LAST STORIES BY A MAN OF REPUTATION

Author: By Bill Marx

Date: SUNDAY, November 9, 1997

Page: L2

Section: Books

The sexual ecstasy and agony of the Ego unites the single-minded self-regard of Brodkey's fiction with his hands-on creation of a reputation. With calibrated immodesty, Brodkey told The Washington Post in 1986 that ``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 half-way educated Jew from St. Louis is prepared to play.'' But play he did, for a literary world that liked images of importance. A master in absentia, he was primarily known for two story collections, 1957's ``First Love and Other Sorrows'' and 1988's ``Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.'' In his 1996 memoir of living with AIDS, ``This Wild Darkness,'' Brodkey remarks on his confused literary standing around the world: ``great artist here, fool there, major writer, minor fake, villain, virtuoso, jerk, hero.''

Critics of the future will have to grapple with claims that ``The Runaway Soul'' is The Great American Novel. Brodkey's champions are still hyping away -- critic Harold Bloom swears the writer is ``unparalleled in American fiction since the death of William Faulkner.'' That's quite a trick, given that Bloom's version of the Western Canon lists eight volumes by Faulkner and only one by Brodkey. While we're waiting for posterity's verdict, ``The World Is the Home of Love and Death'' will make the reading lists only of hard-core Brodkeyites who are hungry for literary leftovers scraped off the bottom of his fridge.

Five of the stories in the collection read as if they had been edited: four appeared in The New Yorker, the other in Glimmer Train. The remaining six pieces strike me as sections rejected from ``The Runaway Soul'' (they feature Brodkey's fictional stand-in, Wiley, and his adoptive parents, S. L. and Lila) or draft material that doesn't stop but dribbles to a halt. Such is the case with ``A Guest in the Universe,'' where, during a '50s party, Wiley mean-spiritedly shoots wannabe New York Jewish intellectuals in a barrel. And with ``Dumbness Is Everything,'' the standard roll in the hay told from the rationalist Romeo's point-of-view: ``Ora bends over: oh the breasts, oh the breasts, oh the `oddity' of breasts, oh the weight of recurring innocence, of virginity returned.'' Perhaps because of his illness, Brodkey never got around to putting these tales into coherent shape. Publishing them does not do justice to the writer's talent.

But I suspect Brodkey's obsession with adolescent newness (``recurring innocence'') by gleefully shedding rational control may be at fault as well. ``Sometimes conscious memory is so much sweeter than reality that compared to living I feel remembering like being gripped by an angel, the blinding brevity and the guidance,'' Wiley remarks. To Brodkey, childhood initiations, intimations of mortality, and sex are experiences that -- if recalled with sufficent artistic intensity -- lead to the spiritual. Yet the more he forgoes reality, the looser and more chaotic his writing becomes, a collapse of authorial distance that leads to repetition and confusion, what he calls ``the pornography of intelligence.''

For example, ``Waking'' takes around 40 pages to chronicle a traumatic bath given Wiley by his adoptive mother, Lila. Brodkey tries to elevate this domestic baptism into a metaphor-crammed meditation on self-consciousness while re-creating childhood sensation, a shotgun marriage of analysis and dream. His prose collapses under the strain: ``To the child the sweetness of her voice is like a bunch of robins pulling worms from him as from a lawn after a rain.'' Groundswells of romantic imagery sweat and heave at significance only to slide into pretension, particularly when weighed down by ersatz philosophical observations: ``Boredom and amusement, life and death, these are the two separate aspects of consciousness of my mind.'' Brodkey fails to convert raw adolescent experience into mythic, aesthetic, or religious epiphanies -- the only compelling excuses for excising everyone but the writer's self out of his fictional world.

The collection's modest stories are more effective, such as ``Bullies,'' where Wiley reconstructs and interprets (via Freudian play-by-play) the conversation Lila has with a rich neighbor, Ida, that flits from a subtle showdown between snotty Christian and feisty Jew to the flirtatious beginnings of a lesbian relationship. The title story begins affectingly, with Wiley taking care of his cantankerous father, S .L., who is wasting away in his mid-40s because of a heart condition. The son's ambivalence about his dad's declining powers is unflinchingly depicted. But the prose degenerates into sentences worthy of head-shaking embarrassment: ``My mind is a dancing cemetery with a sort of waking order of revenant moments glimpsed''; ``the mind is a sort of an angel's egg of the universe and hatches stuff.''

Brodkey doesn't explore the possibility that the mind can be devilish as well as godlike. A bard besotted by his memories -- to the point he believes they are a form of salvation -- could be self-deluded or self-destructive. For all their frenzied lyric posturing, his tales are filled with low-grade melodrama, passages of beauty wrapped in wads of metaphysical hogwash. The chaotic waywardness of Brodkey's thoughts, his maladroit prose, suggests the writer may not have been entirely convinced of the holy value of his solipsistic quest for time past. In ``The World Is the Home of Love and Death,'' Brodkey is crippled by the ``narcissistic masochism'' of his labors.