When Harold Brodkey was a boy he decided he wanted to reach the age of 70 - and also the end of the century. He didn't quite make it and died exactly two years ago just short of 66. His place in US literary lore is assured more by the books he didn't write than by those he did. In fact, the publication in 1991 of The Run- away Soul, some thirty years in the making, was critically dismissed as a bad career move. In the spring of 1993 tests confirmed he had AIDS, the legacy of "my adventures in homosexuality" some twenty years earlier. This coolly intelligent journal was written at intervals during his last years, and some sections appeared in The New Yorker. It is far less operatic than might be expected of such an image-conscious an individual as Brodkey. The mood shifts from outrage to reflection, from arrogance to black humour and, at times, even to controlled regret. Brodkey is tough, so tough and self-absorbed that he does not inspire sympathy. Ellen, his wife, stood by him, and he perceptively describes the particular tension love creates in a crisis. His toughness is possibly the precise quality which makes this harrowing book so compelling. Aware of the social significance of his disease, he also admits to be being embarrassed by it and mentions feeling "cut off from my family inheritance of fatal diseases - the strokes and high blood pressure and cancer and tumours of my ancestors".
Certainly an eloquent and elegant - and offbeat - leavetaking from a strange man. While it never engages the emotions, it does testify to the formal, Jamesian grace of Brodkey's prose.
