Loved this. I often think that to make it in the literary world, one has to think of themselves as a sort of end of the bench player in the NBA--the guy who thinks he deserves to be out there, who knows that if he just gets his shot, he'll prove everyone wrong. This is the attitude of the player who gets garbage time at the end of the game and immediately starts launching three pointers, padding his paltry stats. This sort of delusional, irrational confidence is a paradox, because if you don't have it, you'll never make it, but so many people have it when it's unwarranted. Jeremy Lin is a positive example of this, I think (he famously waved off Kobe to take a last second shot) and the current example is probably Jonathan Kuminga.
I don't even think it was "unwarranted"--he really did have a claim to greatness, even if his need to make that claim so exhaustingly wound up being something of an impediment to it. Absolutely one must have an enormous confidence in one's game, it's just that there are writers (DeLillo would assuredly be one) who keep that confidence indoors, so to speak
I've never read Brodkey, but if you and Marco Roth vouch for him, that's good enough for me. An interesting point about his need to express his greatness becoming an impediment, though--I haven't considered that side of the equation. The trouble, as you point out, is that nowadays you almost have to be constantly doing this, unless you can get others to do it for you.
Well, there's a difference between advocating responsibly for one's work--the hustle that we all, to varying degrees, have to undertake these days--and puffing out one's chest to proclaim one's greatness, no? I don't know that Brodkey was wrong to do the latter--his work had a genuine claim to brilliance, and as one thoughtful commenter here has pointed out, he was awkward in his dealings with the media--but, y'know. Tubthumping like Muhammed Ali works best when you *are* Muhammed Ali, and writers especially who do it tend to come off sounding like tools. It's always best to let other people make *those* kinds of claims, I reckon
The guy is so self-absorbed he ruined his stories. I think posthippie self-absorption really ruined a lot of possible literature. Brodkey's stories become this obsession with himself that he, then, requires you to obsessively orbit him. Some writers are demanding, but he's demanding you give up any individual literary taste. You wonder how cult leaders were so big posthippies. It's really a highlight of the issues of self-conscious culture. To band-aid it, people talk about earning trust, or any other thing, but the issue is the author being unable to not talk about themselves for two minutes to ever be able to engage with other humans. He had possible talent, but his whole schtick was redefining "genius", his talent, completely into himself. That he was theatrical or used flourishes detracted from his actual self-absorption. Those were just ways to communicate on the way to himself.
I think there's little doubt that Brodkey belonged to a generation of American writers who were . . . inordinately self-focused, let's say, and that Brodkey's seismic tracking of consciousness can make the work feel intensely claustrophobic. A little of it can go a long way. That said, plenty of other writers--Proust and Whitman for starters--were similarly obsessed. As I probably don't make clear enough in the piece above, there's a lot to like--and a lot that's pretty great whether one "likes" it or not--in Brodkey though. He's never gonna be my favorite writer or anything but I've been re-reading some stuff these past few days that I like quite a bit
It just seems like a window to a uniquely different perspective. Even how he denies he's a "genius" is so self-absorbed. The way he thinks he's writing for a non contemporary audience, with his discussions about death with delilo, seems like a way they deal with death (by still being here). Also, the way his wife asked if he still loves her. I get it's a stage we all have to go through, and I sympathize with that, but idk, it's not exactly a question you expect to hear around that time. Idk the intricacies of it, but, the samples of writing were sometimes good, and other times it sorta highlights why he needs you to give up literary standards, and to follow them. It's just a nightmare imo.
Matthew, thanks for this--I really appreciate the overall sentiment here about writers and publicity. But as an old Brodkey stan of 40 years (it would be my fondest wish to reissue some of his very best work here at Agate), and someone who followed his career closely, I hope it's OK to rebut, in collegial fashion, a few of your comments. One thing Brodkey and DeLillo shared--hard as it might be to conceive at this remove--was an aversion to publicity over much if not most of their long careers. Brodkey certainly cut a wide swath in his private life, and had the proverbial paranoid's proverbial real enemies to prove it--the late Edmund White, to name one, seems to have pursued every potential opportunity, in his own writing and through interviews, to cast the darkest shade on Brodkey's sexual identity. In their biographies and published journals, writers as disparate as Edmund Wilson and Philip Roth had plenty say about him. But when I first discovered Brodkey's work in the early 80s, it was almost impossible to find anything that he'd said or that had been written about him published over the previous quarter-century, with the exception of one rave review in Esquire from the decade previous. (He'd published a great deal of work since First Love and Other Sorrows, but it was to that point scattered and uncollected.) I first learned about him from a passing reference Updike made in his intro to the volume of Best American Short Stories he edited around that time. Brodkey had removed himself from the scene that thoroughly.
