The story could be cast as urban legend- Behave yourself, some sage editor might advise a young writer, or you’ll be forgotten just like Brodkey-but perhaps rather than a warning, Brodkey’s contradictory ghosts are issuing a challenge. What happened? In revisiting that long-awaited novel, The Runaway Soul, and the terms of its widespread rejection, it’s possible to discern the crucible of Brodkey’s unravelling. When I pointed out to the clerk of a used bookstore that a Brodkey volume was cheaply priced, even though it was signed by the author, I received a shrug of indifference. Today, Brodkey is remembered, if at all, as a kind of literary bogeyman-vain, furious, menacing-a major figure without a biography, reputed to be interesting but seldom studied. Some twenty years after his death, Brodkey still awaits that discovery-a curious fate for a writer Harold Bloom once declared “unparalleled in American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner.” It would be hard to name an author whose reputation has been more thoroughly unmade. “Harold Brodkey and His Great (Unpublished) Novel.” On the cover of the issue, eight years before dying of AIDS, Brodkey clutches a heavily corrected manuscript like a child you’re threatening to take from him. “I write like someone who intends to be posthumously discovered,” Harold Brodkey told New York magazine in 1988.
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