Free I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir by Kevin Sessums

said.
    “Well, I didn’t go to a boarding school if that’s what you’re getting at,” he said. “That’s one thing Harry Potter has done if nothing else. It has restored the reputation of the English boarding school. It has made it something other than a hotbed of homosexuality.”
    A hotbed of homosexuality. It sounded as if he were describing my apartment. “We all play roles in life,” I said. “I finally decided my truest role, even more than The Sissy, even more than The Homosexual, is The Orphan,” I said, wondering at that very moment if The Addict would one day override even that. “Harry Potter is perhaps the most famous orphan now in all of literature,” I said, still able to focus on the conversation at hand. “But there is a whole genre that centers on the orphaned. Your first role at nine was the young David Copperfield. You are now the personification of the most beloved of orphans. It is the thing about you, Daniel, that moves me the most.”
    “I suppose they make good heroes—orphans do—because we love the underdog,” he said. “For an orphan, from the earliest, most basic, most primitive part of your life, things have gone against you. So in that sense an orphan is the ultimate underdog. Everything we know about how people work and are successful, in the conventional sense, starts with family. So the notion is for that to be taken out of the picture one has to work doubly hard to achieve things.”
    “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