DeLillo, same--virtually no interviews, even as he was putting out those underappreciated early novels every year or two. While neither were at the Pynchon/Salinger end of the spectrum, they and a few other writers of their generation (Gaddis would be another) saw themselves as set against the more public-facing postures of more celebrated at the time writers like Mailer (surely at farthest opposite end of that spectrum from Pynchon/Salinger), Updike, Roth, Wolfe, etc. It was only when Brodkey published his first work in hard covers in more than 25 years, and then later, for DeLillo, in the run up to publishing Underworld, that they acceded to the entreaties of their publishers to speak to journalists.
Brodkey, in particular, was really bad at this--or at least, I feel that's another way to think of what you observe about how Brodkey was covered at the time. He was awkward, dry, overly earnest; his irony usually came off badly. It all played a part in the literary world ending up much more focused on what he said to the press than his actual work. I'm glad you see genius in that work--though I think there's a lot more evident there than you do.
This is a lovely comment, and I really don't mean to imply (though it's easy to see how this could be read that way) that I *don't* see the brilliance in Brodkey's work, and that I don't enjoy a fair bit of it. Enough that I keep pulling the books off the shelves thirty-odd years later. (I think my own first exposure was a mimeographed of "His Son, In His Arms . . ." in . . . I guess '87?) I may refer to those two books as "failures," but they're more interesting to me than Updike, Wolfe or (for the most part) Mailer. Any stories that are particular favorites?
I really like some of the long stories the NYer published in the late 60s, like “The Abundant Dreamer;” a few of the really explosive stories he published in the 70s, like “Play”; and then some of the really ground-breaking stuff he did when I believe he was being edited by late-career William Shawn, like “S.L.,” and “The Bullies.” What I think is most remarkable about his work is how radically he transformed his style over the decades, while he was writing obsessively about the same events and characters in story after story. I can’t think of anything else like it in American literature.
I'm especially interested in how this transformation paralleled his dealings with different editors. I believe the 50s work was edited by William Maxwell, and reads like it. "His Son, in His Arms..." was, famously (he made a lot of grand claims for it, and for Brodkey himself), edited by Gordon Lish; and then I believe Shawn himself edited much of the NYer stuff from the 70s and 80s. Maybe Tina Brown can step in and let us know who edited Brodkey during her NYer tenure, which is when they published parts of what became This Wild Darkness, which Marco Roth likes so much.
Man. I would love to have the stories compiled in such a way that one could compare these things. It's tough to imagine Maxwell, with whom he would seem to have shared little besides Midwesternness, as an ideal fit. I'll do some digging. In any case I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying your thoughts on the matter here. Thank God people--readers, sensibliities--like you still exist in publishing. I . . . have a feeling the response to a Brodkey on submission to RH or FSG today would be rather different, unfortunately.
Thank for such a gracious reply, Matthew. I appreciate you letting me wade so ponderously through your comments. And I would love nothing more than to see those stories compiled that way as well.
Yeah, that part is fascinating, that obsessive recursiveness (even if it sometimes drives me nuts that I’ll be looking for a passage and realize I’m in the wrong story, or the wrong version of the same story—since the book and magazine versions tended to have substantial discrepancies—etc. I’ll look for the stories you mentioned asap
Your mileage may vary. There are more than a few Brodkeys for different readers. Was very surprised to see Otessa Moshfegh's recent piece about him not to mention Marco Roth's/
“I am possessed by voices and events from the earliest edges of memory and have never existed except as an Illinois front yard where these things play themselves out over and over again until I die.” I’ve gone back to this sentence everyday since you sent this out. Just wanted to thank you, bud.
Anthony Lane wrote this lovely remembrance about working with Brodkey at The New Yorker. It appeared in the intro to Lane’s book Nobody’s Perfect.
“This is not to deny the warmth of the welcome that I received. Although there were sound reasons to view me as a disruptive interloper—a would-be McMurphy, and a Brit to boot-there were, as far as I can gather, relatively few moves to have me lobotomized. On the other hand, there was Harold Brodkey. He was then in his Indian summer-already sick, and writing with great fluency and irate pathos for the magazine. The trouble was that one of my final acts before leaving British journalism, where I had been stewing for four years, had been to write an unfavorable review of his vast and long-digested novel, The Runaway Soul. Now, Brodkey read every-thing, and I knew that he had read this churlish piece; more to the point, he knew that I knew that he knew who I was and what I had said. Obvi-ously, I could never meet the guy; his sensitivity and height suggested someone who dealt with unappreciative critics by holding up their hearts, still beating, in front of their bulging eyes. "Please," I said to Alexander Chancellor, who was then editing "Talk of the Town," "whatever you do, don't introduce me to Harold Brodkey." Alexander's eyes gleamed, much as Don King's must gleam when a call comes through from Las Vegas. He waited no more than a day. "Anthony," he cried cheerily, "meet Harold." The great man advanced down the corridor and held out his hand. "What a pleasure to have you on board," he said. I gave a milky smile and tried to remember how Mowgli had managed on his first date with Shere Khan. From then on, Brodkey couldn't leave me alone. I would be sitting at my desk when the door would open a crack, to reveal a bony head. "How are you getting along?" It was magnificent. He was kindness itself, knowing that courtesy would keep me in the first, virginal blush of absolute fear. The review was never mentioned, which meant that it was never forgotten. If Harold had slugged me, the matter would have been closed; but it stayed open until the day he died.”
