Love Him or Hate Him, but Don’t Forget Him

Some of the last words Harold Brodkey wrote were these: I am practicing making entries in my journal, recording my passage into nonexistence. This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over.

One year ago today, it was over.

That Harold Brodkey would have nothing else to say to the world, it seemed to me, was one of those events, a time to stop, to grind to a halt, and to look at this thing that was and would be no more. Not just the death of a name we knew and so 20 seconds on the news. No: That identity, that mind, that particular cast of speech, was over.

So I was alarmed and anguished at the virtual absence of tribute to Brodkey in the days following the writer’s death. In this newspaper, which gave his obituary about as much play as anywhere else, the notice was tucked in the inside pages, four paragraphs, 10 sentences, rewritten from the wires: Died in Manhattan of AIDS complications, a result of homosexual relationships; was once likened to Proust; was controversial; spent three decades on one novel; was 65 years old.

A few months previous, the passing of Orville Reddenbacher, the popcorn man, commanded considerably more attention.

And in the week after Brodkey’s death, there were none of the memorials on radio or in book review sections or literary magazines that often accompany the death of a writer of note. Aside from a terse notice attached to the final installment of his essay series for the New Yorker on dying of AIDS, there was nothing.

Admittedly, to discuss a literary writer and the notion of notoriety in America is something of an absurdity. The serious discourse of literature makes up such a tiny corner of this country’s consciousness as to be almost nonexistent. But within that marginal world, Harold Brodkey’s celebrity was considerable, if confused.

He is revered and reviled, impossible to ignore. Many call him an impostor, claiming his body of work is too slim to warrant the accolades it sometimes receives. Many despised him personally, for his arrogance, his egotism, his inability to politely lie as social convention demands. It’s nearly impossible to find an article written about Brodkey’s work that is not dominated by discussion of his mythology and celebrity. This tangential controversy has overwhelmed the only issue of lasting relevance, which is Brodkey’s writing.

In France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, his writing is both praised and popular. In Germany, his 800-page novel, “The Runaway Soul” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), was a bestseller.

But in America, where he lived and died, and where his most essential stories play themselves out, he has never been accepted. As Michael Silverblatt noted during a recent edition of his KCRW-FM (89.9) radio program, “Bookworm,” Brodkey, though “an incontestably brilliant writer,” in his own country is “one of the most enormously--I won’t even say misunderstood--but simply rejected consciousnesses working in contemporary literature.”

*

For Brodkey’s widow, novelist Ellen Schwamm Brodkey, the resistance at home amounts largely to this: “Much of the work today is mediocre, and Harold wasn’t.”

Indeed. For me, Brodkey was a master, a giant, a lion. Towering, and rare.

He hated Harold Bloom’s description of him as an American Proust, but it wasn’t undeserved.

Read a Brodkey story in the morning, and he will narrate the rest of your day. His language, and his perception of reality and consciousness, stay in your head for hours or days at a stretch.

His words have an unusual courage, an uncommon devotion to truth. As Brodkey puts it in his memoir on dying of AIDS complications, “This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death” (Metropolitan Books, 1996): “I am prejudiced toward a nakedness in print--toward embodiment in black-and-white.”

As an example, one of his most celebrated short stories, “A Story in an Almost Classical Mode,” begins:

My protagonists are my mother’s voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.

From another story, “Innocence”:

I distrust summaries, any kinds of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar.

Nakedness.

He loathed fantasy. Said it made life unlivable, and that a devotion to truth was life-giving. At the same time, he equally loathed the idea of truth as an absolute, which he found impossible. He never claimed to have gotten it down right, not definitively, irrevocably right.

He found the world to be filled with error, and so he found his prose to be filled too with error, sometimes acknowledging so in mid-sentence.

He found America, even in its literature, to be unwilling to accept sexuality as a fact of life.

*

As for the works of Brodkey themselves, they include two story collections, the second of which, “Stories in an Almost Classical Mode,” is a masterwork of the short story. His two novels afforded him the room to expand his essay-as-fiction exploration and include vast pieces of his finest writing.

And “This Wild Darkness,” the complete memoir from which his New Yorker essays on AIDS were excerpted, is an astonishing work. We have seen innumerable accounts of dying of AIDS since the onset of our era’s most famous and shame-ridden disease, but this is the first to give such an account with the craft and insight of one of our most gifted artists. It is also a luminous and devastating love story, of Harold and Ellen. And it buttresses Brodkey’s standing as a master of essay as well as of fiction.

At least three posthumous books are in the works, Ellen Brodkey says: a collection of additional short stories, some previously unpublished, followed by a book of essays and another study of his beloved Venice.

But the five books completed during his lifetime speak for themselves, and they speak for Harold Brodkey.

So, it’s been a year now. We’ve lost one of the great ones, one of the rare ones. I can only hope he will be so remembered, and that his work will so endure.