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1930: 25 October, born Aaron Roy Weintraub in Staunton, Illinois (father an illiterate prizefighter)
1932: mother dies, father 'sells' him
1932-50? adopted by father's cousins, Joseph and Doris Brodkey and grew up in University City, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis
1940s? nervous breakdowns
195?: published in Harvard Advocate [history]
1952: graduates Harvard; story in New Yorker
195?? Associate Professor of English at Cornell University
195?-199?: employed by New Yorker?
1959: Prix de Rome
1977: last homosexual adventure infects him? [source]
1981: meets and later marries Ellen Schwamm (2nd wife)
Brodkey told The Washington Post in 1986 that "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 half-way educated Jew from St. Louis is prepared to play."
1984: John Updike's Witches of Eastwick uses HB as model for devil?
1992: Jay McInerney lampoons HB in "Brightness Falls"
1992: greets Tina Brown at New Yorker
1993: announces AIDS in "To My Readers," New Yorker June 23
1996: died 26 January
Survivied by daughter, stepdaughter and two stepsons.
Main source: UK Times obit
Long dull 1995 interview: http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/bpq/8/feature/brodkey.html
...for him, "the use of language was an arena of permanent war, and permanent emergency and permanent collapse.""And if you talk to linguists in Israel, they're flabbergasted by the way certain games played by Arab children have passed on to districts where there have been no Arabs for thirty-something years. The mysteries of place, they do exist and they're considerable..."
RealAudio interview with widow: http://kcrw.com/c/bw1996.html
Fictional identities:
mother: Lila Silenowicz
father: Samuel Lewis--S.L Silenowicz
sister:
self: Wiley Silenowicz
lover: Orra/Ora Perkins
Publisher's page: http://henryholt.com/98-2owl/firstlovesorrows.htm
TV movie: http://us.imdb.com/Details?0192265
Quotes: [source]
"He looked like a statue that had been rubbed with honey and warm wax, to get a golden tone...""I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not."
"[My mother] and my sister would label my sister's suitors: one or two had family, one had money, one-- a poor boy-- had a brilliant future, and there were a few docile, sweet ones who were simply fillers, who represented the additional number of dates that raised my sister to the rank of a very popular girl."
"Girls liked him, and escaped easily from his clumsy longing."
"...only good-looking girls could afford to be good..."
"[When she went out on a date] there would be an air, in spite of her gaiety, of the captive about her."
Begun in 1958, this legendary novel was published only as fragments-- winning tons of short-story awards-- and eventually in 1991 a 'first installment'
Reached thousands of pages in mid-70s
Of his career as the author of one very long novel, Brodkey once said: "From the time I was 28 until I was 58, silence. New York City had seven newspapers when I started. Hemingway was alive. Faulkner was alive. Pearl Buck was still kicking around. I get some letters, and I don't recognize the world the letters are coming from."
Gordon Lish ca1992: http://salonmagazine.com/media/1998/09/01media.html
During the summer, Lish announced that Harold Brodkey's novel "Party of Animals" was the best novel of the last 50 years. Six months later, he said it should never see publication.
Passim:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/arizona.quarterly.48:1.html
includes Party of Animals pieces
aka The Abundant Dreamer? (UK?)
rewrites some of Women and Angels?
Makes Harold Bloom's "Western Canon": http://pw1.netcom.com/~qas105/278books.html
Quotes: [source]
Sentimental Education:"...here was the sort of... girl who could bestow indescribable benefits on any young man she liked-- and on his confidence."
"She rose up in clouds of brilliant light in his head whenever he came across certain words in his reading. ("Mistress" was one, "beautiful" another...)"
"'I feel I would like to give birth to him.'"
"They hadn't kissed then, nor did they kiss each other for several days afterward. It was a tacit confesion that they suspected the presence of passion, and in such cases, if one is at all practical, one stands back, one dawdles, one doesn't rush in to confront the beast in its lair. Or to put it another way, one doesn't go tampering with the floodgates."
