Brodkey in the Wilderness

Harold Brodkey's "This Wild Darkness" found me at last, after many years of my successful ducking. It was at Mercer Street Books, my second-to-last day back in New York. I was following my own rule of used bookstore browsing—"what catches the eye." My eyes and the rest of me got caught. I'd been thinking this was going to be my last time in the US for a good long while. There had been a lot of farewells, a lot of endings, so many that I couldn't even make myself travel to Toronto for my old friend Tom Bolt's memorial service that weekend: Memorial Day weekend—it turned out—an American travesty of a holiday that was now living up to its name; travel was anyway impossibly demanding, expensive, fraught with delay and dysfunction and the flatulence of authoritarianism. So I was poking around good old haunts instead. I like to think Tom—who fell to a brain tumor back in January—would have approved, and I tell him I'll be writing about him soon. At that moment, there was too much elegy, so much around me was crying out to be mourned.

Brodkey himself was a master of the elegiac, at least in tone. His first collection—the one I read, aged 17, at the recommendation of one of my beloved English teachers—first thought says it was Andrew Glassman, kind and majestic-nosed, who also taught us the Russians, but second thought wonders whether it was in fact cherub-cheeked Warren Johnson who would later suicide—that collection, grandiose but also ironic, "First Love and Other Sorrows” begins like this "There is a certain shade of red brick--a dark, almost melodious red, sombre and riddled with blue--that is my childhood in St.Louis." I had that tone in me—it read to me the way the opening of Schubert's String Quintet in C sounded—but I caught it from him and worked for a long time under his influence. In high school, I took him to be the height of contemporary, sinuous American sentences that—in reality—were only precariously still in fashion in 1992.

The choice for the final paper in our English elective, I remember now, had been between Brodkey and Deborah Eisenberg, both New Yorker writers at the time, but radically opposite in style and approach. Eisenberg had actually come to give a reading at our school. I wanted to be the kind of writer who did not give readings for high schoolers. I'm afraid I had thoughts like that at the time. I liked the idea of "aloofness" coupled to Orphic abandon (I was seventeen) but was naturally terrified of exposure. I didn't believe writing should feel good or be something easily shared. I also think I had good instincts but bad reasons—liking Brodkey I defended him against classmates who thought him pretentious, "difficult." Turns out we were both right: Brodkey could be annoying, and it was also a cultivated style: an offense-defense thing. Both an outsider and an orphan, Brodkey had the instinct to write himself into the world he desired to inhabit but also felt sure would never wholly accept him. Who in that setting has not put on airs?

In the New York publishing circles I would later inhabit for a few seasons, he was known for having sold versions of the same novel several times to several different major houses at multi-year intervals from 1973 until its publication in 1991, a conjuring feat in its own right, or the result of a gifted and dedicated literary agent. Eventually this turned into the 800 plus page magnum opus and semi-autobiographical fiasco "The Runaway Soul," a late version of Jewish-American boychik lyricism in the tradition of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep that I found myself wholly unable to read when I picked it up in my 30s. Brodkey was a performer and knew it, "I have been a figure of aesthetic and literary controversy, the object of media savagery and ridicule, also at times of praise...Bernard Malmud once said I had talked away a dozen books I might have written. I never told him how much time I spent lying down and staring at nothing...It was a relief to get away from the tease and rank of imputed greatness and from the denial and attacks and from my own sense of things, of worldly reality and of literary reality...It was a relief to have the future not be my speculative responsibility anymore and to escape from games of superiority and inferiority."

Those sentences are from "Wild Darkness," where he lays aside the mask—somewhat—because he wrote them while he was dying from AIDS, hence his writing about himself in the past tense. Here's another passage with the same deceptive on/off quality as the one I just quoted, when he's lying in the hospital with pneumocystis pneumonia, "What was strange was that all sense of presence, all sense of poetry and style, all sense of idea left me. It was gone, with not one trace, one flicker remaining...Everything was suffocation and the sentence of death, the termite-like democracy and chemical gusts of malaise and heat, of twisting fever, and lazy but busy simmering of the disease in me." Seldom has the evacuation of all poetry and all sense of style been recounted more stylishly. People held this against him. Richard Howard essentially accused him of appropriating the gay plague of AIDS in an act of "mendacious self propaganda," a different kind of "Advertisements for Myself."

I'd been aware of the book when it first came out—barely posthumously—in 1996—I think my aunt must have told me—it was a collection of the pieces previously published in The New Yorker. I hadn't read them there either. My first reason for avoidance was because I knew the subject too well, I thought: my father had lost his battle with AIDS in 1993, just as Brodkey was entering the hospital for the first time. I had lived this world and it was too soon for me to revisit it. I didn't want to be sucked back in. Later, when I was writing about my father in what would become The Scientists, I avoided it for more superstitious reasons. There was already something regressive-feeling about returning to my childhood and adolescence, to the whole family scene. I also feared anything that might threaten what I had to insist—however ludicrously—was the integrity of my writing. I had internalized versions of the Brodkeyan sentence, but I didn't want to be confronted with implicit comparisons and additional Oedipal dramas. Bad enough I was summoning my own father to the page. I didn't need the anxiety of influence.

