Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

by Anatole Broyard

If this was a seduction, it was very abstract.

Though much of the Village was shabby, I didn’t mind. I thought all character was a form of shabbiness, a wearing away of surfaces. I saw this shabbiness as our version of ruins, the relic of a short history. The sadness of the buildings was literature. I was twenty-six, and sadness was a stimulant, even an aphrodisiac.

Perhaps the place is squalid, I said to myself, but it’s not sordid.

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.

He had a curious scuttling gait, perhaps because he always wore espadrilles.

She made love the way she talked—by breaking down the grammar and the rhythms of sex. Young men tend to make love monotonously, but Sheri took my monotony and developed variations on it, as if she were composing a fugue. If I was a piston, she was Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine.

I discovered that you could always find your own life reflected in art, even if it was distorted or discolored. There was a sentence, for example, in a book on Surrealism that stuck in my mind: “Beauty is the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

At last, in a splendid peroration, Dick wound up with several striking tropes, like the final orchestral cadences of a classical symphony. He was breathing hard and smiling a little, as if at a job well done. It was impossible to be angry. God bless him, he thought of a woman as a kind of book. In

People had missed books during the war, and there was a sense of reunion, like meeting old friends or lovers.

With them, I could trade in my embarrassingly ordinary history for a choice of fictions. I could lead a hypothetical life, unencumbered by memory, loyalties, or resentments. The first impulse of adolescence is to wish to be an orphan or an amnesiac.

Books gave us balance—the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity.

“If a person of average intelligence and insufficient literary preparation opens one of my books and pretends to enjoy it, there has been a mistake. Things must be returned to their places.”

Everyone Sheri knew lived on top floors, probably because it was cheaper, but I thought of them as struggling to get to the light.

“It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire.”

She grew very inventive at night; she ran through in a rush all the day’s unused possibilities, the leftovers of her sensibility.

It was found money, so I thought I would spend it in the black market of personality.

Like Fromm and Horney, he was revisionist, and that was what I wanted, to be revised. I saw myself as a first draft.

A successful analysis, I imagined, was one in which you never bored your analyst. In avoiding boredom, you transcended yourself and were cured. I had come there not to free myself of repressions but to develop better ones.

I suppose that like a good analyst he wanted to see my personality grow, while what I needed was for it to be shrunk to a more manageable size. It was much too big for me.

had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.

If civilization could be thought of as having a sexuality, art was its sexuality.

I’d never know that smug sense of being of my time, being contemporary.

Saint Sebastian shot through with arrows of abstraction.

It made some of us anxious to think that everything meant something; there was no escape. It was like a fate.

when van Gogh loaded his palette with pigment he couldn’t afford, he was praying in color. He put his anxiety into pigment, slapped color into its cheeks. Color was salvation. It had to be thick, and tangible.

We converted the horizontal plane into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation.

We were like lovers in a sad futuristic novel where sex is subjected to a revolutionary program.

For Sheri, sex was like space, the jocularity of space. It was a foyer to madness,

It seemed to me that jazz was just folk art. It might be terrific folk art, but it was still only local and temporary.

There was no peace with her. She was like a recurrent temptation to commit a crime.

I felt that I had left Sheri a long time ago, when I was somebody else, younger, wilder. I stood listening in the center of the kitchen, as if she might be coming up the stairs to catch me red-handed, a thief, stealing memories. I saw and felt, as I never had before, what an adventure it had been, she had been. She had taken me in, flaunted her witchcraft. She had shown me the future. She made my head spin.

Leaning on the doorjamb, I gazed at the bed as you gaze in museums, from behind a tasseled cord, at the curtained four-posters of kings and queens.

the critic must regard the poem as a desperate metaphysical or ontological maneuver. It was as if we had just discovered not the word but existence itself. In 1946, for the first time, we existed.

You begin to imagine betrayal as a hypothesis—an absurd hypothesis, a bad joke. Skeptically, playfully, you concede that the circumstances could be interpreted that way, but only if it was somebody else who was betrayed, not you. And then, suddenly, you know that it’s true.

She had broken the rules, rules that all lovers recognized, without which love would have been impossible, unthinkable. But that was what she enjoyed, breaking the rules. It was the only thing she enjoyed—she couldn’t forgive me for being law-abiding.

High seriousness meant being intimate with largeness, worrying on a grand scale.

Talking was such a passionate act for Saul that he had grown a bushy mustache to conceal his mouth. To see the organ of his talk, the words being formed, the working of his lips and tongue, would have been too much.

His features were so emphatically articulated that even when he wasn’t doing anything he looked hysterical.

He bit off his consonants and spat them into the room, and I remember thinking, though not in those terms, that it was the jagged precision of the words he used that made them pass with such difficulty.

In the 1920s in New York City everyone was ethnic—it was the first thing we noticed. It was as natural to us as our names. We accepted our ethnicity as a role and even parodied it. To us it was always Halloween. Most of our jokes were ethnic jokes—we hardly knew any other kind. We found our differences hilarious. It was part of the adventure of the street and of the school yard that everyone else had grown up among mysteries.

Not satisfied to change the way people thought, he wanted to change the way they felt, the way they were, their desires.

Imagine, Saul said when we had settled ourselves, that you’re a character in a well-written and original novel, a person remarkable for your poise, wit, and presence of mind. Gladly, I said. I can think of several such novels, dozens of them, in fact. But what am I to be poised and witty about? About not making a fuss, he said. I want you to enter into a conspiracy with me, to join a movement, sign a manifesto, against the making of fusses. This was alarming, but I kept up the sprightliness. Why should I make a fuss? He pulled off the knitted cap. It wasn’t that cold in the sun. His hair was standing up in a funny way. He said, I’m not coming back. His

The quality of mercy is not strained.

I didn’t know whether I believed him or not. We never believe such things until they’re over. You need leisure to think about tragedy. Maybe you can face it only in the absence of the person, after the fact. Or you can do it only when you yourself are in despair.

My mother thinks that literature is killing me, that Kafka, Lawrence, and Céline have undermined my resistance. She thinks I have brain fever, like Kirillov or Raskolnikov. Whatever happened to brain fever?

We become doctors to prevent death, lawyers to outlaw it, writers to rage against it.

You’re a starcher, he said, skinny but strong. You can fight them off, the Kafkas. Hit them in the kishkas. And remember to read the nature poets—a pastoral a day keeps the doctor away. Don’t be so proud of your anxiety.

I can’t tell this particular story—I can only edit it.

Their heads were so filled with books, fictional characters, and symbols that there was no room for the raw data of actuality. They couldn’t see the small, only the large. They still thought of ordinary people as the proletariat, or the masses.

I knew him, he had already written his best things and most of his talent went into talking. Slander was his genius. Yet his slanders were as lyrical as his best poems. He loved slander as you love the poems and stories you can’t write.