"She couldn't help thinking that what she was with comparative strangers was much pleasanter than what she was with Elgin. With him she was capricious, untruthful, often sharp-tongued, giddy with emotions that came and went, and while one emotion might be ennobling, having six or seven in the space of an hour was undignified and not decent at all."
"Elgin still held some of her, and she would never get it back except when he was beside her."
Innocence:
"She wasn't really a girl, not really quite human: how could she be? She was a position, a specific glory, a trophy, our local upper-middle-class pseudo Cleopatra."
"She was proof of a level of sexual adventure I had not yet with my best efforts reached: that level existed because Orra existed."
"People always stared at her. Some giggled nervously. Do you like me, Orra? Do you like me at all? They stared at the great hands of the Aztec priest opening them to feelings and to awe, exposing their hearts, the dread cautiousness of their lives."
"...just to see her... offered some kind of encouragement, was some kind of testimony that life was interesting."
"To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die... Someone in actuality who had such a high immediate worth..."
Short rave: http://www.salon.com/books/bag/1999/08/23/lesser/
People either love Brodkey's work or hate it, depending largely on whether they ever met Harold. I met him, and I still love it, at its best. Its best, in this collection, are the title story, "Ceil," and one or two others, all of which focus obsessively on his own childhood and adoptive family.
Major critical fiasco, unbearably narcissistic.
HB said the book should be considered the first installment of A Party of Animals.
"The author tells of a long, intensely erotic affair between the narrator, an American novelist named Nino, and an Italian named Onni."
Time magazine blurb: http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/archive/1994/940509/940509.books.brodkey.html
Claim: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/02/04media.html
...before you curse the stifling hand of the market, look at Harold Brodkey, who wrote 1994's acclaimed "Profane Friendship" under the aegis of an Italian organization that sponsored him to live in Venice and write a novel about the city. Whatever else you say about the famously unproductive Brodkey's deal with il diavolo, it did something that, until 1991, 30-odd years of untrammeled artistic freedom had not: It got him to finish a freaking novel.
Quote:
"It's not easy to accept your own unsuitability for life. But if I do not accept it, I will throw my life away in resistance."
"It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself."
Long excerpt: http://www.haroldbrodkey.com/
Extract pending? http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/AIDS/Guide/8extract.html
...he traces both his dying and his homosexual experiences to "the major drama of [his] adolescence", daily sexual abuse by his adoptive father, with the implied knowledge and acquiescence of his mother. Writes Brodkey, "I experimented with homosexuality to break my pride, to open myself to the story." "Now I will die disfigured and in pain."
Quotes:
"I have a bed on a wooden platform--three steps up--and I lie nested at the window, from which I can see midtown and its changing parade of towers and light; birds flying past cast shadows on me, my face, my chest.""I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it -- well, it is dangerous -- but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work."
"God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle--or instruction." [source]
"Death itself is soft, softly lit, vastly dark. The self becomes taut with metamorphosis and seems to give off some light and to have a not-quite-great-enough fearlessness toward the immensity of the end of the individuality, toward one's absorption into the dance of particles and inaudibility."
Reviews: http://ww1.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneakpeeks961018.html http://www.bmjpg.com/studbmj/data/0299/data/0299r4.htm
Two short commentaries: http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/webdocs/webauthors/brodkey165-au-.html
Two-minute RealAudio review: http://www.prognet.com/rafiles/npr/password/nc6o2901-4.ram
Brodkey remarks on his confused literary standing around the world:
"...great artist here, fool there, major writer, minor fake, villain, virtuoso, jerk, hero."
Publisher's page: http://henryholt.com/98-1hh/myvenice.htm
Quotes: http://web.missouri.edu/~tselist/mharc/tse/1998-05/msg00118.html
Analysis: http://web.missouri.edu/~tselist/mharc/tse/1998-05/msg00128.html
Publisher's page: http://henryholt.com/98-2owl/worldhomelove.htm
Boston Globe: "Perhaps because of his illness, Brodkey never got around to putting these tales into coherent shape. Publishing them does not do justice to the writer's talent."
