Obituary: Harold Brodkey

The ambition endemic in American writers cripples talent as much as nurtures it. Harold Brodkey was a gifted writer who became virtually a caricature of the American rites of celebrity.

Although what he wrote was consistently autobiographical, his work did not suffer from a public confusion of his writing with his personality - as with Norman Mailer. Neither, as a very social member of New York's literary scene, did he opt for a reclusive life which, as in the case of Thomas Pynchon, paradoxically focuses public attention all the more on the writer himself. Instead, Brodkey became famous for what he had not written, and celebrated internationally for the novel that was to come.

Even without benefit of this most perverse kind of fame, Brodkey's life was unusual, his talent remarkable. He was born in the Midwest in 1930, and raised there by cousins of his mother after she died when he was two. The shock of this loss resulted in a two-year silence as a small boy that allowed him, as he later suggested, to develop an almost obsessive ability to take things in quickly: "I learnt to read in about 30 seconds . . . I was so abominably bright as a child there was no limit to my social acceptability."

The precocity was lifelong, but so too was the sense of loss fostered by his mother's death, and by the death of both his adopted parents in his teens.

From the Midwest Brodkey went to Harvard, then in the early 1950s moved to New York and married for the first time. He soon began to place stories in the New Yorker, and a first collection, well received, appeared in 1958.

On the surface this all augured well; comparisons could be aptly drawn between the Brodkey of the late 1950s and John Updike, also a Harvard graduate and precocious contributor to the New Yorker. Yet, where Updike's career took a steady and upward path of accomplishment (Rabbit, Run was to appear in 1960), Brodkey's stalled. He continued to write stories, some of which appeared in a collection almost 30 years later, but he also contracted in 1964 to write a novel. Not even Sisyphus on his very first push uphill could have been so unaware of the true burden being assumed.

The Runaway Soul, Brodkey's novel, appeared in 1991, but it was during the quarter-century of its intermittent composition that Brodkey became truly famous. His collection Stories in an Almost Classical Mode appeared in 1988, many of them very good indeed. "Innocence", an account of a sexually voracious affair with a beautiful young woman ("To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die"), stands out for its candour, and the title story, about the death of his adopted mother, is made the more moving by the dispassion of the narrator's account. But it was the novel which literary society was waiting for; nothing else would do.

It may seem hard to understand why. True, Brodkey was already recognised as a talented writer of stories whose natural next move, in conventional American literary terms, would be the "big book" or novel. Also, as a New Yorker contributor living in the city, socially (and sexually) active, a powerful personality who was tall and attractive to boot, Brodkey was the natural object of the gossip and talk that make up much of a putative literary reputation. But neither explanation fully accounts for the fame this non-performance grew into. It was, in the final analysis, as if America wanted a non-existent masterpiece, and one created by a writer (unlike J.D. Salinger) willing to talk about it.

Inevitably, when The Runaway Soul appeared, there was an almost universal sense of let-down. Little of it had much to do with the merits of the book, for encumbered with such expectations the authors of the Gospels themselves would have suffered at the hands of reviewers. Only Salman Rushdie stood out prominently as a Brodkey defender, pointing out the many richnesses of the author's prose, accepting its many longueurs (The Runaway Soul is over 800 pages long), while defending its "huge carnival of language".

Certainly the strength and themes of Brodkey's stories recur in the longer work. The dissection of sexual development and emergence of bisexuality shock less than they would have at the time of the book's commissioning, but may be more interesting for that. The details of ordinary Midwestern life are incessantly conveyed, as if the miniaturist preoccupations of Nicholson Baker have been put in larger hands. The Proustian conviction that linear narratives are inauthentic tools for capturing life makes for confusing juxtapositions, but sometimes powerful ones. The weakest element in the novel is the unevenness of its prose. When straightforward and descriptive it is effective:

Then you come to another sunny district - puritanical little gardens, garden beds, dry-looking rural lawns, clean ditches alongside the road, and fewer trees, and those are topped or pruned or solitary in wide spaces. Nothing is hidden. A single tractor moves at the far end of a dipping and swelling field. A moronic boy sits in a kitchen chair with a doll and near him a sad woman is peeling potatoes over a wash tub.

