TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112591/1125470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 98

The 30-Year Writer's Block


After much advance praise and even more delay, Harold Brodkey
finally finishes his long-awaited first novel

By STEFAN KANFER


    As the 1960s began, Farrar Straus & Giroux announced the
imminent appearance of Harold Brodkey's first novel. In the late
1970s Knopf announced the imminent appearance of Harold
Brodkey's first novel. This year Farrar Straus again announced
the imminent appearance of Harold Brodkey's first novel. By now
readers could hardly be blamed for wondering if the book was the
Great Pumpkin of American literature.

    And yet as he traveled from publishing house to publishing
house, the author lost no adherents. For almost three decades,
Brodkey managed to preserve his high reputation on the basis of
two books of evocative short stories and a handful of magazine
pieces. No other contemporary writer has so successfully
disproved the adage that you can't live on promises.

    The Brodkey legend took wing after his debut, First Love
and Other Sorrows, was published in 1958. Several critics
dubbed him the American Proust. Susan Sontag chimed in: the
author was "going for real stakes." Yale professor Harold Bloom
burbled, "If he's ever able to solve his publishing problems,
he'll be seen as one of the great writers of his day."

    No one seemed as impressed by all this as Harold Brodkey.
Consciously or unconsciously, he used the encomiums as a
strategy for not producing. "If some of the people who talk to
me are right," he told an interviewer, "well, to be possibly not
only the best living writer in English but someone who could be
the rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton is not a role
that a halfway educated Jew from St. Louis with two sets of
parents and a junkman father is prepared to play. In daydream,
yes. In real life, no."

    In daydream the novel was always approaching the finish
line. In real life Brodkey tiptoed around his writer's block,
became the father of a daughter, then went through a divorce
from the woman he had met as a Harvard undergraduate. After a
long bachelorhood he was introduced to novelist Ellen Schwamm.
Two weeks later, she left her husband of 23 years and moved into
Brodkey's cluttered Manhattan apartment. They were married in
1980. He supported himself by teaching part time at Cornell,
developing scripts at NBC and artfully freeloading. He
advertised himself as "an incredibly good dinner guest."

    The quieter his typewriter, the more voluble Brodkey
seemed to be in person. When he was not doing riffs on his own
horn ("I'm one of the people that people fight over . . . It's
just possible I am the voice of the coming age"), he was
appraising fellow authors with faint damns. "What's the point
of talking as if I were Mailer or Updike?" he demanded. "I don't
have the guts they have. I could defend myself by saying that
they're not carrying so dangerous a message, but maybe I'm
flattering myself."

    Only the work would tell, and that was invisible. Until
this month. At the age of 61, Brodkey has at last released his
magnum opus, The Runaway Soul. Physically, it is the long-
awaited Big Book. Whether The Runaway Soul deserves 835 pages
and a price tag of $30 is another matter. For if this is not the
Emperor's New Novel, neither is it Remembrance of Things Past.

    Insofar as there is any plot, Runaway Soul tracks the arc
of Wiley Silenowicz, born like his creator in 1930. Nothing is
left out, from birth to the loss of his parents, to adoption by
S.L. and Lila of St. Louis, through skirmishes with his
sadistic older stepsister Nonie to encounters with a homosexual
cousin, to the death of mother and sibling, to Wiley's
predictably awful marriage.

    En route Brodkey produces some apt similes -- "The
intimacy of a head near one's own is like the lights and doorway
of a house." And he has a phenomenal memory for childhood
experience: the arbitrary behavior of giant adults, the sudden
emotional squalls, the vivid contours of sounds and light. Once
the narrator ventures out to adolescence and beyond, it is a
different story.

    In an effort to render sensation into language, Brodkey
becomes precious, arch and even incoherent ("Rage or quasi-
pietistic acceptance, I distrust the wavering tick-tockishness
of the shrinking and of the dangerous enlargement of the self").
When he is at his most lucid, Brodkey is at his most self-
indulgent, particularly on the subject of sex. Straight or gay
adventures leave Wiley dissatisfied, possibly because he spends
so much time observing his own reactions. "I became," he notices
after one bedding, "laboratoryish about entering and going in
and out watchfully, thoughtfully." Given the narrator's vanity,
that is inevitable. All along, the man has been harvesting every
possible compliment, from a notice that half the old women in the
neighborhood have a crush on him to a judgment that he is
"nationally smart."

    Throughout these encounters Brodkey's invented terms --
"mouthy eyes," "doomfully" -- attempt to be Joycean. They are
more reminiscent of Humpty Dumpty, to whom a word meant whatever
he wanted it to mean. But three words keep the definitions
Webster's International Dictionary assigned to them: I, my, me.
Take those away and The Runaway Soul would be a very brief tale
indeed. Much has been made of the author's investigations into
the permutations of desire. The chapter headings are instructive
here. Some are merely labels: "Nonie in Love," "The River," "The
War." But one of the earliest says volumes about the volume to
follow. It is titled "The Masturbation."