A Guest in the Universe
"during a '50s party, Wiley mean-spiritedly shoots wannabe New York Jewish intellectuals in a barrel"
Dumbness Is Everything
Excerpt: http://home.eznet.net/~patches/ws/dumbness.txt
"the standard roll in the hay told from the rationalist Romeo's point-of-view"
"Ora bends over: oh the breasts, oh the breasts, oh the `oddity' of breasts, oh the weight of recurring innocence, of virginity returned.""Sometimes conscious memory is so much sweeter than reality that compared to living I feel remembering like being gripped by an angel, the blinding brevity and the guidance," Wiley remarks.
"To be logical is to recognize the free symmetries, where one act is free-willed, sort of, and the other in response is not as free to be unsymmetrical, directly or in undermeanings or overtones. The curious movements of the selves are ambitious - male free-will ignores her. Female free-will drifts off into fantasy or other absence: love and flight, the Eurydice thing, not blinking, not looking back, not holding back. "
Waking
"takes around 40 pages to chronicle a traumatic bath given Wiley by his adoptive mother, Lila. Brodkey tries to elevate this domestic baptism into a metaphor-crammed meditation on self-consciousness while re-creating childhood sensation"
"To the child the sweetness of her voice is like a bunch of robins pulling worms from him as from a lawn after a rain.""Boredom and amusement, life and death, these are the two separate aspects of consciousness of my mind."
Bullies
Long partial etext: http://www.chron.com/cgi-bin/auth/story/content/chronicle/ae/books/9798/11/23/brodkeych1.html
"Wiley reconstructs and interprets (via Freudian play-by-play) the conversation Lila has with a rich neighbor, Ida, that flits from a subtle showdown between snotty Christian and feisty Jew to the flirtatious beginnings of a lesbian relationship."
The World Is the Home of Love and Death
"begins affectingly, with Wiley taking care of his cantankerous father, S .L., who is wasting away in his mid-40s because of a heart condition. The son's ambivalence about his dad's declining powers is unflinchingly depicted."
"My mind is a dancing cemetery with a sort of waking order of revenant moments glimpsed...""...the mind is a sort of an angel's egg of the universe and hatches stuff."
Reviews: http://www.thebookery.com/Bookstore/details.cfm/Reviewed/519.htm http://www.chron.com/cgi-bin/auth/story/content/chronicle/ae/books/9798/11/23/brodkey.html
Hatchetjob: http://boston.com/globe/search/stories/books/books97/harold_brodkey.htm
More quotes:
http://www.bookreporter.com/brc/book.asp?item=1914
"Whether writing on the New York City subway or country gardens, on presidential politics or haute couture, on Woody Allen or Walter Winchell, Brodkey was a master of the subtle and unexpected observation. Sea Battles on Dry Land gathers the best of Brodkey¹s essays into a single volume‹among them lighthearted "Talk of the Town" pieces, the prophetic "Notes on American Fascism," and a profile of Frank O¹Hara, one of the most eloquent portraits of a legendary American writer."
Publisher's page: http://www.henryholt.com/99-1hh/seabattlesondry.htm
On autobiography: http://www.easthamptonstar.com/980122/FEAT1.htm
"My mother really had cancer, but I made all the rest up."
Prefers word-processor to typewriter: http://wings.buffalo.edu/Complaw/CompLawPapers/bennink.html
Only reads when he's not writing: http://www.pw.org/mag/articles/a8311-2.htm
His punctuation pondered: http://vms.cc.wmich.edu/~carlsonn/intro/5.html
Cited as Blakean: http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake/SIE/4/4neighb.bib.html
Cited by Courtney Love: http://members.aol.com/bldyviolet/current.html
Anthologised in "Hollywood Handbook" http://msbooks.com/msbooks/media/hollywoodHandbook.html
Quoted: http://userweb.interactive.net/~johngras/
"I have thousands of opinions still -- but that is down from millions -- and, as always, I know nothing."
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/quotes/qthealth.htm
"Athletes have studied how to leap and how to survive the leap some of the time and return to the ground. They don't always do it well. But they are our philosophers of actual moments and the body and soul in them, and of our maneuvers in our emergencies and longings."
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