The New Criterion

What does it say about contemporary American culture that two of the most celebrated novels of our time have never, in fact, seen print—namely, Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers and Harold Brodkey’s A Party of Animals? Think of it: for decades, while many a gifted but obscure novelist presented his work to the world only to emerge with his gifts and his obscurity intact, both Capote and Brodkey garnered an astonishing amount of media attention and critical acclaim simply by offering, in place of their respective long-awaited masterworks, the occasional newsy tidbit about how the works-in-progress were coming along and how magnificent they were going to be. Both writers demonstrated the peculiar truth that in this media-centered age, a book that actually exists between hard covers is news for only one day, while a book that remains little more than a gleam in its author’s eye can stay news for years. For a time, Capote was considerably ahead of Brodkey on the publicity meter, but now that Capote is gone and Knopf is issuing a collection of Brodkey’s work, entitled Stories in an Almost Classical Mode,[1] the file of prominent magazine pieces on Brodkey is growing apace, so that he may yet overtake Capote as the twentieth-century American writer most celebrated for a book he’s never published.

In recent months his slender, bearded face has stared out from the pages of New Tork, which entitled its cover story (by Dinitia Smith) “The Genius,'* and Vanity Fair, in which James Wolcott concluded that “the lesson of Harold Brodkey’s career is that genius can be both too much and not enough.” Similar “lessons,” it will be remembered, were once drawn about Capote; it is interesting that Brodkey, like the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, thinks of himself as a genius and enjoys working the high I. Q. scores of his childhood into his stories and interviews.

A Party of Animals dates back almost as far as Answered Prayers. Capote planned his would-be magnum opus as early as 1958; Brodkey signed a contract with Random House for his book in 1964, moving in 1970 to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in 1979 (after Farrar, Straus had advertised the novel’s impending publication in a number of its seasonal catalogues) to Knopf. As was the case with Answered Prayers, supposed excerpts of Brodkey’s novel-in-progress have been published along the way in magazines—Esquire, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Partisan Review. As Capote talked about his book right up till his death in 1984—describing its structure, pace, and atmosphere in such elaborate detail that his complete recorded comments on the subject, if brought together by some enterprising professor, might well add up to a most unusual document: the Monarch Notes to a non-existent novel—so Brodkey has discussed at length the specifications of A Party of Animals.

There’s one striking difference between the two writers, however: whereas Capote had already established himself as a first-rate writer when the Answered Prayers saga began, Brodkey had, until this year, published only one full-length work—a short-story collection entitled First Love and Other Sorrows (1958). To examine the stories in First Love—an exercise which can provide a highly instructive prolegomenon to a perusal of Stories in an Almost Classical Mode—is to be surprised that its author’s unpublished work could be the focus of so much feverish speculation. For First Love is a decidedly unspectacular item—an assemblage of quiet, innocuous little fictions about Midwestern boyhood, campus romance, and young marrieds. Since eight of the nine stories appeared originally in The New Yorker, it should not be surprising that the campus is invariably that of Harvard University, that the young marrieds are invariably fainter, more plastic versions of John Cheever’s vaguely discontented New York suburbanites, and that the style is invariably spare, precise, graceful, and passionless. In most of these stories, every detail seems shamelessly tailored to the requirements of 1950s New Yorker fiction. As Melvin Maddocks wrote in a review of First Love for The Christian Science Monitor, “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.” The reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly agreed, noting that Brodkey “appears to be the kind of artist committed to working in the minor key which The New Yorker has made fashionable.”

