[In the following review, Scull unfavorably compares Brodkey's This Wild Darkness to Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast.]

Harold Brodkey was a marvellous person: physically irresistible, profoundly original, immensely intelligent, an extraordinary conversationalist—someone who inevitably incurred the unremitting envy and wrath of many members of the mean-spirited New York literary scene, as well as a well-deserved if insufficient fame that transcended national boundaries. And he was besides “a wonderful and a great writer”. Or so he tells us.

What is such a fellow to do, when he discovers that he has been sentenced to a miserable, lingering death at the hands of an indiscriminate microbe, a vicious virus evidently determined to erase him, heedless of his supreme talents and value to the world? Why, write, of course. Cast aside all sense of privacy and discretion to tell the world of his appalling fate, to acquaint his audience with the depth of their loss. After all, why risk “leaving testimony in the hands or mouths of others”, particularly when “I have no shyness now”? Hence, against his doctor's advice and as soon as he feels up to it, he arranges an interview with a fawning New York Times journalist, the appropriately named Jeffrey Schmalz; writes an essay in the New Yorker broadcasting the news of his affliction with AIDS “to my (millions of) readers”; and ensures, finally and posthumously, the publication of this book, “the story of my death”.

Brodkey received the news that he was “death meat” in the spring of 1993. Suffering from what he assumed was “literary exhaustion, age, and bad flu-bronchitis” he discovered instead that he had Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia—and AIDS. Harold had been ailing and losing weight for months, and although “I was never in the Casanova range”, through the 1960s and 70s, he had lived “the myth of my irresistibility”, “amateurishly and assiduously” bedding as many people as possible, male and female alike. His personal history notwithstanding, the news of his diagnosis apparently came as a complete surprise to him. “When Barry [his internist] said I had AIDS, I said I didn't believe him.” After all, his encounters with homosexual men had occurred many years before; “I will say peevishly that I was never accepted as gay by anyone”; and besides, “I felt too conceited to have this death”. But have it, as he soon came to realize, he surely would.

Disdaining reticence, casting aside the discreet silence with which a puritanical society seeks to veil the victims of what it perversely and cruelly defines as a shameful and unmentionable disease, can be an act of bravery. In Brodkey's case, however, it assuredly represents something else, and something far less admirable: his narcissism, his pathological need for public attention, his extreme and quite extraordinary egotism. This Wild Darkness not only undermines Brodkey's claims to serious attention as a writer; it puts on display a singularly unattractive human being. This is, of course, the very opposite of the author's intent. He wants to display his genius, his superhuman qualities, his extraordinary virtues. “I am”, he insists, to his wife, his doctor, to the world, “peculiarly suited to catastrophe because of my notions and beliefs.” Death does not really matter to him because “I was not, am not, young. I am not being cut down before I have a chance to live.” Moreover, poor Harold is tired: “my sad conviction of the important validity of my ideas (of what my work presents), and my hapless defense of my work had so tired me that I was relieved by the thought of death.”

Brodkey learns of his fateful diagnosis in the presence of his wife, a woman with whom he has lived and slept for fifteen years and who will care for him for the remaining two years and more of his life. And yet it never seems to have occurred to Brodkey—and he meticulously charts his emotions, thoughts, and moods, convinced they must matter as much to us as to him—to worry at all about whether he might have infected her. Instead, “I was worried about Ellen's opinion of me”. He looks to her only as a source of care and comfort, apprehensive lest she despise him, and anxious for her to continue to admire him. Repeatedly, he informs us that her tears, on learning she was miraculously free of the virus, were only because “it depressed her to be separated from me”.

Brodkey's extraordinary solipsism, his relentless self-absorption, is apparent on virtually every page of This Wild Darkness. As a child, he informs us, he was adopted “illegally and with great difficulty” because of his “extreme beauty … I remember people coming to the house to see me—I remember being brought out after being dressed and combed, and being passed from embrace to embrace … people talked a great deal about me and quarrelled over me. … Either of my parents would have killed the other for me. … At school, my God, girls waited for me in the hall, or in front in good weather. Twice in one year, four times in all, the mothers of girls whose approaches to me I had ignored complained to the school principal. …” In New York, his “irresistibility” meant

gasps and anger at you and people crying because of you and a lot of gossip and various abduction attempts and threats of suicide because of you and your being followed on the street by people who are obsessed with you. … I was in fashion in New York in terms of this irresistibility off and on for the last forty years. And it was an insiderish thing to be “in love” with me at those times. Other people won literary prizes or academic honors. I discriminated among emotions and suitors.

