Topical though its title may sound, Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay “Notes on American Fascism” probably couldn’t be published today. Reading it, one can almost hear the inevitable editorial demands that its argument be “sharpened” (premised upon the assumption that an argument, rather than notes, is what it offers), or at least that the words of a geopolitical expert or two be shoehorned in to gin up a bit of academic-journalistic gravitas. Not that the essay seems to have been publishable even when Brodkey first wrote it, given that it only appeared several years later in his collection Sea Battles on Dry Land, published a few years after his death from AIDS in 1996. Nevertheless, when revisited more than three decades on, its torrent of portentous observation and speculation about the decline of the kind of liberalism Brodkey calls “the primary American tradition” now seems considerably less disposable than the many anxious prophesies of a fascist United States published more recently, during the reign of Donald Trump.
By the early Nineties, as Brodkey sees it, the gods of “ethnic diversity” (summoned by “the failure of the melting pot to work”) and “the new federalism” (no longer denoting a dynamic between the federal and state governments but between the U.S. and the entire world) have both failed, neither having produced “a new sense of community” or “a workable sense of America.” Real estate is “now so expensive that it is very difficult for people in the lower tier to buy a house, or very much of a house, even if they have inherited money.” The government “does not support American manufacturing or American exports except in very sophisticated ways closed to outsiders.” The uninspiring Democratic program comes down to “a demand for order, for more government, more centralized government”; the Republicans have their perpetual interest in “looting,” but no “overt program beyond the slogans of American greatness and American supremacy.”
In that era, spotting harbingers of fascism in America would have struck some readers as an implausible provocation; now, in the second Trump presidency, it’s a threadbare cliché. But already in 1992—early in a decade now largely remembered as a time of American prosperity, stability and political consensus—Brodkey sensed something coming apart. In “Notes on American Fascism,” he evoked a “disenfranchised class” driven to an “absolute hunger for absolutes” of “land, rootedness, and meaning,” one that “would avail itself of the egoism of a single all-purpose leader who seems likely to be successful if that leader did not socially shame them, but was like them.” Critics at the time called the essay a response to the aftereffects of twelve years of Reaganomics, but neither Ronald Reagan nor any other single figure plays a decisive role in Brodkey’s meditation on American fascism, one indirectly rooted in and structured by personal memory.
Brodkey’s evocations of “programmatic” xenophobia, “patriotic demands for territorial expansion” and “loathing for the real or imagined threats in the moral and political doctrines of liberalism to structures of an imagined society” will sound familiar, indeed almost dully so, to readers of the 2020s. Today we’re flooded with commentary and speculation on the possibility of a fascist regime in the U.S., penned by workaday journalists, bloggers, academics, talking heads, and even those of us who have dutifully kept up with it all may struggle to recall the details of any single take; each is convincing enough in the moment, but forgotten soon after the closure of its browser tab. Many of the memorable qualities, both compelling and frustrating, of Brodkey’s piece owe to his being a fiction writer, and more than that, a fiction writer who tirelessly, even obsessively dedicated himself to exploring his own perception of amorphous, ambiguous circumstances in medias res.
●
Brodkey is remembered today, to the extent that he’s remembered at all, as a writer of intensely intimate autobiographical fiction in general, and as the writer of one ambitious but failed work of such fiction in particular. Having established himself in 1958 with the short-story collection First Love and Other Sorrows, he dined out on his reputation as the next big thing in American letters, an “American Proust” anointed by Harold Bloom, for decades thereafter. But it was only in 1991 that he managed to publish his first full-length novel, The Runaway Soul. The reception of this long-delayed opus, though not as unremittingly harsh as it’s sometimes described, surely wasn’t what he had expected or hoped for. (“The Runaway Soul is absolutely the last book you want to say this about,” said Newsweek, “but it could have used a rewrite.”)
