Twenty years later, Brodkey, who had experimented with homosexuality in the '60s and '70s and had been married for more than a decade to his second wife, the novelist Ellen Schwamm, stated in our pages that he was infected with the AIDS virus. Orra, an uptight Radcliffe coed who had never had an orgasm, finally achieved one after 20 pages of effort by Wiley-after some 10,000 words of Brodkey's adverbial, eddying, Whitmanian prose, that is. Louis to attend Harvard and conquer the New York literary scene, often wrote about the trouble with love during and after the sexual revolution, and he seemed to encompass its trajectory in his life and work. The brilliant young author of the collection 'First Love and Other Sorrows' (1958), who had come east from St. It is a sentence-bold and high-mindedly humorous (if not outright pretentious), addressing not just a woman's character but the status of her century-that could have been written only by Brodkey.
'To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die': thus Wiley Silenowicz, Harold Brodkey's alter ego, described the aristocratic beauty of Orra Perkins, in the controversial story 'Innocence,' in 1973.
