Breaking the Language Barrier :

A Conversation with Harold Brodkey

by Jordan Elgrably

Harold Brodkey died on Friday, January 26 of this year, at 4:30 a.m., due to AIDS-related complications. He was 65. In the last piece he wrote, for The New Yorker, he described his imminent death with a kind of fearlessness, indeed, fascination: "It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself."

But Brodkey, even passing into the afterworld, could never be anyone but himself. An iconoclast of language, he captured the hieratic cadences of sexual discourse and emotional longing as no other. Praising Brodkey's formidable originality, friend and New Yorker colleague Daniel Menaker wrote: "His style was improvisational, aural, brilliantly nuanced and modulated, jazzlike and deeply American, especially in its effect of confidentiality and candor."

Brodkey, acknowledged this former editor, "wrote really great, groundbreaking sentences." The challenge Brodkey set himself was to break the language barrier, to write with absolute and convincing honesty. Indeed, his hale confessional voice puts in me mind of something Isacc B. Singer once argued, when introducing Knut Hamsen's novel, Hunger: "Writers who are truly original do not set out to fabricate new forms of expression, or to invent themes merely for the sake of appearing new. They attain their originality through extraordinary sincerity, by daring to give everything of themselves, their most secret thoughts and idiosyncrasies."

There is no doubt that Brodkey gave everything within his power to give. As he said during a Los Angeles reading at Beyond Baroque, the venerable literary salon in Venice, for him, "the use of language was an arena of permanent war, and permanent emergency and permanent collapse."

We argued about hermeneutics, about the interpretation of meaning in spoken and written language; while I believe the glass is always half-full, Brodkey insisted it was inevitably half-empty, that one could overestimate our ability to understand one another. "In a universe of meanings," he asked, "and in a literary world that has a certain shape to it, how does one deal with the fact that one is at war with the nihilists?"

It was Brodkey's wish to survive the century. He would have been seventy had he lived to the year 2,000.

Jordan Elgrably: I was originally from Los Angeles, departed in the late '70s, and just returned a few months ago after spending more than a decade in Europe and South America. When I left, the city to me seemed pretty much a wasteland as far as literature goes. Now, there appears to be a kind of explosion of literary culture, of readings and of writers working and living here, though publishing mostly in New York. Thus, some of us in L.A. are under the impression that there really is something going on here. What would be the impulse today, do you think, for people to go and listen to writers reading their work?

Harold Brodkey: It varies, of course, from person to person, and a lot depends on what you do in your own life. If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet...Sometimes you can go looking for illumination. I think most of the people go with one kind or another of instruction in mind. Would-be writers go in order to hear something in the voice, something in the speaker's manner that gives them a clue to what it might be for them, or what might be required for them to cross over the line, from being aspirants to being actually in the field. There's another aspect of that which is that in some cases, not all, it's interesting and even important to either imagine or hear the writer's voice shaping the sentence toward a kind of audible, quickly audible meaning, and that helps you sometimes to hear the rhythm you think you're hearing. Sometimes you're hearing the wrong rhythms. And I don't why that is so important, but it seems to me that it is. And then there's just the human thing that you're interested in stories and books. It's kind of nice once in a while to sit in a crowd of people who are interested in stories and books. Movies aren't what they were; they're wonderful but they aren't what they were.

JE: We often forget what the movie was really about after we leave the theatre. Films today are often about a whole lot of things other than storytelling.

HB: But there's a thing in the music of the '60s and '70s that began to die out in the '80s, there's a linguistic aspect to it, linguistic-socio rebellious or whatever, and that's dying out, and some of those people, some of the people who are more word-oriented are reverting, if you like, to language, with music reduced to a kind of background. That's what I think.

JE: William Styron recently suggested to me that the Reagan-Bush era was an apogee of the image as a metaphor for life; he said that some Americans were now revolted by that, and were going back to the sight or sound of the written word.

HB: Oh. That's very deep. I almost agree with that. I think Styron's a wonderful novelist; I almost never agree with him. I can't imagine people reacting quite on that level. What may be the case is that with the collapse of a certain kind of left-wing politics, there's a sort of energy left over for social organization, a kind of exploratory attitude towards something or other, toward life, toward moral principles applied to private events and public events, which can find an outlet in organized religion. I'm really not sure about that part, but you can certainly find an outlet in relation to literature.

JE: When you look over at the United States from Europe, you see a conservative bodypolitik, you see the Republicans, and you don't see any kind of grass roots organization, but when you get closer you find that there are actually all kinds of small groups and associations and people who speak on public radio, so that there does seem to be something stirring, now.

