The Weight of Memories : Books: Harold Brodkey’s “The Runaway Soul” was decades in the writing and a lifetime in the making. The enigmatic author’s territory is the mind itself.

Harold Brodkey has at last stepped out into the world--or at least, for the moment, into a protected segment of reality.

Sitting on the terrace of his sister-in-law’s Los Angeles house--in what he might call a “handleable” environment enclosed by a high stucco wall--the author is contemplating the reception of his long-awaited first novel with a mixture of high spirits and acute anxiety.

“It’s my life. Not the book’s life. My life,” he says in a plaintive, whispery voice, popping a lozenge for laryngitis (“I’ve been talking about myself for six weeks”) and sipping a calming cup of macrobiotic tea for his sensitive nerves.

But the Brodkey Angst, albeit characteristic, is not unwarranted in this instance. His novel, “The Runaway Soul,” has already entered the folk history of American publishing by virtue of its highly publicized absence. The 61-year-old author has been working on his 800-page opus, to be published this week by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for three decades: that is, throughout most of his adulthood, not to mention the major span of the entire post-World War II period.

Talk of its publication has buzzed through the country’s literary inner sanctum for much of that time. As early as 1976, the New York Times ran a story on the manuscript’s purported delivery, and the following year Farrar, Straus listed the novel, titled “A Party of Animals,” in its fall catalogue.

But the tome never materialized.

Instead, in 1988, Brodkey published a collection of novella-length pieces in “Stories in an Almost Classical Mode,” his first work since a book of short fiction, “First Love and Other Sorrows,” had appeared 30 years before.

Normally such a dilatory production would have doomed a writer to a status of dilettantism and ridicule. But Brodkey had received lordly praise from the nation’s literary eminence grise, Harold Bloom, who anointed him “an American Proust . . . unparalleled in American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner.”

And as the book critic and literary biographer James Atlas quips, “If you have Harold Bloom’s imprimatur, you don’t even have to write your book.”

And Brodkey has not been shy about acknowledging his talents.

“He has himself made extraordinary claims for his work,” says Atlas. “He has been a self-advertiser in the mode of (Norman) Mailer”--creating a put-up-or-shut-up attitude among some of the bookish.

“He’s become something of a joke,” remarks James Wolcott, book critic and contributing editor of Vanity Fair. “In all the photographs, his hand is cradling his head as if the sheer weight of everything he knows and feels is too much for him. I don’t know why he’s earned this power to cower people.”

On this afternoon, however, Brodkey is charming, chatty, disarming.

He elegantly arranges his tall, tweed-clad figure in a patio chair. He even removes the hallmark safari hat that guards his privacy--a gesture he remembers making several years ago when New York magazine profiled him in a cover story titled “Genius.”

Wildly discursive, like his writing (“Harold can’t say hello in half an hour,” observes his wife, novelist Ellen Schwamm), he speaks in parentheses and run-on sentences, backtracking, analyzing, sometimes employing a private shorthand that seems to leave important information down in the mind’s basement.

The mind, after all, is Brodkey’s territory. In “The Runaway Soul,” he conducts a veritable CAT scan over the psychic terrain of his protagonist, Wiley Silenowicz, a blond, curly haired Jewish youth whose ruminations on everything from his fluid sexuality to his relationships with his family and oneness with the world come under scrutiny.

The narrative, such as it is, is based on Brodkey’s life. Wiley, like the author, is traumatized after the death of his mother when he was 2 years old. Raised in St. Louis by his cousins, S.L. and Lila Silenowicz, he encounters his pathologically jealous stepsister, Nonie, whose influence pervades his existence even as he attends Harvard, where he meets and marries his wife, Ora.

Brodkey began thinking about the novel around the time he and his first wife, Joanna Brown, divorced in 1960. “Who are you holding in your arms when you’re holding someone in your arms you think you love? That’s kind of the main idea,” he says.

It is his way of threading ideas together that can cause the reader’s gray cells to fumble. In one single-sentence chapter, he writes: “I can see, as I curve through a mental arc inwardly (in an actual moment), the shape of how I sort of kind of hate people who make me say no.”

