\n<\/p>\n
Topical though its title may sound, Harold Brodkey\u2019s 1992 essay \u201cNotes on American Fascism\u201d probably couldn\u2019t be published today. Reading it, one can almost hear the inevitable editorial demands that its argument be \u201csharpened\u201d (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<\/em>, 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 \u201cthe primary American tradition\u201d now seems considerably less disposable than the many anxious prophesies of a fascist United States published more recently, during the reign of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n By the early Nineties, as Brodkey sees it, the gods of \u201cethnic diversity\u201d (summoned by \u201cthe failure of the melting pot to work\u201d) and \u201cthe new federalism\u201d (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 \u201ca new sense of community\u201d or \u201ca workable sense of America.\u201d Real estate is \u201cnow 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.\u201d The government \u201cdoes not support American manufacturing or American exports except in very sophisticated ways closed to outsiders.\u201d The uninspiring Democratic program comes down to \u201ca demand for order, for more government, more centralized government\u201d; the Republicans have their perpetual interest in \u201clooting,\u201d but no \u201covert program beyond the slogans of American greatness and American supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s a threadbare clich\u00e9. But already in 1992\u2014early in a decade now largely remembered as a time of American prosperity, stability and political consensus\u2014Brodkey sensed something coming apart. In \u201cNotes on American Fascism,\u201d he evoked a \u201cdisenfranchised class\u201d driven to an \u201cabsolute hunger for absolutes\u201d of \u201cland, rootedness, and meaning,\u201d one that \u201cwould 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.\u201d 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\u2019s meditation on American fascism, one indirectly rooted in and structured by personal memory.<\/p>\n Brodkey\u2019s evocations of \u201cprogrammatic\u201d xenophobia, \u201cpatriotic demands for territorial expansion\u201d and \u201cloathing for the real or imagined threats in the moral and political doctrines of liberalism to structures of an imagined society\u201d will sound familiar, indeed almost dully so, to readers of the 2020s. Today we\u2019re 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\u2019s 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u25cf<\/p>\n Brodkey is remembered today, to the extent that he\u2019s 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<\/em>, he dined out on his reputation as the next big thing in American letters, an \u201cAmerican Proust\u201d 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<\/em>. The reception of this long-delayed opus, though not as unremittingly harsh as it\u2019s sometimes described, surely wasn\u2019t what he had expected or hoped for. (\u201cThe Runaway Soul<\/em> is absolutely the last book you want to say this about,\u201d said Newsweek<\/em>, \u201cbut it could have used a rewrite.\u201d)<\/p>\n During The Runaway Soul<\/em>\u2019s long gestation, Brodkey paid at least some of his bills with journalism. Sea Battles on Dry Land <\/em>comprises a representative selection of his nonfiction pieces, some written in his capacity as a longtime contributor to the New Yorker<\/em> 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.\u2019s cultural front burner: the 1992 presidential debates, the 1993 Academy Awards ceremony, video stores, \u201cthe Woody Allen mess.\u201d The lack of a similarly straightforward news hook may be one reason editors didn\u2019t take up \u201cNotes on American Fascism\u201d during his lifetime, although the essay\u2019s meandering, fragmentary form probably also played a part. The critics who eventually encountered it responded in contradictory fashions. \u201cHis scattershot approach reaches its nadir in the remarkably unprophetic, singularly unconvincing \u2018Notes on American Fascism,\u2019\u201d wrote Susie Linfield, reviewing Sea Battles <\/em>in the Observer<\/em>; in the Washington<\/em> Post<\/em>, Sanford Pinsker called the piece an \u201ceerily prophetic assessment of our country\u2019s drift toward the Right\u201d that \u201cmore than weathers the test of time.\u201d<\/p>\n Born in 1930, Brodkey remembered the FDR years as a formative period in his life. (Even Roosevelt, he points out, took \u201ccharismatic one-leader lawless leadership quite far,\u201d and allowed the emergence of labor unions with \u201cquasi-fascist structures.\u201d) In his writing, he often evoked America as it was before the Second World War\u2014an America that has now slipped almost entirely from living memory\u2014in his characters\u2019 voices as well as his own. \u201cYou 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,\u201d he wrote in a 1995 New Yorker<\/em> essay on the heyday of celebrity journalist Walter Winchell. \u201cEthnic divisions were extreme and often violent. We had little, compared to today, in the way of national<\/em> structures\u2014just the railroads, the radio networks, a few newspaper chains, such as Hearst\u2019s, and the \u2018national\u2019 magazines.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the course of the twentieth century, with nothing like a \u201crural nobility\u201d to hold it together, \u201csmall-town America\u201d\u2014all those farm belts, those root cellars, those five-and-dimes\u2014had \u201cvanished.