I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (8 page)

“You’re not an orphan, but you are an only child who attained worldwide fame at a very early age,” I said. “Has fame become a kind of a sibling to you?”

“It’s not so much the fame thing as it is the person you are when you are in front of an audience,” Radcliffe said. “Or … well … being interviewed like right now.”

“So you’ve had to become your own sibling?” I asked.

“In a way, yeah, because you develop two personas. It’s not even a conscious thing. Something happens. That’s what fame does to you. You acquire another self.”

That’s what drug addiction does to you, too, I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “You’re a big fan of John Keats.”

“Exactly. The biggest,” said Radcliffe.

“I’m a fan too. He was also an orphan. I was wondering if his theory of negative…”

“… capability…,” said Radcliffe, finishing the term.

“Yes. Exactly. Do you use Keats’s theory of negative capability in your approach to acting, in your approach to life? In it he states—I think I’m getting this right—that the deepest truths are to be found in uncertainty and doubt and mystery and not in the ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason.’”

“Absolutely! Absolutely! You’ve found me out!” he said excitedly. But then his voice grew quiet once more. Again he stared right into my tired and bloodshot eyes.

“The truth is to be found in the things that are not certain, Kevin,” he said. “And not solid. And not easy. And not simple.” He touched my arm. “That’s the secret.”

The secret to what?

Alchemy?

“I like this sibling of yours, Daniel,” was all I finally had to say. “It was nice meeting him.”

“I know—right?” he softly said.

And it was then, in that moment, I realized it was I who was still the overaged urchin. Not that boy with his bag full of toys the night before. Not Daniel Radcliffe. Not Harry Potter. Not even John Keats. I was the one who was still trying to play that role.

FOUR

The Brother

My younger brother, Kim, an obstetrician and gynecologist, is also an artist and a sculptor. I didn’t need to delve into the teachings of the School of Practical Philosophy, as Hugh Jackman had, to learn about the duality so inherent in all our natures. All I needed was to share a Mississippi childhood with such a brother. It was a bit later that I learned this kind of duality could be described as Keatsian from listening to poet Howard Moss. He was talking about having seen Marlon Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire
on Broadway, which somehow led to a story about how Howard met our mutual friend Edward Albee, which led Howard, through some path known only to him, to discuss with me John Keats for the first time. Howard’s voice was more like a low hum, a thrum of sound I had to lean in to hear more clearly and then decipher. As he offered me a quick discourse on Keats I began, in that twentieth-century poet’s generosity toward the nineteenth-century one, to see my younger brother more generously as well.

I relaxed that day in Howard’s thrum and, as I so often found myself doing, followed somehow the thread of his thoughts by sinking more deeply into my own. As he explained Keats’s “negative capability” to me I began to conjure an image of Kim as a little boy carrying his pellet gun out into our yard. Such a sight always bothered me, for I knew that what often followed was his killing the cardinal or blue jay or occasional robin that alighted above him in the grove of pine trees. I would hide wrapped in a curtain that first autumn my brother became obsessed with the killing of birds and would spy on him through the window as he took careful aim. The pinecones and straw around him on the ground had fallen from the trees, leaving the limbs bare above him, so that when the birds perched there they would stand out more starkly and would enable him to get a better shot. I’d stand at that window waiting for the moment my brother, his little cheek puffed out with a mouthful of pellets, removed one from his mouth, which allowed him to lodge the thing, lubricated with his saliva, more easily into the gun. Often he’d get the kill in one shot and the stunned creature would fall to the silent thud of its death on all that freshly fallen pine straw carpeting our country yard.

My brother had begged my grandparents to let him take a correspondence course in taxidermy and they had relented. After he’d shoot a bird, he would bring it into the house and gently lay it on a kind of plinth-like altar he had made back in his room so that he could more easily follow the instructions from the course manual opened up beside it. I hated it with all my heart when he shot a bird. It was just more death to be dragged into our lives. But he was trying to have dominion over death. I had suddenly realized it as it all came together for me that day when Howard Moss first held forth on negative capability and John Keats, the sound of Moss’s low incessant mumbled thrum mixing with the soundless straw that broke a shot bird’s fall. Kim, so lost after our parents’ death, so alone out there in the yard, longed to find a way to preserve life. But in his longing he had to kill something to learn how to do it.

