The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Sea Battles on Dry Land by Harold BrodkeyIrving Malin
Harold Brodkey. Sea Battles on Dry Land. Henry Holt, 1999. 450 pp. $30.00.
This valuable collection contains essays Brodkey wrote between the early 1980s until his death in 1996. In four sections—“Celebrity and Politics,” “Wit and Whimsy,” “Love and Sex,” and “Language and Literature”—the essays demonstrate his preoccupation with masquerade, sexuality, memory, and consciousness. They vary in quality, of course, but every one is provocatively tense.
Here I can mention only the most fascinating essays—or sentences from them—to offer a brief suggestion for future exploration. “My Time in the Garden,” from the second section, is a beautifully written description of sensual delight. Brodkey describes a hidden garden: “They were not an Eden but offered a sense of profusion and of shade with a sense of difference from any other Italian landscape and, then, because of the staggering, interlocking complexities of branches and tree trunks, they had an almost fairy-tale quality of grotesque crowdedness of vegetable incident, of biological life.” The long, seductive rhythm of the sentence reflects the garden, interlocking complexities of yielding one’s self to some terrifying beauty (or beautiful terror).
Although each essay offers Brodkey at his best, the fourth section on “Language and Literature” is, without doubt, the most intriguing part of the book. Brodkey’s essay on Jane Austen versus Henry James is brilliant. He re-creates a Jane Austen who understood sexual intrigue, social
ambivalence. And he is quick—too much so—to alert us to James’s “sexlessness”: “James’s is an invented female voice, extremely intelligent, entirely self-involved in a disguised way. Austen manages to be everyone.” Not only is this collection a tribute to the wide range of Brodkey’s work, from film reviews to celebrity profiles to memoir, it is also proof of a master writer. [Irving Malin]