![]() 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. “Harold Brodkey and His Great (Unpublished) Novel.” 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. In 1964, when Random House signed him to a contract for a novel titled A Party of Animals, Harold Brodkey was arguably the most promising writer in America. ![]()
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