HB: Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been. Obviously because it's radio, it's always been highly verbal. What I started to say is that with the collapse of left-wing politics, some of that energy's got to go somewhere, and it's probably going to go here­­it's not going to go into protest music. You can ponder this theory of a collapse of a certain kind of organized leftism, which kind of embarrassed us. It isn't that my politics were ever so different from those of someone like Styron, but Styron is more embarrassed by the collapse of leftism than I am. I mean he was sort of over there within shouting distance of [Lillian] Hellman. And [Norman] Mailer, who's a good friend really, is sort of embarrassed by it, too. That energy has to go somewhere and those attitudes go somewhere. And in Los Angeles and in New Jersey it's likely to move toward some sort of activist culture. It would've been music up until a few years ago, but music has been co-opted, or it's lost its activist quality, or there's no real mass audience for that sort of thing, just as the political thing has been turned over to the [Republicans] by the failure of the leftists. It's a much more tremendous failure than has been written about, more tremendous and based on shoddy intellectual performance, and less flexibility and less honesty than one wants to think. So this kind of [literary] movement represents something profound and bitter and lost, and nobody can quite foresee where it's going to go, but once in place it's probably not going to go backwards, and most of what these audiences seem to be looking for is something new and something truthful...There's no Dylan playing about "revolution blowing in the wind." And I don't think revolution is blowing in the wind; I think it's here, it's active. They're not buying certain books. The literary culture, which was partly false, has collapsed, has collapsed partly because of its own falsity. How much of this I really want to say publicly, I don't know, but you can start mulling it over. That what you came back to is a cliché. Where's the fire, then afterwards there's a stirring in the ashes and the new plants start to come through­new life, new shoots, new plants start to come through and that's what you see in L.A. The culture which was there when you left, which drove you away, has collapsed in both its right-wing and left-wing aspects, and the thing about the Bush-Reagan stuff is that it's a really kind of anarchy, it's really a kind of emptiness. It's usually destructive, but it's not actually a structure. There's nothing there. So what you begin to sense is this movement of intelligence, this wish to think, this wish to find a language. It's much more serious, it comes from a much more valid place than you might expect, and it's much longer lasting. And very few things, I think, are going to be left in place. Imagine it­­an intelligent Los Angeles.

JE: Poet and KPFK radio host Austin Straus mentioned to me he thought there might actually be some sort of movement forming here, though it was difficult to be sure because he was in the midst of it.

HB: Yeah, but so many systems have failed in the last hundred years, it's perhaps even too intelligent to be a system, but we'll see...The new movement shouldn't be defined this early until somebody comes along, the way Dylan did, to define that other movement.

JE: Talking to Timothy Leary a few weeks back here, he spoke of another kind of movement, what he called "the new breed," which he describes as mainly young people who have a global perspective and are anti-government and anti-political, who are working on computers, communicating in cyberspace.

HB: Leary hasn't turned out as well as I expected when he first appeared on the scene, but he's very smart. You'd just have to reinterpret that a little bit. It isn't that they have a global perspective, it's that there are realities now which are not community-wide or regional but really are global. I mean, I do probably as much journalism in Europe as I do in the United States. The particular way that my days go in New York, I spend a lot of time on stuff that's not in the United States...Look, your life has been part of the time in Europe and part of the time in L.A.; you're not exactly a Californian, you're not exactly an expatriate.

JE: I'm not exactly an expatriate, no.

HB: As soon as you define that and get a little bit clearer, you can see that it's not a case of perspective: you actually live in a rather complex way, which [isn't the same as] in the old days, because cosmopolitanism just wasn't possible in the old days. It took three weeks to get from where you live to Europe.

JE: Paul Berman, the New York essayist, said to me not long ago that he thought rootlessness was the rootedness of our time.

HB: I don't see why. I don't think it's rootless; why is it rootless?

JE: I'm not rooted either in France or in Spain, where I lived for many years, nor in Los Angeles, despite the fact that I was born here.

HB: You're rooted in all those places. Forgive me for picking on you, I don't have much of a voice left, but I do find these ideas really interesting. You're not rooted in one place but it doesn't mean you're rootless. You're rooted in a certain kind of culture which covers a large part of the earth's surface.

JE: He and I were talking about this new reality as sort of nomadic; in other words, that many more people now are like Wandering Jews, gypsies, nomads.

HB: Well, maybe what I'm trying to say is that that's about two hundred years out of date.

JE: Yet the thing is that you always long for some sort of community, especially someone who's a writer. You always want to be connected somehow. You're connected through the people you work with, your readers and so forth, but you're not physically, geographically connected; sometimes that feels like a loss.