Yet not all the stories in First Love are equally contrived. The first three stories in the book—“The State of Grace,” “First Love and Other Sorrows,” and “The Quarrel"—are all told in the first person (the others are in the third person), and each of them manifestly derives from the author’s own youth. They have a touch of genuine feeling and originality that the remaining stories in the book don’t have; their boy protagonists are the only characters in First Love who come alive. Perhaps the most memorable of these three stories is “The State of Grace,” whose protagonist is a thirteen-year-old resident of St. Louis; as in Brodkey’s later, more blatantly autobiographical stories of boyhood, the narrator makes a point of how tall he was, how attractive, how brilliant (“I always had the highest grades—higher than anybody who had ever attended the schools I went to—and I terrified my classmates”), and how “remarkable”: “I was smart and virtuous .. . and fairly attractive, maybe even very attractive. I was often funny and always interesting. I had read everything and knew everything and got unbelievable grades. Of course I was someone whose love was desired. Mother, my teachers, my sister, girls at school, other boys—they all wanted me to love them.” (This—like many of Brodkey’s later stories—leads one to wonder: Was any child ever so admired?) The story concerns the thirteen-year-old’s relationship to one of these “other boys"— a “precocious and delicate” seven-year-old neighbor for whom our protagonist babysits and with whom he identifies, since he feels that both he and the child are unloved and unappreciated by their parents. Yet he doesn’t give the boy his love because the boy, like everyone else, doesn’t love him: “I was fierce and solitary and acrid .. . and there was no one who loved me first. I could see a hundred cravennesses in the people I knew, a thousand flaws, a million weaknesses. If I had to love first, I would love only perfection.” The story ends with a rather touching paragraph, the last sentence of which is, in its modest way, probably the most emotionally unrestrained in a very restrained book:

Really, that’s all there was to this story. The boy I was, the child Edward was. That and the terrible desire to suddenly turn and run shouting back through the corridors of time, screaming at the boy I was, searching him out, and pounding on his chest: Love him, you damn fool, love him.

Of the nine stories in First Love, it is the three stories of boyhood that prefigure the direction Brodkey was to follow in his later work; and of all the sentences in the book, it is perhaps the closing sentence of “The State of Grace” that comes closest to the passionate, oracular prose for which Brodkey would become famous. To read Brodkey’s debut volume is to recognize that it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea for him to pursue the Midwestern-boyhood material that his later stories would obsess over; on the contrary, any reader who looked at First Love in 1958 would have had to conclude—from the strength of “The State of Grace,” “First Love and Other Sorrows,” and “The Quarrel,” relative to the other stories—that if Brodkey wanted to produce fresh and lyrical fiction, he would stand a better chance of doing so if he abandoned the college-romance and young-suburbanite material and concentrated instead on the imaginative treatment of themes drawn from his boyhood. Yet those three stories also contain intimations of some of the cardinal failings of Brodkey’s later fiction—namely, his egocentrism, his indifference to plot, and even (in that closing sentence of “The State of Grace”) his addiction to sentimental, self-pitying, and overheated prose.

To be sure, the first five stories in Brodkey’s new book do not exhibit these failings in profusion. Published in The New Yorker between 1963 and 1969, they are, like the majority of stories in First Love, typical New Yorker stories, if with a few significant differences from those Fifties narratives: longer, darker, more adventurous, they represent the New Yorker story at a somewhat later stage in its development, the mid-to-late-Sixties era of, say, Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” The earliest and longest of them, “The Abundant Dreamer,” makes use of a present-tense narrative and a generous number of flashbacks to tell the story of Marcus Weill, a highly regarded Jewish-American film director who reacts with apparent indifference when told, on the set of his movie in Rome, that his grandmother has just died. Gradually, the flashbacks reveal to us the intricate set of circumstances and feelings behind that reaction, and what ultimately emerges is a rather affecting evocation of the emotionally fragile boy that stands behind, and to an extent still exists within, this egocentric and seemingly self-sufficient man of consequence. Perhaps it is needless to say that there are strong similarities between Weill and Brodkey, both abundant dreamers: like Brodkey, Weill is a “genius” with a complex relationship to his Jewishness and his past; as Brodkey was raised by relatives after his mother’s death, so Weill was raised after his parents’ divorce by his grandmother. What’s more, when Brodkey writes about Weill that “a movie is to him primarily an arrangement of recognitions, an allée laid out so that at every step what is being seen alters the sense of what has been seen,” Brodkey appears to be offering as well, by implication, his own definition of fiction. Yet “The Abundant Dreamer” is not merely a document in self-absorption or a meditation on memory; it is an objective short story in which Brodkey does not confuse himself with Weill, does not place Weill on a pedestal, does not treat Weill’s thoughts on art and Judaism and death as holy writ. Though deeply felt and abundantly human, the story steers clear of rhetorical excess; in terms of style and structure, it is as elegant as anything else Brodkey has ever published.

