Chandler Brossard - Literary Career

Literary Career

Brossard's first novel, Who Walk in Darkness (1952), portrayed the bohemian life of the late 1940s Greenwich Village; it was first published by Gallimard in France. It is sometimes called the first beat novel. Through it, Brossard became associated with early Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but he believed that he was on a different path. He said that reviewers who characterized Who Walk in Darkness as a beat novel

"totally missed getting the book. They thought it was a realistic novel, which of course it wasn't. The French critics knew better. They perceived it as the first 'new wave' novel, a nightmare presented as flat documentary."

More recently, the novel has been characterized as existential, closer to works such as Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Albert Camus' L'Étranger.

Brossard wrote four plays, all produced in St. Louis, Missouri in the 1960s. He published three novels under the pseudonym Daniel Harper. (See below.)

After his first novel, Brossard received little critical recognition for his fiction in the United States, as he had "an unconventional style and characters." In his later works, the critic Steven Moore describes his narrators as seeming "possessed by a variety of voices". Brossard tended to write about characters who were outsiders: "thieves, chimney sweeps, harlots, counterculture activists..." and used the idiomatic language of mostly spoken voice. He has been described as underappreciated in his home country, as his works were considered difficult; they were better received abroad, particularly in France.

In 1971 Anatole Broyard, the book reviewer of The New York Times, wrote a scathing review of Wake Up. We're Almost There, saying of it: "Here's a book so transcendently bad it makes us fear not only for the condition of the novel in this country, but for the country itself." Brossard responded in kind. The two men, former friends in the 1940s, had a continuing conflict.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has attributed the conflict to an earlier falling out over Brossard's "unflattering portrayal" of Broyard as the hipster character Henry Porter in his 1952 novel. Brossard described Porter as a Negro "passing" for white. Broyard was a mixed-race Creole who lived as white in New York. Having seen the galleys, he forced Brossard to change the description of Porter before the novel was published in the US.

After 1971, Brossard's fiction was published only by small presses. Dalkey Archive Press published his novel in 1973, as well as his final full-length novel As the Wolf Howls at The Door in 1992.

A special 1987 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, guest-edited by Steven Moore, was devoted to a critical examination of his work. In interviews with Moore in 1985, Brossard said of his work,

"I think they can all be understood in a deeply religious sense. I think the thing that is continuous in this writing of mine is this almost blind religious innocence, of the religious innocent. Now the religious innocent is an inextricable part of religious literature throughout the ages...The believer who believes in miracles persists in going on. In none of my work has the innocent voice lost its innocence. It may be covered with blood, but it has never become a cynical, pessimistic voice."

His shorter fiction from 1971 to 1991 was collected and published posthumously by Sun Dog Press under the title Over the Rainbow? Hardly: Collected Short Seizures (2005). Brossard had chosen the title shortly before his death. The Russian-British writer, Alexis Lykiard, described Who Walk In Darkness (1952), The Bold Saboteurs (1953), and The Double View (1960) as "landmarks of the postwar American novel". Since 2000, the first two were among three major novels by Brossard that have been republished with introductions by Steven Moore. (See below).