This Wild Darkness

I had only read Brodkey's collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, probably a dozen years ago, and admired his writing. This is necessarily a very dark book, an examination of his last years and months after he learns he has AIDS. It sounds incongruous, I suppose, to say I felt a kinship with Brodkey, but I did, and it was mostly because of this statement - "I am an addict of language, of storytelling and of journalism. I read, not frenziedly anymore, but constantly. I long to love other people's words, other people for their words, their ideas." Well I am not terminally ill, as Brodkey knew he was when he wrote those words, but I knew what he meant. The importance of life: our lives, other people's lives; and the stories from those lives are equally important, to preserve those lives. Brodkey continued to feel this way right up to the end, as evidenced in one of the final entries in This Wild Darkness - "And I am still writing, as you see. I am practicing making entries in my journal, recording my passage into nonexistence. This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over." This was not, of course, a happy book, but it is an important one from a very talented writer. - Tim Bazzett, author of Love, War & Polio

From Julian Barnes's introduction to IN THE LAND OF PAIN: "When Harold Brodkey's heroic--and, it seemed, heroically self-deceiving--account of his own dying was published in THE NEW YORKER, I congratulated the magazine's editor for 'leaving it all in', by which I meant the evidence of Brodkey's impressive egomania. 'You should have seen what we took out', she replied wryly." Leave it to Barnes to turn up his needlenose at Brodkey's self-described sexual "irresistibility". As far as I'm concerned, if Little Sexpot Brodkey was constantly pawed at by his adoptive father, that alone gives Brodkey the right to call himself irresistible. I'm impressed that Brodkey endured *that* scenario (let alone AIDS) without succumbing to suicide. I just wish he had omitted the pointless sidetrip to Venice. From THIS WILD DARKNESS: "For a day I had a kind of fever with chills and sweats but with body temperature *below* normal, at 96 degrees." Technically, that couldn't have been a fever but rather a case of mild hypothermia. Or maybe not. I'm not up on the subject. Ya know how boremongers like Steve Martin & Woody Allen are always doing that New-York-versus-Los-Angeles shtick? Well, Harold took the cake with the following generalization: "New York was the capital of American sexuality, the one place in America where you could get laid with some degree of sophistication, and so Peggy Guggenheim and Andre Breton had come here during the war, whereas Thomas Mann, who was shy, and Igor Stravinsky, who was pious, had gone to Los Angeles, which is the best place for voyeurs." Life is a big blank. That's the most overwhelming impression that I've gotten from life. The fact that life is a big blank. The fact that there are no theological answers. I call it The Big Blank-Out. Harold said: "Death is a bore. But life isn't very interesting either. I must say I expected death to glimmer with meaning, but it doesn't ... I find the silence of God to be very beautiful, even when the silence is directed at me."

Harold Brodkey admits that he is not an easy person to like. It also appears that it was not easy for him to live inside his own skin. But during the three years that he lived with the knowledge that he would die from AIDS, he strove to look, unflichingly, into the face of death. Like the rest of us, he could not always endure the truth. He did, however, write a report from the land of the terminally ill that is unsentimental and painful, with occasional flashes of illumination.

And Brodkey's humanity shines foremost in this simple book. Knocked off-balance by his diagnosis, Brodkey uses words to find his way through the "death experience." Sometimes tongue-in-cheek, more often matter-of-fact, Brodkey examines his impending death as he lives it. Without excessive sentimentality, clear-eyed. And not always "attractive." But honest as dirt.It seems Brodkey learns that style matters little. And that is the source of true style.