Stay a Moment Longer : PROFANE FRIENDSHIP, <i> By Harold Brodkey (Farrar Staus & Giroux: $23; 387 pp.)</i>

The writer Harold Brodkey has made his true mark by taking language into cornices of human emotion and event that have been avoided or overlooked or underestimated by other writers. He opens these moments to view with a stunning accuracy that seems the very purpose of literature: the approach of essential mysteries of life with a sense made of words. At times, of course, he waxed poetic or beyond poetic, but at others he struck the note with an honesty that was simply arresting. It was clear, always, as I think it’s clear in this new novel, that he is willing to stay a moment longer, reach for something--a deeper sense or an essence--that most books won’t even attempt.

“Profane Friendship,” it is noted in the front matter, is a book commissioned by the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the group charged with the task of saving the city of Venice, and the book takes that city, or more exactly the light and mood of that city, as its locus. The lifelong friendship that is traced through the book is between the narrator Niles O’Hara, the son of an expatriate writer, and a Venetian youth Giangiacomo Gallieni, who takes the sobriquet Onni. The novel insists on a tight focus on the two, claustrophobic in its exclusion of the larger scene of Venice--which is evoked primarily through “watershine and amoral sunlight.” Thus it is appropriate that the narrator Niles’ nickname is Nino, the anagram of his friend’s.

Though their lives are in some ways parallel, they are not interchangeable. They meet as boys before the war and the novel takes them well into late middle age, when Niles has become a successful writer/screenwriter and Onni a famous and celebrated film actor. The book is Nile’s record of their friendship, in Brodkey’s conceit: “This book is meant to be no more than an attempt to give one small aspect of love in its dimensionalities and color, its silliness, as a confession of its importance to me.”

Most of the book is given to their youth: their prewar school days and their reunion after the war, when they begin an adolescent sexual exploration. Brodkey’s examination of this relationship, from its dawning in the rough boy-play through its evolution to what Niles finally calls a “profane friendship,” is the kind of intense, long set piece that defines Brodkey at his best. His understanding of the emerging sexual self is extreme, and through long unhurried scenes he shows that the two friends attract and repel each other, play roles, posture, act, act tough, talk about art, about love, about death and politics, and try the possibilities of what becomes an uncertain physical relationship.

But the pull of the novel is not scenic, not illustrative, not literal, not linear. What is traced here is the inner heart of a friendship in all of its vagaries and nuance. The narrator has an “ambition to make the world as much a matter of one’s own vocabulary of memory and experiences as a dream is.”

These are very bright people and Brodkey’s portrait of Niles’ complex emotional life, the cautious development of a powerful and abiding ambivalence toward Onni, may be the masterstroke. Of course, Onni’s life is one of extremes. As a child during the war he was raped, and the abuse makes him the tougher of the two, the mentor. He’s 16 when Niles is 14; he takes the lead in their adventures. Niles, in his genius, measures his distance, at times becoming an unnervingly dispassionate observer. Onni’s worldly habits and his destiny lead them both into rougher and rougher terrain, until inevitably flirtation leads them deeper into the Venetian night and they are degraded, or so Niles sees, and abased. Though we see him primarily with Onni, he sees his friend as a “monster.” “I did so thoroughly in some sense, ‘hate’ him. I mean the history of our connection would be a live thing and ugly. . . .”

Thirty years--the time a conventional novel might have used to give us the lives into which this friendship intruded, the basis by which we might have calculated its real effect on them--are elided in this book, and we see the men again as old men, 60 or so, in Venice. They are still doppelgangers, Onni and Nino, meeting for walks and talks along the pedestrian boulevards in the ancient city’s fabulous light. The writer and the actor each feel the full power of their careers, and the struggle now is manipulation and power. The days and the scenes are those of a dream, unanchored in a city that rinses in the sea tides everyday. The men--devoid of the context of larger lives--talk still about love and death and power in the shadow of a actual film they are making together. This remains abstract when we long for the concrete. And even early in the novel the reader will certainly know that we read this novel to see not what happened when and to whom, but simply to accompany Brodkey’s brilliant and wandering inquiry into the choices and the absence of choice that accrue, later to be called self .

In light of Brodkey’s recent personal essays on having AIDS, this novel seems to hold some fundamental place in his artistic and personal credo. Still it feels more successfully personal than public. To call “Profane Friendship” ambitious is to insult a seasoned hand, and that is not my intention. To describe the book as seminal, that being a notch deeper than realistic, rings true. It exists, as many works do for a time, in a zone utterly required of one life--a book generated in a search for the redeeming aesthetic.