My best reasons for avoiding “Wild Darkness” only became clear once I actually started reading it the other week on the plane back to Portugal. Like my father, Brodkey had been a married overtly heterosexual man with at least one child at the time of his diagnosis. Unlike my father, Brodkey chose to go public with his illness (against the advice of his doctor) and also about his "adventures in homosexuality," which he claims ended in the 1970s, before the disease was known or widespread.

As he goes into greater detail, however, this recollected chronology starts to appear less than accurate. Either the strain of HIV that both Brodkey and my father acquired was of unusually slow gestation—not impossible—or they'd been lying about when they stopped having sex with other men. It wasn't until almost twenty years after my father's death that I learned he too had been down-low bisexual, for a time. It's unlikely in any event that my having read Brodkey's essays when they were published or subsequently would have led me any faster to this fact, although it might have significantly muddied the waters of my eventual search, just as the 1998 publication of my aunt's memoir “1185 Park Avenue” muddied things when she insinuated—with the help of Freud and some cultural stereotypes—that my father might have acquired his immuno-deficiency syndrome in "the more usual way" instead of his quite plausible account of a laboratory accident with mishandled blood that we'd all learned to recite.

Brodkey's childhood secret was his many years of sexual abuse by his adopted father, which—he reveals—set him on the path of "the anal diddling that led to the transmission of the virus." My childhood secret, however, was my father's HIV diagnosis, officially as of 1988, and the regime of secrecy we installed in response. Brodkey made a living through mediated self-exposure (as do I, now); my father had made his as a research hematologist and practicing doctor who had also been the head of the sickle cell disease clinic at Mt. Sinai hospital. The secrecy in his case was partly understandable. He'd stopped seeing patients but kept his lab and the grants that funded it until he couldn't work at all. Still, I didn't really want to be writing a book about my father's death and my mother's fidelity to him, I couldn't do scenes from their marriage. I was writing a book about how my family's relationship to knowledge came to be at odds with its relationship to truth, and how that had shaped me—informed me—and my relationships with all manner of beings—literary, institutional, and interpersonal.

What I did not want to know, manifestly, when writing “The Scientists” was what my father's dying felt like to him and also what it was like for my mother; the feelings around dying and illness and why they made the decisions they made were the very things they had chosen to keep from me. I could only write what I knew, so I described them as they were to me, as mysterious beings who communicated mysteriously, as parents who had let go of being parents before any of us were ready and yet who needed the fiction, the pretense of family togetherness to keep themselves going as they were, until the end.

“This Wild Darkness” brings me the closest I can ever come to understanding my parents on their own terms, of imagining what that life must have been for them. I wasn't ready for that, even by my early thirties. In large part, Brodkey is writing a love letter to his second wife, the novelist Ellen Schwamm, "a fine-boned tyrant, a small Garbo." He is aware of what he calls "his luck," recording this as a reason given by a resentful fellow writer for why he could never read Brodkey's books, "You like your wife, you can live with her, that is unforgivable." He records their dialogues, their disagreements, praises her independently of himself even as he credits her charm and determination for ensuring he receives adequate care from doctors, nurses, and orderlies, the unglamarous parts of a marriage. At the beginning, assuming she too has been infected, "she thought then that we would die together—commit suicide simultaneously—in a few months, when everything was in order." If there was a word of recrimination of regret, a gust of anger, we never hear it.

There's a touching scene when she asks him to say he loves her. He protests at first, "I'm filthy with AIDS." She says she just wants to know, "of course I love you. So what? Love won't inspire the white cells." But he ends by rising to the occasion "'I spoke in very slow motion, and with what sympathy I could piece together for myself leaving without wanting to and for her being left behind: 'I love you. I always loved you.'"

Things about this scene rang rang true to me; my father might have said exactly that about love not inspiring white cells, except that he never uttered the L word once in my presence the entire time he knew he was dying, not to me and not to my mother for everything she did for him. My parents were hardly models of intimacy, or they were excellent models for an intimacy that was so intimate not even their son could see it. Maybe it's just that my father was a more accomplished resister of emotion or a less accomplished performer.

Brodkey:

"My friends and acquaintances who died of AIDS had near the end, most of them, an air of nervous pretense, like guarded actors. It was perhaps always clear, but so very clear to me now, that one plays a role in staying alive and that the place in which one plays this role is hollow, without a floor, without sensible definition. One plays this role with inverted brio, with a nonresident status one tries (and fails) to hide. I tried to hide it from Ellen...I could use my eyes and my smile—this is the actorly thing I saw in my friends—but the expression, the eyes, would misfire or go blank, go dark."

