THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 3, 1996 TAG: 9611010699
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: 74 lines
THIS WILD DARKNESS
The Story of My Death
HAROLD BRODKEY
Metropolitan Books. 177 pp. $20.
We've become accustomed to intimate memoirs of the rich, the famous, the infamous. If the subject's deceased, that passing is a coda, a footnote to what was seen, done, thought, said, eaten, worn, and who was there when it happened.
When he learned he was dying of AIDS, novelist Harold Brodkey (The Runaway Soul) wanted to change that. Acting as a writer, with a perverse fascination for what was happening, he recorded the progress of his death in This Wild Darkness. The account gradually becomes a tale of life and the relationship he had with his wife, novelist Ellen Schwamm.
This Wild Darkness is as much a journal of Brodkey's experiences (mostly the literary and sexual ones) as it is a record of progressing illness. Some pieces were published in The New Yorker as Brodkey completed them; these progress reports, or death notes, stimulated an outpouring from readers who had experienced the isolated horrors of AIDS.
Brodkey noted: ``to die of AIDS is to die outside a tradition, in a silence of sorts.''
Yet letters arrived from people who had endured any lingering demise of a loved one.
Even those who've barely tasted illness can relate to passages such as:
``The hospital is like a bus terminal on a weekend, full of mad and abominable and listless human goods in transit. Going home was an idea, my idea, and it became the germ of a story that was mine once again. The only way conscious reality can deal with wild variability is by telling a story in reference to real time. This was my story: I had come to the end of Ellen's strength, and it was time to go home.''
In the brief years left, Brodkey learned new ways of doing commonplace things, of looking at people, even friends. His kind doctor said, ``Believe me, you can have a couple of good years. But there are other problems.'' Another AIDS patient of his was shunned by a close friend living in the same building; even their children were kept apart.
When the doctor told Ellen which drugstores were ``discreet'' about who's taking what medication, Brodkey noticed her startled expression, ``the certain way the (realization of) wickedness registers on her face.''
Then others were told: children, grandchildren, friends, Brodkey's agent. His daughter cried, ``Who am I going to talk to? I'm not through with you yet.''
One terrible moment was when Abner, age 4, said to the much-changed grandfather he hadn't seen in months: ``I don't remember you.'' Brodkey replied, ``I used to be a pink and black horse.'' Abner thought a moment, grinned. ``I remember you now.'' But to Brodkey's horror, ``I had no strength to respond or pretend after only a short while, less than an hour. I am not able to be present for him and never will be anymore.''
Brodkey reaches back, examining his blighted childhood. He was told that as a baby his father sold him to the aunt and uncle who became his adoptive parents. Perhaps just as well; but then, his adoptive father sexually abused him during his adolescent years. He doesn't linger on bitter moments, handling them as loose pieces to an ultimately unsolvable life puzzle.
The enduring humor between Brodkey and Schwamm was based on stark honesty: ``I said I was sorry, really sorry, to do this to her, to be so much work, and after a rather long pause, she said, `Harold, you were always this much work. All that is different is that I give you meals in bed and I cry when you are in pain. But you were always work.'''
In life, unlike fiction, we cannot dictate or even change our endings. Harold Brodkey died of complications from AIDS in January 1996. He left behind a small, impressive collection of work, to which can now be added his epitaph, This Wild Darkness. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' is a novelist who
lives on the Eastern Shore. by CNB