In an odd reflection of my blog entry a week or so ago, about Stefan Brecht... last night I was reading through John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists, an enjoyable collection of sharply drawn capsule careers of writers; and I tripped over Harold Brodkey. Who, of course, whatever else he had been, eventually became a noted writer about AIDS....
Brodkey was highly intelligent, intensely arrogant, and either mostly straight, or sort of not so much really. He claimed he'd become HIV+ in the 1960s, back when he was still (admtting to) having sex with men – which is really, really implausible; it is considerably more possible that it would have been in the late 70s/early 80s. I've tried to read This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, but it is off-putting – it is amazing just how much Brodkey adores and idolizes himself. And it is, frankly, fairly tedious/repulsive: it is clear that, for him, the great historical and cultural tragedy of AIDS is that it struck (you guessed it) Harold Brodkey.
So it was strange to see Sutherland try to explain what we can know about the hallucinatory mess of Brodkey's creative career: the fiction of the massive Great Novel, which apparently didn't even exist, and the circling, chaotic bursts of publicity that appeared around its imagined existence for nearly forty years. It is possible that Brodkey's greatest fiction was the tale of what he was going to write....
So: like Stefan Brecht, like Truman Capote: the arrogant, unproductive fraud, who is evidently but secretly filled with shame and confusion. And this one had AIDS, to boot. Obviously a shadow figure for me – and by that I mean: someone who seems to symbolize parts of myself I most reject, loathe, and fear, but also parts of myself that I inevitably and constantly carry around with me. That being what a Jungian shadow is....
In a week when I have promised R. that I will work every day, I have actually worked three, or perhaps two and a half, out of five days; and edited perhaps six pages. Not so utterly terrible: but perhaps all these flashing images of failure and success, the unreal background to real work, are keyed in to my views of these other writers.
Because last night my dreams were filled with pages on Brodkey – books, newspaper articles, web pages – and until the early morning hours, when I tried to pin down just what he had done, I couldn't lay the image to rest.
Disturbing dreams: until I could look at them closely enough to acknowledge the reflections... and then the dreams were gone.
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