Brodkey (and his supporters) prattling on endlessly about how he would publish The Greatest Novel Ever™ was similar to Leon Wieseltier talking for ages about how he was writing a genius book about—god help us—sighing. They both seemed like fancy Joe Goulds, and Brodkey might have been better off if he had remained that way.
By the way: I wrote about The Golden Hour in my newsletter recently. Really enjoyed it.
Man, that is a lovely, lovely piece! Thank you for reading, and for writing about it so thoughtfully.
Re: Brodkey, well, I think he had more claim to genius (and more strength of character) than Leon Wieseltier, but I think it’s helpful for human beings in general to recognize our special attributes and never as special as we think they are, and better for our mouths not to write checks our asses can’t cash. The former, of course, is a little easier said than done, but the latter? Not so tough. It would’ve helped Brodkey immeasurably to be able to set the idea of his genius aside. It would’ve helped him realize even more of it, I suspect. But, well, it’s not that uncommon, this problem. Very few people realize their talent in full after all
The last person I expected to read about this morning was Harold Brodkey (which my spell check thought should be Britney), but now I am in an Upper West Side state of mind. Thank you for your unexpected and insightful posts. Btw, the word cheugy — I know what it means but do you know what its derivation is?
grateful for this -- i've been microdosing Stories in an Almost Classical Mode for the better part of a year, rather enjoying it, although it may take me another five years to get through -- feels like i've been lugging these sentences around for months.
i knew of brodkey's reputation as an underachieving institutional giant, so was quite surprised to find these stories were....pretty fucking incredible? florid and indulgent, sure, but there's such vision and feeling in the early stories, a continental intrigue that puts william maxwell's sleepy midwesterners to shame. (i'm told Classical Mode goes south pretty quickly, may need to report back.) but like, even if this were all he accomplished in his career, it's an absolutely towering work!
He’s really good in…one can’t say “small doses,” because really even a paragraph is a full dose w/this guy, but one absolutely cannot write him off. There’s beauty, there’s insight, there’s a musicality to the prose that resembles nobody else. There’s a reason why I keep circling back to him
it just feels like such an overcorrection, this manifestly brilliant writer who quietly battled terminal illness at the top of his game. his wikipedia page has three paragraphs on his "Life," three on his "Literary Career," and seven devoted to "Criticism." people really hated this guy!
I'm in the "pretty fucking incredible" camp with Brodkey, though there is definitely better stuff and worse stuff, as with most writers. But you'd be hard pressed to find a writer whose very real achievement is more obscured by under-informed takes on his reputation, which have been accreting for about four decades now.
That is for sure! I'm happy to poke fun at his rather assiduous cultivation of his own stature while he was alive (even if the reasons for this sort of desperate self-inflation were pretty obviously tragic) but no one's mocking the work itself, or at least I'm not. As I say, he's like no other writer I can think of, and certainly unlike any of his generational peers
Well, as I tried to note in my earlier long reply to your very interesting piece, "assiduous cultivation of his own stature" is not how I'd characterize his disastrously awkward dealings with the media. At least, that's how it appears to me all these years later—he was strikingly, calamitously bad at it.
Well, that makes perfect sense! As I say, he actually does come off as charming. But there too the times have changed so much in the internet era . . . it becomes that much more difficult to parse 20th Century attitudes in print.
I would say the surest indication of how ungainly he could be with interviewers is in seeing how many people have written about Brodkey's ego, attitude, etc. over the years--it takes a rare lack of aptitude to engender that degree of reaction.
Great piece, Matthew. I agree about the dubious merits of publicity runs that explain the work and kill the mystery (in any medium). I guess some artists manage to navigate this rocky road successfully (Bret Easton Ellis springs to mind) but they are rare. Surely tho, the risks of ‘talking about the work’ begin during production? For me, the idea of discussing work when it’s still gestating feels equally high risk. The fear you might ‘talk the work out’, and lose your impetus to create. It reminds me of the old Edward Hopper quote: “If I could say it in words, I’d have no need to paint.”
