Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (129 page)

In his later academic career he took up a post teaching creative writing at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins, retiring from the classroom in 1995. Over these years he divorced and remarried. His later career was crowned with honours. In 1974 he was elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1997 he was awarded the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction. He is routinely confused by the casual reader with his friend, Donald Barthelme – more happily than in most such cases, since their fiction has pleasing similarities. Not least the construction of verbal funhouses.

His reputation grew with each book he failed to publish.
Jay McInerney

Harold Brodkey claimed to have been born ‘Aaron Roy Weintraub’ in Illinois. His father was a prize-fighter and junk-dealer. His birth mother died before he was able to know her. He was adopted (‘sold’, he claimed), aged two, by better-off distant relatives called Brodkey, comprehensively renamed and raised near St Louis, Missouri. These early years are the subject of his introspective novel,
The Runaway Soul
(1991). It continued to be a troubled childhood. Both his adoptive parents died before he was ten. As a child, he suffered nervous breakdowns and reportedly stopped talking for two whole years, retreating deep into himself. Not that he wasn’t bright – prodigious, almost; he claimed to have learned to read ‘in about thirty seconds’. If so, it was the quickest thing he ever did where the printed word is concerned. His most famous short story devotes thirty pages to describing a single act of sexual intercourse.

Aged seventeen, Brodkey gained entry to Harvard where he performed brilliantly, and married a Radcliffe student before graduation. They had one daughter in a ten-year marriage. In the early 1950s he was drawn, like a heliotrope to the sun, to New York. It was, as he always saw it, his destiny to live and die there: ‘New York was the capital of American sexuality, the one place in America where you could get laid with some degree of sophistication … I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it – well, it is dangerous – but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work.’ Brodkey’s breakthrough came early. He showed a story (‘The State of Grace’) to the editor of the
New Yorker
and – at only twenty-three – was taken on board. Harold Ross’s magazine was the red carpet to literary fame.
First Love and Other Stories
was duly published in 1958 to great applause and a garland of prizes. Like all of Brodkey’s fiction, he himself (his twentyish self that is, portrayed as ‘Wiley Silenowicz’) was the Narcissus-subject of his writing.

Now a fixture in the pages of the
New Yorker
, the world was at Harold Brodkey’s feet. Many would have backed him against that other young literary meteor, John Updike, but the Brodkey feet never moved and thereafter his career was silence and rumour. Personal life may have been a factor. He and his first wife divorced in 1962 and he was for a while energetically bisexual. How long is unclear – he remarried in 1980. It was, over these years, put about that Brodkey had embarked on a gigantic work – possibly the greatest Great American Novel ever; a work which would make
Moby Dick
look like a newly spawned minnow. Six thousand pages were mentioned. He had, it was further intimated, been working on this novel since childhood: it
would be called
A Party of Animals
, though the title gave nothing away. Meanwhile, Brodkey’s silence was portentous. He had, it was said, a cork-lined room in his New York apartment, specially constructed on the Proustian model of interior decoration, in which he was forging his masterwork – it demanded no lesser an environment.

But did it exist? As his
New York Times
obituarist, Dinitia Smith, tartly records over the thirty-two years this GAN was in active composition, ‘Mr. Brodkey received advances for it from at least five publishers, refinancing it much as some people do their homes with mortgages.’ A provisional manuscript (some 5,000 pages, it was rumoured) had been lodged with one of Brodkey’s publishers, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ‘in a form so that if something happens to me, someone can deal with it’. Indeed, something did happen to him. Brodkey contracted HIV from homosexual encounters ‘largely in the 1960s’, he claimed in an announcement ‘To My Readers’ in 1993 in the
New Yorker
. If so, the symptoms were, like his publishing output, abnormally slow to emerge. They did not appear for thirty years (and that without modern retroviral drugs). Brodkey insisted he wasn’t gay but, like many writers, experimental by nature – and unluckier than most. His readers had endured a long, forty-year wait and an anti-climactic one. In 1991 there finally appeared the work which the world had been on tenterhooks to see. It was entitled
The Runaway Soul
and ran to a mere 853 printed pages. Brodkey announced that it was only the first instalment of
A Party of Animals
. But he was sixty-one and Methuselah couldn’t have finished the work at this rate. He brought out another novel,
Profane Friendship
, in 1994, a rewrite of Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice
. He died in January 1996 of Aids – within the same 48 hours, curiously, as Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist with whom, to Brodkey’s irritation, he was perennially confused during life. Such things vexed him. He was famous for his feuds – accusing John Updike, for example, of depicting him as the Luciferian hero of
The Witches of Eastwick
.

In his last two years Brodkey penned a poignant account of his end,
This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
(1996). An
ars moriendi
(a venerable but obsolete genre), it traces his painful journey to the dying of the light. It reads more fluently, and with more narrative drive, than any fiction-proper he ever wrote. In it, he seems at times to mount a defence of the snail-like pace of his work. Published a few months after his death, he cannot quite be said to have to beaten the undertaker in the race to the finishing line, but he gallantly finished the course. His great novel didn’t – if, indeed, it existed. In
This Wild Darkness
, Brodkey recalls that when he was six or seven years old, ‘I asked everyone … I mean
everyone
, the children at school, the teachers, women in the caféteria, the parents of other children: How long do you want to live? I suppose the secret in the question was: What do you enjoy? Do you
enjoy living? Would you try to go on living under any circumstances?’ The question remained hanging.

