Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers

Harold Brodkey and Erica Jong

39 Harold Brodkey & Erica Jong In a novel called The Return of Philip Latinovich, by a renowned Yugoslav writer who lived down the street from us the year I was a Fulbright professor in Zagreb, the writerhero of the story returns towards the end of his long life to the village he had come from. Sitting in the local café day after day listening to the conversations going on around him, he reflects that not once did any of them concern literature or literary matters, which had been central and all-consuming interests in his life. He is cast into deep doubt, an existential crisis, about how he had chosen to dedicate his life! I have thought often about this story and its gloomy truth. Except for students, other academics, or literary professionals , I never encounter anyone in coffee shops, bars, trains, on vacations, reading and discussing really “serious” literature. Also in my experience, most writers tend to talk, when with other writers, about agents, publishers, royalties. Until in an elevator in an apartment building on 86th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, I stood next to a man engrossed in a quality paperback copy of a novel by Tobias Smollet, that eighteenth-century stalwart, known, for all practical purposes, only to literary insiders. Unable to restrain myself, I asked the reader if he was a teacher, or, less likely, 40 a student. “No,” he replied off-handedly, “I’m just reading it for pleasure.” Then he got off the elevator and I radiated with wonder. At last! I related this incident to my friend in the building, a high school remedial reading teacher, in whose apartment Anne and I were staying for a couple of days. “Oh,” she said, “that must have been Harold.” Harold who? “Harold Brodkey,” she replied, “He lives upstairs. Would you like us to invite him for dinner?” Yes, of course, and we did indeed have dinner with him, who was then at the height of his career, with a stunning long story in The New Yorker. There went my radiant wonder. I still await an ordinary nonliterary reader of Smollet. I met Harold one more time. In our never-ending quest for support in getting funding for CCLM, William Phillips had induced George Plimpton, then still editor of Paris Review, I believe, to throw a party for us at his Sutton Place apartment. William and Plimpton had been co-chairs of the “New York Intellectuals for Robert Kennedy” during the ill-fated 1968 year, and had continued their relationship. I enjoyed the photographs of Plimpton in the ring with Archie Moore, or quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions (one play). Among the literary lions in attendance were Norman Mailer, Manuel Puig, Gordon Lish (the egotistic fiction editor), and Harold Brodkey, accompanied by his tall, blonde male lover. As I talked with Brodkey, Erica Jong walked in and approached us. She had spent the night at our house in Amherst when she had come to do a reading, shortly after Fear of Flying appeared, but just before it took Harold Brodkey & Erica Jong 41 off as an iconic best-seller. I had liked her in her then uncertainty about the book’s future and her personable, no-side, manner. Jerry Liebling got a good picture of her at that time. So I was quick to introduce her to Brodkey. What I blurted out was, “Erica, I’d like you to meet the best writer in New York, Harold Brodkey!” What a fatal speech to offer two hungry literary lions! Eager to make amends, I blurted out, again, with a red face, “I mean, the second best writer in New York.” I still cringe with embarrassment when I remember that—and she had inscribed our copy of Fear of Flying “For Anne and Jules, With affection, Erica.” Brodkey died a short while later, of AIDS, and I never saw Erica again, except on TV. I continue to admire her and her work—and feel contrite. My son Robert, an undergraduate at Columbia at the time, accompanied me to that party and was a witness to all this, which he never fails to remind me of. Harold Brodkey & Erica Jong ...