Yeah, I tend not to talk about stuff that's under construction at all. (I mean, sometimes I have to, but on those occasions I tend to speak generally enough so as not to give too much away even to myself.) But I think all of this is something of a Chinese finger trap for writers: we're all expected to speak about our work--to promote it, and to describe it in terms that would impel people to seek it out--because otherwise no one will be inclined to read it or know it exists. (As one smart person remarked to me recently, the Pynchon/DeLillo strategy of withholding worked for them because it exacerbated existing interest. That might or might not work for others.) By and large, though? The more I talk about my own (finished) work, the more articulate and convincing I get and the dumber I actually become. I just don't think that anything I say has all that much to do with what actually exists on the page.
As for Bret, I think he benefited quite a bit from being in the right time and place and (crucially) having his work be broadly misinterpreted. The latter, I think, can be more helpful to a writer than one realizes
Okay, sorry, it's time for some internet-style vitriol, with a proposal at the end.
Your post is mostly about reputations and literary gossip, which is fine, except for two things.
First, if we are making authors "smaller, and ourselves dumber, by talking facilely about them," then this essay isn't helping. If it's true that "the more literature, or at least literary culture, is reduced to the merely gossipy or discussible... the less our literary environment can actually mean or matter to anybody" then it's probably a good idea to stop gossiping altogether.
I don't mean gossip can't be both useful and important—for example, as you show, stories about fame and privacy can help writers think about their relation to the public. If you had kept only to the questions of writerly reputation, isolation, privacy, and desire for fame, the post would have been of a piece. But at the end you ask "What about Brodkey though?"—a question that promises a review of the writing.
It doesn't inspire confidence in a review (and it wouldn't do in the London Review of Books, Bookforum, the New York Times Book Review, or the Times Literary Supplement) to inform readers that the reviewer hasn't managed to read the texts in question. "Both books have defeated me across multiple attempts to read them in their entirety," you say, and even "I defy you to make it through all thirty-one pages of his most famous story." You then choose a few lines you like—something that can be done with any book and doesn't help readers judge the whole—and then turn away from the texts and to the possibility that Brodkey was "terrorized, indeed molested... by his adoptive father."
How about a productive discussion of the writing? I will re-read "Innocence" (the long story about cunnilingus) if you'd like to discuss it in detail. Brodkey is an interesting figure, with an unresolved place in postwar American fiction. In my memory, the story is difficult initially because of the sudden and persistent intimacy of the subject, and because of a reader's natural wariness about what assumptions and stereotypes the author might be bringing to bear—but then it bcomes difficult for a different reason, because it becomes clear that the real subject is the author's virtuosity in keeping to the subject for so long.
The comic aspect of "Innocence"—that the author's skill at description is being continuously implicitly compared with his skill at cunnilingus—is so obvious that it is at first hard to believe it is intended to support the entire story, and then hard to believe the author finds it comic: and that is a genuine puzzle, one that doesn't fade. "Innocence" is famous for the superficial reason that it combines pornography and literature in an unexpected way, but also for the more substantial reason that the ideas behind it are driven by a mania that the author himself seems to have barely controlled.
How about an exchange about texts that are intolerable line by line (Matthew Stokoe's "Cows"), those that are intolerable chapter by chapter (some of Sade), and those that are intolerable both in minature and in their entirety ("Innocence")—and the reasons they can be so memorable?
Haha! I'm so thankful you have done the heavy lifting on Brodkey, thus relieving me of yet another putative intellectual titan I would have had to form an opinion.
There was something about the late 20th century that really bred these kinds of guys! Fran Lebowitz was the same. Never wrote anything, just wandered around with everybody thinking about her potential genius, her genius in waiting.
It really was just the bloat of late 20th Century American culture, and the American economy. Publishing could afford to indulge such people, because there was a shot it could pay off, just like any other form of speculation I suppose
"Was the work any good or could he just wear the shit out of a Borsalino?" Thanks for the early a.m. chuckle. Love this. I often think we should all be anonymous,{even as I, too, promote}, and recall never revealing personal info during a small master class at UCLA where one of our members was a forensic psychiatrist. And, while I wasn't even sure what that was, I felt certain he could detect something I wanted kept hidden.