In nearly the same league is “Bookkeeping” (1968), the story of an evening on which Avram Olensky, a thirtyish New York Jew, finds himself caught in the crossfire between his self-destructive Dutch friend Annetje—whose parents both perished in World War Two and who is experiencing the aftereffects of an LSD “experiment"— and his dinner guests, a well-to-do New England WASP and her German husband, neither of whom sympathizes with Annetje’s predicament.; Inevitably, the conversation turns to the Holocaust, to questions of collective guilt and individual responsibility. As in “State of Grace” and “The Abundant Dreamer,” the nature of love and friendship figures importantly here; Avram must weigh compassion against gratitude, must determine the extent of his various obligations to his friends. Here, too, as in “The Abundant Dreamer” (though not quite so fully as in “The State of Grace"), the protagonist can be identified with Brodkey himself; as in both “The Abundant Dreamer” and “The State of Grace,” furthermore, the protagonist’s love and compassion seem to be regarded by both protagonist and author as favors, as gifts to be bestowed or withheld, often for strategic reasons. As the boy in “The State of Grace” refuses to confer his love upon his seven-year-old charge, and as the director in “The Abundant Dreamer” decides that he doesn’t have time to “fend off death” for his grandmother, so “Bookkeeping” ends with Avram contemplating not the tragedy of Annetje’s life but his own virtue in being so kind to her. Is Brodkey out to make a point about human self-centeredness? It doesn’t seem so. He doesn’t even appear to be aware that these characters are self-centered; to his mind, this is simply the way people think about things. In the world according to Brodkey, true selflessness doesn’t exist.

By far the slightest of these five Sixties stories is the short, facile “On the Waves” (1965), which depicts the unspoken rapprochement—in a Venetian gondola, of course, this being a New Yorker story— between a divorced ex-tennis player and his less-than-believable seven-year-old daughter (who finds Venice “insincere”). The remaining Sixties stories are somewhat more impressive, though not without crucial weaknesses. “Hofstedt and Jean— and Others” (1969) is about a forty-five-year-old English professor’s romance with a student less than half his age; despite certain merits, the story is rather too long and diffuse, crowded with extraneous and redundant details in what comes across as an amateurish attempt to capture its characters completely and definitively. The ultimate point seems to be that Jean’s attraction, for Hofstedt, resides less in her inherent charms than in the fact that she reminds his old college buddy of the buddy’s wife when she was young. Hofstedt’s affair, in short, is essentially a consequence of the two men’s puerile competitiveness, which dates back to their days at Harvard (where they were; naturally, the top two students in their class). Though Hofstedt never tires of analyzing his own thoughts and feelings, he pays little heed to Jean’s; indeed, he hardly makes an effort to know what they are. His commentary upon her is confined chiefly to expressions of admiration for her body, cruel ridicule of her use of slang, and a superior, dismissive attitude toward her deepest expressions of affection. Essentially, his take on: the relationship amounts to: I’m too good for her, of course, but being as vulnerable as the next man to human folly I find her youth and beauty irresistible. Is Brodkey’s purpose here to satirize Hofstedt for this self-absorption? Decidedly not. There’s no ironic distance at all between this author and his obnoxious protagonist; in fact, Brodkey seems not to realize for a moment just how obnoxious Hofstedt is. At one point in the story a friend tells- Hofstedt that he “occupies] a private world,” and this story is unquestionably set in that world. It is Hofstedt’s emotions and observations, and no one else’s, which we are supposed to take seriously.

Only the last of Brodkey’s Sixties narratives has a female protagonist. “The Shooting Range” (1969) chronicles the life of a middle-class woman named Ann Kampfel from the time of her romance, at age twenty, with a factory foreman in a small Illinois town, to her long, not particularly happy marriage to a Washington bureaucrat. Bouncing along from one period of Ann’s life to the next, the story doesn’t pause often to render Ann’s thoughts in any depth, but instead concentrates upon capturing the shifting currents of her romantic life over the years. The picture of Ann never quite comes together: though she is a believable character, one feels as if one knows her only from a distance, like a neighbor glimpsed every so often from across the street. When Brodkey tells us that “Ann never contemplated infidelity [because] it would make Fennie [her husband] unhappy,” we accept the explanation, but we don’t feel as if we know Ann well enough to be certain that she would actually think this way. We don’t know why: she leaves the foreman (whom she loves) of why she marries the bureaucrat (whom she. doesn’t) or why she doesn’t pursue the career for which she prepared in college. What We do know about her is not very endearing: she’s grim and humorless and fatalistic, and in her whole life, as Brodkey gives it to us, there is hardly a moment of real joy or even lighthearted-ness; she derives no apparent pleasure from her husband, her children, or the privileges of her fife in Washington. Brodkey’s point, however, is not that this is an exceedingly dour woman, but that life can be an exceedingly dour affair.

