Famous Last Words
Anyone who lived in New York
in the last 40 years, and whose life touched even briefly on that in-town
industry of the printed word, had to have heard of Harold Brodkey. Writer and
reputation were inseparable from the beginning, no doubt because his
self-aggrandizement dovetailed so nicely with the spirit of literary kingmakers
around town. It began as an explosion, in 1954, with the publication of his
still-astonishing collection of stories, First Love and Other Sorrows .
The Big Novel was promised and promised, but it seemed as if it would never
come. There were rumors that Brodkey was getting a kind of perpetually
renewable advance from his publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Fragments of
fiction appeared in The New Yorker throughout the '60s and '70s, but
they eventually amounted not to a novel but to a second collection, Stories
in an Almost Classical Mode (1988). Brodkey began to write an acerbic
column about life and letters for the New York Observer , and it was said
that this new diversion proved he would never finish the novel.
Somehow,
when The Runaway Soul , a novel of some 800 pages, finally appeared in
1991, it was an anticlimax. Though reviewed positively, it was, even its
partisans admitted, perhaps too long, too repetitive, too fragmentary. Literary
fashion is elusive; what in the 1960s might have seemed like an apotheosis of
modernism had, by the decidedly postmodern 1990s, come to seem old hat.
Then, in 1993, while he was putting the finishing touches
on his second novel, Profane Friendship , Brodkey learned that he was ill
with AIDS. He promptly published a declaration of his illness in The New
Yorker , and, suddenly, he was as fascinating as a train wreck once again.
This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death is his final book, a series of
diary essays chronicling the two years leading up to his death on Jan. 26,
1996. An agonizing production of willful beauty, it gives the lie to the
implicitly posed question about Brodkey: megalomaniac or genius? Because he was
both.
Brodkey's
account takes us from his discovery that he was ill with AIDS through his
prolonged hospital stay with pneumonia, his decision to return home, and the
slow months--many in a quiet equilibrium that was not health, but not death
either--that followed. During this time, he was able to revisit his beloved
Venice and spend a final summer in his country house in upstate New York. Even
though we know the end, the story is filled with suspense, and we turn the
pages intently. He was too great a writer not to milk the drama of his own
demise. Running parallel to the story of the author's dying is that of his
relationship with his wife, Ellen Schwamm Brodkey, and the mixture of deathbed
wit, tenderness, and sensuality the couple share. The portrait of Ellen is an
understated valentine that colors the entire book with almost inadvertent
charm.
The great relief here, for reader as well as
writer, is that the fictional mask has been cast aside. Brodkey's work was
always obviously, insistently, autobiographical--but one could get muddled
trying to decide if, for instance, this story's narrator from a St.
Louis suburb was the same as that story's narrator from a St. Louis
suburb. Although the various narrators might sound exactly the same, they would
have different names, and one, a sister. And then there were the confusions
among the many Venetian lovers, male and female, and the mystery of the alter
ego who directs films. These are, no doubt, parochial concerns, but Brodkey
always seemed to be deliberately provoking the puzzlement, coyly playing
hide-and-seek with us.
By
contrast, it seems calming to Brodkey's voice to find itself in a "true" first
person and a lucid present tense.
Medical attention and
the horrors of death, great death, amused me in a quiet way. Amused? Well, what
do you feel when you're expected to fight an often-fatal pneumonia and you've
been sentenced to death already? ... The connection to the ordinary world is
broken, yet not entirely. And there is a cartoon aspect: the curses people
hurled at you have come true. What do you suggest I do? Be unamused?
There
is--unsurprisingly, given Brodkey's reputation--no shortage here of paranoia
and score-settling. Brodkey often darkly refers to his enemies: the enemies of
his work, of his marriage--the enemies of genius. He manages to get one smart
crack in, writing, "I do think about suicide a lot because it is so boring to
be ill, rather like being trapped in an Updike novel."
There are also embarrassing--or, if you prefer,
honest--references to his being "recognized and accepted as an important
writer," to the conviction that his "work will live" after he is gone. He chews
over his past, counts up his debtors, enumerates his aches and pains, and
worries the issue of subjectivity to the bone. "[A friend] says that I am a
monstre sacré but I am not so famous. I am aware of the monstrosity of
my own will and of individual will in anyone," he writes. Or, again, "I believe
that the world is dying, not just me." Is all this his special megalomania, or
just garden-variety egotism? Either way, Brodkey embraces a self-absorption so
extreme that it succeeds, paradoxically, in turning him into an Everyman:
My body is to me like a
crippled rabbit that I don't want to pet, that I forget to feed on time, that I
haven't time to play with and get to know, a useless rabbit kept in a cage that
it would be cruel to turn loose.
Brodkey
underplays the untying of an old psychological knot when he reveals details of
his childhood. His mother died when he was young, and he was adopted by the
Brodkeys. His new parents became physically ill, which exacerbated their
psychological torture of their son (so much one could have gathered already
from Brodkey's fiction). The new details in This Wild Darkness make
explicit the sexual abuses of his adoptive father. Brodkey tells us that, after
several years of unwanted fondling, "I said he could not touch me anymore, not
even a handshake, unless he behaved . ... He turned his face to the wall,
telling me I was a cold fish--because I would not sex around with him. He was
lecherous and strange."
Brodkey expresses enormous ambivalence about
his own later-life adventures in homosexuality, referring, at one unsavory
moment, to his illness as "the wages of sin." While it is easy to see how
infuriating such a pose must be to others, offensiveness in the service of
subjective truth has its place here. If not here, then where? Brodkey is not
obliged to be a poster boy for AIDS. Besides, in another mood, he writes, "It
seemed to me that I was surrounded by braveries without number, that I had been
inducted into a phalanx of the wildly-alive-even-if-dying, and I felt honored
that I would, so to speak, die in the company of such people."
On the
page, Brodkey has always been a brilliant, egotistical talker. As a listener,
one is both stimulated and frustrated, longing to get a word in edgewise.
Perhaps that's why he has always seemed to want to preclude critical judgment
with pre-emptive strikes within his prose, anticipating our responses and
silencing us. He does that here, too, but with a somewhat milder air: "I think
what I think, and the hell with the rest of it, the rest of you; you don't
actually exist for me anyway--you're all myths in my head." Perhaps the
absoluteness of the act of writing, in effect, his own elegy--and the
absoluteness of his inability to answer his critics afterward--curiously
mellowed him.
It turns out to be surprisingly easy to get past the
whining and the nonsense about fame. And Brodkey's strenuous feats of
observation and language, in the teeth of death, more than repay the
effort:
At one time I was
interested in bird-watching, and I noticed that when I saw a bird for the first
time I couldn't really see it, because I had no formal arrangement, no sense of
pattern, for it. ... But once I identified the bird, the drawings in bird books
and my own sense of order arranged the image, and made it clearer to me, and I
never forgot it. From then on I could see the bird in two ways--as the fresh,
unpatterned vision and the patterned one. Well, seeing death nearby is very
like the first way of seeing.
What can one do with
Brodkey's gift of his own death, given in a manner at once casual and shocking?
Receive it with gratitude.