Make mystery possible again
Loved this. I often think that to make it in the literary world, one has to think of themselves as a sort of end of the bench player in the NBA--the guy who thinks he deserves to be out there, who knows that if he just gets his shot, he'll prove everyone wrong. This is the attitude of the player who gets garbage time at the end of the game and immediately starts launching three pointers, padding his paltry stats. This sort of delusional, irrational confidence is a paradox, because if you don't have it, you'll never make it, but so many people have it when it's unwarranted. Jeremy Lin is a positive example of this, I think (he famously waved off Kobe to take a last second shot) and the current example is probably Jonathan Kuminga.
I don't even think it was "unwarranted"--he really did have a claim to greatness, even if his need to make that claim so exhaustingly wound up being something of an impediment to it. Absolutely one must have an enormous confidence in one's game, it's just that there are writers (DeLillo would assuredly be one) who keep that confidence indoors, so to speak
I've never read Brodkey, but if you and Marco Roth vouch for him, that's good enough for me. An interesting point about his need to express his greatness becoming an impediment, though--I haven't considered that side of the equation. The trouble, as you point out, is that nowadays you almost have to be constantly doing this, unless you can get others to do it for you.
Well, there's a difference between advocating responsibly for one's work--the hustle that we all, to varying degrees, have to undertake these days--and puffing out one's chest to proclaim one's greatness, no? I don't know that Brodkey was wrong to do the latter--his work had a genuine claim to brilliance, and as one thoughtful commenter here has pointed out, he was awkward in his dealings with the media--but, y'know. Tubthumping like Muhammed Ali works best when you *are* Muhammed Ali, and writers especially who do it tend to come off sounding like tools. It's always best to let other people make *those* kinds of claims, I reckon
The guy is so self-absorbed he ruined his stories. I think posthippie self-absorption really ruined a lot of possible literature. Brodkey's stories become this obsession with himself that he, then, requires you to obsessively orbit him. Some writers are demanding, but he's demanding you give up any individual literary taste. You wonder how cult leaders were so big posthippies. It's really a highlight of the issues of self-conscious culture. To band-aid it, people talk about earning trust, or any other thing, but the issue is the author being unable to not talk about themselves for two minutes to ever be able to engage with other humans. He had possible talent, but his whole schtick was redefining "genius", his talent, completely into himself. That he was theatrical or used flourishes detracted from his actual self-absorption. Those were just ways to communicate on the way to himself.
I think there's little doubt that Brodkey belonged to a generation of American writers who were . . . inordinately self-focused, let's say, and that Brodkey's seismic tracking of consciousness can make the work feel intensely claustrophobic. A little of it can go a long way. That said, plenty of other writers--Proust and Whitman for starters--were similarly obsessed. As I probably don't make clear enough in the piece above, there's a lot to like--and a lot that's pretty great whether one "likes" it or not--in Brodkey though. He's never gonna be my favorite writer or anything but I've been re-reading some stuff these past few days that I like quite a bit
It just seems like a window to a uniquely different perspective. Even how he denies he's a "genius" is so self-absorbed. The way he thinks he's writing for a non contemporary audience, with his discussions about death with delilo, seems like a way they deal with death (by still being here). Also, the way his wife asked if he still loves her. I get it's a stage we all have to go through, and I sympathize with that, but idk, it's not exactly a question you expect to hear around that time. Idk the intricacies of it, but, the samples of writing were sometimes good, and other times it sorta highlights why he needs you to give up literary standards, and to follow them. It's just a nightmare imo.
Matthew, thanks for this--I really appreciate the overall sentiment here about writers and publicity. But as an old Brodkey stan of 40 years (it would be my fondest wish to reissue some of his very best work here at Agate), and someone who followed his career closely, I hope it's OK to rebut, in collegial fashion, a few of your comments. One thing Brodkey and DeLillo shared--hard as it might be to conceive at this remove--was an aversion to publicity over much if not most of their long careers. Brodkey certainly cut a wide swath in his private life, and had the proverbial paranoid's proverbial real enemies to prove it--the late Edmund White, to name one, seems to have pursued every potential opportunity, in his own writing and through interviews, to cast the darkest shade on Brodkey's sexual identity. In their biographies and published journals, writers as disparate as Edmund Wilson and Philip Roth had plenty say about him. But when I first discovered Brodkey's work in the early 80s, it was almost impossible to find anything that he'd said or that had been written about him published over the previous quarter-century, with the exception of one rave review in Esquire from the decade previous. (He'd published a great deal of work since First Love and Other Sorrows, but it was to that point scattered and uncollected.) I first learned about him from a passing reference Updike made in his intro to the volume of Best American Short Stories he edited around that time. Brodkey had removed himself from the scene that thoroughly.
