Word: brodkey
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...traveled from publishing house to publishing house, the author lost no adherents. For almost three decades, Brodkey managed to preserve his high reputation on the basis of two books of evocative short stories and a handful of magazine pieces. No other contemporary writer has so successfully disproved the adage that you can't live on promises...
...Brodkey legend took wing after his debut, First Love and Other Sorrows, was published in 1958. Several critics dubbed him the American Proust. Susan Sontag chimed in: the author was "going for real stakes." Yale professor Harold Bloom burbled, "If he's ever able to solve his publishing problems, he'll be seen as one of the great writers...
...seemed as impressed by all this as Harold Brodkey. Consciously or unconsciously, he used the encomiums as a strategy for not producing. "If some of the people who talk to me are right," he told an interviewer, "well, to be possibly not only the best living writer in English but someone who could be the rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton is not a role that a halfway educated Jew from St. Louis with two sets of parents and a junkman father is prepared to play. In daydream, yes. In real life...
...daydream the novel was always approaching the finish line. In real life Brodkey tiptoed around his writer's block, became the father of a daughter, then went through a divorce from the woman he had met as a Harvard undergraduate. After a long bachelorhood he was introduced to novelist Ellen Schwamm. Two weeks later, she left her husband of 23 years and moved into Brodkey's cluttered Manhattan apartment. They were married in 1980. He supported himself by teaching part time at Cornell, developing scripts at NBC and artfully freeloading. He advertised himself as "an incredibly good dinner guest...
...quieter his typewriter, the more voluble Brodkey seemed to be in person. When he was not doing riffs on his own horn ("I'm one of the people that people fight over . . . It's just possible I am the voice of the coming age"), he was appraising fellow authors with faint damns. "What's the point of talking as if I were Mailer or Updike?" he demanded. "I don't have the guts they have. I could defend myself by saying that they're not carrying so dangerous a message, but maybe I'm flattering myself...