HB: See Jordan, I sort of disagree with that all down the line. You're connected to place, to language, to people, and as the world changes it's now become considerably too complicated and too interesting to be said in those words. A relationship to an audience is always a kind of unfixed one. People die, and then people come along; that is, you have an enormous statistical shift of population in a given city in a ten-year span. So an audience is sort of an odd thing, especially when you try to divorce it from the idea and the reality of the time. And the sense of rootlessness is an odd thing too, if you try to divorce it from the idea and the reality of time. I can't think of myself as rootless, but I do think I'm rooted in a rather complicated fashion...

JE: If we do just look at language as the roots, then I would agree with you.

HB: But that's what I'm saying. I'm talking about place, and then language relates somehow to place, but it relates to culture. That is, English is now spoken by enough people in Europe that one is inclined to think of it as (perhaps a little prematurely) a world language, as French used to be and still is.

JE: In some instances it is. But if, for example, you're an English-language writer living anywhere in Europe you're definitely marginal, you're not part of the culture that you're living in, really.

HB: Probably that's true if you live in a certain way. If I went now to live in Germany I don't think I'd be marginal to the culture.

JE: You could participate, especially if you know the language, and then too, you'd be translated, so you could participate in translation. This is what happens to me. Wherever I am I get translated, but being translated is another thing altogether. I mean that each language is its own community, its own memory, its own history.

HB: You see, what you and I are doing here is­­and you're going to wind up disliking me intensely­­we're not listening to each other. I think you're using terms that are really left over from 25 or 30 years ago, and you'd be better off dispensing with them as soon as possible. Just wake up some morning and say "I'm never going to use those terms again." For anything. What I'm saying is that when I'm in Germany I'm not marginal to the culture...And it's not just linguistic. It's culture. It's complicated, it's different from the old ways of thinking about it.

JE: I can see that there is one larger western culture, obviously, because for instance they listen to the music produce here, and we see (sometimes, too rarely) their films; we're sharing a lot of culture. But if we agree that there is a sense of collective identity through language­

HB: I didn't say anything about a collective identity through language. A nation is now a certain kind of media entity. Culture is something different. It has its relationship to the entities but it's not exactly national, nor was it ever. I mean high German culture, for instance, only exists in certain pockets.

JE: Well, I don't think in nationalistic terms, I just think in terms of language.

HB: Well, in terms of language, I don't speak the same English, say, as Styron. And he and I together probably speak more alike than I speak like, say, a construction worker across the street from the hotel that I'm in right now. But I can probably speak the construction worker's language, I can probably understand it some. I don't know how much I can understand [of] the German construction worker's language until I settle down to do it, but I do know that there are certain educated Germans who understand my English better than Styron does. Yes, and you know it. The same thing happens to you. You can't find enough understanding here and you get restless and you go looking for it in Europe and you find it, and you find it not complete and you get restless and you come back. But it's not a linguistic question so much any more. The linguistic thing has changed and it's going to have to be redefined in a certain sense. It isn't that you want to move outside of English, for instance, but that the kind of English that you most enjoy, or the kind of English that you need to hear may not be spoken here. Perhaps it's being spoken in Tel-Aviv at this instant. And if it is in L.A. and not in Boston, that would be a cultural revolution of a kind, inside the United States. Before you try to understand a new situation you've got to stop dragging in terms that are left over from other periods, and they weren't very good in those other periods either. Because what's collapsed is one overwhelming system, and then a series of related systems in which intelligence was assumed to exist following along certain predetermined lines from certain very shaky premises, premises really only an idiot would have accepted in the first place. You're not actually constrained by them. For one thing, you speak five or six different kinds of English, and where you place yourself in relation to the English spoken in the United States is representative of a certain number of conscious choices on your part.

JE: I know that there are different nuances in different parts of the country, but I get this question, for instance, when people who don't speak Spanish ask me: is Mexican different from Spanish, and isn't Spanish different say, from Venezuelan? And I say they are slightly different, yet the grammar is the same, and people can understand each other.

HB: That's not true. They can partly understand each other.

JE: Well, my Spanish is Castillian Spanish and yet I can have conversations with Mexicans or with anybody from any Latin American country.

HB: You're rushing the idea of understanding. If I put you in a room with a construction worker, there are a certain number of things you can understand and a number of things you won't. Your areas of understanding are not going to be set entirely by social class, either. You're using understanding as if it were a truly general term covering nearly everything. It's not so. And I've seen Mexican and Spaniards not making it with each other.

JE: That partially has to do with a certain antipathy they have toward each other's culture.

