posted on 04 Dec 2020

This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death by Harold Brodkey

I imagine few now remember the controversy that swirled around Harold Brodkey, the American novelist, short story writer and New Yorker contributor, in the 1980s. By many accounts (most often his own), Brodkey was a towering figure in US literature, about to fulfil his promise with a magnum opus that would stun the world. When The Runaway Soul was finally published in 1991 it sunk, gradually but certainly, almost without trace. Brodkey didn't really need a reason to become even more irascible, his giant ego yet more outraged by neglect, public misunderstanding and the blinkered idiocy of the literary establishment, but here he had one. His life’s work, this 850-page novel that would establish him as the Proust of Manhattan, dismissed as a bloated hoax.

But as it turns out, The Runaway Soul isn’t the work Brodkey is remembered for. Rather, it is this short, strange, intense memoir that he wrote from the very edge of the grave, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. There are other “AIDS memoirs” chronicling the final years of those who died from the illness, especially during the 80s and 90s, but I think it’s safe to say that there probably isn’t another quite like Brodkey’s.

Brodkey believed he contracted the disease in the New York bath-houses and gay meeting places of the 1970s but he wasn’t diagnosed as having HIV/AIDS until early-1993. And he refused to believe his doctor, a friend but one he berates throughout the book in a raging mixture of scorn, affection and grudging respect. Brodkey’s “adventures in homosexuality”, as he calls them, were so far behind him that AIDS, he believed, couldn't be the reason for his mysterious illness. And if it was, how could he inflict the intensive, punishing workload that caring for him would entail on his wife, the woman who had shared his life for decades.

Over the following 150-odd pages Brodkey describes “his death” with a kind of radical honesty. “…I am prejudiced toward a nakedness in print – toward embodiment in black-and-white,” he says. It seems that nothing is ruled out – no matter how it might reflect on himself, his wife or others.

Speaking of the early stages of his illness he is concerned primarily with the difficulties it creates in maintaining his busy literary schedule – right now, when the recognition he deserves seems to be beckoning. “Ellen [his wife] began to worry when a blackish, caved-in spot appeared in my right cheek,” he writes, “but I thought it was the macrobiotic diet I was trying to follow. The poetry of being recognized and accepted as an important writer in Berlin and then in Venice while I was sickening in some way I couldn't understand presents to me a dark beauty of complete wreckage.”

The illness may have been an immense strain on his physical and emotional energies but, as ever throughout his life, he was more concerned about his reputation, feeling “strained beyond my level of strength by the difference in reputation and treatment I received in various countries – great artist here, fool there, major writer, minor fake, villain, virtuoso, jerk, hero”.

So you see, it almost doesn't matter what critics might say or think about Brodkey – he is there before them all, anticipating and dismissing both criticism and ill-informed acclaim equally.

I still think there are some passages in this book that defy comprehension. This isn’t to say his prose or his language are especially complex, but I think his ideas are – or at least, his descriptions of those ideas, of his perceptions and of his interior life are, and in this he sometimes resembles Virginia Woolf a little in the way that sometimes she struggles to find a language that will capture the very act of consciousness. Equally, there are extraordinary passages that take the breath away – partly through their expression, and partly their audacity. Take just one example: “I have a number of kinds of humility, but I am arrogant. I am semi-famous, and I see what I see. I examine everything that is put in front of me, like a jeweler. I am a Jew from the Midwest, not at all like a New York Jew. I am so arrogant that I believe a formulation only if it has the smell or lift of inspiration. I have never, since childhood, really expected to be comforted.”

Somehow, despite its arrogance and self-regard, I think the book genuinely does achieve a kind of greatness. Perhaps you simply need to keep reading (I know I did) until you become accustomed to the tone and world-view of this extraordinary and enraging figure. Eventually I began to recognise that I was in the presence of something that hadn’t been written before, not in this way, not with such honesty – nor with such ruthless determination not to be defined by AIDS or the “gay experience", nor such scornful dismissal of both public stigma or sympathy.

Brodkey’s biggest and most over-hyped novel may have been prolix and abstruse, but death – as a review in the new York Times suggests – was the ruthless editor Brodkey had been waiting for and This Wild Darkness, his final work, is “chiseled and potent”. Let me quote its final paragraph because it is worthy of Joyce or Scott Fitzgerald – both beautiful and enigmatic:

“One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely real, without miracle – or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft…It is precarious. Peace? There was never any peace in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.”

Brodkey died in January 1996, three years after the diagnosis of his illness.

 

Alun Severn

December 2020