Harold Brodkey

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Harold Brodkey in a drawing by Howard Coale, 1995

Harold Brodkey (born on 25. October 1930 as Aaron Roy Weintraub in Staunton , Illinois , died on 26. January 1996 in New York City ) was an American writer , essayist and journalist .

Brodkey published two novels and two volumes of short stories in book form during his lifetime, and another volume of short stories appeared posthumously. His prose encircles his own biographical memories in an elaborately executed, often sprawling linguistic design, exploring the limits of linguistic expression in relation to childhood traumas and the possibilities and abysses of emotional and sexual experiences - "Brodkey's stories are hyperexact studies of what happens between people , the court of words and gestures, the struggle for recognition, the web of power of sexual dialogue, the infinite, constantly renewing remnant of deliberate and unintentional misunderstandings ”, is how Dorothea Dieckmann characterized Brodkey's last stories in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit .

Life

Harold Brodkey came from the Russian-Jewish immigrant family Max and Ceil Weintraub (née Glazer). The information on the author's place of birth is inconsistent in the secondary literature : Brodkey himself described Staunton as the place of birth in an autobiographical essay in The New Yorker in 1987 and Alton , also in Illinois, as the place of residence in childhood, followed by Dinitia Smith in her extensive portrait of the author in 1988 in New York magazine . In her obituary for the author's death in 1996 in the New York Times , however, the same author gives Alton as the place of birth. In his entry on Brodkey in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Philip Bufithis mentions Staunton as the place of birth, but points out that the information about Alton is different .

Brodkey was adopted by Doris Brodkey, his father's cousin, and her husband, Joseph, after his mother's death at the age of two. He spent most of his troubled childhood in University City , a suburb of St. Louis , Missouri . After graduating from University City High School as the best in his class, he studied literature at Harvard University , Cambridge (Massachusetts) from 1947 , under Archibald MacLeish , among others . After graduating (BA 1952), he settled in New York as a freelance writer and began writing short stories, mainly published in The New Yorker and Esquire magazines. He has taught literature and creative writing sporadically at Cornell University and City College, City University of New York .

While still a student, he secretly married the student Joanna Brown in 1952. The marriage was the 1953 born daughter Ann Emily Brodkey (called "Temi Rose".) In 1960 the marriage was divorced.

After the divorce from his first wife, Brodkey began a period of life that was determined by homosexual relationships and which he himself described as "part Byronic part ET ". It was during this time that his first literary successes fell and he began work on his “great novel”, which would accompany him for the next three decades.

In 1978 Brodkey met the writer Ellen Schwamm , who had just published her first book, and in 1980 the couple married. The encounter changed both lives fundamentally: Brodkey's bohemian way of life was from then on more orderly, even if the couple's economic situation remained precarious. In particular, Brodkey found in his wife the necessary support for the publication and editing of his writings and the organization of the manuscript bundles of his novel. The relationship had more far-reaching consequences for Sponge, she radically distanced herself from her previous, orderly bourgeois existence, left her husband and children and moved to Brodkey.

Harold Brodkey died in January 1996 in the New York borough of Manhattan of complications from his AIDS illness.

Stories and novels

Brodkey published his first story in 1953 in the literary magazine The New Yorker , to whose authors he was to remain until his death. From then on, Brodkey continuously published short stories, essays and journalistic articles there and in other magazines. His first book publication was a collection of such short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows (1957, German: First Love and Other Sorrows , 1968), shaped like the following works. The author caused a sensation in the scene and received enthusiastic reviews, but was still comparatively conventional in the form of the stories and barely revealed the literary complexity of his later works.

Brodkey won the prestigious O. Henry Prize twice in succession for the stories published in magazines in 1975 and 1976 and was highlighted in literary criticism as the “new Proust ” because of these publications , but 30 years passed between the first and the second independent Book published in 1988. With this second collection of stories, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988, published in German in two volumes: Unschuld (1990) and Engel (1991)), which Brodkey outsourced from the extensive material on the still unpublished “great novel” and with whom he had found his own literary tone, Brodkey became famous. One of the stories, Innocence (German: innocence ), had already caused a sensation after it was first published in the American Review in 1973. Brodkey describes over 30 pages the efforts of his protagonist to help a woman to her first orgasm. This volume of short stories, and in particular Innocence , made Brodkey a "cult figure" in the US literary scene in the 1980s.

Since the late 1950s, but especially after the divorce from his first wife, Brodkey had been working on the “great novel” mentioned above. The publication rights for Party of Animals , one of the working titles, had wandered from one publisher to another several times, and a publication date had been announced and discarded several times. In this way, Brodkey had become, over the years, a writer famous for a novel he had never published. In the end, more than 30 years after the first drafts, he still managed to complete the work. It was published in 1991 under the title The Runaway Soul (German: Die flüchtige Seele 1995). However, the novel was unable to meet the lofty expectations that the author himself had helped to build. It met with a divided, predominantly negative response in literary criticism, and it hardly found any reading public. The novel was largely received as a linguistic and content-wise failure, a literary failure of over 1000 pages in an attempt to psychologically penetrate an extremely stressed childhood and family story in every detail and to bring it into a linguistic form that corresponds to the traumatization of the first-person narrator should.