During The Runaway Soul’s long gestation, Brodkey paid at least some of his bills with journalism. Sea Battles on Dry Land comprises a representative selection of his nonfiction pieces, some written in his capacity as a longtime contributor to the New Yorker spanning the administrations of William Shawn and Tina Brown. Those on politics or popular culture tend to date from the late eighties or early nineties, dealing with subjects then on the U.S.’s cultural front burner: the 1992 presidential debates, the 1993 Academy Awards ceremony, video stores, “the Woody Allen mess.” The lack of a similarly straightforward news hook may be one reason editors didn’t take up “Notes on American Fascism” during his lifetime, although the essay’s meandering, fragmentary form probably also played a part. The critics who eventually encountered it responded in contradictory fashions. “His scattershot approach reaches its nadir in the remarkably unprophetic, singularly unconvincing ‘Notes on American Fascism,’” wrote Susie Linfield, reviewing Sea Battles in the Observer; in the Washington Post, Sanford Pinsker called the piece an “eerily prophetic assessment of our country’s drift toward the Right” that “more than weathers the test of time.”
Born in 1930, Brodkey remembered the FDR years as a formative period in his life. (Even Roosevelt, he points out, took “charismatic one-leader lawless leadership quite far,” and allowed the emergence of labor unions with “quasi-fascist structures.”) In his writing, he often evoked America as it was before the Second World War—an America that has now slipped almost entirely from living memory—in his characters’ voices as well as his own. “You had a country two to three times larger in population than England or France or Germany, but much less well organized or centralized. People had root cellars and iceboxes, and no down coats, and Washington was a small Southern town,” he wrote in a 1995 New Yorker essay on the heyday of celebrity journalist Walter Winchell. “Ethnic divisions were extreme and often violent. We had little, compared to today, in the way of national structures—just the railroads, the radio networks, a few newspaper chains, such as Hearst’s, and the ‘national’ magazines.”
Over the course of the twentieth century, with nothing like a “rural nobility” to hold it together, “small-town America”—all those farm belts, those root cellars, those five-and-dimes—had “vanished.” And with them had vanished “the safety in this being such a large country,” America’s vastness being, as Brodkey saw it, a precondition of its democratic character. As the American public concentrated in cities and then suburbs, tuning in to the ever more dominant mass media, it became increasingly manipulable: “Now the population is more concentrated and the technological means for close control exist.” At the same time, as the “proportionally large middle class” that once held the U.S. system together shrank, Brodkey saw that, in at least one respect, late-twentieth-century America was becoming more, not less, like it was in his youth. “What is happening today worldwide,” he writes in “Notes on American Fascism,” “is a reorganization of ancient or new or newish social classes into two social classes: the economically and technologically sophisticated and the failed and unrooted and not sophisticated.” In the essay on Winchell he puts the point more bluntly: “When I was young, you had two major social classes (as now again, since Reagan): the people who mattered and the trash population.”
Brodkey’s discussion of “the unrooted class,” whose members are “tied to America because their skills and emotions are not readily transferable,” drew on personal experience dealt with more directly in his fiction of childhood and adolescence, filled as it is with details of lower-middle-class deprivation (and worse). Adopted at an early age by his father’s cousin after the death of his mother, he was raised humbly in the suburbs of St. Louis before going off of Harvard (one of the few institutions that can still credibly offer an express ticket to the highest echelons of society), then to New York. If his fiction is focused on his humble Midwestern upbringing, his essays often reference his acquaintance with Dorothy Parker, a dinner in the company of Elizabeth Taylor and so on. “If a survey should be made, it might turn out that I have one of the most envied lives in America,” he writes in a 1986 piece. “I work at home—freelance—in a fourteenth-floor apartment on upper Broadway, with a view the length of Manhattan, at sky level.” Social ascent of this kind has become rare in our time, giving Brodkey’s real-life trajectory the air of historical fiction.
●
In a 1994 London Review of Books essay titled “Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future,” Edward Luttwak diagnosed “the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people” caused by accelerating economic globalization and structural change. The unwillingness among existing political actors to address that condition, he argued, leaves space “wide open for a product-improved Fascist party” promising economic security, however dubiously, to those working people. Richard Rorty drew on this analysis in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, whose sales were much revived after the 2016 election, when a passage from the book predicting how the dispossessed “nonsuburban electorate” would eventually begin “looking around for a strongman” circulated online.
