Innocence Harold Brodkey

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  3. About Harold Brodkey. Harold Brodkey was born in 1930 in Staunton, Illinois. He grew up in Missouri and graduated from Harvard College. Since the early 1950s, his stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker and other magazines. His many honors include two first-place O. Henry More about Harold Brodkey.

For the past thirty years Harold Brodkey has pursued a path unique in American letters. After publication of a volume of finely made short stories written in his twenties, First Love and Other Sorrows (1958), many of which first appeared in The New Yorker and were acknowledged to be of outstanding promise, Brodkey began composition of an extended prose work, portions of which have been published in magazines and journals, which has provoked a wide diversity of critical opinion—from Denis Donoghue’s claim in Vanity Fair that it is a “work of genius” to suggestions that it may be a bloated hoax. In the meantime, the work became something of an object of desire for editors; it was moved among publishing houses for what were rumored to be ever-increasing advances, advertised as a forthcoming title (Party of Animals) in book catalogs, expanded and ceaselessly revised, until its publication seemed an event longer awaited than anything without theological implications. In recent years, some critics, editors and publishing wags have begun to adopt, in relation to this native of the show-me state, what amounts to a somewhat peevish “put up or shut up” attitude, an opinion most explicitly advanced by Rhoda Koenig in New York magazine, who referring to Ernest Hemingway’s many posthumous publications bearing witness to that writer’s industry, quipped that Brodkey alive was less prolific than Hemingway dead.

Harold Brodkey, Author Alfred A. Knopf $24.95 (596p) ISBN 978-0-394-50699-9 More By and About This Author A voice all too rarely heard, Brodkey's exalted reputation is based on one collection of.

Brodkey has, however, been publishing all along—some fifty pieces since the first collection. Yet he withheld publication of the manuscript in book form, and consequently was able to elude ultimate public judgment until November of 1991, when Farrar, Strauss and Giroux published The Runaway Soul. Still, Brodkey declines to say whether this is the first of a multivolume novel, or even that this is “The Book,” the novel that had been advertised as Party of Animals. Reviews and advance notices contained divergent opinions, and still the only consensus on Brodkey’s extended prose fiction remains that it is “long awaited.”

From his first published stories to the most recent, Brodkey has treated his childhood, boyhood, and youth as if they were a well to which he could constantly return as a source of narrative. He was born in 1930 in Staunton, Illinois, and soon afterwards put up for adoption, a dislocation that provoked a severe withdrawal from the world—as a two-year-old he stopped speaking for more than two years.

He entered Harvard at sixteen, studied literature, and was an editor on the college literary magazine. He interrupted his studies for a year spent traveling in Europe. He married Joanna Brown just after graduation and soon found himself a junior executive at the NBC television network, commuting on the Harlem-Hudson line from Westchester County, where he lived with his new family. It was on this train that he planned the first writing produced in his adult life: a story, “State of Grace,” edited and published by a fellow commuter whom he knew socially—William Maxwell of The New Yorker.

Innocence Harold Brodkey

After publication of his first book of stories, he was awarded a residency fellowship in Rome by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The following years brought divorce, a brief involvement with the Group Theater, “legendary” sexual wandering, permanent residence on New York’s Upper West Side, occasional teaching positions, work as a staff writer at The New Yorker, the production of the stories “Innocence”—a touchstone, for want of a better word, of erotic literature—and “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft,” a masterpiece of reminiscence, and finally the development of his later idiosyncratic mode of narrative.

Brodkey married the novelist Ellen Schwamm in 1980, and published another collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, in 1988. Brodkey and Schwamm divide their time between an apartment on upper Broadway—the view to the south somewhat occluded now by the “luxury” apartment buildings thrown up in the development boom of the last decade—and a wood-frame Victorian house in a summer community up the Hudson.

The meetings that formed this interview took place in the Manhattan apartment. At the outset Brodkey suggested the interview should be conducted without the aid of recording equipment and that the interviewer record his impressions of the meetings afterward, maintaining that this would be the best manner in which to capture the “truth” of the encounters. Indeed, when presented with the transcript of the proceedings of the first meeting that used equipment, he complained of its quality and asserted that it bore no relation to the discussion that had taken place. Brodkey continued to be an elusive though solicitous subject.

