Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

by Anatole Broyard

was the only son of a Catholic family from the French Quarter in New Orleans, and no one is so sexually demented as the French bourgeoisie, especially when you add a colonial twist.

semantic despair. Our sexual

What was it like, I wondered, to leave your own country for another, where all you met was the unhappiness and confusion of the people who lived there?

Culture in those days was still holy.

but when you’re young, everything matters, everything is serious. And besides, I was living

The life we led depended on modern art. Without that, all we had was a dirty apartment.

When he said that with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Picasso had fractured the picture plane, I could hear it crack, like a chiropractor cracking the bones at the base of your neck.

was a foyer to madness, a little picnic of madness. In her more benign moments,

shudder of hypotheses, a debate between being and nonbeing, between affirmation and denial, optimism and pessimism, illusion and reality, coming and going.

The social history of the world is, in some ways, a history of censorship.

Perhaps sex is most wonderful when it preserves a bit of that grotesqueness we all feel in the beginning. It’s the surrealistic moments that frighten and elate you with a kind of impractical, unenactable love, a love that you can’t bring down to earth.

The nakedness of women was such an anticipated object that it was out in front of American culture, like

the radiator ornament on the hood of a car. We