It’s surprising, on some level, that no mainstream liberal journal has yet credited Brodkey with having predicted the rise of Trump, even though he wrote “Notes on American Fascism” before Luttwak and Rorty’s prophecies. Brodkey’s may have simply become too obscure a name to drop. Yet there was a time when he and Trump could be mentioned in the very same headline: the summer of 1989, specifically, when Nora Ephron published an essay in Esquire about American fame and the figures who so openly crave it. “He wants to be famous. He wants people to talk about him. He wants people to notice him. He wants people to write about him. He wants people to ask him for autographs and recognize him and invade his privacy,” she wrote of Trump. “Except for an occasional churlish moment he seems to be genuinely enjoying the experience of fame in a way that no one in his right mind ever does, and the fact that he therefore seems not to have any sense or intelligence or taste whatsoever is beside the point. The man has adapted.” As for Harold Brodkey, she assures her reader, you know him: “the man of letters, the famous author of the most famous unpublished novel of our time … the same Harold Brodkey who was recently featured, along with his wife, as a Couple in People magazine.”
In 1988, Brodkey had been the subject of a New York magazine cover story (“THE GENIUS”) in which he boasted, “I write like someone who intends to be posthumously discovered.” He may never have come out on top quite like Donald Trump somehow keeps doing, but in some respects, he was even more of an American striver. Being one, he was well placed to know one, as well as to recognize the ill effects that personality type could inflict, at scale, on the wider society and culture. He did, after all, secure that perch on upper Broadway from which he could register the impulses of success-driven U.S. mass society, at once hypertrophied and strangely hollowed out. “Some of this is the failure of New York intellectuals and of the movies, of clerics and of other leaders,” he suggests in “Notes on American Fascism.” “They have not made a sufficient attempt even to begin to try to understand the community. They use old forms, they use idealism and absolutism to draft a position, they fail to observe what is here.”
By any standard, and despite his protestations of being “a halfway educated Jew from St. Louis with two sets of parents and a junkman father” unprepared to play the role of “the rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton,” Brodkey would surely have counted among those “New York intellectuals.” Yet he remained primarily an observer of his own experiences and their resonances down the long, crooked halls of his memory. In a way, this sensibility was actually well suited to the political-cultural atmosphere of the Nineties, when the discourse on national political issues like “unemployment, violence, gender issues, abortion, more or less government intervention” had “devolved into what each voter knows from personal acquaintance”: a devolution that has continued apace.
What conditions did Brodkey observe? That already in 1992, “the old American middle class is gone,” its scattered remaining members defined only by participation in such institutions as the stock market, the tax system and “an interlocking web of universities.” Most of them live in isolated suburbs, which “do not and cannot do much to preserve culture or the interplay of groups and classes that heretofore made up American education in politics, in American political realities.” Due to the consequent loss of “political and social ballast,” awareness of local reality has given way to the seductiveness of mass fantasy. “Moral issues are complex and tangled. The jury system argues tacitly that all issues are arguable. And they are. And that time changes things. And it does. That adjudication and rights and duties are complex matters.” Common sense, but also “almost all culture, literature, history, philosophy, even religion, if studied and pondered, tell us that. The disappearance of common sense and the ebbing of culture and the advance of the dreamed-of and dreamlike are clear signs of social danger.”
What Brodkey wrote against, in “Notes on American Fascism,” was less ideology per se than “idealism of an absolutist kind,” whose growing lack of patience with reality was “built into our present use of language.” He set himself the writerly mission, as he articulates it somewhat grandly in Sea Battles’s closing essay, of bringing about
a more equitable and flexible language and a just world, of course; an increase in the spirit of charity among us; greater happiness for a widening number of people; and an enlargement of one’s sense of amusement and interest in life, more of which can be spoken about sensibly, more of which can find its way into language.
He defined language itself as “articulated consciousness,” a fitting conception for a writer whose idiosyncratic prose takes not the shape of argument but the shape of thought. The resulting work is unlikely to satisfy the many politically minded readers in perpetual search of narratives whose conclusions flatter their own preconceptions—or indeed, conventional narratives or conclusions of any kind. Today there may be a surfeit of commentators ready to address the subject of American fascism with invincible certainty, but of writers like Harold Brodkey there are no more.
