Fifty Books Project 2023

Kafka Was The Rage. A Greenwich Village Memoir by Anatole Broyard

Nineteen forty-six was a good time – perhaps the best time – in the twentieth century.  The war was over, the Depression had ended, and everyone was rediscovering the simple pleasures.  A war is like an illness and when it’s over you think you’ve never felt so well.  There’s a terrific sense of coming back, of repossessing your life.

            New York City had never been so attractive.  The postwar years were like a great smile in its sullen history.  The Village was a s close in 1946 as it would ever come to Paris in the twenties.  Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had. The streets and bars were full of writers and painters and the kind of young men and women who liked to be around them.

I picked up this slim volume as part of research for a writing project I am working on – I thought it would be a good portrait of New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  In fact, it is so intensely focused on one man’s experience that it is not very good for research purposes.  However, it is beautifully written and wildly entertaining.

Broyard was the book critic for the NY Times for many years and began this memoir late in his life.  It was interrupted by cancer and remains unfinished.  This is sad for many reasons, not the least of which is I would love to read another 150 pages.  Broyard is originally from New Orleans, but grew up primarily in Brooklyn and only moved to Greenwich Village after the war, when he studied literature and art history at The New School.  While there is abundant flavor of the city and the time period in this, Broyard focuses primarily on his own early adulthood.  There are very funny stories of his sexual escapades and a number of name-dropping anecdotes – introducing the poet Delmore Schwartz and the art critic Clement Greenberg to the salsa dance halls of Spanish Harlem, fighting off sexual advances (and then just fighting) Caitlin Thomas, wife of Dylan, running through the streets of the village late at night in search of condoms, hoping to find them and return home before his date changed her mind.  

While there is a good deal of talk about literature, much of this involves his young-man’s fascination with sex.  Half the book involves adventures, carnal and otherwise, with his very-odd first girlfriend, and after they break up he focuses a good deal on his efforts to replace her.  These anecdotes are not clearly sexist, but Broyard’s conception and portrayal of women is more narrow than it would be today.  

Broyard creates an impression of himself as a kind of young buffoon.  This is belied by the wisdom inherent in his writing and in his observations about poets and writers of the time, but which allows him to critique this world without seeming superior to it.  He has some scathing things to say about intellectuals in general, but on the whole, this is a fun and fascinating book.

To some extent, my appreciation is tempered by the context that became public after Broyard’s death.  His family had been mixed-race in New Orleans for many generations.  Broyard apparently spoke of feeling isolated as a child in New Orleans because neither black nor white children would accept him.  When the family moved to Brooklyn, the tensions of being mixed-race were even more striking and Broyard stopped acknowledging his African heritage.  He had a long, successful career as a writer and public figure without any such acknowledgement, only letting his children know of his family history shortly before he died.  This struck me, for reasons I do not understand, as somehow brave:   an act of self-definition that defied the limitations the world would otherwise have placed on him.  However, I found it difficult to reconcile the humility and honesty of this memoir with the knowledge of that secret.  His narrative of these years in his life never mention race in any context – except when he discusses his love of Latin music and his writing about Jazz.  Knowing now how he approached the depiction of his life and his society with such bracing humor and clear-sightedness, I find myself wishing he had felt he could tell the whole truth.