In 1993 the author informed his readers in an essay in The New Yorker that he had AIDS . Nevertheless, he followed up with his second novel about homosexual love and friendship in Venice relatively quickly in 1994, Profane Friendship (German: Profane Friendship 1994), which met with similar opposition in American criticism as the first, but in Germany as " Masterpiece ”was celebrated.

His notes on the development of his illness and on living with the expectation of imminent death were published posthumously as This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (1996; German: The story of my death 1998), as well as a third volume with previously unpublished stories : The World is the Home of Love and Death (1997; German: Gast im Universum 1998).

Awards

Works

  • First Love and Other Sorrows , 1957
    (German: First love and other worries , translated from the American by Elisabeth Gilbert, Diogenes, Zurich 1968, ISBN 3-257-20774-3 )
  • Stories in an Almost Classical Mode , 1988
    (German in two volumes: Innocence. Almost Classic Stories 1 , from the American by Karin Graf, Dirk van Gunsteren, Thomas Piltz, Angela Praesent, Susanna Rademacher, Harry Rowohlt and Hans Wollschläger, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1990, ISBN 978-3-499 -13156-1 and Engel. Almost classic Stories 2 , German by Dirk van Gunsteren, Jürg Laederach, Helga Pfetsch and Angela Praesent, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-13318-0 )
  • The Runaway Soul , 1991
    (German: Die Flüchtige Seele , Roman, German by Angela Praesent, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995, ISBN 3-498-00540-5 )
  • Profane Friendship , 1994
    (German: profane friendship , novel, German by Angela Praesent, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, ISBN 3-498-00570-7 )
  • This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death , 1996 (posthumous)
    (German: The story of my death , German by Angela Praesent, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-498-00580-4 )
  • The World is the Home of Love and Death , 1997 (posthumous)
    (German: Gast im Universum , Stories, German by Angela Praesent, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1998, ISBN 3-498-00592-8 )

literature

Web links

Unless otherwise noted: All web links were last accessed on March 22, 2014.

Individual evidence

Unless otherwise noted: All web links were last accessed on March 22, 2014.

  1. ↑ The indication of Staunton as the place of birth follows the biographical notes of the publishers of the German-language editions of the works Brodkeys, Rowohlt ( author page at Rowohlt-Verlag ) and Diogenes ( author page at Diogenes-Verlag ); other sources cite Alton , Illinois ; see. see the section on life .
  2. ↑ a b c Dorothea Dieckmann: Last signs of life of a foundling. In: Die Zeit , August 27, 1998.
  3. ↑ Dinitia Smith: The Genius . In: New York , No. 37, September 19, 1988, p. 56; the mother's name is only documented in literature.
  4. ↑ Families . In: The New Yorker , November 23, 1987, p. 119 ( abstract ).
  5. ↑ Dinitia Smith: The Genius . In: New York , No. 37, September 19, 1988, p. 56.
  6. ↑ a b c d e Dinitia Smith: Harold Brodkey, 65, New Yorker Writer And Novelist, Dies of Illness He Wrote About. In: The New York Times , January 27, 1996.
  7. ↑ a b Philip Bufithis: Harold Brodkey . In: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature , p. 208.
  8. ↑ Dinitia Smith: The Genius . In: New York , No. 37, September 19, 1988, p. 58.
  9. ↑ a b Dinitia Smith: The Genius . In: New York , No. 37, September 19, 1988, p. 61.
  10. ↑ Dinitia Smith: The Genius . In: New York , No. 37, September 19, 1988, p. 62.
  11. ↑ a b Matthias Matussek: In the purgatory of literature. In: Der Spiegel , January 23, 1989.
  12. ↑ Dinitia Smith: The Genius . In: New York , No. 37, September 19, 1988, p. 54.
  13. ^ Matthias Matussek: Death in New York. In: Der Spiegel , June 28, 1993.
  14. ↑ in the German translation over 1300 pages
  15. ↑ See, for example, the review by Jochen Schimmang : Die Flüchtige Seele in Deutschlandfunk , Sendung Büchermarkt . For the entire context cf. Fritz J. Raddatz : Be me for a while ... In: Die Zeit , April 1, 1994.
  16. ↑ About Fritz J. Raddatz: I be for a while… In: Die Zeit , April 1, 1994. Cf. also Matthias Matussek: Tod in New York. In: Der Spiegel , June 28, 1993.
personal data
SURNAME Brodkey, Harold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weintraub, Aaron Roy (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer, essayist, and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Staunton , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH January 26, 1996
Place of death New York City