This also made sense and explained a lot. Brodkey is clear that he is writing about dying as a process. When he enters the hospital: "my life was over and my dying began." The cliché that we are born dying just isn’t true, it's a way of avoiding—not the fact of death—but of the more disturbing fact that most of us will undergo a dying, a slow dispossession, an ugly prolonged sloughing. Part of that is losing the ability to be present to others, to laugh at their jokes or make jokes, to inhabit their concerns, even when they are your own flesh and blood. The reason that my father didn't feel all there to me for the five years we lived with his full-blown AIDS was because he couldn't be. He only appeared fitfully and in flickers.

And then there were "the children"—Brodkey's daughter and Ellen's from different marriages. Nothing is said to them until some time after Brodkey returns from his weeks long hospitalization—the chronology is unclear but it's most likely several months. In any case these kids were older, functioning adults by this point, at least one with young children of their own. The priorities are nevertheless clear and I didn't question them for a moment. The catastrophe so sudden, the immediate crisis coming all at once—pneumocystis was one of the big killers and it's possible that Brodkey might not have emerged from his first hospitalization—as my father very easily might not have from his with the same illness. The marriage closed around the couple and emerged as a new relationship of two people committed to each other in the face of death, not committed to each other in the raising of a family.

In this sense, both Brodkey and my father were lucky their marriages had been strong enough to survive what was not just their "infidelity" or a series of infidelities, but a fatal one that might have killed their spouses. But then—and this might be self-indulgent—I still find it hard to face that I—the only child—was not only not the center of our family life but an additional problem to be managed.

I had been packed off to my aunt's across town (closer to school) on the pretext that my father had developed a bad allergy to something in our apartment and needed to be hospitalized for tests. I swallowed this, of course, having also been raised to believe hospitals were benevolent centers of healing and research where one might check in for a while, as into a hotel. My parents did tell me eventually—that August, of 1988—my father had been hospitalized in March—and to this day the thought that he might have died away from me shocks me. I still loved my father then with an eager boy's love and still loved my mother with a practically underequipped and spoiled boy's neediness. They couldn't explain to me then, nor could they explain to themselves, that they had functionally and demonstrably turned away from me for reasons they were unequipped to fathom, let alone articulate, but which Brodkey, pleading their case for them, makes clear.

There were differences too. My father was 48 when he was diagnosed, younger than I am now. He believed he had a treatable illness, or an illness that would one day be treatable. He dove in to all the treatments and discussions of treatments, submitted to drugs and trials for drugs that probably, in the end, added to his suffering and diminished his quality of life in his last years. But it gave him (and those around him) a purpose, a reason to keep living rather than submit wholly, luxuriously, to dying. Brodkey was 62 when he began writing up his account of dying, and was entirely fatalistic, "it makes ecological sense to die while you're still productive, die and clear a space for others, old and young...I am not being cut down before I had a chance to live." He can also sound heroically resigned, "it was a middle class decision I made, nothing glorious, to try to go ahead and have AIDS, live with it for a while." Harold gets to see his garden in upstate New York, watch the seasons turn, receives a visit from his grandchildren, lays eyes once more on his beloved Venice. "And," he writes, buttressing this resignation, "I think my work will live."

He was not exactly right about that. So utterly has the landscape of American literature changed in the years since he died in 1996 that Brodkey's oeuvre is, if anything, a deep cut, a thing to be plucked from used bookstore shelves. You won't find him featured at "The Center for Fiction" or taught in MFA programs. I'd bet most editors and writers at today's New Yorker haven't touched him and might not even know he existed, let alone that he used to be a staff writer at the magazine. Certainly he is not on a high school English syllabus. In the great winnowing of "straight white male American writers" from the generation born on or around the same time, in the early 1930s, a list that includes Philip Roth, John Updike, William Styron, Cormac McCarthy, and Leonard Michaels, Brodkey's more supple, lyrical masculinity didn't quite fit into formerly idealized visions of American literary greatness—now demonized—primarily by David Foster Wallace's mansplaining of a previous generation of feminist literary critics and since parroted by "the educated" as an excuse not to read books containing cis-het penises. But neither does Brodkey have a home in the counter-canon that has since emerged. Brodkey's semi-Proustian (we'd now say autofictional) embrace of his own life (and exclusively his own life) as the matter of his art was only belatedly recognized by American literati in the shape of the big boxstore Scandinavian import of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle.

Even neglected or read only by expats and weirdos, Brodkey's work remains alive on the page, or rather he lives on through it, an enduring echo of the city I bid goodbye, a place "raunchy with words," as he put it, "menacing and lovely, the foursquare perspectives trailing down the fat avenues which were transformed in the dimming blue light of the dissolving workday. Overwhelming beauty and carelessness, the city then—one of the wonders of the world." Certainly this aliveness gleams through his account of his dying, an achievement so far unmatched by any of America's more recent generation of much fêted autofictionists. But they will get their chance.