DeLillo, same--virtually no interviews, even as he was putting out those underappreciated early novels every year or two. While neither were at the Pynchon/Salinger end of the spectrum, they and a few other writers of their generation (Gaddis would be another) saw themselves as set against the more public-facing postures of more celebrated at the time writers like Mailer (surely at farthest opposite end of that spectrum from Pynchon/Salinger), Updike, Roth, Wolfe, etc. It was only when Brodkey published his first work in hard covers in more than 25 years, and then later, for DeLillo, in the run up to publishing Underworld, that they acceded to the entreaties of their publishers to speak to journalists.
Brodkey, in particular, was really bad at this--or at least, I feel that's another way to think of what you observe about how Brodkey was covered at the time. He was awkward, dry, overly earnest; his irony usually came off badly. It all played a part in the literary world ending up much more focused on what he said to the press than his actual work. I'm glad you see genius in that work--though I think there's a lot more evident there than you do.
This is a lovely comment, and I really don't mean to imply (though it's easy to see how this could be read that way) that I *don't* see the brilliance in Brodkey's work, and that I don't enjoy a fair bit of it. Enough that I keep pulling the books off the shelves thirty-odd years later. (I think my own first exposure was a mimeographed of "His Son, In His Arms . . ." in . . . I guess '87?) I may refer to those two books as "failures," but they're more interesting to me than Updike, Wolfe or (for the most part) Mailer. Any stories that are particular favorites?
I really like some of the long stories the NYer published in the late 60s, like “The Abundant Dreamer;” a few of the really explosive stories he published in the 70s, like “Play”; and then some of the really ground-breaking stuff he did when I believe he was being edited by late-career William Shawn, like “S.L.,” and “The Bullies.” What I think is most remarkable about his work is how radically he transformed his style over the decades, while he was writing obsessively about the same events and characters in story after story. I can’t think of anything else like it in American literature.
“Play” is absolutely phenomenal. What a great, great story.
I'm especially interested in how this transformation paralleled his dealings with different editors. I believe the 50s work was edited by William Maxwell, and reads like it. "His Son, in His Arms..." was, famously (he made a lot of grand claims for it, and for Brodkey himself), edited by Gordon Lish; and then I believe Shawn himself edited much of the NYer stuff from the 70s and 80s. Maybe Tina Brown can step in and let us know who edited Brodkey during her NYer tenure, which is when they published parts of what became This Wild Darkness, which Marco Roth likes so much.
Man. I would love to have the stories compiled in such a way that one could compare these things. It's tough to imagine Maxwell, with whom he would seem to have shared little besides Midwesternness, as an ideal fit. I'll do some digging. In any case I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying your thoughts on the matter here. Thank God people--readers, sensibliities--like you still exist in publishing. I . . . have a feeling the response to a Brodkey on submission to RH or FSG today would be rather different, unfortunately.
Thank for such a gracious reply, Matthew. I appreciate you letting me wade so ponderously through your comments. And I would love nothing more than to see those stories compiled that way as well.
Oh, man, are you kidding? I greatly appreciate the insight
Yeah, that part is fascinating, that obsessive recursiveness (even if it sometimes drives me nuts that I’ll be looking for a passage and realize I’m in the wrong story, or the wrong version of the same story—since the book and magazine versions tended to have substantial discrepancies—etc. I’ll look for the stories you mentioned asap
Your mileage may vary. There are more than a few Brodkeys for different readers. Was very surprised to see Otessa Moshfegh's recent piece about him not to mention Marco Roth's/
“I am possessed by voices and events from the earliest edges of memory and have never existed except as an Illinois front yard where these things play themselves out over and over again until I die.” I’ve gone back to this sentence everyday since you sent this out. Just wanted to thank you, bud.
Anthony Lane wrote this lovely remembrance about working with Brodkey at The New Yorker. It appeared in the intro to Lane’s book Nobody’s Perfect.
“This is not to deny the warmth of the welcome that I received. Although there were sound reasons to view me as a disruptive interloper—a would-be McMurphy, and a Brit to boot-there were, as far as I can gather, relatively few moves to have me lobotomized. On the other hand, there was Harold Brodkey. He was then in his Indian summer-already sick, and writing with great fluency and irate pathos for the magazine. The trouble was that one of my final acts before leaving British journalism, where I had been stewing for four years, had been to write an unfavorable review of his vast and long-digested novel, The Runaway Soul. Now, Brodkey read every-thing, and I knew that he had read this churlish piece; more to the point, he knew that I knew that he knew who I was and what I had said. Obvi-ously, I could never meet the guy; his sensitivity and height suggested someone who dealt with unappreciative critics by holding up their hearts, still beating, in front of their bulging eyes. "Please," I said to Alexander Chancellor, who was then editing "Talk of the Town," "whatever you do, don't introduce me to Harold Brodkey." Alexander's eyes gleamed, much as Don King's must gleam when a call comes through from Las Vegas. He waited no more than a day. "Anthony," he cried cheerily, "meet Harold." The great man advanced down the corridor and held out his hand. "What a pleasure to have you on board," he said. I gave a milky smile and tried to remember how Mowgli had managed on his first date with Shere Khan. From then on, Brodkey couldn't leave me alone. I would be sitting at my desk when the door would open a crack, to reveal a bony head. "How are you getting along?" It was magnificent. He was kindness itself, knowing that courtesy would keep me in the first, virginal blush of absolute fear. The review was never mentioned, which meant that it was never forgotten. If Harold had slugged me, the matter would have been closed; but it stayed open until the day he died.”
