City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [91]
Harold had lived with Doug for some eight or nine years. Doug was so polite and respectful that even when Harold would say something absurdly far-fetched, Doug would cock his head to one side and up a bit, as if he were a bird trying to make sense of a new, higher, quicker call. Doug was a big man with a bass laugh, but around Harold he didn’t take up much space. I think he’d decided that Harold was both cracked and a genius and that even his insults were, ultimately, harmless, but Doug taught biology in a private school and had endless hours of grading and preparation and counseling and teaching to do, whereas Harold appeared to have enough money to be idle—and to meddle. When I told David Kalstone about Harold, David sang, “Time on my hands…”
I wasn’t quite sure what Charlie did, though I must have been told. (Americans are never reluctant to ask strangers what they do.) I think he was a math teacher and then he manufactured clothes in the Adirondacks. He wasn’t around often and seemed to be more Harold’s boyfriend than Doug’s, though I’m sure Harold told me they were all three lovers. The apartment was big enough to accommodate them all and even give each of them privacy. Harold was on the prowl. Not all the considerable time he spent at the Y was devoted to swimming. People who knew him said he was a tireless, overt cruiser.
Harold seldom talked about his own work but loved to deliver pronouncements about literature and how to make it. He particularly enjoyed giving other writers—even older, more successful writers—advice. As the years went by, I kept hearing strange and then stranger stories about him. One of his great defenders was Gordon Lish, a top editor at Knopf and the man who had virtually invented minimalism. Gordon apparently walked into the office of his boss, Bob Gottlieb (who’d started his own career as the editor of Catch-22 and had even been the one to persuade Joseph Heller to change the title from Catch-18), and said something like “You’ve published a few good books, Bob, but nothing that will make people remember you after you’re gone. Now you have the chance to publish Proust—but you must write a check for a million dollars and not ask to see even a single page.”
At that point Harold had been signed up with Farrar, Straus for years, but they’d paid him a considerably smaller sum—and they weren’t willing to give him the full attention he demanded. Harold needed not one editor but several to go over with him the thousands of pages he’d already written. As far as anyone could tell, he was years away from delivering. But Farrar, Straus’s reluctance to put the full resources of their staff at his disposal ate away at Harold. Responding to the challenge, Gottlieb wrote the check.
In a slow groundswell of media attention leading up to publication, various magazine articles appeared about Harold, all wildly laudatory. I remember one in Esquire in 1977 by the religious novelist D. Keith Mano (“Harold Brodkey: The First Rave”), who confessed he’d set out to debunk Harold and his myth but who’d stayed to be conquered. Mano even told Brodkey about some of his personal problems—a minor betrayal by a friend. The passage is worth quoting because it reveals one of Harold’s seduction techniques:
In passing I mention a personal misfortune, a betrayal—none of your business what—that had shocked and demoralized me the day before. Harold listens, advises; he parses it out. I hang up feeling both presumptuous and stupid. What am I to Harold Brodkey, he to me, that I should lay my tsuris on him? Yet, one hour later, Harold calls back. My distress, a stranger’s distress, has alarmed him. We talk for thirty minutes on Harold’s long-distance dime. The man cares. I am moved: such concern is unlooked-for. Subsequently, we talk several times. In fact I became, well, jealous; his stamina, his integrity, his grasp of circumstances is better than mine and these, dammit, are my circumstances. After a while I’d prefer to forget; it’s human enough. But Harold won’t sanction that; his moral enthusiasm is dynamic; he knows