“I don’t know of anyone who has isolated the family and focused on it so narrowly,” comments writer Guy Davenport, the distinguished former University of Kentucky English professor, who calls the “vastly repetitious” style “dangerous as an artistic ploy.”

A winner of a 1990 MacArthur grant and a professional pen pal of Brodkey’s, Davenport admits: “You don’t dare try to read every sentence one after the other. I look around in a paragraph and sort of savor it.”

But it’s not just potential reader resistance, it is everything from the logistics of fame to the potency of praise that worries Brodkey as he waits on the cusp of publication.

Nevertheless, he clearly enjoys the publicity he is receiving. “It’s nice to get attention, because it shows I’m not a complete klutz.”

On the other hand . . .

“It’s better at my age to have had the career and have people come and say we’ve loved your work for 27 years.

“The big winner is Katharine Hepburn. Everybody hated her and hated her. Now everybody loves her. Here I am at the stage where everybody hated her and I’m practically the same age she is.” (Hepburn is actually 21 years older.)

Which brings Brodkey to the maddening matter of being compared to Marcel Proust, author of the voluminous, autobiographical “Remembrance of Things Past.”

“When the compliment is overwhelming, it’s in a sense not acceptable,” Brodkey declares. “I got so upset about it, I sicked a reporter for the London Times on Harold Bloom.”

Why, Brodkey wanted to know, “did these guys start this obscene stuff which has wrecked my life?

“I mean, as long as he calls me maestro and says things I understand, like ‘That’s the best short story I ever read,’ that’s fine. I can take heavy praise if I can comprehend it.”

In fact, Brodkey at times receives lavish kudos even from those who find him socially unsatisfying.

Atlas comments on his seductiveness as a “faculty for bringing you in under the eaves of his capacious ego. . . . He flatters you while drawing the sustenance he needs.”

Davenport finds the Brodkey persona baffling. “In his letters he sounds like he’s the most sorrowful, put-upon, paranoid individual,” says Davenport. But having met him last year, he declares, “in person he’s delightful.”

By his own admission, Brodkey is shy, mildly dyslexic and a slight stammerer when he is tired.

Facing the ordinary world, he lapses into abstractions. At the gym where he used to work out, Schwamm says, he actually dropped barbells on his toes, and he would step out into Manhattan traffic on a green light.

“I used to send him off in the early days and think of (French chemist) Pierre Curie, who was knocked down by a carriage,” says Schwamm, adding, “he’s better.”

Yet going down into himself when he writes is a painful process for Brodkey. “Sometimes I just stand there for hours with my hand on his shoulder so he can go on with parts that are too hard to do if he’s alone,” says Schwamm. “It sounds melodramatic, but it happens.”

Working amid a clutter of computers and papers in their rambling Upper West Side apartment, Brodkey has produced hundreds of revisions of his work. A wall of cupboards is filled with drafts and 38 more boxes are in storage, plus revisions for “The Runaway Soul,” which are at Harvard.

It is getting to the truth as revealed through memory--the goal he has set for himself--that emotionally exhausts him. Before he met Schwamm, Brodkey spent a large part of his time exercising his memory, relentlessly returning his thoughts to his early childhood.

His earliest memory, he insists, and the one that opens the book, is his birth: “The odors, the noises, the light, the shock of it. I remember being welcomed. It doesn’t have a name to it. I just remember that atmosphere: Here he is. “

Brodkey intended to publish these memories posthumously, fearful, says Schwamm, of being “lauded” or “crucified.”

But now Brodkey has a new angle for his anxiety. “The first thought that crossed my mind when I turned this book in was now they don’t need me anymore.”

To preclude any such oversight, Brodkey has two more manuscripts in waiting, a total of 2,300 pages. One is a father-son study, tentatively titled “Of Love and Death”; the other is about New York.

Schwamm, Brodkey’s daughter, Temi, and his editor, Jonathan Galassi, could finish them “if anything happens,” he says weightily.

Yet one does not sense that Brodkey is ready to self-destruct. Does that mean the two books are completed?

Brodkey laughs incredulously. “In my terms? Good God, noooooo.”