HB: You're changing the thing again. You see, you're not going to give up the formulations that you have, but if you would look at it freshly you'd see that in a certain sense, for Mexicans maybe Spaniards are more interesting or a closer kind of foreign than certain kinds of North Americans, but that's not always true. The notion of community now is a very strange one. If you want to start from a simple idea, just consider Los Angeles, what would be included in the Los Angeles community. And it's really weird. Some of it's technological, the way it's expanded, some of it is psychological. A movie company shooting on location in North Carolina: is it Los Angeles or is it North Carolina? Is it difference or just a nuance? I think there's enough difference; you would say a nuance.

JE: I would, because the first thing that I want is to have some understanding, even if it's only 75%. And if it's 75% understanding, I begin to get somewhere, so I don't see the differences as being more than nuances.

HB: Well, if you don't see them as being more than nuances, maybe you're right, but maybe you're missing a great deal, such as the central thing.

JE: I'm not beginning to negate the beauty of those nuances in language.

HB: You can't really talk about 75% of understanding, except as a very loose kind of metaphor or illustration of another point, and that has no literal existence. You can't prove the extent of an understanding. People from Los Angeles who move to Dallas: how long does it take them before they become genuine inhabitants of Dallas?

JE: That depends on how quickly the Dallasians are willing to accept them. Understand them. Partially.

HB: I don't think so. Why? It depends on how much the people from L.A. want to change, how able they are to change, what the circumstances are in Dallas, what the cultural differences are. Don't you think?

JE: I don't know. I would never move to Dallas.

HB: [chortles] You have more than a thousand different ways of winning an argument.

JE: This is Talmudic. You keep turning it around, sometimes in stichomythic ways.

HB: What's happening now is that these ways you have are closing off the discussion, with these formulas. That's been wiped out, I think.

JE: Does it close off, or open up other avenues?

HB: It closes off. It's a deadening thing, you should stop, really. There's a peculiar world out there. And I don't think you can define it in those terms.

JE: ...I'm not a thinker, I'm just trying to understand on the simplest levels.

HB: Jordan, if you're trying to understand you're thinking.

JE: I know. I'm making a distinction between the layman and the professional thinker.

HB: What I'm accusing you of, is you're not trying to understand. You'd like to perceive things, then you close off the perception, and it's troublesome.

JE: All right. I'll accept that. I confused, earlier, rootedness with stability. Two different things.

HB: Maybe. On the other hand, stability never quite existed, but we were rooted differently because of the difficulties of traveling. When I first went to college, before you were born, it took me three and a half days [to get there], and by the time I was a junior I could fly home in a couple of hours. That made a huge difference. One thing that linguists have discovered is that even with rootless populations and the media explosion, and all the influence of movies and television, regional accents have not become less pronounced but more pronounced, and they don't know why. And if you talk to linguists in Israel, they're flabbergasted by the way certain games played by Arab children have passed on to districts where there have been no Arabs for thirty-something years. The mysteries of place, they do exist and they're considerable, but it's not a terribly good idea to close it off in terms of formulation. There's probably a certain sense, if you grew up in California you always have a certain kind of California quality.

JE: I hope not.

HB: [laughs] But by now, you see, whether you want to admit it or not, you're a citizen of a culture which has extended in all kinds of directions.

JE: I admit, I think it's certainly wider than the first few years of my existence.

HB: Particularly the way the culture exists nowadays. It didn't exist when Styron was young, it didn't exist when Leary was young. But I think Leary got a glimpse of it. And Styron I think is simply immune to catching on. As I say, it's not just a [question of] a different perspective, there is a different reality, which has hardly been written about yet. It's there, and we live it, it's palpable. And then the other thing [Leary] said about this movement being anti-government­­it's not anti-government, there's something ludicrous about some of the people my age who are in the government who are still using some of the same techniques and tactics that are twenty-five or thirty years out of date. The times really have changed, and the situations are wildly different, and there's a kind of deadness in a great many institutions, and nobody knows what to do about it, and a lot of people hate it. It would be pretty revolutionary except that the revolutionary system or systems is out of date too, and everybody knows it. And the whole world is in this wild state of change. Without meaning to be, I'm as close to the actual circumstances of what's going on in Romania as I to what's going on in San Francisco. And what this is going to become in terms of cultural identity or federalism or economics I think is wildly unclear. Leary is much closer to it than Styron. There is, the few times I've been in L.A., a huge difference lately, which is that L.A. has become a great world city. It's so unprovincial now, it's so much a kind of capital of something or other. It's not just a kingdom of dreams, it's real in the way people talk and the styles, the way the city itself feels when you move through it, it's all very different. Maybe it'll all turn to nothing, but at the moment it seems exciting, it seems kind of wildly exciting. I'm very jealous of L.A. actually.

© 1996, The Blue Penny Quarterly. All rights reserved.