The sense of being the only creature that matters, of being the centre of his and everyone else's universe, is everywhere: on the occasion of a visit to Venice at the invitation of his German publisher, he announces portentously, “I am dying … Venice is dying … The century is dying. …” His decision, taken early on in his illness, to demand his premature release from hospital is rooted in his sense that the place is beneath him. “The hospital is like a bus terminal on a weekend, full of mad and abominable and listless human goods in transit (including, of course, other victims of AIDS) … the room was unbearably ugly, the bed useless for sleeping, the food vile, the nights oppressive. …” But most of all, Harold Brodkey had to leave because … “I was tired of being unimportant”.

From beneath the too transparent veil of insouciance, there periodically emerge snarls and thrusts at his enemies, those who refuse to acknowledge his self-evident superiority: “I regret having been so polite in the past. I'd like to trample on at least a dozen people. Maybe I will live long enough to do just that.” More expansively still, there is the recognition that “underneath the sentimentality and obstinacy of my attitudes, are, as you might expect, a quite severe range and a vast, a truly extensive terror, anchored in contempt for you and for life and for everything. I believe that the world is dying, not just me.” But it is that “me” that matters, as nothing else can: at bottom, “I [am] crazed with grief for myself”.

Losing the one you love hurts—hurts more deeply and profoundly than almost anything else in our experience. It claws and tears at the soul—most savagely, it would seem on Brodkey's account, when the object of one's love is oneself. Perhaps not, though, among those less relentlessly self-centred than he, a fact brought home in another memoir by a writer haunted by the AIDS virus, the award-winning poet, Mark Doty. Unlike Harold Brodkey, Doty is part of an extended community to whom he matters, and who matter deeply to him. There is, first and foremost, his long-time lover, Wally Roberts. But there are also a whole array of others—straight and gay—whose existence is of profound import to him, and whose lives, sorrows and happiness are inextricably bound up with one another in mutually enriching ways. Like other gay men in the last decades of the twentieth century, Mark and Wally live in the shadow of AIDS. Even while asymptomatic, they are aware that the infection may already have struck and blighted their lives, as it has so many people of their acquaintance. And in late May 1989, it does: testing for HIV reveals that Wally (but not Mark) has acquired the virus.

Heaven's Coast is a deeply affecting lament for a lover, a disturbing description of the ravages of an awful disease, and finally a man's moving account of his passage through grief to a renewed engagement with the world. It reveals, as This Wild Darkness never succeeds in doing, some of the human costs of this tragic epidemic—which for some of us seems to be “endlessly consuming my generation and the one before and the one after me”.

AIDS, as Doty makes rivetingly clear, is no metaphor. Its depredations are many and various, unpredictable in any given case, but always cruel. It is also, he discovers, “an intensifier, something which makes things more firmly, deeply themselves”. Mark and Wally learn their fate while living in Vermont, a solitary, openly gay couple isolated within a sea of faintly disapproving Yankees. The perceived need for friends and like-minded community induces them to move to Provincetown, a decision that makes their last years of life together brighter and more bearable, at last part of a community in which they can openly express their affection for each other. But the disease closes in, implacable, inescapable and unpostponable.

Blinding headaches, the psychic terror of uncertainty, the fear of what lay before them, all accompanied the relentless decline of Wally's immune system. No pneumonia, no lesions, no retinitis, but an ever greater weariness, a gradual loss of bodily substance, a steady, inexorable decay. Privately, Mark confesses in his journal “I'm terrified of being alone—sometimes I think I won't be anyone without him—and terrified of his suffering, of being unable to be there with what he needs.” In a way, as he comes to see, this period before the full onset of AIDS was the worst: “There was so little I could do. Later, I could at least attend to the countless little needs of a man who couldn't walk, but now his difficulties, his growing sense of diminishment, were things neither of us seemed able to do a thing about … he was steeping in his illness, taking on its color, the way fabric steeps in dye.”

Death ultimately was kind, but it was also “utter, unbearable rupture” Grief, too, contained its own contradictions, numbness somehow intertwined with excruciating pain, lying in wait to ambush Doty at odd moments, making it “impossible, for a while to go on”. There is, as he recognizes, no consolation. And the world contains yet more pain. “Wild arrogance, to imagine there won't be more to feel because you won't be able to feel it. To think no more loss can happen because you can't hold it.” Mourning the death of Wally, Mark learns he must simultaneously absorb the loss of a close friend, a woman poet killed in a car accident. Briefly flirting with suicide, he literally pulls himself back from the brink. Slowly, he discovers that “there was too much in the world to see, too much I wanted to pour myself into, to encounter and absorb, too much I wanted to do”.

No one who reads Heaven's Coast can doubt the depths of Mark Doty's devotion to his lover. It captures with uncommon precision the physical and emotional texture of their world, and the wrenching reality that to love is to court grief. If one is tempted at times to avert one's eyes, in the end one is led to rejoice in his renewed sense of the possibilities the future presents, in his determination “to know how the story of my life will turn out”.