“Writing Is Like a Struggle to Get Back to a Kind of Belated, Quite Impure Virginity” — Harold Brodkey on Writing

Harold Brodkey at the The Paris Review—

Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity where the issues are not entirely those of corruption and despair. Everything you know about language, writing, talking, holding an audience, everything you have theorized about what was wrong about the work of the generation before you and is wrong in your contemporaries’ work emerges in the performance stress of writing a final draft or the master draft in one sitting.