Wringing Real Moments from Memory
FALKENBERG, BETTY
Wringing Real Moments from Memory Stories in an Almost Classical Mode By Harold Brodkey Knopf. 596pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review, " New York...
...Ann Marie is "arch, stolid, firm, pious," and a bit fat...
...Stories in an A (most Classical Mode contains 18 pieces by Brodkey, all but one of which have been published in various magazines (chiefly the New Yorker) over the past 25 years...
...For instance, in "Play" (1973) he writes: "to be eleven was humiliating, the powerlessness....We were sick to death of innocence [and played] games of real or of mock violence...
...and of course a lot of it, really a lot of it, is for herself...
...She points to my limp hand that has the spoon in it...
...Ah' (or Ach), [Ann Marie] sings, she interpolates: 'Mehr more—mehr more....'" More often than not, the child's world recalled by Brodkey is a threatening one...
...For 40 pages, this latter-day Jacob mentally wrestles with the Angel, demanding not so much to be blessed as to be vouchsafed some kind of meaning for his future existence...
...and my own continued life hinted that questions of meaning would remain...
...Slowly I stiffen my hand, my wrist, I raise the spoon and take the poisonous stuff somewhat into my mouth...
...Their dominant subject matter is quasiautobiographical...
...She came from Alsace-Lorraineand speaks German...
...Such savage games were a kind of revenge against the adult order...
...The New Figure was white indeed, but the white of all colors, as if it were dressed in prisms," heobserves...
...Finally, you will be moved...
...The most ambitious story of the collection is "Angel...
...Suitability" withBrodkey has something of the weight of " Decorum" in 17th-century poetry, and must not be confused with any conventional notion of propriety...
...The reflection in its ideal nature shows a house in which I cannot live—one I cannot enter...
...It said that only new positions are honest or possible...
...its "basic plot was helplessness, and the reality of ruthlessness, and the survival of the will or its breaking...
...In all these stories, and particularly in "Angel" Brodkey keeps asserting through his various protagonists the incompleteness of his notionof himself as a Jew...
...I suck at the applesauce at the edge of its little puddle in the spoon I hold...
...It is just that memory deals in totals, in summaries, in portable forms of knowledge, so that what it dredges up are things that are like mottoes or aphorisms or apothegms rather than like real moments...
...The Angel "bade me love incomplete meanings...
...Unfortunately, he never gives the point much substance...
...This is not a novel theme, to be sure, but it is one to which Brodkey brings a fierce new energy...
...I can't live in the reflection...
...Much as with Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, the child's defense against respectability and against the accusation of immaturity becomes ever more anguished, ever more a war cry...
...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review, " New York "Times Book Review" Reading a story by Harold Brodkey is an unsettling experience...
...Occasionally she is "visited by voices...
...Still, such is Brodkey's uncanny genius that his works demand to be read and pondered...
...First you must grapple withtheauthor's idiosyncratic devices: a predilection for colons, an aggressive use of syntax as a pacing device, and a heaping-on of details that often cancel each other out or give a sense of viewing the scene through a panopticon...
...Walking across the campus one October afternoon in 1951 he looks up and is startled by "a facelike thing" that has appeared in the sky...
...but it's for God, too...
...One of these was called "Torture...
...The author describes, or struggles to describe, a mystical experience in ways "suitable" to its dimensions...
...You sense in this passage the unreliability of the physical universe as well as the peopled one, a recurrent theme...
...The narrator of "Angel" isaHarvard student...
...I kicked at the puddle, or stepped on it, to break it, or squash it...
...But his vision takes an unexpected course: "The moments did not continue being profound, and my heart and soul were not steadily attentive...
...The child's life-threatening problem is that he cannot keep down food...
...Only Ann Marie can feed him, by virtue of her patience, wisdom and love—and her singing...
...The Nurse's Music" (1988), one of the finest, is devoted—one would like to say "dedicated"—to the narrator's nursemaid, "who saved my life when I was a small child...
...And she is musical: Her singing is "in celebration of me...
...I do not think memory lies for a cheap reason," says the narrator in "Nurse's Music...
...One particularly evocative attempt to capture the past, or at least a sense of its frustrating elusiveness, occurs in the story "S.L...
...Then you may find yourself drawn into the labyrinth of his mind...
...I echo and ring, groggily, as marble does, while Ann Marie tinkles out more notes...
...The child's experience eating is recounted with the accreted detail and rhythmically accelerating punctuation that characterize Brodkey's writing...
...I move the spoon toward my mouth, 1 look at the cold taste of silver and at the writhy bits of worms of mushed apple in the back of my throat, I look at nausea and spasms, and so on, and put the spoon to my lips...
...Ann Marie strikes of f a note, a clear, sweet note—she strikes off an absurdly clear and strange succession of the notes of an opening of a lullaby so that I am sick on food and I gag, and I am gay and peaceful with listening, and I am flattered, and I am nakedly without connection to an inner life—all at the same time...
...Even if he wears us all out in the process, it's worth it...
...It makes me tremble, the phenomenon, the dreamlike screen, the flattened and foreshortened mimicry and then the true and shadowed, to me somewhat tilted, wood loomer...
...Frequently they rework the same, or overlapping, material from different vantage points, most often a child's...
...Whatever the manifest subject matter of these stories, they are all at bottom about the act of writing and its relation to memory...
...I cannot tell you how much I loved the actual house and how much I feared and even loathed its reflection...
...The narrator, againasmall child, is out on a jaunt with his dad...
...You will want to talk back, to demur...
...The boy has just discovered puddles, and they hold both fascination and terror for him: "A white house rises in front of me above its own gray and black reflection in a puddle, a sheet of dark water...
...It originally appeared in a limited edition of four Brodkey stories put out in 1985 by the Jewish Publication Society with the collective title Women and Angels...
Vol. 71 • November 1988 • No. 19