The text that follows is based on five meetings that took place over the past three years. Once the process began, Brodkey made a habit of pronouncing “for the record” (and often most epigrammatically) on the phone when no tape recorder was available, or in a restaurant, or even at a party where no pen was at hand. Some of this additional material has been added to the text. The whole, some three hundred and fifty pages, was edited, rearranged and revised by the interviewer, by Brodkey, by the editor of this magazine, and finally deemed by the subject to be “compromised” and “tainted,” but ultimately a text he would allow to be attributed to him.

Innocence harold brodkey youtube

Conversation with Brodkey—whether in person, or on one of the many long phone calls he makes daily to friends and publishing types to check on the progress of culture, as one might inquire about the weather before venturing outside—can be an adventure. By turns immensely charming and socially clumsy, offering observations of acute honesty with an air of Delphic significance, or an opinion with the genial guardedness of a con man. Brodkey is always intelligent and engaged—often with a declarative and emotional urgency reminiscent of an actor trained in the Method school. To a degree unusual in a man his age—and he is wont to remind one that he is sixty, “an old man,” in need of indulgence—he strikes one as remarkably unformed.

On entering the New York City apartment one is confronted with a legend—a wooden placard enjoining “Deeds not Words,” an artifact, like the rest of the furniture in the house, of early nineteenth-century vernacular design from the Era of Good Feeling. Hallways extend toward the kitchen and pantries in one direction and bedrooms and studies in the other.

Brodkey’s study is a large, white-walled made-over bedroom crowded with library tables, a drafting board, outlines and notes taped to the wall, and a collection of computer equipment worthy of a bond-trading room—computer systems of different makes, a monitor, another monitor of a vertical-rectangular shape that can show a single whole page of text, printers, and a scanner that Brodkey used to input the many pages of manuscript he wrote before he went “high tech.” A long wall is lined at shoulder height with cabinets that one is assured, ominously, are fireproof.

HAROLD BRODKEY

Before we get started I just want to say one thing. When I was a kid I really did think that people would someday cheer for me, a kind of acknowledgment of what I would do as a writer. Then, when I was in my mid-thirties, I was running at the West Side Y in New York, on the track that goes around up above the basketball court, and as I ran, I watched the basketball game being played below. McBurney School was playing someone or other. They came from behind and the game went into overtime, and they won; there was this huge outburst of cheering, screaming, kicking, and stamping on the floor. People shouting. I think the track is twenty-four laps to a mile, unless that’s the swimming pool, and I was on about my twentieth lap, which is always rather an emotional time anyway, and I burst into tears, because I finally realized, you know, they’re never going to do that for a writer.

INTERVIEWER

Not unless you climb into the ring, the sports arena.

BRODKEY

Veronica Geng, who is very smart, and I were sitting around talking with George Trow and Ian Fraser. I don’t know who brought up baseball, but I said I was jealous of baseball players’ salaries; I said it bothered me that Dwight Gooden got so much more money a year for what he did than I got for what I did. So Veronica said, But Harold, Dwight Gooden goes out and delivers exaltation on a regular schedule to a great many people on a reliable basis.

INTERVIEWER

Are you beginning to feel exposed?

BRODKEY

All of a sudden, when Stories in an Almost Classical Mode came out, I moved from being a kind of amiably well-regarded nobody to being not exactly an often hated somebody, but close. But you’re not really somebody; you can’t go around assuming that an enormous number of people have read your stuff and liked it; you can’t be gracious, it isn’t like that.

INTERVIEWER

It would be nice, though, if more people would give you that opportunity to be gracious.

BRODKEY

Sure. Being an object of curiosity (and rivalry) is very peculiar when you’re no longer young. You really spend an awful lot of your time in New York just being confused about how to act. Someone like Elaine, who runs that restaurant, she helps because she places you in the hierarchy. She’ll try to tell you you’re a certain kind of person, and that’s a kind of an anchor. A lot of the time people insult you, tease you, insult your work, but sometimes it’s flirtation, or a job offer, the prelude to an alliance. When New York magazine came out with my picture on the cover a couple of years ago, I would be walking down the street and people would pass me, and then I would see the same people again, a minute later; they’d circled around to see the cover in life. And I would think, What do I do? Should I smile? Do I really like this? What’s the etiquette here? I think I did like it, but I’m not sure. It was bloody goddamn strange. On Broadway once I saw this guy about ten yards in front of me with a lively, educated, great face, smile at me. Then he began to applaud. Now, first of all, he was handsome and ironic, so I thought it was a joke. Or he was mad. But I thought, Hell, go ahead, believe it. He raised his hands and clapped them, and as we started to pass each other, he said, You’re the best. Keep it up. You too, I said stupidly. And I applauded him—I had no idea what I could do to thank him. Then there was this guy who followed me into Burger King, he asked for an autograph. He had about three coats wrapped around him, a homeless guy. I said my autograph wasn’t worth much, and I gave him a buck. He said, Sign it. The buck. I don’t know.