He seems also to want to make a point about class. At the beginning of this extremely long story, Ann has been talked by a college boyfriend into being a Communist, a believer in “the brotherhood of man and the release of men from economic pressures that distorted them and their fives” (the year is 1934); the foreman persuades her easily enough to leave the Party, and she goes on to lead the life of a typical bureaucrat’s wife. Yet it is not until the end of the story that she, now the mother of two grown daughters, complains she’s “turning middle-class… Why is that, Fennie?” It’s a disappointing conclusion; one feels cheated to have come all this way for so feeble a fare-thee-well. It isn’t even clear whether we're expected to mourn with Ann over her middle-class metamorphosis or laugh at her for not realizing that she’s been middle-class all her life. Perhaps we're supposed to recognize Ann’s seemingly automatic and self-defeating life choices as having been a consequence of her middle-class mentality; if so, however, the first forty-one of the story’s forty-two pages must be considered extremely ineffective— for there is little justification in these pages for blaming Ann’s confusing behavior on the class into which she was born. Even discounting the class-mentality theme, the story is a weak one. In its shape and tone, and of course in its attempt to present an entire unremarkable life in unadorned fashion, it much resembles Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple”; but any reader who recognizes this similarity must be struck at once by everything that Flaubert has and that Brodkey lacks: not only poignancy and moral rigor, but also a humility before life, an affection for one’s characters, and an instinctive awareness that one is addressing an audience.

Brodkey’s four substantial Sixties stories, then, have their failings. To be sure, they are all highly readable, even compelling, and are blessed with poise and grace; unlike most of the stories in First Love, they have the texture of real life, and their characters convince. But to read through them in chronological order is to feel increasingly that they are the work of an author who is eager to render an extremely complicated vision of life, but who either has not yet brought that vision into focus or has not yet arrived at a satisfactory means of communicating it. To put it another way, Brodkey wants us to climb inside his skin— or a skin that is very much like his own— and to experience what it is like there, but he is incapable of giving us our bearings; he speaks to us in a language of the heart, but it is a language that is not quite our own, and is one for which he has failed to provide a lexicon. So it is that the protagonists of these four sizable Sixties stories—Marcus Weill, Avram Olensky, Leo Hofstedt, and Ann Kampfel—are alive enough to make one believe in them and to make one angry at them, but they never grow quite familiar enough to make one understand them or care about them.

It was, of course, not these Sixties stories but those of the Seventies and Eighties that catapulted Harold Brodkey into a position of eminence enjoyed by few writers in our time. Thirteen in number, these stories occupy more than two-thirds of Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. Turning the page after the end of “The Shooting Range” and beginning the first of these stories— “Innocence,” originally published in the American Review in 1973—one crosses a boundary into an utterly different world. Suddenly. Brodkey’s prose is loose, talky, even offhand The sense of control that is. evident throughout his earlier work has disappeared. Brodkey makes, little attempt to disguise the fact that he and his. protagonist—here, as in most of these later stories, called Wiley Silenowicz—are essentially the same person. He make’s little attempt, indeed, to pretend that what he is giving us is fiction and not autobiography. Toward the beginning of “Innocence,” Brodkey unleashes what is, in view of his previous output, a remarkable manifesto:

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with where it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.

