Harold Brodkey, My Venice (1998)

The would-be "American Proust" reflects on an un-fantastical city

Harold Brodkey put out his first novel The Runaway Soul at the age of 61. He did so after enjoying more than thirty years of literary notoriety, if "enjoying" be the word. Since the late nineteen-fifties, he'd been publishing only short stories and New Yorker pieces, and somewhere along the line, as the repeatedly promised full-length debut repeatedly failed to appear, his golden-boy reputation turned somehow villainous. During the first half of his career, he seems to have been regarded as a potential American Proust; during the second, as a bloviating, quasi-malevolent egoist, bent on inflicting his torturously convoluted, near-parodically self-obsessed prose on the innocent reading public. When it appeared, the 800-page-long The Runaway Soul was greeted by reviews now remembered — if, like the book itself, remembered at all — as career-endingly harsh.

Yet Brodkey's career didn't end: he wrote a second novel, and did so, in fact, in just one year. Where the not-quite-universally-savaged The Runaway Soul centers on his longtime alter-ego Wiley Silenowicz, an adopted child who grows up in nineteen-thirties St. Louis, Profane Friendship centers on Niles O'Hara, a famous novelist remembering his youth in the Venice around that same period. Though primarily set in Venice, it does fall short of being a book about it. In a contemporary London Review of Books piece, Colm Tóibín notes that "there are times when the description of Venice seems to be written by numbers," quoting the following: "February’s an alphabetical light, pale with dark shadows like lines and blotches on a page. We played in the beckoning and slightly motional, slightly vulgar, pallid and yellowish light of March."

That particular passage doesn't appear in My Venice, a short collection of Brodkey's writings on La Serenissima published posthumously in 1998. He'd died of AIDS two years earlier, an experience that had provided him material for a final series of New Yorker essays, including "A Writer in Venice," which reappears as this book's final chapter. Otherwise, My Venice consists mostly of excerpts from Profane Friendship, both the published novel and its earlier drafts. In a note at the end, editor Angela Praesent explains that the project "arose from our resistance to the innumerable revisions, deletions, and expansions of Profane Friendship that the author made as he carried out his larger vision for the novel. A plan was devised to preserve the extended descriptions of Venice that Brodkey sacrificed for the sake of the novel's overall composition."