"LOOK, it's only death. It's not like losing your air or all your money. I don't have to live with this." Witty phrases, full of bravado, were New York writer Harold Brodkey's initial defence against the news that he had AIDS.
In his powerful last book before his death last January, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Dying Brodkey records, with remarkable insight and acceptance, the physical and mental anguish, indignity and occasional joy of the last three years of his life.
Every nuance of feeling is explored with an honesty rarely tainted with self pity. The narrative is beautifully and simply written in a style that is by turns detached, vulnerable, endearingly absurd and infuriatingly arrogant. We begin to live inside this crumbling wreck of a man who was once the envy of his bitchy New York peers for being too lucky - lucky in literary success, lucky in love - in fact, an object of desire for men and women alike for most of his life.
We meet him when he is 62, suffering from what he thinks is "literary exhaustion, and age, and bad flu bronchitis - the death urgency brought on by finishing a book, what I called the Venice book, Profane Friendship." He is" surprised to learn he has pneumonia, and disbelieving when he, hears it is the Pneumocystis carinii variety, which means "I have AIDS and must die".
At once, his wife Ellen becomes his indefatigable nurse and companion. He notes wryly: "Ellen was treating me with an unyielding attention and a kind of sweetness, without any noticeable flicker of independence or irony. She had never once been like that with me, even sexually." Ellen is sure at first that she has contracted the virus from Brodkey, and is content for them to die together. Later, when she learns she is free of the virus, she cries.
Brodkey feels Ellen "has the right to leave me; my having that disease suspended all contracts and emotions". Yet Ellen moves into his hospital room until he has fought off the pneumonia, and nurses him when he is strong enough to go home. Her ministrations represent a new level of intimacy, a honeymoon of death observance, a bit like a Japanese ceremonial occasion. It was a kind of snobbery towards death."
Ellen, although half Brodkey's physical size, is clearly the stronger in every way. She has already survived odium because she left her husband for Brodkey 15 years before. She has survived the near death of her son from cancer. She knows everything about Brodkey's many affairs with men and women. She helps him totter, still hooked to the IV, to the bathroom.
Brodkey confesses that at times he is "not graceful in his dependence". When he apologises to Ellen for this, she responds, with revealing humour: "Harold, you were always this much work." Brodkey anatomises what he is experiencing with a mixture of irony and vivid detail: "Death is a bore. But life isn't very interesting either. I must say, I expected death to glimmer with meaning but it doesn't. It's just there. I don't feel particularly alone or condemned or unfairly treated, but I do think about suicide a lot because it's so boring to be ill, rather like being trapped in an Updike novel. I must say I despise living if it can't be done on my terms."
After recovering from pneumonia he has two years of relative stability in which he gets no more more infections. He continues to, write, and even goes to Venice with Ellen to celebrate the German publication of Profane Friendship. Travelling weakens him and he develops bronchitis: "I am very fragile. Illness makes me shy; being ill is like the experience of public nakedness in dreams." He sees everything with larger than life poignancy: "I am dying ... Venice is dying... The century is dying...
PARTICULARLY difficult to bear is his encounter with a group of young Italian fascists. Brodkey is Jewish, and compares having AIDS to the death camps: "The separation from society, the political marginalisation and the financial thefts, the attacks to see what can be stolen from you, and the indignity - including social indignity - of AIDS suggest a partial, sometimes fluorescent and linoleum version of the death camps. Those who postpone the final crescendo of the humiliations - wasting, dementia, diarrhea, thrush, PML (which affects the brain), Kaposi's Sarcoma, certain exotic glaucomas - for more than a year or two are sometimes called survivors."
Brodkey must learn when he leaves hospital that having AIDS will make him a pariah unless he is careful about who he tells. His devoted doctor, Barry, advises Ellen to go to "discreet drugstores" in a different part of New York to get his medication. But Brodkey will not keep secrets. He writes articles; he tells his daughter and grandchildren. "My grandson Harper said, `Are you sick?' And I said, `Yes', and then he changed the subject. When the visit ended, he made a point of telling me that he liked me quite a lot."
Barry insists Brodkey must face the cold facts of what having AIDS means: "What I think he wanted me to know is that AIDS is the terminus in a thus far fatal viral infestation, which was identified in 1981-2... The terminology is distinctive: `You will die of complications from AIDS'."
Brodkey makes much of the strength he inherited from his parents: "My mother, before I was born, travelled alone from near Leningrad to Illinois in the 1920s, a journey that, at her social level, took nearly two months... My father once boxed a dozen men in a row one evening on a bet and supposedly laid all the women under 30 who lined up afterward."
But Brodkey was an orphan from an early age. When he was two, his mother died and his father sold him to relatives for 5300. His foster father, Joe Brodkey, sexually abused him when he was 12 and 13.
Brodkey's foster mother was ill with cancer and did not intervene.
Brodkey's repeated assertions of his "irresistibility" have their roots in this heart chilling early abuse, leaving him less able to resist so many later insistent advances: "You play dumb and pretend to be respectable, but you are an old, old hand, an aged whore at this stuff."
Barry does everything and more to extend Brodkey's life: "His respect for my life verged on the idiotic. He could not win. Literally, he shone and prescribed and analysed and stole for me a month here, perhaps two years there."
At the end of these two stolen years, Barry's ingenuity and Brodkey's resistance come to an end. "The needle has replaced the kiss." Ellen sells their country house. He feels his life has been mostly "error and crap". Yet he doesn't wake angry: "Somehow I was always short of rage. I had a ferocity and will but without rage. I often thought men stank of rage; it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals."
He still has "millions of opinions" and "as always, I know nothing". Finally, he finds peace, and the insight: "Attentive to nothing but breath, perhaps in my dying I was alive in a real and complete way, a human way, for the first time after 10 or 15 years of hard work. I lay awake in almost bright amusement".