Any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical.
Edna O’Brien

As O’Brien recalls, ‘the first book I ever bought – I’ve still got it – was called
Introducing James Joyce
, by T. S. Eliot’. She proceeded to read
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and ‘reading that book made me realize that I wanted literature for the rest of my life’. As Joyce famously pronounced, the Irish author can only survive by ‘silence, exile and cunning’ and a willingness to offend Ireland. O’Brien passes the last in grand style: the first half-dozen of her novels were banned in Ireland. She also sails through on Joyce’s exile criterion. She left Ireland in her early twenties and her career as an author – as flamboyantly Irish as her name – has been entirely passed in literary London. ‘Silent’ O’Brien has never been. Cunningly, however, she has kept hidden details of the many love affairs London literary gossip credits her with.

She was born in a village in County Clare in the west of Ireland in an atmosphere she describes as ‘fervid, enclosed and catastrophic. The spiritual food consisted of the crucified Christ.’ Since her family owned a run-down farm, the food on the table was that of the healthy peasant. Peasant-like, too, was the culture of her home. The opening chapters of her first novel,
The Country Girls
(1960), give a grim picture of that home. Her father was drunken and when in drink physically violent to his womenfolk. The novel opens with the fourteen-year-old heroine, Caithleen, waking with the petrified thought ‘he had not come home’ – which meant he had spent the night ‘on the batter’ and will perpetrate some domestic battery (which he duly does). The O’Briens had once been well off and there remained ‘the relics of riches. It was a life full of contradictions. We had an avenue, but it was full of potholes; there was a gatehouse, but another couple lived there; we had lots of fields, but they weren’t all stocked or tilled. I remember fields high with ragwort. I remember my father giving them to other people. There was a prodigality, which I regret to tell you I have inherited.’ Her father would be the ‘ogre figure’ in much of her early fiction. Her mother,
to whom
The Country Girls
was dedicated (she did not appreciate the gesture and went through her copy carefully obliterating all the dirty bits), had been to America and almost escaped her Irish destiny. Her daughter would succeed.

Aged eleven, Edna won a scholarship to a convent boarding school some forty miles away. The nuns, if her novel is to be believed, proved as tyrannical as her father – if more ingenious in their cruelties. ‘Sins got committed by the hour, sins of thought, word and deed and omission.’ In
The Country Girls
there are two girl-heroines who, as O’Brien records, reflect different aspects of her own personality. Caithleen (later Kate) is obedient, bookish, clever and shy. Baba, the daughter of a rather more decent veterinarian father, is rebellious, sluttish and dumb – but full of life. Caithleen’s initial vocation is to take the veil, but, encouraged by her wayward alter ego, she too rebels. At the climactic moment, ‘anger pervaded like a rash and then and there I knew that I would not be a nun rather I would be a film star and get a perm in my hair’. O’Brien left the Sisters of Mercy in 1946. Whether, like Caithleen (egged on by Baba), it was for writing blasphemous filth is not clear. If so, it would have been in character.
The Country Girls
, when it came out in 1960, offended the authorities on any number of scores but its most wounding charge against Irish society was that – while fanatically defending the traditional ‘family’ – it institionalised sexual abuse of the young. The fourteen-year-old Caithleen is targeted, continuously, by ‘happily’ married men. Ireland, we apprehend, is a cesspit of sexual hypocrisy and furtive male lust.

Aged eighteen, O’Brien went off to Dublin to qualify as a chemist’s assistant. She worked in a shop by day, dispensing worm powders with gentian-stained hands. There was a glorious night at the ‘pictures’ once a week and evening classes. She pigged it in a bedsit, with few prospects other than the kind of marriage which had destroyed her mother. O’Brien has always been sensitive about the higher education she deserved and was denied. She takes malicious pleasure in relating the fact that a reviewer on the
New Statesman
was dismissed for calling her ‘illiterate’. As she recalls in her semi-autobiographical book,
Mother Ireland
(1976), she lost her virtue in a field on the outskirts of Dublin. It was the ‘ultimate crime’ but she no longer felt it as such. She was eventually ‘whisked away’ from her dreary existence in the chemist shop by the Czech-Irish writer, Ernest Gébler. The complex nature of their relationship is reflected in the second volume of her ‘girls trilogy’ and only fully disclosed after his death in 1996.

Gébler earns a place in literary history as Ireland’s first international bestselling author. His novel,
The Plymouth Adventure
(1947), about the pioneer American puritan voyage, was made into a film starring Spencer Tracy in 1952. Gébler was a Marxist, an intellectual fifteen years O’Brien’s senior, and in the process of
divorcing a rich American wife. On learning that his daughter was living in sin with a married man, Edna’s father burst into the couple’s house, as O’Brien recalled, decades later, in a radio interview: ‘There was a fight so he [Gébler] was hit or kicked. That evening he had wounds and was livid. My father came with a priest. It was like something out of the Middle Ages.’ The couple went on to marry after his divorce came through in 1954, ‘in a very grim little wedding in the sacristy of a Catholic church in Blanchardstown and the witnesses were two builders’. They moved to London a few years later. According to O’Brien’s memoir,
Mother Ireland
, ‘I left Ireland without a wrench’ – but, in every other than the geographical sense, the country would never leave her.

Gébler eventually became yet another tyrant in her life. Where men were concerned, O’Brien concluded, she was incorrigibly ‘masochistic’. Gébler is portrayed as Eugene Gaillard (the initials are a giveaway) in the trilogy, thinly disguised as a middle-aged documentary film-maker with a previous wealthy American wife, ‘35 and going bald’. Gaillard is initially drawn to Caithleen by her innocence and docility. ‘You’re like Anna Karenina in that coat,’ he compliments her, and she duly goes off to read the novel. As time passes and two children arrive, he comes to see her innocence as something to despise. ‘He said I came from ignorance and peasants,’ a pained Caithleen says.