\u201d And with them had vanished \u201cthe safety in this being such a large country,\u201d America\u2019s 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: \u201cNow the population is more concentrated and the technological means for close control exist.\u201d At the same time, as the \u201cproportionally large middle class\u201d 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. \u201cWhat is happening today worldwide,\u201d he writes in \u201cNotes on American Fascism,\u201d \u201cis 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.\u201d In the essay on Winchell he puts the point more bluntly: \u201cWhen I was young, you had two major social classes (as now again, since Reagan): the people who mattered and the trash population.\u201d<\/p>\n Brodkey\u2019s discussion of \u201cthe unrooted class,\u201d whose members are \u201ctied to America because their skills and emotions are not readily transferable,\u201d 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\u2019s 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. \u201cIf a survey should be made, it might turn out that I have one of the most envied lives in America,\u201d he writes in a 1986 piece. \u201cI work at home\u2014freelance\u2014in a fourteenth-floor apartment on upper Broadway, with a view the length of Manhattan, at sky level.\u201d Social ascent of this kind has become rare in our time, giving Brodkey\u2019s real-life trajectory the air of historical fiction.<\/p>\n \u25cf<\/p>\n In a 1994 London Review of Books<\/em> essay titled \u201cWhy Fascism is the Wave of the Future,\u201d Edward Luttwak diagnosed \u201cthe completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people\u201d caused by accelerating economic globalization and structural change. The unwillingness among existing political actors to address that condition, he argued, leaves space \u201cwide open for a product-improved Fascist party\u201d 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<\/em>, whose sales were much revived after the 2016 election, when a passage from the book predicting how the dispossessed \u201cnonsuburban electorate\u201d would eventually begin \u201clooking around for a strongman\u201d circulated online.<\/p>\n It\u2019s surprising, on some level, that no mainstream liberal journal has yet credited Brodkey with having predicted the rise of Trump, even though he wrote \u201cNotes on American Fascism\u201d before Luttwak and Rorty\u2019s prophecies. Brodkey\u2019s 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<\/a> in Esquire<\/em> about American fame and the figures who so openly crave it. \u201cHe 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,\u201d she wrote of Trump. \u201cExcept 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<\/em>.\u201d As for Harold Brodkey, she assures her reader, you know him: \u201cthe man of letters, the famous author of the most famous unpublished novel of our time \u2026 the same Harold Brodkey who was recently featured, along with his wife, as a Couple in People<\/em> magazine.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1988, Brodkey had been the subject of a New York <\/em>magazine cover story (\u201cTHE GENIUS\u201d) in which he boasted, \u201cI write like someone who intends to be posthumously discovered.\u201d 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. \u201cSome of this is the failure of New York intellectuals and of the movies, of clerics and of other leaders,\u201d he suggests in \u201cNotes on American Fascism.\u201d \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n By any standard, and despite his protestations of being \u201ca halfway educated Jew from St. Louis with two sets of parents and a junkman father\u201d unprepared to play the role of \u201cthe rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton,\u201d Brodkey would surely have counted among those \u201cNew York intellectuals.\u201d 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 \u201cunemployment, violence, gender issues, abortion, more or less government intervention\u201d had \u201cdevolved into what each voter knows from personal acquaintance\u201d: a devolution that has continued apace.<\/p>\n What conditions did Brodkey observe? That already in 1992, \u201cthe old American middle class is gone,\u201d its scattered remaining members defined only by participation in such institutions as the stock market, the tax system and \u201can interlocking web of universities.\u201d Most of them live in isolated suburbs, which \u201cdo 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.\u201d Due to the consequent loss of \u201cpolitical and social ballast,\u201d awareness of local reality has given way to the seductiveness of mass fantasy. \u201cMoral 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.\u201d Common sense, but also \u201calmost 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.\u201d<\/p>\n What Brodkey wrote against, in \u201cNotes on American Fascism,\u201d was less ideology per se than \u201cidealism of an absolutist kind,\u201d whose growing lack of patience with reality was \u201cbuilt into our present use of language.\u201d He set himself the writerly mission, as he articulates it somewhat grandly in Sea Battles<\/em>\u2019s closing essay, of bringing about<\/p>\n 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\u2019s sense of amusement and interest in life, more of which can be spoken about sensibly, more of which can find its way into language.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He defined language itself as \u201carticulated consciousness,\u201d 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\u2014or 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.<\/p>\n Photo credit: Nicholas Turpin \/ Alamy<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n