At the time of its original publication, a reader of “Innocence” might not have made much of this passage, but to read it where it appears in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode is to recognize it as a veritable declaration of independence on Brodkey’s part—independence, that is, from the obligation to transfigure his obsessions, into fiction, from the obligation to rein, in his Angst and to surmount his morbid self-obsession and to edit his rambling ruminations into something well-crafted and coherent. If in his stories of the Sixties he sought an effective means of rendering his authorial vision in fictional terms, in “Innocence” he abandons that attempt, essentially renouncing, in his manifesto,, the very concept of fiction. His true interest, after all, lies not in imagined fives—or, for that matter, in. the real lives of other people—but in the tormented history of his own soul; with “Innocence” he announces his unwillingness to persist in pretending otherwise: his refusal to continue hiding behind some fictional characters and feigning curiosity about others, his impatience to serve up reams of vatic, well-nigh stream-of-consciousness prose in place of the taut, polished sentences he’d produced for two decades. Just as another New Yorker writer, J.D. Salinger, had turned from the compact, civilized prose of his Nine Stories to manic, effusive excursions into the eccentric world of the Glass family, so Brodkey now put his New Yorker stories of the Fifties and Sixties behind him and embarked upon a frenzied, fanatical voyage into himself.

To read “Innocence” and most of the stories that follow, then—the majority of which have been identified, at one time or another, as sections of A Party of Animals is to find oneself trapped within the extraordinarily arrogant and self-obsessed soul of Harold Brodkey, a.k.a. Wiley Silenowicz, and condemned again and again to relive his agonizing childhood and youth. Brodkey’s is, to be sure, a genuinely tragic personal history. He was born in 1930 in Staunton, Illinois, with the name of Aaron Roy Weintraub. His mother died when he was an infant, whereupon his father, an illiterate junk man, allowed him to be adopted by relatives named Doris and Joseph Brodkey; these new parents renamed him Harold Roy Brodkey, and raised him in a St. Louis suburb named University City. When Brodkey was nine, his adoptive father had a stroke or heart attack and became an invalid, finally passing away when the boy was fourteen; when he was thirteen, his adoptive mother came down with cancer, and lingered on for years in pain and bitterness, finally dying while Brodkey was an undergraduate at Harvard. Wiley shares every bit of this personal history with Brodkey, the chief differences being that Wiley’s adoptive parents are named not Doris and Joseph but Lila and S. L.

Life with Lila and S.L., as recounted in these stories, is hardly Life with Father. In “A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” (i973)» Brodkey/Wiley describes a typical day of his youth: “I would come home from school to the shadowy house, the curtains drawn and no lights on, or perhaps one, and she [Lila] would be roaming barefooted with wisps of hair sticking out and her robe lopsided and coming open.” If he said hello, she would scream: “Is that all you can say? I’m in pain. Don’t you care? My God, my God, what kind of selfish person are you? I can’t stand it.” If he said, “Hello, Momma, how is your pain?” she would scream: “You fool, I don’t want to think about it! It was all right for a moment! Look what you've done—you've brought it back . . . . I don’t want to be reminded of my pain all the time!” In either case, she would end up yelling: “Do you think it’s easy to die?. . . Do something for me! Put yourself in my place! Help me! Why don’t you help me?” One cannot read this sort of thing without feeling profound sympathy for Harold Brodkey and for the boy he was; if even a fraction of his anecdotes about his childhood and youth are true—and taking into account, as well, the distinct possibility that Brodkey is giving us a very one-sided view of things—then it is certainly a great credit to him that he survived and prospered. To criticize him for his continued fixation upon such memories would be not only unfair but heartless.

Yet a critic who is faced with the task of passing judgment on these stories—and of evaluating, as well, the legitimacy of the reputation that they have gained—cannot, alas, do anything other than criticize most of them. For the fact is that 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. Whole paragraphs are devoted to such matters as his adoptive mother’s pet phrases, her opinions on a multitude of subjects, the way she dressed, the way she walked. Though these stories contain a number of affecting—and even emotionally draining— passages, the adversities and tensions and interrelationships and tastes and daily routines of the family in which Brodkey grew up are described so extensively and repeatedly that the ultimate effect of these stories is almost invariably one of numbing monotony. As a rule, not only is there no plot—there’s no movement whatsoever. What power the stories do have is primarily not aesthetic but documentary in nature; the young Brodkey’s diary, if he'd kept one, would doubtless be just as powerful, and in precisely the same way. Indeed, to all intents and purposes these stories do amount to a diary, the record of a man talking to himself about himself. Take “A Story in an Almost Classical Mode,” for instance: it is not until the story’s final sentence that Brodkey seems at all aware of or concerned about his audience, and even then his awareness comes across as little more than an afterthought. “Make what use of this you like,” he says, effectively admitting that, aside from sheer confession, he doesn’t really know what his intention here has been.

