There exists a group of American authors who could well bear the label of the Mid-Century Generation — analogous to the one we have in Spain — and which would include John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Grace Paley, John Updike, or Shirley Jackson. No academic or literary critic has yet devised such a classification, but we can deduce that one of its peculiarities is to account for the disillusionment of postwar United States, that era of the baby boom, the growth of the suburbs, and McCarthyism, with tones that swing between weariness and irony. Many of them, moreover, leaned toward the short story as a vehicle for expression. There we find Cheever’s alienation in tales like “The Swimmer” or “The Country Husband,” humor as a vehicle for critique in Paley’s writings, or the almost unbearable nihilism of early Pynchon.
De ahí que resulte gratificante encontrar, de entre ese cúmulo de grandes voces, un contrapunto que nos ofrezca una mirada tierna, jovial e incluso optimista de aquella época. Esto es lo que propone First Love and Other Sorrows, the literary debut of Harold Brodkey, a writer born in Illinois, very popular in his country but little read in the Spanish-speaking world. This first work dates from 1957; thereafter, Brodkey did not publish anything else until 1985, a body of work that is not enough to encompass him within the hypothetical Mid-Century American Generation but yes to include these nine stories in the literary harvest of those turbulent years.
Over the decades, Brodkey drifted away from this lively outlook and forged a style increasingly introspective, meticulous, and refined, which found its zenith in the monumental The Runaway Soul, a nearly thousand-page novel published in 1991, which led critic Harold Bloom to consider him “the American Proust.”
The first four stories probe the figure of a archetypal young man from Saint Louis, a classic expanding city of the American Midwest, who must face the challenge and pain of growing up, of taking on imposed social responsibilities and, above all, of meeting the expectations of adults. In “The State of Grace”, the young protagonist wrestles with a mother who is about to become a widow, with an early first job, and with the discovery of a body that changes daily. In the story that gives the book its title, we see the same young man — or another very much like the first, really; that distinction is immaterial — in adolescence, in search of the first kiss and fighting against the ominous virginity, while witnessing the suffering that befalls his beautiful and insecure elder sister due to having to marry the supposedly right man. It is here that Brodkey begins to lay out with greater force one of his signature stylistic traits: the lavish description of the atmosphere. One can sense that it could not have been easy for the translator to interpret fragments such as this:
“I raised my face — that exasperating feature that was my face — and I stood in a trance, gazing at the night, the swaying crowns of the trees, the branches stirred by the wind and, embedded in the night sky, the round moon that turned the nearby clouds into mother-of-pearl.”
In “The Fight”, two youths who have navigated the briars of adolescence venture into the harsh land of early adulthood, and embark on a bicycling journey through England and France, an initiatory sojourn that signifies breaking away from the family nest, embracing one’s limits, and learning to negotiate even within a context of friendship. In “A Romantic Education”, the volume’s best story, we delve into the stiffening of university life and the weight of social yokes as a constraint on the intimate lives of young people; here the reader witnesses and participates in the emergence, development, and decline of the courtship between Elgin and Caroline — arising from metaphysical poetry classes and Montaigne’s essays — as well as the blow of reality that the end of infatuation entails. This is how Brodkey describes the reaction to the proposal to end a bond that months earlier seemed unbreakable:
“Caroline hesitated for a moment, but the mere idea of freeing herself from these feverish emotions seemed like a wonderful dream.”
The remaining five stories explore the intimacy of a single character, Laurie or Laura, whom we meet in front of the mirror, applying makeup to her face and masking her emotional instability before the family’s and society’s demand to choose, once again, the richest and most suitable man to leave with. In the subsequent tales, that appointment ends in marriage and the subsequent birth of young Faith, whom we see grow from story to story, and with her grows Laura’s discernment in taming her own emotional swings and those of her husband. Here it is admirable the way Brodkey interprets the gaze of a baby without ever slipping into cliché or easy register — a mistake that often dissuades many authors from introducing characters of such a young age who nonetheless carry weight in the plot.
It is also admirable the delicacy and depth with which the author shapes the gaze of a young woman pressed by tribulations that do not yield: the desire to go out with this one rather than that one; the desire to become a mother or not; the way she manages her own anxiety knowing that her daughter will inevitably be subjected to similar future anxieties; or the wish to recover her individuality once she has passed through the first motherhood, as this great fragment shows:
“The rocking chair began to move gently. The baby had started to nurse. Laura directed a smile toward her other heart and said:
—Isn’t it true that in the end you will give me back to myself, when you no longer need me?
And then she laughed out loud, at the fierce look on the little one’s face as she fed at the breast.”
As noted above, despite the misgivings that the stories’ premises may initially convey, the resulting effect of reading is one of rejoicing, and this is due to the author’s deftness in exposing the characters’ inner worlds, the beauty of the details chosen with an eye like a goldsmith, and the reflections prompted by learning to forgive oneself, without stone-throwing yet without complacency.
———————
Author: Harold Brodkey. Title: First Love and Other Sorrows. Translation: Enrique Murillo. Publisher: H&O. Sales: Todostuslibros.