INTERVIEWER

Has this business about fame been a longtime concern?

BRODKEY

When I was a kid there was this show called “The Quiz Kids.” I auditioned for the producers; they asked questions, but I quit part way through. I stopped trying, because I got this sense, you see, that there was this trap, that you had to merchandise yourself, be cute on cue. And then you’d be stuck with producing that effect, that personality, all your life; you’d never escape. There was a clear association in my mind of stardom and self-destruction, so much so that when Larry Rivers said at Frank O’Hara’s funeral in the 1960s, “We all expected Frank to be the first of us to die,” that really glittered with truth. It was the same with James Dean when he got killed, and Marilyn Monroe. But I had this sense when I was a young man that you got famous and then, one way or another, you killed yourself. Or you retired—deadened, burned-out, cynical, sour. Death and fame.

INTERVIEWER

You felt from the start this . . .

BRODKEY

I’m pretty sure, looking back, that I was afraid of being mediocre, ultimately, in the light of literary history. And yet at the same time I was determined that no one was going to say I was a great writer and catch me that way. I was interested in escaping all that bullshit. It was necessary that everything I did be good of its kind but that it not present greatness as an issue. When that is attached to the aura of a writer, you get two writers, one the narrator and then another—an in-between persona, the rumored immortal running for office, the office of rumored immortality.

There’s a Yiddish word, yenta, for the sort of person who nags you all the time. Frank O’Hara was a yenta. I wasn’t someone he publicized, but twice a year he would confront me and tell me that I was a great writer, a great artist, a great thinker, whatever, and that I was just hiding. And he would say that this was despicable. He would say that the work was fantastic, that it had influenced him, but unfortunately (he would say), I was a middle-class drag, not serious about becoming famous and influencing the world. William Maxwell said many of the same things to me. I practiced evasion until I was forty.

INTERVIEWER

Evasion of what?

BRODKEY

Of being an honest, wholehearted, fame-spurred writer. A sucker. A writer—and eaten up by it. Then, when I was forty, I gave up. I stopped being evasive. I clumsily wanted to be known. An eaten man. I think—and I have some evidence from when I was a teacher—that most people who try to write can succeed but don’t want to; I would argue that psychologically they would rather daydream about creating texts and being recognized while having real lives—they would rather do that than publish, I think.

Harold Brodkey, by Howard Coale for The New Yorker, 1995
Born
October 25, 1930
Staunton, Illinois, U.S.
DiedJanuary 26, 1996 (aged 65)
OccupationWriter

Harold Brodkey (October 25, 1930 – January 26, 1996), born Aaron Roy Weintraub, was an American short-story writer and novelist.

Harold

Life[edit]

Brodkey was the second child born in Staunton, Illinois, to Max Weintraub and Celia Glazer Weintraub (1899-1932); Samuel Weintraub (1928-2017) was their oldest child. He was Jewish. When their birth mother Celia died, Samuel Weintraub was four and old enough to remain with his father but Aaron Weintraub, only two years old, was adopted by his father's cousin, Doris Rubenstein Brodkey (1896-1949) and her husband, Joseph Brodkey (1896-1946) and renamed Harold Roy Brodkey. Doris and Joseph lived in University City, Missouri, with their daughter, Marilyn Ruth Brodkey (1923-2011). Brodkey would chronicle his life with his adoptive parents and sister in his short stories and his novel, The Runaway Soul.

After graduating from Harvard University with an A.B.cum laude in 1952, Brodkey married his first wife, Joanna Brown, a Radcliffe graduate and, in 1953 their only child, Ann Emily Brodkey was born. With the aid of his editor, William Maxwell, a childhood friend of his wife, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories to The New Yorker and other magazines. His stories received two first-place O. Henry Awards. Brodkey was a staff writer for The New Yorker until the end of his life.