Incredible. The work of an absolute master
Brodkey (and his supporters) prattling on endlessly about how he would publish The Greatest Novel Ever™ was similar to Leon Wieseltier talking for ages about how he was writing a genius book about—god help us—sighing. They both seemed like fancy Joe Goulds, and Brodkey might have been better off if he had remained that way.
By the way: I wrote about The Golden Hour in my newsletter recently. Really enjoyed it.
https://booksireadthismonth.substack.com/p/books-i-read-this-month-may-2025#footnote-anchor-1-165138609
Man, that is a lovely, lovely piece! Thank you for reading, and for writing about it so thoughtfully.
Re: Brodkey, well, I think he had more claim to genius (and more strength of character) than Leon Wieseltier, but I think it’s helpful for human beings in general to recognize our special attributes and never as special as we think they are, and better for our mouths not to write checks our asses can’t cash. The former, of course, is a little easier said than done, but the latter? Not so tough. It would’ve helped Brodkey immeasurably to be able to set the idea of his genius aside. It would’ve helped him realize even more of it, I suspect. But, well, it’s not that uncommon, this problem. Very few people realize their talent in full after all
The last person I expected to read about this morning was Harold Brodkey (which my spell check thought should be Britney), but now I am in an Upper West Side state of mind. Thank you for your unexpected and insightful posts. Btw, the word cheugy — I know what it means but do you know what its derivation is?
It’s kind of a fake internet word isn’t it? I asked my kid about it years ago and she just rolled her eyes
The eye roll says it all.
Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars, Matthew.
grateful for this -- i've been microdosing Stories in an Almost Classical Mode for the better part of a year, rather enjoying it, although it may take me another five years to get through -- feels like i've been lugging these sentences around for months.
i knew of brodkey's reputation as an underachieving institutional giant, so was quite surprised to find these stories were....pretty fucking incredible? florid and indulgent, sure, but there's such vision and feeling in the early stories, a continental intrigue that puts william maxwell's sleepy midwesterners to shame. (i'm told Classical Mode goes south pretty quickly, may need to report back.) but like, even if this were all he accomplished in his career, it's an absolutely towering work!
He’s really good in…one can’t say “small doses,” because really even a paragraph is a full dose w/this guy, but one absolutely cannot write him off. There’s beauty, there’s insight, there’s a musicality to the prose that resembles nobody else. There’s a reason why I keep circling back to him
it just feels like such an overcorrection, this manifestly brilliant writer who quietly battled terminal illness at the top of his game. his wikipedia page has three paragraphs on his "Life," three on his "Literary Career," and seven devoted to "Criticism." people really hated this guy!
LMAO, yes, God, that "criticism" section--which I hadn't looked it--is absurdly lacerating, isn't it? Yikes.
I'm in the "pretty fucking incredible" camp with Brodkey, though there is definitely better stuff and worse stuff, as with most writers. But you'd be hard pressed to find a writer whose very real achievement is more obscured by under-informed takes on his reputation, which have been accreting for about four decades now.
That is for sure! I'm happy to poke fun at his rather assiduous cultivation of his own stature while he was alive (even if the reasons for this sort of desperate self-inflation were pretty obviously tragic) but no one's mocking the work itself, or at least I'm not. As I say, he's like no other writer I can think of, and certainly unlike any of his generational peers
Well, as I tried to note in my earlier long reply to your very interesting piece, "assiduous cultivation of his own stature" is not how I'd characterize his disastrously awkward dealings with the media. At least, that's how it appears to me all these years later—he was strikingly, calamitously bad at it.
Well, that makes perfect sense! As I say, he actually does come off as charming. But there too the times have changed so much in the internet era . . . it becomes that much more difficult to parse 20th Century attitudes in print.
I would say the surest indication of how ungainly he could be with interviewers is in seeing how many people have written about Brodkey's ego, attitude, etc. over the years--it takes a rare lack of aptitude to engender that degree of reaction.
