The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Southernmost and Other Stories by Michael Brodsky
Thomas Lecky

Michael Brodsky. Southernmost and Other Stories. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996. 341 pp. Paper: $14.95.

Wallace Stevens writes in his Adagia, “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” Michael Brodsky’s new collection of stories contemplates this willingness. The novella “Southernmost” proposes the fictional meeting of Stevens and Hart Crane in Key West, the southernmost of the title. But it is also the figurative southernmost of the imagination, where both Stevens and Crane rigorously pushed themselves, that Brodsky is after.

For Brodsky, Stevens and Crane reflect two poles: Stevens the corporate man, whose willingness to dive into fictions Brodsky’s narrator often sees as a tendency for rationalization, and Crane the recalcitrant bohemian, whose intractable imagination destined him to his final plunge. The raw impulse of desire, suggests Brodsky, led Crane to language—“the language of their own transformation.” The narrator who recounts this meeting admires Crane’s insistence on the transformative power of poetry to affect the world and sees Stevens as an obese pretender. Thus is Stevens Crane’s arch rival.

What is most disturbing about this statement is the perceived gulf between these two poets, both of whom, in my mind, were after similar imaginative ends. The narrator comments that “[Crane’s] life—any life—was too brief to encompass meaning.” It is unfortunate that Stevens—who also lived a life—cannot in some way correspond to Crane, if only because he espoused that great willingness for fictions.

Southernmost serves as the groundwork for the later stories. In “Bagatelle” the fragility of narrative is encountered in the inability to unravel the mystery behind an assassination. We are told in “The Assessed,” “And that vengefully vigilant and elliptical telling will necessarily resist—parry—almost apotropaically—all paraphrase.” It is the very telling itself that is mired in fragility. Our lives, our languages, are lost in a maelstrom of Babel. And yet Brodsky is a writer, an immensely talented writer, and our willingness to believe aside, his words somehow become the imaginary line connecting the poles. And that, in the end, is the correspondence: the line written in words between Stevens, Crane, and the author of their fiction. [Thomas Lecky]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Southernmost and Other Stories by Michael Brodsky Thomas Lecky Michael Brodsky. Southernmost and Other Stories. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996. 341 pp. Paper: $14.95. Wallace Stevens writes in his Adagia, “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” Michael Brodsky’s new collection of stories contemplates this willingness. The novella “Southernmost” proposes the fictional meeting of Stevens and Hart Crane in Key West, the southernmost of the title. But it is also the figurative southernmost of the imagination, where both Stevens and Crane rigorously pushed themselves, that Brodsky is after. For Brodsky, Stevens and Crane reflect two poles: Stevens the corporate man, whose willingness to dive into fictions Brodsky’s narrator often sees as a tendency for rationalization, and Crane the recalcitrant bohemian, whose intractable imagination destined him to his final plunge. The raw impulse of desire, suggests Brodsky, led Crane to language—“the language of their own transformation.” The narrator who recounts this meeting admires Crane’s insistence on the transformative power of poetry to affect the world and sees Stevens as an obese pretender. Thus is Stevens Crane’s arch rival. What is most disturbing about this statement is the perceived gulf between these two poets, both of whom, in my mind, were after similar imaginative ends. The narrator comments that “[Crane’s] life—any life—was too brief to encompass meaning.” It is unfortunate that Stevens—who also lived a life—cannot in some way correspond to Crane, if only because he espoused that great willingness for fictions. Southernmost serves as the groundwork for the later stories. In “Bagatelle” the fragility of narrative is encountered in the inability to unravel the mystery behind an assassination. We are told in “The Assessed,” “And that vengefully vigilant and elliptical telling will necessarily resist—parry—almost apotropaically—all paraphrase.” It is the very telling itself that is mired in fragility. Our lives, our languages, are lost in a maelstrom of Babel. And yet Brodsky is a writer, an immensely talented writer, and our willingness to believe aside, his words somehow become the imaginary line connecting the poles. And that, in the end, is the correspondence: the line written in words between Stevens, Crane, and the author of their fiction. [Thomas Lecky]

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