Harold Brodkey: Master of the Unpublished Novel

Halfway through the interview, the world’s greatest unpublished novelist stops short in his discourse on how Proust “lied” when he wrote about the way memory works.

“You don’t dip the madeleine cookie and have everything come flooding back,” says Harold Brodkey, who, by the way, has been compared to Proust. “Memory is not like that,” he says, rising abruptly from his chair to search the hotel room for his yellow-tinted eyeglasses.

Behind the Glasses

A small silence ensues as Brodkey, a tall, austerely elegant figure, forages through drawers and pockets, finding, at last, the elusive glasses. Positioning them like small, yellow shields on his elongated, bearded face, the writer--who is stopping at Los Angeles and other selected spots, to talk about his newly published collection of short fiction--sighs in relief, declaring, “I needed something to hide behind.”

Secure now behind his glasses, Brodkey returns to the subject of memory. Or to be more precise, the kind of looping, associative, time-free thinking that goes on in the mind when one tries to arrange and order memory.

It is a subject that preoccupies him; most of the 30 or so short stories upon which his literary reputation is based deal in one way or another with mastering mind-time and memory. Indeed, he spent years training himself to remember, lying on a couch thinking, conducting a sort of self-analysis that might open the gateways to the walled-off feelings he wanted to write about: the emotions of childhood and particularly those feelings connected to the mother who died before he was 2.

“What I try to set up is the notion of how memory really functions . . . because there’s no other way to talk with any sort of knowledge about any human event,” he says. “All of cognition is based on a sense of what you know, and a sense of what you know is a sense of what happened in the past. But your sense of what happened in the past--there are thousands and thousands of forms it takes, almost all of them summaries. And then as you use what you know, those summaries are overlaid with further experiences and further summaries.”

Many of the pieces in his current collection of short stories, “Stories in an Almost Classical Mode,” are about childhood and were originally published over the past 25 years in magazines such as the New Yorker and Esquire.

A few of the pieces are said to be taken from the much-heralded, unpublished novel Brodkey has been working on for at least 20 years--perhaps longer. The 58-year-old writer has said he has been working on the novel--”Party of Animals”--since he was 8.

The “big, Brodkey novel,” as it has been called, has been the talk of the literary world for years. Brodkey says that it will be published next year and will be 800 to 1,000 pages. It will open with the sentence: “Imagine a mind shaped like a person.”

Greatest Novelist Alive

Those who have read, or claim to have read, parts of the manuscript are unstinting in their praise of Brodkey’s brilliance. They have compared him to Proust, to Joyce, to Freud. Recently he was pictured on the cover of a national magazine along with the caption, “The Genius.” He has been called the greatest novelist alive.

But he has yet to publish a novel.

Still, “Brodkey writes with a power unequaled in this century,” says the writer and editor Gordon Lish, who, in the 1970s, edited two of Brodkey’s stories for Esquire magazine.

Some critics, however--assessing Brodkey’s literary talent on the basis of his published work--have described his subject matter as “unabashed self-preoccupation.”

Reviews of “Stories in an Almost Classical Mode” have been generally favorable--some calling the book “a great one” and “heroic.”

(Brodkey will be offering rare readings from the work or signing autographs at 7 tonight at Book Soup in Hollywood; from 2-4 p.m. Saturday at Small World Books in Venice; at 2 p.m. Sunday at Dutton’s Bookstore in Brentwood; and at 8 p.m. Monday in the Buenos Aires Room at the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center at UCLA.)

But a few have been nasty and personal in attacking Brodkey’s growing reputation vis-a-vis the anticipated novel.

He shrugs off all criticism, good or bad. He has his own assessment of his work: “I know I’m a great writer and it’s a great book. And I don’t write in any way that actually has existed in an American writer before. Perhaps in any writer before.

Unbearable Grief

The essence of Brodkey as a person is hard to pin down. It’s like his description of sorting memories: Impressions emanate like sparks from Brodkey, often colliding, superimposing themselves, one on top of the other, into summaries. And just when you think you’ve got a handle on who is at the controls of the inner man, it all changes.

In an interview he is playful, charming, sly, self-confident almost arrogant, argumentative, brilliant. But Brodkey seems most real after the yellow-tinted glasses are in place, and the voice of the wounded, still-grieving child hiding behind those glasses emerges in full force.

It is a voice heard in many of his stories. Brodkey writes often of a boy whose childhood grief over the early loss of his mother and the altered life that followed is immense, consuming, unbearable; a grief that finally makes the boy ill, unable to eat or function.

Brodkey’s mother died before his second birthday, an event that he says caused him to “crack up.” He stopped eating, walking and talking. At 2, he was adopted by his father’s cousins, Doris and Joseph Brodkey, and moved from Staunton, Ill., to a St. Louis suburb. By 8, he says, “My family situation became so bad . . . so unbearable” that he could not face it without “being destroyed. So I told myself, ‘I will write about it.’ And by saying that, I was promising myself that there was some sense to this and so it didn’t get me down.”

He leans forward to ask a question: “You have children? Yes? You remember your 2-year-old? That’s just about the peak of separation anxiety. And some of the reason why I can do what Cynthia (Ozick) said I can do--dig down so deeply--is that anywhere near that subject (his mother’s death) is all the raw, infantile stuff that was never outgrown. It was simply walled off. So it’s almost as fresh now as my experience of it.”

But Brodkey insists that his work is not autobiographical: “When you finish my book, you may know something about the way my mind works. But you won’t know me.”