SAVING HIS LIFE

DAVID BRUDNOY'S MEMOIR OF DISEASE AND DISCOVERY

Author: By David Mehegan, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 5, 1997

Page: N14

Section: Books

The reader of radio talkmaster David Brudnoy's brightly written memoir, ``Life Is Not a Rehearsal,'' may struggle at first to find the answer to the question. As a publishing project, the reason for the book is clear. Brudnoy is a local celebrity (if perhaps not so big a figure as he makes himself out to be) whose near death from complications of AIDS two years ago, followed by his on-air disclosure and discussion of his sexual identity and his illness, was a big story for a while.

Still, it's not so clear what Brudnoy himself is getting at in this book, what exactly he makes of it all, nor what we should make of it. It does not satisfy, somehow, to read that he is now a more tolerant and caring person, less self-sufficient and yet ``fonder of himself'' (as he puts it), since his illness. A more poignant answer is there to be found, by the patient reader, but it is as implicit as the question.

Part of the challenge to the reader is one of focus. This is not technically a memoir; it is an autobiography, the story of an entire life. And most of it is as interesting as any other ordinary life, but no more so.

David Brudnoy, 56, is the much-loved only child of a Minneapolis Jewish family, and he tells not only of his birth and childhood, but also those of his parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. He excelled in public school in the 1950s, was a foreign exchange student in Japan and went to Yale, graduating in 1962 with a degree in Japanese studies. After abandoning a graduate program in east Asian studies at Harvard, he moved to Houston in 1964 to teach at all-black Texas Southern University. In 1966 he returned to Boston, and over the next few years earned a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Brandeis. After resuming his teaching career at Northeastern, in the 1970s he began to write conservative political commentaries for National Review and other magazines, then gradually built a career as a radio talk-show host and television commentator, ending up most successfully at WBZ.

The sub rosa story -- only here it is super rosa -- is of Brudnoy's slow awakening to his gay identity in the pre-Stonewall '50s and his active sex life in the '60s and after. That is not as fresh a story these days as it once was, and Brudnoy's telling of it is not remarkable. He dated girls and tried to play the macho game in high school, and only as an AFS student in Japan dared touch, only fleetingly, another boy sexually. Eventually he picked up a silent stranger in Bryant Park in New York and had what he presents as a cold, sordid and uncomfortable introduction to gay sex. Still, he had found his own sexual truth and in time learned how to enjoy the ways of a to-him new but natural world. In his 20s, he had several true love affairs, but many more quick nighttime encounters in America and Europe and in Caribbean vacation spots. These lessened as he grew older and younger men became less available.

By the 1980s he was a bona fide media star in Boston, with many friends and a lively private life. But a few friends died of a strange new illness. He tested positive for HIV in the early 1990s. He felt well for several years, then began to sicken, but denied what was obvious to friends and colleagues. By late 1994 he was sometimes incoherent in class (he had taught at Boston University for years), and even on the air, but still refused to listen to friends' urging that he check into a hospital. In December he collapsed and was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital. He later learned that he had been within minutes of death, saved only by timely antibiotics; he hovered at the edge of life for weeks, with friends rallied round, a group of guardian angels he calls ``the Gang of Five.''

A harrowing account of his symptoms and pathologies follows, from temporarily paralyzed lower legs to a horrifying encounter with post-herpetic neuralgia. Gradually he improved and eventually went home. Brudnoy tells in considerable detail of his discussions and negotiations, while in the hospital, with Boston Globe editors and writers who had got wind of his disease. He came out as a gay man with AIDS in a Globe story, and when he was well enough to resume his radio show, spent the first program talking about his identity and illness.

The book is brisk and lively reading, though Brudnoy's personal appeal doubtless comes through better in person and on the air than in writing. He is too wary of sentimentality, too much the distanced ironist, to be tempted by a strongly triumphant finish, which makes the epilogue a little on the diffuse side. He does allow himself such unremarkable observations as ``I realized that Donne was on the money: no man is an island, entire of itself.'' OK, but what do we realize about this story?

This may seem like a commonplace observation about a memoir, but in its first two-thirds, ``Life Is Not a Rehearsal'' is an almost tediously self-centered book. A great memoirist, even a very good one, makes the people and places of his life rich and, well, memorable. Brudnoy is clearly a man of many friends. But few of the people, and none of the places, in his book have any resonance or depth -- not his lovers, not even his parents; they're in the book because the author knew them. Perhaps this is a sign of a book too quickly written, but to this reader (who has never met the author) Brudnoy sounds for much of the book like a smart, talented man having a stimulating life, surrounded by wooden people on various stage sets.

But then comes his sickness, and everything changes, in the book and maybe in his life as well. In his crisis, Brudnoy is surrounded by a corps of people who love him intensely, who minister to him and lift him up when his own strength is gone. And as they do so, they take on life in a way no one earlier in the book has done. After hundreds of pages of brassy, self-confident, I-did-this, I-did-that, I-am-the-captain-of-my-fate narrative, in the chronicle of his illness Brudnoy tells a moving story of loving friendship, in which sexuality and celebrity are irrelevant, in which he is not the star.

So here is the answer, perhaps, to the implicit questions, Why was this book written? and what is the story it has to tell? It's the oldest story, and still the best. At least sometimes, at least for a while, amor vincit omnia.