I first discovered Harold Brodkey’s 1954 story “The State of Grace” in 2013, and I’ve probably read it a hundred times since. It remains, for me, one of the most charming and strangely affirming depictions of a budding artistic consciousness in fiction. In the simplest terms, it’s the story of a man recounting select dramas from his adolescence. The grownup narrator never identifies himself as a writer, but the prose is so calibrated—lyrical, emotional, intentional—that the story is easy to mistake for memoir. Perhaps it’s safe to assume that “The State of Grace” was based on Brodkey’s own adolescence, in suburban St. Louis in the nineteen-forties. The terrain of the narrator’s childhood seems to have calcified into mythology.

But here’s something peculiar. Brodkey wrote “The State of Grace” in his early twenties, a sweeping act of pure genius that took him only forty-five minutes (or so he said). Not on the first reading but maybe on the second or the third, I started to pick out evidence of the writer’s youth and inexperience: the nostalgia gives way to romantic grandiosity now and then; the poeticism can occasionally veer into grandstanding. The voice is almost musical in its cadence, a little precious in its attention to details. I love the multidimensionality of these moments. And I relate to them. As a younger writer, I experienced a similar tonal crisis when I wrote fiction inspired by, for example, my travels, or some personal disaster. These stories were full of such extreme self-seriousness that when I read them over a few days later I had to laugh at myself. Not because the events hadn’t actually been painful but because I had heightened the subjectivity so grotesquely that I could suddenly see myself from the outside. (That’s part of youth, I think: the luxury—and perhaps necessity—of self-seriousness, the belief that your misery is so unique and exquisite, you must describe it with perfect accuracy, or else it might kill you.)

I can believe that Brodkey wrote “The State of Grace” in less than an hour—it feels inspired, rendered from a moment, one sitting, one experience. I imagine that he also worked on it for many days afterward. It has all the turns and guideposts of a short story that resonates with forethought and authority, even though it reads like candid recall. Brodkey is a very cool writer, of course; he has a lot of control. He allows for a little self-exposure, but can also seamlessly transmute from one register to another. A single plainspoken sentence will pierce through the fiction with the ring of holy truth, from the perspective of someone older, someone who’s spent years recovering from the family that made him. That interplay—the youthful lyricism punctured by adult disillusionment—is what makes “The State of Grace” seem so alive to me, so true.

There’s a passage in the story I’ve returned to so many times that I’ve memorized it:

I was to be rich and famous and make all their tribulations worth while. But I didn’t want that responsibility. Anyway, if I were going to be what they wanted me to be, and if I had to be what I was, then it was too much to expect me to take them as they were. I had to go beyond them and despise them, but first I had to be with them—and it wasn’t fair.

“It wasn’t fair.” And yet, by writing the story, Brodkey makes it fair. He imposes form on what was once chaotic. He uses storytelling to both preserve and transform his adolescent suffering.

I wrote my own story “The Comedian” with an appreciation for the complexity of Brodkey’s relationship with his personal mythology. “The Comedian” couldn’t pass as memoir—the narrator is very clearly not me—but it does tell a coming-of-age story that ends with the narrator confronting the love he hasn’t allowed himself to feel. I never identified my own adolescent loneliness as an unmet need for the love and acceptance of the people around me. I saw the lack of all that as a fated consequence of my position as an artist. Perhaps this loneliness is the essential fuel for any committed artist. That, and the fear that, if we don’t put our suffering to use creatively, it will destroy us. ♦

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