Photo credit: Nicholas Turpin / Alamy
Topical though its title may sound, Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay “Notes on American Fascism” probably couldn’t be published today. Reading it, one can almost hear the inevitable editorial demands that its argument be “sharpened” (premised upon the assumption that an argument, rather than notes, is what it offers), or at least that the words of a geopolitical expert or two be shoehorned in to gin up a bit of academic-journalistic gravitas. Not that the essay seems to have been publishable even when Brodkey first wrote it, given that it only appeared several years later in his collection Sea Battles on Dry Land, published a few years after his death from AIDS in 1996. Nevertheless, when revisited more than three decades on, its torrent of portentous observation and speculation about the decline of the kind of liberalism Brodkey calls “the primary American tradition” now seems considerably less disposable than the many anxious prophesies of a fascist United States published more recently, during the reign of Donald Trump.
By the early Nineties, as Brodkey sees it, the gods of “ethnic diversity” (summoned by “the failure of the melting pot to work”) and “the new federalism” (no longer denoting a dynamic between the federal and state governments but between the U.S. and the entire world) have both failed, neither having produced “a new sense of community” or “a workable sense of America.” Real estate is “now so expensive that it is very difficult for people in the lower tier to buy a house, or very much of a house, even if they have inherited money.” The government “does not support American manufacturing or American exports except in very sophisticated ways closed to outsiders.” The uninspiring Democratic program comes down to “a demand for order, for more government, more centralized government”; the Republicans have their perpetual interest in “looting,” but no “overt program beyond the slogans of American greatness and American supremacy.”
In that era, spotting harbingers of fascism in America would have struck some readers as an implausible provocation; now, in the second Trump presidency, it’s a threadbare cliché. But already in 1992—early in a decade now largely remembered as a time of American prosperity, stability and political consensus—Brodkey sensed something coming apart. In “Notes on American Fascism,” he evoked a “disenfranchised class” driven to an “absolute hunger for absolutes” of “land, rootedness, and meaning,” one that “would avail itself of the egoism of a single all-purpose leader who seems likely to be successful if that leader did not socially shame them, but was like them.” Critics at the time called the essay a response to the aftereffects of twelve years of Reaganomics, but neither Ronald Reagan nor any other single figure plays a decisive role in Brodkey’s meditation on American fascism, one indirectly rooted in and structured by personal memory.
Brodkey’s evocations of “programmatic” xenophobia, “patriotic demands for territorial expansion” and “loathing for the real or imagined threats in the moral and political doctrines of liberalism to structures of an imagined society” will sound familiar, indeed almost dully so, to readers of the 2020s. Today we’re flooded with commentary and speculation on the possibility of a fascist regime in the U.S., penned by workaday journalists, bloggers, academics, talking heads, and even those of us who have dutifully kept up with it all may struggle to recall the details of any single take; each is convincing enough in the moment, but forgotten soon after the closure of its browser tab. Many of the memorable qualities, both compelling and frustrating, of Brodkey’s piece owe to his being a fiction writer, and more than that, a fiction writer who tirelessly, even obsessively dedicated himself to exploring his own perception of amorphous, ambiguous circumstances in medias res.
●
Brodkey is remembered today, to the extent that he’s remembered at all, as a writer of intensely intimate autobiographical fiction in general, and as the writer of one ambitious but failed work of such fiction in particular. Having established himself in 1958 with the short-story collection First Love and Other Sorrows, he dined out on his reputation as the next big thing in American letters, an “American Proust” anointed by Harold Bloom, for decades thereafter. But it was only in 1991 that he managed to publish his first full-length novel, The Runaway Soul. The reception of this long-delayed opus, though not as unremittingly harsh as it’s sometimes described, surely wasn’t what he had expected or hoped for. (“The Runaway Soul is absolutely the last book you want to say this about,” said Newsweek, “but it could have used a rewrite.”)