Great piece, Matthew. I agree about the dubious merits of publicity runs that explain the work and kill the mystery (in any medium). I guess some artists manage to navigate this rocky road successfully (Bret Easton Ellis springs to mind) but they are rare. Surely tho, the risks of ‘talking about the work’ begin during production? For me, the idea of discussing work when it’s still gestating feels equally high risk. The fear you might ‘talk the work out’, and lose your impetus to create. It reminds me of the old Edward Hopper quote: “If I could say it in words, I’d have no need to paint.”
Yeah, I tend not to talk about stuff that's under construction at all. (I mean, sometimes I have to, but on those occasions I tend to speak generally enough so as not to give too much away even to myself.) But I think all of this is something of a Chinese finger trap for writers: we're all expected to speak about our work--to promote it, and to describe it in terms that would impel people to seek it out--because otherwise no one will be inclined to read it or know it exists. (As one smart person remarked to me recently, the Pynchon/DeLillo strategy of withholding worked for them because it exacerbated existing interest. That might or might not work for others.) By and large, though? The more I talk about my own (finished) work, the more articulate and convincing I get and the dumber I actually become. I just don't think that anything I say has all that much to do with what actually exists on the page.
As for Bret, I think he benefited quite a bit from being in the right time and place and (crucially) having his work be broadly misinterpreted. The latter, I think, can be more helpful to a writer than one realizes
Really nice.
Okay, sorry, it's time for some internet-style vitriol, with a proposal at the end.
Your post is mostly about reputations and literary gossip, which is fine, except for two things.
First, if we are making authors "smaller, and ourselves dumber, by talking facilely about them," then this essay isn't helping. If it's true that "the more literature, or at least literary culture, is reduced to the merely gossipy or discussible... the less our literary environment can actually mean or matter to anybody" then it's probably a good idea to stop gossiping altogether.
I don't mean gossip can't be both useful and important—for example, as you show, stories about fame and privacy can help writers think about their relation to the public. If you had kept only to the questions of writerly reputation, isolation, privacy, and desire for fame, the post would have been of a piece. But at the end you ask "What about Brodkey though?"—a question that promises a review of the writing.
It doesn't inspire confidence in a review (and it wouldn't do in the London Review of Books, Bookforum, the New York Times Book Review, or the Times Literary Supplement) to inform readers that the reviewer hasn't managed to read the texts in question. "Both books have defeated me across multiple attempts to read them in their entirety," you say, and even "I defy you to make it through all thirty-one pages of his most famous story." You then choose a few lines you like—something that can be done with any book and doesn't help readers judge the whole—and then turn away from the texts and to the possibility that Brodkey was "terrorized, indeed molested... by his adoptive father."
How about a productive discussion of the writing? I will re-read "Innocence" (the long story about cunnilingus) if you'd like to discuss it in detail. Brodkey is an interesting figure, with an unresolved place in postwar American fiction. In my memory, the story is difficult initially because of the sudden and persistent intimacy of the subject, and because of a reader's natural wariness about what assumptions and stereotypes the author might be bringing to bear—but then it bcomes difficult for a different reason, because it becomes clear that the real subject is the author's virtuosity in keeping to the subject for so long.
The comic aspect of "Innocence"—that the author's skill at description is being continuously implicitly compared with his skill at cunnilingus—is so obvious that it is at first hard to believe it is intended to support the entire story, and then hard to believe the author finds it comic: and that is a genuine puzzle, one that doesn't fade. "Innocence" is famous for the superficial reason that it combines pornography and literature in an unexpected way, but also for the more substantial reason that the ideas behind it are driven by a mania that the author himself seems to have barely controlled.
How about an exchange about texts that are intolerable line by line (Matthew Stokoe's "Cows"), those that are intolerable chapter by chapter (some of Sade), and those that are intolerable both in minature and in their entirety ("Innocence")—and the reasons they can be so memorable?
Haha! I'm so thankful you have done the heavy lifting on Brodkey, thus relieving me of yet another putative intellectual titan I would have had to form an opinion.
There was something about the late 20th century that really bred these kinds of guys! Fran Lebowitz was the same. Never wrote anything, just wandered around with everybody thinking about her potential genius, her genius in waiting.
It really was just the bloat of late 20th Century American culture, and the American economy. Publishing could afford to indulge such people, because there was a shot it could pay off, just like any other form of speculation I suppose
"Was the work any good or could he just wear the shit out of a Borsalino?" Thanks for the early a.m. chuckle. Love this. I often think we should all be anonymous,{even as I, too, promote}, and recall never revealing personal info during a small master class at UCLA where one of our members was a forensic psychiatrist. And, while I wasn't even sure what that was, I felt certain he could detect something I wanted kept hidden.