*   *   *

“You know what finally stopped me from killing those birds?” my brother asked me when I was talking with him about his taxidermy days. “I looked through the sight of that pellet gun one day and a red-winged blackbird turned and looked right back at me. It was the first time a bird had done that. I felt seen.”

Kim and his wife had stopped in New York on their way to Maine, where he was going to check in with the Farnsworth Museum and its Wyeth Center, which had purchased a bust of Andrew Wyeth that he had sculpted. It was the only bust Wyeth had ever sat for and in his flinty way he had developed an affection for my brother and a respect for him as an artist, so much so that Wyeth had stated in his will that he would furnish the endowment to purchase the bust for the Farnsworth’s collection. Andy Wyeth had been my brother’s idol when he became interested in art after his detour into the details of taxidermy, so this was a kind of completion of a circle in his life.

Before he headed up to Maine he wanted to see the Willem de Kooning retrospective at MoMA as well as a grouping of Cy Twombly sculptures he’d read about. My brother’s art had once been realistic. Lifelike. He had recently, though, freed himself from the strict boundaries of sculpting busts and begun to move in a more abstract direction, using found objects and utilizing collage in his art. Twombly now inspired Kim as much as Wyeth once had.

The galleries opened and we headed upstairs. On one of the upper floors we turned a corner together and I saw my brother stop in awe to find the Twombly sculptures suddenly before him instead of his having to study them in photographs. “You can’t get the feel of it, the scale, without seeing the real things,” he said, a reverence in his voice he usually saved for church, for my brother is also a religious man. Born again, he’d claim. Kim is comfortable talking about God’s grace in a way I feel a bit awkward being around. And yet I often feel the need to broach the subject with Kim as a way of justifying myself to him.

One Twombly sculpture’s worn patina reminded me of the wooden crucifix—an altarpiece—from the 1840s that I had bought at a flea market the weekend before. I had responded to the crucifix’s own sculptural qualities, not its religious ones. The long, thin Christ figure no longer had its arms and had been worn to a soft tannish hue that animal hides often have. There were grooves carved in its sides where Christ’s ribs would have been. The only color was the faintest bit of pink in two of the grooves to symbolize the blood of his wounds. The long, thin, worn figure had been in a booth filled with religious relics, but I was drawn immediately to it alone and had picked it up. It had fit perfectly atop my forearm as I had stood staring at it for several minutes, unable to put it down. It was from a Catholic church in the Philippines, I was told by the booth’s purveyor, yet it felt as if it had always belonged to me.

I mentioned all this to my brother, whose brow furrowed a bit as he looked more closely at the Twombly. I knew that familiar furrow. Kim was disguising it as an appreciation of Twombly, but it was the furrow that creased his brow when he prepared himself for another of my justifications.

“I then went across the street from the flea market to an antique store to pick up a vase I’d bought,” I continued, following him as he studied more of the Twomblys. “I go there a lot. The woman who runs it and I are kind of friendly with each other without really knowing one another. I told her about the armless Christ figure and she asked, ‘Are you a believer in Jesus?’

“‘Yes. I believe there was such a person,’ I said.

“Her whole demeanor changed,” I told my brother. “She grew stern. ‘But do you believe he rose from the dead?’ she asked me.

“‘I’m not so sure,’ I told her.”

My brother sighed.

I found an odd satisfaction in the sound of my brother’s troubled sigh, which was so like that sigh my father could make at my presence. It was one of the ways Kim resembled my father without even knowing it. I continued. “‘It’s a historical fact,’ she said, pointing her finger in my face.”

I then abruptly pointed my own finger in my brother’s face to demonstrate how adamant the woman had been, but he just as abruptly pushed it away to get a closer look at the most elongated of the Twombly sculptures.

“‘He rose from the dead,’ she wouldn’t let up.” I wouldn’t let up either and followed my brother to the next Twombly. “‘There’s no denying it. It’s a historical fact,’ she kept saying as if that were all the argument she needed to make. But when I got home I couldn’t get our conversation out of my mind. So I went back.”

“Oh, brother,” my brother said.