When abstract and self- consciously intelligent it is ponderous, pretentious:

It is somehow part of the substance, the very quality of my mind, to conceive of goodness as absolute, unchanging, as solid and philosophical, and of evil as cloudy, interpretable, changeable, capable of redemption, worldly, temporal. But that is the mind's doing. That conception hardly matches actuality or my own thought but is a shadowy thing, an absolutist notion of the matter . . . traditional . . . since goodness is temporal, too, is as cloudy, interpretable, changeable, as ridden by storyness.

The hostile reaction to his novel was devastating to Brodkey; in bleaker moments he suggested it may have brought on the full-blown Aids he died from. Curiously, however, it also seems to have liberated him as a writer, and another novel, Profane Friendship, was published in 1994. Again, it did not enjoy good reviews but was sufficiently distinctive to suggest a considerable talent at work. As his illness took hold, Brodkey continued to write, including two powerful essays on his own Aids for the New Yorker. These are notable less for their revelations about his homosexual past than for the mix of personal preoccupation and detachment while facing death: "It's my turn to die," he wrote. "I can see that that is interesting to some people, but not that it is tragic."

The self-absorption found in all Brodkey's work is present, but the self- importance is now moderated. At last, Brodkey's reputation - whatever its fortunes to come - will be for what he wrote, not for what he failed to.

I first met Harold Brodkey in 1991 when, in company with his wife Ellen Schwamm, he came to London to promote The Runaway Soul, writes Gilbert Adair. As one of the very few British critics to have praised the novel - as, apparently, one of the very few critics to have read it from its first page to its last - I was rung up by The Late Show, which was (rather desperately, was my impression) looking for someone to interview him. I accepted, hastened along to meet him at Television Centre and almost instantly fell under his spell.

I say almost, for Brodkey's charm was of the so-called "disarming" kind which normally has one reaching for one's revolver. How can he - I wondered suspiciously - be so ingratiating to a total stranger and really mean it? Surely it has to be a pose? Yet it soon became evident that Harold Brodkey charmed as he breathed; and on our subsequent encounters in New York he passed every traditional test of sincerity and affection. If I were delayed returning to my hotel for an appointment with him, I would find him sitting patiently in the lobby. If I left a message on his answering machine, the call would infallibly be returned. If we had a dinner date, he would be in the restaurant before me. He was, to be sure, an incurable narcissist - but, considering his behavioural elegance and conversational brilliance, who could blame him?

The last time I saw him he was already dying. I rode up in the elevator of his West 88th Street apartment block bracing myself for the shock that I expected to receive from his physical deterioration. I ought to have known better: apart from a few extra grey circles around his eyes, he looked terrific. It was typical of Brodkey that, at that stage of his condition at least, he contrived to be terminally ill in the photogenic way that movie characters are.

Although he had clearly been pained by The Runaway Soul's less than unanimous critical reception, he had never lost faith in its enduring qualities. Nor had I. In our conversation that afternoon I told him I thought his novel such a giant, baggy monster of genius, it had had the effect of obscuring its own context, thereby frustrating those reviewers who can only function by "contextualising" works of literature. "Yes," he sighed, "I suppose I'm what's called a near-great writer." In that "near", in that exquisitely lucid qualification of his own vanity, there was all of Harold Brodkey.

Aaron Roy Weintraub (Harold Roy Brodkey), writer: born Staunton, Illinois 25 October 1930; author of First Love and Other Sorrows 1958 (revised edition 1986), Women and Angels 1985, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode 1988, The Runaway Soul 1991, Profane Friendship 1994; married 1952 Joanna Brown (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1962), 1980 Ellen Schwamm; died New York 26 January 1996.