In 1993 he announced in The New Yorker that he had contracted AIDS; he later wrote This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (1996), about his battle with the disease. At the time of his death in 1996,[1] he was living in New York City with his second wife, novelist Ellen Brodkey (née Schwamm). Brodkey contracted the HIV virus from a homosexual relationship, though he reportedly did not consider himself to be gay.[2]

The author is most famous for his breathtaking conversational skills, his progressively more complex text and for taking 32 years to complete his much anticipated first novel, published in 1991 as The Runaway Soul.

Literary career[edit]

Brodkey's career began promisingly with the short-story collection First Love and Other Sorrows, which received widespread critical praise at the time of its 1958 publication.

Six years later he signed a book contract with Random House for his first novel, tentatively titled 'A Party of Animals' (it was also referred to as 'The Animal Corner'). The unfinished novel was subsequently resold to Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1970, then to Knopf in '79. As a Paris Review interview noted, 'The work became something of an object of desire for editors; it was moved among publishing houses for what were rumored to be ever-increasing advances, advertised as a forthcoming title (Party of Animals) in book catalogs, expanded and ceaselessly revised, until its publication seemed an event longer awaited than anything without theological implications.'[3] In 1983 the Saturday Review referred to 'A Party of Animals' as 'now reportedly comprising 4,000 pages and announced as forthcoming 'next year' every year since 1973.'[4]

During this period, Brodkey published a number of stories, most of them in The New Yorker, that dealt with a set of recurring characters—the evidently autobiographical Wiley Silenowicz and his adoptive family—and which were announced as fragments of the novel. His editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, called the novel in progress 'the one necessary American narrative work of this century.'[5] Literary critic Harold Bloom declared: 'If he's ever able to solve his publishing problems, he'll be seen as one of the great writers of his day.'[6]

In addition to publishing, Brodkey earned a living during this period by writing television pilot scripts for NBC, and teaching at Cornell University. Three long stories from 'A Party of Animals' were collected in Women and Angels (1985), and a larger number, including those three, appeared in 1988's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. Brodkey had apparently decided to omit them from the novel, for when, in 1991, he published The Runaway Soul, a very long novel (835 pages) dramatizing Wiley's early life, no material from Stories in an Almost Classical Mode was included. The novel seems to be either 'A Party of Animals' under a new title or the first volume of an eventual multivolume work. Brodkey made some comments that suggested the latter.

Brodkey's second novel, Profane Friendship, appeared in 1994.

Criticism[edit]

From the beginning of his career, Brodkey accrued detractors. Reviewing First Love for The Christian Science Monitor, Melvin Maddocks wrote that 'a sense of vital, untampered-with conflict is missing. These stories seem too patly, too cautiously worked out. They are Japanese-garden fiction with every pebble in place.' A critic for The Atlantic Monthly similarly complained that Brodkey 'appears to be the kind of artist committed to working in the minor key which The New Yorker has made fashionable.'[7]

Kirkus Reviews called Stories in an Almost Classical Mode an 'endless kvetch.'[8] In The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer found the book's tone to be 'extraordinarily arrogant and self-obsessed.' He further wrote, 'Brodkey is so fixated upon the tragic memories of his childhood and youth that he has virtually no sense of proportion about them. In one story after another, he offers up pages of gratuitous detail, straining, it seems, to squeeze every last drop of significance out of every last inane particular.'[7] Later, in assessing The Runaway Soul, Bawer wrote, 'The plain fact is that 99 percent of the prose here is gawky, aimless, repetitive, murky, and pretentious—and there are few more unenviable literary experiences than having to read over eight hundred pages of it.' He concluded that the novel was 'one of the literary fiascos of all time.'[9]

'Entering The Runaway Soul,' wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times, 'is like arriving at a monthlong house party and being accosted at the door by your host, who sticks his mouth in your face and begins to talk.' Lehmann-Haupt found the book to be replete with 'bogus philosophizing' and 'paradoxical non-art,' with prose that was 'verbose, repetitive, overstuffed with adverbs, of questionable sense, tedious and just plain ugly.'[10] In The American Scholar, Michael Dirda criticized the novel's 'consummate, unmitigated tedium.' [11]

Regarding This Wild Darkness, Brenda Bracker in The Baltimore Sun criticized the 'long and self-indulgent stretches of the author's much-touted mystical prose' and wrote that 'watching Brodkey watch himself die by inches becomes, ultimately, tedious.' [12]

