The 30-Year Writer's Block

By Stefan Kanfer

As the 1960s began, Farrar Straus & Giroux announced the imminent appearance of Harold Brodkey's first novel. In the late 1970s Knopf announced the imminent appearance of Harold Brodkey's first novel. This year Farrar Straus again announced the imminent appearance of Harold Brodkey's first novel. By now readers could hardly be blamed for wondering if the book was the Great Pumpkin of American literature.

And yet as he traveled from publishing house to publishing house, the author lost no adherents. For almost three decades, Brodkey managed to preserve his high reputation on the basis of two books of evocative short stories and a handful of magazine pieces. No other contemporary writer has so successfully disproved the adage that you can't live on promises.

The Brodkey legend took wing after his debut, First Love and Other Sorrows, was published in 1958. Several critics dubbed him the American Proust. Susan Sontag chimed in: the author was "going for real stakes." Yale professor Harold Bloom burbled, "If he's ever able to solve his publishing problems, he'll be seen as one of the great writers of his day."

No one seemed as impressed by all this as Harold Brodkey. Consciously or unconsciously, he used the encomiums as a strategy for not producing. "If some of the people who talk to me are right," he told an interviewer, "well, to be possibly not only the best living writer in English but someone who could be the rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton is not a role that a halfway educated Jew from St. Louis with two sets of parents and a junkman father is prepared to play. In daydream, yes. In real life, no."

In daydream the novel was always approaching the finish line. In real life Brodkey tiptoed around his writer's block, became the father of a daughter, then went through a divorce from the woman he had met as a Harvard undergraduate. After a long bachelorhood he was introduced to novelist Ellen Schwamm. Two weeks later, she left her husband of 23 years and moved into Brodkey's cluttered Manhattan apartment. They were married in 1980. He supported himself by teaching part time at Cornell, developing scripts at NBC and artfully freeloading. He advertised himself as "an incredibly good dinner guest."

The quieter his typewriter, the more voluble Brodkey seemed to be in person. When he was not doing riffs on his own horn ("I'm one of the people that people fight over . . . It's just possible I am the voice of the coming age"), he was appraising fellow authors with faint damns. "What's the point of talking as if I were Mailer or Updike?" he demanded. "I don't have the guts they have. I could defend myself by saying that they're not carrying so dangerous a message, but maybe I'm flattering myself."

Only the work would tell, and that was invisible. Until this month. At the age of 61, Brodkey has at last released his magnum opus, The Runaway Soul. Physically, it is the long-awaited Big Book. Whether The Runaway Soul deserves 835 pages and a price tag of $30 is another matter. For if this is not the Emperor's New Novel, neither is it Remembrance of Things Past.

Insofar as there is any plot, Runaway Soul tracks the arc of Wiley Silenowicz, born like his creator in 1930. Nothing is left out, from birth to the loss of his parents, to adoption by S.L. and Lila of St. Louis, through skirmishes with his sadistic older stepsister Nonie to encounters with a homosexual cousin, to the death of mother and sibling, to Wiley's predictably awful marriage.

En route Brodkey produces some apt similes -- "The intimacy of a head near one's own is like the lights and doorway of a house." And he has a phenomenal memory for childhood experience: the arbitrary behavior of giant adults, the sudden emotional squalls, the vivid contours of sounds and light. Once the narrator ventures out to adolescence and beyond, it is a different story.

In an effort to render sensation into language, Brodkey becomes precious, arch and even incoherent ("Rage or quasi-pietistic acceptance, I distrust the wavering tick-tockishness of the shrinking and of the dangerous enlargement of the self"). When he is at his most lucid, Brodkey is at his most self- indulgent, particularly on the subject of sex. Straight or gay adventures leave Wiley dissatisfied, possibly because he spends so much time observing his own reactions. "I became," he notices after one bedding, "laboratoryish about entering and going in and out watchfully, thoughtfully." Given the narrator's vanity, that is inevitable. All along, the man has been harvesting every possible compliment, from a notice that half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on him to a judgment that he is "nationally smart."

Throughout these encounters Brodkey's invented terms -- "mouthy eyes," "doomfully" -- attempt to be Joycean. They are more reminiscent of Humpty Dumpty, to whom a word meant whatever he wanted it to mean. But three words keep the definitions Webster's International Dictionary assigned to them: I, my, me. Take those away and The Runaway Soul would be a very brief tale indeed. Much has been made of the author's investigations into the permutations of desire. The chapter headings are instructive here. Some are merely labels: "Nonie in Love," "The River," "The War." But one of the earliest says volumes about the volume to follow. It is titled "The Masturbation."