“When I walked back in the store she wouldn’t look at me. But I told her I came back to tell her what bothered me about her making the resurrection simply a historical fact was that she took something wondrous and made it dry and commonplace. I told her that, yes, I had my doubts about it. But without doubt one doesn’t have faith. Faith without doubt is really just blind obedience. The deepest truths are to be found in uncertainty and doubt and mystery and not in the ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason,’” I said, and heard myself wrapping myself in Howard Moss quoting John Keats and remembered how I had once hidden wrapped in that curtain so far out in the country in Mississippi and watched a much younger brother take aim at a helpless bird before it could turn and look back at him. He turned in that moment away from the last Twombly and looked back at me. Our eyes met, but they didn’t see; they aimed. My brother and I longed to find a way to preserve life. But in our longing we had to kill something in each other to learn how to do it.

*   *   *

My brother and his wife headed for the de Kooning exhibit. “When Andy Wyeth was sitting for me we talked about a lot of stuff,” Kim said. “We started off talking about ears,” he said as he absentmindedly reached down to run a finger along one of his wife’s in the gentle offhand way that husbands flirt with their wives after years of marriage. “‘You’ve given me big ears,’” Andy told me, admitting that his were big but not quite that big. ‘Don’t you think you should make them more delicate?’ he suggested. ‘Ears are a delicate thing.’

“‘You know ears can be portraits themselves,’ I told Andy. ‘They can reveal as much as the eyes or the mouth as far as I’m concerned.’

“‘You know I feel the same way,’ he said. ‘Edward Hopper and I once had this conversation and he told me that Eakins didn’t feel that way,’” my brother quoted Wyeth, pronouncing “Eakins” as “Aikens.” “‘Eakins’ ears were all the same,’ Andy said, ‘sort of put in only to finish the head.’”

“I always thought it was ‘Eakins,’” I said, using the long
E
.

“Well, as Andy insisted when I told him I thought it was pronounced that way too, ‘Hopper always pronounced it “Aikens” and if pronouncing it “Aikens” was good enough for Edward Hopper it’s good enough for me.’ As I put the finishing touches on Andy’s own head we talked about other American artists and his place among them. We talked about our families and the family tragedies we’d each had to live through. We talked a lot about what goes into a painting or a piece of sculpture.” Kim kept talking as we passed an assortment of each lined along the walls of MoMA. “I finally told him that I hoped that all of his work now owned by Japanese collectors would someday return to America.

“‘That would be nice,’ he said. ‘But I won’t be here to see it.’

“‘Maybe not,’ I told him. ‘But if I’m still here when it happens I’ll tell you when I get there.’

“‘Awwh, I’ll be down there,’ Andy said, pointing toward hell, then turned his finger up toward heaven. ‘And you’ll be up there.’

“‘What makes you say that?’ I asked Andy.

“‘Oh, I’m just an old scoundrel,’ he said. ‘I’m not a very nice person, you know.’

“‘Well, I believe the outcome isn’t based on what we did here,’ I told him. ‘We’re all scoundrels We’re born that way. I believe it’s based on what somebody else did for us.’

“‘Nobody’s ever said that to me,’ Andy told me.”

We turned into the de Kooning exhibit and I stared at one of his earliest portraits of a woman, the low cut of her dress revealing but a glimpse of a nipple, as faint and pink as the lone wound on that armless altarpiece that had finally found a home with me.

*   *   *

In 1962—when I was six years old, my brother was four, and our new little sister was two—our big-eared father quit his job as a basketball coach at a small Mississippi high school to accept the job as the track coach at Hinds County Junior College and we moved from Clinton, Mississippi, a few miles down the road to Raymond. “I’m just a professor of P.E.,” he’d often crack the same deprecating joke when some of his fellow coaches with a bit of seniority on him would visit us where we had taken up residence in Raymond in one of the faculty houses built by the junior college in a circular street just off campus. Mississippi was a violent and scary place in the summer of 1962. It was the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement and the air was already fetid with the feel of forced change. But if one lived in a cosseted neighborhood where the picket fences and faculty families all were white there was, even in the Mississippi of 1962, a sense of comfort and safety. The only progressive thing about the place was the Saturday night dinners that would travel course by course from faculty member house to faculty member house, parents taking their ice teas and children in hand to cross yard after freshly mown yard. We’d eat fried chicken at one dining table, butter beans and corn bread at another, potato salad and deviled eggs at a third, barbecued hamburgers slathered with mayonnaise at a fourth, meringue-slathered lemon icebox pie at a fifth.