And confession is certainly the word for most of these stories. Brodkey is baldly, brutally, shamelessly confessional, speculating about his boyhood state of mind in the tireless, self-absorbed manner of a patient on a psychiatrist’s couch: “...perhaps I was not a very loving person. Perhaps I was self-concerned and a hypocrite .... Perhaps I just wanted to get out with a whole skin.” That such narcissistic maunderings fail to get us anywhere doesn’t appear to matter to Brodkey; he seems to think that they are in themselves somehow equivalent to self-knowledge. If there is a reason for his obsessive, seemingly pointless accumulation of remembered details, it appears to be that he believes the more details he sets down, the more satisfactory a catharsis he will achieve. As for the rest of us, he seems to be suggesting, we can bloody well sit back and watch. Most writers feel that they have to earn a reader’s attention; the Brodkey of these Seventies and Eighties pieces has the earmarks of someone who feels he has an inalienable right to that attention. If there is considerable anger at large in the last several hundred pages of Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, it may well be the anger of a man who is furious at the world for expecting him to earn the attention he believes he received unbidden when he was the star of the seventh grade.

So similar are most of these recent Brodkey stories that it would be an exercise in Brodkeyan monotony to describe them all in detail. This is not to suggest that there are?no distinctions to be made. Two of the stories—Brodkey’s Gospels, we might call them—provide most of the principal family facts, and are so long and windy that, to the reader determined to get through them, they seem positively Saharalike. Both center on our boy hero’s relationship with his adoptive mother; one is “A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” (in which Brodkey and his parents, incidentally, go by their real names) and the other is “Largely an Oral History of My Mother” (1976). These twin dissertations repeat each other almost as extensively as they do themselves. Two other stories are much shorter and markedly more tolerable. The sixteen-page “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft” (1975) makes use of a single exhilarating memory—of being lifted into the air, as a child, by his father (here christened “Charlie")—as the focal point for a meditation on their relationship; unlike most of these stories, it has at least a hint of shape and of literary purpose, and rather movingly recalls a father who had moments of “accidental glory.” The nine-page “Puberty” (1975), a recollection of an experience in the Boy Scouts, is very slight, but is also the most straightforward and well written of the post-"Shooting Range” pieces. Other stories seem more peripheral, and read like forced attempts by Brodkey to develop themes from his childhood which he'd given relatively short shrift elsewhere. “Play” (1973) is a pallid twenty-one-page discourse on the games he played at age eleven; “Ceil” (1983) unconvincingly addresses the subject of the biological mother that Brodkey never knew; “The Nurse’s Music” (1988) centers on his governess, “The Pain Continuum” (1976) on his sister, and “The Boys on their Bikes” (1985) on his best friend Jimmy; “S.L.” (1985) rehashes the material of “His Son” at forty pages’ length.

Not all of the post-Sixties stories are about Brodkey’s family. “Verona—a Young Woman Speaks” (1977) is an odd little monologue by a young woman about a childhood experience; the closing story, “Angel” (1985), is the collection’s version of the Book of Revelations—a bizarre forty-page narrative about God and man at Harvard that begins with this sentence: “Today the Angel of Silence and of Inspiration (toward Truth) appeared to a number of us passing by on the wall in front of Harvard Hall—this was a little after three o'clock—today is October twenty-fifth, nineteen-hundred-and-fifty-one.” And “Innocence"—all thirty-one pages of it—relates in exhausting physical detail how Wiley manages, during his senior year at Harvard, to give a willful, beautiful classmate her first orgasm. Since most of the story is written at an unvarying fever pitch—with numerous run-on sentences and words in italics, endless series of parallel phrases and clauses and extravagant modifiers piled up on top of each other in frantic, desperate emphasis— to quote from virtually any portion of it is to give a fair sense of the whole:

She called out, “Wiley, Wiley!” but she called it out in a whisper, the whisper of someone floating across a night sky, of someone crazily ascending, someone who was going crazy, who was taking on the mad purity and temper of angels, someone who was tormented unendurably by this, who was unendurably frightened, whose pleasure was enormous, half human, mad. Then she screamed in rebuke, “Wiley!” She screamed my name: “Wiley!”—she did it hoarsely and insanely, asking for help, but blaming me, and merely as exclamation; it was a gutter sound in part, and ugly; the ugliness destroyed nothing, or maybe it had an impetus of its own, but it whisked away another covering, a membrane of ordinariness—I don’t know—and her second pair of wings began to beat; her whole body was aflutter on the bed. I was as wet as— as some fish, thonking away, sweatily. Grinding away. I said, “It’s O.K., Orra. It’s O.K.” And poked on. In midair. She shouted, “What is this?” She shouted in the way a tremendously large person who can defend herself might shout at someone who was unwisely beating her up. She shouted— angrily, as an announcement of anger, it seemed—“Oh, my God!” Like: Who broke this cup? I plugged on. She raised her torso, her head, she looked me clearly in the eye, her eyes were enormous, were bulging and she said, “Wiley, it’s happening!”

Though the story is about Orra’s first orgasm, the hero of the piece is of course Wiley. Orra has been with many other men, and claims that she’s “too sexual to have orgasms”; it is Wiley, with his superior wisdom and his gift for the art of copulation, who teaches her otherwise. Here as elsewhere, Brodkey habitually refers to the sex act with the word fuck: “I figured I had kept her from being too depressed after fucking—it’s hard for a girl with any force in her and any brains to accept the whole thing of fucking, of being fucked without trying to turn it on its end, so that she does some fucking, or some fucking up; I mean, the mere power of arousing the man so he wants to fuck isn’t enough: she wants him to be willing to die in order to fuck.” Though with this repeated use of the blunt Anglo-Saxonism he seems to be trying to identify himself as a worldly, with-it adult, Brodkey—this man who is ever fascinated with himself at age thirteen—sounds instead very much like a thirteen-year-old boy reveling in Dirty Words. Or, rather, like a vulgar man who thinks like a boy, a man who, preoccupied with his own physical sensations and ego gratification, regards his sexual partner only as a football field upon which to demonstrate his manly prowess—orgasm as touchdown. Sex, here, has little or nothing to do with affection and everything to do with power and the aggressive assertion of self. Not even the oeuvre of Norman Mailer contains a more gruesome piece of self-advertisement (though, as critics have noted, “Innocence” bears a strong resemblance to Mailer’s famous piece of sexual braggadocio, “The Time of Her Time,” which is also about giving a formidable young lady her first orgasm).

That Brodkey attributes to his orgasmic heroine “the mad purity and temper of angels” should not be too surprising, for in his hands the distinctions between such phenomena as college girls' sex fives and imagined heavenly visitations quickly evaporate. To Brodkey, nothing seems to mean anything unless it means just about everything. Even the ordinary little tussles between a boy and his sister can’t be described on their own terms, but must instead be magnified beyond recognition into something cosmic and Wagnerian. “This is my first, uncertain knowledge of evil,” Brodkey writes in “The Pain Continuum” of such an encounter, at age four or so. “I am about to give birth—to death .... Pain is less than blood .... Blood is the boundary of a special seriousness.” And so on. Such lofty rhetoric serves only to distance the reader from the modest incident it purports to describe, to crush the event itself under the weight of its own grandiloquence. This sort of thing happens time and again in Brodkey’s later stories; in the world of these stories epiphanies abound, and, what’s more, they're all pretty much alike—in kind, in degree, and in moral dimension. Orgasms, the arrivals of angels, the thrill children feel when they are hoisted in the air by their fathers: when in his later stories Brodkey attempts to describe these phenomena, they all somehow seem to come out to the same thing—a fact which doubtless goes a long way toward accounting for the stories’ monotony.

