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A tall, blond biologist named Doug Gruenau, four years younger than I but like me a graduate from the University of Michigan, was living with the novelist Harold Brodkey on West Eighty-eighth Street. Harold had—which sounds like a contradiction in terms—an immense underground reputation. Everyone in New York was curious about him, but few people outside the city had ever heard of him. Long ago, in 1958, he’d published First Love and Other Sorrows, a book of stories that had been well reviewed, but they weren’t what all the buzz was about. Now he’d bring out a story occasionally in the New Yorker or New American Review or even Esquire. The one in New American Review (a quarterly, edited by Ted Solotaroff) was highly sexual but not dirty—a fifty-page chapter, published in 1973, about a Radcliffe girl’s first orgasm. The prose in “Innocence” could be strained if striking: “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.” It seemed the longest sex scene in history, rivaled only by the gay sex scene in David Plante’s Catholic—and reminiscent of the sex scene “The Time of Her Time” in Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (except that one had been anal!).

Then there had been troubled, labyrinthine stories about Brodkey’s mother in the New Yorker of a length and complexity no one else would have been allowed to get away with. This was obviously a writer, we thought, who must, above all, be extremely convincing. The mother stories nagged and tore at their subject with a Lawrentian exasperation, a relentless drive to get it right, repeatedly correcting the small assertions just made in previous lines. Everyone was used to confessional writing of some sort (though the heyday for that would come later), and everyone knew all about the family drama, but no one had ever gone this far with sex, with mother, and with childhood. We were stunned with a new sort of realism that made slides of every millimeter of the past and put them under the writer’s microscope. In Esquire in 1975 a short, extremely lyrical story, “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft,” appeared, about a baby boy being carried in his father’s arms. Mother might get the niggling, Freudian treatment, but Daddy deserved only light-drenched, William Blake–like mysticism.

All these “stories,” apparently, were only furtive glimpses of the massive novel that Brodkey had been working on for years and that would be the American answer to Marcel Proust. Brodkey’s fans (and there were many of them) photocopied and stapled into little booklets every story he’d published so far in recent years and circulated them among their friends, a sort of New York samizdat press. His supporters made wide fervent claims for him. Harold was our Mann, our James Joyce. That no one outside New York knew who he was only vouchsafed his seriousness, his cult stature, too serious for the unwashed (or rather the washed, a more appropriate synecdoche for Midwesterners).

He and Doug lived in a big, rambling West Side apartment with a third man, named Charlie Yordy, whom I met just once but who reeked of a hoofed and hairy-shanked sexuality. He was a friendly, smiling man but seemed burdened, as are all people possessed by a powerful sexuality.

Harold was as bearded and hooded-eyed as Nebuchadrezzar but tall and slim and athletic as well. He must have been in his forties. His constant swimming and exercising at the Sixty-third Street Y (the one I’d lived in when I first came to New York) kept him as fit as a much younger man. His moods and thoughts were restless, rolling about like ship passengers in a storm. Sometimes he looked as if a migraine had just drawn its gray, heavy wing across his eyes. The next moment he’d be calculating something silently, feverishly to himself—then he’d say out loud, “Forget it.” Cryptic smiles flitted across his face. He seldom paid attention to what the people around him were saying because he was concocting his next outrage—for most of his remarks were outrageous, and he could not be cajoled out of