During The Runaway Soul’s long gestation, Brodkey paid at least some of his bills with journalism. Sea Battles on Dry Land comprises a representative selection of his nonfiction pieces, some written in his capacity as a longtime contributor to the New Yorker spanning the administrations of William Shawn and Tina Brown. Those on politics or popular culture tend to date from the late eighties or early nineties, dealing with subjects then on the U.S.’s cultural front burner: the 1992 presidential debates, the 1993 Academy Awards ceremony, video stores, “the Woody Allen mess.” The lack of a similarly straightforward news hook may be one reason editors didn’t take up “Notes on American Fascism” during his lifetime, although the essay’s meandering, fragmentary form probably also played a part. The critics who eventually encountered it responded in contradictory fashions. “His scattershot approach reaches its nadir in the remarkably unprophetic, singularly unconvincing ‘Notes on American Fascism,’” wrote Susie Linfield, reviewing Sea Battles in the Observer; in the Washington Post, Sanford Pinsker called the piece an “eerily prophetic assessment of our country’s drift toward the Right” that “more than weathers the test of time.”
Born in 1930, Brodkey remembered the FDR years as a formative period in his life. (Even Roosevelt, he points out, took “charismatic one-leader lawless leadership quite far,” and allowed the emergence of labor unions with “quasi-fascist structures.”) In his writing, he often evoked America as it was before the Second World War—an America that has now slipped almost entirely from living memory—in his characters’ voices as well as his own. “You had a country two to three times larger in population than England or France or Germany, but much less well organized or centralized. People had root cellars and iceboxes, and no down coats, and Washington was a small Southern town,” he wrote in a 1995 New Yorker essay on the heyday of celebrity journalist Walter Winchell. “Ethnic divisions were extreme and often violent. We had little, compared to today, in the way of national structures—just the railroads, the radio networks, a few newspaper chains, such as Hearst’s, and the ‘national’ magazines.”
Over the course of the twentieth century, with nothing like a “rural nobility” to hold it together, “small-town America”—all those farm belts, those root cellars, those five-and-dimes—had “vanished.” And with them had vanished “the safety in this being such a large country,” America’s vastness being, as Brodkey saw it, a precondition of its democratic character. As the American public concentrated in cities and then suburbs, tuning in to the ever more dominant mass media, it became increasingly manipulable: “Now the population is more concentrated and the technological means for close control exist.” At the same time, as the “proportionally large middle class” that once held the U.S. system together shrank, Brodkey saw that, in at least one respect, late-twentieth-century America was becoming more, not less, like it was in his youth. “What is happening today worldwide,” he writes in “Notes on American Fascism,” “is a reorganization of ancient or new or newish social classes into two social classes: the economically and technologically sophisticated and the failed and unrooted and not sophisticated.” In the essay on Winchell he puts the point more bluntly: “When I was young, you had two major social classes (as now again, since Reagan): the people who mattered and the trash population.”
Brodkey’s discussion of “the unrooted class,” whose members are “tied to America because their skills and emotions are not readily transferable,” drew on personal experience dealt with more directly in his fiction of childhood and adolescence, filled as it is with details of lower-middle-class deprivation (and worse). Adopted at an early age by his father’s cousin after the death of his mother, he was raised humbly in the suburbs of St. Louis before going off of Harvard (one of the few institutions that can still credibly offer an express ticket to the highest echelons of society), then to New York. If his fiction is focused on his humble Midwestern upbringing, his essays often reference his acquaintance with Dorothy Parker, a dinner in the company of Elizabeth Taylor and so on. “If a survey should be made, it might turn out that I have one of the most envied lives in America,” he writes in a 1986 piece. “I work at home—freelance—in a fourteenth-floor apartment on upper Broadway, with a view the length of Manhattan, at sky level.” Social ascent of this kind has become rare in our time, giving Brodkey’s real-life trajectory the air of historical fiction.
●
In a 1994 London Review of Books essay titled “Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future,” Edward Luttwak diagnosed “the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people” caused by accelerating economic globalization and structural change. The unwillingness among existing political actors to address that condition, he argued, leaves space “wide open for a product-improved Fascist party” promising economic security, however dubiously, to those working people. Richard Rorty drew on this analysis in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, whose sales were much revived after the 2016 election, when a passage from the book predicting how the dispossessed “nonsuburban electorate” would eventually begin “looking around for a strongman” circulated online.