Several weeks after Brodkey announced in The New Yorker in 1993 that he was suffering from AIDS, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Howard wrote in The New Republic that the disclosure was 'a matter of manipulative hucksterism, of mendacious self-propaganda and cruel assertion of artistic privilege, whereby death is made a matter of public relations.'[13]

In reviewing Brodkey's essay collection Sea Battles on Dry Land for The New York Times, Wendy Steiner wrote that although the anthology 'does contain some very good sentences,' others were 'unspeakable,' e.g. 'A car simply is too weak and too complex to be a good symbol, since neither does it plow, and it does not weep either.' Moreover, 'Brodkey's philosophizing alternates between deconstruction-rivaling nonsense and delusional pieties.'[14]Kirkus Reviews complained that in these 'self-involved, prolix' essays, 'Brodkey seems to be parodying both himself and The New Yorker.' Among the offending examples cited were 'a superannuated New Journalism style piece on the Academy Awards,' 'pompously irrelevant analyses of the 1992 presidential campaign,' and 'preciously insubstantial vignettes' for The New Yorker's 'Talk of the Town' section.[15] 'If, for some reason, you consider yourself a New York intellectual, Sea Battles on Dry Land might encourage you to secede from the tribe,' wrote Susie Linfield in her review of the book for The New York Observer. 'When [Brodkey] is bad, he is very, very bad, and he is very, very bad quite often. Sea Battles is filled with whoppers: misstatements, overstatements, nonstatements and statements that are silly, false or incomprehensible.'[16]

Bibliography[edit]

Short-story collections[edit]

  • First Love and Other Sorrows (1958, ISBN0-8050-6010-3)
  • Women and Angels (1985, ISBN0-8276-0250-2) (3 stories, all later included in his 1988 collection).
  • Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988, ISBN0-679-72431-1)
  • The World is the Home of Love and Death (1997, ISBN0-8050-5999-7)

Novels[edit]

Innocence Harold Brodkey Quotes

  • The Runaway Soul (1991, ISBN0-374-25286-6)
  • Profane Friendship (1994, ISBN0-374-52973-6)

Non-fiction[edit]

  • This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (1996, ISBN0-8050-4831-6)
  • My Venice (1998, ISBN0-8050-4833-2)
  • Sea Battles on Dry Land: Essays (1999, ISBN0-8050-6052-9)

References[edit]

  1. ^Dinitia Smith (January 27, 1996). 'Harold Brodkey, 65, New Yorker Writer And Novelist, Dies of Illness He Wrote About'. The New York Times.
  2. ^Brodkey, Harold (7 February 1994). 'Dying: An Update'. The New Yorker. Retrieved 28 October 2015.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  3. ^Paris Review, Winter, 1991.
  4. ^Saturday Review (U.S. magazine), December 1983.
  5. ^Newsweek, November 18, 1991.
  6. ^Time, November 25, 1991.
  7. ^ ab'A genius for publicity by Bruce Bawer - The New Criterion'. newcriterion.com. Retrieved 2015-09-01.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  8. ^'an endless kvetch'. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/harold-brodkey-2/stories-in-an-almost-classical-mode/#review
  9. ^'Image: big&bad5.jpg, (1696 × 2200 px)'. brucebawer.com. Archived from the original on 2015-07-16. Retrieved 2015-09-01.
  10. ^Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (November 11, 1991). 'Books of The Times; Long in the Making, a Long Book About One Mind'. The New York Times.
  11. ^https://theamericanscholar.org/a-positively-final-appearance/#.VoEeEShbzzI
  12. ^'Harold Brodkey's 'Darkness' -- journal of dying - tribunedigital-baltimoresun'. articles.baltimoresun.com. Retrieved 2015-09-01.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  13. ^'Harold Brodkey, 65, New Yorker Writer And Novelist, Dies of Illness HeWrote About - NYTimes.com'. nyti.ms. Retrieved 2015-09-01.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  14. ^'Teeming Isolation'. nyti.ms. 1999-05-09. Retrieved 2015-09-01.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  15. ^'SEA BATTLES ON DRY LAND by Harold Brodkey | Kirkus'. kirkusreviews.com. Retrieved 2015-09-01.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
  16. ^http://observer.com/1999/04/the-late-immortal-brodkey-a-hollow-core-at-the-center/

External links[edit]

  • 'People: Harold Brodkey', The New York Times
  • James Linville (Winter 1991). 'Harold Brodkey, The Art of Fiction No. 126'. Paris Review.
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