the
allée
could lead nowhere but to this. In Rome, about to commence shooting on
Rencontre du Voyage,
he says, “The beginning will be very simple. She is in the Sistine Chapel, in a crowd of tourists, looking up at the ceiling. She is sad and restless and frightened in that crowd, looking at that ceiling. Then we know her.…” He speaks slowly, asthmatically breathing through his mouth, at breakfast on the terrace of the large villa outside Rome his backers have rented for him. The movie is to go before the cameras in an hour. Below the terrace lie a largely untended garden and a swimming pool, and, beyond an uneven hedge of oleanders, greenish-yellow fields (a sunburned golf course), and the hills leading to Rocca di Papa; in the middle distance are the ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct. It is not quite eight o’clock in the morning, and some coolness remains in the air from the night, but it is unsubstantial, wispy, and will soon disappear.

From the head of the table, he addresses his writer, Loesser; his cameraman, Alliat; and his stars, Jehane Duret and Oskar Haase. (Marcus’s family—his children and his housekeeper-companion—are in Paris; he has brought only his valet.) Jehane Duret is his mistress, but the affair is dying. She is tall, with a taut body, a broad, self-assertive mouth. “You are both restless,” he says to Jehane and Oskar—“Oskar le Beau” the French papers call him. “They—You must see this thing about them.” He has trouble finding words. “They are
ordinary
—not in looks … not in soul … but in the guesses they make.…” His voice trails off. His auditors stare at him with incomprehension. He frowns. He says pleadingly, “One could photograph them anywhere. In front of a department-store window—they would look
suitable
there!” His audience stirs, sensing something performable; they wait for further instruction. Marcus jumps up. “Look. Look, I will
show
you.” He is a poor actor; there was a time when he tried to act, but no matter what part he was assigned he was onstage merely an overintense, large-eyed young man anxious to be an actor. He embarks on a pantomime. His smile fades; he looks bored, distant; he wrinkles his mouth, knits his fingers.

A maid hurries out of the villa, her shoes loud on the stone pavement;
observing the pantomime, she tiptoes the last few feet, a finger to her lips signifying she does not intend to say a word, and she slips a cablegram into Marcus’s hand. Marcus shrugs and resumes his pantomime, turning in a slow circle until he confronts the striking view—the slow, yellow-brown descent of the fields to the aqueduct and the skirts of the bluish hills rising to Rocca di Papa. He hopefully scowls, reaches out his arms, turns away, head drooping. It is a ludicrous performance. Loesser, the writer, says in a low voice, “Isolated—sensually and personally. Trapped. Unable to feel.” Oskar Haase exclaims,
“Ja! Gut!”
He nods, but he looks eager to please rather than penetrated by understanding. Jehane’s eyes are shut, probably with embarrassment at Marcus’s performance.

Marcus says, “They feel this way in front of expensive automobiles and movie theaters. Their guesses are crooked.” Oskar and Jehane sit up, actors’ shrewdness and voracity in their eyes. The cablegram rustles in Marcus’s hand. “So you are very restless,” he instructs them, adding, “and cold. If there is no self-pity, you cannot pity others.” He turns to the cablegram. It is from America, from his stepmother, and states: “
NANNA DIED IN SLEEP LAST NIGHT FUNERAL TWO-THIRTY B’NAI SHOLOM BOSTON SEVENTH JUNE.
”

The sun lies heavily on Marcus’s white shirt; dampness wells from the ocher walls of the villa.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
Jehane asks.

“Ma grandmère est morte
.”

“
Oh, pauvre petit,
” Jehane says. Her actress’s face plunges into sympathy, the muscles of the strong, self-assertive lips loosen, the eyes grow somber. It is a familiar sight; she has stayed up with him for long nights on lawns, in rooms: “I cannot sleep.”
“Pauvre Marc.
Shall we play cards?” “I am too nervous for cards. The picture is not growing.
La mort vient et je suis nu.”
He is afraid of being tired the next day, but he fears death more and cannot sleep. “I’ve taken three Seconal, but they don’t work.” Jehane has walked with him for hours in the city, among lampposts: “Our orchard,” Marcus calls them. He can always sleep after dawn.