To a few critics, of course, these stories are anything but monotonous. Pick up any recent magazine or newspaper profile of Brodkey and chances are that somewhere in the first couple of paragraphs you'll find quotations from one or more of the following authorities: Harold Bloom, who calls Brodkey “an American Proust”; Denis Donoghue, who pronounces A Party of Animals “a work of genius” and says of its author that “there is no one writing in American literature at all comparable”; and Gordon Lish, who declares that “Harold Brodkey has been creating the one necessary American narrative work of this century.” According to Dinitia Smith (from whose piece in New York magazine most of these quotations have been taken), Brodkey himself reportedly talks obsessively about literary politics, and the curious thing is that such quotations sound less like honest critical judgments than like the remarks of a political campaign’s spin doctors. One can readily figure out, in any case, why it would be in the interest of these three particular men—aside from reasons of personal friendship—to prop up the reputation of a Harold Brodkey. Bloom? Brodkey fulfills Bloom’s need for a contemporary Jewish-American visionary, a West Side version of Milton and Blake. Lish? The modus operandi of Brodkey’s later stories validates Lish’s own crude, ripped-from-the-gut style of shock-confessional narrative. Donoghue? Brodkey exemplifies, in extreme form, Donoghue’s notion of American literature as something whose “moral and rhetorical aim” is “to separate essence from existence, and to protect essence—or call it selfhood—from the vulgarity imposed by mere conditions.”

What is remarkable, though, is not that a handful of influential critics have trumpeted Harold Brodkey’s name so loudly, but that literary folk have listened so respectfully. Brodkey’s stories of the Seventies and Eighties have developed a truly towering reputation; and yet the most cursory inspection is enough to establish that they contain some of the very worst prose of our time. Brodkey writes not only like a man who is certain that his every fleeting thought and trivial act is fascinating and pregnant with meaning; he writes also like a man who is convinced that his every word, comma, and ampersand is divinely inspired. He mistakes bombast for profundity, lexical flatulence for the divine afflatus. Some of his sentences are so wordy and abstract (not to mention pretentious) that they read like examples of bad writing in a freshman composition textbook: “It is not metaphorical or a figure of speech or a conceit,” he writes in “The.Pain Continuum,” “to say that as that knowledge grew to occupy the center and the periphery of my attention, whatever else I knew seemed unimportant, and was, in a geographical sense, forgotten: that is, there was no room for it in my attention.” Some sentences are infected with a chatty shapelessness: “Also,” Wiley says of Lila in “Largely an Oral History of My Mother,” “there are certain serious gloomy honesties in her, a pessimism, and dark insights into people that served as a form of somewhat lazy omniscience (‘No one’s really nice,’ she would say), and a dark forgiveness and wonder that a child oughtn’t to know about, so she would say to me at times, ‘Don’t pay attention to me. Go away now—live your own life.’” (Lazy omniscience indeed!)

Some sentences have to be read at least twice to be understood: in “His Son, in His Arms,” for instance, Brodkey writes of his father that “My gaze, my enjoying him, my willingness to be him, my joy at it, supported the baroque tower of his necessary but limited and maybe dishonest optimism.” And quite often, as in this passage from “S. L.,” he just yammers away:

It was a peculiarity of that moment and of my life that he was not my father by blood and that I was not an infant when I met him except that I was like an infant. I was an infant a second time, an older, smarter, tougher infant, and weaker and more scarred. And he was like a father. I'm trying to say that I was a peculiar example of a son, not an ideal example, but some of thatching of being ideal hovered around me, probably unwisely, as a kind of explanation of the pain of emotion and the poignancy of hope, and a reason for grief and for pleasure—the hurt urgency in the real thing, plus the charitable part, gave a glow of the ideal. But I was not the son or his son but only a son he had. And he was not whatever an Ideal Father actually is or would be—a kind of light inside a common thing—he was not it, or maybe he was, or maybe he was at moments, how would I know?

There is always the possibility, of course, that Brodkey will redeem himself—that he will publish A Party of Animals and that it will be everything his champions say it is. But if the stories of boyhood which he has collected in the present book are any indication, readers who have been led to expect a work of genius are in for a major disappointment. One particularly odd phenomenon is that even those commentators who admit their dissatisfaction with Brodkey’s work have a way of turning their criticism to his advantage. When James Wolcott writes that the lesson of Brodkey’s career is that “genius can be both too much and not enough,” he is taking a familiar line. But the truth is in fact quite different: the lesson of Brodkey’s career is that one should not be surprised when an egocentric writer who is preoccupied with his own supposed genius—and who is mesmerized by the image of himself as a suffering prodigy-produces hundreds of pages of jagged, vainglorious, even infantile prose. The Brodkey of the Eighties may be bearable in small doses but is insufferable at lengths of thirty and forty pages; one can only imagine what he might be like at novel length. Then again, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode may be all we will ever see of A Party of Animals.

1. Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, by Harold Brodkey; Knopf, 596 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.