It’s surprising, on some level, that no mainstream liberal journal has yet credited Brodkey with having predicted the rise of Trump, even though he wrote “Notes on American Fascism” before Luttwak and Rorty’s prophecies. Brodkey’s may have simply become too obscure a name to drop. Yet there was a time when he and Trump could be mentioned in the very same headline: the summer of 1989, specifically, when Nora Ephron published an essay in Esquire about American fame and the figures who so openly crave it. “He wants to be famous. He wants people to talk about him. He wants people to notice him. He wants people to write about him. He wants people to ask him for autographs and recognize him and invade his privacy,” she wrote of Trump. “Except for an occasional churlish moment he seems to be genuinely enjoying the experience of fame in a way that no one in his right mind ever does, and the fact that he therefore seems not to have any sense or intelligence or taste whatsoever is beside the point. The man has adapted.” As for Harold Brodkey, she assures her reader, you know him: “the man of letters, the famous author of the most famous unpublished novel of our time … the same Harold Brodkey who was recently featured, along with his wife, as a Couple in People magazine.”
In 1988, Brodkey had been the subject of a New York magazine cover story (“THE GENIUS”) in which he boasted, “I write like someone who intends to be posthumously discovered.” He may never have come out on top quite like Donald Trump somehow keeps doing, but in some respects, he was even more of an American striver. Being one, he was well placed to know one, as well as to recognize the ill effects that personality type could inflict, at scale, on the wider society and culture. He did, after all, secure that perch on upper Broadway from which he could register the impulses of success-driven U.S. mass society, at once hypertrophied and strangely hollowed out. “Some of this is the failure of New York intellectuals and of the movies, of clerics and of other leaders,” he suggests in “Notes on American Fascism.” “They have not made a sufficient attempt even to begin to try to understand the community. They use old forms, they use idealism and absolutism to draft a position, they fail to observe what is here.”
By any standard, and despite his protestations of being “a halfway educated Jew from St. Louis with two sets of parents and a junkman father” unprepared to play the role of “the rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton,” Brodkey would surely have counted among those “New York intellectuals.” Yet he remained primarily an observer of his own experiences and their resonances down the long, crooked halls of his memory. In a way, this sensibility was actually well suited to the political-cultural atmosphere of the Nineties, when the discourse on national political issues like “unemployment, violence, gender issues, abortion, more or less government intervention” had “devolved into what each voter knows from personal acquaintance”: a devolution that has continued apace.
What conditions did Brodkey observe? That already in 1992, “the old American middle class is gone,” its scattered remaining members defined only by participation in such institutions as the stock market, the tax system and “an interlocking web of universities.” Most of them live in isolated suburbs, which “do not and cannot do much to preserve culture or the interplay of groups and classes that heretofore made up American education in politics, in American political realities.” Due to the consequent loss of “political and social ballast,” awareness of local reality has given way to the seductiveness of mass fantasy. “Moral issues are complex and tangled. The jury system argues tacitly that all issues are arguable. And they are. And that time changes things. And it does. That adjudication and rights and duties are complex matters.” Common sense, but also “almost all culture, literature, history, philosophy, even religion, if studied and pondered, tell us that. The disappearance of common sense and the ebbing of culture and the advance of the dreamed-of and dreamlike are clear signs of social danger.”
What Brodkey wrote against, in “Notes on American Fascism,” was less ideology per se than “idealism of an absolutist kind,” whose growing lack of patience with reality was “built into our present use of language.” He set himself the writerly mission, as he articulates it somewhat grandly in Sea Battles’s closing essay, of bringing about
He defined language itself as “articulated consciousness,” a fitting conception for a writer whose idiosyncratic prose takes not the shape of argument but the shape of thought. The resulting work is unlikely to satisfy the many politically minded readers in perpetual search of narratives whose conclusions flatter their own preconceptions—or indeed, conventional narratives or conclusions of any kind. Today there may be a surfeit of commentators ready to address the subject of American fascism with invincible certainty, but of writers like Harold Brodkey there are no more.
Photo credit: Nicholas Turpin / Alamy
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